Engaged Learning

SLQOTD – Blog Project & Delicious

May 26, 2009 Twitter, blogging, slqotd

In this “All About Social Learning Question of the Day” post:

- BLOG PROJECT

- DELICIOUS TAG

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BLOG EDITION

SLQOTD has been a huge success, with almost 800 professionals following on Twitter.  But, alas, 140 characters can only go so far.  And there is much more wisdom in those noodles of yours to share.  So, to stretch minds and words and advice, we are announcing the SLQOTD – Blog Project.  This is how it works:

• On Monday morning (or first business day of the week), along with a regular SLQOTD, a topic will be posted on Twitter (#slqotd.b).
• If you would like to participate, write a post on your personal blog answering the question or giving feedback.  You will have Monday through Thursday to think about it and post it.
• On Friday, the SLQOTD will ask for answers to the Blog Edition.  Everyone then tweets (to ‘d slqotd’) the links to their post responses.
• If you read a great one, comment to SLQOTD so everyone can see which ones you love and why.

It is that easy!  We hope many people take the opportunity to write the post and share with the group.  Talk about targeted learning!  For this first week we will put out many notices about this on SLQOTD.  Please forgive the redundancy, but we want to reach as many people as we can.

DELICIOUS TAG

If you see an article you would like to share with everyone, please tag it with ’slqotd’ in Delicious.  We want this to be a HUGE repository for us all specifically on the topics we love to tweet about!

Social vs. Not – Pictorally

Mar 10, 2009 Email, Implementation, RSS, Searching, Social Learning SIG, Verbs of Social Learning, Wiki, blogging, collaboration, social media

I don’t know who to credit this to, but I love it. It has been posted so many times that the originator is lost. But, THANK YOU! to whomever it was.  (UPDATE: It is from Nasa.  Thanks, Harold!)

What I love about this is that it is simple & direct. This got me thinking… Why don’t we have more of these? So I decided to create some more. And here they are…

Blog Advantages: Two-way Constant Receive feedback Searchable Archived Interactive Conversational Smaller, faster updates 1: many:many Learning increases

RSS Advantages: Pushed to you Only what has been updated Information > time spent Constant Searchable Archived Personalized content Automatic Learning increases

Social Networking Advantages: Infinitely more resources Easily contact 1000’s of loose connections yet… Very small maintenance time Searchable Learning increases

Eliminating Email? Not Quite, but I am Going to Try

Sep 2, 2008 Enterprise 2.0, Social Learning SIG, blogging

Image via Wikipedia

Inspired by Luis Suarez and his “Giving up on email” quest, and the fact that I feel the need to more fully walk the talk, I am doing my part to eliminate the Outlook electrons.

Emails for this practise will only be counted from internal sources – I won’t be counting junk mail, vendor mail or outside non-work email that comes through my normal email (not that I would have any )  But if they come from another employee I will count them.  Those that I send will be counted as well.

Here is the break down (I always want to start beat boxing when I say “break down” for some reason).

I have never analyzed my emails before, but am happy to see that I receive less than I create.  You will notice that last week is not counted.  That is because I was experimenting to see if this would really work.  And I think it will!  Time will tell, but I am optimistic.

The first thing I did this morning was create a blog post and let everyone know what I am doing, and why.  One thing I have added in is that if someone want’s to get my attention with a particular discussion or wiki document, they should add my username to the tags.  My RSS feeds now pick up anything tagged with my username.

Below is a snippet of my post:

PROS:

• I don’t need to keep getting bombarded with emails every time someone replies. I can, if I want, see the culmination after a few people have chimed in. This cuts down on my viewing time and gives me back time I need.
• My days (and the tasks I do during the day) are not driven by my email. Rather, I spend longer times on one task and finish it, rather than being interrupted by many different tasks.
• I might be asking the wrong person a question and the right person (or someone who knows the answer) might see the information and give us the correct answer.
• I go to one place for all the information on the subject, not 10 different emails.
• Discussions / documents focus on one topic. Emails can branch out into other topics not related to the original. With all the emails, one can get lost and not quite find the information they are looking for later on.
• I can go back and actually find the conversation I had with someone else and remember why we decided what we did or the details of it rather than losing the email and guessing.
• If I ask a question, there is a good chance others have, or will have, the same question but now they will find the answer.
• If it is an announcement of some type, this elicits discussion – which is a big pro.
• Often what I do concerns projects. It is good to be able to go back and see what happened, when, what issues were worked through, what questions were asked, etc., for the next time.

CONS:

• I have never done this before. So it will be a change of how I do work. Assuming all goes well, this will turn into a pro.
• Those discussions will be out there. One may argue that it may ‘clog’ up GTSX (the name of our internal environment) with extra information that is not needed. But, again, if I have a question, someone, sometime will have the same question. So, again, it turns into a pro.

Now – why?  We can learn and share information more easily this way.  Natually, much of my offline communication has already gone this way.  In fact, I was commenting to my wife last night that I spend more time on my iPhone than I do our home computer.  A refreshing change!

Here is a SlideShare presentation on eliminating email.

Tags: Email, iPhone, Luis Suarez, Outlook, RSS, SlideShare

Explain Social Learning Without Talking About It

May 30, 2008 Learning 2.0, Podcast, Social Learning SIG, Video, blogging

The simple genius of the Common Craft team has done it again. And if we put a learning twist to it, it comes out just as beautifully. Watch this new “In Plain English” video on the topic of Social Media.

When you watch it:

• Replace “Ice Cream” with knowledge/skills/information;
• Replace “Big Ice Cream Company” with your training and/or communication department
• Replace “Flavors” with training programs
• Replace “Ice Cream Maker” and “Board” with new tools

And pay attention to the value statements. Also, notice that the “Big Ice Cream Company” was still around and demand even grew. It is the same with learning. Social Learning does not replace but adds to it.

I love how they talk all about Social Media and barely mention it and the tools. Great presentation example showing that you can explain something without really even talking about it.

Updated Look – It’s About Time!

Jan 28, 2008 Implementation, RSS, Wiki, blogging, collaboration

I did surgery this weekend on this blog. Extreme Makeover. Although it is not totally complete, it is close. It needed one badly!

Speaking of updating looks, I am trying to customize the front page of our Social Learning solution internally. It has the default page which shows an aggregate of most recent content for all wikis, discussions and blog posts. (Trying to customize it has been difficult. A great great solution overall, but as with everything there are pros and cons.) The problem with that is that each of those three have different lives: 1) They are each created in different intervals; 2) they all have different relevancy lengths and 3) they have different audience contexts. Imagine three related but different people living under one roof (maybe you don’t need to imagine too hard…)

WIKI: The wiki, at least internally and in our stage of development, has a rapid creation cycle. We have many which are created each day. Thus, they dominate the ‘Most Recent Activity’ aggregate shown on the first page. Plus, so many are created with varying topics, that the list becomes irrelevant. Unlike RSS where you can pick and choose what you information you want to show, this page is like the newspaper. Rarely do you care about every story. You want information that relates to you, not EVERYTHING. The wiki’s active life is short. For the most part, it is created and not many are changed or added to immediately.

DISCUSSIONS (forums): These have a shorter creation cycle. Currently, one is created only every few days. I expect that to pick up in the future. Their active life is usually short, but immediate. Ask a question, get an answer – a number of answers. The problem is that they are being burried by the wikis and unless you go specifically to the discussions, you would never know a new question has been asked.

BLOGS: The life of blogs can very depending on the person(s) writing them. For us, no one (almost) is using blogs because, again, they are getting buried unless the user specifically goes to check out the latest blog postings. Their active life is relatively short. When a post happens, usually comments follow pretty quickly. Then they taper off.

Putting all three together as a “Recent Activity” will usually not produce the results you want. And the results are usage. You want people in there using everything to share information. If information is shared and it is time sensitive (as usually forums and blogs are) you will want to make sure it has appropriate real estate for its life.

Can we use Twitter in Learning? & Excuse: Vacation

Aug 29, 2007 Learning 2.0, blogging

SLACKER! Now that we have that out of the way, I really want to be more prompt on the posting. But (here comes the excuse) I was on vacation last week and was playing catchup the last few days of this week. Soooo, here I am finally posting. But I think you will find this one particularly interesting.

I was talking with a friend about his time up in Seattle at Gnomedex, THE conference for serious bloggers. He mentioned that it is a tough conference to present at. My initial thought was, WHY? You have a bunch of bloggers and technogeeks who love this – isn’t everyone feeding off of each other? Yes they are, but not in the way I thought.

.

He mentioned that as the presenters were up doing their magic, everyone was on their laptops/phones, etc. They were listening, but they were also using Twitter to communicate about the presentation real time. So as the presentation is going on, there is another conversation happening simultaneously in the audience. As the presenter speaks, they critique the words/concepts and lobby them back and forth using Twitter. They debate among themselves, cross check information and refine the presenter’s material. By the time question and answer period starts, they have all asked the basic questions to each other and refined them and really boiled down to some pointed issues. Those are the questions they ask the presenter, and it sounds like it almost tears him apart. By this time the intial questions have been asked, debated and refined. Only the real difficult questions are left.

What was the audience doing? Learning in double time. We can guarantee that they learned more in that session with Twitter than without.

Given that, how can it be used in other situations for learning? To tell you the truth, I have not thought about it enough. My guess is that it is limited, but there are some niche area where it could help.

E2.0 – How Do We Get Wild Adoption?

Jun 20, 2007 Enterprise 2.0, Learning 2.0, Wiki, blogging

Good question.  One story was told of a CEO saying, “I don’t want to be irrelevant to those who have never used email (because they rely mainly on IM, wikis, blogs, text messaging and other technologies).”  So it can be driven from that.  But how do we help drive adoption?

• The culture has to change.  Not overnight, but it must change.
• The people who horde information should be naturally punished.  This is in and of itself a whole discussion.  It is not hierarchically but culturally imposed.
• The technology must be embedded in our activities.
• Use current tools to transition.  For example, send an email and it will automatically create a wiki page or blog entry.
• Lurkers are people, too.  Treat them as such.  Not everyone needs or wants to contribute.
• Invest and train in these tools.
• Get agreements on what information should be put where and how – not too much strict structure, just enough so everyone is playing the same game.
• Execution.  roll out to a select few, train and prototype.  Then repeat.  This way, when it is rolled out to the masses there is content and it is immediately useful to them.