Engaged Learning

RSS – Day 4 – Other Uses

Nov 19, 2009 Social Media & Network Challenge

RSS is so simple, it is hard to say anything else that hasn’t been said.  Except that RSS is not only for blogs and textual information, it is for podcasts & videos as well.

When subscribing to a podcast, iTunes will download the latest version. Just as RSS finds the latest and delivers it to you.  There are other services that will do that as well.

Here is where I take a sidestep.  I love learning, so RSS is a natural love of mine because it gets me the information I want right away.  First, my story, then, your challenge.

I was in a job.  A good job, but my direction was not clear. 

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Tags: ipod, Podcast, RSS, social media challenge, vodcast

RSS – Day 3 – RSS at Work

Nov 18, 2009 Social Media & Network Challenge

Week 2: RSS: Day 3

Great.  There are a lot of sites that we could use RSS on, but what about at work?  How can we use this where it will make a huge impact?

Photo by Robert Scoble on Flickr

This is a story I tell often when I talk about these technologies.  In a past life one of my responsibilities was to put together a conference for our customers.  The first year I did this I introduced the use of some of the tools we are talking about in this Challenge, including RSS.   The majority of the work was done in these tools.

For this conference, a number of employees were tasked to create 1.25 hour sessions.  The content and tasks were tracked in this tool.  Instead of holding a meeting and getting an update as to everyone’s progress, RSS fed it to me.  If they were making progress, I saw it.  If there wasn’t any progress, I could see that updates were not made.  Then I could target that person directly, instead of pulling everyone into meetings or teleconferences and punishing those who were on track.

As software matures, it is not uncommon for them to include RSS feeds.  For example, SharePoint,

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Tags: RSS, soc, social media challenge

RSS – Day 2 – Using RSS

Nov 17, 2009 Social Media & Network Challenge

RSS – Day 2 – Using RSS

Now that you have your account set up, you are good to go!  You can now receive updates on just about any information, not only blogs.  For example, you can subscribe to News sites, National Geographic Photo of the Day (I looked for NASA photos of the day, but they didn’t have RSS feeds – ’tis a shame), shows on Frontline, videos on TED.com, and much, much more.

RSS Folders

But it doesn’t all come in a jumble of information.  With folders or tags, you can organize the information.  For example, I have a “Photography” folder that holds all my photography RSS feeds (imagine that!)  If I have some extra time I look at them. If not, I skip them.  I have a “Learning-2.0″ folder – one that holds feeds from sites which talk about learning and the best methods for organizational learning.  This one I make sure I keep up to date one.

These two examples display one of the great aspects of RSS feeds. 

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Tags: RSS, social media challenge

RSS – Day 1 – An Introduction

Nov 16, 2009 Social Media & Network Challenge

Week 2: RSS: Day 1

Last week we learned about Blogs, set one up and posted.  We even looked at a number of others’ blogs.  But there are two sides to this beast – the writing and the reading.

WARNING: Once you learn about RSS and try it, you won’t be able to turn back.  This is one of those technologies that once tried, everyone wonders how they ever lived without it.

RSS logo

Let’s say you found ten blogs you loved.  But to read each of them you have to go out every day and see if there is an update.  Maybe five of them have posted, but you have just wasted time looking for something that wasn’t there with the other five.  Part of what makes Web 2.0 so great is that everything you need to do is easy (or at least is aimed to be easy).  That is why it has taken off.

Reading should be the same way.  And, yes, even though you are still reading a web page, there is an easier way to read.  It is not the actual reading, but how the reading is delivered to you.

ENTER RSS

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Tags: RSS, social media challenge

I Finally Get It – It’s Personalization, Not Publication in Social Media

Oct 21, 2009 I Finally Get It, RSS, Twitter, collaboration, why

photo credit: Lazurite

Here is another ‘ah-ha’ moment for me.  Again, it was something that I always knew, but the importance of it became even more glaringly obvious.

I was reading a ReadWriteWeb post from back in September on Personalization.  To make their point, they quote Ken Fromm as saying,

“The Internet is shifting from discrete units of websites and Web pages to discrete units of information [...] organized in ways that are relevant and personal to each individual, using data gleaned from social graphs as well as recommendation and personalization services that allow users to set their preferences.”

Much of our focus is on sharing data. 

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Tags: friendfeed, personalization, RSS, Twitter

Multi-Tasking & Social Media – Mastering the Balance

Feb 11, 2009 Social Learning SIG

While reading Will Thalheimer’s blog on multitasking, I started playing out situations in my mind.

• Twitter, email and IM popping up new messages
• Going through my RSS feed
• Checking LinkedIn & Facebook
• Answering the phone
• Attending to visitors

Yet as we do this we are all learning.  So if it actually is a disturbance to multi-task, where is the line?  What is considered multi-tasking and what is considered fruitful learning & performance?  This is what I have come up with initially…

I see myself in a constant state of learning.  But those non-formal times of learning which are best for me are when they are targeted.  It doesn’t matter if I use 100 different resources or 1.  But if I am focused then I can use all my tools to accomplish a task.

For example, yesterday I was trying to find a way to create a movie in Camtasia, send it to Adobe Premiere and produce the final with a clear picture.  The ones I was doing were decent, but I needed more clarity.  To do this I integrated a google search, help search, Twitter shout-out and email.  I wasn’t multi-tasking.  Instead I was focused on one task even though I was using multiple avenues.

Recognizing this some time ago, I have turned off email popups and check my RSS feeds, LinkedIn, Facebook and NING sites on purpose (as apposed to haphazardly).  (Twitter I still have on, but often I let those go until I can check a bunch at a time.)  If I am heavy into the moment I let my phone go to voicemail.  And in desparate times I “pull out the plant.”  This large plant blocks anyone from visiting me.  All these things keep my learning and production focused, avoiding the multi-tasking.

One last thought – I have found there is some benefit to procrastination.  Interruptions don’t always receive immediate brain share.  They are put on the backburner unless they are an emergency (Covey’s “Important vs. Urgent”).  Sometimes they disappear before I get to them.  Often my brain will, in the background, deal with the situation so when I do allow it to occupy my time I can speedily take care of it.  The brain is a beautiful thing.

Tags: Camtasia Studio, Facebook, LinkedIn, multi-tasking, RSS, social, social media, Twitter

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