e-Clippings (Learning As Art)

"We" are Smarter then "Me" - Looking for Collaborative Input for SoMe Workshop

So I'm doing a couple of things at DevLearn 2009 this year. I'm doing a pre-con workshop on Social Media and Learning and we're also doing a Social Learning Camp that will run throughout the conference. Of course I want to use Social Media to develop the ideas, themes and focal points for these events and I've always found that you can't really learn if something will work unless you actually try to use it for something - so here goes.

I always liked using post-it notes and whiteboards (I know, how very 0.5 of me) for general organization of something so I like this metaphor that PinDax is using.The image you hopefully see below is a live view of the PinDax board I'm using to organize thoughts for DevLearn. The full board is here. It's not perfect - I want to be able to edit notes once they are posted and I want some way to export the whole thing to my desktop for an archive - but the price is right and I think its got some good functionality. 

I've checked with a couple of folks and while you should be able to view the site without signing up, you need to sign in to be able to leave a note- should take a few seconds - pls let me know if there are any problems. Anyway, once you are signed up, please feel free to add, move, comment, etc - there is also a synchronous chat app so we might check that out - but I do believe that We are better then Me at putting something like together and would love and value your input.

Thanks and Happy Posting!

"IBM Crafts Web 3.0 Collaboration Tools" (PC World)

(story link)

**As an aside, I love the new editing UI in Typepad...good job guys!

So IBM is releasing something called OpusUna (which means something like "work as one"); "OpusUna enables participants to collaborate and communicate from within the same browser space, incorporating widgets, audio, and video cameras to display themselves on the screen. IBM envisions, for example, collaboration on patient care via sharing of medical images. Financial traders also could collaborate from around the world."

Right now I guess its only working in Safari...??

Anybody know any good change management or org dev conferences? I think I really need to hit some of those to see if our thinking about organizations and how they function is keeping anything close to the pace of tech advances....

More ammo for the next time someone asks "what good can you do with Twitter?"

You tell them you can do something incredibly useful like troll it for professionals in your field that it might be valuable for you to follow. Jane Hart has posted the "100+ (E-)Learning Professionals to follow on Twitter." Now that looks like using a blog and not twitter but now since somehow (Jane probably just needed someone in the O's) I squeaked onto the list, I am watching my Twitter followers light up with new folks thus broadening my community of practice.

So ask those folks if they think it might be valuable to somehow pick the Top 100 people in your field and then be able to follow them via something like Twitter and learn from them along the way.

Anybody Else Notice How Much Context Amazon is Now Wrapping Around A Book?

I mean check out the photo here...and if you can't see this well enough...just go search for a book. There are tags, both yours and others, reviews, both by the publisher and by customers (who have their own ratings based on the judgment of the community on their past reviews)..now you can even upload your own video review of the product. Then there are the discussions that can go on that are associated with the product as well. You get to see other books that cite this book, books that people who have seen or bought this book have also seen or bought..I mean geez there is a ton of stuff here. There is practically a community of interest possible around every single product listed on the pages of Amazon.

Would that be useful around your courses? Conference sessions? Is that scary - that level of feedback? Would it be scarier to get a lot of feedback or would it be scarier to get no feedback with all those robust tools in place? What would it mean to get no feedback?

Get Your Free WikinomicsChapter from Social Text

First, if you haven't read Wikinomics, you should. Second, let's assume you have or maybe you haven't and you want a free taste; either way - head over to Socialtext and pick up your free copy of Chapter Nine: The Wiki Workplace.

After you finish reading that chapter, then head over to Wikinomics Wiki (powered by Socialtext). This is the home of the Wikinomics Playbook - aka the unpublished chapter of the book. It is being written collaboratively and I think the process and the rule set that they have in place there, can serve as models or starting points for corporate or institutional implementations of Wikis.

So it's not exactly, if you build it they will come?

Anybody ever try to manage an online community and wonder why  it seemed so hard? Great post on BGN linking to some pointers on building social web apps - translatable into building communities).

Now this is how it is supposed to work!

Dan Bricklin has posted a podcast that he did with Toby Redshaw, corporate VP of Motorola. The podcast is about the use of blogs and wikis within Motorola. Look at these stats:

• They have about 4,433 blogs (about 40,000 blog entries)
• 3,300 wikis (each with often many pages)
• Several thousand FAQs
• 28,000 inquiries and responses in 2,400 forums

Here are some other pieces that I thought were important:

• It was completely viral adoption internally, "without a single memo from upstairs"
• It is heavily used low down in the organization to get things done, and less used and less understood as you go up the organization.
• Three quarters of the company participates by posting to blogs, wikis, forums, and FAQs. He thinks his statistics show that all employees with access to a computer worldwide use the system at least every week.
• They do 2.5 million transactions a day on their system.
• They have 69,000 employees and 75,000 active users (including 8,000 in an extranet with partners, universities, etc.).
• They manage it with four people and some management.
• Any public-facing blogging or wikis (e.g., the CTO has a blog, there is a wiki for the Q) are something separate.

Let's leave the the debate aside for a minute and just agree that these points and these numbers represent an important dynamic and that the dynamic is closely related to learning. Also you could do a quick scan for how much investment they made in doing instructional design for this system. I would argue that the system could benefit from some rationally applied design (maybe after working closely with an anthropologist) but let's be clear - there is a chunk of learning going on here without any help from anyone on the learning and training team whatsoever. That, I think, is worthy of discussion in our profession.

New Spaces and Capabilities...but have we thought about this?

The ning post got me thinking...it really does have some nice features...I have also been looking at Wikispaces and Netcipia and have been really impressed with how these tools are maturing so quickly into things that could be really helpful in learning and training.

I can't help though but have this feeling that the technology is vastly outpacing our ability to rationally integrate it. We can't stop trying but we need to find a different way....maybe this discomfort I feel is related to the fact that I am thinking about how to use these tools in an industrial age model of learning. Maybe I just don't have a sufficiently advanced theoretical construct into which I can place these new tools and quickly deduce their levels of functionality and applicability.

(Update) Maybe this is where technology like iReader (Read/Write Web story) comes in. Maybe we look to sue tools that flow with "us" as we move across the Web (meaning in our browsers)....

Using a WIKI and Students to Create Their Own Tests

(found via Brent - Brent' on a roll)

Over at mamamusings, Elizabeth Lane Lawley recounts how she used a wiki to have students submit questions for their own midterm. I think that the results are interesting since she made submitting questions an assignment and tied the quality of their questions to their grade on the assignment. I wonder how this would work in an adult learning situation? Could we use a reflective exercise like this to generate questions from a corporate learner population? I don't so much care that the students generate questions to be used on a test, I just really love the dynamic of asking them to generate questions as part of assessing their knowledge of the topic.

Show Me Yours and I'll Show You Mine (Heck - I'll show you mine anyway)

If I haven't mentioned it already, you should really listen to this podcast by Ryan Freitas from Adaptive Path. One of things that Ryan mentions is sharing what we are thinking about as opposed to what we are working on. So, in that vein, I wanted to expressly share with you the best ways (aside from standing over my shoulder - which honestly, would creep me out a bit not to mention REALLY overcrowding my office) for you to track what I am looking at online and thinking about (pardon the arrogance of thinking you actually want to know this).

Conversely, I'd love it if folks could leave a comment and share in a similar fashion...I know we all have blogrolls, etc but maybe I just feel the need to re-package this a bit and maybe I should re-do the front page here so that this info is always up. Anyway, here you go:

My del.icio.us feed
My flickr feed
My blog feed

My OPML file:Download oehlert_OPML_December_2006.opml