I’m hearing a lot about Social Media. Is it relevant to my business?

Social Media, or social tools, are attracting a lot of press these days. Google's recent acquisition of YouTube for $1.65 Billion and MySpace's 120 million users and the reported 53 million blogs that Technorati track every day suggest huge audiences.  But, the question is what exactly are Social Media tools and can your business exploit them?

Let's first define social media technologies. Typically, the phrase refers to:

• Social Networking
• Blogging
• RSS
• Wikis
• Podcasting

A soon to be published study from the Center for Marketing Research suggests that these technologies are being adopted at a far faster rate than previously thought. 42% of America's 500 fastest growing companies claimed to be very familiar with social networking, with the even the least familiar technology, the wiki, enjoying 17% adoption.

This contrasts starkly with the estimated 8% adoption rate of Fortune 500 organisations.

Why are these companies adopting these tools?

Many of the companies exploiting these tools are building businesses that leverage a new business architecture, sometimes called an 'Architecture of Participation'. The phrase, coined by Tim O’reilly, has come to define one of the key elements of what's been called Web 2.0, which describes the collection of companies, technologies and projects that are designed around the culture and economics of openness.

When these technologies are deployed to the workplace they are sometimes referred to as Enterprise 2.0.

Enterprise 2.0 social media tools offer considerable efficiency potential to the business relating to accessing structured information. For example, RSS allows users to define their own information "feeds" from data stored in corporate applications. Efficient use of RSS will essentially redefine how information is located and consumed in the enterprise.  Collaborative community platforms, like Emerald InTouch, support emergent communities of practice and allow individuals to engage in joint development and learning, retaining tacit knowledge within the organisation.

Can I deploy these tools to my business? 

Perhaps. It is important to remember that any deployment of these tools needs to take into account the culture and philosophy of the organisation. These tools are social in nature and for many businesses with strong, centrally controlled hierarchies this might be unnerving at first. There are risks which require proper management. You will need policies in place before the technology.

Another key challenge for businesses is how they integrate these new technologies within their enterprise and figure out which best suit their needs, which are toys for people with time on their hands, and which really will make inter- and intra-organisational communications easier and more effective.

Smart organisations like the BBC, Sun Microsystems and IBM are encouraging their staff to blog and participate in online forums whilst educating them about the dos and don'ts, thereby minimising the risk of damage to brands and reputation. . 

After all of that you can then encouraging staff and customers to get involved and build communities around your brands. Many of the companies who have successfully deployed Social Media tools know that they can get better results in terms of staff productivity and engagement, but also customer retention and acquisition.

Ben Edwards, publisher Economist.com discusses social media on Economist.com

As a weekly print publication with a readership that is global, and yet could easily be considered non-web friendly, there are serious challenges.

"Looking at some of the social media ideas we are considering for our readers. Social media is something you develop with your customers," Edwards said."I used to be a journalist for 14 years, and went to join IBM to work in the area of social media. One of the things I noticed when I rejoined the Economist was the speed at which social media is being adopted, especially over the last 6 months."

USA Today, has really switched on all the social functionality that Myspace or Facebook utilises. Our traditional interaction with our readers is called the Letter to the editor. It is an ancient medium, there are 24 letters; they carry the name and the address of the letter writer as that is the convention." We now publish all letters online, we get around 1000 a month using a blog technology and readers can comment on each others letters. We will add some discovery tools so that we can develop a community of letter writers. We are taking the traditional way that our readers communicate with us and broadening it online.

"I want to create an experience that reflects back to our readers and for the Economist the letter is a good place to start. A letter is a more considered form of content than a comment. It has to reflect what people expect from a brand."

Our blogs use a separate content management system from the normal one, this creates ghettos of content. We are now using a technology called Pluck, it will deploy social media to any of your systems and is platform agnostic. These include discovery tools, comments, recommendations like a Digg, and profiling."

On USA Today, the content that has the most recommendations has the highest place on the site. The community of the site are creating the front page look." Economist one-year roadmap is based on two thoughts:

1: Interaction with our content

2: Reader interaction with reader

Edwards also plans to launch an external blog for development, "it’s a further way for me to open up to our existing customers and ask for feedback and that is another instance of the power of the blog."

IWR Blog - information industry insight from www.iwr.co.uk - Individual Archives

 

 

[[Extracted from an earlier post]]

InTouch  is a means of supporting collaboration among individuals and groups, peers and experts alike.

Firstly, what is a community?

Here's a working definition:

"Communities, communities of practice, are trusting groups of professionals united by a common concern or purpose, dedicated to supporting each other in increasing their knowledge, creating new insights and enhancing performance in a particular domain. They are people who need to work, learn from, and help each other achieve business goals."

Communities can serve four key functions:

• They are nodes for the exchange and interpretation of information. Because members have a shared understanding, they know what is relevant to communicate and how to present information in useful ways. As a consequence, accomunity of practice is an ideal channel for moving information, such as best practice, tips, or feedback across organisational boundaries.
• They can retain information in 'Living' ways, unlike a database or a manual. Communities of Practice preserve the tacit aspects of knowledge that formal systems cannot capture. For this reason, they are ideal for iniating newcomers into a practice.
• They can steward competencies to keep the organisation at the cutting edge. Members of these groups discuss novel ideas, work together on problems, and keep up with developments inside and outside the firm. When a community commits to being on the forefront of a field, members distribute responsibility for keeping up with or pushing new developments. This collaborative inquiry makes membership valuable because people invest their professional identity in being part of a dynamic, forward-looking community.
  
• They provide homes for identities. They are not as temporary as teams, and, unlike business units, are organised around what matters to the members. Identity is important because in a sea of informaiton, ithelps sort out what to pay attention to, what to participate in, and what to stay away from. Having a sense of identity is a crucial aspect of learning in organisations and characterises the smart enterprise.
  

If you would like to know more about how communities of practice can support collaborative programmes, follow these posts:

• Vertical and Horizontal communities
• Critical Success Factors
  

Communities can be organised vertically, the way people are organised in a business, or horizontally, spanning departmental boundaries. Vertical communities are more common, usually based on reporting relationships. Org charts are good illustrations of a vertical community structure. Each memeber of the group has a specific role in supoprting the larger group. Dialogue centres on achieving specfic short and long term goals of the group.

Horizontal communities are relationships between people with similar interests and needs, independent of reporting relationships. Horizontal community conversation tends focus on knowledge sharing.

It is highly likely that people will belong to more than one community.

Community membership can be short or long term and the community itsef can be temporary or permanent. Individuals can join a community based on a short term assignment and then leave when the work is done.

This is how learning and knowledge spreads in the business and how best practices are born. 

To begin, more communities fail than succeed. They don't get the participation taht was expected or don't achieve the results for which they were formed.

Getting people to collaborate is problematic. If all anyone did was to put their content online you might have the beginnings of  a good knowledge repository, but you would not have a successful community.

Marc Rosenberg identifies ten critical success factors for communities to succeed. By succeed I mean members value their participation, and the business values their contributions.

• Peer Identification
• Content Value
• Incentives
• No Pain
• Make it special
• Community Leadership
• Support from the top
• The Right environment
• Tools 
• No Big Brother - not even the crappy TV show 

 

 

This is a copy of a story from the Beanstalk community.

'The influential journal Nature is enlarging its publishing empire yet again by starting a Web site, Nature Precedings, for informal discussions of preliminary research findings. The site, which will go live this week, will “make informal communications such as conference papers or presentations more widely available” and will enable them “to be formally cited,” said an editorial in the current issue of Nature. “This, in turn, allows them to solicit community feedback and establish priority over their results or ideas.”

The site will cover biomedicine, chemistry, and earth sciences — keeping away from the territory of the widely used physics preprint server, ArXiv.

Early reactions on academic blogs have ranged from one scientist, who called the announcement “great news,” to a librarian, who was concerned that “Nature will now have rights to everything that grows out of that early-stage material.” —Lila Guterman'

Keywords: Business Schools, Deans, management, Management education

London, June 13^th.

I attended Moving Learning last year, when it was held at Microsofts UK HQ. It was one of the better events of the year and I signed up for the 2007 event pretty much straight away.

 
Now, almost 24 hours I’m still quietly furious with myself and Moving Learning for wasting an afternoon of my life. This is balanced by a gratitude for a really, really good morning.
 

This is the tagline for Moving Learning 2007:

“Discover the latest trends - hear the hot options at Moving Learning 2007

In recent years there has been much discussion about informal learning yet few feel the learning industry has properly got to grips with it. With learners reaching for Google before the course catalogue, how can learning departments engage with future learners in new ways?”

This is a really interesting set of questions and in the morning we were treated to some great insight and a passionate call to arms to better understand how emergent technologies and behaviours are impacting on learning and training and development within the organisation.

The evidence pointing to the need to support informal practices of learning was striking, though not new. Studies demonstrating that over the course of the last 20 years the actual percentage of knowledge that a person needs to know (in their own head) has gone from 75% in 1986 to around 8% in 2006. Elliot Masies story of his new hire ‘bringing’ her virtual posse to work to was a great example of this. Jay Cross’ Informal Learning stat of an 80/20 split in spend on formal/informal learning and the 20/80 split on learning that helps people do their job better was also highlighted.

So, great evidence to show what does work, how people are, in effect, cirumventing the training department entirely.

This all made the afternoon sessions seem even more depressing than perhaps they really were. A mechnical retelling of Lovells experience in deploying an elearning programme was crushingly familiar and flew straight into the face of all of the evidence and anectodes that in the morning suggested this approach DID NOT WORK very well. The session on metrics that came after that was also an exercise in having the ‘profession’ develop skills in covering it’s own backside rather than helping the business define objective performance improvement goals and measure that, not hours trained, or % with a particular passing score.

I had the real pleasure of being able to talk with Elliot Masie for a few minutes – in his session he recalled that fact that annual, global R&D spend on Learning and Training development (as a body of knowledge) was  less than what Nintendo spend on R&D in developing a new game. It’s a great quote – it feels kinda right, but I don’t know. Is this because Training/Learning Professionals think they know it all already and that they don’t really need to stay in touch with the kind of thinking that some of the presenters were pushing? If you’re a Trainer let me know because this is really foxing me right now.

The Clayton Christensen book, The Innovators Dillema, describes how great companies, doing all the right things can be disrupted and overturned in their dominance by smaller, less ‘good’, but innovative companies applying technology in an innovative way at the bottom of the market. I’m struck by the similarities here. An entire profession, complacent and comfortable delivering expensive training programmes to corporations is being disrupted through User Behaviour – googling, the search and connect model, Social Networks and media tools that allow people to have dialogue to support their personal learning objectives. Who the hell needs a Training Department to help them do that? Classically, The training departments then respond by offering more and more expensive strategic learning iniatives – oversell and overperformance, while the users improve and refine their own skills, behaviours, creating their own own learning materials, publishing it and sharing with each other. Ultimately, the training department has no future in this scenario.

 

 

 

 

 

The first of irregular postings from the Tools of Change conference here in San Jose.

This posting is coming from a pre-conference tutorial on the subject of RSS for publishers.

We're partway through and the guy from Newsgator is doing a good job of giving a god's eye view of RSS. Very newsgator oriented, with a bit of a sales pitch thrown in.

A lot of time is taken up with talk of gadgets/wdigets. Very popular apparently and some examples taken from Newsgator clients.

The gadget stuff is interesting I must admit. I'd like to look into this a little further; Emerald Gadgets for placing personal homepages - How would this work with firewalls and institutional subscriptions?

The newsgator widget creator (Editors desk) is looking kinda buggy but the idea is a sound one - I'll be following this up at a later date.

Moving onto how to get started with RSS for publishers - for marketeers I think.

This was a high level intro to RSS and for that level it was pretty good. I think we're a little ahead of the curve for the most part - use and knowledge of RSS within Emerald is beyond the novice level and the commitments to extend RSS for 2008 is good evidence of that. The widget/gadget things, although not unknown to me, looked really interesting. Perhaps more sustainable than RSS itself, in fact a great RSS application people can use intuitively without any knowledge of RSS at all.

 

 

A 3 speaker panel from Elsever, National Academies Press and the Digital Library Fedration.

I thought this session would be about how to implement DRM and how good it is and seriously, you need to do it now and here’s why.

WRONG! The Elsevier speaker talks about allowing access via subscription models and IP address ranging, something we already do at Emerald.

Then, the NAP guy tells us that the balancing act for them is between openness and financial sustainability – fair enough. For NAP a policy more openness has been a successful strategy. The messages from the panel are clear – Don’t err on the side of caution with respect to openness, in fact quote : “Invisibility is the Killer!”.

This is not the session I was expecting. It turns out that there is a clear consensus that DRM introduces an unnecessary layer of technology between the publisher and the reader/researcher/student – which runs the risk of making your customer pissed of with you, for no real material gain since the fears that DRM play on are largely unfounded. Elsevier, NAP and the DLF were very relaxed about the issues of Piracy and DRM. In fact as a means of tapping into the long tail effect and ultimately marketing the brand it’s no band thing, unless of course it becomes really, really, out of hand, but no-one hand any experience of such an event.

A quick poll  of the room ( about 40 or so) revealed that no-one implemented DRM in their PDFs or other electronic content offerings. Very revealing.

A hugely entertaining and quite wonderful final keynote from Erin Mckean. Challenging many of the audience’s stereotypical perceptions of books – booky books and non-booky books – Erin suggests that many of the current forms for distributing data and information, knowledge and reference works might not be the best form, we have simply developed this attachment to their format because no other format was available . The dictionary for example is not a booky book – it has no chapters, no single author, and no final publication (it iterates until the end of time). The need for the dictionary and similar references is different to that of a novel, for example. A dictionary is, or should be ambient. That is I should be able to turn to my dictionary (book shaped or otherwise) to answer my question and help figure out what exactly tomatoe pomace is – leftovers from squeezing juice from fruit if you’re wondering and is found in dog food and grappa (now you know) – I can’t do this with my dictionary if it’s at home on my bookshelf. If however my dictionary has been set free from it booky type confines and is available digitally then the dictionary is serving its purpose and my needs far better than if it were beautifully bound but at home, gathering dust.

I loved this final keynote. Erin is entertaining, thought provoking and a great choice from the organisers to end what has been an exceptional 3 days, and now I’m leaving having developed a crush on a lexicographer! Must have been a good conference...

The first TOC conference has ended and I have to say I loved it.

Some irregular postings here have captured some of the sessions but there was such diversity it was not possible to record it all; that and the fact I also had project deadline to hit while I was here which was a little distracting.

Not too distracting though. The 3 days started with tutorials on a range of topics and it's here where you'll find the biggest grumbles I guess. Too long, but somehow not managing to get into any great detail. The RSS workshop from Newsgator was interesting enough without offering any real insight but it did prompt me to look closer at widget technology, so no complaints really.

A theme running through the sessions has been a commentary on growing culture of free content.  Chris Anderson started it all on Tuesday and Jimmy Wales continued with news of his new project, wikia.

However, it's not as straight forward as that. A counter cultural series of talks also promoted the notion that people also want to pay for content, assuming certain conditions are met - Richard Lindkes session, and the SafariU Books case study stand out here.

This is great stuff. I blogged here some time ago about the insipidness of a recent eLearning conference in which many of the under the surface issues were neatly managed through the novel tactic of not talking about them. Not so here and it made for a far more interesting three days.

They keynotes were passionate, inspiring and informative. Special mentions to Manolis Kelaidis (Blink:Completing the connection between the analogue and the digital) for his truly wonderful book hybrid which received the only standing ovation from the floor. Tim O'Reilly talks about it here.  And Erin McKean, the DictionaryEvangelist, for her contrary, highly entertaining, thought provoking and just plain wonderful final talk on Dictionarys and Other Book Shaped Objects. Blogged on these pages shortly after it's conclusion.

Although the publishing world is large and diverse - here we had book publishers, magazines, scholary publishers, fiction and non-fiction, hardwares and software vendors all promoting and defending opinions of how things are and how they should be.

I've learned a lot about the industry I find myself in these days and I will be returning to the UK inspired and stimulated.  Can't ask for more really.

Some images of the three days can be found here (Flickr).

And although the final day was little fraught, trying to squeeze all this and get a project off the ground in the UK at the same time, it all ended up OK; in the closing draw of conference evaluations I won a free pass to TOC2008!!! HAHA! 

Great stuff. See you next year in New York. 

A shameless reproduction of a Tony Karrer posting on eLearning 2.0 themes and thinking. Too good not to capture for permance here on InTouch.

Follow the links to Tonys blog for greater insights than I could ever provide.

Start of extract:

Small updates made - June 25, 2007. I need to do a bigger set of edits to incorporate thinking from:

• eLearning 2.0 - An Immediate, Important Shift
• Personal and Group Learning Using Web 2.0 Tools
• Personal Work and Learning Environments
• eLearning 1.0, 1.3 and 2.0
• Learning Trends Point To and Shape eLearning 2.0
• Web 2.0 and eLearning 2.0 Start-Up Guides
• Personal and Group Learning Using Web 2.0 Tools
• Authoring in eLearning 2.0 / Add-ins & Mash-ups

and others on the topic.

Someone from the Institute of the Future said (and Bill Gates likes to say it as well):

The impact of Technology is often overestimated in the short-term and underestimated in the long-term.

I think eLearning 2.0 is an example of where technology has snuck up on us and there’s something very interesting going on that we are only beginning to recognize. Another time, I’ll talk about how amazing the technology revolution is, right now, let’s just focus on something I just heard. The person roughly said, I’ve been hearing about Web 2.0 and eLearning 2.0 and I don’t think I get it. What is eLearning 2.o anyhow?

It’s really not an easy question to answer, but let me take you through what I see as the cornerstones of eLearning 2.0. And let me apologize up front that I’m not trying to give any kind of formal definition. Instead, I’m trying to describe how I see eLearning 2.0 playing out in the short-term and medium-term for people in corporate eLearning.

Also, as you read this, if you have questions, comments, additions, please put a comment at the bottom and I’ll try to improve this over time.

Finally, if you really want to help yourself to “get it” – I strongly believe you need to play around with some of this technology. I’ve put a couple of Action Items within the contents. I don’t think I really “got it” until I played with these things.


Web 2.0

To get a sense of eLearning 2.0, it’s helpful to have some sense of what Web 2.0 is. Probably the most cited article on this is from Tim O’Reilly called "What is Web 2.o?"

To pull the most relevant aspects for eLearning 2.0:

• Software Services
  
  Today, you can easily go out and get software that runs completely outside of your own systems – “software as a service.” All you need is a browser. Probably the most known example of this is www.SalesForce.com – which is a CRM package that you just sign-up for on the web. Now, this is becoming quite common.
  
  If you aren’t sure what this means, take a look at: http://www.writely.com/ & http://www.writeboard.com/. These are two examples of Word Processor applications delivered through the web. And since they are web enabled, you can easily share this with others.
  
  Action Item: sign-up for Writely or WriteBoard and try it out. It’s instant. No installation.
  
  
• Harnessing Collective Intelligence
  
  In some ways this is very simple to understand, Google and Amazon have made fortunes on using this approach. Google ranks search results partly based on how many other sites link to that page. They are relying on the fact that the more other people have linked to something, the greater likelihood that it has value. Similarly, Amazon uses other shoppers patterns to help you find things you might like.Under Web 2.0, this approach is being used with dramatic results. Consider the following:
  
  · Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.com/) – a fantastic online encyclopedia based on entries from everyone.
  · del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us) – shared, tagged bookmarks
  · Cloudmark – collaborative spam filtering
  
  Action Item: If you’ve not been to WikiPedia, you really need to go visit it.
  
  
• Everyone as Publisher
  
  While related to the previous item, this is slightly different. The barrier to being able to create content has dramatically fallen. Probably the best example of this are blogs. Also included are wikis (like that used for WikiPedia). But in reality it also includes all sorts of other ways for us to create content including Flickr (photos), eVite (invitations), Podcasts, and the list goes on and on. Many people have referred to this as the transition to the “Read-Write Web.”
  
  Action Item: Go to http://www.blogger.com/ and create your own blog. Takes about 5-10 minutes. Only hard part is what the topic for your blog should be. How about posting your take on eLearning 2.0 and putting in a comment that points us to your blog. (I know – this is a really cruddy kind of threaded discussion. Don’t get me started on that again.)
  
  
• Aggregation & Tagging
  
  Of course, now that everyone publishes, information overload is taken to even new heights. So, to help make sense of this, we have ways of grabbing this information and pulling it together through mechanisms like RSS aggregators. We similarly have the problem that the information is not neatly organized, so one of the approaches to help make sense of this is Tagging as is done in systems like del.icio.us.
  
  
• Lightweight Programming & Composition
  
  A really BIG trend for all of this is a change in the way software is being designed and built. Many applications are being built as small components that can be plugged into the middle of other applications. The classic example of this is Google Maps that allows you to embed a map in the middle of your web page (which is now your application) that shows your data on top of the Google Map. This kind of composition is often called a Mash-up. For an example, check out http://www.housingmaps.com/.
  

eLearning 2.0 Base Trend

Okay so that’s Web 2.0. Now onto eLearning 2.0…

There are a few articles on this, probably the two most commonly cited (up until this article) are: E-Learning 2.0, Stephen Downes,

E-learning 2.0, whatever that is, David Jennings

But both of these took me a long time to partially understand, so let me give you a slightly different angle or take on eLearning 2.0. Oh, and also part of the what makes understanding eLearning 2.0 hard is that several different “camps” have all landed on the same basic kinds of approaches from different directions. I would, via a gross generalization, put these camps down as:

• eLearning
• Collaboration / Communities
• Knowledge Management

Again, this article is primarily aimed at people coming from the eLearning world.

In this world, probably THE major trend that we’ve seen is a demand for faster learning in the context of work. We’ve also seen the slow smushing together of Online Reference, Online Job Aids, small eLearning pieces, Rapid eLearning and Blended Learning.

So, my concept of eLearning 2.0 starts with the trend towards:

• Small pieces of content
• Delivered closer to time / place of work
• Likely delivered in pieces over time as part of a larger program

This trend exists independent of the whole discussion of Web 2.0. In reality it is what is driving a lot of the discussions around Blended Learning and Rapid eLearning. And it’s really a big piece of what eLearning 2.0 is. An interesting discussion of this trend can be found in Elliot Masie’s column in CLO Magazine (but I hate his title) “Nano-Learning: Miniaturization of Design.”

eLearning 2.0 Meets Web 2.0

But, let’s start to add in a couple of things from Web 2.0.

If you did the Action Items above, you likely had the same reaction when you created your blog. Wow! That was incredibly easy! For me, it was really an “aha” moment. Wow, this software as services thing really works. Wow, I can now create a web page incredibly fast that’s publicly available.

Another “aha” was when I looked at the Add-ins for Blogger. These are small modules that are provided by completely separate companies (which are also very easy to set up) and plug right into my Blog. I created a poll and put it right in my blog. Wow, this small software component stuff really works.

Content Creation in eLearning 2.0

Okay, at the end of the day, a lot of us in eLearning think of ourselves as delivering content. Sure, sure, we are trying to improve performance in a way that has bottom line impact, but I’d also better produce some content.

Because of the Base Trend described above, we are today creating more content that looks like Online Reference and Online Job Aids. CMS & Wiki solutions make this really easy to do. It’s basically no harder than using a MS Word. Again, did you look at Writely? Better yet, chances are that your company already owns a CMS / Portal tool (and is looking for someone like you to use it).

Action Item: Go find out what Portal software you have in your company. It has CMS built in. You’ve got your easy to use content creation tool.

What you don’t get when you put up Online Reference or Online Job Aids is tracking. In other words, you won’t know who’s gone in and looked at the materials. Right now this is the big advantage of LCMS solutions, but you can actually create an add-on for the CMS solutions to track this today. Today, most companies are forgoing the tracking of who’s accessing the reference material and instead looking to gauge overall hits (total usage) and if they really want to test competence, they look use a follow-on test, they survey the manager or they look at the numbers.

Okay, so first content creation trend is the insanely easily creation of reference materials.

But it gets better…

We all know that in the middle of my HTML based course I can easily drop in a Flash interaction, right? Or I can also drop in a brief demonstration or simulation authored in Captivate. I’ve done this many times to create a kind of hybrid reference / courseware piece.

Now, the number of components that I can drop-in is increasing dramatically (think about Blogger Add-ons). See my previous article to get some ideas about different interactive elements that I can drop in.

Hang on – I use Lectora and I already have “drop in” interactions. What’s different here? Well you do and its pretty much the same. But using add-ins instead of what the authoring tool provides allows me to choose best of breed. I can use what Lectora gives me or I can choose a different add-in. And, that add-in can allow my students to interact with the content and each other!

Wait, what was that?

Yep, interaction with your students within your content. I’ve done this the hard way in the past. For example, a few years ago for one of our clients we created a pretty cool little feature. The client would be bringing a new customer up on their software and would need to train five people how to operate and run the software. These learners would go through online courseware for about 6 hours that would teach them about the software and test them using simulations. At any time during the course, the learner could click “Ask a Question” and it would allow them to type in a question that would be saved in their question list. At the end, they would be able to edit their list and then it was sent to the instructor. Once all five people were done with the courseware, the instructor would schedule a WebEx and go through the questions.

It really worked well. But, of course, we had to build that capability. Now I can drop it into my course for free. I could also drop in other opportunities to interact with the content that would get back to the instructor and also to share thoughts and comments with other learners.

This is GOOD STUFF!!! And it’s here today!!!

And, by adding in the ability for students to interact with our content, we are suddenly opening a lot of possibilities. I’m citing some very narrow examples above. Remember that this also means that I can very easily set up blended learning opportunities that have significant follow-up components that include active participation by learners and other related people. For example, in retail, when we have an intervention aimed at store managers, we will include the district managers as coaches and require that the store managers create action plans that are reviewed and commented on by district managers. We could also ask them to review other store manager’s plans and provide comments. We can then track the intervention through online discussions to find what’s working and not working.

Of course, this is where the KM and community / collaboration folks look at us and say “welcome to the party.” But, I’m not here to tell you that it’s easy to go to the next level of multi-point content creation where you are capturing knowledge and fostering communities that help with individual and organizational learning. But, I am saying that eLearning 2.0 has opened the door where there is a low-barrier to looking at models for going beyond one-way communication (trainer -> learner) or even two-way (trainer <-> learner) and consider many-to-many communication schemes that involve training, SMEs, coaches, peers, managers and others who are involved in fostering the performance at the end of the day.

Can anyone argue that given a low barrier to creating a 10 minute piece for the learner’s manager that we shouldn’t be creating that piece in most cases? That we shouldn’t foster some kind of communication and follow-up? The tools to do this are really here today and the barriers to using them are dropping rapidly.

As a community, and with the help of folks from KM and community / collaboration backgrounds, hopefully we can figure out what patterns really work here. I do believe the next few years are going to be times of incredible experimentation with many-to-many communication approaches as part of learning initiatives.

Content Access in eLearning 2.0

And one more thing that I put in eLearning 2.0 is content access through search, aggregation and tagging. As we lower the barrier to content creation, look to create smaller objects, have students create content, have SMEs create content, we are going to have an explosion of content. We need this content to be searchable. We also need ways to aggregate it into interesting “courses” and “programs.” We need to be able to tag it so that we can later find it.

Out of these three, aggregation you are already doing – in fact that’s almost half of our job description - it’s just that we are going to need new tools and techniques as multi-point content creation becomes more prevalent. Search is a slam dunk. In fact, Action Item: go find out what search you have in your company. Tagging I’m still trying to figure out how necessary its going to be. I know as a means of fostering community research, its great. I’m assuming that it will be important to help us aggregate.


Again – if you have comments, questions, thoughts, ideas, I welcome them.

 

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Free internet access, we read last weekend, means such parlous times for academic books that publishers are suggesting corporate subsidy. This bothers me: hardbacks may well fall prey to kickbacks . . .

Click to read the full article at Times Online

© Subsidised Academia Ltd -Times Online

 

 

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 Hilarious!

 

via Knowledgespeak

The World Association of Newspapers and a global coalition of publishing and media groups recently held a conference to unveil the progress of the Automated Content Access Protocol (ACAP). ACAP is a new standard to allow on-line content providers to automatically communicate information to search engine operators and others on how their content can be used.

Launched in October 2006, ACAP is slated for completion by the end of 2007. The initiative is designed to encourage owners of high quality content to make their work easily available online and also help avoid complex and expensive legal disputes between content providers and search engines.

The conference to mark the pilot project’s halfway point showed that ACAP is building on existing technology including Robots Exclusion Protocol and is using established methods for defining standard permissions semantics. Collaboration and support for the project has been overwhelming. The list of 28 organisations continues to grow and represents a worldwide interest in the project. Work is now in progress to prepare ACAP for the post-pilot stage -- to hand over a long-term sustainable model to a pre-existing governance organisation or to set up its own ACAP governance organisation.

In addition, ACAP is developing a language that will allow publishers to state permissions information in a standardised format that can be read by the web "crawlers" that are used by search engine operators and other content aggregators to search and index on-line content. No such system currently exists to enable the search engine operator to systematically comply with such policies on how this content can be used.

ACAP’s final conference is scheduled for November 29, 2007 in London.

Click here to read the original press release.

 

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