Social Learning Systems

Knowledge Management and Collaboration Create Knowledge Sharing - from Baseline

A very good series on knowledge management and collaboration.

Knowledge Management and Collaboration Create Knowledge Sharing

Baseline recently conducted a study of 342 managers knowledgeable about their company’s usage of knowledge management and collaboration technologies.

According to the survey results, 47 percent of companies have formal knowledge management initiatives or are planning them.  

 

 

 What’s the downside of using social networking to power knowledge sharing? Loss of control. “You have to have a tolerance for a certain amount of chaos or disorganization,” says AIIM’s Mancini. “You can’t anticipate many of the outcomes, so don’t try to over-engineer the whole thing.”

 

Goodbye to the Office - Seth Godin

 I enjoyed this article by Seth Godin. For years, I have worked in partly or fully remote roles and have managed staff located in various locations around the world. I am amazed that there are still many managers and executives that don't "trust" the idea that employees can be perfectly productive (maybe even more productive) without commuting and sitting in "the" office all day.

Seth provides some excellent points about WHY we work in offices in the first place, and why, in the 21st Century, this doesn't make nearly as much sense as it did before.

SETH's BLOG - GOODBYE TO THE OFFICE

MediaShift Idea Lab - Taking the "Me" Out of Social Media

Dan Schultz providea a great look at social media, as it exists today. In his article, In Search of a Community That Takes 'Me' Out of Social Media, he provides insights about caring more for community than for himself.  I especially like the diagram he provides about individual vs. group focus:

He lists some ideas about the value of contribution and gives some wishes for the future. A very good article! 

Training Employees about Social Media - Telstra Provides Great Example

How a 40,000+ Employee Company Trains its Employees on Social Media - TELSTRA

on Mashable: "How a 40,000+ Employee Company Trains its Employees on Social Media" - http://bit.ly/7OlOWS (via @mashable)

Telstra has published it's entire social media guide online! It's called The 3R's of Social Media Engagement and has terrific tips for anyone wishing to use social media in a corporate environment. Use the NEXT tab at the lower right of the guide to turn pages.

 Their policy for using social media can be found here.

Social Media for Trainers - Book from Jane Bozarth

Jane Bozarth ([email protected]) notes that this is the very topic of her forthcoming book, entitled Social Media for Trainers: Techniques for Expanding and Extending Learning. Bozarth also points to the following blog post, where she offers readers some preliminary tips, including specific activities: http://bozarthzone.blogspot.com/2009/11/social-media-in-training.html.

Bozarth is an e-learning coordinator for the State of North Carolina and is the author of several books, including E-Learning Solutions on a Shoestring (Pfeiffer, 2005) and Better than Bullet Points: Creating Engaging E-Learning with PowerPoint (Pfeiffer, 2008).

Is eMail About to Disappear? I Don't Think So.

     

Two interesting pieces about the rise of social networking vs. the use of email.

The Wall Street Journal published the following article about why eMail No Longer Rules. Jessica E. Vascellaro presents a very good description of the rise of Facebook, Twitter, and other site and concludes with the following.

"People were very dependent on email. They overused it," he says. "Now, people can use the right tool for the right task."

"Perhaps. But there's another way to think about all this. You can argue that because we have more ways to send more messages, we spend more time doing it. That may make us more productive, but it may not. We get lured into wasting time, telling our bosses we are looking into something, instead of just doing it, for example. And we will no doubt waste time communicating stuff that isn't meaningful, maybe at the expense of more meaningful communication. Such as, say, talking to somebody in person."

Chris Crum posts the 10 reasons he believes that eMail will not disappear anytime soon.  I agree. Do you?

Reasons Email Isn't Going Away Anytime Soon

1. People still send hand-written letters via snail mail, even though they could instead make a phone call, send an email, text message, or status update. 

2. Nearly all sites on the web that require registration require an email address. Some are starting to integrate social media into this process (through things like Facebook Connect), but that is still a very small fraction, and they typically still allow for email information as well. 

3. Email notifies you of updates from all social networks you are a part of (provided your settings are set up that way). 

4. We haven't seen any evidence yet that Google Wave really is the next big thing and will catch on on a large scale.

5. Email is universal, and social networks are not. Nearly everybody on the web (while there are no doubt some exceptions) has an email address. Many places of employment give employees email addresses when they begin working there. Meanwhile, a great deal of them are banning workers from even accessing social networks. 

6. There are plenty of people who have no interest in joining social networks.Frequent news stories about security, privacy, and reputation issues do not help convince them. 

7. Email is still improving. It hasn't screeched to a halt with the rise of social media. There is still innovation going on, and integration with social media. Look at how Google is constantly adding new features to Gmail. Look at the new Yahoo Mail.

8. Even social networks themselves recognize the importance of email. Never mind that they update users about community-driven happenings via email. MySpace (still one of the biggest social networks) even launched its own email service recently. 

9. More social media use means more email use. Look at these recent findings from Nielsen. The people consuming the largest amount of social media are also the people consuming the largest amount of email. 

10. As far as marketing is concerned, email is doing pretty well, as many companies continue tostruggle to find the right social media strategy to suit their needs.

Fast Company Looks at Online Education

Read a great article in Fast Company this week - How Web-Savvy Edupunks Are Transforming American Higher Education. The article says that "Suddenly, it is possible to imagine a new model of education using online resources to serve more students, more cheaply than ever before."

"The Internet disrupts any industry whose core product can be reduced to ones and zeros," says Jose Ferreira, founder and CEO of education startup Knewton. Education, he says, "is the biggest virgin forest out there."  

Cathy Casserly, a senior partner at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, says, "We're changing the culture of how we think about knowledge and how it should be shared and who are the owners of knowledge."

David Wiley of Brigham Young University has written, "universities will be irrelevant by 2020." Today, "open content" is the biggest front of innovation in higher education. The movement that started at MIT has spread to more than 200 institutions in 32 countries that have posted courses online at the OpenCourseWare Consortium.

Read the entire article here.

Twitter for Those Who Don't Get It

Here's a great blog about explaining why we love Twitter to those who don't understand its value. The article is from Diana Adams and the entire text can be found here.

Here is a summary of her 5 Tips for explaining Twitter:

1. Remember that just because Twitter is special to you doesn’t mean it’s going to be special to everyone you talk to about it. Not everyone will love Twitter like you do... so don't try to convert them.

2. Explain Twitter by describing it as sending short emails that lots of people can see. I like to share information and links related to my business, and I follow people that have the same interests, and I learn from them. It is about much more than tweeting what we had for breakfast, but because we do tweet what we had for breakfast, there is a very personal aspect that is light-hearted and fun.

3. Next, I explain that if they are going to get on Twitter, they will probably want to plan to devote at least 15-30 minutes each day to it, otherwise it’s tough to build those new relationships. Why is that? Because Twitter is REAL LIFE and you cannot build real life relationships by always doing the “tweet and run”.

4. There is a wealth of information on Twitter.  It’s all about who you follow!

5. Last but not least, explain that Twitter is fun. Twitter is a fun distraction that does not ask for a lot in return.

Do You Have a Favorite Social Network?

Advertisting Age looks at research from Anderson Analytics in a detailed report on the use of social networks. According to Beth Snyder Bulik, in her article in Advertising Age:

Your favorite social network may reveal a lot about you.

"Today 110 million Americans, or 60% of the online population, use social networks, and that number is fairly conservative, because instead of counting unique users or everyone who has an account, as many estimates do, the Anderson study counted only people who have used a social network at least once in the past month.

Users tend to spend a lot of time on social networks. The average social networker goes to social sites five days a week and checks in about four times a day for a total of an hour each day. A super-connected 9% stay logged in all day and are "constantly checking out what's new."

...

Social-network users overall

Social networkers get a bad rap for using social media to pump up their egos and reputations with "fake" friends. But the truth is, in general, they're not super-aggressive about building networks. Almost half (45%) said they will link only to family and friends, and another 18% will link only to people they've met in person. That means almost two-thirds associate only with people they know offline. The fake-frienders are still out perpetuating the myth, though -- 10% of those surveyed said they will connect with anyone who's willing to connect with them.And another myth blown: Most users are not wasting company time. Only 15% said they go on social networks at work.

For a thorough look, see What Your Favorite Social Network Says About You.

Matt Jones - Why I Hate Social Media

This is a great article from Matt Jones on Ad Age...

He says, "People are interesting. Ideas are interesting. Stories are interesting. Real stuff is interesting. Brands are interesting (or, at least, some of them are). Even ads can be interesting. But media? Media just connects those things. It's a conduit. Media is not interesting. Not even the "social" kind."

"What would happen if we acted on the implications of social media, rather than just use it as cheap media? What if we recognized that social media is really only shorthand for the multi-channel, hyper-connected, user-generated, co-created, always-on world we now live in -- a world where the good gets what it deserves and so does the bad?"

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Matt Jones is director of strategy and planning for Jack Morton Worldwide in New York. In April he moved to New York from Sydney, Australia, where his clients included Ford, Microsoft and Sony.