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Advice on implementation comes from learning professionals, not software geeks. Jane knows social networking tools as well as anyone in the industry; Harold has his finger on the pulse of bottom-up learning and open source approaches; Clark is a passionate advocate of cognitive design, applying what we know about how people think to the design of systems. Jay is the thought leader in informal learning and the convergence of work and learning online.

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This past week on Work Literacy has focused on social bookmarks, perhaps the easiest and simplest of social media. Most people are already using bookmarks/favourites with their preferred browser so the leap to social bookmarks is not huge. I’ve learned a few more things about social bookmarking for learning and have discovered that Diigo is used by a lot of educators.

Once again this week, several of the +600 members jumped-in and became guides and coaches, making the work of the facilitators much easier (thank you). This kind of sharing shows that online activities can actually scale well beyond the size of a traditional course, as long as the instructors/facilitators don’t try to control everything.

I also like what Michele Martin has done with her Delicious Portfolio and think I will create one for myself. The portfolio is a good snapshot for those of us who do much of our work online and is easy to keep up to date. I can see this usage becoming common.

Next week (#3) we move on to blogging. The real benefits of blogs, which I noted over three years ago remain today:

• Using a feed reader (via RSS), saves a lot of time and bookmarking.
• The information I get from bloggers is usually weeks ahead of the mainstream press. Call this competitive intelligence.
• By blogging, I have raised my profile on the web and increased visits to my site by a factor of 1000 in less than one year. This is cheap marketing.
• I use my database of posts when preparing reports, proposals and presentations. It helps to have a searchable system like Drupal. [now WordPress]
• Blogging forces me to think and reflect in order to write, so that what was just an idea in my mind becomes more concrete.
• The underlying technology of easy posting and RSS to keep track of things, makes a lot of sense for collaborative learning and collaborative work - two areas of interest for my business.
• Through blogging, I have met a number of business partners.
• Blogging keeps me in touch with a lot of interesting people and expands my view of the world, providing new ideas for my business.
• When I have a problem, especially a technical one, I post it on my site or someone else’s and usually get an informed answer within 24 hours. It’s like a large performance support system.
• It allows people to get to know my opinions before they engage me as a consultant; saving time and potential frustrations.

It’s hard to get management’s attention when things are going well. They’re running off to meetings, golf games, conferences and the like. However, as cash and clients become scarcer, management has to focus on the business at hand and figure out how to do things better. They might even question the role of the training department.

I’ve been in the business of virtual learning and online collaborative work pretty well since the Web entered the business world. It’s been a hard sell over the years, especially since many people would prefer a trip to Florida in the Winter to attend a training course. Everyone deserves some time away from the office, but as travel and training budgets get slashed, more companies are examining learning and working on the Web.

Image via Wikipedia

Recently I’ve been seeing more search phrases like - “open source social networking” and “cheap web conferencing tools” - coming to this site. Necessity is the mother of invention and people are looking for options. Luckily, many organisations have led the way in online collaboration over the past decade and there is a fair bit of expertise around, as witnessed by the range of knowledge on our Work Literacy online learning event. There are also a lot of tools to select from - some would even say too many.

I have a feeling that there will be a growing demand for innovative ways to help people in organisations work and learn together using the Web. For instance, I’m talking with a potential client who does not want me to travel on-site. Since I’m advising on how to move from a classroom teaching model to e-learning, he reasons, we should set the example and do all of our work online. I’m quite comfortable working that way, but it’s taken several years of practice.

I also see a rising interest in online performance support and just-in-time help, as opposed to just-in-case online courses. For professionals with skills in analysing business problems and finding methods and cost-effective technologies to address them, this is a time of opportunity. If people in the learning & development field complain that they can’t get management’s attention at this time, then perhaps they never will.

Image via Wikipedia

Last week on Work Literacy the topic was about social networks for learning. Tony Karrer wrote a good summary of things that were noted, shared and learned. A number of people wrote that Linked-In was for professional connections while Facebook was more for social chatting. Others picked up on this and showed how Linked-In could be used for learning, but there were not a lot of instances of Facebook being used for learning.

A recent article by Marcia Conner in Fast Company is one of the best articles I’ve read on how Facebook can be used for learning, Face to Facebook Learning. She cites the work of one of my local colleagues, Hal:

Or how about the work of Hal Richman, who started the Convergence of Social and Business Networking group on Facebook to explore the learning he was seeing all around him. Early on he conducted a survey and 81% of group members said they like to merge their social and business worlds and 93% said they expected or aspired to meet people they will network and collaborate in the future. One qualitative response captured the essence of many others with, “It is important that business contacts get to see the real you. In that way you present a more rounded and credible personality who is more likely to engage others.” Discussion topics were thoughtful and revealing, helping me as a group member to learn about how others were grappling with important emergent themes.

There are lots of concrete examples and links to explore how Facebook can be used for learning and Marcia has created a group, What are you learning on Facebook?

This coming week (#2) at Work Literacy we will be discussing social bookmarks. I wrote about the basics of social bookmarks last year in Step 1: Free Your Bookmarks, which discussed how to get your data onto the Web cloud.

I think that social bookmarks and RSS aggregators are the two basic tools for using the Web for personal knowledge management. For those with limited social media experience, I usually suggest these two tools to get the hang of information flows on the web, which can feel like a tidal wave.

Dave Pollard, who is participating in the Connectivism and Connected Knowledge course notes how social media can have a connectivist aspect:

Refocusing Social Tools: Just as Knowledge Management is now shifting focus and attention from collection to connection, social media need to turn their attention to enabling more, more effective, more informed, more valuable conversations. They need to help us identify ‘the right people’ (to live with, make a living with, love, and talk to) and then connect with them in real time in simple yet powerful ways that mimic, as much as possible, face-to-face conversations. They also need to help us make these conversations and meetings and social interactions more effective — bring more clarity and context, reach consensus, enable stories to be told and remembered, capture non-verbal communication, and pick up from where we left off at the end of the last conversation — keeping us connected, all the time, everywhere.

Social bookmarks are but one aspect and one way to keep connected online, and in my experience one of the easiest ways to get started with web social media.

Getting your bookmarks out on the Web where you can easily access and search them definitely can help with personal productivity. It’s just easier to find things. However, it is only after some time when you have a number of pages marked with your tags and comments and when you have connected with other people that you realize that social bookmarks are more than just a heap of personal links. Other people start connecting to your network and they can annotate a link for members of their network. Suddenly, who you know becomes as important as what you know. If someone in your network knows that you’re interested in an area, perhaps they’ll find and mark a reference that you would never have found. Serendipity can happen, but only once you’ve engaged in the social space.

Here is an example of some recommendations from my network:

Stuart Henshall says that you should Use the Tools First: Then Talk to Me:

I just walked out of one session where the presenter made a joke about Facebook. I checked; I’m fairly sure he’s not on it. That’s a big problem that exists here. You cannot talk about the impact of wikis, blogs, social bookmarking, tagging, even search unless you actually use them.

I agreed with this as soon as I read it and then wondered why. You don’t ask a doctor to have first suffered a disease before discussing how to treat it. Many academics in business school have never started a company, yet they can talk about the fundamentals of business.

Why is the Web, and especially social media, so different?

I think that one fundamental difference about social media is that they have a strong influence on the user, very much in a McLuhanesque medium/message/massage way. Those who come to web media for the first time are like adults learning a new language. You cannot start with the same advanced mental models and metaphors that you have in your primary language. Furthermore, if you do get to an advanced level in your new language, you may not have noticed it but the language, with its idioms, metaphors and culture, has had a strong influence on how you think in that language.

Social media change the way you communicate. Write a blog for a year or more and your writing (and thinking) will change. Use Twitter for some time and you will get an immersed sense of being connected to many people and understanding them on a different level. Even the ubiquitous Facebook changes how you may think of being apart from friends. Social media can change the way you think.

When you adopt a web social medium you are also starting on the bottom, or at the single node level. You have to make connections with what will become your network, either by connecting to existing relationships or doing something that helps to create new relationships, like writing a post. Starting over again, in each medium, can be daunting, especially for someone in a position of authority who is concerned about image or influence.

Yes, you need to use the tools first. You have to understand what it’s like to be a node in a social network. There is almost nothing like it in the industrial workplace or school system to prepare you for this. Therefore you won’t know what you’re talking about until you learn the new language of online networks. The only way to learn a new language is through practice. Social media are new languages.

PS: I took Stuart’s advice and downloaded the social web browser, Flock, from which I wrote this post.

At the Work Literacy course (starts today, with 365 people registered) we’re using Ning as our social networking platform. According to my co-facilitator, Michele Martin, “Online social networks facilitate connections between people based on shared interests, values, membership in particular groups (i.e., friends, professional colleagues), etc. They make it easier for people to find and communicate with individuals who are in their networks using the Web as the interface.” That’s an okay working definition and gives those new to the concept an idea of what I’m talking about.

We chose Ning because it is easy to manage as a completely hosted service. It’s been around long enough to have the major kinks worked out, the company is well funded and all of the facilitators have used it before. We also don’t expect this community to be active for long after the 6 week course is over, though we could be surprised. We didn’t expect to have so many people sign up either. Our initial idea was to use Ning as the connector, while writing on our own blogs, or the Work Literacy blog. For communities that are going to be around for a longer period of time, a different platform could be more suitable.

I came across Grou.ps recently and set up a demo community. I like the interface and the various options for modules. Grou.ps also includes a wiki module. Like Ning, it is not open source, but the company says that an OS version is coming. Grou.ps has already donated a fair bit of code back to open source projects. I prefer using open source based platforms for any community site that has the potential to scale. With open source you keep the option of migrating the platform to your own servers where you can maintain better control of service.

Another new player that I’ve only looked at quickly is Buddy Press, a social networking framework built on WordPress MU (multi-user). An example of WordPressMU used for education is edublogs. Since I’m already using WordPress and wordpress.org has always been open source, I’m quite excited about this new set of tools. BuddyPress is in Beta at this time, so it may not be best for your first company-launched community. Let the geeks test it out first.

Finally, an older player in the open source community space is Elgg. The free Eduspaces service offers Elgg as a hosted service, which you can test out and connect with the educational technology community.

There are several options to test out social networking online as well as some open source platforms that won’t break the bank and will allow you to tinker with what’s under the hood. As far as the technology is concerned, there are few excuses not to try out social networking for work or learning. Notice that I didn’t have to mention the really big social networking platforms that are getting all the mainstream media attention?

Jay Cross is currently focusing on the ROI of organisational learning initiatives and debunking some of the myths and metrics. His notes from the CLO Symposium include this:

Jayne Johnson, director of Leader Development for GE at Crotonville, delivered the final keynote presentation. Someone asked how she measured the on-going effectiveness of Crotonville; she doesn’t. As for cost-justification in advance, no, GE believes in “launch and learn.” Experiment a lot, and keep what works.

The notion of launch and learn reminds me of the cynefin approach to complex environments:

The cynefin framework looks at five domains (the 5th is Disorder) and it shows how our reliance on backward-looking tools, such as best practices, is not a suitable strategy for complex environments:

Complex, in which the relationship between cause and effect can only be perceived in retrospect, but not in advance, the approach is to Probe - Sense - Respond and we can sense emergent practice.

Probe-Sense-Respond (P-S-R) is similar to GE’s Launch-Learn approach. When no one can understand the vagaries of your situation in a changing, complex environment then the only thing to do is try out new things based on your best judgement then watch, learn and keep trying new things out. Effective organisational practices will emerge by doing things.

This is the big challenge for Web 2.0 for learning professionals as well. There are no best practices or even good practices. There are things that work for some people, some of the time. As learning professionals, our job is to understand our organisation or client’s situation and look outside to see what others are doing. We have to try things out and see how they work. If we wait for the best practices, we will be too late. This is life in continual Beta (change) and the natural world provides some good examples.

We announced the WL - Web 2.0 for learning professionals online course yesterday and now have over 100 people signed up after one day. This is a six week (or is that six step?) program, covering the basics of Web 2.0 tools and methods, with room for the more experienced to join in and add their expertise to the mix. I’m pretty excited to have all these interesting folks decide to join us. Perhaps it was the price tag? (FREE)

As I was preparing for this online stint, I looked for an image that might convey what we’re trying to achieve. I came across Dave Gray’s sketch, Rain on the landscape of the mind,  on Flickr and thought it was perfect for our endeavour [thanks to Dave for letting me share it]:

A storm of new information passes over the mind – a flurry of activity can bring chaos, excitement, energy, and create the conditions for new ideas – new life – to come into being.

I’m looking forward to Monday …

BBC News reports on Tim Berners-Lee’s warning about trust on the Internet and the fact that unfounded rumours, such as those about the LHC, grow very quickly:

Sir Tim told BBC News that there needed to be new systems that would give websites a label for trustworthiness once they had been proved reliable sources.

Sir Tim and his new foundation are looking at ways to rate trustworthiness on the Web with something like Google Page Rank. I’m not sure that an external evaluation tool is really necessary and in the meantime each of us can have our own system. I know that I do.

I have developed relationships with:

• people whom I know personally and trust
• people with whom I connect on the Web who are consistently trustworthy in what they publish online (at least they admit their mistakes)
• sources of information that are consistent and I have learned to trust at some level

Quite often I will check on a piece of information before writing about it. Google Search shows me what is being served up on the subject and Technorati tells me who’s blogging about it. I can send out a quick question on Twitter and that network may have some more information.

If I want to check the trustworthiness of a piece of information, I have many options. I can even blog about it -  and we know that there is no greater urge known to humankind than to correct someone who is wrong on the Internet. I’m sure I’ll be told that I’m wrong and then I can make a note about this on my original post and voilà, the Internet is fixed once again

We have many of the tools that we need to check sources and make sure that we are not being duped. Perhaps we lack the techniques and the motivation to do so. I hope that the next generation finds it more natural to think critically than our television generation does.