There are some ideas that capture our imagination and provide us with a way forward or a framework for further action or study. For me personal knowledge management (PKM) and wirearchy are two such ideas. These are not my ideas and even though I may not cite the original sources in all cases that I discuss them, I give credit where it is due. I learned this many years ago as an undergraduate. I remember my History professors demanding, “Source?” whenever we made a bold  statement of fact or brought in some new line of thought. I have a link to wirearchy on my header and I ensure that I add references when I publish or distribute any work that mentions PKM. I will mention work by Lilia Efimova, Denham Grey and Dave Pollard on PKM or Jon Husband on wirearchy.

*** Update: There are some “self-corrections” in the comments pertaining to this next section [how's that for speed?] ***

On a related note, George Siemens posts that The Rhyzome Project fails to even mention the published work of Dave Cormier on Rhyzomatic Education. With the simplicity of adding hyperlinks to web pages, citing your main sources should not be a problem, and this is something that the project could rectify quickly. I wonder how long it will take to give the appropriate citations? This could be an interesting case study of the self-corrective nature of the Web and blogs.

Jay Cross has often discussed the return on investment (ROI) on learning and knows that you can’t properly measure much learning anyway, at least not to a direct cause-effect relationship and then to some monetary calculation:

“You can’t manage what you don’t measure” is nonsense. The vast majority of what senior executives manage is immeasurable. They make judgment calls; they play hunches. How else do you select the right people for key jobs? How else do you choose your partners? How else do you divine the future? Organizations pay senior executives handsomely to buy their ability to make wise choices in the absence of simple measurements.

I liken learning ROI to military morale. The military puts a lot of stock (and money) into the maintenance of good morale but there is no morale indicator scale in real life. Good commanders know when morale is high or low and they how far they can push their troops. They don’t waste time trying to put an ROI calculation on every effort to build a cohesive team.

Charle’s Green says that we should stop measuing ROI on soft skills training and gives several reasons why. Here is one to add to your notebook, so that you have a good response when someone asks about your ROI calculation:

the perversion of individual measurement. Most soft skills deal with our relationships to others. The drive to individually behavioralize, then metricize, has the effect of killing relationships—an ironic outcome for relationship-targeting training.

As much of our work moves online and becomes more collaborative and via multiple social networks, we should remember that quantifying these relationships may be detrimental to the very same relationships that help our organisations prosper.

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?

I spent the weekend helping out with a few community events. We had our Fall Fair, with some great entertainers and also had a farm field day that saw over 5,000 visitors, followed by an environmental trade show on the street - Green4Generations. The latter included a free showing of Who Killed the Electric Car, with David Swan, one of the engineers on the original GM project. David brought along a Toyota RAV4 electric car:

On Sunday I remembered what Lester Brown had said the night before - that there will be a trend toward local energy and local food. We already have our own solar energy specialists in the area, at Ener-green Coop:

We are also supporting local farmers through the Sackville CSA:

Being local doesn’t mean being out of touch with the Web and the global community. You may have noticed that I’ve used Wordpress to set up a few of our local websites, keeping costs to a minimum at only $15 per year for a domain name. Our local sustainability initiatives include communicating what we are doing to anyone who may be interested and learning from others. All of this was started by a local outdoor shop, Wanderlust Outfitters. The idea of Community Supported Agriculture is not ours, but we’ve adapted it for local conditions. As Lester Brown wrote in my copy of his book, “Let’s do it!”.

If you want to address climate change, then the best thing you can do is get politically active, according to Lester Brown, founder of the Earth Policy Institute, speaking here in Sackville on Saturday evening.

Some highlights of his presentation:

• How many failing states do we need before we have a failing civilization?
• It is possible to cut carbon emissions by over 80%; we just lack the political will (and Brown has the numbers to prove it).
• We may be reaching a tipping point in our willingness to do something about climate change but the major obstacles are at the political level.
• New thinking is happening today and even the oil companies are starting to focus on renewable energy.
• The trend is toward localisation, for both energy and food. Our food choices will decrease and we’ll move back to seasonal products.
• We are in a race between tipping points - natural and political. If we can tip the political will then we can stop the natural tipping points, such as the meltdown of the Greenland ice cap, which will increase sea levels by 23 feet.
• Based on the advice of prominent scientists and economists around the world, the best way to significantly reduce our carbon emissions are 1) reduce individual income taxes, while 2) increasing carbon taxes.

I picked up a copy of Lester Brown’s latest book, Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization and look forward to reading it.

Finally, some memorable advice:

Saving civilization is not a spectator sport.

Third Tuesday NB had a great meetup last night in Moncton, with CommandN TV on-site. They are an excellent example of folks from Atlantic Canada who have worked hard to create their own niche in this market, with growing success. Even though Jeff is the only one on the team who currently resides here, I think that that we may be able to lure them, and many others, here with a simpler lifestyle, cheaper housing, bigger yards, and lots of clean water (more water than we wanted this year).

I engaged in several conversations with start-ups and even was able to connect a few folks. I’m more positive about this business/social/tech gathering, which is very much a grassroots efforts, than many others that have been attempted in our region in the past decade. We had several people drive up from Halifax, which added to the mix. The Meetups cross over industries and disciplines and the inclusion of marketing & communications specialists has given techies a bit more shine. The conversations are just more interesting.

Speaking of social media, there is a good review of Seven Social Media Consultants on R/WW, even highlighting a Canadian! Check out links to their blogs and podcasts for some more interesting perspectives.

Dion Hinchcliffe has a good overview of the leading technology platforms for communities of practice, ranking Joomla and Drupal at the top. I’ve used Mambo, from which Joomla developed (forked) and have used Drupal in several cases. I find Drupal to be exceptionally powerful but it requires a skilled team to implement it. If Joomla is like Mambo, it’s easier to get up and running but is not as flexible as Drupal. Anyway, it’s not really about the technology, but good tools can help the community grow and get its work done. Hinchcliffe also offers this example of the lifecycle of a CoP:

I’ve seen communities and members at these various stages and this is a good analogy. In my experience though, progression is not linear and people can depart from all levels. Here are some conclusions from a community of practice/interest I worked with five years ago:

• A sense of community cannot be forced;
• communities are self-defined;
• communities are conversations; and
• communities evolve over time.
• Face-to-face contact can be the impetus for online conversations, while online contact can be the impetus for face-to-face meetings.
• Communities of individuals have stronger bonds than communities of companies;
• blogging helps to define dispersed communities; and
• password-protected web sites do not encourage conversation.

Choosing a suitable platform can make your job easier but any technology will constrain the community in certain ways. It’s best to put off the technology selection to as late as possible, once you’ve got the pulse of the people, the work, the values and the vision.