Target/Blogging Yahoo/Wiki -- New Skills Are Relevant
A few weeks ago Target included blogging skills as a job listing requirment. My post on it, and the importance of online facilitation and communications skills, drew a thoughtful comment a few days ago (thanks, Anil) that is helping me get clearer on my tirade on the importance of these skills and my bafflement about why some universities don't seem to have a clue about them.
We see now that Yahoo asks for wiki skills Program/Project Manager 1: Yahoo! Inc - Yahoo HotJobs"
The more I turn this over in my head, the more I think I have been confounding my own message about the sets of skills and the means to getting these skills. The point that universities aren't always teaching them is separate from the importance of the skills.
Wiki gardening, for example, could be viewed as both a facilitation and communication skill. Thinking before you post wild assertions on your blog? Clearly communication. If I were leading a team, it might also be facilitation. So the line between these two in my mind is not fixed. My definition of facilitation is very broad and includes acts both of named-role facilitation (you are the facilitator ... it is your job to do this) and those little acts of voluntary facilitation that spring without formal brief in groups and communities. It is, in fact, that latter form that I think is such an imporant skill: the act of communicating online with more than one's self in mind. That is facilitation to me.
Now, as to how we learn this stuff, or teach it. Yes, this is stuff that, as Anil noted in his comments, that we just figure out as we go. Kids are learning it in games, running through the gauntlet of 10 IM windows open at once. Some of these skills are individual survival skills. Some are for the benefit of the group. I watch my son coordinate his online game play with his guilds via chat and IM. I see them work hard to try and pin down a time for a guild war (sometimes to be dashed by someone's mom calling for dinner. NOW!) Clearly these are virtual team faciltiation skills.
But then look at what my son might learn at university about online communication skills. If he is studying communication theory, shouldn't there be something about online? If a business major looks at managing and leading skills, shouldn't there be an inclusion of how these show up in a distributed organization?
What about the kid who did not have the benefit of growing up digital? What about the different cultural approaches to online communication? There is a place for the full range of informal, learn as you go and the more formalized offerings because those structures are part of our society.
If you are a university faculty, I'd be interested to hear what your school offers in terms of online communication, facilitation and leadership skills. If the answer is none, what world are you preparing your students for?
[via Seb]
Categories: onlinefacilitation, onlinecommunication
posted by Nancy White at 3:46 PM
4 Comments:
Blogging as a skill--
Seven years ago as a undergrad, I took "Rhetoric of New Media" led by Tom Levin and assisted by Wendy Chun. (It appears to have sinced be subsumed under the bland name of Cultural Systems).
Sure, HTML skills were par for the course, and the final presentations were expected to be done in DHTML or Flash or some other digital format.
But the thrust of the course-- this being a liberal arts institution, not a business school-- was to understanding the rhetoric underlying both the boosters of technology (John Perry Barlow) and critics (Geert Lovink). I owe much of my deep skepticism and caution towards technology/rhetoric to this class, and also, to my engineering training.
Certainly the education needs to happen, earlier than college. Weinberger asserts that kids learn this stuff on their own, which is quite true. Though children also learn linguistic grammar on their own, and that doesn't exempt them from grammar class. I do hope "how to write a business letter" has been upgraded in American elementary schools-- and it is not merely "how to rant on your blog" but, how to research it, how to find the right person to write to, how to use the best language, how to do so in a responsible manner, how to contribute to a community, how to follow up.
To me, your question raises the point as to what a blogging or a wiki skill is. Also, one thing you may not realize is the extent to which course offerings depend on internal marketing. In addition to recently founding The Community Engine, I have been on faculty at University of Michigan's Ross School of Business since 1997.
Since last Fall, I have extensively incorporated blogging into my classes. The first effort was one you linked to at:
http://thecommunityengine.com/home/archives/2005/03/a_learning_blog.html
In that one I answered the question about what a blog is by essentially using it as a knowledge management tool with external visibility. It really opened my eyes to how you can foster participation from an internal group and get the outside world to look at the same time.
Students in the course were extremely positive about blogging and also the course. However, the course is technical and difficult. For next Fall, it is not fairing as well against what may be perceived as more topical courses having more centrally to do with business strategy, marketing, etc.
My second effort is with something I call the High Octane Blogging Bootcamp which is more oriented toward gaining Internet visibility for small businesses using blogs. This course again focuses on blogging as knowledge management but with an emphasis toward the end result of Internet visibility to enhance the bottom line. You can follow that thread here:
http://thecommunityengine.com/home/archives/learningblogosphere/index.html
Basically, a lot of what went into the design of this course is an attempt to marry blogging and social media with market perceptions and demand. In that effort, one has to come up with a definition of the skill that meets a need the market perceives.
I think people see university professors as somehow being able to legislate curricula. In point of fact, those inside universities frequently face the same marketing and acceptance constraints as those in the outside world.
Hey Nancy,
I bet David Silver, a communications professor at UW and the guy you met at MS would have some things to say. We talked about this subject over pizza recently where I asked him if I could have been a better blogger if I had a degree in communications. He said he doubted it. :)
The question is, will being a blogger make you a more knowledgable communicator going forward into other roles. I don't think it is the centrality of blogging, or being a blogger or a wiki-maven. It is understanding the practice of online communication in it's various manifestations.
For example, would you think it wise that a person who is in electronics marketing in the US have knowledge of blogs? Or a project manager knowing how to communicate within a variety of online environments?
I don't want to obsess about how to be a blogger. It is how to use online tools to communicate effectively in a given situation. Along with other communications skills like understanding rhetoric, critical thinking, etc.
Now, the course marketing, who controls what, yes yes yes, these are certainly part of the equation.
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