Category: facilitation

Common Sense and the Gen Y Guide to Web 2.0 at Work

Sacha Chua’s The Gen Y Guide to Web 2.0 at Work has a few things going for it. First, it is a great use of simple visuals. See you CAN draw! Second, it has a sense of humor. Third, it does a great job of communicating key ideas in 14 simple slides about how to use social media usefully as one transitions from school to work. Finally, at the core, the slides are deeply embedded with that fabulous magic, common sense.

There are two things I want to draw out of this video. The identity thing and the common sense thing. First, take a look at the slides.

The Gen Y Guide to Web 2.0 at Work

View more presentations from Sacha Chua.

Identity

I have been in conversation with Shirley Williams of Reading University about identity (see her cool site here) and she has been tracking the shift in social media use of her students as they began to explore their identity beyond university and into the workplace. This is also a topic of the CPSquare Connected Futures workshop. David Armano also has a nice post (and visual!) about this topic. What Shirley, David and others are surfacing is a skill set that might very usefully be embedded in both our educational and business organizations. A couple of weeks ago this was a key point to a presentation I made to educators in Estonia. This is a system level change. How is your organization changing to recognize how identity shows up in the era of social media?

Common Sense

Why not make a blog post about two totally different things, eh? Back to common sense. What ever happened to common sense? What the heck IS common sense? How do you define it? How does it show up in your world?

Sometimes I think the most value I bring when consulting is common sense. At other times I think I’m stating the obvious, like the village idiot. There seems to be an interesting overlap that might make us dismiss common sense as boring, not innovative, old skool. Common sense can also be our ruts, our outdated mindsets, even our bad habits. Or good habits grown irrelevant.

So how do we make the most of common sense? When is the village idiot useful?

Jessica’s Teleconference Call Tips

Flicr CC photo by fLeMmaI’m beginning to feel like I live in telephone and Skype conference calls. And some are tortuous. All I can say is “Amen Sistah” to these three simple tips from Jessica Lipnack. How many multi-tasking on conference calls? 100%

1. Make the calls shorter. And shorter. And shorter. One senior exec whom I love for his discipline in this got his calls down to 15 minutes. And he’s very senior. Stars on his shoulder and all that.

2. Please, please, please listen to the “medical” experts, those who’ve treated thousands like yourselves: Always use some form of screen sharing during your calls so that everyone can focus on what you’re talking about. Imagine that you’re in a conference room together and everyone has their backs to one another and is looking out the window in different directions. How much attention are you paying to what’s being discussed? Looking at the same object is a powerful way to focus attention.

3. Close your email while you’re on your calls. Close it. Click it shut. And for those of you reading this post during your call, your browser too.

After reading this, I realized I really needed to update my old teleconferencing tips page, so here it is!

See also

Photo Credit fLeMmA

Toby, Liz and Nancy on Online Community Relationships

Toby Bloomberg of Diva Marketing had Liz Strauss and I on Blog Talk Radio today. What a trip! Social Media and Social Networks internet radio show 4/2/2009 | Social Media Communities: Real Relationships or Illusions of Friendships?. Take a listen!

Edit: April 3. I’ve removed the embedded player because it auto plays. Sorry. You can click here to here it!

Travel Budget Slashes, Meeting Crunch and Going Virtual

Flickr Photo by http://farm1.static.flickr.com/199/517610028_956361eb2c.jpg?v=0Throughout the year  I’m involved in quite a few conferences and meetings. This year, the ground is shifting. Travel budgets are being slashed (faster here than in Europe as far as I can tell) and people are starting to think more seriously about the non financial costs such as carbon emissions of the travel and the plain old wear and tear on our bodies traveling across time zones and geography.

Financially, meeting organizers have serious concerns. One US based conference coming up this Fall is seeing a 30% reduction in registrations and they feel LUCKY! One of my core communities of practice, KM4Dev, just had a call to discuss how we could meet, and scuttle our more ambitious S. Africa plan and do something more focused and less expensive because we could not get funding. Ed-Media, a conference I’ve been invited to speak at (in Hawaii – and yes, I feel both thrilled and carbon-guilty, even with offsets), sent email today announcing opening of virtual presentation submissions and participation. I say “good on ya!” Here are a few snippets from their note:

>>  Virtual Presentations included in Final Call  <<
http://www.aace.org/conf/edmedia/VP/
 > Please forward to a colleague <
http://www.aace.org/conf/edmedia/call.htm
_______________________________________________________________
ED-MEDIA 2009

World Conference on Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia & Telecommunications
June 22-26, 2009  *  Honolulu, Hawaii

INVITATION:
ED-MEDIA 2009 serves as a multi-disciplinary forum for the discussion and exchange of information on the research, development, and applications on all topics related to multimedia and telecommunications/distance education.

ED-MEDIA, the premiere international conference in the field, spans all disciplines and levels of education and attracts more than 1,500 attendees from over 60 countries. We invite you to attend ED-MEDIA and submit proposals for presentations.

All presentation proposals are peer-reviewed and selected by three reviewers on the respected Program Committee for inclusion in the conference program, Proceedings (book and CD-ROM formats) and EdITLib (Education and Information Technology Digital Library),   http://www.EdITLib.org

VIRTUAL PRESENTATIONS:
————————————-

In consideration of presenters who may be unable to attend ED-MEDIA in person due to funding or time constraints, Virtual Presentations have been added to the program with the same validity (publication, certification, etc.) as the face-to-face (F2F) conference and with the capability to interact with session participants.

A limited number of presentations in these categories will be accepted:
– Virtual Brief Papers
– Virtual Posters
– Virtual Corporate Showcases

Why a Virtual Presentation?
————————————
* Saves money.  No travel, accommodation, and restaurant costs
* Saves time. No travel or away time required.
* Allows you to participate when you schedule your time to do so.
* Same validity as the face-to-face (F2F) conference (publication, certification, etc.).
* Paper published in CD, book, and Digital Library ( http://www.editlib.org) proceedings.
* Publish and share all supporting media (PPT, video, etc.) in the proceedings.
* Capability to interact with your session

I love meeting face to face. But the reality is those of us who can are priveledged and soon, the ability to travel and gather may be even more restricted. We have to get better at “being together” using technology. That means better tools AND practices. That probably leads me to griping about the web meeting tools I have been using because they are what my clients use.

After criticizing SharePoint last week for it’s silo-creating, I have to ding Microsoft Live Meeting for it’s top down control model. There is no group chat (participants can only chat with the moderator or one other person at a time, thus no horizontal communication nor any easy ability to collectively take notes), there is no visible participant list (thus defeating any community building part of one’s agenda), and there can only be one moderator at a time, reducing the ability to agily collaborate. This is “I deliver content to you” style technology. Yes, it may integrate nicely with Office and Outlook, but what if you are not using or don’t focus on these integration issues?

Not far behind in its clunkiness is WebEx, which makes passing the control baton something of a high wire act. I have enjoyed using Elluninate more. I’ve had the best luck with their integrated VoIP and their breakout rooms, while still a bit tricky, are much easier for me than WebEx.

On the free and lower cost side, Vyew is getting higher marks from me, but I’ve not tested it with a larger group and have not taken a run at the latest version of Dim Dim. Both currently offer 20 person rooms for free!

Skype – audio and chat – is still at the core of my small group meetings, often augmented by a quality phone/Skype bridge when I have larger groups (which costs me $40/month).

However, without clear purpose and useful practices, these tools are useless. We need to make gathering time serve our purposes and to be useful, functional and ENJOYABLE. Not a torture test. Friends and colleagues in my circle have all acknowledged we need to start thinking, working and practicing together to both better understand and manipulate the tools and improve the meeting processes themselves. Clearly, I need to make time for this.

Photo credit (and yes, I’ve used this one twice!) by stephentrepreneur

CoP Series #9: Community Heartbeats

This is the nineth in a series of blog posts I wrote for Darren Sidnick late last year in the context of communities of practice as part of online learning initiatives. I am finally getting the rest of the series up.  Part 1, part 2, part 3,, part 4, part 5, part 6,  part 7 ,  part 8 , part 9 and  part 1o here!

Community Heartbeats – when synchronous interactions matter 

Online community learning is great in that it provides us the opportunity to learn anytime,and  anywhere we have connectivity. However, that is a pretty rosy view when we consider the competition a course or workshop has against everything else going on in our lives. Often the thought of “oh, I can do this anytime so I’ll do it later” leaves a course to be done in the wee hours of the night or on weekends when we really might like or need to be doing something else. A learner who stays away too long may begin to feel they have fallen too far behind, or isolated from their community. That’s where synchronous events can help. They can keep the heartbeat of a learning community going strong. For some, they create a sense of community, relationship and “realness” — voices and not just words on a screen.

What are synchronous events?
Synchronous online events are when some or all of the learners are online at the same time and interacting using tools such as Voice over IP (VoIP), telephone bridge lines, chat rooms, web meetings and instant messenger tools – even Twitter!. They can be discussion based, or can be a presentation by a guest or tutor combined with time for questions and answers. They can be large group or small group breakouts from the larger community. Some examples include:

  • Weekly online tutor “office hours.” Learners can log on and ask questions, get support and just check in. These could be mandatory or voluntary. I find that if you do one first that is “all hands” people can get a sense of the value of the office hours, then are more likely to participate in the future.
  • Presentations and guest speakers & lecturers. First of all, if you aren’t planning any interaction with the learners around lectures or presentations, don’t make them synchronous. Save the synchronous time for INTERACTION. Content can be provided on the web to be viewed at anyone’s convenience.  But if you can bring in a special guest, this is worth a fixed meeting time and it makes it — well – SPECIAL.  Keep in mind, this is not about pushing powerpoints. A good online presentation will mix presentation with interative activities – a good mix is 7 minutes of content, 7-10 of interaction. An hour is good, and 90 minutes should be the maximum. Include audio, text and visual elements. Some of us are not so good at just listening!
  • Small group meetings. Is there small group work? Encourage learners to set a time to meet each week. This builds full participation and helps reduce procrastination. They can meet in a web meeting room or even just on an instant messenger or Skype. Even a shared Twitter hashtag can create little moments of shared learning and support.

What frequency of online events is useful?
For new learners, it is helpful to have regular synchronous events until they have figured out their learning and participation rhythms. Virtual team expert Martha Maznevski likens it to the heartbeat of a runner. New runners’ hearts are still weak so they beat fast early on in their runs. But trained runners hearts beat slower. So experienced learning communities may not need to meet as often, unless meetings are their preferred mode of interaction.

How do we bridge between the synchronous and the asynchronous?
Synchronous meetings don’t work for everyone due to schedules, internet access and personal learning preferences. So we need to have strategies that bridge between the synchronous and asynchronous.

  • Post recordings, notes and artifacts of synchronous meetings. Make sure your learners know where they are and how to access them.
  • Follow up on synchronous action items in the asynchronous interaction spaces. Notes taken “live” in a web meeting can be shared right afterwards, with action items highlighted. If additional conversation is needed, continue in a discussion thread, blog or wiki area.
  • Prepare for upcoming synchronous meetings by involving the group in planning, again using the asynchronous tools you have at hand. You can even use scheduling tools like http://www.doodle.ch to pick a meeting time!

Finally, check in with the group as to how the “heartbeat” is going. Ask for feedback and use that to improve the meetings and the timing of the meetings. Each group is different and we can use iterative planning to make the most of that diversity, rather than stifle it with set plans.

Resources: