Blogging Strategies

The third week of Web 2.0 for Learning Professionals Free Online Course (you can jump in at any time) is all about Blogs for Learning. Interestingly, when I prepared the notes for this week, I was able to leverage what the course members had produced during the previous week on Social Bookmarks:

• http://delicious.com/tag/wlning+blogs
• http://delicious.com/tag/wlning+blog
• http://delicious.com/tag/wlning+blogging

You can read in the link Blogs for Learning about my perspective on using Blogs for Learning and Networking. There's a bit in there on blogging strategies, but the reality is that when I go back and look at my previous posts on what your personal strategy should be around blogging, I'm not finding that much. And one of the course members raised a really interesting question in the Forum around blogging strategies:

Matthew, how has blogging changed the way you think? I myself have not had that experience and I'm interested in understanding how it has such an effect on yours. My own experience is that blogging is not very social (even when I have asked for feedback). I have people that follow my blog; I know this from both statcounter and google analytics. However, I have yet to really have "conversations" and feedback except from a few core people.

For me, reading and commenting on blogs (not writing them) gives me the opportunity to learn from others. My own blogging has switched from being an invitation for discussion (which was unsuccessful) to more of a journal of my thoughts as they pop into my head. Before blogging, those thoughts were fleeting. Now they allow me to record the thoughts and expand on them as I experience and learn new things.

The discussion that is following it is quite interesting and I think gets into the heart of what blogging as an experience and as a learning tool is all about. The reality is that as you blog, your blogging strategies are bound to shift.

I recommend looking at Top Ten Reasons To Blog and Top Ten Not to Blog and also:

• How People Interact with Blogs?
• Time Spent on Blogging

Love to get comments in the Forum around this.

Survey - Do You Know What These Are?

I'd like to ask your help. Can you please take a really quick survey - three questions only. Your age and then shows you two images and asks if you know what they are. I'll post the results up pretty soon (within a week or two) as I need them for an upcoming presentation.

You'll likely get the point of the question based on the two images in the survey.

Also, since readers of my blog tend to be over 27, if you happen to have access to a younger audience, i.e., students, and can ask them to take the survey, that would be great.

Thanks for your help.

Take Survey

Record Video Chat Interviews

A client of mine (celebrity) would like to record video interviews they are going to be doing with people all around the country. We are thinking that we will be sending out some basic equipment (web cam + microphone) to the people involved in the interview if they don't have the right stuff.

I'm trying to figure out what software we will use. It looks like ooVoo provides the split screen capability and ability to record and I've seen a couple instances on YouTube that look okay. I've personally not used ooVoo, so a bit worried about recommending it.

Are there other solutions that we should look at?

Any other thoughts on how to handle this?

Likely the site and videos will get some decent traffic because of who is involved and where they will be discussing the site.

Social Bookmarks

The second week of our Web 2.0 for Learning Professionals Course is starting and the topic is Social Bookmarks. Here's the great resource / assignment that Harold and Michele created for this week:

Week 2: Free Your Bookmarks with Social Bookmarking

This has sparked some interesting activity and makes me think that the net effect of this kind of open course is a bit more interesting than I had thought. Take a look at the pages that are being tagged as part of the course - Work Literacy Ning Links. These are all coming from people participating in the course. But several of them are fantastic items that I had never seen before. They are also coming in somewhat categorized so that I can look at:

http://delicious.com/tag/wlning+blogs
http://delicious.com/tag/wlning+blog
http://delicious.com/tag/wlning+blogging

to find stuff that might be useful for next week's materials. Great stuff.

I also saw that several people have posted slideshare presentations embedded into the forums. Scroll down a bit on this page.

It's fun to have a group that is partly experience and partly new with social learning going on. I'm hoping that there will be a couple of good questions/examples that will emerge again this week that can get folks to do screencasts similar to what I did last week. Btw, if you pick up Jing, you can probably do it in under 10 minutes. It's fun to have a real problem to try to work on and then see how people try to address them.

This is a bit different than I expected and a whole lot of fun.

Social Networks

The first week of our Free - Web 2.0 for Learning Professionals is wrapping up. This week we looked at Social Networks. Here are some thoughts on this topic, especially thoughts around social networks for learning.

Starting with Social Networking was a blessing and a curse. Social networks have a tendency to be a bit messy. Virginia Yonkers told us -

I would like to know how to manage the information flows in social networks. I have been part of Ning groups before, but find it overwhelming, very quickly because there seems to be multiple inputs for information. It sort of feels like a classroom with too much noise and side conversations. As a teacher, we learn how to manage that. As a student we learn how to ignore the chatter. How do we do this in the social network environment?

And, I think that the course fell right into this trap. Even as an organizer, when I get into the Ning group, I feel overwhelmed. Maybe this is partly design, but it's also how conversation, content spread across social networks.

Still, if I ask, what would I want to have helped learning professionals to know at a base level around social networks and their relationship to learning:

1. What's a social network and what do users do in social networks? Common elements such as Profiles, Discussions, Friends, Groups.
2. How do social networks relate to personal learning?
3. How do social networks relate to formal learning?

I think we likely did okay on these topics, even if people (including me) felt a bit lost at times. The fact that we used a social networking tool meant that you somewhat had to get some feel for using a social network. And the messiness is somewhat part of the experience. The personal learning aspect was maybe not as strongly experienced, but some of the discussion and tools brought this home. And I think it's very interesting to see a formal learning experience using a social network teaching about using a social network for formal learning. Yes, it's only one example and hopefully people thought about lots of others as part of it. So, while it might be a bit messy, I feel like we did pretty well with the core of what we were going after.

The questions at the start of the week were fantastic. We likely could have spent all our time just answering those. Of course, that would lead to even worse scattering. Here were some of the questions people had along with some thoughts -

How do people currently use social networks in their professional lives? Are there any particular ways participants currently use social networks for training and educational purposes? Is it advantageous to you or just 'techno-fluff'?

I discussed part of this in my recent screencasts LinkedIn for Finding Expertise and Searching for Expertise - LinkedIn Answers. Certainly, the conversations and the finding of expertise via social networks such as LinkedIn is a big part of their use. There was some really good discussion (but less than I expected) on Using Social Networks with Learners. I really expected more conversation about Social Learning. Most often it's not the normal Social Networks that are getting used, but rather other kinds of targeted networks. The resources that were provided on this are great:

• The Facebook Classroom: 25 Education Apps
• Facebook as a Learning Platform
• Ning in Education
• Some learning professionals weigh in on how they're using social network...

Another set of questions ...

I too would like to learn how people use social networking professionally. What’s the time commitment for the average user? How do people manage the multiple networks?

There was a forum on Manging Your Social Networks and the Time Commitment with some good thoughts on this question.

Another question / comment ...

I don't know about ning or even facebook. Here in Brazil, people are more familiar with Orkut or Myspace. Some teachers here use Orkut to teach English or to get in touch with other professionals to share ideas, lesson plans and so on. But what disapoint me is the fact that some schools, educational institutions don't allow the use of social networks in info labs. Is this a problem which happens only here in Brazil or not?

I hate to say it, it's a problem everywhere - according to the eLearningGuild's surveys schools block these sites and corporations block access to web 2.0 tools.

Conversation included LinkedIn, Ning, MySpace, Orkut, PLE, Plurk, Utterli, Twitter, Elgg, Xing, Edmoto, wow, there are a lot of these things to consider.

As I'm writing this summary and looking back at the conversations (I'm barely scratching the surface here), this really has been a fantastic week of learning.

Looking forward to next week's topic - Social Bookmarking.

By the way, you can join the course at any time. There are 582 members right now, but the traffic statistics indicate that we may have some lurkers in addition to the core group.

Conversation Learning

One of the questions being raised this week in the free, online course Work Literacy: Web 2.0 for Learning Professionals is how social networks impact personal learning. To me, this is a critical part of The New Skills for knowledge workers. And what I often cite as the biggest change in knowledge work skills over the past 20 years is the change in access to people. Sure, the amount of existing content out there grows exponentially (a trillion web pages indexed by Google in 2008). But, more remarkable is that now you have a lot of mechanisms to reach out to people and find expertise.

In Value from Social Media, I talked about the issue of finding information via Google / Search vs. seeking conversation:

Let’s consider a simple scenario - I’m trying to decide if a particular solution makes sense for my company / organization. I do some searching on Google and find some overviews of the solution and some other good information. But, what it’s still not quite enough to make me feel comfortable with my recommendations. I would like more in the areas of:

• Experience - What have been the experiences of other organizations (not the canned case studies) when they’ve used this solution.
• Boundaries / Existence - I’ve got a particular issue and I’m not sure if answers to that issue exist out there, I’ve not found it in my searching.
• Confirmation - I’m beginning to have an answer, but I’d like to get confirmation of the answer based on my particular situation based on experience.
• Importance - Some of the issues I see, I’m not sure how important they are in practice, should I be concerned.

All of these kinds of questions are hard to answer with Google.

In a recent presentation, I showed an example problem (selecting an authoring tool), went through searching, and then asked whether you felt comfortable with the following questions:

• What’s really going to happen?
• Did I miss something important?
• How important are the various issues?
• Is my answer reasonable?

These are the same issues raised above, worded differently. During this week's course, one of the more interesting things was seeing one of the members experience - My Real-Time, Real-Life Research Project (Using LinkedIn and Ning). Here was the challenge:

I am currently trying to find a SME experienced with Moodle (a CMS/LMS) and WizIQ (synchronous web class technology).

Great example of a query. So much so, that I responded with Searching for Expertise - LinkedIn Answers and LinkedIn for Finding Expertise. Later this same person who had established this goal told us:

Well, I just went over to check my email, and learned that someone replied within the past 15 minutes, and gave me the most complete answer I've found thus far. Interestingly, I found the Moodle-specific ning through someone mentioning it in a response to my posting of the same question to one of the LinkedIn groups which I belong to.

Essentially, a Moodle expert that I found using LinkedIn directed me to a different forum in which to ask my question, and a different Moodle expert answered my question, 20 hours after I asked it. And I just learned about ning for the first time yesterday!

I am really excited to be learning how to connect and do research this way. It's certainly way more fun than a boring old Google search. And I can use the Advanced Search function to find experts to answer other questions I have about Moodle.

This is a great example of what you can find by reaching out to seek conversation. And conversation can be virtual or by scheduling a call. Or ...

In Know Where You Can Find Anything, I showed some problems were being specifically designed to be hard to find via search. Realistically, solving them using conversation would be too much. In these cases, a new kind of conversation, distributed work is required. Parcel it out to experts in different areas. Social networks can be a good way to do this. Find groups who are interested in the separate questions and have them run with it.

As a side note, the Work Literacy browse search feature worked great for me today. When I went to a page that combined Google Search Network, there were a bunch of posts that were pretty interesting. It's a bit ugly, but still quite useful.

Training Specialist

Saw a post by Matthew Franz - where he tells us - I don't get e-learning 2.0 - and it made me wonder if Franz is a training specialist - who's not looking at more than training as a model for learning. Here's what he said:

I just don't get why folks are trying to lump in wikis, blogs, rss, etc. as "e-learning."

RSS, Blog, Wikis, etc. are fundamental workplace tools in the same way that other tools (office applications, web applications, the Internet etc.) are also tools, but think of the absurdity of making a big deal of Excel as an "e-learning 1.0 tool."

Is it because corporate trainers (I am one now, so I can critique them) are so backward and 2.0-illiterate? Is that why this is a big deal? To me if you make the definition of "e-learning" so expansive (and yes, I realize there is overlap between e-learning and knowledge management but to classify knowledge management activities as learning seem silly) it makes the term almost meaningless. Yes, everything you do should be about learning and creating knowledge, but this is different from Learning with a Big-L and little-l learning. What am I missing here?

I agree with Matthew that there's nothing inherent in these tools that makes them an eLearning tool. You can use them for very practical things all day long that no one would walk by and say - "Hey, that's a learning tool." So, why are they coming up in talks, blog posts, etc. about learning?

When the question is phrased this way, I'd be surprised if Matthew wouldn't be able to talk to these tools in the context of their impact on personal learning and formal learning. When you look at the examples from my blog post that he cites - Examples of eLearning 2.0 - clearly these things are being applied to formal and informal learning opportunities.

I believe what Matthew is questioning (Big-L vs. little l) is whether there is anything that pushes these into the realm where someone who is a learning professional (especially a training specialist) should somehow care more about these tools than anyone else. (Or maybe I'm missing what Matthew is missing.)

My strong belief (see Leading Learning and Developing New Skills) is that learning professionals (even training specialists) actually have an important responsibility here.

• Learning professionals must be adept in these tools so that we understand how they apply to formal learning settings and in a myriad of personal learning settings.
  
• Learning professionals must be actively promoting (through tactical application) their use in our organizations.

And I'm not allow in these views - see Lead the Charge.

Part of what may be at issue here is the continuing question of the Scope of Learning Responsibility where I see Learning (capital L) being responsible for helping knowledge workers be able to do their work (that inherently has learning involved) more effectively, efficiently, accurately, etc. If you look at this from a training specialist standpoint and stop at formal training as your definition of scope, then this stuff is less interesting (but still interesting).

Matthew, like you, I don't see Excel as being all that exciting with it's application to learning. (Side note: If you had said, Google Spreadsheet, then the collaborative and real-time aspects of the application actually have some interesting implications - maybe we would have had a more interesting discussion.) But when you come out and essentially say that there's nothing that interesting about Wikis, Blogs and RSS when it comes to learning or Learning. Well, I'm not sure how that's even a little defensible.

This could be only around definition of the term eLearning - and maybe Matthew defines it as eLearning 1.0 (authored content) - then I guess I would understand why he tells us that he doesn't get eLearning 2.0.