Entries Tagged 'tools' ↓

Vyew provides a virtual space to share information and to work together. Get your point across visually. Host live conferences and interact in real-time. Post documents and presentations for review and commenting anytime. It’s free. I’ve never been shy about promoting what I like, and I like Vyew a lot.

Vyew just came out of beta. We’ve used it extensively in our Unworkshops. The Unworkshops are morphing into an ongoing learning community. A list of View features is below the fold. Vyew is headquartered right here in The People’s Republic of Berkeley.
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In ten days, I’ll be conducting a number of “Guide on the Side” sessions at Training 2007.

I’ve posted information on the sessions and some pictures of Flawda gators on Internet Time Commons.

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Review of Informal Learning in this month’s T+D magazine. (pdf)

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As someone who makes a living out of designing formal learning systems for large corporations, I was an unlikely candidate to buy into Jay Cross’s theory that formal learning is largely ineffective. But my curiosity got the better of me, and I found myself totally engrossed in his out-of-the-ordinary thinking on learning.

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Google Reader offers so many possiblities. Say I want to set up a feed of things to check into once a month. Perhaps I want to take my team to places off the beaten path.

This month I might want to tweak my organization’s interest with TED (fantastic video snips of great, short presentations), The Software Abstractions Blog (admittedly, not everyone’s cup of tea), Donald Clark (plan B from Brighton), and Learnlets (Clark Quinn’s thoughts on learning, cognition, games, modeling and more). All I do is tag these blogs “once-a-month” and Google Reader gives me a URL for a stream of posts from those sites. I can even show a listing of the current feed flow on my site:

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A participant in our current unworkshop (which is morphing into a learning community as fast as we can push it) told of an informal learning technique so obvious it’s brilliant. Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. Check Lizzie’s The Strength of Weak Coffee and What’s the purpose of free coffee mornings?. It’s refreshing to learn about an intervention so practical that you don’t need theories to see the common sense and buy into it.
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Kick-ass* Kathy Sierra on community (and the “Dumbness of Crowds”):

One of the high-profile concepts of the Web 2.0 meme is community. Giving community the control. Letting the community make decisions. Trusting the community. And–if you’re a lucky bubble-2.0er–letting the community do all the work while you collect the money. But this idea of consensus-community is not at all what I’ve heard Tim O’Reilly talk about when he uses the phrase, “harnessing collective intelligence” or when he describes Web 2.0 as something whose value to users grows with the number of users.

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It’s the sharp edges, gaps, and differences in individual knowledge that make the wisdom of crowds work, yet the trendy (and misinterpreted) vision of Web 2.0 is just the opposite–get us all collborating and communicating and conversing all together as one big happy collborating, communicating, conversing thing until our individual differences become superficial.

*Kick-ass is a passionate user’s compliment.

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Our new Informal Learning Corner has just allied with Social Media Club to explore the synergy of unconferencing and informal learning. The Club’s rallying cry:

*If you get it, share it*

Hmmmm, get what? Well, the simple explanation of our tag line is that if you understand social media, share your understanding with others. Don’t just horde it all to yourself as if we still lived in a world where keeping knowledge within a given SILO was the smart thing to do. Help yourself grow your reputation, your influence and your expertise by sharing what you know with others.

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Creative friction is good for you.

You can never learn something you already know. Learning means changing your mind. It entails forging new neural connections. It happens when you encounter something that doesn’t fit your mind’s frameworks and pigeonholes. Your learning goes into overdrive when you are really ticked off.

Taking risks or traveling outside your comfort zone are powerful ways to learn. I think it was Malcolm Forbes who said that if two partners agree on everything, one of them is not necessary. If there’s no friction in sex, you don’t feel anything.

I hereby give you permission to challenge other people’s ways of thinking. Learning will emerge. It’s good for both parties.

The whole point of Unconferencing is to enable people to speak their minds. It beats death by PowerPoint. Opposites create.

Some people avoid conflict. They are called slow learners. Send them here if you need to quote an authority.

The current issue of Harvard Business Review has a useful article entitled How Leaders Create and Use Networks by Herminia Ibarra and Mark Hunter. It’s a no-brainer that to succeed in business, you’ve got to take advantage of your network. But not just any old network will do. To be a successful business leader, you must build and maintain three types of networks:

Your Operational Network is made up of the people it takes to get your job done. Most of them are insiders. It’s pretty evident who they are. Your goal is to foster deep working relationships with them.

Your Personal Network are the people who help you develop personally and professionally. They also keep you informed. Most of them are outsiders. They can come from anywhere. Your goal is breadth, not depth, of these relationships

Your Strategic Network becomes more important the higher you go in the organization. These people help you see what the future holds and how to line up stakeholder support. Some come from inside the organzation, some from outside. It’s not obvious who you want to participate: that depends on the strategy. Your goal is to work with people who leverage the linkage between inside and out.

WORKING is part of networking. You shouldn’t blow off networking because you don’t have time.

The authors caution against the common error of spending too much time on tweaking Outlook entries and not enough time picking up the phone. A network only thrives if it is used.

A former friend of mine considers himself a great networker. He’s not. Whenever he calls, I know he’s after something. “Hi, how you doing? How’s the wife? You still have those cute dogs? By the way, do you know anyone high up in Intel?” A great networker calls when she doesn’t need anything.

Networking is not in most people’s comfort zone, but it’s a good investment of time on a cost-benefit basis.

In 2007, nurture your networks.

Allison Rossett and Lisa Schafer have a new textbook out: Job Aids & Performance Support — Moving From Knowledge in the Classroom to Knowledge Everywhere.

I didn’t read the book so much as adsorb its message by osmosis. This has become a common practice for me since I wrote about it in
Informal Learning. I read the covers of the book and the table of contents. Then I flip to the back to scan the references and index. I look at the illustrations and an occasional caption. I may read the introduction and a chunk of the first chapter. I’ll read the last few pages. I try to sort of breathe it in. That’s about it. I come away from this fifteen-minute speed-read with probably 80% of the message I’d remember after four or five hours of front-to-back reading. It’s how I grapple with “So little time, so many books.”

Day before yesterday I found the book clear, well-constructed, and a good resource for someone new to the field. Yesterday I had a flash of inspiration about how to simplify the messages of the next Unworkshops: two key job aids. And today I realized where the inspiration had come from.

Anything your phone can do, Skype can do better.

Skype is wonderful. If you don’t know what it is, look here. In addition to free computer-to-computer calls (with video and IM), you can call from computer to landline for next to nothing. You can make conference calls for up to five people. You can check a chronology of past calls and chats. You can set up group chats for up to 100 people.

But wait, there’s more…

The Skype Plug-In for Firefox highlights phone numbers in emails and web pages. Click a highlighted number and Skype calls it for you. You can download code for a button that shows your status and gives one-click access to you.

FOLLOW-UP: 12/22. The static on an international conference call this morning was so irritating that we switched to Skype. There’s a new position for Skype to take: Better than your land lines.

For $25, I bought a lifetime license to Skype add-on Pamela that lets me record calls as wav or mp3. It’s also an answering machine, offline recorder, and voicemail manager.

Skype 3.0 beta is now available, as is Pamela 3.0.

Business Week.com reports:

IBM Corp. said Friday that it collaborated with electronics retailer Circuit City Stores Inc. to open a big-box outlet in the virtual video-game world, Second Life.

IBM said the prototype store is part of a bigger complex Big Blue plans to open next week in the virtual world.

The store contains replicas of real-life Circuit City products. People can direct their avatars, or in-game characters, to walk down the aisles, pick up and examine items, and order online for home delivery, IBM said.

The two companies are also working on virtual customer service and a place for shoppers to recreate their real-world living rooms, then test different TV sizes and sound system setups.

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Online Educa is over for most of its 2,000 participants, but I’m only about half way through. In the context of unbounded, informal learning, events are but a component of a broader learning process. At Online Educa I was gathering input and finding new nodes to follow up. Now my mind is sorting through what’s memorable and what’s mental clutter. New neural connections are forming. I awoke today with fresh insights.
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