GJ_notes_ama_webinar

Setting ground rules

• There is no anonymity
• See slide 12 for best practices

Risk and Pitfalls

• Security
• Intellectual Property

Information leakage, big waste of time, aligned to the time, does my company have the resources, behavior of the employees, quality of information itself

Valid-Risk taking with companies, they tell us that the information risks are overblown. They are public environments your name and picture is attached making itself governed. People stake their own reputation when they post.

Sell benefits to executives- tie to business needs and strategic initiatives.

• Collaboration environments are tied to business objectives, encourage collaboration and getting things done
• Draw hard lines to separate community functions to how work gets done. Works similar to email it is just augmenting collaboration

Do you recommend consulting with legal departments?

Yes if there is some information that needs to be kept confidential, is there is some information that is use at your own risk. Be really careful to place those types of learning’s and use your hard and fast controls. Be careful only lock-down the areas that you have too, check with legal to find out what, be careful not to lock down too much.

What are some emerging tools?

World of War Craft and Second life-Collaborative tools

They are good for collaborative simulations. Today they are used to simulate emergencies and such some difficult environments that are hard to recreate in real life, response to terrorist attacks and such.

After the application is used then you go into a real format. Leadership scenarios are being simulated as experimental learning environments where leaders have to go through employee interactions.

Virtual world are not places for continued collaboration and are more focused toward simulation.

Where do you begin?

Use the free apps and experiment and try. Many of the employees are already doing it. Find out where collaboration is happening and augment that collaboration.

Adoption- alignment to the business, they will take hold if it is incentivized and help achieve strategic initiatives. If it is part of the job then it will be adopted no matter what.

**If everyone thinks it is a sideline initiative then it will be the first cut.

Content is king, if there is good content then people will come. Have the early adopters and evangelist from the business pound the ground and provide that good content.

This cannot be a special destination. It should not require logging in.

Start easy

• Some applications allow email participation (ease in)
• Show the advanced stuff later
• Do not make it out of the flow of work

Make it easy for the user to adopt

Furl

Furl see other social bookmarking sites. I feel that it would be wise for one of these bad boys to join up with some sort of social network and make a freaking powerful application.

Paint.net

Paint.net I did not download this software but from what I read it looks to be a good alternative or at least a good affordable option for those who do not have access to Photoshop.

Textthemob

Textthemob this is the second service I have seen like this and I think this is great for live feedback. Anyone who had run a webinar that allows polling questions has seen a similar feature. But now there is away to add that same undisclosed polling to live instruction on a large scale. I can see this being an awesome use in political debates and conferences.

NVU

NVU does not exist anymore according to godaddy.

Freepath

Freepath seems like a wonderful tool for presenters and instructors. I see one downfall with this being a download able application. I would like to see someone use this then critique it.

Animoto is the s@#&

I mean check it out
this is my family link

Howard Rheingold Social Media Extraordinaire

If you have read my blog before you may have seen my post on writing objectives. The only reason I bring it up is that BA the coworker that I spoke about actually pointed me in the direction of Howard Rheingold by providing me this link. After reading the blog listed before I became interested in Howard's Social media classroom as seen below and decided to do a bit more research.

There is not much that I can write about Howard that he or someone else has not already written. So instead here is a link to his profile where you will find loads of info about what he has done and the books he has written. If you watched the video above you will see some basic info about Social Media classroom. This is what hooked be because with all the WEB 2.0 tools around and the lack of consistency and no one place to view it all Howard is working to produce that solution.

If you have not been able to tell from his profile or his general involvements Howard is quite the busy individual. So through some conviniantly timed instant messages I was able to get a bit more detail about Howard and that transcript is below.

Greg: Hey Greg again you think you may have time to answer random questions for my school project via IM?

Howard: Sure.

Greg: cool

Howard: Now is good

Greg: Tell me about what you do?

Howard: I explore, understand, and communicate about the individual, social, political, economic meanings of communication technology revolutions.

Greg: How did you get to where you are at in your career?

Howard: I have been a freelance writer since I was 23. In the early 1980s, I sought information about computers because I had heard you could use them instead of typewriters. I found my way to Xerox PARC and wrote Tools for Thought, which is on my website. That was a 1985 look at where people and PCs would be in 2000. The entire book is online. You can look back at my prediction of the future from the future I predicted. In the process of writing that book, I got online.

That led to writing "Virtual Communities" for Whole Earth Review in 1987 -- the first use of that word. That book is online as well. Both at rheingold.com.

Greg: Great info

How do you keep up with trends and keep yourself on the cutting edge?

Why elearning and distance education?

Howard: That's such an interesting question that I made a series of videos about how I spend my time online. I haven't finished the series, but you can find the first of them in the archives at http://vlog.rheingold.com

Education because I believe the answer to "are digital media and networks good for individuals, communities, democracies," is "it depends on who knows what about how to use available media . So I'm teaching. I'm not so much interested in distance education -- although that is one of my interests -- as in the use of social media to teach social media theory.

Gotta get back to work now.

Greg: thanks I will email the last 2 questions and look up the rest

Continued on 9/29/2008

Greg: Howard I wanted to check again just to make sure that I have your permission to use our conversation in print? I also wanted to make sure you got the email that I would like to partipate in the COP?

Howard: Yes, you have my permission. I don't have access to the list, but if you emailed and asked to participate, I saved your email.

Greg: perfect thanks

So back to the title "Social Instruction Extraordinaire" back in 1993 Howard was credited with creating the term virtual community. To me he was way ahead of his time or at least had the ability to come to the realization how important socialization is to learning. Currently I have been working on a project at work to start to integrate WEB 2.0 tools into our instructional workflow. Due to this research I have tested many tools that have been great and many that our bad. It is my hope that when Social Media classroom launches it will be as revolutionary as some of the work that Howard has already produced.