I have this nifty macbook pro laptop which I bought a couple of years ago. Like each machine I have loved, this one has quickly filled up. It started warning me about this state of affairs in January. I was able to get rid of some stuff and keep it happy for a while, but by last month, the low hanging fruit had all been tossed. It was time to upgrade.

A quick googling around assured me that I could indeed replace my 100 gig hard drive with one three times as big. Cool! But also, that this process is sort of involved, a lot more involved than hard disk replacement on a macbook, or on my old Toshiba, in which basically all you had to do was take out a screw or two, give a yank, and push the new one in. No, for the macbook pro, you have to loosen a dozen some screws, remove the keyboard, and get right down into the guts of the machine.

So I thought well, ok, maybe I need to entrust this job to a professional. But calling around, the pros who were willing to do it are all 40 minutes to an hour away, and would require me to leave my precious machine in their custody for several days. They’d charge from $80 to $150 to do the labor, which is reasonable for a fairly involved bit of surgery, but none of them stock the new 320 gig drive, just the 250 gig size.

Well, shoot. Back to the drawing board. Or Google. Which sent me to Other World Computing where not only do they sell the parts I’m looking for, but they publish installation VIDEOS in which an affable, knowledgeable, calm repair guy performs the replacement procedure and talks the viewer through it.

I watched the video, and decided that yes, even though I’d botched a similar surgery on my trusty old Toshiba laptop a coupla years ago (In attempting to replace the fan, I sliced through fan wires. Not good. Note that the macbook dates from shortly after this adventure!) with the guidance of the nice guy in the video, I could do this.

So I placed my order with the other world folks. The parts came, I set up a workspace in front of my desktop screen, cued up the video, and went to work. The difference between this experience and the Toshiba one was significant. With the Toshiba, I had the help of some excellent web pages with still photos. But to be able to hear the sound the keyboard should make when it comes up, and to watch the tech struggle a bit to wiggle the disk into place conferred subtle but important information which would have been really difficult to communicate textually, or even with still photography.

The video was very basic. Production values were Spartan. Clear audio, clear video, and the calm, confident voice of the narrator were the primary ingredients. That OWC did not edit down the portions which took longer to do than they probably should have helped, too. It gave me confidence pre-purchase that I was seeing a real person doing a real task, in which complications sometimes arise, and more confidence as I re-watched while doing the task, that the difficulties were easily surmountable. And indeed they were. Half an hour later, I was merrily performing a disk restore to my newly capacious machine.

I’m sure I am not the only person who has made a purchase based on the availability of online training for the task I needed to do. Of course, it’s a little easier, when selling parts, to imagine with some certainty what the learning needs of your public might be.

It makes me wonder, though, what percentage of the training programs we e-learning providers are offering hit that sweet spot, effectively teaching exactly what learners need to know, in a way which permits them to immediately and effectively apply that learning?

As part of the preparation for Elliot Masie’s Learning Systems 2008 conference next week, Bill Bruck did an interview with Elliot. The podcast features Bill’s observations on the state of the learning field, its future trajectory, and how Q2 sees our eCampus fitting into the picture.

I learn in three ways, and I want my learning system to support all of them. Sometimes I learn by being taught; sometimes I learn by going out and finding information I need; and sometimes I learn by asking a colleague. Probably only 5% of my learning is from being taught and unfortunately, that’s the only piece that most learning systems excel at.

Moreover, I don’t distinguish learning from a couple other things I do in my job. I produce knowledge – intellectual property – for my organization, and I produce deliverables for our customers. Most often I do both of these in collaboration with others.
I want my online environment to support all these things, because in my job, they are all connected: work, learning, collaboration, and knowledge sharing.

We may as well call what I want a “learning system” because no one else is looking at providing this – but truly what I want is for this system to recognize and support the fundamental convergence of learning with the rest of my life.
And launching eLearning modules or scheduling me for classes is the least part of it.

As the CPsquare “Long Live the Platform” conference wraps up this week, I’ve been thinking a lot about “community” and its role within the enterprise.

Community is one of those concepts debated endlessly in circles of individuals who have spent their careers involved in one way or another with computer-mediated communication. The central question among this crew tends to be “at what point can you call a group of people who are in communication, “a community”? Back in the day, there were worries that in-person get-togethers of individuals who had formed friendships online would in some way taint the purity of the online community they had formed. That theory proved false – the vast majority of people who form relationships online find that meeting in person broadens and deepens their relationships.

Relationship is the key. People are in community with one another once they have formed relationships with one another. Those relationships may form over shared interests – there are Linux communities and cat fancier communities. They form over shared resources: Friends of the Library, for example. Some of the strongest communities are those which form over shared efforts to meet shared challenges: support groups for alcoholism recovery, parenting and various chronic disease processes are frequently venues where people make deep and lasting friendships.

So how does any of this relate to the business world? Well, if you can get people sufficiently interested in your product that they form a community around their shared interest in it, that can do a lot for brand loyalty and ultimately accessory and repeat sales. For that reason, figuring out ways to encourage the formation of “retail communities” is very high in the consumer product arena, and we see products with MySpace pages so that fans can “friend” them.

Within the enterprise, there is significant interest in fostering knowledge sharing. During the CPsquare conference, Eric Sauve , whose Tomoye platforms, like our own eCampus, use both the traditional discussion forums and the newer web 2.0 modalities to support communities of practice, argued that perhaps we need to expand our sense of online community to include the participation of those who find it too much effort to add to conversations, provide resources, etc., but do contribute by rating the value of other people’s contributions.

My friend and co-worker Charles Roth points out that participating in rating, while useful, more precisely identifies one as adding to what James Surowiecki calls The Wisdom of Crowds . It’s helpful to know that people I don’t know rate a resource as valuable, but the value of that information does not compare to that of the same referral from someone with whom I have an actual relationship, and whose take on the subject at hand I know I either trust or distrust.

Is it enough to provide a platform which facilitates (and provides recognition for) “one-click participation”? Or is it worth it to go to the next level: fostering the formation of mutually beneficial relationships among the individuals who collaborate on the various projects which further enterprise goals?

Resource constraints may indeed force some enterprises to settle for the “crowd” solution. Doing so certainly beats NOT gathering resources and opinions on them, and one-click participation is better than no participation at all.

But it seems to me that fostering the growth of employee relationships beyond shared membership in the “paycheck-receiving community, ” beyond merely reacting to the contributions of others, and into active participation in a true community of practice in which co-workers actively seek to provide each other with insight into their shared challenges is what is needed to maintain agility in today’s rapidly changing marketplace.

Fostering that growth requires more than providing a platform with objects to which individuals can respond. To build the crowd into a functioning community, one must provide the venues for conversation which allow for the development of relationship.

It's an interesting exercise. So far, there have been two presentations, one by our own Bill Bruck on Q2's xPERT eCampus and another by Bob Doyle who has put together a wide range of tools for the DITA users group.

What is emerging, unsurprisingly, is that what makes a platform a good choice for supporting a community has EVERYTHING to do with the goals of the individuals in the community. DITA users are technical writers who meet regularly face to face in regional user groups – what they seek online is generally the opportunity to ask technical questions of each other, and to access references and tutorials on the DITA standard.

Q2's customers are more heterogeneous, but a large part of our business revolves around providing training opportunities and shared workspaces to people who are not co-located. What they are seeking is a way to do collaborative learning and work together on projects without being together at the same place, or at the same time. The affordances we build in to facilitate online conversation are essential for our users, but not of interest to folks who can have their conversations in person.

Some newcomers to the CPsquare conversation are asking for a list of essential features in CoP software. As usual, that's a question which has to be answered with another question – what are the members of your community trying to accomplish?

Proposition: The house believes that social networking technologies will bring large [positive] changes to educational methods, in and out of the classroom.

So opens this week's debate in the ongoing series at Economist.com. I find myself in substantial agreement with both Ewan McIntosh's pro position, and with Michael Bugeja's con position. The two men have taken very different views of just what a "social networking technology" is.

McIntosh includes virtually every technology which puts learners in touch with people who know stuff, and argues the not-very-controversial point that creating such connections enriches the learning experience.

Bugeja considers a narrower definition of social networking technologies, namely, those commercial ventures like MySpace and Facebook who bill themselves as social networking platforms. He suggests, persuasively, that permitting commercial ventures to set the agenda for education is fraught with peril.

They are both right. I've been in love with the potential for online social networking for enriching learning since we found a really weird-looking plant on the glacial kame my son's 4^th grade class was studying, and with a few emails to some folks I know through a parenting list, had links to discussions of this very primitive life form, and the email address of a botanist who studies them. My kids have grown up in a world where it's possible to read about something on the web, and start up a conversation with the author, simply by clicking the link to her email address provided on the site.

A key to the value of a social connection is the context in which the connection is made, whether it happens in person, or online.

That's the main problem with the big commercial network sites – Potentially eeeevil profit-making privacy-invading concerns aside, they make possible connections which don't have any context, and hence aren't that valuable. When a fourth grader emails a botany professor with a question about a strange plant, there is an educational context which adds richness to the exchange – the fourth grader is expressing interest in something in which the professor obviously has interest, and it's fair to assume that the professor has some interest in teaching which complements the fourth-grader's interest in learning, even if they are not in a formal instructor-pupil relationship.

When a college kid "friends" somebody they've met on campus, there is also a context of mutuality. This is why Facebook took off so quickly.

It is a pleasure to be contacted by old friends, by valued colleagues, and to make the acquaintance of people one has never met with whom one nevertheless shares a mutual interest. It is annoying to have to wade through messages from people with whom no mutuality is immediately apparent. I predict that the development of sufficiently nuanced filtration technologies to keep the "spam" down in the social networking apps is what will eventually separate the winners from the losers.

In the meantime, I celebrate the numerous, creative efforts being made daily to harness technology to put people who are interested in learning stuff in touch with people who know a lot about that stuff. That this can be done with a simple static web page with interesting info and an email address is cause for celebration. That it can be done effectively with sophisticated software which permits people who have already identified their mutual interest to continue conversations across time and space is the belief which keeps me working where I do.

Maybe I need a new way to explain what I do? "Hi, I'm Val Bock, and I work in online educational social networking."

Nah, too much of a mouthful, and it sorta sounds as if I give MySpace lessons. But it sure makes the point better than saying "I work in e-learning" does!

The old saw suggests that if the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.  We're seeing a lot of that in the social software space.

Apparently, now that every corporate executive has a kid on Facebook, more and more companies in the Web2.0, social software space feel the need to answer "but does it have Facebook-like capability?" with yes.

The thing is, people are still really unclear on which tasks Facebook is well suited for, and which are better handled by different tools.

The latest entry in this sweepstakes is WorkBook: A Secure Corporate Overlay for Facebook

Worklight offers several scenarios which illustrate why they think it would be handy to have Facebook capability in a corporate secured environment.  Let's look at these:

	Francesca interacts securely with colleagues at remote offices, taking advantage of Facebook's social networking tools (e.g. send birthday greetings, share your status, send requests, etc.) Um, ok. Let's take these one at a time: Send birthday greetings -- Birthday greetings sent to a Facebook page will only be received if the person checks their Facebook page.  It's still customary in most cultures to send such greetings to a person where they are.  And while college students may spend a lot of time on Facebook, working people are likely doing their work, and probably more reachable via phone or email. Share your status – to see someone's status, it's necessary to check their Facebook page.  IM clients are MUCH more convenient for this purpose.  With one glance, I can look at my MSN messenger window and see that my boss is on the phone, my colleague is heads-down pumping out a project report, and the sales guy is out on a call. Send requests – usually, people need a way to store and organize the requests they receive.  Email allows people to file requests atomically.  Project discussion rooms allow the posting of requests in the space where the project is being tracked, and allow everyone else on the project to see who is asking whom for what.  But requests sent to a Facebook page are not manipulable there. They will likely have to be copied somewhere else for tracking. Who needs that?
	Marisa, a civil engineer based in London, uses Facebook/WorkBook to find corporate colleagues in Asia and North America who have already solved a structural challenge she has just been assigned. This is a job for an expert locator.  While Facebook offers detailed profiling, and presumably Workbook adds to the mix by adding some corporate-related fields, it's not at all clear how one makes a collection of profiles into an expert locator without developing some shared taxonomy.  Where in your facebook page are you going to mention the list of structural challenges you've solved?  How is someone going to find that in a search?
	Joe, a field rep in Omaha, posts a link to an interesting article from the Wall Street Journal, so that his peers in other regions can use the information in sales presentations If this is a resource for sharing with a group of folks, wouldn't it make more sense to share that link in a full featured resource library? Say, one which is organized by topic?  How are people going to know this resource exists? I'm more likely to subscribe to the "sales related articles" folder if I want that sort of information than I am to Joe's page.
	Rajiv, an Accounts Receivables manager, shares an unpaid invoice record with the appropriate sales manager. Where? On Rajiv's page? On the sales manager's page? Wouldn't this be better handled in a space dedicated to stuff about the client?
	Deborah changes her work-related to status to “working on next year’s budget” I won't know this, though, unless I check her page. If she updates her message on IM though, it'll be displayed in a nice little window which I keep open on my desktop at all times.
	Corporate management announces a recent large deal to all employees and posts a new HR policy to European employees. Where? In an all-hands group and an HR Group?  How will people know that new information is on these pages?  Through a blizzard of email notifications? If so, why not just send out the text in an email and be done with it?

The thing is, Facebook and similar applications presume that people and their properties are the center of attention.  This is quite true in the social world – we make our friends and maintain our friendships based on who they are and what they are thinking about and what they are interested in.

In the work world, personal relationships do matter a great deal. Knowing something about a person's personal life and sharing those personal bonds builds trust.  Sharing professional experiences builds regard.  But being effective at work requires putting THE WORK at the center of focus, and making relationships around getting the work done.   I don't want to have to check individual pages for each of my team members to know how the XYZ project is progressing. I want to go to a space where all the XYZ stuff is being discussed, where documents relating to XYZ are being worked on and stored  I want that space to be flexible. I want to be able to tell at a glance what I've already read there and what is new.

I use a wide range of tools to get my work done each day.  I appreciate the need to bring together a range of functionality under a single interface.  I'm excited by the approaches people are coming up with to try to do this.  But I'm darned sure that Facebook is not going to be the Swiss army knife we're all dreaming of. It's just not sufficiently work-centered!

Drakos' opening line "The collaboration support market is being revitalized, with buyers and sellers looking to add social interaction in the context of broad collaboration support." is indeed what we're seeing here at Q2.  The new awareness of social aspects to enterprise knowledge sharing tools usually manifests in sales calls in the form of a comment like "yeah, this is pretty much what we need, but do you have 'facebook-type' functionality?"

Drako's analysis reflects this state of affairs.  He observes "Buyers in the collaboration support market are looking for persistent virtual environments where participants can create, organize and share information, as well as interact with each other."  His "low" baseline for inclusion are features we've had for years in our platform:

• membership management
• access controls
• user profiles
• shared workspaces
• document sharing
• discussion forums

He adds to it his list of "High Expectations of Additional Optional Functionality" and  indicates that the ability to do these things will gradually be added to baseline expectations.

• calendar integration
• task allocation
• task tracking
• workflow
• basic project management
• wikis
• blogs,
• social tags
• social bookmarks,
• social network analysis
• social network visualization
• content feeds
• people search (expertise location),
• team decision support (voting, sorting, ranking, scenario planning and categorizing)
• content rating
  
• reputation management
• alerting

I'd call the first few items on that wish-list the "project management toolkit".  Sites like Basecamp have been in that space for a while. The thing is, project management tends to have some very organizationally specific cultural requirements, and it may be a while before the online tools develop the sophistication of the offline ones sufficiently for established project management cultures to become comfortable using them. At Q2,  for example, we use a combination of Microsoft Project, some software tools of our own design, and discussion forums for project management. When we're doing joint projects with other orgs, we have a tendency to force the issue of using online discussion space for a tool, and we've noticed that people we've dragged along on that path eventually are converted!

Wikis, of course, are a mechanism to facilitate group document generation, and are, I believe, one of those things that are shortly going to disappear from the conversation just as word-processing software has, because their essential utility will make them ubiquitous.  Some day soon, anyone who has to work with documents will know what eventually wins out as the standard wiki the way we all now know Word.  So yeah, if you are in the online collaboration space, and you don't have a wiki, you are probably missing some essential functionality.

The jury is still out on the extent to which blogs will become a must-have in the enterprise social software sphere.  We have pretty robust blogging capability in our software, enabling our customers to configure blogs for internal or public consumption. But we aren't seeing it utilized much at all.  People seem to experiment with blogging for a while and then decide that other tasks on their list are more critical for the advancement of their careers and their organizations. Or, if they are already engaged in blogging from a public site, they just leave their blog in the platform they already understand and where their public knows where to find them.  It may be that being able to link out to blogs will be more important in the enterprise arena than being able to generate them—it will be interesting to see.

Which brings us to the newly-christened "social" stuff.  An important question underlying this functionality for the enterprise is "how much is lost if we limit our universe to our own organization?"  Tagging, rating, and reviewing internal proprietary content is pretty obviously a job for software internal to the enterprise.  Finding people internal to the enterprise who have experience with a given client. project, or skill-set is also well-suited to a platform within the firewall.  But what about those public spaces?  How much is it worth to an organization to have its people "out there" on del.icio.us, on Linked-in and Facebook, sharing their expertise and opinion of publicly available resources?  When employees are searching for new information, to what extent should they depend on internal tools, and when is it important to venture out?  To the extent that they venture out and find things of value, how should those things be brought "in" so that others in the organization can benefit?  In short, when is a filtered network optimal, and when is an unfiltered network the place to go?

We’re thinking about these questions, and trying to strike a balance, creating a tool which fosters the creation and nurture of the internal social network, while making it easy to bring in the best resources from outside.  It's sort of in our blood – we were around when discussion forums evolved from BBS and Usenet to the Web.  (I still get a chill when I think about how cool it was the first time I could post a relevant URL to a discussion forum!)  I believe that the acceleration of global interconnectedness will mean that even for the largest organizations, it will be in discussing information streaming in from outside, comparing it to internal intelligence, and constructing meaning with other knowledgeable people that strategic advantage is attained.

Dion Hinchcliffe did a pretty exhaustive survey of the state of enterprise 2.0 a couple of weeks ago.  It's a great read, if only to get a handle on just what Enterprise 2.0 is evolving into in the minds of people who are thinking about it!

At the core of Enterprise 2.0 is a paradox: What is the best way to incorporate "social applications that are optional to use, free of unnecessary structure, highly egalitarian, and support many forms of data" into a highly structured corporate environment?  Hinchcliffe observes

By the time you’ve installed, configured, customized, and integrated all of the ingredients you’ve brought together, if you’ve lost sight of the specific reasons why Enterprise 2.0 is supposed to work better, your effort will have been in vain. I see this often when Enterprise 2.0 projects don’t provide, say, read access to RSS feed readers to workers or fail to make it easy to create a blog post or wiki page from the Intranet and a dozen other minor decisions made on top of the Enterprise 2.0 tools selected, yet contrary to their spirit and that will be significantly detrimental to the outcome. Best advice: Clearly understand the benefits of these news tools and ideas and then do your very best to ensure they aren’t negated.

Of course, the same lack of clarity which leads to installations which frustrate the purpose of the initiative makes training on how to use these tools more complex, too.  Hinchcliffe describes the training needs:

Just like the previous generation of workers received computer literacy classes en masse and learned how to use business productivity applications such as word processing, spreadsheets, and email, the same will be required for the current generation of workers and Enterprise 2.0. This is even simple guidance such as should something go into a blog post, a wiki page, or mashup app. Also why and when should workers respond to comments and participate in social networking, bookmarking, and internal/external online communities? 

I don't see this sort of guidance as "simple" at all.  It was pretty straightforward to figure out which work should go into a spreadsheet and which into a word processor. The hard part was learning the features and how to activate them.  But where, or perhaps more importantly, whether to post one's thought among a range of new venues for expression, that's a question of corporate culture.  The executive suite is rightfully reluctant to simply adopt wholesale the approach of the early adopters in the org, but they are the only ones so far who've done the experimentation and have a feel for what sort of work fits best in which of the new formats.

During this early, experimental time, it's a little frightening to invest big dollars in a large scale integrated product to support a way of working which is still largely untested.  But it's very expensive in terms of worker productivity and data fragmentation to have critical work scattered among a wide range of different, overlapping applications which don't have integrated search.

We've been working on these issues.

In xPERT Office, we think we have a solution which helps mitigate organizational risk during this time of transition. We offer a platform which integrates a high-powered discussion forum with wiki and blog capability, so users don't have to learn a new interface as they experiment with each of these new ways to present work.  These tools can be made open to everybody, or rolled out gradually as new teams need them.  xPERT Office stands nicely on its own as an office-on-the-web, but can easily be integrated with the enterprise HR system to keep user data sync'd. To ease what can be a difficult transition in workstyle, it permits participation via email for those who aren't quite ready to make the leap out of their inboxes  into a more organized environment.

More importantly, perhaps, we have some expertise in helping an org think through just how the corporate culture they have, and the one they aspire to develop, can be expressed through thoughtful incorporation of these tools into the work of their people.

I've been watching the rise of the social networking sites with fascination.  There has always been a bit of fuzziness (or violent controversy, depending on in which circles one is having the conversation!)  about what constitutes community in general, as well as about what constitutes online community.

I think the rise of online social networking gives us a new angle on this question.  It seems to me that my social network forms with me at the center, and allows me to branch out from there. This explains the online social network software's "me" focus – First you post what it is you want others to be known about you, and then you go out to create connections to others

Community usually forms with something else at the center – a shared geographic location, a shared project, a shared interest – something around which people gather, and as a result of that gathering, develop deeper understandings of one another and of the community focus.  Community is where you get things done.  A social network is an invaluable tool for pulling people into community.

Social networks form bridges across communities. My memberships at the YMCA and the karate dojo have more than once resulted in my introducing a friend from one to the people I know at the other.  Like most people, I've landed jobs (and hence new strong ties to new organizations) as a result of introductions from people I've met in various communities.

Interestingly, though talk continues about whether a "virtual" community (one which exists primarily online) is in some fundamental way different from an offline one, nobody worries too much about whether a "virtual" connection to somebody through a social networking site is fundamentally different from an offline connection.  Now that a critical mass of ordinary people have a presence online, it's more common to be in contact online with people to whom one is already connected offline.  Being introduced online just doesn't seem to make a difference, what matters is the communities in which one participates after the connection is made.

My 18 year old son caved to pressure from his high school friends, and finally made a Facebook page before he headed off to college.  That page was quickly populated by friends from his high school community, and by a friendship link extended to the guy in Texas who was assigned to be his roommate.  These days, his friends page is dominated by people he's met at college, but those other folks are still there, too.  It's clear from just a casual perusal of his wall (I did NOT ask him to "friend" me, as somehow, having a shot of mom on your friends page is not exactly the kind of thing which enhances a young man's image, but I can see his page because my son and I share a new community now – he is attending my alma mater, which makes him "in-network" according to Facebook)  that the network is primarily serving to maintain ties he's formed through his new community membership at college.

My use of the same resource looks very different. Though some of my offline relationships are represented among my Facebook friends, a large number of my Facebook contacts are people I met online first.  That is likely an artifact of my age – most people not working online don't really need an online presence the way I do so they just don't have a page to link to, but I do have a lot of colleagues and friends I've met online in my Facebook network.

There's a fascinating formal debate taking place on The Economist site this week. The proposition put forward is:

This house believes that the continuing introduction of new technologies and new media adds little to the quality of most education.

Speaking to the pro side is Sir John Daniel, President and Chief Executive Officer of The Commonwealth of Learning which is "an intergovernmental organisation created by Commonwealth Heads of Government to encourage the development and sharing of open learning/distance education knowledge, resources and technologies. COL is helping developing nations improve access to quality education and training."

I don't know that I agree with Sir John when he says there's a zero-sum relationship among volume, quality, and cost. Technology changes that, a lot. One of the really amazing things about using the Internet, as in the Open University model, for example, is that there's very little marginal cost associated with opening a program to a large number of additional learners.

What's sort of sad is that the guy arguing the con side, Dr. Robert Kozma, Emeritus Director and Principal Scientist at SRI international, has to carefully qualify his argument in order even to make it. He says "new technologies and new media do make a significant contribution to the quality of education, at least under certain circumstances."

I've spent the last 15 years of my career facilitating the incorporation of technology into educational programs. I wouldn't have been doing this if I didn't think I was in fact adding value to the world.  But it's an area fraught with landmines.

The truth is it's possible, and sadly, common to detract from the quality of a given learning opportunity by adding a lot of cognitive overhead in the form of new technology learners must master in order to access that learning opportunity!  Except in those programs which are explicitly designed to introduce technology, it's probably a bad idea to require learners, or instructors, to master more than one new technological interface per course.  And it's really better for learning efficiency if there's NO new technology at all to master, so that one can free up one's brain to learn the program material which is being presented, without having to be on guard against looking stupid because one doesn't know exactly what to do.

My husband remarked to my son-the-junior-in-college and a classmate of his that really, they should savor their junior year.  As juniors, they know their way around the campus. They know how to figure out what the professors want. They have mostly fulfilled their core requirements, and are free to study the subjects that interest them in depth. And, they don't yet need to devote energy to that looming question of "what's next".  In short, they are free to concentrate on the learning tasks at hand, without all that excess overhead to manage.

I don't know that we can reliably simulate junior year in the groves of Academe here in the corporate training world. But I do think keeping that ideal in mind might curb some of our more technophilic tendencies to throw a lot of cool new stuff into our programs without sufficient thought about where the resources to master that stuff must be taken from!  If it's worth teaching, it's probably worth teaching in a format our learners have a level of comfort with.  And if we've got a brilliant idea for a new format which we really do have reason to believe will improve the cost/quality/reach of our programming, it's probably worth taking some time to train learners in it's use apart from whatever challenging programming we'd like to put into it.

If the web-displayed email list is the oldest form of Web2.0 technology, the message board is probably the second-most venerable form of the read-write web.

For many web denizens, the message board is their first experience with publishing their words in a world-readable place. And though some would like to think this technology too "last century" to be of interest in a world with blogs, wikis, instant messaging, text messaging, and twitter-like micro-messaging, message boards continue to be in wide use, notably in customer-support "communities" for high-tech goods like those at Tivo. A board is literally comprised of message "planks," each with subject line crying out for the attention which will solve a vital problem: "Tivo Crisis: HELP!" is a typical example.  In time, a Tivo employee assigned to answer customer questions, or possibly, a Tivo enthusiast who has encountered this problem previously will see the message, and either ask some additional questions or offer a suggestion, thus ending the transaction and quite possibly the customer's relationship with the board and the people on it.

Message boards offer a range of affordances which tunes them well for this sort of application. Reputation management is a popular one, making it possible for somebody new to see immediately how others judge the value of a stranger's contributions.

There is a difference, though, between leaving a message, in the hopes someone, anyone, will answer, and having a discussion with a group of colleagues who share one's interest in exploring an idea or in moving a project forward.

It is for this latter purpose that discussion forums like Web Crossing, Caucus, and the discussion engine in our own eCampus are optimized.  Teams of people working together over time to create action plans, documents, or  new initiatives have different needs from those who are seeking answers to technical questions. They need to be able to attach a range of different resources, and to be able to search through those resources. They need to compare notes, and bounce ideas off one another. They need to track off-line communications – agendas and minutes from face to face meetings, links to resources elsewhere, recordings of key events. They need to track conversations they are not necessarily contributing to.  Discussion forums provide these affordances, and more.

It's common practice in this era of social software to tack a message board onto an app and pronounce it a social networking or collaborative platform. But if your idea of collaboration requires providing web workspace where people known to one another can think together and riff off each other's ideas, you need software which does more than take messages.  You need a full-featured discussion forum.

Educause has released their study of Students and Information Technology, 2007.  There's not much startling in this report, which the authors characterize as a detailing of evolution, rather than revolution.  More students are using content management systems than ever. More have laptops than ever.  Many have complaints about the unhelpfulness of the college help desk, and the lack of expertise demonstrated by their instructors when the instructors incorporate technology into the curriculum.  Most use email to reach instructors and other institutional staff, and facebook, IM or text messaging to reach each other.

Indeed, email appears to have acquired something of a professional patina. What once seemed like a perfect medium for a quick note, looks, by comparison to the more immediate modalities of chat and instant messaging and mobile text messaging, more and more like something the old folks use to produce official correspondence.

Unfortunately, email's rise to prominence for this kind of communication has not been accompanied by an initiative to teach the art of formal business correspondence.  High school writing texts still teach the formal business letter, which, while not having gone the way of the dinosaur quite yet, is sufficiently beyond the experience of most students to seem utterly irrelevant.

That this gap has significant repercussions for young people was illustrated this week at a college recruiting information session I attended with my daughter.  Representatives from several schools offered general tips on how to conduct a successful college search.  One of them spoke to the issue of email, addressing issues which startled me:

Email is an excellent way to reach us.  You may want to consider obtaining a separate email address for your college correspondence. That address should be "family friendly."  You would not believe some of the addresses we see in our inboxes!

Please use actual words. At our prestigious institution of higher learning, we recognize "to", "too", and "2" as separate and independent concepts.  We appreciate correct spelling, punctuation, and capitalization.  Please use complete sentences.

Yikes. On the one hand, I'm appalled. On the other, how the heck are kids, or for that matter, our employees,  supposed to know what is expected in formal business correspondence if we don't teach them?

September's big question on the Learning Circuits Blog is Where to Work? I think there are fewer questions that are more personal than what working environment is the "best", so I don't think I'll try to generalize, but I will reflect a little on why I enjoy my work.

As is obvious from the placement of this post, I work for Q2 Learning, which markets software to facilitate online training and online collaboration.  Q2's official mailbox is in Falls Church, Virginia, but our offices are quite literally on the web. That link above is sort of our reception area. This blog is a part of our Public Relations department. Behind it is a rabbit warren of project spaces and meeting areas and code repositories and document libraries which is where my colleagues and I spend our days.  Physically, most days, I'm at my desk in my home office, but tomorrow, I'll take my office with me to the car and, through the miracle of wireless broadband through my mobile phone carrier, work from the passenger seat as my husband drives our family to Dayton, Ohio. where he and my son will be competing in the USAF Marathon Saturday.

At Q2, we communicate via IM and discussion post and telephone, all day long, so it doesn't usually feel lonely.  I do think I'd enjoy having an office to pop into once or twice a week, because the full-bandwidth experience of people in person is almost always richer, and often more efficient.  But I'm cognizant of the very real advantages of the 30 second commute, and as the mother of teens, it's difficult to measure the value of being able to offer the house where kids can gather on days off school because everyone knows there is an adult here.  When I do travel, it's really great to be able to reach all the resources I have at the office from where ever I happen to be.

I value the high-trust, highly-collaborative culture of my workplace. I work with some extremely bright, extremely hard-working, and very funny people. Though they are not always acted upon, my recommendations are always considered carefully by the folks empowered to decide, which gives me a sense of high control over my destiny, at least at work!  The partners who own this firm make it a policy to deal as honestly and as transparently as possible with people inside and outside the organization, so even when I disagree with what they are doing, I usually understand what the thinking is which is driving their decisions.  That sort of transparency, and the credibility it builds, has seen this organization through some difficult times.  It also builds a culture of accountability, in which we count on each other to do what we say we'll do, and don't have to worry about being let down.

I love being part of a fast-moving, innovative organization. I love being a part of solving new problems each day. I sometimes am uncomfortable and feel things are moving too fast, but mostly, I'd be bored if they weren't.  And I love being part of a team which brings to market a platform which makes it possible for other organizations to build the same kind of flexible workspace I value so much.

Heher notes the key features of the new app, dubbed "A-Space":

Aside from simply being able to share documents back and forth, experts who are in the same field but work for different agencies could meet each other virtually and swap ideas and information directly. Experts say the current procedures for sharing information is so cumbersome that such communication is now impossible.

"It's just a better way to build and grow that network so that improved analysis can come out the other end," said Robert Cardillo, deputy director of analysis for the Defense Intelligence Agency.

It's so tempting to respond with a resounding DUH!  Maybe if people are actually conversing with each other, instead of shipping memos and planning documents back and forth, important knowledge will be transmitted and even created!

We run into this issue a lot. Many organizations have invested big bucks into document management systems, and IT departments, in particular, tend to view these applications (Sharepoint is a common example) as "the collaboration software we have that everyone needs to use."  But making documents available does not collaboration create. There has to be a way for people to let each other know what's in the doc, and why they should care. And the best way to do this is to have them actually talk to each other!  There is a huge difference between receiving an automated notice that somebody has uploaded a new doc to the shared repository, and being part of a conversation in which somebody says "Oh, yeah, we ran into that a while ago, and I wrote up this thing about handling it. Here it is, you might find this helpful!"

The quotes from people who have their doubts about how effective this initiative will be are telling—

Richard L. Russell, a former CIA analyst who teaches at the National Defense University, says the government needs to focus on building better analysis and human intelligence, not fancy tools.

"You may have a great technological infrastructure for managing information, but if you put garbage into it, the output will be garbage," he said.

Hmmm. It sounds as if he thinks he's talking about a database!  See, the cool thing about mixing people in with the data is you have someone there to say "yeah, this report came out before we knew about the stuff which is covered in this other report you should check out…"

Experts say the service will only be as effective as those who use it. And with many older workers puzzled by their younger colleagues' obsessive use of Facebook and its ilk, full-blown use could take time.

Sigh. Well, yes, any community is only as good as the people who participate in it. But seed it with the right folks, and people might not be "baffled" by the chance to talk to others working on the same problems, the way they are by the "friending of strangers" on public networking sites.

Here's hoping these folks have some really savvy people planning the roll-out. This technology could really help break down the siloing which has been the bane of U.S intelligence…but there needs to be some serious culture change right alongside it, and some senior folks committed to using this tool and requiring it of the folks they work with.

It's only our national security in the balance…

Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach posted a very thorough round-up of current thinking in The Art of Building Virtual Communities  over on the TechLearning blog.  If you haven't read it, do.  I learned of it from industry veteran Howard Rheingold.  I've found over the years that when Howard says something is worth checking out, I'll be sorry to have missed it.

While Nussbaum's focus is around educational community formed on platforms like Ning and Elgg, I found myself thinking about how these principles apply to Facebook and similar social networking sites.

Facebook made the cover of Newsweek this week.  And in other critically important Facebook news, my soon-to-be-a-Freshman-in-college son, Steve, built his Facebook page this week.

I've experimented with several of these social networking sites over time. I have pages on Orkut (which seems to have forgotten everything it knew about me, since it became a part of Google!) Linked-In, MySpace, Facebook, and probably some others I've forgotten. But my use pretty much parallels the use of most people in my age group—I might check in every so often, but my social network page is not the center of my online life. There are a range of reasons for that, lots of competing priorities is a huge one, but it does seem that we middle-aged folk have rather more compartmentalized lives, and often, our online and offline venues are populated by very different groups of people.

With the kids, something very different is happening. Steve has been mentioning "setting up a Facebook page" in the same breath as the other pre-college tasks he needs to get done – get his computer set up, arrange the billing, coordinate with his roommate.  Within the first few hours of putting up his Facebook page, my son "friended" his older brother, the kid up the street with whom he shares a ride to work, and several other of his high school friends.  Apparently, a weeknight in summer is an excellent time to do this, because immediately, his wall filled with comments. 

Nussbaum notes that one of the things which makes for healthy community is "Really active and consistent participation within the community. Community members really start to moderate themselves. It isn't just the moderator that handles issues. And members greet someone when they are new and answer questions and do not just point newbies to a FAQ doc"

Steve's initial Facebook experience included "welcome to the addiction!" notes from several of his friends. And a long, funny post from the kid up the street, who has long served as something of a mentor to Steve, about how not to look stupid on Facebook, which transmitted critical community norms like "Post a picture!" and "Don't use more than one of those add-in applications." That nobody sent him to an FAQ is in part a reflection that all of these initial contacts came from people he met in person, first, and is linking to online, second.  The only person he has *not* already met in person who appears on his list of friends is the guy who will be his roommate when he starts school next month. 

Poring over his future-roommate's page is completely analogous to the way in my generation, we pored over the paper facebook which was mailed out before school started, featuring our high school graduation pictures and a few details we'd chosen to share about ourselves. 

Steve is very conscious of the kind of impression he wants to make on his future classmates. But he's constrained, in a way his dinosaur parents were not, by the ability of people who know him well to access his page and call him on any exaggerations or distortions he might choose to present as part of his profile.  There's a tension between the desire to project the best of who he wants new friends to see, and the necessity of passing muster with the people who "knew him when."

Right now, most of the people he knows on Facebook are his high school friends. In a few short weeks, that will change, and it will be the norms of his college community which will likely be those he will be most concerned about understanding, observing, and reflecting in his Facebook use.

People do "friend" people they haven't met in person, and, according to Newsweek, even marry them. There are "groups" on facebook, but most are named affiliations only, few seem to engage in any group activity—even group discussions are sparse.  For most of its history, the driving power behind Facebook has been the vibrancy of the offline community to which its members are attached – first Harvard students, then other universities. It clearly has a hold on the college-bound high school crowd, but it remains to be seen whether Facebook will have the same "addictive" power for people are not already part of tightly-knit offline communities using this tool to facilitate other activities they engage in with each other.

I think this leaves the rest of us online community folks right back where we've always been. We find that in order to get the kind of passionate commitment we want to see, we need to take care that our communities are meeting real needs in the lives of our participants. It's not about the tool, or the hype or lack of hype attending the tool. It's about who is at the other end of the communication link, and how much we care about staying in touch.

There's a bit of a tempest brewing over the behavior of John Mackey, CEO at Whole Foods. Seems Mr. Mackey was a regular on a Yahoo! financial forum, where, under a pseudonym, he talked up his company. He also used that pseud to cast aspersions on Wild Oats, which is a target for acquisition by Whole Foods.

According to a  Reuters article "Mackey said he "posted on Yahoo! under a pseudonym because I had fun doing it. Many people post on bulletin boards using pseudonyms."

He's absolutely right. It's fun to post to message boards. And lots of people do it under pseudonyms.

There's nothing illegal about it.

Sometimes, though, doing this sort of thing will look pretty bad when the FTC gets around to suing to prevent an acquisition your company is trying to make.

Anonymity and pseudonymity have a valid place in human communication. With the advent of the Internet, that place has grown.  Most folks would agree that it's better that children, especially, participate in public forums under pseudonyms rather than release information which would make it easy for predators to track them down in person.

The freedom which anonymity and pseudonymity permit -- the ability to say what one will without fear of consequences -- is a two-edged sword.  Certainly, that freedom can be critical in enabling whistle-blowing where reports of illegal or dangerous behavior would otherwise not be made because the reporters risk their livelihood. It also is useful in support forums, where people are talking about extremely sensitive personal information.  But that freedom also permits participants to engage in irresponsible behavior which runs the gamut from stretching the truth to issuing hurtful personal attacks on other participants.  Anonymity and pseudonymity also prevent the transference of respect gained for excellent contributions to a space into the contributor's offline life.

It's our experience that if the purpose of a discussion space is the exchange of valuable information,  it's critical that participants be identified by their real names. Otherwise, it's simply impossible for participants to perform the essential task of "considering the source."  Spaces where people contribute under their real names are more readily integrated into the participants' offline lives.  It becomes more worthwhile to take the time to post that tidbit which could help your colleagues when your boss knows that it's you who made that contribution.  And of course, it's a lot easier to maintain decorum when everyone knows that they will be held accountable for what is done under their name.

Mackey has done nothing illegal, but his behavior strikes a lot of people as unethical.  Just as we structure our workplaces and other organizations to encourage ethical, productive, responsible behavior, we need to structure our online spaces to do the same. Requiring that people identify themselves using the name they use everywhere else in their lives is one of the better ways to harness the power of personal accountability towards that end. 

As a professional who has spent most of my career developing technical tools to facilitate communities of practice and training, I think I can reasonably refer to my work as facilitating the management of knowledge. Mostly, I’ve been all about figuring out ways to disseminate knowledge effectively within an organization of people who are charged with collaborating to develop some sort of product which will have value to others.

I’m a curious person, and I love that I have at my fingertips these days the ability to learn about any little thing which tickles my fancy.  I’m the product of a liberal arts education, one who believes that casting a wide net not only makes a person more interesting, but also sharpens their thinking and makes them more valuable to themselves and others.

But, in general, it’s pretty easy to judge whether something I’m learning about is likely to be of greater or lesser value to my employer and my clients.  As a matter of personal integrity, I try to focus the learning I do during work hours on subjects which will make me a more valuable employee.

The question is, at what point do the things I learn become valuable to the people who are paying me to learn?

I would argue that my learning is of no use to my employer until I either apply it to my work or share it with others.

The corporate culture around knowledge sharing is what determines whether people share at all, and also, if they do share, whether that sharing is in a form which is useful to others.

At Q2, we’re a pretty high-trust, transparent, high-information environment. We really try to keep each other apprised of what’s going on, because we’re often pulled into projects which have been started by others.  So everything, including emails exchanged by people who don’t have access to the discussion space, that has to do with a given project is generally posted to the discussion items set aside for that project. Because this makes it much easier for new folks pulled in to come quickly up to speed, we generally encourage our clients to join us in the project-planning space, and tend to have the vast majority of communications in the joint space, with only the bare minimum in “our team only” private space.

What this means is that when any of us come across some tidbit of information which might inform a project, we know we’ll engender positive regard for sharing, and more importantly, we know exactly where to share it so that it gets maximum exposure among the folks who would find it valuable.

Yes, we have wikis, and resource libraries full of relevant documents we can turn to for reference. I’d hate to have to get by without these helpful resources. And of course, we have face-to-face meetings and telephone conversations, too.  But it’s the discussion space I turn to first, to get the context of the project, so I can make sense of the documents.  It’s there I get a sense of who is in which role, and how they have been acting in that role over time.  I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve remembered that somebody shared something important with a particularly colorful turn of phrase—and how being able to search on the remembered phrase took me right to the information I was seeking. Sometimes, I find that the information isn’t quite what I need, but at least now I know who said it, and I can follow up with them.

Several bloggers have remarked recently on how blogging has supercharged their learning—how reflecting on what their colleagues are saying and constructing well-thought-out written responses clarifies the issues for them.

Discussion space facilitates exactly this same process, but opens it to those who are not comfortable standing on the platform which writing a blog implies.

Cultivating a culture in which people discuss issues in shared online space, in a format which captures it in searchable form, is stealth Knowledge Management.  Instead of depending upon people to dutifully catalogue information, discussion space encourages sharing in the form of spontaneous social constructivism…people riffing off each other’s ideas to move towards an innovative solution to the challenge before them.  Given the choice between talking to somebody about something they know about and I need to learn, and searching through a database when I’m not even sure just which terms to search on, I’ll take the personal contact every time.

How might the people in your organization respond to this kind of opportunity?

tc

Josh Catone does a very nice round-up of freely-available collaboration software this week in Rolling Your Own Online Office.  Though our xPERT eCampus is a pretty comprehensive online collaboration tool, we at Q2 do use a few of the tools he mentions – email, obviously, but also Google Docs and instant messaging, and some other stuff too.

What really caught my eye about Josh’s post, though, was the picture he used to illustrate it, which I’ve used here, as well.

This guy has been around for a *long* time, as is evidenced by the tiny screen and great thickness of his laptop – looks like my first laptop, circa 1994 or so.  He's been around long enough that most of us have seen him before, and long enough that we all probably need to admit to the erm, stretching of the truth this image puts forward.

First of all, today’s screens are much better, but squinting at a screen in the blinding light reflecting from sand and water at the beach is still a fast track to migraine-ville.

Secondly, what kind of a dufus leaves his shoes and socks and jacket on while he hauls a beach chair into place?

But on a more important level, there’s a real conflict between trying to appreciate the natural wonder that is a beach and doing serious business analysis. Heck, I’m not even sure it’s possible to type good poetry at the beach, though it might be possible to write it if one were a poet and had a pen and a pad of paper handy  Ubiquitous computing may make it possible to appear that one is working just about anywhere, but all too often, appearance is all that is achieved.  I’m all over working near a beach, and I do love the technology which makes doing so possible, but if I’m honest with myself, I have to admit that for me to be effective, I need to do my computing work where the call of the wild is muted, and treat myself to fully enjoying the environs during my breaks.

I think there’s a similar disingenuousness around the joys of rolling one’s own office.  For those of us who thrive on checking out the latest shiny new tool, these are heady days. It is wonderful to be able to play with a new tool, find that it does just what we need it to, and have the freedom to incorporate it into our work style.   If we’re honest, though, I think most of us might admit that a lot of that time spent futzing around with new stuff to do that evaluation is not very productive.  And to the extent that we are playing with collaborative tools, the utility of a new tool is primarily a function of the extent to which our collaborators also adopt it.  If we’re working together, and I’m trying to manage the project in Basecamp and you are accustomed to using Project, we’re going to have a problem until one of us accommodates the other’s choice of tool.

Generally, when people need to work together, they meet at somebody’s office, where they can count on finding the basic tools they will need – telephone, copier, computers, white board, markers, conference table, chairs. While there might be a call to check that there is, say an LCD projector available, nobody has to spend any time at all on these basic things, they are just assumed to be the fundamental toolset.

Similarly when we work together online, it’s more effective to have at the ready a suite of tools in the online office than it is to negotiate over which tools we’ll all be using.  We think our xPERT eCampus makes for a pretty cushy online office,  though it’ll be better when we work out the coffee thing!

His low-tech representations of the workings of RSS and most recently,  Wikis, using a white board, marker, and cut-outs of screen elements, somehow seem so much friendlier than the screencam approaches we’ve all become accustomed to.

I think the jury is still out on whether Wikis will ultimately become the tool of choice for shared documents.  They are great when you foresee the need to create links back and forth among a number of pages, but I’ll confess, when I wanted to coordinate with my family on Thanksgiving dinner, I chose Google Docs, on the theory that everyone I was working with already knows how to use a word processor, and the holidays are a lousy time to invite people to learn a new interface. 

If Wiki does eventually gain the wide acceptance (and by acceptance, I mean interest in creating as well as consuming content) among the ungeeky that search engines, mp3 and Youtube enjoy, it’ll be in large part because of the really friendly introduction LeFever and his team has created.

Dave Lee is noticing a pervasive, annoying issue for anyone who has advanced from experimenting with social tagging to depending upon it.  In de.lic.ious and my folksonomy he complains about how searches of his tags weren’t showing some of his bookmarks, because his personal tagging strategy is incon