Facebook Fridays

A mistitled article - found via Bill Ives on the FastForward blog - Serena Software Adopts Facebook as Corporate Intranet.

The real focus of the article is how Serena Software has adopted a practice called Facebook Fridays:

Each Friday, employees are granted one hour of personal time to spend on their Facebook profiles and connect with co-workers, customers, family and friends. This initiative will start today and will be rolled out in 18 countries where the company has offices.

If you think about it, this is somewhat similar to having a company lunch, but probably much more effective at getting connections to happen in interesting ways. You are more likely to connect farther away from people you know. Although my guess is that you need to do some seeding of ideas and techniques to make it effective.

Of course, it's helpful to have a CEO say things like:

“Social networking tools like Facebook can bring us back together, help us get to know each other as people, help us understand our business and our products, and help us better serve our customers-on demand. A corporate culture that fosters a sense of community and fun will ultimately help us get more done. Companies that do not embrace social networking are making a huge mistake.”

eLearning 2.0 Presentation - ISPI Los Angeles

I had a great time this Saturday presenting to ISPI Los Angeles on eLearning 2.0. This presentation was somewhat similar to past presentations, but I've added a couple of new slides and concepts. I'm including my slides (via Slideshare below, but it misses a lot of what the discussions were really about).

Oh, and if you are interested in this topic, I will be presenting a slightly different take on it this Thursday at a Free Online Conference - Corporate Learning: Trends and Innovations. There will be a lot more time for discussion in this case as well. My guess is that there will be some lively discussion off of this.

If this topic is of interest, then I would suggest also referring to:

• What is eLearning 2.0?
• Have Work and Learning Changed or the Way We Do Work and Learning?
• Learning and Networking with a Blog (Deleted Scenes)
• Understanding eLearning 2.0
• Needed Skills for New Media
  
• eLearning 2.0 - An Immediate, Important Shift
• Personal and Group Learning Using Web 2.0 Tools
• Personal Work and Learning Environments
• eLearning 1.0, 1.3 and 2.0
• Learning Trends Point To and Shape eLearning 2.0
• Web 2.0 and eLearning 2.0 Start-Up Guides
• Personal and Group Learning Using Web 2.0 Tools
• Authoring in eLearning 2.0 / Add-ins & Mash-ups

Related posts from several eLearning Blogs:

• eLearning 2.0
• Web 2.0
• eLearning Trends
• Enterprise 2.0

But don't be like the "other Tony" and get lost reading all this stuff. Instead, how about subscribing so we can continue to discuss this topic over time? Oh and don't subscribe via email - that's old school - subscribe with an RSS reader.

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Help - Pace in Industry

For a few upcoming presentations, I would love to be able to cite how much faster things are moving today for corporations than in the past. Certainly, we all are seeing and feeling it. Yet, I've been struggling to find good charts, graphs, quotes, etc. that show examples of:

• Trends in the number of new products introduced
• Trends in the time it takes from concept through launch and lifetime of new products
• Other aspects of the pace for corporate entities

I saw an interesting article that talked about the concept of "corporate clock speed" and they generally said that it was ever increasing, but how about some proof.

For example, is there a source that shows the number of new car models introduced each year?

What would capture the fact that corporate environments are moving at a faster pace?

Update - here's an example that came from one of the comments that shows roughly the kind of thing I'm going for. It shows that while chips are becoming ever more complex (number of gates), the time taken to design them is ever shorter. Further there are more and more chips coming out. Any others?

New Hire Onboarding Blog or Social Network

Just wanted to through an idea at everyone that came up during several discussions today at DevLearn ...

How about asking select new hires to keep an inside the firewall blog as they begin their jobs at your company?

or

If they come into the company in waves, how about providing them a discussion group or better yet a social network tool that has good discussions as a means of communicating with each other and with coaches?

Is this already being done all the time? If not, why not? This seems painfully obvious.

DevLearn - Ken Robinson Keynote

Notes from Sir Ken Robinson's keynote talk at DevLearn...

I've seen Ken on his Ted talk which I've embedded below:


His talk was quite entertaining and followed somewhat his talk from Ted. A few of the thoughts or points from his talk:

• $3.5B spent in California on state school system - $9B spent on prison system
• Creativity can be facilitated and supported to foster innovation
• Audience rated themselves average roughly of 7 in creativity and 7 in intelligence
• 73% give themselves different marks - tend to believe that there is a difference between creativity and intelligence
• Creativity and intelligence are intimately related - highest form of intellectual exercise is creativity
• Capacity to think of lots of ideas - divergent thinking
• Genius level among 3 - 5 year olds in divergent thinking - 98%
• At ages 8-10 - 32%
• 13-15 - 10%
• 25+ - 2%
  
• Education teaches you that there is one answer, its in the back, don't look, and don't talk to anyone else either
• We encourage collaboration outside the classroom
• Misconception about creativity - I'm not creative. If someone says "I'm not creative" it doesn't mean they are not capable of becoming creative.
  
• Can be creative about anything - not just arts - including things like math, etc.
• Technology fundamentally changes learning
• Creativity is the way to compete in a flat world (my words not his)
• Creativity is a practical process
• Intelligence is tremendously diverse, intensely dynamic, connections between domains, distinct
• Real question is not how intelligent your are but how you are intelligent
• And not how creative you are but how you are creative
• How do you compose great groups in organizations that can be intelligent and creative
• How do you promote culture that will be creative
• Think of yourself as a farmer - you can't make a plant - you must create the conditions where plants (people) will flourish

I need to look at Divergent Thinking and how you can build skills around creativity.