Communities / Social Networking and LMS Merger

Update 12/7/07 - Great comments from David Wilkins (see below) including:

user-generated content is going to change eLearning; anyone who thinks otherwise or who is not yet planning for the shift is going to be left wondering what the heck happened in just a few years.

I've not seen a lot about Mzinga in the eLearning world, but it represents something pretty interesting. Mzinga is a merger of KnowledgePlanet (an LMS provider and also the maker of the eLearning simulation tool - Firefly) and Shared Insights - a community / business social networking software company.

From what I can gather from the press releases and based on who's in charge of the combined company, it appears that KnowledgePlanet is somewhat the loser. The top execs at Mzinga are not the top execs from KnowledgePlanet. It makes me wonder what this says about the LMS and tools market. We are beginning to see dominance by a few bigger vendors and if you can't be one of them, then it's tough sledding.

The other interesting thing here is that it seems like LMS vendors really are moving away from being LMS vendors. Previously, I talked about how they are now referring to themselves in terms of talent management and workforce productivity. There have also been moves to become focused on a niche such as an industry or function or certification.

This merger points to another direction - combination of LMS capability + community / social networking. I'm not sure I quite get what that means yet. I wonder if mzinga does? The description of their offerings seem still mostly separate (communities software and the KP learning platform). Also, if you go to the solutions page, it doesn't mention Firefly. And even the name of the page - Community Solutions - suggests that the LMS isn't all that important.

Luckily David Wilkins - who I've known for quite a few years - has helped me try to understand. It sounds a lot like an LMS with integrated communities. But like Q2Learning, they aim to provide visibility into community activities. This is something that I think makes sense, especially when trying to get communities going. David helps to paint a bit of a picture:

...think certification training with links to discussion forums or a Wiki or relevant files in a shared file repository...

He also pointed me to a Gartner quote:

Enterprise social software will be the biggest new workplace technology success story of this decade.

This certainly helps us understand why you might want to have someone like KP's sales and marketing to help you sell community software into the enterprise.

italki - Social Network for Language Learning

italki is an interesting website in the language learning space - which seems to be very busy these days. They provide the ability to connect with other learners who are trying to learn a language. People find each other using the site and then connect via chat, IM, voice/Skype, etc.

There are other resources, but the use of a social network to find people who can help each other learn the language is a great idea.

Not sure if it can work in practice given the many other barriers that will come up.

I'd be curious what people think about this as a learning mechanism.

Too many updates

I use FeedBlitz to provide email subscriptions to my blog. A surprising number of people actually use this option - roughly 150 of 3,000 subscriptions. I get a couple sign-ups for email every week and about every other week someone unsubscribes. Feedblitz allows the user to specify a reason. Most often it's either "no longer relevant" or "subscribed in another way."

Today I got my first cancellation with the reason "Too many updates" ...

It actually, made me smile.

I've become part of the problem. :)

Aha Moments in 2007

The Big Question is back...

December Big Question - What did you learn about learning?

I'm going after this just a little bit different. I wanted to go back and figure out what things really struck me during 2007....

So I first went back to what I wrote about last year:

Some of the more specific memories from 2006:

• I started my blog in February 2006.


• I started using del.icio.us and Yahoo MyWeb to save bookmarks - locally saved favorites seem rather limited now.


• I had a real "aha experience" after using add-ins to provide features inside my blog. Boy were they easy to use. It's all pure service. And this experience kept coming all during the year with Wikis, and more (Incredibly Cool! Vision of Future of Application and eLearning Development)


• I found myself no longer recommending the use of RoboInfo or other similar programs for reference materials. Wikis are way better even if the end-users don't edit.


• I had a very interesting disagreement with a client about the technical direction for their solution - they wanted local editing via a Word add-in locally installed - I advocated providing a pure web delivered solution. I lost the argument. In the long run, they'll lose. No one should advocate putting stuff on a desktop anymore without a dang good reason.


• I found myself using Wikipedia early in research tasks on all sorts of topics.

But by far the most vivid memory of 2006 comes from a comment made during a panel that I was moderating on eLearning 2.0. We had discussed Wikis, Blogs and were embarking on Second Life. Someone from the audience in all sincerity said:

“This stuff is freaking me out.”

She is right on the money. It is freaking us out. We know something pretty special is happening right now.

If you are a glutton for more of this, take a look at:

• Does eLearning 2.0 Make a Difference?


• Authoring in eLearning 2.0 / Add-ins & Mash-ups

Wow, what a great list from 2006, I'm glad I have that saved somewhere. ;)

So how about in here's a random list of things from 2007:

• My 10 year old son edited Wikipedia - A Fourth Grader Wikipedia Update and added value.
  
  
• Some people are really not getting the impact of different tools. Getting Value from LinkedIn, Thomas Davenport and Blogging - He is Wrong!, Spending or Wasting Time on Web 2.0 Tools?,
  

• But the good news is that it appears that more and more people are getting it (More eLearning Bloggers, Facebook Fridays and I'm definitely Pushing Harder Now and we need to adopt the attitude - eLearning 2.0 - Just Go Do It.
  
  
• We are going to be going through Disruptive Changes in Learning. and unless you innovate (Innovators' Dilemma in Learning/eLearning) you are going to fall prey to alternatives be it do-it-yourself learning or start-ups.
  
  
• A purely virtual conference (Free Online Conference - Corporate Learning: Trends) with amateur organizers, gorilla marketing through social networks, and a wiki for it's main page worked out pretty well. And I'm sure it could be better.
  
  
• Social networks through my blog or LinkedIn are great ways to get specific help for yourself and for others... Making Learning with an LMS Fun? Help Needed!, Help - Pace in Industry, LMS Selection Presentation, Writing, Learning, Knowing - Help Needed.
  
  
• Courseware is being pushed towards Good Enough because clients value speed more than quality in many cases.
  
  
• It's hard to find out how people are using Web 2.0 tools inside organizations.
  
  
• Adoption is going to be personal/consumer first - organizational adoption is going to lag: Web 2.0 - Consumer vs. Enterprise Use. Companies are going to have a big problem trying to handle this: More Discussion on Personal Work Learning Environments.
  
  
• Signs of the times: End of an Era - Authorware Dies, InfoWorld Folds Print Magazine
  
  
• When you name your kids, consider personal search - Personal Search - and Naming Your Kids.
  
  
• The way people find you can be amusing: Top Ten Subliminal Searches.
  
  
• I'm not very good with Back Channel Use - and I should learn how to do it better.

But probably the biggest sign of the times for me is that I personally find myself working on helping lots of organizations figure out how social media, new technologies, etc. affect them and their users.

Cisco - Enterprise 2.0

I don't know how I missed this, but thanks to Bill Ives for covering it on the FastForward blog -More Web 2.0 Stories, Part One: Cisco Goes All Out on Enterprise 2.0 points us to:

Mike Gotta - Cisco: Learning Internally Before Delivering Externally and Money's Cisco's display of strength

[Martin] De Beer a year ago set up an internal wiki called I-Zone that has so far generated 400 business ideas. "Better still," he says, "another 10,000 people have added to those ideas." His team measures which notions draw the most activity and cherry-picks a handful to unveil at Cisco's quarterly leadership-development program. Normally at such gatherings, promising up-and-comers from across a company hear lectures, bond, and ponder case studies. But De Beer decided to use these sessions to take the most promising I-Zone ideas and pound them into real-world business plans. Three of the nine notions so tested are now in active development.

This whole process has been an eye opener even for Chambers. He used to tell his staff, "I do strategy; you do execution." "He was amazed," says Ron Ricci, a former consultant who since 2000 has served as Cisco's internal culture keeper. "He said, 'We just did three billion-dollar market opportunities without my knowing about it.'"

This sounds a bit like IBM's innovation jams which have been very successful in generating ideas and discussion across the organization.

In September [2007] it launched a website that is a microcosm of everything evoked by the phrase "Web 2.0." There's a Ciscopedia, where people can build an evolving body of lore about anything fellow Ciscans might want to know.

This sounds similar to what Intel did with Intelpedia - which has been really great at providing support across a wide cross section of activities at Intel. Several training initiatives have made good use of content being created on Intelpedia.

There are text blogs and video blogs, discussion groups, and "problems and solutions links." There's an internal version of MySpace, which provides not only title and contact info but also personal profiles, job histories, interests, and videos. Soon it will show whether a person is reachable by, say, office phone, cell, IM, or telepresence, and offer a one-click connection.

Fantastic. Great way to find expertise and resources. Capture best practices. And support personal learning and networking.

And there's more. "We're going to use social bookmarking to allow us to take the pulse of the organization," says Jim Grubb, who built the website (and whose day job is putting together John Chambers' demos). They'll do that by aggregating the tags employees create into "tag clouds" when they click on sites. Tracking these will allow a Cisco honcho to get a snapshot of the current hot-button issues for marketing or finance. If an employee is tagged as the go-to person for virtualization, say, he could earn a bonus for this previously unacknowledged expertise. That's down the road. Asked for a here-and-now example, Cisco marketing head Sue Bostrom laughs (proudly) and recounts the six-month online campaign to develop and select a five-note "Cisco sound" for TV and Internet ads. "Ten thousand employees voted," she says, "and 1,200 partners also participated."

Great description of what organizations can do.