CoComment Co.mments Switch

After struggling for a while with tracking my conversations via CoComment, I've recently decided to switch over to Co.mments. It seems to be working pretty well. I considered a few of the other services as well, but it seemed like they were the best choice.

I'm still not sure that there's a great overall answer to Blog Discussions Types. I discussed the specifics of Blogs, Community and Discussion Tracking - What's Really Needed a long time ago. Not sure that we've got an answer quite yet. It's still very messy to try to track all your activity across the network. Maybe there is no answer given how fluid everything is, but it still would be nice to have something better than what we have right now.

Conference Wiki Examples

Someone asked me for an example of a conference using a Wiki both for organizers during planning, evaluating proposed sessions, etc. and for attendees with session pages, participant lists, that kind of stuff. Certainly we did parts of this for Corporate Learning Trends 2007. It was more aimed at the attendee side. I can say that this made pulling things together for the conference significantly easier. And we even had people pitch in to do things like adding calendar files, automatic time conversion, profiles and questions for sessions.

For planning this year, we relied on Google Docs and Google Spreadsheets as the primary tools. This worked well with a small group and a small set of sessions. Likely the Wiki would be much better for something larger.

There have to be lots of examples like this out there. Can someone help out with pointers to a few?

Update - I was just pointed to Nonprofit Technology - Conference Wiki that pointed me to a couple of different posts that might be interesting such as: Collaborative Models for Capturing and Sharing Conference Notes at Nonprofit Gatherings. Of course, then I also checked eLearning Learning - Conference Wiki and found an old post of mine: Social Conference Tools - Expect Poor Result. These talk about slightly different issues, but still might be interesting.

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Google Blog Search Problems

I rely pretty heavily on Google Blog Search to help me find people who are citing blog posts of mine so that I can see that kind of conversation. Unfortunately, it looks like Google Blog Search has decided that they will now include the entire contents of the web page rather than just the contents of the RSS feed. What this means is that I now get links to every post where the author includes my blog in their blog roll.

This completely defeats my purpose. I want a nice clean RSS feed of any posts that include links to my various sites.

I can't tell if this is something that is intentional, but it's been happening for a while.

I actually left Technorati for Google because Google appeared to be doing a better job. Time to evaluate my options?

Any suggestions on what to use for this?

Help Create Resources for Keynote?

I'm doing a keynote presentation at ASTD TechKnowledge in January on New Work Literacies and eLearning 2.0 and another session on Learning 2.0.

I would really like to be able to point attendees, blog readers, and realistically a lot of other folks to a set of resources that would help them on these topics. But, I really don't have time to create what I want to create.

Are you willing to pitch in to help me create some interesting resources?

I'm not sure how we will create these (Google Docs, Wiki, Mindmap, etc.). I'm fairly flexible, but at the end of the day they need to be web pages that attendees of TechKnowledge and other folks can access. I definitely will post them to my blog. And chances are they will get quite a fair amount of page views.

I will certainly give credit to anyone who contributes in a meaningful way both in my blog and during the keynote (assuming this happens).

Here are the two resources that I'd like to see us work on ...

Work Literacy 2008

A set of resources for concept workers who are not early adopters to help them be aware of relatively newer methods and tools that they should consider adopting to help them in their day-to-day work. These would be organized around the following categories:

• Search
• Keep/Organize/Refind/Remind
• Leverage Expertise (Network)
• Collaborate
• Scan (Continuous Awareness/Learning)

Learning 2.0 for Workplace Learning Professionals

A set of resources that would help workplace learning professionals get up to speed on:

• Introduction to Web 2.0 tools and their implications for Personal and Formal Learning
• What Learning 2.0 means to them both personally and professionally.
• Opportunities to apply Learning 2.0 in their workplace
  

I think that the resources collected as part of the recent Web 2.0 for Learning Professionals are a great starting point. For example, look at the following:

• Introduction to Social Networking
• Introduction to LinkedIn
• Introduction to Facebook
• Introduction to Ning
• Using Social Networks for Personal Professional Development
• Using Social Networks with Learners
• Social Networking and Privacy
• Managing Your Networks and "Time Suck"
• LinkedIn Tips and Tricks
• Social Networking Wiki

Because these are tied into forums, it makes them a bit harder for most people to go through. I'm also not sure that I buy that this quite tells a Workplace Learning Professional what they should do in terms of their personal use and in terms of how these might be used in their organizations. It was more intended as a introduction to the tools and likely does a good job of that.

Please drop me a comment or email me: akarrer @ techempower.com if you are willing to work a bit on this.

Evaluating the Performance of Knowledge Workers

I've recently been talking to people about evaluating performance of Concept Workers. I want to thank Dave who has provided thoughts in several posts such as Getting to Exemplary.

Evaluating concept worker performance is an interesting challenge:

• No right answer - Most often there is no single right answer. Which authoring tool, LMS, etc. we should use in a particular situation - you can't possibly get it exactly right. You are trying always to arrive at a reasonably correct answer given all the other factors (amount of time you can spend finding an answer, etc.)
  
• Evaluator knowledge limit - In most cases, the person doing the performance evaluation knows less about the subject that the performer. So, they can't directly judge the answer, but may be able to sense when answers are possibly not correct.

The interesting bottom line has been that the way you evaluate a concept workers performance is by looking at signals such as:

• Process - They went through a reasonable process to arrive at their conclusions.
• Reasonable - Their conclusions are reasonable in your opinion (if you can formulate one).
• Compare - If you took what they did and compared it to what you would expect from other similar performers, would they have arrived at the same result.

To me this has heightened my sensitivity to the need for concept workers to reach out to people for knowledge work tasks in order to ensure they will receive a good evaluation. It reinforces the fact that Leveraging Networks is Key Skill. I'm coming to believe this is the most important Knowledge Worker Skill Gap. This makes this things like: Network Feedback, Finding expertise, Using Social Media to Find Answers to Questions, Learning through Conversation very important topics.

What I've been saying in recent presentations is that going to Google and searching for information as your primary mechanism leaves you open to criticism. Instead, having a conversation with a peer can give you feedback on:

• Was my process appropriate?
• Is my answer reasonable?
  
• How does my answer compare?

And if you want to be mercenary about it, the real bottom line is that if someone challenges your answers, you have already done their evaluation for them. You can say, "Look, I talked to a couple of people who have done this before. They said I've gone through the right steps. I've looked at the right stuff. My answer seems pretty reasonable. If they would have done it, they would have come up with the same thing."

There's a beauty in this!

But it does require better ability to reach into networks for help.