Remote Collaboration

My primary interest here are the methods and tools that allow us to work better as part of remote work teams. In other words -

How do we collaborate together in remote work teams to be as effective or even more effective than a team that works down the hall?

Let me admit that I'm likely in over my head when talking about methods and tools for collaboration. I cannot claim to be an expert, and I feel like this topic demands a lot of soft skills such as communication skills, team skills, handling cultural and work style issues, etc. as well as knowing about tools and methods.

My focus in this post is mostly on the Tool Set and a little bit about methods - as is the focus of this series. So, this post is only a small portion of the answer.

I'm particularly drawing on both personal experience and on experience with the work skills workshops we are offering. At the start of these workshops, we put people into remote work teams. At the core, when I look at what a team needs, it's a pretty simple list:

Real-time

• Voice
• Screen Sharing
• Document Editing (sometimes)

Asynchronous

• Share / collaborate on documents, web pages
• Discussion
• Notification

Of course, I'm simplifying by leaving out things like video chat, recording, etc.

Real-time Voice

I have had great success with a number of tools. So while I'm listing the following because they are good initial choices, there are a lot of Collaboration Tools out there.

Skype - Fantastic voice tool for 1-to-1 as well as conference calls up to 25 people. See: Quick Start Guide for New Skype Users.

Freeconference.com - For times when someone cannot be online, this service works great to establish a quick conference line.

Real-time Screen Sharing

Again, same caveat - lots of great tools that provide screen sharing. A few starting points:

Adobe Connect Now - free online meetings for up to three people.

DimDim - Still a little rough around the edges, but a great, free tool.



Real-time Document Editing

I've had two experiences recently that have really struck me around real-time document editing.

One was having a small (7 person) project team get together on a conference call and have all of us editing the status report real-time via Google Spreadsheets. You could see where people are working. People moved ahead of the conversation and updated status notes so we could skip them. We found we would discuss what needed to be discussed, agree on the next step and see it appear real-time. You leave the meeting with an agreed to status report, action steps, etc. It's truly a thing of beauty.

The other experience I mentioned in Real-Time Collaborative Editing, Robin Good used MindMeister to allow participants to collectively edit a Mind Map during a session at the Learning Trends. It resulted in a great learning experience and a quite good resource.


Asynchronous Content Sharing / Editing

In terms of using these products with remote work teams, Google Spreadsheets seems to have hit the most important items for me. In addition to the real-time editing described above, it also has notifications of changes to people who are collaborating on the document. For some (inexplicable) reason, Google Docs does not.

I also heavily use Wikis, especially when the desired result is a set of web pages. I recommend pbWiki as an easy to use Wiki solution. If you are not familiar with Wikis - here's a quick introduction -


Here are additional resources for people new to Wikis collected as part of the Work Literacy course:

• 5 Uses for a Wiki at Work

• Wikis as Personal Space

• Examples of Educational Wikis

• Horizon Project--Vicki Davis's "Flat Classroom Project"--outstanding example of how to use a wiki for learning.

• Wiki Wake-up Call and Use Cases

• WikiPatterns--A great collection of patterns and "anti-patterns" that spur (or impede) wiki adoption

Because I use Delicious as part of my better memory, I like it when work teams use it to share web pages that are relevant to the team. To do that, you must first agree on a tag to use to indicate it's part of the work teams' effort. You should already be doing that individually, this only requires an added step of getting agreement with the group.

The next level of my better memory was taking notes. I mentioned that I either do that through working documents or through a blog. Those exact mechanisms should be extended out to the work team. Blogs are an excellent way to allow the work team to see stream of thought of team members.

Other tools that fit into sharing content:

• Google Calendar - great calendar tool especially when collaborating on calendars.
• Xdrive: Online storage to share files.
• YouSendIt: Clean way to send large files.
  
• Flickr: Share and find photos.

Asynchronous Discussion

I personally have found that Ning works great as a tool for all sorts of different needs. Creating a new Ning network is very easy and it gives you a lot of what you would want / need as a work team. Here are a couple of quick guides to getting started on Ning:

• How to Create Your Own Social Network with Ning

• Start Your Own Social Network in Minutes with Ning

Of course, if you've not yet joined some of the existing Learning Communities on Ning, then go do that right now so you are used to how it works.

Work Team Notification

Notification of team members of what's going on with the team is incredibly important. I already mentioned that the fact that Google Docs does not support notification makes it more difficult to use as a solution.

The bottom line on most work teams is that you want to have a reliable notification of changes, discussion, etc. done by the team; to the appropriate channel; with the appropriate frequency. There are two primary notification channels that most work teams wants:

• Email - periodic or real-time notification of changes.
  
• RSS - feed changes into an RSS reader that will be checked as needed
  

As members of the work team, we should be able to control what goes where and with what frequency.

Teamwork Tips and Skills

• Are We Really Collaborating?
  
• Teamwork Tips
• 7 Keys to Building Great Workteams
• Groups that Work
• Five Habits of Effective Teams
• Building Better Virtual Teams
• Conference Call Tips
• Building Social Relationships in Virtual Teams
• Assessing the Quality of Collaboration in Virtual Teams
• Online Community Toolkit
• Seven Habits of Successful Virtual Teams
• Leading Virtual Teams
  

If you want a lot more on this, you can go to: http://delicious.com/tag/virtualteams

Other Collaboration Tools

There are a lot of tools that can be considered Collaboration Tools.

Other Posts in the Series

• Tools and Methods 2009
  
• Work Skills Keeping Up
  
• Top-Down Strategy
  
• Better Memory
• Information Radar
• Processing Link Pages
• Network Learning
  
• Collaboration
• LinkedIn Guide for Knowledge Workers
• Twitter as Personal Work and Learning Tool
• Search
• Browser Short Cuts
• Work Skills Workshop

Learning Materials

I've been having a very nice email conversation with a reader who contacted me with a question. The question is one that I've seen before, and I thought it would be worth asking for help from the community. Here's the basic question -

What belongs in an LMS?

more specifically, the question is:

For learning materials / content that is not a course such as videos, reference, documents, do you house these inside your LMS?

They have about 300 or so courses (ILT and courseware) on a variety of subjects in the LMS. They have quite a bit of other learning support materials. There is internal debate about putting this in the LMS vs. having it reside on the intranet (SharePoint in this case).

Advantages of having it in the LMS:

• Usage tracked on a per-user basis (so you can see what dept, etc. are using materials)
  
• Organized using the same structure as rest of courses
• Appears near the courses so learners don't have to hunt around for it. And when a person thinks "learning" - there's a single location
  
• Encourages use as part of learning
  
• Uses same approval workflows
  

Advantages of having it ouside the LMS and on the intranet:

• Easier to access directly when outside the LMS
• Organization is easier outside the LMS
• Content inside the LMS seems cleaner without all the non-course material
• Materials not developed/approved by L&D do not require management in the LMS, instead they use SharePoint to manage
  

A few additional notes:

• The CLO is asking for best practices, and in this case believes that there is a somewhat magic number of having "no more than 300 courses in the LMS."
• Part of this is a philosophical debate about whether materials that are not really "training" materials should be inside an LMS.
• They know that they can link between stuff inside the LMS and back to the other resources, but that doesn't really solve it. It's more a question of whether the other materials have first class status in the LMS and all the normal charateristics of something housed there.
  

Additional Aspects

Workflow of Other Types of Materials? - If you believe it makes sense to put this in the LMS, then there's the added question of how you handle the workflow, approvals, etc. for these other materials?

Value in Additional Tracking? - If you currently keep these kinds of materials in your LMS, do you get significant value from the ability to track to a specific user level?

Where do You Draw the Line? - Assuming that you are willing to put some or all of these additional materials in the LMS, you must draw the line somewhere. Where do you draw the line between having something in the LMS vs. putting it outside?

Additional information from my blog and other bloggers on Learning Management Systems (LMS) can be found by clicking the above links as provided by the eLearning Learning community.

Nonprofit Technology Portal

I've been working with Beth Kanter on the creation of something similar to the eLearning Learning content community, but centered around the vibrant community that focuses on the use of technology in nonprofits. This is a work in progress, but she's done a pretty good job explaining what it is and why she's doing this in her post: How Do You Browse By Category Blog Content from NpTech Bloggers?

She raises some interesting questions around how you browse through existing blog content which was one of the primary reasons for originally creating the technology. As a blogger, keeping my labels/tags/categories up to date, was always very hard. So, this technology not only does that for me, but it helps surface the particular terms that I use more than others.

If you have thoughts on eLearning Learning or Nonprofit Technology, this is still a work in progress and we are hoping to get feedback.

Networks and Communities

Mercenary Rationale for Network Work & Learning

As I discussed in Evaluating Performance of Concept Workers, evaluating the performance of a concept worker is difficult because there's no right answer and most often the evaluator knows less about the subject than the worker.

Thus, the bottom line in evaluating a concept workers performance is by looking at:

• Was a reasonable process used?
  
• Are the conclusions reasonable?
• How would this compare to results from other concept workers?

To make sure you pass this test - I suggest cheating. And there is no better cheat for the concept worker than reaching out to other people to test your process and conclusions. Basically make sure 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."

Limits of Search

In Value from Social Media, I looked at a scenario where I'm evaluating a particular solution for my company / organization. Through Google, I find a lot of information. But in many cases, I will still be left feeling uncomfortable ...

• What’s really going to happen?
• Did I miss something important?
• How important are the various issues?
• Is my answer reasonable?

These are common questions when only search is used. Often it's difficult to use search to address:

• Experience - What have been the experiences of other organizations (not the canned case studies) when they’ve used this solution.
• Boundaries / Existence - I’ve got a particular issue and I’m not sure if answers to that issue exist out there, I’ve not found it in my searching.
• Confirmation - I’m beginning to have an answer, but I’d like to get confirmation of the answer based on my particular situation based on experience.
• Importance - Some of the issues I see, I’m not sure how important they are in practice, should I be concerned.

However, each of these can be directly addressed through conversation. This is why I say that Leveraging Networks is Key Skill.

I'm coming to believe this is the most important Knowledge Worker Skill Gap.

Network Readiness

Before you can reach into a network or community to seek conversation, you generally need to have spent time on

• Building some level of connection (network building).
  
• Being ready to engage to seek conversation (network access).
  

Patti Anklam, in Seven Leaders Lessons tells us:

High-performing people tend to have stronger, more intentional networks.

The word "intentional" is intentional. You have to look systematically at your networks and communities to be in position to be able to use them as part of your work and learning. As part of your top-down evaluation, one of the points you have to evaluate is whether you have appropriate networks and communities. Even if you are a member of LinkedIn, you may not have links to people in the right fields. Thus, you may have to spend time building some initial links so that you can reach out effectively. Similarly, you should spend a bit of time finding the right communities.

I personally do a lot of my network building slowly. I try to get people into my networks when I meet them (for example connect on LinkedIn). I keep my ears open for new communities and often lurk for a while to see what's going to happen there.

When I'm relatively new to an area, then I spend much more time building my network. Recently I started up with a new client in a new area. I spent a good chunk of time my first month reaching out (mostly through LinkedIn) to make connections with people who had lots of related experience to get thoughts and ideas around particular issues that we might face - and found a lot more issues that I hadn't considered. I also signed up to a couple Ning communities where I'm lurking. Now I have a great starting point when I want further conversation.

Conversation Seeking

So bottom line is that it's really important for us to be able to seek out different forms of conversation inside and especially outside our organizations. There are a myriad of different places and ways to seek conversations.

A few months ago, we asked how people went about deciding where and how to seek conversations. The answer was, as always, it depends.

Karyn Romeis uses a series that goeses from people she already knows who might be experts then to less known connections. She looks at distance vs. likelihood vs. experience vs. cost.

Karl Kapp makes the point that you should ask in multiple places because you never know who might have the answer and the overall cost is negligible.

I think there's some risk of being spammy if you ask too broad, but Karl has somewhat convinced me that what I really need:

• Find networks and communities related to my future needs
  
• Know mechanisms used to seek conversations in these networks and communities
• Build enough connection into networks and communities to be ready to leverage
• Be able to quickly and with minimal effort seek conversation in appropriate networks and communities.
  

So, it's being aware of what's available, getting integrated enough to have it open for use, and be able to navigate it when you need it.

The top two slam dunk answers here are:

• LinkedIn
• Various learning communities

I personally also use my blog and twitter

• Blog
• Twitter
  

If you look at my top two, they would both be called social networks.

Introduction to Social Networking

• Introduction to Social Networking
• Six Steps to a Remarkably Powerful Network
• Weave Smarter Networks with LinkedIn
• How to Grow a Facebook Network
• Join a Ning community

Before You Seek Conversation

There's an acronym that everyone should know - RTFM. It stands for Read the Friggin Manual. It's a common response to stupid questions posted in certain communities. To me its a reminder that before you ever seek a conversation you should have done your homework.

Your homework is:

1. Search the web - save related content
   
2. Search the community / network for prior discussion - save related
3. Maybe ask someone you know already for a reality check
   

This arms you with the basics before you ask your question or seek conversation. It also allows you to ask the best kind of question -

I've searched on the web and in this community for information on X and I found A, B, C.

But I am not finding Y, I'd like to find people who can help.

-or-

I'm concluding Z, but I'd like to talk to people who have done this.

You are showing that you've done your homework. Your question will be much more interesting. You are providing value via the question with the appropriate links. And this form of inquiry gets much better response.

You will notice that in this template question, I am asking for a conversation. In some cases, I will change it to ask for written responses.

LinkedIn

There's quite a bit about the use of LinkedIn for this purpose, so rather than reciting it here, please go check out:

• My LinkedIn Open Connection Approach
• LinkedIn Facebook Twitter - Connection Styles
• LinkedIn for Finding Expertise
  
• Searching for Expertise - LinkedIn Answers
• Tips on using LinkedIn
• 10 Ways to Use LinkedIn
• Make Your LinkedIn Profile Work for You
• Write Your LinkedIn Profile for Your Future

For me, the bottom line usage of LinkedIn really comes down to three primary activities:

1. Seeking conversation directly - LinkedIn for Finding Expertise
2. Asking questions to get written answers and to seek conversation - Searching for Expertise - LinkedIn Answers. Note: I often try to connect with people who provide answers directly (via Skype or phone) to discuss in more detail.
3. Having discussions via groups - which acts much like questions and I do the same thing.

It's very interesting to see how LinkedIn Answers and Groups has given us new opportunities to surface interested experts and having that connected to known mechanisms for sparking conversation.

If you've never approached a few people for a conversation on a topic via LinkedIn, then you should make that happen within the next month.

Learning Communities

The key here is to have ready access to a variety of communities. Take a look at the Learning Communities List.

Additional Reading

Patti Anklam has a series on living in a network age:

• Seven Leaders Lessons
• Six myths
• Five purposes
• Four design facets
• Three network tools
• Two network sources
• One network lens

From her series:

High-performing people tend to have stronger, more intentional networks.

Other Related Tools and Methods

• MetaFilter - Answers to Anything

Other Posts in the Series

• Tools and Methods 2009
  
• Work Skills Keeping Up
  
• Top-Down Strategy
  
• Better Memory
• Information Radar
• Processing Link Pages
• Network Learning
  
• Remote Collaboration
• LinkedIn Guide for Knowledge Workers
• Twitter as Personal Work and Learning Tool
• Search
• Browser Short Cuts
• Work Skills Workshop

Hot List

There are some very cool new features especially our hot list feature coming out soon on the eLearning Learning Content Community. The site is beginning to take into account social signals. In other words, we are using what is happening:

• with the content out in the network
• on the eLearning Learning
• searches that land on us and that occur on the site,
• and various other kinds of behaviors.

Together these social signals indicate that the content is likely of higher quality (or at least of higher interest). Thus it belongs in both a best of list and a hot list. This is going to take some work to get it right, but we believe it will help to highlight various hot list content.

We are particularly excited that this capability will soon allow us to have a weekly post that highlights hot list for the week. This will be something like:

Hot List for the Week of 1/2/2009 - 1/9/2009

Hot List Posts

• Tool Set 2009
• The U.S. Air Force: Moving Full Scale Into Social Media
• i-Clickr
• Year of the cloud
• Rypple: telling it like it is
• 2009 Predictions, Remembrance and Challenges
• What is the TRUE cost Rapid eLearning?
• Social Learning Question of the Day E-Book
• Now You Can Design E-Learning Courses Like a Pro
• Twitter, Networks, and “following” people
• Learning Circuits Blog Big Question: What are your Challenges, Plans and Predictions for 2009
• Hopes and Predictions for 2009

Hot List Items

• How to Embed Almost Anything in your Website
• Copyright-friendly image source websites " Moving at the Speed of Creativity
• YouTube - E-learning tips
• eLearning Learning

Hot List Keywords

• Work Skills
  
• FLV
  
• Knowledge Work
• iPhone
  
• Twitter
  
• Jing
• GeoLearning
• Saba
• Mzinga
  
• Cornerstone
• Workshop

Notes on the weekly hot list.

• The posts come from the primary sources for this group. Other items come from other sources.
• Keywords are based on occurrences this week in addition to other social signals.
  

I'm not always sure I can explain why certain things are going to be in the hot list for the week. The social signals seem obvious in some cases, but not always clear to me in other cases. Still I would claim that most of those posts are pretty good ones - certainly I'm happy seeing that list. Similarly, it's interesting to see what keywords are getting to the top each week.

I'm very curious to hear any reactions to this idea of a hot list.