Considering what I saw when I looked at following Twitter Learning Professionals - quickly I decided Twitter Mass Follow - Never Mind. My concern about twitter is that it will be too random for most people, especially those who have not established any relationships / understanding of the people they are following. Thus, my opinion is: Twitter is not a tool for people who are new to social media and the use of social media for personal learning and work. There is one exception to this. If you are going to a conference or evening event where attendees will be using Twitter in a group fashion, then that's likely a good opportunity to try out the tool.
Twitter is Okay, But Not Primary
For a person who is already more into social media and what their experience might be take a quick look at Brett Miller's recent post 10 days of Twitter. I think his explanation of his experience coming onto twitter is pretty realistic, but he's also not new to social media.
Still, I would put Twitter as a social tool, a serendipity learning tool, a quick hit, general question tool. But it's still down on my list and you have to be careful not to allow it to waste time. Other Posts in the Series
Michael Hanley was nice enough to post a description and screencast of how to navigate the eLearning Learning Community and what he sees as the value proposition. It's very cool to have people like Michael involved who can add value to the collective whole. Thanks Michael.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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:
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.
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?
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.
