Great post by Ken Allan asking - What do you do with a Fan of Links? This is all about what to do when you encounter a page that links to many other possibly interesting pages. This relates to the strategies that I defined for how to process information in the posts Better Memory and Information Radar. However, this is a slightly different twist that I'm sure we all recognize:
I'm reading a page with lots of links
I know that some of the links are going to be good stuff
and either
I don't have time to go read all the pages linked, or
I don't want to lose the flow of the original post to go look at the other links.
But, if I don't visit the other pages, then they will not have made it into your virtual Google Memory (as described in Better Memory).
So, what do you do?
The suggestion by Tim on Ken's post is pretty much what I do, but I'm going to modify it slightly:
Ctrl+Click on interesting looking links. This opens it in a new tab but keeps focus on the current window (if you've set up your browser that way).
Continue to skim-dive-skim the article.
When I'm done with the page, I decide if I'm going to spend more time right now or at a later time going through this.
If I want to come back, I often will bookmark it with a particular tag that reminds me to look at it again.
If it's really important to come back, I set a reminder in my calendar - those are my task lists.
If I have more time, right then, I will continue to skim-dive-skim the pages that I've opened and process them.
The key here was to open those pages so that you've got them in your Google memory. They become full-text searchable.
One warning - as most of us are infovores / information addicts and we hold dearly to the myth of keeping up. So, don't be surprised if you quickly accumulate a fairly large list of "read later" tagged items. You will find that you need to really be careful about what you put on that list or you will never read it.
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.
