ItsDevelopmental - content + technology + people

Web 2.0 impact on HR and training

Jeremy @rhemagroup is talking about the HR function and its role as an internal police force.

He says there needs to be a paradigm shift for HR - as people are talking to each other in spaces such as Facebook. Need to tap into this and enagage with employees.

Also talking about the disruptive nature of social media tools and what employers need to do to engage employees.

Emerging theories around learning and social media

Dr Sian Bayne from school of education, Edinburgh University, is showing her Friend Wheel representation of Facebook. She is talking about theories around social media and learning.

Notes images of scholarship are bound up in paper publishing. Time to break away from the 'page metaphor'.

Shares a study of 3 higher ed programmes using social media. Used virtual ethnography (Hine) - how to make boundaries between real and virtual.

Themes: new literacies, appropriation and taming, the uncanny (strange views of second life)

Wiki - volatile and movable text. Students feels it is a more formal space than a discussion forum. Like editing others' work but issue of netiquette. Holyroodpark wiki space as an example

Roland Barthes - death of the author quote - 1977. 'A text is made of multiple . . .' used to expalin wikis.

As for taming - blogs used in conventional course design.

Uncanny - a Freud term. Sian is talking about Second Life and its weirdness - how students find being in Second Life - out of body experience, reanimation, zombies, anxiety, troublesome.

Need to teach a pedagogy of uncertainty. This uncertainy is exciting. An ontological issue.

Higher education stilll requires written work for assessment although student practices are online. The institutions need to catch up.

Web 2.0 in learning

We have prof Robin Mason from Open University. Just raised Paul Bradshaw's Twitter learning experience which Robin didn't seem that interested in.

BTW, Robin is author of The E-learning and Social Networking Handbook.

So, Robin is saying the implications of web 2.0 learning are:

• There isa need to reduce course content

• Need to structure online discussons

• Valuing content from online interations ie using at coursework.

Problems

• collaborative learning makes the course less flexible than traditional distance learning

• Schedules of busy people mean holidays etc can be a real hindrance to sustained participation

• Students feel more guilty failing their peers in collaboration than they do their students i individual work

Teaching and learning in Second Life

Kathy Trinder, a learning technologist is talking about how Glasgow Calendonian University and use of virtual worls in learning and development.

Emphasises the fact this is still new to higher education and that there is a lot of experimentation.

Started with staff and students attending evening classes = development of a comunity around 2nd life. Aim was to get through early adopter issues.

Ran competitions to find projects - got 9 entries from around GCU.

Projects from law students, clinical students and psychology students. 

Examples:

Computer tech students wanted to learn more about Artificial Intelligence. So they created a robot/simulation to see how AI algorythm worked. Third year students built the simulator for thefirst year students. Peer teaching proved powerful.

Xray simulator - in real life these machines cost a lot - to help students learn how to do x-rays. Much easier to get 150 students to train on simulator.

Student support in second life. Enable students to approach her without the stigma - as adifferent(anaynous) persona. Not right for all students, but good for some. Plan to build some support spaces in  second life.

Law of second life project.

Virtual ward to practise decision making processes around patient needs.

Exciting - new open source version of Second Life called OpenSim - avirtual worl on a USB stick.

Kathy gives an example of a student who takes tutorials in Second Life. And highlights the collaborative nature of online games - crucial skills for business.

Blogging from learning lab @ Wolverhampton Uni

Today I am  doing a presentation on social media tools for HR and training. I am co-presenting the session with Jeremy Francis from Rhema Group. He asked me to help him out so here I am.

The session is one of the many put on by Wolverhampton University Learning Lab.

This is the order of sessions:

Session 1 – Kathy Trinder – Glasgow Caledonian University
Teaching and Learning in 3D Virtual Worlds: The GCU Experience

Session 2 - Professor Robin Mason – Open University
The impact of Social Networking on Higher Education

Session 3 – Dr Sian Bayne – University of Edinburgh
Researching social media for learning

Session 4 – Jeremy Francis – RHEMA Group, Martin Couzins, Reed Business Information
HR and Training 2.0

I'll be attempting some live blogging throughout the sessions plus some tweeting.

Twitter as a learning tool

Worth noting how Paul Bradshaw's students used Twitter and its users to find out ways to use Twitter. What a great way to learn quickly, with great links to relevant information, to share with others with knowledge and to have the results of the learning experience aggregated in one place - here is the twitter feed for #twask.

The only outlay was time. Amazing.

 

Picture: responses to the NUJ 'effing blog' post

 

[Click on picture to see it fully - it's not showing properly at the moment]

Been really busy catching up this week and have missed out on (and haven't had time to enagage properly) the NUJ blog discussions. However, I had a look through lots of the comments and was thinking about my response and then I thought I'd do this.

I created a Wordle of the effing blogs post.  I pasted all the comments into Wordle and it came back with this visual presentation. I like the fact it highlights the most used words. Note: standards is a big one and is actually a main theme in all these discussions.

NUJ training storm follow-up

Been away so this is an update of what happened to my original post on why NUJ must be focussed on training right now.

The post was picked up by Adam with a post entitled: NUJ: Still not 'getting' social media [30 comments]

Then Adam again in this post: NUJ: 'Effing blogs' [54 comments]

NUJ and Adam Tinworth’s ‘effing’ blog by Kevin Anderson on Strange Attractor.

Kevin Anderson at The Guardian posted: NUJ training chair at centre of blog storm [79 comments]

Then Adam: The NUJ and social media - a few follow-ups

Adam again: The NUJ, Social Media and Video Conversation

I have also had some comments via Twitter and email, which I will follow up shortly in a separate post.

If you read the comments to the related blog posts you will see how the conversation took a different course and got quite personal and not very nice in places. The comments (and number of them) and the way the conversation developed are quite an eye-opener.

Heaven knows what would-be union members would make of this. I find the whole thing quite depressin.

All is not doom and gloom, however, as i had a couple of more constructive comments from NUJ members in Scotland about the type of training they are developing for members.

More on that shortly.

Top 10 social media sites 2008

Thanks to Alex at Nielsen Online for these 2008 unique user stats for UK social media sites. I was hunting around for these but couldn't find them - they must have been published somewhere.

Anyway, a useful reference as I am doing some research around this. Was struck by the popularity of the blogging platforms.

Rank	Social Media Site	Unique Audience (000)	Active Reach (%)
1	Facebook	17,645	48.7
2	YouTube	14,508	40.1
3	Wikipedia	12,793	35.3
4	Blogger	7,525	20.8
5	MySpace	5,361	14.8
6	Yahoo! Answers	5,298	14.6
7	Bebo	4,324	11.9
8	WordPress.com	3,498	9.7
9	Flickr	3,066	8.5
10	TripAdvisor	2,933	8.1

 

Identity crisis time for publishers

Thanks to Adam for pointing to this post by Rory Brown. As Rory points out, reporting time for listed media companies gives a good insight into how they see the world and how they are looking to grow and adapt. And there will be more reports next week, and they may not be pretty.

Here is a key point about my parent comapny Reed Elsevier

The vast majority of Reed Elsevier’s revenues and profits do not come from a ‘buyer meets seller’ introduction service that a lot of publishers cling to. Instead they are providing valuable data and workflow solutions that help their customers do their jobs better, more efficiently, with more transparency and faster. 

This point really resonates for me as I am reading Jeff Jarvis's What Would Google Do? In particular, the following lines.

You should be asking: am I a knowledge company? a data company? A community company? A Platform? A network? Where is your value and where is your revenue? Remember that they might not be in the same place; the money may come in through a side door. It's time for your identity crisis.