Category Archives: Technology

information & communication technology

What’s working in social business

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What’s working in social business in 2012? This is the question that CMSWire asked me to write about. In my opinion, technology sales, marketing campaigns and the speakers circuits are doing well. Implementation and organizational change are lagging far behind.

Like the knowledge management and e-learning hype phases of the 90′s and ’00′s respectively, social business is being led by software vendors. Some are even the same vendors that MIT’s Peter Senge said co-opted the field of knowledge management. I watched as e-learning moved from hope for ubiquitous learning, to the overproduction of self-paced online courses, also known as “shovelware.”

My focus on social business stems from a background in training, knowledge management, performance improvement and social learning. I have learned that the hard work comes after the software has been installed and the initial training sessions are over. Then comes the question, what do we do now?

Transparency

People may say that it’s not about the technology, but that is where a large share of the budget goes in any major change initiative. The bigger change to manage however, is getting people to work transparently. One of the major benefits of using social media is increasing speed of access to knowledge. But if information is not shared, it will never be found, and knowledge will remain hidden. Transparency is a necessity for social business.

While social media enable transparency, they also lay bare a company’s culture. A dysfunctional company culture does not improve with transparency, it just gets exposed. In the transparent social business, there is no place left to hide. This change alone can be enough to cause massive organizational upheaval. Transparency can be scary for anyone who owes their position to the old system.

Social business is not just about using social media but changing routines and procedures. With greater transparency, information now flows horizontally as well as vertically. New patterns and dynamics emerge from interconnected people and interlinked information flows, and these will bypass established structures and services. Work gets more democratic as it becomes visible to all.

With the democratization of information, user-generated content increases. Today, search engines give each worker more information and knowledge than any CEO had even 10 years ago. Pervasive connectivity changes organizational power structures, though the full effects of this take time to become visible. From a transparent environment new leaders and experts may emerge, as it takes different leadership and an understanding of networks to support a social business.

Narration

Agile social businesses need people who can work in concert on solving problems, not waiting for direction from above. Management must ask: how can we help you work in this transparent environment? In social networks we often learn from each other; modelling behaviours, telling stories and sharing what we know.

While not highly efficient, this is very effective for learning. There is a need to model the new behaviours of being transparent and narrating one’s work. Social business also requires power-sharing; for how long will workers collaborate and share if they cannot take action with their new knowledge and connectivity? Changing to more social behaviours takes time, but most of all, it takes trust.

Once social technologies have been installed, modelling new work behaviours becomes the main organizational challenge.

The organization can support this by fostering and supporting communities of practice. These are potential bridges between work teams and the open social networks on the Internet. Narration of work, or learning out loud, is a prime enabler of knowledge-sharing. One indicator that a social business is working is when people at all levels are narrating their work in a transparent environment.

If the daily routine supports social learning, and time is made available for reflection and sharing stories, then an organization is on the right track. One determinant of effective professional communities is whether they actually change practices. Only then will we know if the social business initiative has been successful.

Enterprises adopting social business need to find and support people who can model knowledge-sharing behaviours, not just talk about them. Managers should identify people who already narrate their work, create user-generated content and share transparently. Companies should get advice from people who share power and do most of their work in networks already. Just think, if there is nobody to model social business behaviours in the organization, how will people learn? From their friends on Facebook?

In a social business, work is learning and learning is the work. Social learning needs to be integrated into the daily workflow. Workers need more than technology; they need ongoing, real-time, constantly-changing, collaborative support. Management’s primary responsibility in a social business is supporting organizational learning.

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Originally posted on CMS Wire

Meet Zedfast

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Living in a small town in Atlantic Canada (pop. 5,000), it’s not often I find people in my community who understand what I do, let alone work in similar fields. Zedfast, founded by Steve Scott, is the exception.

Zedfast is currently focused on developing eLearning content in HTML5 and Flash. They even have a Fortune 500 client, which is not bad, given our town’s distance from any major commercial centre. According to MacGregor Grant, building the app from scratch typically involves using the storyboards, source images, and audio files from the client to produce the course. Zedfast then continuously streamlines the conversion process. So far, most of Zedfast’s content has been developed for the iPad.

Here are MacGregor and Steve hanging out at the local café, which doubles as my downtown office ;)

This company, which has three full-time staff here in Sackville and another ~30 contractors in North Amercia and Europe, is not just focused on elearning. Several new project ideas are on the agenda, including wireless networks, mobile payments, and even social games. In addition, Steve is helping to create a work-sharing space in our community (a Commons), which is something I’ve tried to do a few times.

Great guys, great company; in a great little town.

A new view on lurkers

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For several years, there has been a rule-of-thumb, called “90-9-1″, that 90% of online participation in groups/communities consists of “lurkers” or more politely, “passive participants”, and only 1% are active creators. Jacob Nielsen’s 2006 post on Participation Inequality provides a good overview of this phenomenon.

All large-scale, multi-user communities and online social networks that rely on users to contribute content or build services share one property: most users don’t participate very much. Often, they simply lurk in the background.

In contrast, a tiny minority of users usually accounts for a disproportionately large amount of the content and other system activity.

A recent BBC survey of 7,500 people shows significantly different results.

Here we see that passive lurkers make up only 23% of participants; active (intense) participants have increased to 17%; and there is now an “Easy” group in the middle who, “ … respond largely to the activity of others. This includes replying, ‘liking’ and rating, all activities where there’s little effort, exposure or risk.”

Perhaps the most interesting finding is that many early adopters, those who used to be active online, are dropping out and are classified as “passive”. I’m not sure if they are actually dropping out or have just moved on to other media and communities.

One conclusion I would make is that in 2012 it is now easier to get people engaged in online participation, whether for work or pleasure. This is the Facebook effect, which I have noticed since the service became mainstream. With a concrete model of what a social network looks like, people can more easily understand online communities. Of course, there comes a saturation point which many of us have faced as we add social networks to our lives. The YASNS effect ["Yet Another Social Networking Service" ~ Clay Shirky] is also becoming ubiquitous.

If nothing else, this report indicates that social media are making people more social online. The medium is the message, or so it seems.

Thanks for the code

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One of my earlier blog posts is still online, which I stumbled upon this week, much to my surprise.

Note: Nine years ago I was warning how production jobs were leaving Canada and getting outsourced. Deep conversations about R&D in this Province never materialized though. The industry was much too focused on “jobs”, which were subsidized by the government. One of the few large eLearning R&D projects in the province just finished last year. The private sector partner is an Ontario company and no further R&D is happening in New Brunswick.

I later shifted to using Blogger (WordPress had just been created in 2003) with a link off my website. It was easier than trying to manage a blog by myself.

Note: It’s interesting that the whole learning objects discussion seems to have disappeared from the mainstream. MOOC’s are the current educational hot topic. I have also moved on, doing much less work in the educational sector and now more focused on integrating learning into the enterprise workflow.

My self-hosted blog started in 2004 using the Drupal CMS and I later switched to WordPress, which made it much easier to manage. Drupal was too much for a mere blog.

Hosting my own blog was one of the best decisions I ever made. Using WordPress was fortuitous, as Automattic is probably the best internet company there is. Best in the sense of supporting its greater community. Best in “not being evil”. The company is doing a very good job of making the Web a better place.

Blogging has provided me with a medium for self-expression and self-publication and a unique medium to reflect on almost a decade of work. Thanks to all those people who believed enough in blogging to write code that works! Many of us really appreciate it.

Etiquette for sharing

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Many people like to share things online. Twitter is full of links to other websites. For a long time you needed to use URL shorteners to ensure you stayed within Twitter’s 140 character limit. There are now many to choose from, including open source and full-service analytics. Now Twitter has its own URL shortener – t.co – that converts every link that is shared. This is so Twitter can analyze all of this sharing and then sell the aggregated information.

One problem with using a third-party URL shortener with Twitter is that you are adding another potential point of failure in the link. I now copy & paste the full URL into Twitter, and it auto-shortens the link. There is only one potential point of failure and people can see the original URL as ALT text. This is user-friendly and respectful to readers.

Many people like to analyse what happens with their online activity and use tracking tools. For example, if your site exports its RSS feed using something like Google’s Feedburner, then the link people click on in their aggregators has extra information attached; so you can be tracked. I think it’s very rude to pass on these kinds of links and I always clean these URL’s before sharing them. All you need to do is delete everything after the question mark (in bold):

… tryingtotrackyou.com/?utm_source=feedburner …

I use Google Analytics on this site and understand why people want to see their social media traffic. However, it is easy for users to block these services, just like using pop-up blockers. My RSS feeds are clean and I provide a full-feed so I don’t force people to come to my site to read an article, just so I can increase my traffic. I think it’s important to share as openly as possible. I appreciate full feeds and clean URL’s as a reader.

Recently I have noticed another layer of complication being imposed by those who share links. Not only are tracking URL’s used, but these links go to another third-party site, like paper.li or tumblr.com which usually add no additional context for the reader. Often they are just clippings of the original website so the reader has to find the link to the original to read the complete article. All of these services are adding additional points of failure. If these services go down, as many do, then the chain is broken.

My intention with this post is to explain why it’s important to understand some of the technical aspects of how the web is working so we can do what people do best – be social. Please don’t be unintentionally anti-social. I would also be interested if there are any other common anti-social online practices that should be stopped.

Etiquette at the Ball for the Victorians of London Society

Online community ethics

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Are you on Facebook? Who isn’t these days? Here’s a question about using Facebook as an extension of work or classroom learning. Is it ethical to force people (over whom you have some power & authority) to use Facebook, a proprietary platform that tracks users & sells their data to third parties?

I ask this question to organizational community managers, teachers, professors and even companies. For example, if I want to interact with our national public broadcaster, it seems the preferred venue is “The Facebook”. Last December I put my Facebook account into hibernation (you cannot actually delete your Facebook profile). Since then, I have had many offers to join groups or engage in communities on the platform, all assuming that, of course, I use Facebook.

For those of us who understand these technologies, are we doing a disservice by not promoting a free & open web? People learn most from modelling the behaviour of their peers. For those of us who have been online for some time now, what kind of tacit examples are we providing?

Educators and facilitators of organizational learning need to have a conversation about the open web and understand the implications of their actions. It is more than just owning our data, it’s having some control over our collective digital future.

Update: A good article on what online walled gardens are doing to us: I killed the Internet

Related:

Jaron Lanier: The False Ideals of the Web – via @jhagel

The obvious strategy in the fight for a piece of the advertising pie is to close off substantial parts of the Internet so Google doesn’t see it all anymore. That’s how Facebook hopes to make money, by sealing off a huge amount of user-generated information into a separate, non-Google world. Networks lock in their users, whether it is Facebook’s members or Google’s advertisers.

Wired – Dirty Little Secrets: The Trouble With Social Search

Still, this potentially marks a real transformation to the way we have looked for information on the web, one with real winners and losers. It also signals a real danger to the balance of power between users and megacompanies. We are increasingly moving from a bottom-up web, where users vote with their links, keyboards and their clicks to show what’s relevant to them, to a top-down web where that’s doubly or triply mediated by browsers, search engines and social networks.

Oopsie! The Audacious iBooks Author EULA - via @nwinton

Apple, in this EULA [end user license agreement], is claiming a right not just to its software, but to its software’s output. It’s akin to Microsoft trying to restrict what people can do with Word documents, or Adobe declaring that if you use Photoshop to export a JPEG, you can’t freely sell it to Getty. As far as I know, in the consumer software industry, this practice is unprecedented. I’m sure it’s commonplace with enterprise software, but the difference is that those contracts are negotiated by corporate legal departments and signed the old-fashioned way, with pen and ink and penalties and termination clauses. A by-using-you-agree-to license that oh by the way asserts rights over a file format? Unheard of, in my experience.

the new electric media

Quote

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“Of course we can live without a bodily identity, but the body confers a particular kind of identity. Aquinas pointed out that the principle of individuation consists in the intersection of matter and spirit. Without the body, then, individual identity is not possible. Discarnate man is mass man; individuality is simply not possible because there is nothing on which to base it, to give it substance. Individualism and private identity are artefacts, side-effects of the phonetic alphabet and its symphony of abstraction. (Laws of Media chapter one.) One of the three themes on which Take Today: The Executive as Dropout is based is that jobs disappear under electric conditions and they are replaced by roles. Roles mean audiences and participation. Private identity depends first and foremost on detachment. Social media like Facebook provide identity from the in-crowd of friends that one can amass: that attention is the identity dynamic. Take it away and the user is nobody—a nobody with no body.

With private identity and detachment also comes another artefact: privacy, now a major concern. As private identity evaporates, privacy becomes a matter of great concern-and so do private ownership and copyright. All of these things are interrelated and make no sense in isolation from each other. It is no secret that private identity is unknown in non-literate societies and equally that they have no use for privacy.” ~ Eric McLuhan

The initial design influences everything else

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If you pit a good performer against a bad system, the system will win almost every time.

This quote from Rummler & Brache in Improving Performance, sums up many of the symptoms of hierarchical systems, whether they be schools, businesses or even prisons.

The great work to be done at the beginning of this century is the democratization of the workplace. Efficiency and effectiveness are not enough, and too often become mechanistic. It’s time to discard industrial management models that emphasize command and control and ensure that individuals at all levels have opportunities to engage in and question the system.

Without questioning, things can quickly go awry.

Gary Stager discussed the well-known Milgram Experiments, conducted in the 1960′s to see how far people would go in administering electric shocks to learners. These experiments were replicated by ABC News and Stager picked up the direct link to public education [please read the whole article]:

One of the subjects in the television program was a 7th grade teacher who explained that she didn’t stop shocking the learner because as a teacher she had learned when a student’s complaints were phoney. I thought to myself, “Has she electrocuted many students?”

The teacher asked the researcher, “There isn’t going to be any lawsuit from this medical facility, right?” When told that the teacher was not liable, she replied, “That’s what I needed to know.” It is however worth noting that this was after she induced the maximum shock and the learner demanded that the experiment be terminated.

This is why we need to change the entire education system – constraining curriculum; compulsory testing; useless homework; irrelevant subjects; classrooms cut off from the world; systemic bullying; etc. More or better teachers won’t help; we need to change the system.

In this interview, Dr. Philip Zimardo discussed the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, where students played their roles as guards or prisoners and abuses started within 24 hours:

But on the second morning, the prisoners rebelled; the guards crushed the rebellion and then instituted stern measures against these now “dangerous prisoners”. From then on, abuse, aggression, and eventually sadistic pleasure in degrading the prisoners became the daily norm. Within thirty-six hours the first prisoner had an emotional breakdown and had to be released, followed in kind by similar prisoner breakdowns on each of the next four days.

As Churchill said, “First we shape our structures, and then our structures shape us“. This reminds me of the question about who is the most important person on board a ship. Is it the Captain, the Navigator or the Engineer? Actually, it’s the Architect, because the initial design influences everything else.

Sometimes, no matter how hard you try, you cannot change the way things work in an organization. The problem may be the organizational model itself and it may be better to leave and create an alternative model than help keep a flawed one going.

Clay Burell had guest blogger Bill Farren discussing the hidden curriculum of school architectural design. He asked what hidden messages are our schools themselves asking by their inherent design:

  • Did the building’s designers take into consideration its location?
  • Who decided how (if) it should be built?
  • Does the building make an attempt to connect students with their outside world?
  • What does the formal, intentional curriculum teach?
  • How is this formal, intentional curriculum taught?
  • How is the school run?
  • How is security portrayed?
  • What is sold or advertised on campus?

There was an article I read many years ago, but never see cited, about designing learning environments. It’s Rodney Fulton’s SPATIAL model (1991) [my emphasis added]:

While a body of knowledge does exist that documents the relationships between learning and physical environment, there are problems that need to be resolved before the present level of understanding can be systematically advanced. One problem is that common vocabulary does not exist. Thus, in the literature, concepts are often described with similar but not identical terminology. Conversely, the same terms are used for similar but not exactly the same concepts. But this confusion in vocabulary is only a symptom of the fundamental problem: the lack of a conceptual model that explores relationships of physical environment to learning rather than to behavior in general. Architectural models address built environments, emphasizing both interior and exterior features of building design that allow, encourage, prohibit, or inhibit various behaviors. Psychological models discuss environmental attributes that set conditions for or even control human behavior. Sociological models emphasize the importance of environment in terms of how it facilitates human interactions. By emphasizing individual appreciation of the environment, aesthetic models address the relationship of values to human behavior. Workplace training models, including human factors engineering, emphasize the fit between environment and person and seek out optimal conditions for performance.

Each of these perspectives can add to a global understanding of the learning environment; however, a model that addresses learners in learning environments is a needed first step in refining educational research. The model described here – satisfaction-participation-achievement-transcendent/immanent attributes-authority-layout (SPATIAL) — can serve as a fundamental basis for organizing research designed to identify relationships between and among components of the learning environment and attributes of the learner. Further, this model has potential for weaving together findings from architectural, psychological, sociological, aesthetic, and human factors engineering studies.

Rodney Fulton responded, when I originally wrote this post in 2008:

I found it very interesting that some 17 years after I published the SPATIAL Model in a Jossey-Bass publication there was discussion that included the model. I am not aware of any significant use of the model or of any real impact on the field of Adult Education in the United States. I have longe since moved on from the field of Adult Education and am now very involved in Public Education at the Elementary level in the US. But again, it was gratifying to see my model referenced in 2008. If you know of any other people using or interested in the model, I’d be happy to hear from you. Thanks Rodney Fulton

There is still much structural work to be done.

old-school.jpg

Photo by Atelier Teee

Note: this post is an update of two previous posts from 2008

There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in

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This site was offline from sunrise to sunset today [yes, I missed you, too], in support of the anti-SOPA/PIPA protests. One factor that influenced my decision was this article (and several others) by Michael Geist, Canada Research Chair in Internet Law:

Some of the Internet’s leading websites, including Wikipedia, Reddit, Mozilla, WordPress, and BoingBoing, will go dark today to protest against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA). The U.S. bills have generated massive public protest over proposed provisions that could cause enormous harm to the Internet and freedom of speech. My blog will join the protest by going dark tomorrow. While there is little that Canadians can do to influence U.S. legislation, there are many reasons why I think it is important for Canadians to participate.

Here is the Wikipedia article on SOPA/PIPA, the only page available on that site today:

What are SOPA and PIPA?

SOPA and PIPA represent two bills in the United States House of Representatives and the United States Senate respectively. SOPA is short for the “Stop Online Piracy Act,” and PIPA is an acronym for the “Protect IP Act.” (“IP” stands for “intellectual property.”) In short, these bills are efforts to stop copyright infringement committed by foreign web sites, but, in our opinion, they do so in a way that actually infringes free expression while harming the Internet. Detailed information about these bills can be found in the Stop Online Piracy Act and PROTECT IP Act articles on Wikipedia, which are available during the blackout. GovTrack lets you follow both bills through the legislative process : SOPA on this page, and PIPA on this one. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to advocating for the public interest in the digital realm, has summarized why these bills are simply unacceptable in a world that values an open, secure, and free Internet.