CivieBlog

This post is intended to capture a few of the common objections that I hear at various sessions as well as ways that people suggest you overcome those objections. I will update this over time.

Kevin Jones recently went through and captured 15 Objections to Social Learning and some thoughts on responses to these objections:

• Objection #15: Silent Yet Deadly
  
• Objection #14: Prove It!
• Objection #13: How Do You Measure ROI?
• Objection #12: How Will You Measure That It Is Working?
• Objection #11: Too Much Info
• Objection #10: Wasting Time
• Objection #9: They Aren’t Technical
• Objection #8: Out of Date Information
• Objection #7: The Information is Wrong!
• Objection #6: Mixing Things Up
• Objection #5: How Do You Know it’s Accurate?
• Objection #4: Posting Anything, Including Bonobos
• Objection #3: Control of Information
• Objection #2: What Does This Have To Do With Training?
• Objection #1: Socialize!

There's another good post on a related topic - Ten Common Objections to Social Media and How to Respond - includes:

1. I suffer from information overload already.
2. So much of what's discussed online is meaningless. These forms of communication are shallow and make us dumber. We have real work to do!
3. I don't have the time to contribute and moderate, it looks like it takes a lot of time and energy.
4. Our customers don't use this stuff, the learning curve limits its usefulness to geeks.
7. Upper management won't support it/dedicate resources for it.
8. These startups can't offer meaningful security, they may not even be around in a year - I'll wait until Google or our enterprise software vendor starts offering this kind of functionality.
9. There are so many tools that are similar, I can't tell where to invest my time so I don't use any of it at all.

I would also look at establishing policies: Corporate Policies on Web 2.0

I've decided to start naming some of the sources I use to locate new and interesting websites and information. I've decided to do this for a number of reasons

• I just don't have time to write about everything I find, so this gives people the opportunity to find things for themselves and perhaps write about them.
• I always feel guilty that I don't acknowledge the sources of much of the information I get. This isn't because I'm guarding my sources, it has more to do with not working in a very organised way. I tend to mark interesting sites and come back to them later, by which time I can't remember the original source.
• I don't have a blog roll, but I would like to send some kudos to some of the sites and site owners that I feel have really helped me.
• A number of people have asked me how and where I find great sites to write about.
  

If you have a blog and it doesn't appear on this list, please don't be offended, I will try to make this a regular feature as there are so many that I don't think it's useful for readers to put them all into one post.

Lastly, before I get started I would also like to say that the list is not in order of importance, so I'm not saying that any one source is better than another. Anyway, here goes:



KillerStartups
This site is a great source of new websites that have just been launched or are in Beta or Alpha still. One thing I really like about the site is that users can rate the site in terms of its likelihood of surviving. There is some basic information about the new sites, then some reasons why it might succeed and some reasons why it might fail. Users can also add their comments. This is potentially quite a useful activity for students too as it gets them reading and evaluating - valuable thinking and analytic skills practice.



Go2Web20.net
This is another great source and one that I could browse for hours. It also has a really nicely designed interface which shows you the logos of all the sites. If you mouse over the logo you'll see a brief description and clicking on the logo gives you a more detailed description. There's a search engine too, if you know what you want to find. Every time I visit the site I find at least 4 or 5 really interesting sites within a few minutes.



WebWorkerDaily
This is another favourite of mine and is the source of lots of great information and ideas. It's a great place to get ideas, tips and information about ways to work more efficiently with your computer, but tends to be more 'geek' than educationally orientated. Still a great source of information though, and it's well worth checking through the archives if you have some time.



Demo Girl
This is a great source for finding useful sites and demo girl also provides video tutorials showing how to use the sites. There's quite a huge archive of information on her site too, so it's well worth sorting through the archive search categories on the right of the screen.



MakeUseOf
This is another great source of information and in particular web based apps or free software. They tend to focus mostly on free stuff which is handy and they have a great Web2.0 Directory which is worth browsing through, especially if you are looking for a particular tool.

Well that's probably enough to keep you busy for a while. All of these sites provide an RSS feed, so if you don't have time to look through the archives, just sign up to the feed and keep up to date with what's new on them.

If you don't have a feedreader, you can check out my article on Creating a personal hompage using Netvibes as that can really save you some time.

Hope you enjoy these sources and find something useful. More coming in the next week or two.

Best

Nik Peachey

Well it had to happen! As every other kind of site these days has a social network attached to it, why not karaoke too?The site I've been looking at is called RedKaraoke and it has quite a few useful features. There isn't a huge range of songs there yet, but users can upload their own, it also has a web cam feature so for potential singers who want to be seen as well as heard you can have your web cam hooked up while you sing.

As with most karaoke, there are background tracks and you see the words of the lyrics highlighted as you are supposed to sing them. You can rate other singers too and have your own profile as well as take part in forums (mainly used for technical support by the looks of things) and there's also synchronous chat too.

The high ranking singers get pushed to the top, and if you like someone you can leave encouraging messages of support.

So why use this with EFL students?
Anyone who has ever taught a EFL / ELT will know how powerful and motivating music and song can be to help students acquire language, so sites like this can be really useful.

• If your students are interested in music and singing, you can get them along to the site to record a few of their favourite songs (Onlye the more confident students though)
• You can get students to listen and rate other singers too and leave messages for them if they like them (though don't encourage messages to singers they don't like)
• The site has the words and music to quite few songs, so even if your students don't feel confident enough to record themsleves, they could still get some practice in the privacy of their own homes.
• If students do record themselves you can get them to rate each other and see if any of your students can get into the top ranking list.

What I like about it

• Well as ever for me the first attraction is that it's free.
• There are a range of songs and it's not all in English, so if you are teaching or learning other languages then there is potential material here.
• I like that you can have the web cam recording too.
• The interface is quite easy to get around simple to use.

What I wasn't so sure about

• I think this is going to be pretty bandwidth hungry, especially if you are using a web cam too, so only one for broadband users working alone from home.
• The quality of some of the sound files wasn't so great, but that's always going to be the case with Web 2.0 type content.
• Looks from the forum like a few people have had problems with getting their recording synchronised, though I'm guessing that switching off the wqebcam would help with this.
• As with any site where students are asked to register and add a profile, be sure your students know how to protect their pivacy and personal information.

In theory, if you have students who like karaoke, this could be a potentially very useful site. To be honest I'm not a great fan of the art and have to admit that I didn't make recording myslef, but thought I would share the site anyway, as I know some teachers and students really enjoy it.

Hers the ful URL of the site: http://www.redkaraoke.com/

Hope you find this useful

Best

Nik Peachey

I'm a big fan of questions (see Better Questions for Learning Professionals) and as I'm preparing a workshop (Revolution in Workplace Learning) one of the things I stumbled upon is what seems to be a great new question:

Given that eLearning 2.0 (web 2.0, wikis, blogs, social networking, etc.) represents new ways of supporting learning and work ... as a learning professional, what are the new questions that I need to ask as part of analysis?

There must be new questions that we need to ask in order to figure out if and how eLearning 2.0 approaches apply to given performance improvement needs.

In this post, I want to focus on questions that will help identify if there are opportunities for using eLearning 2.0 approaches as part of your performance intervention.

I would very much like to hear your thoughts on this. Some of the questions that come to mind that I would use to:

Identify eLearning 2.0 Opportunities:

Content -

• What content is already shared through other means? Ex. are lessons learned discussed, or work-arounds.
  
• Is there information that can be created and shared coming from either a 3rd party (e.g., a help desk, experts, etc.) or from the audience itself?
• What content gets updated more frequently?
• What reference material is already being created that might be a target?
  

Audiences -

• Who has the pain?
  
• Who's going through an experience that they would want to share?
  
• Who is able and active enough to use the tools to create content?
• Does it align with their motivation or can it be aligned with their motivation?
• Are there natural content creators that we could leverage?
  

So, what questions do you ask to identify eLearning 2.0 opportunities?

On this month's Big Question - Lead the Charge - we are already seeing some interesting responses.

The Learning Revolution: Where have all the leaders gone?

It's difficult to not agree with everything that's in Tony's post an my short answer would be: yes they should, and the good ones already are.

So, of course, I say, great post. :) There are some interesting thoughts in the post, but also

Most learning professionals can only do so much. There's a vacuum of leadership in the adoption of enterprise/web/learning 2.0 tools from learning professionals in senior positions and too many barriers put up by over-zealous HR and IT departments. Over 50% or organisations in the UK are still on Internet Explorer 6 and I've come across some that restrict javascript and all cookie. This makes using something like google docs or pbwiki as an experiment somewhat difficult for the poor, lonely learning professional.

I'm not sure I buy this. Is it okay for a learning professional to be unaware at this point of social media and its impact on learning and work? I can understand barriers to being able to put it into practice (and there are many barriers), but not barriers to being aware. My experience at ASTD recently was that most people were completely unaware of all of this. They have their head in the sand.

Harold Jarche in Skills 2.0:

Today, active involvement in informal learning, particularly through web-based communities, is key to remaining professional and creative in a field. Being a learning professional in a Web 2.0 world is becoming more about your network than your current knowledge.

Gina Minks: Adventures in Corporate Education What Competencies do Knowledge Workers Need?

How can you design with these new tools if you don’t understand them? How can you apply them to your existing systematic learning system if you don’t know what the heck wiki even means? So, yes, learning professionals must learn and use these tools, and then apply the tools to there existing framework.

She lists the tools and what you should know as:

• Wikis: How to edit, how to read, how to link to
• RSS Feeds: What are they, how do I read one, once I have a reader set up how do I scan info collecetd, how do I share info using one
• Blogs: How do I write one. Why SHOULD I write one. How do I evaluate info from one. How do I scan, collect keywords, and rescan to crystallize ideas and information?
• Information Creation tools: Exps: Youtube, SlideShare, Flickr. How do I use. Why/When do I use.
• Tagging: What is this? Why is it important? How do I use with content I create? How do I use to search for info I need?

Great stuff Gina. And there are some good comments in her post including:

A lot of “us” learned these technologies organically, as we needed to. Trying to come up with ways to teach people them all at once is going to be challenging.

If you can come up with ways to show the results of the tools, that people who are attracted to the technology will find ways to learn the tools. Nobody cared about wikis until wikipedia came along. Nobody cared about RSS readers until information overload made them a necessity.

I think the thing we have to be careful of is teaching the tools outside of the benefits.

Clark Quinn - Learnlets: Lead the Charge? talks about how learning organizations must transition from

the perspective from a training group being an expendable cost-center to a learning capability that’s central to organizational effectiveness and performance.

I received a question today and thought I'd ask blog readers if they can help with answers. The question comes from a blog reader who captures a lot of different videos within their organization. They have "over a couple of thousand of video and audio clips that new hires and tenured employees are currently using for on-boarding and training."

What they want to do is to help employees better access the video content. They've seen viddler which allows people to tag specific sections within the video. They are interested in that capability, but also in rating the videos, and especially rating portions of the videos.

That makes me wonder ...

To me it seems that having video rating and/or video tagging for the video as a whole would make sense, but I'm not convinced that it makes sense for portions of the video. Do you think it makes sense to rate / tag specific sections of video? Will it distract learners?

What tools or solutions would you recommend they consider as part of their solution?

Any other thoughts on video ratings or video tagging?

Creating your own personal homepage / feed reader can be really simple to do and can also help you to save time and stay in touch with what's going on in your professional and personal life.


My own personal home page is something I use everyday and have open for most of the day. It brings me the news from all my favourite websites, blogs and yahoo groups and allows me to scan content from 20 -30 different sources within a few moments. This would otherwise take me a few hours!

So when I was asked to design a course to help teacher trainers use Web 2.0 technology in their teaching, I decided that a session on RSS and personal home pages was an essential.

I've been using a yahoo reader for more than 4 years now, but I've become increasingly impressed with some of the other readers on offer and so I decided to have a look around at what else was available. Some of the main ones that impressed me were:

• http://www.pageflakes.com/
• http://www.netvibes.com
• http://www.igoogle.com
• http://www.google.com/reader

Of these my favourites turned out to be Netvibes. So I produced this task list to help teachers set up their own homepage and explore some of the capabilities of Netvibes. Feel free to print and use this yourself if you want to set up your own homepage or use it with other teacher if you would like to help them set up their own page.

• Creating a personal homepage with Netvibes: Six tasks >> (1.3Mb pdf)
  

What I like about Netvibes

• It is quite easy to add feeds from sites and blogs
  
• The visual design is really nice and quite clean and modern with simple block colours
• There is a nice assortment of widgets to add including ones to enable me to check both my Apple DotMac email account and my Yahoo email account from the same page.
• There is some nice localisation of content
• The interface is generally pretty simple and intuitive so a good one to use with people who aren't too IT savvy
• I particularly like that you can set up the 'Web search' widget to search across multiple search engines and a variety of different formats from text to video.
• You can add and name different pages for different topics (one for ELT and a separate one for technology etc.)
• You can have private pages and also have public pages to share with your students.

So why should teachers use a personal homepage?

• There's lots of functionality all in one place, so it can save you loads of time
• You can keep in touch and up to date with blogs and other sites that change almost every day / few hours.
• The Flickr creative commons feed is a great source of images / flashcards to use in class or online.
  

So how can you use this with students?

• You can have your own personal homepage and add public pages for different students / classes to feed them information or publish their work or links to their projects. There's a great example of this which Gladys Baya created http://www.pageflakes.com/gladysbaya
• You can get students to create their own home pages and use the range of resources and widgets to help support their learning. Things like 'to do list' can help to set learning goals and remember homework. Sticky / web notes can be used to help them remember new vocabulary words and definitions.
• There are a host of different widgets from dictionary / thesaurus ones to word of the day, idiom of the day etc which can help our students learn.
• They can set up their homepage to supply them with the kind of English language content they are interested in, from sport to lifestyle.
  

Well I hope you find the task sheet useful and if you don't already have a personal homepage, you try this out. It really is a time saver.

I'd also be very interested to hear comments from anyone else who has their own personal homepage and to hear what you are using to create it. Any other Netvibes fans???

Best

Nik Peachey