Category Archives: Social Media

Boots On The Ground: Introducing A Community of Practice at Bechtel

My colleague Paul and I wrote an article for the Learning Solutions Magazine about building a community of practice at our company. Here’s a summary:

In this article, the authors, members of the Global Learning and Development team at Bechtel, a global engineering and construction firm, give a detailed account of building an online community of practice geared to help field professionals share knowledge and insights gained at the project sites with each other. A key point they attempt to make in this article is that with the right game plan, it IS possible to start and nurture informal learning communities even in organizations where management has not explicitly embraced the value of social learning and networking.

Find the full article here. (eLearning Guild membership required.)

mLearnCon 2011: Our impressions

My colleague Paul & I attended a mobile learning conference in San Jose last week. We interviewed each other to record our impressions of the conference while it was still fresh in our memory. See it here: 

p.s. We made the video in a hurry so some details are missing from the video or are incorrect.

1. Jeremiah Owyang Keynote slides are here: http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2011/06/21/slides-developing-a-learning-strategy-for-mobile-and-social-keynote/ (And my last name isn’t Johnson, so I shouldnt comment on someone’s last name.)

2. A brilliant young chap by the name of John Park co-presented with Alison Rossett.  http://www.elearningguild.com/mLearnCon/concurrent-sessions/session-details.cfm?session=2430Link to their presentation here: http://www.johnjpark.com/mlearning/MLC11_505_ROSSETTPARK.pdf

3. NexLearn doesn’t just sell SimWriter but they build custom sims. And Brandon Andrews, the presenter at the session I attended is THE expert to learn how to write simulations from.

What is a check-in?

Recently I was at a restaurant with my wife’s family and decided to use facebook’s new Places feature using my iPhone. Among the people I tagged in the check-in was my 74 year old Father-in-law. The next day I received an e-mail from him asking me what a check-in was. Here’s my response: A check-in is a way to announce to your friends through facebook that you are at a specific geographical location, a bar, a restaurant or an airport. That way if they are at that location they can meet you in person.

This exchange got me thinking about a previous post I wrote about “Social networks will be like air.” The geolocation piece adds a whole dimension to ubiquity. What’s the impact on learning? talent management? Oh..the possibilities! More soon.

Social networks will be like air

I was watching a presentation on YouTube by Charlene Li (author of Groundswell) at Google and was struck by this statement she made about social networks. At first blush it sounds terribly hyperbolic. But she went on to elaborate on what she meant by it.

And it made a lot of sense.

I don’t think she was referring to social networks as they exist today: facebook, myspace or twitter. I think what she was referring to was the impact of social networks, the information transacted in them or on other sites linked to them or probably anywhere on the internet on our behavior. An easy example is one of Amazon showing us not only the highest ranked reviews for a book but also what our friends thought about the book. Or Yelp alerting me my friends hated a restaurant I am about to enter.

I can easily see how this lends itself to suggesting learning experiences within the enterprise based on what my colleagues, who have interests or aspirations similar to me, enjoyed participating in.

p.s. What also blew my mind was that Charlene said all this sometime around March 2008!

Trying Flock again..

Read a post on Read Write Web on how Flock with its new release has a new feature called Flockcast …So I am giving it another shot. I believe the last time I gave up on it was because I had a much smaller social media footprint and maybe I even had some configuration issues similar to Chrome.

Update: The picture below shows what the post looked like when I posted from Flock. The text was in italics. The video didn’t show. Either I didn’t use the Blog Editor right, or someone forgot to test it with wordpress or my WP Template messed it up.

flock-post
Flock did send out a ‘cast’ to Facebook. I was expecting a tweet too!
flockcast on fBt

I was compelled to return to WordPress to edit the post to match the look and feel & the issue with the YouTube embed.

So what’s the early verdict?

I like it. And I’m willing to give Flock a shot for this week at home and see if the features really help. More soon!

July 27, 2009 Update:

It’s been a while and I am back to using Firefox. Why? Flock clutters the browsing experience. All the add ons are distracting and I am more comfortable compartmentalizing my blogging, browsing and social networking.