Tuesday, June 5, 2012

Session 1 Follow-Up

I hope you all enjoyed our first session. 
1. Please answer the poll question at right: What's your favorite tool?

2. Please add a comment (click on "commentsbelow). What do you see as opportunities for and challenges to using blogs or wikis (or other social tools) with your workforce and content? How would you overcome the challenges?

11 comments:

  1. The opportunities for blogs and wikis we've identified are as follows:
    1. Marketing and networking for our eLearning courses
    2. A way to extend the learning past a completion certificate, allowing users to learn from eachother once the course is completed.

    The challenges are:
    1. Opposition from our company - we're not yet sure we'll be allowed to open up any independent social media tools for our group! Not sure if this is something we can overcome.
    2. Time and manpower. These tools will require one of our staff to take on the responsibility of tweeting/blogging/etc. This can be overcome by our team's willingness to all take time out of their schedule to send out a tweet or two.

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  2. The opportunities we have for blogs, wikis, and other social tools are:
    - Informal learning (on the job, and in support of ILT/WBT)
    - Enhance transfer opportunities for formal training
    - Employee engagement

    Our challenge is:
    - Resourcing, both in terms of the time for our ambassadors/advocates to lead content generation and in terms of our administration strategy. Our training and development staff are very fully allocated. To overcome this we have been working hard to build the value proposition and get buy-in so this isn't perceived as "just one more thing"

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  3. Darlene: We've only started looking at tools, but blogs are generally regarded as the lowest-risk by IT types. What do you think the organization WOULD support? And what do you think the objections really are?


    Greg: One of the biggest stumbling blocks in implementing social media for learning is the matter of staffing. Keep an eye out for others in the organizations who are active and might be able to help. If you do a group for graduates of a course, for instance, it makes sense that some actual graduates would help with it.
    JB

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  4. Having a hard time adding a comment ... but, blogs are a quicker way to get information into other's hands. It is a tad better than email as users have to login to email accounts whereas the intranet is open on most computers all day.

    Our challenges are upkeep and making them interactive. The first responsibility is mine ... for the second I'll just have to offer free lunches or car washes, I guess.

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  5. The opportunities for using blogs or wikis that we have identified are:
    1. Marketing for programs to increase learner interest
    2. Informal discussion groups after learning programs in conjunction with organized meetings for follow up of learning transfer and skills practice

    Challenges
    1. Security restrictions for outside sites. The company has tried an internal wiki and the site was deactivated due to lack of resource and use for upkeep and interest.
    2. Time required to create and maintain sites for learning use. Our learning resources are stretched as it is and we are trying to incorporate more leadership participation to garner interest top down.

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  6. Opportunities for using blogs or other social tools:
    1. Social & collaborative learning - provides a channel where users can comment and share best practices
    2. Tool for employee engagement - from instilling a sense of belongingness in the group to using the blog to recognize outperformance (ie. using online badges)
    3. Information dissemination - faster and easier to maintain since it can be replicated easily (somewhat) in different social tools

    Challenges & how we can overcome these:
    1. Security risks - clients may not be open to the idea of allowing an external website to be accessed on their network; can be overcome by looking at other networks where social tools can be accessed from (ie. company intranet site)
    2. Maintenance - lack of dedicated team to create the content and keep users engaged in the blog; can tap resources from different groups to generate participation

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  7. t's interesting that Nicole and Mariel both brought up the issue of internal v external sites. Truth is, organizations love internal sites but generally employees don't -- one more place to log in to, what the organization wants to talk about is not what employees want to talk about, and it's not where your friends or greater contacts are. Also: employees have security concerns of their own. See "Why We Use Social Media in Our Personal Lives — But Not for Work" http://blogs.hbr.org/erickson/2012/02/why_we_use_social_media_in_our.html
    JB

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  8. I missed the e-maiil with this homework :(

    We have opportunities to use wikis to share knowledge. For us, the issue is which tool to use. We have too many tools in the toolkit (Jive, SharePoint 2010, Moodle)

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  9. Posting as anonymous.

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  10. I really like these designs of magnetic badges.Thanks for such a reliable blog post!

    magnetic badges & name badges

    ReplyDelete