Synesthesia » Collaboration

Links for 2012-01-31

Julian — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 22:00:00 +0000

Bookmarks I’ve shared on 2012-01-31:

Scrum Alliance – Agile Testing: Key Points for Unlearning
agile testing
Edmodo | Secure Social Learning Network for Teachers and Students
e-learning collaboration web2.0 education socialnetworking microblogging edmodo teaching
Five Questions You Need to Ask Before You Outsource an Agile Project
agile outsourcing
Using jQuery with SharePoint Online
jquery sharepoint Office365
Google User Feed
Replacement for the defunct plusfeed.appspot.com
google feed
There Is No Silver Bullet
agile opinion

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Can paragogy help technology production?

Julian — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 15:10:09 +0000

A sticky idea

Howard Rheingold has thrown up a new idea – Peeragogy – which has found a sticky resting place in my brain.

In a blog post written as a pre-cursor to his 2011 Regents’ Lecture at the University of California, Berkeley he reflects on his experience to date with collaborative learning, and sets out the stall for his next project – to collaboratively create a guide to collaborative peer-to-peer learning:

I’m calling it “peeragogy.” While “paragogy” is more etymologically correct, “peeragogy” is self-explanatory. In my lecture, I’ll explain the evolution of my own pedagogy and reveal some of what I’ve discovered in the world of online self-organized learning. Then I will invite volunteers to join me in a two week hybrid of face-to-face seminars and online discussion. Can we self-organize our research, discover, summarize, and prioritize what is known through theory and practice, then propose, argue, and share a tentative resource guide for peeragogical groups? In theory, those who use our guide to pursue their own explorations can edit the guide to reflect new learning.

This idea has definitely struck a chord with me – and slightly tongue in cheek I tweeted:

Is it me, or is #peeragogy about doing learning in the way a lot of “real” work is done?

More going on

As is so often the way, I then read further to discover that someone else had not only spotted the connection but grounded it with references. Rheingold acknowledges the work of Joe Corneli and Charles Danoff, who have termed this area of study Paragogy, have co-authored a paper on it, and are writing a book. In their paper Corneli and Danoff make an explicit link between Paragogy and Peer Production.

Relating this to technology production

When I tweeted, what I had in mind were the complex loops of idea exchange implicit in any kind of technical product development (either for external customers or internal company users):

Most, if not all, of these conversations imply some sort of mutual learning:

what sorts of things might surprise, delight or downright disappoint the customer/user
what sort of product and business model might work
what are the technical options
what does the industry provide
how can we adapt the current technology to meet the needs
what would we like the industry to develop next
and so on…..

If the future of work is learning, or more bluntly work is learning- so what, how can we exploit the developments in paragogical theory and practice to make such work work better?

My questions

it’s turtles all the way down, but a few starter questions that spring to mind are:

does treating these processes as learning exercises lead to better performance? (and how might we measure that?)
what support do teams need to surface learning goals around their work?
what team and organisation culture will best support rapid learning?
how beneficial is it to make the learning explicit?

Right now this is mostly a “lightbulb” – I need to do more thinking and have some dialogue to explore further.

if any of this strikes a chord with you, please comment.

Links for 2012-01-29

Julian — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 22:00:00 +0000

Bookmarks I’ve shared on 2012-01-29:

I am Synesthesia

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Links for 2012-01-26

Julian — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 22:00:00 +0000

Bookmarks I’ve shared on 2012-01-26:

I am Synesthesia

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Links for 2010-12-16

Julian — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 22:00:00 +0000

Bookmarks I’ve shared on 2010-12-16:

Easy Projects .NET
collaboration projectmanagement project_management_tools webapps

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Links for 2010-02-14

Julian — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 22:00:00 +0000

Bookmarks I’ve shared on 2010-02-14:

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Links roundup for 2008-03-06

Julian — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 00:30:08 +0000

Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user Synesthesia on 2008-03-06:

A Conversation about Project Management and Social Media
Dennis McDonald and Lee White
project_management socialmedia socialsoftware
Google Maps API Demo Gallery
googlemaps
BBC Podcasts as OPML
bbc xml opml
London is Free – Your online guide to free events in our expensive capital.
london via:beatnic
Kaltura – Creating Together
colalborative creation of video artefacts
mashup web_2.0 collaboration
iSoton
Good example of a mashup page on an institutional website to display the wider webview of the institution.
mashups web_2.0

Web 2.0: Deploying, measuring and succeeding with Social Software

Julian — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 14:44:50 +0000

I’m at Web 2.0 and Beyond – Applying Social and Collaborative Tools To Business .

Deploying, measuring and succeeding with Social Software

Ian McNairn, IBM SWG

What does success mean – critical mass? application use? customer delight? increased profit? in other words be clear what you want.

Know what to measure – communities and social networks are different things – determine the business outcome (look for linked indicators) – get clear about the changes you want to get – think about cause and effect. Just because it’s easy to measure, doesn’t mean it means anything…

Measure impact and usage – based on the business outcome. examples, Knowledge Currency, tagging, polls, linking, availability vs. time-to-complain

Pitfalls to avoid – don’t decide on metrics without thinking about context, don’t measure the past, beware “build it and they will come”, don’t try to boil the ocean, don’t expect all users to have equal understanding.

Deployment tricks to increase success – pre-populate with content, engage the members in interaction, on-demand in-context help, make enrollment easy, reward contributions by example.

Web 2.0: Who’s Afraid of Identity?

Julian — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 14:01:22 +0000

I’m at Web 2.0 and Beyond – Applying Social and Collaborative Tools To Business .

Who’s Afraid of Identity?

Tom Ilube, Garlik

Garlik aiming at the “mainstream digital consumer”

Explosion of personal data on the web in last 18 months. Equivalent huge rise in ID theft.

Consumers don’t understand identity management…

But people make decisions about us based on our web status…

And then the talk ended – mostly a “here we are” pitch for Garlik without actually saying anything about what they do…

Web 2.0: The Power of Film

Julian — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 12:36:26 +0000

I’m at Web 2.0 and Beyond – Applying Social and Collaborative Tools To Business

The Power of Film – Adding video podcasts to the communications mix

Joyce Lewis, University of Southampton

First video podcasting news service in any UK university (March 2006)

“People don’t care about cold facts. They care about pictures or stories” – Nancy Green, Donovan and Green.

ECS website has 827,000 pages(!). Video podcasting backs up a lot of the messages .

Inclusion and empowerment – for example, use of videos to support staff through a major upheaval after a key building was destroyed, adding emotional depth.

JE thought – how is this “Web 2.0″? – feels just like broadcasting to me…