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Social networking is fast becoming ubiquitous

June 25, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Further evidence of the near universal appeal of social media comes in the form of a new report from Neilsen, which shows Internet usage in April of this year. According to the report:

  • Worldwide, 22% of all online time is spent social networking.
  • Three quarters of all Internet users visit a social networking site when they log on (that’s 24% more than just last year).
  • The average user is spending 66% more time on these sites than a year ago, which amounts to some six hours a month.
  • Australians spend the most time networking, followed by Americans and Italians. Don’t ask me why.
With social media practically ubiquitous, the pressure will inevitably mount for similar functionality to be present in enterprise systems. Surely connecting with people to share information and solve problems is even more vital at work than it is when we get back home.
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Interoperability Matters

June 21, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Despite the increasing use of web conferencing, instant messaging, and social media tools in the workplace, email shows no sign of disappearing. There are plenty of arguments for and against email, but it has one very big plus that most other systems don’t have; no matter which email system you’re using, you know it’s interoperable with everyone else’s email system.

Imagine if GMail users could only email other GMail users, or if you could only email other people inside your organisation. Of course, it would take away most of the benefits of using email. It works because everyone adopted the same set of standards, and although there may sometimes be inconsistencies with style and formatting, you know you can usually rely on the message being delivered.

The same can’t be said for web conferencing and telepresence platforms, and it’s easy to understand why the platform vendors like to keep things closed; they usually work on a per seat licence basis that wouldn’t stand up to a more open model. It’s hard to imagine email (or the telephone, mobile phones or text messaging) becoming as commonplace as they have, if the user was tied to a particular vendor, software, hardware or network.

I’d like to see this same open approach to standards applied to web conferencing, because I’m sure that it would increase overall adoption. It seems to me that the budget decision to invest in this kind of platform must be easier to justify if you can demonstrate more opportunities to use it.

Things may be heading in the right direction. When Cisco aquired Tandberg, they announced that they would be adopting their own Telepresence Interoperability Protocol (TIP) and that they would open source it, a commitment that they recently delivered on. It allows interoperability between Cisco and Tandberg telepresence systems, as well as any third party system that supports it. At the moment that’s limited to Cisco’s own Webex Meeting Centre, and Microsoft Office Communicator, but let’s hope that other vendors adopt the same standard, rather than introducing their own.

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Web conferencing is the scalable option

June 17, 2010 By Leave a Comment
At the INGO E-Learning Conference today at Oxfam I had a chance to chat with Martin Baker of the Charity Learning Consortium. He told me about a new business book abstracting service called getAbstract, which is distributed in the UK by LMMatters. What I found interesting was the story he told me about one of the early clients for this service, a major multinational (to remain unnamed). The CEO decided to push the occasional 5-page abstract to lower levels of management within the organisation, as a stimulus for a subsequent discussion to be held online. The first abstract covered ther topic of innovation and they prepared the follow-up webinar on the assumption that 30 or 40 would attend. Tne result? An audience of 800.
This brought home two thoughts to me. Firstly, that the old 1-2 of an asynchronous piece of content followed by a synchronous debrief worked so well. Secondly that it would have been impossible to handle such an unpredictably large response in a face-to-face setting. Web conferencing really is the scalable option.
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A word about overload (well a few really)

June 15, 2010 By Leave a Comment
We have to acknowledge that, like a computer, the human brain has limits to its capacity for memory and processing. Instructional material often disregards these limits, and the result is what psychologists call cognitive overload. It is tempting to hold fast to the view that certain information is so precious and so comprehensive that it must somehow be forced into the minds of learners. Typically this happens in the work of lawyers, politicians, technicians and others whose lives are regulated by many pages of written rules and guidance. However it is an absolute certainty that overload works against memory and confuses understanding.
This is true no matter what level of success one has reached in academic study. Even those with advanced study skills are vulnerable to attacks of information overload. The best approach is to reconfigure large volumes of information where you can. Technology makes it easier to sort dense information ergonomically and to add aids such as indexing, tags, hyperlinks, signposts, subtext and glossaries. Good sense dictates that plain language and what Bernstein termed “an elaborated code” are preferable to impenetrable long sentences, avoidable jargon and passive synax and constructions.
Even if it is impractical or breaks a rule to alter the text or simplify a complex document, it is rare to find a circumstance where memorisation of the whole thing is essential in order to perform some role. As designers of learning our challenge is to embed the generality of complex material and provide practice in retrieval and interpretation. Such practice has to be authentic and relevant to the individual and so it has to mirror the type of circumstance in the real world where the user has to find and make sense of information that may be located deep in a lengthy document. These principles support a learner-centred approach to training and elearning. We have to become much better at distinguishing between need-to-know, nice-to-know, and where-to-go types of information.
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