Wikis as Personal Space
We Need More Beginnings

Clearing My Feeds: Facebook, Change Management, & Personal Learning

Once again, some things in my feedreader that I wanted to get to . .

Facebook
Awhile ago I wrote a post on using Facebook in nonprofits. I haven't had a lot of time to get back into it, but fortunately for you, Soha El-Borno at Wild Apricot has been hard at work. Her most recent contribution is on using the Causes widget to promote your nonprofit. Also check out her Beginner's Guide to Facebook.

Change Management
Scott McLeod at Dangerously Irrelevant is running a fabulous series of change management resources this week. I haven't had a chance to thoroughly read and digest his posts, but my quick skim tells me that this is some great stuff for organizations looking to facilitate the change process. Which I would assume means ALL organizations, since dealing with change is pretty much what we do in this world anymore. Some of my favorites:

  • Resistance to Change--Reviews the 10 key reasons people resist change and the three things that motivate people.
  • Agreement and Trust--Helps leaders analyze their relationships with essential people in terms of the levels of agreement and trust that exist and then offers suggestions on how to create more of both.
  • Getting to Consensus--This is a great post on which tools of consensus to use, depending on the extent to which there is organizational agreement on how the world works and the organization's goals.

Scott also has some great quotes and suggestions on books to read. While his primary focus is on change in schools, these are resources that are applicable to all change efforts.

Personal Learning Environments
You KNOW I couldn't have a post like this without going back to PLEs. . . First, Beth Kanter has an interesting post on why she loves Slideshare.  She says,  "I use Slide Share everyday to increase my personal knowledge about social media and consume whatever I can find related to nonprofits."  I use Slideshare, too, but have tended to do so when I needed a way to put a Powerpoint slideshow on line for a project or training. Beth's post made me see Slideshare as a potential addition to my personal learning environment.

There's also been a bit of a discussion going on around how personal learning environments fit into organizations. Stephen Downes argues that personal learning is about individuals setting and following their own learning agendas, rather than those set for them by corporations. Needless to say, I agree with this perspective.  Tony Karrer then raises the issue of how organizations will have to wrestle with integrating the notion of personal learning environments into their operations and whether or not employees should set up their PLEs inside or outside the organizational firewall. (I say outside, in case you were wondering).

In my mind, what this comes down to is the purpose of a PLE--is it to serve the organization or the individual? If a PLE is an institutional tool, then it will end up developing along a particular path that includes standards for participation, tighter controls, a greater likelihood of a single "PLE system" and organizational ownership of the contents of the PLE. On the other hand, if PLEs are for the individual, then I think there will be a move toward exploring the idea of different tools, loosely joined and a focus on which tools could be used to engage in which personal learning activities. And most definitely the ownership of the PLE will lie squarely in the individual's lap. Again, I'm clearly advocating the latter, as I believe that this will actually end up not only serving individuals better, but also organizations because there will be greater freedom to create, innovate, collaborate, etc.

On Blogging
Finally, a couple of nice blogging articles:

Happy Friday!

Comments

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As someone interested in social media, change management, and PLE's this post is a hat trick. Keep it up and you'll become my favorite blogger (after me of course) and I have 140+ feeds in my aggregator:-)

I'll be reading.

Regards,

Glenn

Facebook is getting better day by day! You can now add your del.icio.us bookmarks to your Facebook profile in one easy step with the new Facebook/del.icio.us widget.

Once you're all set up, all your freinds will be able to see a short summary of your most recent del.icio.us bookmarks.

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