< One of the projects I completed earlier this month for a client of mine was an online career fair. It was geared toward middle and high school students, their parents and educators. Our goal was to expose them to career exploration information and some summer job search tips and techniques. The event took place over a three-day period, with a "teaser" webinar the week before the career fair to... Read more →

Great video--some money thoughts: If you're looking for innovators, people who are going to create things that have never been created before or solve problems that haven't been solved, you can't look at their resumes and find evidence that they've accomplished what you want them to accomplish. It hasn't been done, so it's not going to be on their resumes. When you work collaboratively, you take someone's work and say... Read more →

The Work Literacy online learning event is over and Harold Jarche has posted some of what he learned from our facilitation of the course. Time for me to share some of my thoughts. . Using Ning for the Course Our first big decision was what platform to use. We ended up going with Ning because it integrated several different tools (blogs, forums, video and photo-sharing, social networking profiles, groups) at... Read more →

Yesterday I shared a couple of videos on real-life, online communities of practice. In comments, LaDonna Coy asks an excellent question: I really appreciate this post. I've been looking for some good examples of communities of practice and here's two that are spot on. Thank you. I'm particularly taken by the sharing culture concept that Dave talks about and Rio Tinto does in practice. In my line of work we'd... Read more →

A couple of short videos on communities of practice. The first is from Dave Vance, former president of Caterpillar University, who shares some of Caterpillar's experiences in facilitating online communities of practice. His advice? You need to have a sharing culture to build from--communities of practice don't work in organizations that have a culture of hoarding information. It isn't about capturing the knowledge, although that can be a good side... Read more →

I'm working with the folks over at the e-Learning Guild on a project and had the opportunity yesterday to get a guided tour through their incredibly rich data. One of the practice searches we ran was to look at which online conferencing tools were being adopted in different sectors. What was interesting was that the tools being used by most businesses were NOT the same as the tools being used... Read more →

UPDATE--Be sure to check out Britt Atwood's take on our discussion here. The other day, I had the great pleasure of doing a Skype interview with Britt Watwood, Jeff Nugent and Bud Deihl of the Virginia Commonwealth University Center for Teaching Excellence. I've been corresponding with Britt on a variety of topics for awhile and Bud and I had bonded over Jott. Through our interactions and though reading their blogs,... Read more →

Via Stephen Downes comes this link to the Open PD project, a world-wide professional development opportunity for teachers to learn about social networking tools together. What's interesting to me is the model, which could be applied across occupations, industries and topics. This happens to be a group of teachers learning about social media. It could just as easily be a group of managers learning about how to support their employees.... Read more →

Last week's post on facilitating conversations between commenters on a blog post opened up some great discussions, both in comments here and at other blogs, that I wanted to try to pull together a little. Warning--ill-formed "process post" ahead. As you'll recall, I started with asking some questions about what we as bloggers could to to expand conversations so that they didn't just occur between the blogger and the commenter,... Read more →

Over at Building a Better Blog, we've been talking about blog conversations. On most blogs, commenting looks like the top part of this image--the author posts and then commenters respond to the author. But as Skelliewag (the source of this graphic) points out, true conversation is really about the second half of this image--the author and commenters all interacting with one another. The question is--how, as bloggers, can we facilitate... Read more →