Looking at tools like Google Squared, Google Trends and Wolfram Alpha, it's becoming increasingly clear to me that one of the key challenges we have before us is learning how to ask questions. And not just any question, but the RIGHT questions. There's tremendous power in the possibilities of these tools, but if you don't know what to ask about or how to ask it, then what's the point? This... Read more →

Building Community with Ning View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: netork maricopatech) Alisa Cooper of South Mountain Community Colleges has produced a great narrated presentation on how she uses Ning to build community in her courses. She's also using podcasts, live streaming video and drop.io. And check out her Voicethread on using Ning, which she said she started using because she thought the usual online offerings were "a... 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 →

A couple of interesting posts from Nathan Wallace on his organization's experiences in implementing a wiki and then a year later, a customized microblogging platform called Jitter. You need to read both, but here are some key points: The organizational wiki seems to have been adopted more quickly and used more extensively than the Jitter solution. This is in part, Nathan says, because the wiki was responding to a need,... Read more →

Massive list posts ("50+ Ways to Use Flickr," "100 Social Media Resources", etc.) seem to be a really popular format. I know that I myself am attracted to them, bookmarking almost every one I see because the sheer quantity of items seems to indicate that it must be useful. But this morning I was thinking that these kinds of posts, while attractive, are not necessarily very helpful, particularly for newbies.... Read more →

Building on my ongoing interest in understanding what it means to be "literate" in the 21st century, as well as my exploration of professional development and personal learning environments using social media tools, I'm pleased to announce a new project I'm working on with Tony Karrer--Work Literacy. Work Literacy is a network of individuals, companies and organizations who are interested in learning, defining, mentoring, teaching and consulting on the frameworks,... Read more →

I'm currently leading a project where we are bringing together four nonprofits and 11 young people who have dropped out of high school and/or who are aging out of foster care. There's a lot of data about the bad outcomes for HS dropouts, but not a lot of political will in some areas to do something about it. Through our project we are working with our student teams to help... Read more →

Yesterday I was trying to catch up with my feeds and I came across a great post from Janet Clarey--Do You Have a Learning Strategy for the Recession? This led me to think about recession-proofing your career, which led me on a hunt for some articles to post here. Normally, what I would do is have one tab open to my blog post composition window and another for my search.... Read more →

In response to my musings this week on why educators seem to have more readily embraced Web 2.0 for learning, Manish Mohan has written an excellent post. You should read the entire thing, but in a nutshell: "In the field of education, the onus of learning is on the learner. In workplace, the onus of training is on the organization and training department. If I don’t learn in university, it... Read more →

A few days ago, I posted on Jane Hart's latest list of 100 Tools for Professional Development, picking up on Jane's point that it seems that there's a tool divide between workplace learning professionals and educators. According to Jane's survey, while corporate e-learning staff may use social media for personal learning, when it comes to designing learning for their organizations, they're primarily using authoring and presentation tools--more "Learning 1.0" types... Read more →