I've written before about some of my thoughts regarding the responsible use of social media and whether or not we can count on people do the right thing when it comes to blogs and Facebook and Twitter. In general I tend to believe that if you can't trust your employees to behave appropriately on a social network, then you probably shouldn't be trusting them to go to meetings, answer phones... 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 →

Hot on the heels of our two women bloggers sessions at the Brandon Hall conference, Janet Clarey points out that Zaid's list of 25 Great Edublogs features only three women--Cathy Moore (who joined us in our women who blog workshops), Jane Hart and Patricia Donaghy. Janet rightly notes that given the large number of female edubloggers, it is interesting that only three would make Zaid's list. Zaid's response (in comments... Read more →

For the past few days I've been working with a group of grant-funded projects from across Pennsylvania who are evaluating whether or not to form a state-wide network and thinking through what such a network could do. One of the issues that came up (as it inevitably does) was how to share information, which naturally led to a discussion of social media and networks. Last year I'd set up a... Read more →

Jen of @injenuity is feeling frustrated with Ning: It pains me to say this, but I am no longer a fan of Ning for community building. It has been a year since I created my first site, a network for moms that has grown to 200 plus members, but I have no time to maintain. The network I created for faculty at my campus plugs along, but isn’t functioning the... Read more →

For the past few days I've been deep into thinking and learning about homophily, our tendency to connect to people who share similar backgrounds, experiences, interests and values. I've been excited to see a conversation beginning to occur both here in comments and at other blogs. It's interesting to see the conversations evolve and new pieces being added to the puzzle. As I continue my reading, discussions and thinking, I've... Read more →

I learned a new word this week--"homophily," which is the tendency for people to associate and bond with others who share their interests, values, culture, demographics, class etc. This is the all-too-familiar online behavior I was remarking on earlier this week in my post on 21st century workplace literacy. There I noted that it seems like edubloggers tend to associate online with other edubloggers, while the workplace learning folks are... Read more →

Three months ago we started the Building a Better Blog Ning network. After three weeks I was still enamored with the community. Things were going well, we had a lot of new members. All was right with our little corner of the digital world. Then we hit a wall, which I blogged about a few weeks ago. Site activity was way down and we began struggling with ways to continue... Read more →

Looks like interest in Facebook is continuing: It's Facebook Week! Over at Read/WriteWeb, it's Day One of Facebook Week. You can join the Facebook group for Read/WriteWeb readers and learn a little about the platform. During the rest of the week the plan is to look more closely at some specific applications--like in this post Top Ten Facebook Apps for Work. If you're interested in following the posts, you may... Read more →