The other day I found How to Nail an Interview, a one-page website set up to describe the 22 Tips on Interviewing Steinar Skipsness learned as a result of a hidden camera experiment he set up: What is it that certain people say or do during a job interview that makes them stand out? Why do some people struggle to find work, while others land a job in no time?... Read more →

Via Workplace Learning Today comes this article on the distractions of tagging. Apparently, according to Erica Naone, research indicates that tagging an article (as in Delicious) actually reduces our ability to remember what we've read: Raluca Budiu, a user-experience specialist for the Nielsen Norman Group, asked the audience whether typing in tags for articles would help them remember key concepts. The answer, according to her research, is no. Users remembered... Read more →

Although I have little brain capacity to think new thoughts, it occurred to me yesterday on the drive home from a planning session with a client that I've begun to see some movement on the social media front. It seemed worth it to document this moment in time, since I usually just complain about how clueless people are. I persuaded an association client to give up their outdated static website... Read more →

In a comment on my post about the tyranny of dead ideas, Shannon Turlington left me a link to a great post she did exploring some of the dead ideas that surround the use of wikis. She sees three (but go read her post to get the full explanation): The need for permission Someone "owns" the content Everything must be "perfect" This got me wondering what are other dead ideas... Read more →

My daughter is taking a New Media Research studio class at NYU where (somewhat to my dismay), she's learning about using RSS and Delicious. I'm dismayed because I would have taught her about these things for free, but you know college students. Parents are good for tuition, not for tutoring. Or maybe I'm just jealous that I can't take the course. At any rate, this week's assignment is a doozy--A... 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 →

This video cracks me up. It's a product video for a treadmill that "walks/runs" the streets while you're treading on it. Because apparently it's too hard to just walk or run ON the street. Instead, we need a tool that does the same thing as walking or running, but is heavy, clunky, hard to turn and makes you look like an idiot. This is what we do sometimes when we... 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 →

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 →

One of the questions I'm most frequently asked when talking to people about using social media for learning in organizations is how do you "manage" comments and how do you deal with people "being negative." There's a general fear that once you open the floodgates to participation, you're going to be inundated with people acting inappropriately and unprofessionally. Although I think this is a fair question I think that 1)... Read more →