POD projects

Due to the fact that I am based in London I was unable to attend the POD project meetings to experience and collaborate as a class using a variety of social networking tools.  Instead (at Ken’s request) I have compiled a list of my experiences and observations with a subset of these tools.

Facebook

Facebook is the ubiquitous social networking tool that has made social networking a reality (addiction?) for some 300 million people.  Despite the fact that I have experience with a number of social networking tools, I can’t help but refer to Facebook when thinking about the topic.  It also seems to be the platform on which I have my most mature online profile – if I was to consolidate my online identity into one place, most of it would be on Facebook with perhaps just a tiny bit needed from LinkedIn to fill out my professional side.  I have even read recently that they are making a movie about the Facebook story starring Justin Timberlake.  I challenge you to find another social networking tool that stars in its own movie.

GMail chat

I am an avid user of the Google suite, Gmail, Docs, Calendar and Reader in particular.  Not only to they offer high performance, but their stripped-back usability also appeals to me as an interaction designer (and a Mac user).  GMail chat is no different – it just works, no install required (unless you’re after video).  I actually retired from IM about 3 years ago in an attempt to increase my ‘Flow’ time at work.  I still find myself on GMail chat from time to time however as it seamlessly works in with Gmail and sneaks up on me.

Ning

My experience with Ning has been with the London IA group, and that was fairly limited.  The Blue Pod group decided on Ning as our primary tool for collaboration however and I’ve learned much about it since.  The feeds are an excellent way to stay across the activity of a group where members are all working separately but with coordination.  We also used discussions and blogs to share thoughts and ideas across timezones.  Finally, we made heavy use of the chat facility in the 3 real-time group meetings that we had to complete assignment 2.  I found that Ning’s profiles allowed us to connect as a group and removed the facelessness of communicating electronically.

Skype

I use Skype in 2 capacities.  1 – Professionally as an alternative to paying for phone calls.  2 – Socially as a means to keep in touch with my family in Australia as we now live in London.  Skype has been a revelation for our parents who we actually now ‘see’ more often then when we were living in Australia.  Although the chat and messaging facilities allow a good sense of connection over timezones, the synchronous nature of Skype does make me feel more self-aware and uncomfortable than other less direct tools – I often consciously log out of Skype if I don’t feel like being disturbed or am in the middle of something (like assignments such as this one!).

Tokbox

I hadn’t seen this tool before but it is an excellent example of a both web 2.0 browser-based rich internet application and a tool that consolidates existing online identities.  This fact made the barrier to entry extremely low as not only was minimal information required to get started, but I very quickly had a personalised interface with my own contacts up.  This tool is a real trendsetter and I think that we will see far more of this seamless leveraging of our existing online identities in the near future.

Twitter

I joined twitter in 2007 but had all but forgotten about it before its rise last year.  I use the platform very differently than the Facebook status – instead of social banter it use it almost completely for ‘professional’ purposes as a means by which to tap into what mentors and leaders in my field are saying.  It will be interesting to see what happens when the search engines really start to unlock the vast amount of knowledge being broadcast on Twitter – I wonder if there really is anything of worth in there 🙂

Webex

This is a tool that I use at work.  We do agile development and regularly present to stakeholders and its rare to get them all in the same room at the same time.  We have even had occasions when due to the lack of meeting rooms available, we have done an entire presentation on Webex with voice via a standard phone-conference call even though most people in the meeting were actually all sitting next to each other.  It works well enough and the business people are able to use it – my only gripe is that it can be a little slow if the network connection isn’t good, which has made interacting with a prototype extremely difficult when there is a slight delay on clicks and drags!

Assignment 2 – CIO Recommendations

Blue groups created a list of merged recommendations collaboratively in real-time using Google docs and communicating over Ning chat.

The report can be found on the Blue Ning at http://itc501blue.ning.com/profiles/blogs/blue-groups-final-cio.

Assignment 2 – CIO notes for merging and editing

A. What are the issues involved with using social networks for professional development in the workplace?

Social networks are sets of people who are connected by social relationships such as friendship, co-working or information exchange (as cited in Singh, 2007).  Using social networks for professional development has the potential of delivering higher quality, lower cost professional development to companies.  There are however many different social networking systems and technologies available and many ways of utilising them.  Options range from setting up a Facebook group in a couple of clicks to installing a wiki to the creation of extensive 3D environments.  According to the National Professional Development Center on Inclusion (2008), professional development “encompasses all types of facilitated learning opportunities”.  In order to implement a professional development programme that leverages social networking, the following issues will need to be considered:

• Which existing social networks will be used: This will depend on a number of factors such as cost, time to setup, existing employee familiarity and security of company intellectual property.  Second Life has specific products for this and has even recently launched a microsite dedicated to it.
• Goals: While it is easy (and common!) for CIOs and IT managers to jump aboard the bandwagon of the latest buzz technologies, social networking and online communities come in so many different forms that a clear idea of the goals and objectives of the project are essential from the outset.  Is it primarily the distribution of individual learning materials that is required with some discussion to enable questions to be answered?  Should the project facilitate real-time, synchronous discussions or generate output such as a wiki that can be used as a resource by others in the future?  Is participation to be done at the employee’s own pace over a long period of time or are sessions moderated and facilitated by managers or trainers?  The answers to these questions will provide the parameters for this project and the issues listed below will allow the company to then move forward and select candidate systems and propose how they will be used.
• Cost: Blogging and wiki software is freely available, but total cost of ownership must be taken into account when measuring these things as they will need to be configured and maintained.  Hardware may need to be purchased and training can be expensive.  Existing advertising-based platforms such as Facebook can be free to set up and almost free to maintain (depending on the amount of ongoing administration required for the community).  More sophisticated solutions such as 3D worlds can start to become very expensive, but must be measured against the cost of the alternative.  SecondLife’s IBM case study (Linden Lab, 2009) reports that over 200 IBM employees attended their conference on virtual worlds in October 2008 at a cost of $80,000 USD.  This doesn’t seem so bad when you consider that the same event would have cost $250,000 USD to hold in the physical world.
• Time to setup: Setting up blogs on existing platforms such as wordpress and blogger is almost instantaneous (“a minute” according to the blogger homepage) and has indeed been used as the solution for this very subject.  Having large amounts of employee data in the pubic domain is unlikely to be acceptable to a multinational corporation however and their own copy of the platform would need to be installed and configured.  In addition to the time required to setup the base platform itself, consider effort required to populate it with content, add structure such as categories, create user accounts and permissions and develop community guidelines and focus (“How to start a wiki”, n.d.).  Developing an in-house product may also be an option depending on the goals of the community and resources available to do the work.
• Knowledge management goals: Blogs and wikis can facilitate learning and adaptation within an organisation to enormous advantage (Andrus, 2005).  If research and discussion are being generated as the result of online community activity, plans on how this could be captured and used in the future should be put in place.
• Existing employee familiarity: Some platforms and paradigms are more familiar to employees than others.  Although there are few people who haven’t used Wikipedia, how many would be savvy enough to actually contribute to it.  Statistics from founder Jimmy Wales show that over 70% of Wikipedia’s the edits are made by just 2% of its users (Swartz, 2006).  Platforms such as Facebook with an active membership of 300 million users require far less training than more complex paradigms.  SecondLife’s IBM case study (Linden Lab, 2009) describes how employees were provided training before their virtual world conference.
• Security and privacy: Any proposed solution will need to be ratified against the organisation’s security and privacy policies.  Using the infrastructure of a 3rd party requires a high degree of trust and possibly appropriate legal documents in place.  IBM’s SecondLife virtual worlds conference required several months of work with Linden Lab to create the environment which sat behind IBM’s corporate firewall (Linden Lab, 2009).
• Culture:  The degree of control and structure that the network takes on will depend on the culture of the organisation and probably be an extension of the way that professional development is currently done.  Employees who are used to micromanagement and strong direction may not perform well if given a blank wiki.  Senior executives of a top-flight legal firm may not be accepting of flying around in meetings within virtual worlds.

B. How do Web 2.0 tools (blogs, wikis, podcasts and video lectures) complement such social networks.

Social networking has risen in as part of what is known as Web 2.0.  Tim O’Reilly coined the phrase in 2004 and describes it as “using the internet as the platform… using that platform to build applications that harness networks effects to get better the more people use them” (O’Reilly, 2006).  Web 2.0 tools are built to facilitate the communication and collaboration of groups of people and usually provide the ability for participants to define their online identities within the group.

Singh (2007) points out that one of the uses of our social networks is to acquire knowledge and that while the internet contributes to information overload, it also provides useful tools to effectively manage one’s social networks and through them gain access to the right pieces of information.  As well as providing the platform for delivering professional development content, Web 2.0 tools also provide access to social media to help us to judge whether it is what we are looking for, discuss it and in the case of the wiki, change it.  This provides the opportunity for those participating to reinforced what has been learned and apply it to specific work situations as a group.

Of the Web 2.0 tools available, this question explicitly mentions blogs, wikis, podcasts and video lectures – each of which is discussed below:

• Blogs: “Blog” is an abbreviation of “weblog”, a site that maintains an ongoing chronicle of information (WordPress, n.d.).  Blogs promote structured discussion with a persistent output that is accessible not only to a marker, but the entire group.  Educational institutions such as Charles Sturt University have used blogs successfully to provide students with an environment in which to work collaboratively through a structured curriculum.  The asynchronous nature of the blog also facilitates collaboration between people from around the world who may be in different timezones – an great advantage to a multinational company who’s smartest people may not get to rub shoulders in their day-to-day working lives.
• Wikis: Wikis are shared spaces that anyone contribute to.  C2 is the original wiki site and defines a wiki as “a composition system; it’s a discussion medium; it’s a repository; it’s a mail system; it’s a tool for collaboration. Really, we don’t know quite what it is, but it’s a fun way of communicating asynchronously across the network.” (”Front Page”, n.d.).  Wikipedia is the most popular example of the wiki concept today and illustrates how such a system can allow a group of people to create a shared repository of information over an extended period of time.  This is an excellent example of the web 2.0 quality of getting better as more people use it.  Whilst it is also true of blogs to an extent, a wiki would provide both a means of participation in professional development tasks as well as the creation of a valuable resource that can be leveraged by other participants in the future and even the business in its daily activities.
• Podcasts: A podcast is a series of digital media files that are episodic, downloadable and program-driven (“Podcast,” n.d.).  Podcasting can be used to deliver content to professional development participants as well as provide a means through which to elicit feedback and discussion from them.  iTunes U is an excellent example of how podcasting can be used for educational purposes and actually has content that may be able to be utilised by a corporate professional development programme.
• Video lectures: Video lectures allow content to be produced once and then used by many people over an extended period of time.  Free video lectures can be sourced from many places on the web and could complement any materials that the company is planning to produce themselves.  Training and development staff could then spend their time reviewing and sourcing content instead of producing it.  MIT’s OpenCourseWare site is an example of this and provides free content for a broad range of subjects (http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm).  The videos are even streamed through YouTube which means that employees don’t even need to download them to watch them.  Video lectures could be used in isolation or as part of a broader podcast (see above).  As with podcasts, video lectures are a means of delivering content which would then need to be rated, discussed and worked through using the other social networking tools mentioned earlier such as blogs and wikis.

C. How is a work-related social network developed and sustained?

To create a social network that is able to initially develop and then sustain itself over time, a number of aspects of sociability need to be incorporated into the professional development programme.  The following recommendations are drawn from the research of Granovetter (as cited in Singh, 2007) and Preece (as cited in Eustace 2009):

• Clearly state the purpose of the community: This needs to be in line with the company’s brand and policies, particularly for output such as blogs or wikis that may be used as a resource in the future.

• Assign special roles: Preece points out that an awareness and use of special roles can help newcomers and keep experienced members.  Moderators and mediators can further help community governance by ensuring that policies are adhered to.

• Encourage stars and allow sub-networks to drive growth: This is closely related to the previous point.  Kumar, Novak and Tomkins (as cited in Singh, 2007) showed in their study of Flickr and Yahoo that the development of social networks follow a pattern.  When the it initially emerges, over half of a network is represented by the “middle region” (isolated sub-networks that only interact with each other and are often centred around a ‘dynamic’ participant’) and “singletons” (individuals who have no connections and are least central).  The rest of the network is made up of of the “giant component” (the largest central group, tightly connected to the central nodes and to each other).  Most growth happens in the middle region where the star members encourage others to join the network.  Singh refers to these sub-networks as “virtual ghettos”.  Eventually these sub-networks may join the giant component, at which time the dynamic member’s influence diminishes.  Therefore to drive growth, the network must encourage growth amongst smaller groups and empower and incentivise the dynamic participants within those groups.

• Joining and leaving policy: This will be be important for security as credentials may need to be tied back to participant’s employee privileges and permissions to determine who can access what.

• Allow for lurkers: In a work-related social network, lurkers should not necessarily be seen in a negative light as their access to the activity and output of the community can still have a positive impact on their professional development.  They can however be a hindrance in situations where a critical mass in community size needs to be achieved.

• Encourage the formation of weak ties: As a multinational company, participants have much to gain by connecting to others who they may not work with every day or know very well.  These connections are known as “weak ties” and are more useful than strong ones as the lack of shared history provides more diversity of information.  Facilitating the formation and utilisation of these weak ties by encouraging participants to go beyond their local cliques could add much value to the community.

References

Andrus, C. (2005, September).  The Wiki and the Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community. Studies in Intelligence, Vol 49, No 3. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=755904.

Eustace, K. (2009).  Topic 6 – Designing for usability, sociability and sustainability. Retrieved October 12, 2009, from http://ispg.csu.edu.au/subjects/cscw/schedule/topics/topic6.

Front Page. (n.d.). Retrieved August 29, 2009, from http://c2.com/cgi/wiki.

How to start a wiki. (n.d.). Retrieved October 4, 2009, from http://www.wikihow.com/Start-a-Wiki.

Linden Lab.  (2009).  How meeting in Second Life transformed IBM’s technology elite into virtual world believers. San Francisco: Author.

National Professional Development Center on Inclusion. (2008). What do we mean by professional development in the early childhood field? Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina, FPG Child Development Institute, Author.

O’Reilly, T. (2006). Web 2.0 compact definition: trying again. Retrieved October 7, 2009, from http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/12/web-20-compact.html.

Podcast. (n.d.). Retrieved October 8, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podcast.

Singh, S. (2007, September). Social Networks and Group Formation. Boxes and Arrows.  Retreived October 7, 2009, from http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/social-networks.

Swartz, A.  (2006).  Who writes Wikipedia?.  Retrieved October 4, 2009, from http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia.

WordPress. (n.d.). Introduction to blogging. Retrieved October 8, 2009, from http://codex.wordpress.org/Introduction_to_Bloggin.