Thanks to everyone who could make our DevLearn09 session (#114) on delivering low cost mobile solutions. Please find the session (embedded slideshare) handouts below. There were many amazing presentations to catch, so if you missed it, check out a nicely written summary from the eLearning Weekly blog (BJ Schone rocks!).

Looking forward to staying in touch with the many familiar and new peers online. See you on the cloud!

To make the technology-enabled social networking easier (i.e. Twitter), I created a “Hello my Name is” Twitter sticker for attendees to write their twitter user name on. This will hopefully make the Twitter business card exchange must faster.

My fantastic fellow T-Mobile co-worker Jeff Tillett and I will be printing them and handing them out at our presentation on how to develop low cost mobile learning solutions on Wednesday (114).

Feel free to download and print this 3”x5” Twitter sticker to write your Twitter user name.

I am looking forward to attending the many DevLearn inspirational presentations on innovative learning (gaming, mobile and social), as well as the usual informal conversation with (in my humble opinion) the best minds in the eLearning world.
See you there!

The geniuses behind Google Maps recently announced Google Wave, which they are calling a “personal communication and collaboration tool”. It is a browser application (HTML 5)  that brings the opportunity to “collate” and evolve emails and traditional documents into a real-time collaborative experience that will integrate instant messaging, wiki (read-write) and social networking components.  You can also easily embed these “wave” conversations on blogs to share the discussion…pretty cool!

BONUS points – Google Waves works on Android mobile devices. I repeat…Google Waves works on Android mobile devices. Check out the video below!!! I cannot wait to try out on my G1. Being a huge fan of Gmail and Google Documents, I just signed up for the alpha and am VERY, VERY interested in how a tool like this can be used to streamline business communication and collaboration. HEADS UP teammates and peers out there, get ready for the Mark Wave…coming soon!

They are not only calling it an application but also a platform and protocol. Being open source, Google is looking for the community to try out, see what works and extend it to make it better.

I like this quote about email-

“…email (aka snail mail), which was invented 40 years ago, is still today is the most popular communication tool….but lacks the experience of real-time SMS etc. ”

When you have a question about something what do you do?

A. Ask a friend?
B. Go to the library?
C. Google the answer?
D. Make up an answer? (No!)
E. None of the Above

What about using ChaCha?

Learning “on demand” is a hot topic and popular way for finding information today. A peer suggested ChaCha to me yesterday. When I tried it, an answer for  “death of Napoleon” came back in less than a minute…”gastric cancer” wow that was fast!

In January of 2008, ChaCha launched its mobile answers text service at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival. Since that day, hundreds of thousands of people have become ChaCha fans – of both the text AND mobile answers voice service – asking ChaCha millions and millions of questions every month.

On September 17th, 2008 ChaCha announced that it now has more than a million users and has answered more than 27 million queries since it launched its revolutionary mobile answers service in January. This, combined with its quarterly growth rate in Q2, makes ChaCha the fastest growing mobile search service, surpassing both Google and Yahoo in both WAP and text-based search growth rates (according to the latest data from Nielsen Mobile).

ChaCha was the fastest growing U.S. mobile text-based search service again for the 2nd quarter in a row surpassing Yahoo and on the heels of Google growing market share from seven percent to 28 percent in only 90 days, according to Nielsen Mobile.

Here is how it works:

Try it two ways:

Call 1.800.2ChaCha (1.800.224.2242)
Text 242242 (spells ChaCha)

1. Simply ask your question from your mobile phone as if you were talking to a smart friend.
2. We’ll instantly route your question to the most knowledgeable person on that topic in our Guide community.
3. Your answer is then returned to your phone as a text message within a few minutes.

As the saying goes, “the only thing that is constant is change.” While reading HG Wells Food of the Gods, about two scientists researching the growth process of living things, something occurred to me. The rate of human growth used in the book can be used as a reference for how people learn, process and adapt to new information. Stay with me for a moment…

Change is constant and learning is constant, right?

In Food of the Gods, two scientists theorize that the natural rate of growth is constant with periods of rest (Figure C.), which (applied to learning) is an ideal rate for Bloom’s Taxonomy right? We start with receiving information and progressively move to knowledge and then evaluation. That is great! Although, raise your hand out there if you feel like the rate of change and new information in your day to day life is a constant stream (Figure D.)? Everyday we can expect that things will change, new information will come in, new events will happen that impact our daily work and lives.

How do we manage this constant change? How can organizations manage this? Will sporadic growth and periods of rest continue to work for us? How many organizations have learning programs to accommodate Figure C. and D? To the contrary how many organizations have programs that resemble Figure A. and B? An initial information dump without reinforcement or no change at all.

What is the answer? Here are my thoughts:

• Create learning programs that resemble Figure C. and D.
• Provide tools to enable informal learning.
• Build communities to support social learning.
• Revisit topics of frequent change.
• Use refreshers consistently to reinforce.
• Turn learning into a constant stream.
• What are you thoughts?

In closing to paraphrase Tim O’Reilly,

“…it is easier to consume small bites of information over a long period of time than to consume large bites of information in short period of time”.

Rate of Learning

Found this via TopRank blog via @leeodden-

BlogWell will be showcasing a number of social media case studies from a variety of industries. Interesting to note that a number of big companies are leveraging Twitter for customer relationship building such as @mayoclinic, @hrblock, @allstate, @uscoastguard

BlogWell is the only conference devoted to learning how big businesses successfully participate in social media. You’ll learn directly from the executives at the largest corporations in the world who are engaging in this right now.

• The Home Depot
• Mayo Clinic
• H&R Block
• Sharpie
• US Coast Guard
• Allstate
• Walmart
• Procter & Gamble

Want to learn to play the guitar on your phone? SplashPlay, available via the Android Market, allows you to download songs, add chords and share with others through the SplashPlay website.

With a very slick interface, this type of application makes learning a fun, flexible and a rewarding experience. I certainly could have used this type of performance support tool when I use to play bass in a band and totally forget my part!

SplashPlay , Keith Sturch, Andreas Ipp, Friedger Müffke and Ronan Schwarz

www.splashplay.mobi

Learn to play the guitar on your phone. Download your favourite songs, add chords and share with others through the SplashPlay website. With optionally available hardware, chords appear also on the real instrument.

Just getting back from San Jose and a million thanks to Brent and the Guild for an absolutely amazing DevLearn08 (#dl08). The event was held in the beautiful Fairmont hotel near Adobe headquarters and was jammed packed with inspirational keynotes, deep dive concurrent sessions and physical + virtual connections with fellow bloggers, tweeters and learning professionals.

What were your favorite presentations? I was able to catch excellent conversations and sessions on mobile learning (Judy Brown, BJ Schone, Barbara Ludwig, David Metcalf), immersive learning (Mark Oehlert), instructional design using the semantic web (Rueben Tozman), micro-blogging trends (Michelle Lentz), new work literacy (Tony Karrer)…and many, many others. Of course, there was a lot of tweeting going on and informal aha moments. Special shout out to my new T-Mobile teammate Jeff Tillet, who I am excited to dive into new media learning solutions with.

Keynote Highlights

Tim O’Reilly – follow the alpha geeks, early adopters and people who need training the least (high performers). Reach out to them and turn them into mentors, as well as provide convenient resources, reinforcement. Then study successes.

Dan Roam says – break every problem into Who, What, Where, Why and How…all you need is a napkin and sharpie. By the way, I tested the PowerPoint slideshow drawing feature, which is cool and can even convert to a slide object.

John Medina – covered a few of his 12 Brain Rules and how the education system counteracts how the brain has evolved to process and store information.

LinkedIn, da Vinci and Qik dinner

The days and nights were crazy busy, and in a few cab rushed evenings, I was also able to meet up with Jackie Danicki from Qik in beatiful Palo Alto for dinner, see the Leonardo da Vinci exhibit at the Technology Musuem, drive around Google-land and get a tour of LinkedIn headquarters, where we rocked out to Guitar Hero and got free snacks and fruit drinks in the LunchedIn kitchen. Special thanks to my co-presenter George Aston’s cousin Scott (LinkedIn web developer) for the dinner and tour…look forward to further tech discussions.

Thanks to everyone for coming to our 402 session on Using Rapid Video…it was almost a full house, which was cool. After quick hitting brain and film theory fundamentals with video examples, we broke the session into a hands-on video workshop with three groups tasked with props, storyboard and a Flip camera to rapidly create content. George and I were stoked by the amount of participation and levels of creativity. Please find what the groups created below on YouTube, as well as our slide deck in SlideShare. Also, if you are interested in current trends in user generated video, check out my article in Training Solutions Magazine.

402 Workshop Videos

Group 1 | Using paper props

Group 2 | Using real props

Group 3 | Using a flip chart and markers

Note: First few audio seconds for each video have a slight delay…not sure why…maybe a Vista issue with Flip software???

Presentation SlideShare Deck

Social media tools help people easily (and virtually) connect with peers, friends and families to help answer questions like “how are you you”,”have you seen this video” and “so, what are you doing”. As Marcel LeBrun, CEO of Radian6 puts it social media is like a new phone. (credit Chris Brogan).

Moving forward, we can’t help but consider the opportunity to use this new form of social connection on the job. Your average employee has been using email for everything and for a very long time, and it is time to figure out best way to incorporate these tools with your team and organization. A lot of you out there are probably already doing this via grass roots.

Networks are exercises in structured informality.

The key principle of networking is focusing on what you do best and delegating other activities to your allies. – Heather Creech and Terri Willard | Strategic Intentions

Why bring social media tools into your organization and what is the best way? Groundswell, written by two analysts from Forrester Research, tells us to walk through Peope Objective Strategy Technology:

1. People – What is your employee and/or customer technographic profile?
2. Objective – Select one (yes only one) objective (Talk, Listen, Energize, Support or Embrace).
3. Strategy – What will be different when you are done? Do you want a closer, two-way relationship with your best employees or create a knowledge support groups and self-serve community?
4. Technology - NOW select your tool of choice (user-generated video, blogs, social network)

Let’s compare two technographic profiles. Do you see any differences? Notice the difference between critics, creator, joiners and inactives. Which group would be easier to talk to vs. listen to? Which group would be conducive for building an online community?

Profile A

Profile B

I was reading this Mashable article that hits exactly on what I have been thinking for a little while, how businesses can leverage microblogging tools like Twitter and Plurk, aka Yammer to help build online communities. This new communication tool can open up enterprise doors to faciliate cross-department conversations and support.

The article concisely summarizes business value and key considerations:

Business Value:
Emergency Broadcast System: First and foremost, any company needs a way to reach all of its employees quickly and efficiently. E-mail is obviously one way to do this but increasingly, it’s hard to separate the wheat from the chaff. With many folks receiving hundreds of e-mails a day, it can take minutes if not hours before we get to an e-mail from the CEO.

Knowledge Management: Here’s where things get interesting. One of the biggest failings of many companies is the fact that they trap their intellectual property in Powerpoints, spreadsheets and Word documents and store them on shared drives and e-mail inboxes. Once the creator of that content walks out the door, the odds of their years of work finding its way into anyone else’s life are slim. As companies start uploading more and more content onto wikis, or central file repositories, these files can be linked to and indexed by conversational tools like microblogs.

Training: Any company that has gone on a hiring binge quickly realizes how painful it is to train new employees. If a formal training program exists, the materials are often outdated almost as soon as they are created. By identifying a few key influencers and allowing new employees to see their daily “streaming,” information and best practices can be shared more easily and in real time with little burden on the “trainer.”

Expert Identification: Another area that many larger companies fall down is in making their resident experts easily findable. If you can see your company’s employees talking (possibly segmented by business unit or group within an organization), it wouldn’t take long to figure out who knows what about whom.

Seeing the Connectors: Good companies spend a lot of time on succession planning. Unfortunately, most companies don’t have a good handle on who the true connectors are within their organization. By analyzing conversations and watching the conversations of employees, senior managers can easily identify who these connectors are and then ensure these employees compensation and titles match their internal value AND start to add additional connectors if too much information is flowing through any one individual.

Inclusion of External Stakeholders: Back in the early 2000’s, extranets were all the rage. There would finally be a way for companies to include partners, investors and even certain customers in their daily conversations. Portals obviously began to fill this roll to a degree but none were ever truly conversational. Enter enterprise microblogging with the ability to include these aforementioned stakeholders in the mix.

Key Considerations:
Single Sign-On (SSO): A growing problem in the social media world right now is identity proliferation. With some notable exceptions that accept OpenID, most sites still require you to create yet another account in their system (or identity domain). In most enterprises, a fair amount of effort has already been expended on establishing single sign-on through the intranets’ LDAP registry. It would be highly desirable to leverage this capability to enroll employees in the microblogging system. So, an enterprise microblogging solution must have flexibility in adapting to existing ID and sign-on registries.

Reliability: Initially, microblogging may seem like a non-essential, nice-to-have kind of tool, but our bet is that most businesses will find it very quickly becomes indispensable for keeping important lines of communication open. People, on their own, will invent many different uses for such a simple tool, as they have with Twitter. In a large corporation with geographically distributed sites, it would be best to have a solution that allows each campus to run its own server and not be dependent on a remote centralized service. These distributed servers would exchange data to unify the system as a whole. See Distribution below.

Analytics: Businesses will eventually want to analyze the traffic on their microblogging sites. They’ll want to know who follows who, who posts the most and to who and most importantly, a feature I’d love to have in Twitter, the ability to see and search all my posts and other posts selectively for important information, just like we can search our G-mail accounts now.

Security:This will probably be of paramount concern at least initially in most businesses. Most corporations are very aware of keeping internal communications safe from prying outside eyes. An enterprise microblogging solution must provide for fine-grained authorization and trustworthy security of communications. Management, through the IT department will want to be able to restrict who can see certain posts.

Scalability: The word Enterprise covers a huge spectrum of organizations. An enterprise microblogging solution should be scalable from less than 100 users to tens or even hundreds of thousands of users, spread across the globe. The ability to distribute and federate many local servers on the corporate intranet will help to satisfy this need.

Groups: Enterprises comprise many different groups within their walls. Not just departments, but project teams, ad hoc working groups, common interests, etc. An enterprise microblogging solution must provide for the easy definition of groups or tags, where any employee user can belong to many groups.

Distribution: This requirement has been touched on already, but it should be mentioned again because of its importance to other requirements. It refers to the ability of the enterprise microblogging solution to be decentralized, spread out across wide geographic areas, and hence to become fault tolerant, so the failure of any one node does not cause a failure of the whole system.

Interoperability: Clearly a distributable enterprise microblogging solution would require its various nodes to federate and interoperate, but a corporation wishing to allow interaction with its customer base outside its walls would require a solution that interoperates with other microblogging solutions that may exist, yet allows only some posts to be seen outside the corporate firewall.

Screenshot of Yammer