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Facebook | Home on 2009-01-07
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Time Zone Converter on 2008-10-07
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The eLearning Guild : Why e-Learning 2.0? on 2008-09-09
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Enterprise 2.0: Wachovia Turns To Wikis, Blogs To Support Growth -- Enterprise 2.0 on 2008-06-27
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Under the plan, Wachovia is adding wikis, blogs, instant messaging, social networking sites, and other Web 2.0 technologies to traditional methods like e-mail, according to Fields.
Beyond connecting employees around the world, Wachovia's collaborative environment is designed to attract -- and retain -- younger Generation Y employees who expect access to Web 2.0 tools at work. "They grew up in the flat world," said Fields. "
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Fields said that many of corporate America's young workers' engagement levels "fall off the table" after about a year on the job because "we give them no means of input."
To change that, Wachovia is giving its Gen Y workers a role in helping its Enterprise 2.0 makeover succeed. Younger employees are assigned to teach senior staffers about the benefits of using collaborative networks.
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Wachovia's Sharepoint project was in part funded through anticipated travel savings, Fields noted. Managers from various departments committed 5% of their annual travel budgets for five years to fund the effort.
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Finally, the effort is also meant to help Wachovia retain institutional knowledge as older workers retire by preserving their experience in digital form. "It dwarfs what we have in our content management systems" said Fields.
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The Bamboo Project Blog: Comprehensive or Comprehendible? The "Best" Choice or the "Good Enough" Option? on 2008-06-27
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http://tinyurl.com/23aa9w
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It's Not What You Know, It's Who You Know: Work in the Information Age on 2008-06-27
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To keep their network engines revved, workers constantly attend to three tasks:
- Building a network: Adding new nodes (people) to the network so that there are available resources when it is time to conduct joint work;
- Maintaining the network, where a central task is keeping in touch with extant nodes;
- Activating selected nodes at the time the work is to be done.
NetWORK is an ongoing process of keeping a personal network in good repair. In the words of one study participant, "Relationships are managed and fed over time, much as plants are." Two key actions come into play in constituting a network: remembering and communicating. We will discuss these actions in the context of building a network, maintaining a network, and activating network nodes
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Once nodes are in a network, they often require "care and feeding." While dormant nodes may be activated after surprisingly long periods of time, many of our informants spoke of the need to nurture relationships. This was accomplished through intermittent interaction, or "keeping in touch." Our informants talked about keeping contacts (often customers or clients) "happy" and feeling "taken care of." They emphasized that small personal touches such as taking people to the most fashionable restaurant or playing a round of golf yielded out of proportion rewards.
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Keeping in touch involves remembering who to keep in touch with. We were surprised at the difficulty this task caused study participants. It is hard for people to remember who is in their network for several reasons. Networks get large. People move around from company to company. They change roles. Remembering a network thus involves remembering who is in one's personal network, as well as where they are currently working and what they are doing. In today's economy where workers often migrate from company to company, tracking a personal network is an important aspect of netWORK. People used their own memories, paper-based tools, and computer databases of various kinds to remember their networks.
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But people also experience problems in maintaining their networks. Gary, of the small media firm, talked about how he sometimes forgot who was in his network. His strategy for maintaining his contacts ("refreshing his list") was to use a computer tool that beeped after specified intervals to alert him to the fact that he had not called a contact in the database. Gary also described problems in remembering critical information about people who were in his network but where the connection had been dormant for some time. He talked about how he would sometimes get a phone call from a prospective client whom he had worked with in the past, but he didn't remember well.
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Activating a network involves remembering who to contact for a particular need.
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Ed underscores the heterogeneity of his network and the work of "tracking back" different players in his network.
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When a portion of a network is activated for ongoing joint work, it is a kind of living entity that must be carefully attended. When a set of nodes is "live," the relations that keep it going must constantly be renewed through acts of communication. The live portion of a network is not a static structure but a result of human interaction. Communication that activated live subnets entailed deliberate choices about communication medium and language.
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Most media choice research emphasizes sender preferences, such as preferences relating to the affordances of various media (Short, Williams, and Christie, 1976; Daft and Lengel, 1984). According to this research, senders choose the most appropriate medium for the communication task at hand, for example, some people choose e-mail because they need to have a paper trail, while others find the immediacy of phone communication desirable.
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We found that media choice depended heavily on two intensional network factors: recipient preference and the developmental history of interaction.
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While senders had their own media preferences which entered the calculus of choice, they were highly responsive to the preferences of those to whom they sent messages. The power of recipient preference is shown in the following quote. "Rachel" worked for the multimedia firm that produced Web pages, CD-ROMs, and other media. She described her frustration at having to use e-mail as her client demanded, instead of the using the phone, which she personally viewed as more appropriate.
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Our interviews also indicated that media choice was influenced by developmental factors in a trajectory of events (Engeström et al., 1999) including project history and the personal history of interactions with given people in a network. Media choices were not simple evaluations of media affordances for isolated communication events, but part of ongoing judgments about communication couched in a specific history of project work and social interaction.
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One example of this relates to how projects moved through stages. Our informants described how different media were appropriate at different stages of a project.
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Abrupt unexpected events were also part of the developmental flow that sometimes affected media choice. Kathy noted how a difficult event could rupture the flow of communication in a project, requiring a change in medium
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Crossing organizational boundaries often involves dealing with people very different from oneself. In our study people told us how they consciously changed their language to adapt to those with whom they were working. This is a remarkably fine-grained adjustment in response to the heterogeneity of people's networks.
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Rachel explained the care with which she activated phone communication with her contractors who worked at home. She wanted them to be loyal to her company, so she put herself in their "space" mentally, imagining their surroundings and responding to them on their terms, using what she called "intermediary language":
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I talk to them. I realize that they are at home in their home setting. I don't call them up and talk business right away. I'll call them up, for example, one of my programmers off site is working on fixing up his house. I'll call him up and say, "Hey! How's your floor going?" or "Your windows!" and kind of get into his world. And he'll talk to me and we'll chat about this and that and then I'll get to work stuff. Cause I know, I've worked at home before. I know what it's like when you get this business call and you're in your home setting. It's just kind of sometimes invasive or intrusive, and you need to walk a fine line whereby you have that kind of intermediary language. And I don't think it's a ruse. I think it's just a part of conversation that you're meeting each other somewhere.
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She noted that it was explicitly her strategy to gain allegiance by talking to contractors in the context of their own space and situation, even though she was not physically sharing that space or situation at the time she talked to them. Through skillful use of language, she was able to "meet" them "somewhere."
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enger (1999) observed that indicators of a community of practice include dimensions such as "mutually defining identities," "local lore, shared stories, inside jokes, knowing laughter," shared jargon, "very quick setup of a problem to be discussed," absence of conversational preambles, and "shared discourse reflecting a certain perspective on the world" (pp. 125-6). As we have documented, the social landscape is quite different within intensional networks. People do not share a backdrop of common experience in intensional networks. We found people consciously changing their language to suit different audiences, lacking a shared sense of humor (not to mention knowledge of specific jokes), carefully planning conversational preambles, and putting considerable effort into setting up "problems to be discussed," as well as establishing the working relationships themselves. In consequence, intensional networks are more heterogeneous than communities of practice, including people with whom the worker may share little, especially in the initial stages of contact.
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Another important difference is that intensional networks are personal. In contrast to communities of practice in which workers inhabit a shared cultural space, intensional networks are the creation of individuals. Joint activity is accomplished by the assembling of sets of individuals derived from overlapping constellations of personal networks. These individuals have to create sufficient shared understanding to get work done, but such understanding must be collectively constructed rather than existing historically in an ongoing community or organization.
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An intensional network is often much more distributed than a community of practice. Work happens in phone calls, e-mails, exchanges of documents, and face to face interactions in diverse settings. These settings are often far from any place that workers' would even metaphorically consider a "community." Even when physical space is shared, the heterogeneity of interacting intensional networks, such as that described by Gary in our first example of the media loft in San Francisco, means that insider jokes, shared identities and perspectives, and so forth, are lacking.
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A closer approximation to intensional networks is provided by the concept of "knotworking" developed by Engeström, Engeström, and Vähäaho (1999) within an activity theory framework. Like us, Engeström and his colleagues have noticed that a great deal of work in today's workplace is not taking place in teams. They pointed to non-team work configurations such as airline crews, courts of law, and groups of radiologists who assemble at work in a situation driven way (see Barley, 1988). The authors observed that an important form of work group is a "knot" in which "combinations of people, tasks, and tools are unique and of relatively short duration." Knots bring together "loosely connected actors and activity systems." Just as we see intensional networks as an important form of workgroup configuration in today's economy, Engeström et al. described knots as a "historically significant new form of organizing and performing work activity." The authors contrasted knots to communities of practice, noting the differences between the two in terms of knots' loose connections, short duration of relationships, lack of shared lore, and so forth.
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intensional networks often involve long-term relationships (Österlund, 1996 also provides data on this point). Second, the joint work may last for long or short periods of time. Third, the knotworking that occurs within established institutions is more structured in terms of the roles it draws upon.
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n intensional networks, workers are not thrown together in situation-dependent ways or assembled through outside forces (such as hospital staffing personnel). Instead, work activities are accomplished through the deliberate activation of workers' personal networks. Configuring labor is up to workers themselves, whether it is a public relations specialist enlisting a journalist to do a story, or a media firm finding animation experts, or a business development executive seeking new business partners. In Engeström et al.'s examples of knotworking, knots form either through corporate or institutional agency (airline crews, courts of law), or they are pulled together in unscripted ways as situations unfold (e.g., Engeström's example of the capture of a mental patient). Intensional networks, by contrast, are grounded in the deliberate activation of personal networks that have been carefully cultivated, often over many years
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Intensional networks may also coexist with conventional teams.
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An important aspect of knotworking and netWORK is a temporal patterning of ebb and flow in network activation and deactivation. Engeström and his colleagues observed a dynamic in knotworking they called pulsation in which a knot would come together to accomplish work, and then dissipate as the work concluded.
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For now we can say that in an intensional network, even after the pulse slows, there is a strengthening of the network for future joint work. Or there may be a rupture in the case of conflict. In either case, the network is transformed as a result of the activity in a way that does not seem to be as characteristic in knotworking. For example, after intense interaction within a network, media choice decisions may change in the future.
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Although intensional networks are egocentric, portions of any individual network overlap with portions of others' networks, so they do not have the "one-off" character that the notion of an egocentric network might suggest. Within professions and activity systems, networks overlap, giving a sense of connection to workers even under the conditions of flux that characterize today's economy. Intensional networks are extended through the networks of others, as we saw with Jane recruiting partners through the networks of her colleagues. One of the most important resources we share with each other is access to those in our social networks.
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The reduction of corporate infrastructure means that instead of reliance on an organizational backbone to access resources via fixed roles, today's workers increasingly access resources through personal relationships. Rather than being embraced by and inducted into "communities of practice," workers meticulously build up personal networks, one contact at a time. Accounts of the "virtual" organization and organizations with flattened hierarchies have stressed the benefits of the streamlined, nimble, democratic workplace, responsive to contingency, empowering workers to make decisions quickly and independently. It seems however, that these transformed organizations also mean reduced institutional support, and that individual workers incur some of the costs associated with these corporate gains. In the Information Age, workers meet the challenges of diminishing organizational resources through who they know.
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Half an Hour: The Reality of Virtual Learning on 2008-02-19
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Learning is shaping yourself rather than acquiring something. To learn, as the slide says here, is to instantiate patterns of connectivity. So what you’re doing is like exercising. You don’t make someone strong by putting muscles into your arm (that’d be kind of neat, like Schwarzenegger, “I’m Ah-nold…”
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But you don’t put muscles into your arm. You have to grow muscles, you have to develop them and you do that through certain processes. I imagine you guys understand those processes much better than I do.
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Challenges and Strategies for Sustaining eLearning in Small Organizations on 2007-12-02
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There is often a total lack of training or learning in the small enterprise. Managers and employees are usually so busy working on a variety of projects and trying to keep up with the daily workload that training and preparing for future improvement is not an option. This is certainly the case with many small nonprofits who are more concerned with surviving year after year than preparing their small staffs for future expansion or new skills.
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Research has shown that most small organizations are “crisis-driven.” They are so consumed with putting out fires and trying to take advantage of opportunities when they are recognized, that they never actually are able to make a plan to strategically improve the human performance within the organization
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Even more common in small organizations is the existence of informal coaching, experiential learning, and peer groups (SOLT, 2004) rather than formal training programs.
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Managers’ lack of commitment for elearning is usually a challenge reported by small organizations. There is a wide array of issues involved with managers’ preferences, decision making, prioritizing and awareness
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Small organizations often believe they lack the appropriate infrastructure for elearning. This infrastructure can refer to things such as staff, computers and connectedness. Additionally, many small organizations can not afford to have their employees take time to focus on training because of the costs involved in implementing the training,
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Small organizations need to find ways to substantiate elearning by using other justification methods. Maximizing unused resources or learning materials, saving time, allowing for further expansion, connecting geographically isolated resources, freeing up time in the future, and making replication of services or processes easier are plausible reasons to support the use of elearning.
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The final common challenge for elearning is that small organizations often do not understand their training needs. This is because they do not have a training specialist or any other individual (or department) dedicated solely to analyzing businesses needs and performance gaps, and the manager or director who could be focusing on this is occupied with other tasks.
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here are three important recommendations to help make this possible. In spite of the crisis-driven frenzy that small organizations often face, they should 1) combine elearning and learning culture with the strategic goals and activities of the organization, 2) encourage a web savvy staff, and 3) hire, maintain, or train a good training professional.
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Combining elearning with virtual networks is a multipurpose way to address a number of challenges. Nearly every small organization in the world, no matter how financially restricted, owns and maintains a web page. Web pages have become the cornerstone of small businesses worldwide, and the same idea can used create an organization’s intranet delivering just-in-time training. Informational resources, such as electronic filing cabinets, online reports, and important links, as well as PowerPoint presentations, discussion boards, bulletin boards, webcasts and conference rooms can all be easily made part of these virtual networks that are essentially glorified web portals for a select internal crowd.
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There are also types of software for online workgroups that allow real time collaboration and pose similar benefits, and costs for them can climb to $1,500.00, but there are also many free or almost free constructivist learning tools, such as blogs, podcasts, Moodle and wikis. Seitzinger (2006) explains a number of new, very inexpensive ways to create an online learning system using these types of tools whereby multiple people can actively contribute, there is plenty of interaction among participants, and the content can reflect goals that the group is working toward.
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Capturing niche skills with elearning : A staff technician had visited Africa and researched a hot new technology, biofuel production, which was obviously a growing field that would continue to raise much interest. Instead of a creating a trip report or a research paper, the technician assembled an elearning module that was used to train other technicians in biofuels while also serving as a promotional tool. The elearning module has since been distributed to project leaders, partners, and other technicians in over 30 countries, and it has attracted attention to an extent far greater than any trip report or manual could ever have done. Ultimately, it has captured important technical information, it is being used to train staff and partners, and it is also serving as a great marketing tool. This is the type of multipurpose approach that small organizations can benefit so much from.
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Capturing process info with elearning: The same organization often sends out packages to groups around the world. These packages hold seeds, informational booklets, posters, videos, books, CDs and other materials that will assist the group to carry out a tree planting project. Creating these packages is a long, tenuous job that entails preparing customs slips, selecting species, assembling contents, and entering all the information into a database. This job was usually done by staff technicians whose time is always in demand. Volunteers were available but were not familiar with this process and it was a gamble to invest the staff time to train each new volunteer who came in. The solution was to document the entire process from beginning to end with video and pictures, and the result was an instructional video. Now, technicians save an average of three days of staff time per month, every month, because of their new elearning tool.
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eLearning in small organizations is a large, untapped market that should be tapped by the small organizations themselves, not by vendors.
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Sustaining elearning in small organizations requires building the capacity of the organization and the capacity of individuals who comprise it.
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STANFORD Magazine: November/December 2007 > Features > Microlending with Kiva on 2007-11-29
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The Bamboo Project Blog on 2007-11-05
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