As we continue exploration of new work, collaboration, and the technologies that develop these practices, our course reading in the Working Smarter Fieldbook 2011 emphasizes the importance of trust relationships--"competence trust" and "compliance trust" (p. 278). The foundation for collaboration is trust, foundational to the use of the tools. These types of trust display themselves in how top leaders support and expect middle managers to allow the use of social media tools by work groups, and the empowerment of several levels of an organization to manage or create content in the social-media environments. A condition of social media investment in an organization should also be justified by the results produced. (This summary is drawn from pp. 277 - 282).
Tools the Authors Share for Various Collaborative Purposes. These are the exact titles of the rich categories most certainly worth exploring (pp. 284 - 291).
- Brainstorming
- Mind Mapping
- Collaborative Authoring
- Collaborative Reviewing
- Collaborative Reflection
- Collaborative Commenting
- Collaborative Annotation
- Group Project Management
- Collaborative Course Design and Development
- Collaborative Learning
About Blogs
Tasks for this week are to create a blog and a wiki. I had used Blogger, explored Typepad, and returned to Posterous, thinking is would be the easiest of all. After mucking around in Posterous, I returned to my oldest choice, Blogger to write remarks for the class.
Aspects I like about Blogger: I can post to it from email, can quite easily embed video and photos in it, and easily push a post out to Twitter. I also like that the admin can add up to 100 authorized contributers. This makes it easy to share the voices that can contribute posts.
One of the drawbacks I have experienced when we moved Blogger onto a server at work was that we could only import the old templates, and not the new ones which allow the user to add a lot of widgets.
Perhaps this has changed.
An interesting blog article that showed up in Twitter this week was "Secrets of Bloggerhood" The post mentions a key component of popularity: exclusion. What does this negative word choice have to do with attracting readers to a blog? Good blog practices can capitalize on a synonym: selectivity of audience and selectivity of content for that audience.
About Wikis:
As for group work, the author for this section offers these insights: "...collaboration is the secret sauce of innovation....Conceptual work is inherently collaborative"(p. 314)
The description of wiki as a "group-editable website" and Google docs as "page-at-a-time wiki"(p. 315) are very helpful.
I am familiar with PBwiki, wikispaces, and wikimedia. Personally, I found PBwiki easiest to use a collaborative tool to support a face-to-face professional development event for adult educators:
http://chiresources.pbworks.com/w/page/15802021/FrontPage.
The Wiki Matrix site helps you compare various features of wiki products and services:
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