If you’re interested in my literary pursuits: I publish a blog in English and another one in German only. Hence, no more blogging here, alas.

What I had said sounded almost a little belligerent in hindsight, as if a war was coming on:

“[Social media have] the potential to move groups of shareholders from passive administrators to active participants. [...] The financial industry in particular ought to be wary of social media as a means of creating assemblies where people learn to articulate, sell and distribute their adverse views.”

I’d like to qualify and explain this a little more because there’s something big and real brewing and it’s fun to speculate where it came from and where it may be going.

To begin with, social media of course were not conceived for activism or Tsunami-news, that is a bye-product. But they’re also not simply modern-day substitutes for mail shots and phone calls as some commentators have suggested. So – what are they?

Social media tools are community building tools. If an activity is meaningful to a community, it can use social media to build information, momentum and relationships much, much faster than ever before. That these tools are related to “community” (a wider group with common interests) rather than “friendship” can be gathered from the many facebook pages that are dedicated to a cause.

Community networks don’t just chat, they play games and they look for ways to apply the power of their community – in most cases,  building information around the common interest will be the result. In other cases, the virtual/electronic community becomes real – shareholder community networks are an example. Their true interest does not lie in being connected but in maximizing shareholder value. The community is a conduit for that. For small shareholders, it is a conduit that did not exist before.

When Don Tapscott and others are talking about “wikinomics” and the “wiki way” (see also an article in the Economist) – wikis being another one of the social media/web 2.0 tool box to which facebook/twitter do also belong – they mean an approach to business that is at once

• more concerted (assembling people online is easy),
• highly informed (creating and sharing content online is easy),
• targeted (getting behind a vote or a cause online is easy),
• learning-based (most online processes are less consumptive and more interactive than, say, TV, and appeal to more learning types, too)
• egalitarian (rather than hierarchical – the online world is access-flat)
• open (it is easy to get to stuff as long as it exists and you can find it online; also, closed communities don’t grow).

Using this approach for shareholder activism provides all these advantages in the context of communicating with other shareholders and getting to “yes”, to “no” or, better, to a different platform of opinions. It could be a way to overcome the simplified “Yes/No” world of the general shareholder assembly, which is dominated by the big players. It could be a way to establish learning before, during and after real meetings – thereby effectively changing the relationship of shareholders with one another and also with the information (on which the value of a share is, after all, based).

Social media tools have the potential to move groups of small shareholders from passive, disconnected administrators of their own (small) company share to active, connected participants in company wealth creation – via the creation of information & community platforms. Wiki, Facebook, Twitter are software solutions used for that at the moment. I have no doubt that we’ll see these developing rapidly as the emphasis moves away from chatting and towards doing and organizing collective intelligence.

In a way, social media are both a consequence and a cause for globalization. If we didn’t have them already, we’d have to invent them now. This is one of those systemic paradoxes that I like so much because they break through the simple causality that we try to employ to explain what happened to ourselves.

Communities: social media focus, fun places and a force to be reckoned with.

Presentation Area VWBPE 2011

My talk, titled “Transfer of Physical Classroom Techniques to the Virtual Classroom During a Practice Supervision Course” is based on recent research (with A. Gallo) on a virtual course, which I have discussed before.

For another conference, B Hagmaier and I created a short (6 min) movie – employing an unusually strong German accent, where I talk about most of the tools that we use in this virtual environment:

Second Life – HWR Island (long version, music, screenshots) from KMU Interkomp 2.0 on Vimeo. There is also a German language version of this movie.

Support of the BMBF/FHProfUnt project Interkomp 2.0 is gratefully acknowledged.

This was a thoroughly gratifying experience – the students were marvelous too and very patient, which helped – and, in the end, said things like: “I thought the course was really really cool.” It hardly gets better than that: this is what I’d like my twenty-something year old students like to say about my classes!

In summary, the experiment showed that many classroom processes could be transferred “in-world” (meaning: to Second Life) not only without a loss of quality but at times – as in the case of role plays – with a noticeable gain.

Which brings me to the issue of constellations. In short, constellations are interventions using a spatial representation of elements of a system – be it a family, an organisation or a person. Space is used to “set up” an issue that needs to be resolved. “Setting up” in practice means choosing representatives for aspects of the system related to the issue – these representatives can be other people (strangers) or inanimate objects. With objects, a constellation could look like this in SL:

The leader has set up a problem using colored objects: each object represents an aspect of a problem. Moving the objects simulates changes to the original problem setting.

I am currently planning to lead an organisational systemic constellation in Second Life as part of the anniversary of the workgroup AK E-Learning convened by Avameo. (When: Sept 9, 18:00. Where:  Kybernethik 1)

See also this 2008 post (in German) by A Mertens (with recent discussion) on online constellation work. I will be writing a lot more about this in the weeks to come – also because I’m wrestling with a longer academic article on the issue of virtual transfer…

Second Coach: Birkenkrahe Aya

First coach: Marcus Speh Birkenkrahe

... but who is this guy?

forget stan and ollie, buster and billie, butch cassidy and the sundance kid, forget the marx brothers – now there are “besel and mo” – short for besel bearsfoot and mo rhys, two avatars let lose on the wonderful wild world of second life®, who began blogging yesterday.

perhaps i’ll let you know from time to time what i’m up to as well but mostly i’ll be absorbed by the amazing adventures of the avatars besel & mo.

- Give the writing of a short story suitable for role play (a situation which had emotional value) as an assignment (students were permitted to simply provide a link to their blogs where they put stories like this).

- Paraphrased all stories and put their short version on Picasa from where we projected them during our in-world session.

- Prepared an appropriate warming up exercise which involved placing your avatar on a staircase according to the question “how much did the internship fulfil your expectations?”

From Stories for Roleplay

- Letting the students decide which of the eight stories presented we would use for the role play.

The story picked by the students was a rather extreme example which, however, seemed to trigger a lot of emotion among the audience.

The role play this time was not a play back of a given scene but a directed role play whereby the narrator (Juliane) played herself and gave detailed instructions to the other actors.

From Stories for Roleplay

The final survey on the quality of this class and the interest in more role plays confirmed our own initial enthusiasm for this method. This is another example where class room activities can with relative ease transferred to the virtual 3D environment. In fact, my hunch is that for role play in particular the threshold for inexperienced actors (i.e. most students) to participate in a role play via their avatar is lower than in a real classroom situation. The student can hide his embarrassment behind the avatar – this way of working through issues benefits from that.

One can argue that a real life role play is much richer because of body language, gestures, facial expressions etc. – but most students (more than in our in-world experiment) seem reluctant to go up on stage.

This was a great, instructive experience!

In yesterday’s scenario, we tried a role play method known as “playback” where a group of (max. 4) actors plays a scene told to them by the protagonist. The students played the scene (as it had happened), then the protagonist was asked for comments and the floor was opened for a brief discussion. In a second scene, different actors then played out a different scene – in this case based on the things our protagonist would have liked to say but didn’t.

The result was, at least for me, quite impressive. From the moment that the playing itself started, the energy “in the room” (i.e. on our virtual island) was high and everybody seemed very involved – just like during improvisational theatre in the real world! The client/protagonist said several times that he enjoyed seeing both scenes from the outside.

We closed the evening with our – by now habitual – opinionator session for which I had prepared a couple of questions including “I would like to do more role-playing”. To Jutta’s and my surprise after what seemed like a successful session, all students disagreed. Questioned about the why, two things seemed to be the problem:

1. students are not used to talk about their feelings and the emotions accompanying both positive and negative experiences on the job.
2. those who shared their stories including feelings felt that they’d been “whining” and complaining too much.
3. students did not understand the advantage of role playing over mere discussion.

We’ll give it another try next week with a role playing method that is a little more involved and should activate the whole group more. I think Jutta and I found good arguments on (3) – regarding (2) it would have been good to help the protagonist of the evening in particular to “step back into the group” so to speak (we ran out of time there). And issue (1) of course is a serious limitation of our whole university education: apparently, we do unleash our business administration and management students onto the world without the knowledge that their feelings are their most prized possessions – telling them, among other things – what to do, what ‘feels’ right and wrong and who they (really) are.

Having said that: I didn’t know this at age 20 or 25. Heck, I didn’t know this until I had seriously fucked my first big management assignment up!

So, still happy with the experimentation, and in particular with my helpers (Jutta/Naomi) and the students of this course!

And to round it all off: here are the pictures and slides (in German).

(reposted from the virtualHWR mixxt community)

What I’m missing out on is niftly and neatly documented by a short video that one of my facebook friends sent me today. The ability of the online world to take the piss out of itself is refreshing at times. Otherwise my teaching in Second Life is going great – status updates here.

More interesting than virtual venues was the HWR Berlin career day “new/social media”, organised by the splendid Denise Gücker, attended by plenty of students and made into a rich event by excellent talks from paypal, ]init[, VZ, Fox Mobile Group with a kick-off talk by my colleague Frank Habermann – accompanied by heavy tweeting. The talks showed that this market is booming and hungry for talent especially those interested in rapid project management.

And now I’m off for some time in the garden – real plants, real dirt and no Internet connection – bliss!

These may be strong words…I spoke even stronger ones at my talk at the Publishers Forum 2010 organised by Berlin-based Klopotek AG today. Though I couldn’t attend the entire event, it was clear that most of the talks and the buzz was dedicated to the e-book craze fueled by the success of Amazon’s Kindle (no link – not hard to find – it’s everywhere) and the iPad (equally easy to find…)

Since these two are very different, one should not compare them: the Kindle is indeed an e-book reader, yet another device for privileged consumption of intellectual goods. It is not the future of the book. The future of the book lies in communities of readers, who are also writers (not Tolstoys all of them) and the Kindle is, if anything, community-hostile. Not so the iPad: as a transportable Web-access device it is friendly towards social media, the most highly developed path towards online communities. The iPad is, of course, not just an e-book. Hopefully, it will provide access to smarter virtual books as suggested by David Gelernter in his recent article in the FAZ.

See, this was a large part of my talk in a nutshell. There’s more of course – my view that publishing will once again become a cottage industry. That publishing houses have to embrace this new reality and the new power of the communities of content creators. And so on – all wrapped in a nice historically motivated review of knowledge management as we knew it. Which is dead because now we have social media and KM is happening all around us – both inside and outside of companies, one more than one channel at a time. The slides of my talk are here in English or German. The text will appear in a special issue of buchreport after the conference.

Will my words come back to haunt me? I don’t think so. If the Kindle is the future of the book then a window frame is the future of the house.

On one hand I don’t envy the publishing industry, on the other hand I am optimistic that they will indeed learn from the bad decisions made by the music industry. If only because books aren’t songs.