Coursera was established by computer science professors Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller from Stamford University and is one of a growing number of organisations offering free online courses. Courses include Humanities, Medicine, Biology, Social Sciences, Mathematics, Business, Computer Science, and others. Each course includes short video lectures on different topics and assignments to be submitted, usually on a weekly basis. Assignments were scored automatically for the Social Network Analysis course, with results available within minutes of submission. Some courses and assignments use a peer review system where an objective standard is difficult to establish. This was the case for the optional programming element of the SNA course.

I opted for something called the “Signature Track”, which meant that all my assignments and exam submissions were electronically verified against my personal ID, which was established by one-off submission of an official photo ID document, such as a driving licence or passport. The only technical requirement (other than a PC/laptop and Internet connection) was a webcam for taking a photo image of my face, submitted for each assignment, which would be compared to the image they had on record. All of this security and fraud detection was supplemented by a clever algorithm that profiles keyboard typing patterns, e.g. to deter me from substituting someone else to submit assignments.

It’s not compulsory or necessary to run this gamut of security procedures if all you want to do is take the course and are not worry about having a formal certificate of achievement at the end. I did, but that’s purely a personal decision. I got my certificate for a pass score of 88.5%, where 80% was the pass/fail threshold.

Given this was my first experience of a MOOC, I did a bit of background research to get a better understanding of how this compared to traditional pedagogical learning methods. I was slightly surprised to learn that, on average, less than 10 percent of students complete a course. This is according to research conducted by the Open University.

See: Why do students enrol in (but not complete) MOOC Courses, by Ian Quillen

Amongst the reasons quoted for this low completion rate is that students enrol because they recognise the unusual opportunity afforded by MOOCs but, unlike traditional college courses, there is no financial obligation if they subsequently decide to drop out, e.g. having experienced the full demands of a course.

There may also be people who just want to see what’s going on, see how others teach the same subjects they do, as well as competitors who might want to steal some ideas and use them in their own platforms.

I have to admit that in my enthusiasm, I signed up for two courses that overlapped mid-way through my SNA course and found that I couldn’t cope with a combined commitment of around 20 hours/week, so had to drop out of the other course. So my advice is that unless you really do have lots of spare time, stick to doing one course at a time.

I was also interested in what sort of demographic or cohort was doing these courses, and why. According to Donald Clark, several target audiences have emerged. For the record, I fit into 8 and 9:

1. Internal students on course – cost savings on volume courses
2. Internal students not on course – expanding student experience
3. Potential students national –major source of income
4. Potential students international – major source of income
5. Potential students High school – reputation and preparation
6. Parents – significant in student choice
7. Alumni – potential income and influencers
8. Lifelong learners – late and lifelong adult learners
9. Professionals – related to professions and work
10. Government – part of access strategy

Clark observes:

(MOOC)….decision makers often don’t have the marketing skills to differentiate between different addressable audiences. External adult learners may not want a long-winded, over-engineered, six to ten week course on anything. Life’s too short. Yet academics are used to producing courses of this semester length. What many may want are mini MOOCs. They may want them to be asynchronous starting and ending when convenient for them. This, of course, is exactly what’s happening. All in all, however, the good news is that MOOCs are forcing HE institutions to change. MOOCs may very well be the force that makes them more open, transparent and relevant. There will, of course, be a backlash, but the digital genie is out of the bottle – MOOCs are here to stay.

See: Who’s using MOOC’s? 10 Different Target Users, by Donald Clark for the full piece.

I must admit that I like the idea of “mini MOOCs”, and the concept of asynchronous start and end dates, which would have avoided the problem I referred to earlier with two courses overlapping for a period of time. I’ll await developments in this area.

One last reference on completion rates; I picked up this post that appears to be stating the case for traditional education techniques as opposed to on-line learning. I’m not sure I agree with all that the author has to say, but I do agree that it comes down to personal motivation. In particular, the last paragraph resonated with me:

Why online education is mostly a fantasy, by Francisco Dao

“Education is primarily driven by motivation, and online learning doesn’t do anything to address people’s motivational needs. In fact, the nature of online education strips away many of the components that keep students engaged and committed. Many of the factors that online education advocates claim are a benefit, such as time flexibility and the lack of classrooms, are actually a hindrance to learning. Studies have shown that a fixed structure and the sense of belonging that comes from a student body improve completion rates. Allowing students to study on their own removes these components of the support system resulting in lower rates of course completion.

In the end, MOOCs and online programs primarily help those who are self motivated to learn, and the vast majority of these people would have figured out how to educate themselves, whether in college or on their own, regardless of whether or not online courses are available.”

To conclude, my own experience has been an enjoyable sojourn into the world of MOOCs. I found the teacher for my SNA course (Professor Lada Adamic) very knowledgeable, engaging and helpful. The course materials were, without exception, of the highest quality. There was also an active online community of students and staff, willing to help with problems, and a strong sense of peer support. I would recommend MOOC’s to anyone who wants to explore new knowledge or skills, or to build on the knowledge they have, either for personal or professional improvement.

Then following links and references might help get you started.

• Major Players in the MOOC Universe from The Chronicle Of Higher Education
• 300 free MOOC’s from leading universities by Open Culture
• Free Learning Websites for all 21^st Century Learners, from Edtech Review.
• MOOC News and Reviews - published and edited by Robert McGuire.

“Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.” – Mahatma Gandhi

“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.” – Mark Twain

List of MOOC Providers

10gen Education - an online learning platform run by 10gen (the MongoDB company)

Academic Earth

Canvas - An open, online course network that connects students, teachers & institutions

Caltech’s ‘Learning From Data’ Course - California Institute Of Technology

Class2Go – Stanford - Now in maintenance mode. Will be merged with the edX platform.

Coursera - Founded by computer science professors Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller from Stamford University. It has teamed up with 62 colleges (and counting) for its classes. The company is experimenting with a career service that makes money by connecting employers to its students, and attracted $22-million in venture capital in its first year.

CourseSites MOOCs  Blackboard is pleased to support open education opportunities and massive open online courses (MOOCs) through CourseSites by Blackboard, a free, hosted and scalable online learning platform.

EdX - A Not-for-profit enterprise with MIT and Harvard universities as founding partners. So far, students can take classes only from Harvard, MIT, and UC Berkeley, but classes from nine more universities are coming soon.

Futurelearn - The first UK-led multi-institutional platform, partnering with 17 UK universities, offering MOOC to students around the world. It is a private company owned by the Open University.

iversity - A company with a diverse interdisciplinary team from Berlin presently offering MOOC  production fellowship and collaboration network for academia.

Khan Academy – Salman Khan made waves when he quit his job as a hedge-fund analyst to record short video lectures on everything from embryonic stem cells to (naturally), hedge funds and venture capital.

NovoEd - Rebranded version of Stanford’s Venture Lab, with a special focus on students collaboration and real-world course projects.

OpenUpEd - First Pan-European MOOC initiative, with support of the European commission.  It includes partners from 11 countries.

Open2Study - An initiative of Open Universities Australia which itself is a leading provider  online education through collaboration of several Australian universities.

OpenLearning  -Free courses from educators worldwide

OpenHPI - The educational Internet platform of the German Hasso Plattner Institute, Potsdam, focusing on courses in Information and Communications Technology (ICT).

Open University – One of the founders of open education. Launched in 1969 to provide (paid for) distance learning. Tentatively stepping into the MOOC arena

MRUniversity - Focusing on economics courses, founded by two GMU professors

P2PU - Peer to Peer University is a non-profit online community based learning platform, founded with funding from the Hewlett Foundation and the Shuttleworth Foundation.

Saylor - a non-profit organization that provides over 280 free, self-paced courses.

Udacity - Udacity was an outgrowth of a Stanford University experiment in which Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig offered their ‘Introduction to Artificial Intelligence’ course online for free in which over 160,000 students in more than 190 countries enrolled.

Udemy - An online learning platform that allows anyone to host their video courses.

UoPeople – University of the People (UoPeople) is a tuition-free, non-profit, online academic institution offering undergraduate programs in Business Administration and Computer Science.

World Education University - Many of the courses have been provided through OpenCourseWare initiatives.

Putting aside my previous skepticism on the value of influence and reputation scores , whether it’s Kred, Klout, Peerindex or whatever, I was taken by surprise to see that I featured in the top 100 Knowledge Management Influencers list compiled by Mindtouch.

As it is, I’m halfway through a Social Network Analysis (SNA) course being run by Prof Lada Adamic at the University of Michigan, which I signed-up for to satisfy my thirst for knowledge on this topic, and I’m getting a much deeper appreciation on different types of networks, how they evolve and what influences their structures. Having analysed my own Facebook network (Twitter is next) I was a somewhat surprised to see how closely the quantitative analysis matched my qualitative perspective on who my influencers were.

I don’t know exactly how Mindtouch created the KM Influencers list, though it will have been based on some aspect of SNA, e.g. number of influencers that follow a particular person, but the stand-out thing for me is that nearly all of the people on the list are the people that I follow and listen to on the topic of ‘KM”. Some of them are definitely my influencers, and I guess I must also be influencing some of them. Leaving aside the potential for strong reciprocation within the network, it probably does give a view of who might be worth following if you’re interested in knowledge management (and I’m not saying that because I want more followers).  Like the other people in this list, I would soon drop out of the reckoning if I consistently spouted rubbish or untruths. I value my reputation (online and offline) and – though some may laugh – I’m quite proud to have bene featured in this list, and will display the badge with some pride!

If you’re like most people, you probably find yourself doing two things at once pretty regularly—talking on the phone while reading an email, skyping relatives as you cook dinner, munching on toast as you commute to work; the multitasking in your life can seem both unavoidable and necessary if you want to get everything done. However, even though everyone multitasks, very few people seem to realize that, in fact, your brain isn’t as efficient in multitasking as it seems. The reality is, everyone’s brain slows down considerably when trying to juggle multiple tasks—and some people’s brains slow down much more than others. If you really think your multitasking skills are a cut above the rest, the only way to know for sure is to see how your brain’s speed compares to that of other multitaskers. When people talk about “multitasking,” what’s really being referred to is one’s ability to switch between different activities, as well as juggling multiple actions at one time. So how can these things be efficiently measured? With a multitask test of course. Test your tasking abilities and see how they stack up against others: Check out the following interactive multitasking exercise, and see how well your brain performs when it juggles multiple tasks—your results could surprise you!

Try it out and see your test results while contributing to the overall data. Probably best to do this whilst sober so not to bring the averages down!

But what do we mean by ‘Personal Knowledge Management’ – or  ‘PKM’?

For me, this is the missing element in the SECI Model of Knowledge Dimensions, which is rather a dry look at KM processes and misses the personal element altogether.

I should come clean here and admit that I don’t much like the term ‘Knowledge Management’ (KM), which is an instant turn-off for many people, particularly those that have had Knowledge Management ‘done to them’. They’ve perhaps been sucked into a corporate strategy to become a ‘learning organisation’ that was heavy on vision and messages, but light on “what does it mean for me?” Or maybe they’ve lived through the hype and legacy of the snake-oil salesmen that pedalled instant technology solutions that would solve all of their organisation’s information problems.

So, by putting ‘Personal’ in front of ‘KM’, am I propagating the confusion, or fear? Maybe I am, but we need a common lexicon to be able to communicate, and like it or not, KM still looms large as a topic, a discipline, a process and a profession. Hence, I’ll have to live with the legacy of misinformation rather than trying to invent a new label.

I’ve leaned towards the PKM term as a follower of many of the articles and blog posts by Harold Jarche, who has influenced some of my thinking (but not all). The “Seek-Sense-Share” paradigm as promoted by Jarche is a simple but effective process that encourages the self-learn facet at the heart of PKM. Jarche defines PKM as:

A set of processes, individually constructed, to help each of us make sense of our world & work more effectively. (Harold Jarche)

This is pretty much consistent with the Wikepedia definition:

Personal knowledge management (PKM) is a collection of processes that a person uses to gather, classify, store, search, retrieve, and share knowledge in his or her daily activities.

But what is the importance and relevance of PKM?

There are at least two factors that have hastened the need for knowledge workers to practice Knowledge Management at the personal level (Tsui 2002):

• Firstly, the knowledge economy has given birth to a new kind of worker. These workers are likely to be self-employed, their decisions are almost all knowledge-based, their work tasks are far less structured and they fiercely defend their independence.
• Secondly, for Enterprise Knowledge Management initiatives to be successful, it is important that individual knowledge workers are competent at managing knowledge at the personal level.

PKM extends further than giving employees access to Intranets, Enterpise Social Software Systems or Knowledge/Information Standards. If organisations stopped spending so much time on processes and technology solutions and uncovered the latent potential in employees then real value could be harnessed through Personal Knowledge Management. The goal is to make knowledge workers better at capturing, using and sharing knowledge, and maximising their personal effectiveness in the social and relationship-building part of their jobs.

PKM is also about taking responsibility for your own personal and professional development. This means being an accomplished networker, comfortable with technology and – perhaps most important of all – curious. Curiosity encourages serendipitous connections and a desire to understand the complex world we live in. By equipping ourselves with the skills to understand the environment we live and work in , we can make better decisions, grow our reputation and ensure we remain relevant in the career path we have chosen for ourselves.

I hope you find the slides useful.

(NB. I curate a paper.li magazine on subject of PKM, and run occasional training courses for TFPL. The next course is scheduled for 11^th September 2013. Sign-up for one or both if you’d like to understand more about PKM).

Presentation Slides:

This is second post on the topic of emergent social ecology, which embraces social media, social networks, communities of practice, enterprise collaboration technologies, social business, social learning, collaboration, cooperation and sharing. A wide brief, but with a common thread: the liberation and empowerment of people to take responsibility for their own personal and professional development.

In my previous post (Part 1) I identified a number of key challenges and opportunities for anyone who wants to survive and thrive in this emergent social ecosystem:

• Social media is generating enormous amounts of unorganised content: how to make sense of that.
• Social networks enable a wider range of connections: how to find people and develop relationships.
• New forms of collaboration are made possible by social media and networks: how to organise and manage.
• There are a bewildering variety of methods and tools: how to choose and learn to use.
• The new ways of making sense, connecting, collaborating, and using technology throw up the need for new skills: what are the new roles and the new skills?
• The emphasis on open access and sharing changes where value may reside: so what are the new business models?
• Social capital is becoming increasingly important in establishing trust and credibility in the virtual world: how do we increase or measure our social capital?

I want to explore some of these points in more detail, and specifically how social/collaborative technologies are creating new roles, new skills and new opportunities for personal and professional development.  I will state categorically that I’m not a social media “expert”, and will challenge anyone who labels themselves thus. The social ecology is far too volatile, technically complex and populated by people and organisations with vested opinions and hidden agendas for anyone to fully comprehend the various dynamics. However, I have a lifetime’s experience dealing with people and information, and that most important of human assets – curiosity.  Having some understanding of the environment I belong to gives me perspective on how to work smarter, and what skills I need to survive.  After all, isn’t that what life’s really all about?

To survive and thrive in this century demands a new spectrum of literacies. These include:

• knowing how to manage and protect one’s online identity
• recognizing the importance of reputation and how to grow (personal) social capital
• proficient in creating, organising, repurposing and sharing content
• capable and adept at using social learning networks for continual personal and professional development

It goes without saying that technology underpins all of these literacies. It is difficult to imagine how today’s knowledge workers could function without access to and familiarity with technology.

In this Part 2 piece I wanted to look at some of the social ecology trends, and specifically:

• collaborative platforms (or the technology that underpins social networks),
• email (because it is still the biggest consumer of time)
• personal knowledge management (the human algorithm)
• the growing importance of the community manager and the digital curator

Technology Trends

Collaboration platforms and social network facilities are becoming increasingly sophisticated and we can now match the people we are connected to (our social graph) with the work we do or the topics we are interested in (our interest graph). Previously we’ve had to seek out and make these connections ourselves, but (and for example) the combination of Google Plus Circles and Google Plus Communities gives us the capability to discover new and relevant connections, i.e. we can now link our social graph with our interest graph. And as we know from experience, once users become familiar with features and capabilities that get deployed in the Web 2.0 world, they eventually emerge in Enterprise 2.0 technologies (i.e. business environments).  Hence we can expect to see a ‘social’ element being introduced to corporate Intranets that offers more than just blogging or micro-blogging capabilities. We can expect to see automatic connections being made using profile and activity data, i.e. between people, interests, expertise, activities, topics and places.  Capabilities that perhaps many of us take for granted with Google Plus or LinkedIn’s suggestions and recommendations, but yet to fully emerge within the corporate environment. Something that might undermine the traditional hierarchical and silo’d organisational structures? Let’s hope so!

 Email

A report by Atlantic Monthly claimed that workers waste up to 50% of their time managing unwanted communications, finding the right people to help them and searching for information to do their job. (Image source: Harold Jarche).

According to the same report, workers spend 28 per cent of their time, reading, writing or responding to email, and another 19 per cent tracking down information to complete their tasks. Communicating and collaborating internally accounts for another 14 per cent of the average working week, with only 39 per cent of the time remaining to accomplish role-specific tasks.

However, I’ve never really understood this growing clamour for the end of email, and get tired of reading the latest predictions about its demise. Did we decide the telephone served no useful purpose once we had social media? No, because it is still a relevant form of communication. How it is used has probably changed over the years, but it is still with us because it’s ubiquitous, easy to use and relatively secure.  I think that companies such as Atos – which has a stated mission to eliminate all corporate email communication within 2 years – and senior managers who ban use of email on certain days, are misguided. They are addressing symptoms of email misuse, and not the underlying causes.  Email has been with us for over 30 years, and I’m predicting it will still be with us for the next 30 years – and more. Like the telephone (or mobile phone), email is ubiquitous, simple to use and a relatively secure method of communication. A telephone number and an email address are the two lowest common denominators in today’s connected world, and that’s not going to change in the short or medium term.

What will change is the move to publish-subscribe communication, where control of the information flow will be managed by the recipient, not the sender.  Having something useful and relevant to say will become far more important than who you send it to.  Email will become the primary means by which we authenticate ourselves and subscribe to the networks and channels through which we want to receive information. And we’ll have better tools for aggregating and filtering this information torrent.

Personal Knowledge Management

It’s been said many times before, but worth repeating – technology alone will not create a collaborative and learning organisation, and neither will it give us the knowledge or skills to make sense of an increasingly complex and volatile environment.  This requires human effort and application. Something that Brian Solis has called the “human algorithm”. To quote Brian Solis:

“The human algorithm is part understanding and part communication. The ability to communicate and apply insights internally and externally is the key to unlocking opportunities to earn relevance. Beyond research, beyond intelligence, the human algorithm is a function of extracting insights with intention, humanizing trends ad possibilities and working with strategists to improve and innovate everything from processes to products to overall experiences.”

One application of the human algorithm is in social media listening and sense-making. In addition to tracking simple data signals such as conversations, sentiment, narration and service inquiries, data can present insights into preferences, trends, areas for innovation or refinement, R&D, co-creation, etc. Even though sophisticated tools can help track data points that can lead to these insights, it still takes a human touch to surface them and in turn advocate findings within the organisation. It’s the difference between insights, actionable insights, and executed insights.

How do we gain the skills needed to hone and improve our human algorithms? We give  time and effort to Personal Knowledge Management (PKM).  And what is “PKM”?

PKM: A set of processes, individually constructed, to help each of us make sense of our world & work more effectively. Keeping track of digital information flows and separating the signal from the noise.

Harold Jarche has been a long-term proponent of Personal Knowledge Management and over eight years has developed the “Seek: Sense: Share” model, described thus:

PKM, or learning in networks, is a continuous process of seeking, sensing, and sharing.

• Seeking is finding things out and keeping up to date. Building a network of colleagues is helpful in this regard. It not only allows us to “pull” information, but also have it “pushed” to us by trusted sources.
• Sensing is how we personalize information and use it. Sensing includes reflection and putting into practice what we have learned. Often it requires experimentation, as we learn best by doing.
• Sharing includes exchanging resources, ideas, and experiences with our networks as well as collaborating with our colleagues.

Two specific roles that have been honed on PKM skills and the ‘seek-sense-share’ methodology are The Community Manager and the Digital Curator.  In some cases this may be one and the same role, since the functions are quite similar.

Community Management

Community Managers have become a core part of engaging with customers on social channels. The role has developed from the Facilitator or Moderator role that is well established within online Communities of Practice (CoP).  In either case, the key responsibilities are very similar:

• Training and educating users (or customers)
• Encouraging and guiding conversations
• Providing recommendations on how social media tools can be used more effectively, or identifying new tools.
• Monitoring platform statistics and trends, and observing behaviours in order to extract new learning and ideas.
• Signposting useful content; developing and sharing resources and best practices.
• Weeding and feeding content
• Project managing

I’ve previously described the role of the Community Manager/Facilitator, and this diagram sums up the key elements of the role:

Digital Curation

‘Digital Curation’ is a phrase for a practice that has been emerging over the past two years to filter the overabundance of signal, and create quality, thoughtful, human-organised collections. By focusing our attention, providing context, and creating a specific experience, curators can enhance our online experience. Digital curators are conceptually similar to their counterparts in museums, because they tend to trade in very specialised, focused content. As a part of a wider collective, curators choose a topic they are interested in, and then search and display dynamic content related to this topic, using one or more digital curation tools.

Some examples of digital curation tools include:

Paper.li enables the curator to automatically create an on-line newspaper, selecting content using keywords, conversations and/or links to websites that are relevant to a particular topic or theme.  There is a considerable degree of automation involved, and the curator needs to be able to continually monitor and if necessary adjust the sources in order to ensure the content remains relevant.

Scoop.it is a very useful and attractive curation tool, enabling summaries and snapshots of related content from blogs, media sharing sites and other social media. It has an impressively intuitive interface. You pick your topic, add a description of the collection, then you can begin searching for relevant articles and other media to include.

Storify is another style of curation tool, enabling the curator to search for specific content from social media sites that can be sequenced into a blog style story. The curator can add their own text and embed the final product into their blog

Pearltrees, works as a visually-oriented connective network of content, which can be shared, repurposed and linked in a number of ways across social media platforms. The Pearltrees Teams group function also enables users to collaborate to create shared curated collections of content.

All four tools allow conversations and further sharing, and all four are very attractive as a means of making sense of the vast amount of content there is on the web. There are of course many other tools being developed that can also perform similar tasks of consolidating and accumulating content, and offering it in a digest form to busy professionals. A useful resource to follow if you want to know more about content curation is Robin Good’s Content Curation World on scoop.it.

I will continue this discourse on the emergent social ecology trends in a subsequent post, focussing specifically on the importance of Personal Knowledge Management for developing the skills and literacies we need to become effective and proficient 21^st century knowledge workers.

This is first in what I plan to be series of posts about the evolving social ecology, which embraces social media, social networks, communities of practice, enterprise collaboration technologies, social business and anything to do with social learning, collaboration, cooperation and sharing. Quite a wide remit I know, but I believe there is common thread flowing through all of these topics, memes and disciplines, namely the empowerment of people to take responsibility for their own personal and professional development.

The social ecology influences just about everything we do. From the way we communicate, get information, buy and sell, travel, live and learn, to our very health and wellbeing.  For those who thrive on change this is might be perceived as just part of human evolution. For those less comfortable with the rapid and disruptive effects it is having on their lives, it might feel more like a revolution, i.e. something they can’t control or influence – and hence the title for this series of posts.

People, Environment or Technology?

Though we might like to think that “it’s the people, not the technology that matters”, the truth is that the two are now so inexorably linked in the developed world that it’s difficult to imagine how we could get anything done if technology was taken out of the equation.

Technology is changing the way organisations communicate with their employees, partners, stakeholders and customers. Email was the essential business tool in the 1980s, but we are now living in a world where people want to communicate and share on social networks such as Facebook, Google+, Twitter and LinkedIn. The Cloud has opened up opportunities for much more work to be done away from the traditional office environment. In fact, more and more knowledge workers expect data and information to be available anywhere, anytime and on any device.

This demand has fuelled the enormous growth in mobile and web Apps, and accessing and downloading apps is now a familiar and trusted process for owners of mobile devices (e.g. smartphones and tablets).  More than six billion mobile phones are in use worldwide, enabling users to socialise online wherever they go and inspiring a new range of leisure and business applications. Smartphone adoption, which is projected to reach 50 per cent of consumers globally by 2015, will bring more than 1 billion new users online who may never access the Web from a personal computer. (McKinsey. The Social Economy: Unlocking value and productivity through social devices, July 2012).

Against this background we’re seeing enormous amounts of unorganised content being generated by social media; everyone is potentially a publisher. To quote Clay Shirky “Publishing is no longer a job; it’s a button”.

And if it’s so easy to publish, it’s even easier to share – just one click of a button and it’s shared with all of your Facebook/Twitter/Google+ followers. Your network of friends and followers will in turn share with their networks. Tweets beget more tweets, which might stimulate new comments and new Tweets. And so it goes on. According to various reports, information is doubling every two years. By 2020 the world will generate 50 times the amount of information it now has (source: IDC). How to make sense of this information torrent and separate that important signal from all of the noise?

Social networks continue to grow and proliferate. Facebook has set the benchmark for on-line sharing and has become the foghorn of human consciousness. Google+ continues to gain traction and Twitter has established itself as the place for real-time news, where timeliness trumps accuracy. Professional journalism is becoming niche, as people increasingly rely on social media for news and not the traditional newsprint and TV media channels.  How does this affect our perceptions of truth and reality? Who do we trust and how credible are our sources?

Social networks enable a wider range of connections and opportunities to find people and develop relationships. How best to manage these relationships? There are a bewildering variety of methods and tools: how to choose and learn to use?

Is the future likely to be as I’ve previously described as Personalised, Mobile and Appified  ?

Key Challenges and Opportunities

So, to set the scene and agenda for future posts in this series, and with thanks to David Wilcox for inspiring these points, these are what I consider to be the key challenges and opportunities for anyone who wants to survive and thrive in this emergent social ecosystem:

• Social media is generating enormous amounts of unorganised content: how to make sense of that.
• Social networks enable a wider range of connections: how to find people and develop relationships.
• New forms of collaboration are made possible by social media and networks: how to organise and manage.
• There are a bewildering variety of methods and tools: how to choose and learn to use.
• The new ways of making sense, connecting, collaborating, and using technology throw up the need for new skills: what are the new roles and the new skills?
• The emphasis on open access and sharing changes where value may reside: so what are the new business models?
• Social capital is becoming increasingly important in establishing trust and credibility in the virtual world: how do we increase or measure our social capital?

I will attempt to answer as many of these questions as I can in this series of posts over the coming weeks.  In the mean time, comments and views are always welcome, particularly if you think I’ve missed an important facet of the social and collaborative landscape.

Social Ecology -a definition:

Social ecology advocates a reconstructive and transformative outlook on social and environmental issues, and promotes a directly democratic, confederal politics. As a body of ideas, social ecology envisions a moral economy that moves beyond scarcity and hierarchy, toward a world that reharmonizes human communities with the natural world, while celebrating diversity, creativity and freedom. Source: Wikipedia

Previous versions:

• Social Media Revolution 2010
• Social Media Revolution 2011
• Social Media Revolution 2012

For users – well, we still have a bewildering choice, which can’t be a bad thing.

We live in interesting times!

The State of Social Media 2012 by The SEO Company

We are increasingly being flooded – bombarded even – by news and information from an ever-increasing number of social media channels. Increasingly, news is coming to us through our friend and interest networks, via Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and LinkedIn especially. Our cognitive powers in making sense of it, finding the signal within the noise, have never been more challenged.

Some people talk of information anywhere, anytime, but in fact, isn’t it more a case of information everywhere all the time? You can’t get away from it.

There was an article in the press recently querying:  “Are you an “Infomaniac”?

According to the article:

• 34% check their smartphone after sex,
• 23% go on Twitter more than 10 times a day,
• 51% check social network sites at dinner,
• 62% use their phones while shopping and
• 42% will stop a conversation if their phone beeps.

One person was quoted: “Sometimes I wake up in the night and reach for my phone so I can do a Tweet”.

And another: “I take pictures of my food, my feet….pretty much anything and post it online”.

Yes, I think I’m following a few people like that, which reminds me I must do a bit of ‘weeding’ on my Twitter account!

Some other useful (?) statistics that seem to reinforce this sense of  “information pervasiveness”:

• The average Briton now has 26 Internet accounts for everything from email and bank services to online shopping, social media sites, Skype and Paypal.
• The average worker checks his email inbox 36 times every hour.
• 1 in 3 smartphone owners would rather give up sex than their mobile phone (Pew Research)
• 90% of 18 – 29 year olds say they will sleep wit their phone in or beside their bed (Pew Research)
• 1 in 10 say they are woken at least a few times per week by calls, texts or emails (Pew Research)

This all seems to reinforce the growing phenomenon of FOMO, pronounced FO-MO, meaning ‘fear of missing out’. These people want or need to be connected to their email and social media channels 24 x 7. And apparently there is another new phobia you can add to the list of human paranoia – Nomophobia. It’s the fear of losing your cell/mobile phone!

But whilst we complain about information overload and having no time to do the quality things in life, we are at the same time adding to the volume. Everyone has a voice and everyone wants to be heard. Which reminds me of the quote by Clay Shirky “publishing isn’t a job any more, it’s a button”.

And if it’s so easy to publish, it’s even easier to share – just one click of a button and it’s shared with all of your Facebook/Twitter/Google+ followers. And your network of friends and followers will in turn share with their networks. Tweets beget more tweets, which might stimulate new comments and new Tweets. And so it goes on. No wonder we’re drowning in information, and social media has made it all so easy. But are we losing something in this morass of news and information, made possible by simple one-click interfaces and frictionless sharing?

I only realised through a conversation with a friend that her relationship with her now ex-boyfriend, was predicated on a whole new protocol of ‘Unfriending’ on Facebook.  You no longer have to have a face-to-face discussion to end a relationship; it can all be done with a click of a button!

Perhaps this one-button-does-everything mentality that we’re now so used to is making us less social and more insensitive to the feelings of others? We have a paradox where social media is reinforcing anti-social behaviour.

It will be interesting to see what 2013 brings in terms of new and shiny social media tools and social networks, but it doesn’t take a philosopher to predict that the cycle of news and information propagation is going to get faster, more people are going to get connected to the Internet, more people will have a voice, and finding that signal amongst all of the noise is going to get that much harder.

Maybe we should think about what we’re losing – the social skills that help us establish trust and understanding with our fellow human beings, and rediscovering those quality conversations. A New Year’s resolution maybe?

Happy Christmas!

What has happened over the past several years is that social technology has made it easier than ever before to find, connect and engage with “experts” and people with similar interests. This trend was encouraged by Andrew McAfee in 2006 who coined the term “Enterprise 2.0” to describe how the strategic integration of social technologies into an enterprise’s intranet, extranet and business processes could improve decision making. This has given new life to learning, sharing and personal development. Enlightened organisations have recognised that investment in social technology and (most importantly) the organisational development that must accompany it in order to nurture and embed a collaborative culture, can overcome the limitations of silo’d structures that inhibit information flows and opportunities for innovation.  However, it’s still unfortunate that in many cases social media platforms are seen as technology projects and not as part of a wider and more embracing strategic organisational development project. It’s only when poor adoption rates become apparent that organisations begin to focus on behaviours, education and training

Put simply, we’re all still on the learning curve on how to build and sustain a truly collaborative culture, and must be continually reminded that technology is an enabler and not the solution. The paradox is that most collaboration projects are still IT-led and any involvement from HR or knowledge/information professionals is at best incidental.

In a broader context, the pervasive and ubiquitous availability of social media in almost all aspects of daily life, from the way we communicate, get information, buy and sell, travel, live and learn is adding to the pressure on organisations to provide a more porous interface between internal (behind the firewall) and external services. Knowledge workers are increasingly making their own decisions on what tools, products and services that they need to work more effectively and will become increasingly disaffected if these are not available within the work environment.  We’re already at the point where mobile platforms (smartphones, laptops, tablets) are outstripping sales of traditional desktops, and workers who can’t access social networks such as Twitter or Facebook on their office PC are just as likely to use their Smartphone to get access.  Some organisations are adapting to this challenge and embracing more mobile and agile working strategies by implementing ‘bring your own device’ (BYOD) projects, with all of the security implications this entails.

What I’m hoping for in 2013:

1. Organisations start to think about what problems they are trying to solve before implementing a technology “solution”.
2. Collaboration and knowledge sharing are recognised as skills to be learnt and behaviours to be encouraged as part of a wider organisation development plan, rather than as a nebulous outcome on the back of an IT project.
3. Organisations listen more to what tools their staff need to do their jobs, rather than assume that one-size-fits-all.
4. Organisations embrace the benefits of more agile working and accept that not everyone needs to be in the office all of the time.

Well….I can hope!