"We've discovered that some things matter much less than you may suspect when building a great team. Getting the smartest people, for example." HBR has a new issue out this month, April 2012 on teams. In my LinkedIn review of what's new, I see that there may be some updates to the team models and traditions of the likes of Belbin, Tuckman, Gibb-Dannemiller and crew. Excerpted from a pre-publication blog post by Alex "Sandy" Pentland: "...I've encountered teams that are "clicking." I've experienced the "buzz" of a group that's blazing away with new ideas in a way that makes it seem they can read each others' minds." ____________________________ How we communicate turns out to be the most important predictor of team success, and as important as all other factors combined, including intelligence, personality, skill, and content of discussions. ____________________________ MIT's Human Dynamics Laboratory used wearable electronic sensors to capture how people communicate in real time. Not only did they determine the characteristics that make up great teams, but they also described those characteristics mathematically. What's more, we've discovered that some things matter much less than you may suspect when building a great team. Getting the smartest people, for example. Our data show that great teams:
...According to our data, it's as true for humans as for bees: How we communicate turns out to be the most important predictor of team success, and as important as all other factors combined, including intelligence, personality, skill, and content of discussions. The old adage that it's not what you say, but how you say it, turns out to be mathematically correct. Read the full blog post, The Hard Science of Teamwork, here. 
"Info & a video about free & for fee whiteboard screencasting tools - all the rage for creating educational videos like those featured in the Khan Academy." Here's a few excerpts, adapted:
Here's a video featuring Camtasia.
The basic concept is very simple: you plan your lesson, then record what you draw using the drawing program and your narration with the video screen capture program. The input device (use a graphics tablet for best results) allows you to draw or write on a tablet rather than trying to use the mouse. iPad Video Capture: For those interested in capturing the action on an iPad 2 or 3, this helpful video from MacMost Now will explain how. ==== I'd like to try this for instructional video soon. Have any of our readers done this on the iPad? 
This goes with my last post, custom education aided by tools like Course Hero.
Robin Good: Course Hero is a platform which allows the creation and delivery of online video courses curated from the best existing published content on that topic.
There are already ready-made courses to access or you can submit a topic that you would like to video-curate into a course.
"You can learn just about anything from YouTube...if you're willing to dig through millions of videos."
From Techcrunch: "Luckily, Course Hero has done the work for you, offering coherent classes by hosting collections of the best educational YouTube videos and other content. The newly launched courses section of the eduTech startup’s site now has classes in entrepreneurship, business plan development, and programming in a variety of languages. ... By drawing from YouTube and other openly available education, Course Hero plans to set up courses for anything it, or you, can think of. ... Each course breaks down into roughly 6 chapters of 6 concept YouTube videos, Justin.tv videos, articles, and more. Unlike Udemy‘s one-teacher-per-class approach, Course Hero courses are compiled from content by many teachers. Rather than put you at the mercy of long-winded professors, Course Hero trims videos and articles down to their most important teachings.
Along the way you’ll answer quiz questions, take tests to complete chapters, and face a final exam to finish a course and earn proficiency badges..."
Full article: http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/12/course-hero/
Courses: http://www.coursehero.com/courses/
More info: http://www.coursehero.com/ Via Robin Good 
Helpful perspective from Robin Good and the curator of this post: Pinterest is only the tip of the iceberg. Out there there are literally tens of visual pinning and sharing boards covering styles, topics and tribes of all kinds.
One such group of product and object curation tools is the one dedicated to the collection and organization of luxury, fashion, art and design.
This article highlights and briefly reviews five of these social product discovery services while analyzing their key differences.
The services reviewed include:
-> Discoveredd -> StyleSaint -> Spark Rebel -> Common Bloggers
Very useful. 7/10 Full article: http://fashionablymarketing.me/2012/04/four-social-curation-sites-for-luxury-brands/ Via Robin Good, janlgordon 
I'll bet you'll be familiar with most or all of these barriers to learning in organizations. Awareness and systemic, planful action on your preferred future can help us overcome them.
Here's a sample from the 12 listed:
Program focus – new programs and services are evaluated in isolation rather than as interdependent parts of the whole organization, e.g., a diversity workshop is evaluated by the participants at the end of the workshop, not by everyone in the organization weeks and months after the workshop
Limited resources – learning is not given adequate funding and support, e.g., staff are not given resources to experiment with new ideas before risking large scale implementation
Some of the others on this great list include:
What are your thoughts about a preferred future that makes these barriers irrelevant? Via Frederic DOMON 
Social media is the platform and social learning is the act. (paraphrased by me - dn) Social learning... is the act of exchanging ideas, knowledge or information through social media means. Marcia Conner and Tony Bingham, in The New Social Learning, define social learning as:
Social learning is a behavior. It is not a separate behavior outside of the overall learning spectrum, but one that is also relatively new. One cannot assume that by enlisting in a Facebook or Twitter account (social media examples) that the user will be able to socially learn. Organizations not only need to help with the definition of learning, they need to provide the right opportunities to help their employees understand how to socially learn as well. 
"As businesses become social businesses, collaboration and community skills are becoming the new workplace skills." This post recalled one of the structural questions I like to consider in organization design: how changing roles, goals procedures & relationships will foster collaborative culture through encouraging and supporting new skills. Excerpts: [Consider what roles would] help identify what “good” collaboration behaviour might look like within [your] organisation, and ...help to build an effective collaboration culture. [A chief collaboration officer] will need:
...developing collaborative skills will require an ongoing, adaptive, organic “modeling” process – not a one-off training event. 
Pinterest THIS! It's an opportunity to channel your connect-the-dots ability into absorbing this prescient piece from Brain Pickings.
It may strike you as sophisticated & illuminating or wandering and confusing, depending on how it grabs your favorites or introduces you to unknown history.
Some excerpted nuggets:
"The purpose of this inventory is to draw a circle around a body of objects; to take stock of their common properties; and to tell a story about where they came from, what they were, and where they led.
Their variety is such as to sustain a multiplicity of narrative threads: about
. Referred: for the Information Age via @piscitelli Via juandoming 
Great piece on how to deconstruct & construct interactive & social learning.
One of the best ways to learn to build better courses is to find some good examples, break them apart, and then try to build something similar. This way you get some hands-on practice, which is a lot more valuable than reading about interactive elearning. ![Pinterest Drives More Traffic Than Google+, YouTube and LinkedIn Combined [STUDY] | Social, Peer Learning & Curation | Scoop.it](http://img.scoop.it/qT7hMAiBMqAreMXxZhIIHTl72eJkfbmt4t8yenImKBVaiQDB_Rd1H6kmuBWtceBJ)
Pinterest now beats YouTube, Reddit, Google+, LinkedIn and MySpace for percentage of total referral traffic in January. Wow! Pinterest is growing like gangbusters, like an 8000% increase, (another Pinterest post in my Peer/Social Learning & Curation stream here.) It remains to be seen what that means for the company and it's sustainability.
Excerpts from Mashable: The darling network of brides-to-be, fashionistas and budding bakers now beats YouTube, Reddit, Google+, LinkedIn and MySpace for percentage of total referral traffic in January, according to a Shareaholic study. Pinterest accounted for 3.6% of referral traffic, while Twitter just barely edged ahead of the newcomer, accounting for 3.61% of referral traffic. In July 2011, Pinterest accounted for just 0.17% of referral traffic, proving the site’s blockbuster growth. 
"What better time to be bold, try something new, than in 2012 with an UnConference?" I'm starting to track unconferences in this curation stream, as I'm quite intrigued with their results and impacts on peer & social learning. I'm privileged to be a convener of a taste of Open Space for 30 minutes of a 90 minute panel kickoff session for the Association of Change Management Practitioners, 2012 (#ACMP2012) in Las Vegas, in April. (Early bird deadline today.) Our collaborative panel + Open Space will be a new experience to a good number of the structured focused participants as this conference, a number of whom are corporate, PROSCI change management trained. It will also be familiar to a smaller group of us, those who have some comfort with being uncomfortable and "leaning into" the new, the unfamiliar, which is a natural part of learning. To that end, here are a few excerpts from this HR based (read: HR generally prefers structure) UnConference. I like to tap into these seemingly yin/yang experiences whenever possible to learn: #SLCONF 2012 is a 1-day engaging unconference that explores the growing impact of Social Collaborative platforms in Learning & Development. The unconference will combine a mixture of Case Study presentations and Interactive Discussions. My next post will be a YouTube video on how to run an UnConference. It's illuminating if you are new to the idea, regarding peer learning and using a semi-structured process. 
What are the actions, results that come from our collecting, referencing, bookmarking, and proliferations of social media profiles, blogs, channels and social empires? This post refers to current tools, and probes our purpose in using them by asking questions I often ask in executive coaching or in just making a smart decision:
Excerpted: ...With the near omnipresence of digital reference material, many of us no longer turn first to our own collections. Yet we were trained, explicitly or implicitly, to collect and save large amounts of information. In Scott Belky’s recent book Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality, he argues that most people spend too much time collecting notes of various kinds, and goes so far as to say: References obstruct your bias toward action. Many times, we hold onto an email, the URL of a website, or the PDF of a journal article, as a kind of emblem of an action we intend to take... If those actions are important, then they should be captured and put into your action list. Otherwise you’re just piling up digital clutter. Tools like Evernote, Catch (formerly 3Banana) and DevonThink can help you tag, manage, and easily retrieve those references.) If you just keep everything, then you lose sight of what’s most important. Today, with so much information all around us, there’s less and less that you really need to keep yourself. Focus on the important stuff and let go of the rest. |
Check out the top five schools using social media well, at least today. These are the usual suspects. ALSO take a look at OmniAcademy and Southern New Hampshire University (profiled in Fast Company.) These two seem to have more in common in preparing for the disruption in higher education that is already beginning to happen. Via Peter Azzopardi 
"Is it really about teaching more, in less time, with shrinking budgets? Or are we doing our brains & our bottom line a disservice, including conference event planning?" This is a great post on how to leverage learning that sticks, is sticky, vs. a spray and pray approach that still, unfortunately, dominates training programs and many conference events. Here's an excerpt of this great post by Fresh thinking about how we learn
With this finding, scientists such as Lila Davachi at NYU and others have been able to test out many variables involved in learning experiences, such as what happens to the hippocampus if you distract people while absorbing information. Over a few months of collaboration, Lila Davachi and I, along with Tobias Keifer, a consultant from Booz & Co., found a useful pattern that summarized the four biggest factors that determined the quality of recall. These are:
The AGES model was first presented at the 2010 NeuroLeadership Summit, and then published in the 2010 NeuroLeadership Journal. Read the full post including Learning that lasts through AGES that has a summary of this important research here. 
From Pinterest wildly successful pinboards to a custom mobile tool, like Kullect - with context: "why people share the things they do, or how they fit into a larger story."
Robin Good's summary of Kullect - a mobile publishing tool that allows you to capture, organize and share "collections" about things that interest and inspire you.
Excerpted: From Xconomy: "Open up any of today’s top mobile media-sharing networks on your smartphone—like Instagram or Picplz for photos, Klip for videos, or Path for group sharing—and what you see is a random stream of disconnected items, stretching infinitely from today into last week, last month, and last year.
Each individual item in a stream may represent somebody’s special moment or act of curation, but there are no mechanisms within these platforms for ordering things or imposing a theme.
No pattern emerges. It’s just one damn thing after another.
Which is a little too much like real life, if you ask me. What’s missing is a sense of context.
I’d get a lot more out these apps if I understood why people share the things they do, or how they fit into a larger story.
That’s the whole point of Kullect.
As the name suggests, the app is all about building collections [which are like] extended, multimedia blog posts.
...
You can have as many collections as you want, and a collection can have any theme you want—I’ve seen Kullect users posting pictures from trips they’re taking, lists of their favorite bars or clubs, and varieties of roses in their gardens.
But whatever the theme, a collection amounts to a kind of story about what you’re doing or what you’re passionate about."
(Source: http://www.xconomy.com/national/2012/04/13/kullect-reinvents-blogging-for-the-smartphone-era/)
Check out this introductory 2min video: http://youtu.be/vsEBko0T05M
Android: https://market.android.com/details?id=com.kullect.android
iPhone: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/kullect/id414731330?mt=8
More info: http://www.kullect.com/ Via Robin Good 
Via renee fountain 
"Facebook has announced the launch of Interest Lists, a new feature designed to help users curate the content of pages and public figures in which they’re interested."
Curation hits Facebook. You can become the sorter of all that Facebook info to collect and group what is of interest to you. All my fellow Facebook link posters, this includes you.
Excerpted:
Facebook new Interest Lists promises to deliver the top posts from each interest group (list) in the user’s newsfeed.
Over the coming weeks, users will see “Add Interests” appear in the left-hand sidebar on their newsfeed. Users can also create lists from “Create List” in the “Interests” page.
Interest lists can help you turn Facebook into your own personalized newspaper, with special sections—or feeds—for topics that matter to you. You can find traditional news sections like Business, Sports and Style or get much more personalized.
Interest Lists are, of course, similar in concept to Google+ Circles, though they are limited to curating content from public figures and Pages..."
Read full article here: http://j.mp/xmbXuO Via Giuseppe Mauriello, Robin Good 
"There is no better way to learn something than to research, organize and build a personal framework of information, facts, resources, tools and stories around it," says Sam Gliksman.
And from Robin Good:
Curation can therefore be a revolutionary concept applicable both to learners and their approach as well as to the new "teachers" who need to become trusted guides in specific areas of interest.
Robin selected several excerpts to illustrate from Gliksman's post:
As a process consultant and facilitator of groups, this quote especially caught my eye:
The full article is here. Via Robin Good "Using Storify, another curation tool, this is a helpful collection of what expert curation is and can continue to be from a journalistic and curator perspective." After experiencing an excellent special collection of Rembrandt "The Faces of Jesus" at the Detroit Institute of Art recently, just after walking through the Dutch masters exhibits on their 3rd floor, context and quality is the MAIN thing in expert curation. Excerpts: "Curation is not simply the act of collecting disparate items and sloppily slopping them together." Peter Alter explains his duties as a curator at the Chicago History Museum here, via video. Business Insider's Steve Rosenbaum says that "curation is the new role of media professionals." Here is his explanation of how those professions can provide context. 
"If we do this right, I'll learn more about facilitating others to self-organize learning." Toward Peeragogy: the transformative power of high-end, peer-to-peer, global learning via the internet and social media. From the author of a UC-Berkley post: I've been invited to deliver the 2011 Regents' Lecture at University of California, Berkeley. I intend to expand the paragogy universe by instigating a peer-created guide to pure peer-to-peer learning. I'm calling it "peeragogy." While "paragogy" is more etymologically correct, "peeragogy" is self-explanatory. In my lecture, I'll explain the evolution of my own pedagogy and reveal some of what I've discovered in the world of online self-organized learning. Then I will invite volunteers to join me in a two week hybrid of face-to-face seminars and online discussion. Can we self-organize our research, discover, summarize, and prioritize what is known through theory and practice, then propose, argue, and share a tentative resource guide for peeragogical groups? In theory, those who use our guide to pursue their own explorations can edit the guide to reflect new learning. It's not exactly a matter of making my own role of teacher obsolete. If we do this right, I'll learn more about facilitating others to self-organize learning. This is the last in a very popular series. The previous three posts are: D.I.Y.U.: An Experiment, Pop Up U, and Learning Reimagined: Participatory, Peer, Global, Online. 
Is it finally Time for Social HR? What's out there that uses social systems to revitalize how people are recruited and learn, grow and develop within organizations? If organizations tend to be hidebound against change, Human Resources (HR) is even more so, in spite of the trendy strategic HR spin of the early 2000's . Consider HR's roots, which persists: labor relations, compensation, employment/personnel and the number of lawyers on staff. Here's some fresh thinking about injecting social into HR systems. Excerpted, adapted: Knowledge Sharing: Forget the idea of databases acting as “repositories” of knowledge, internal social networks can capture employees work activity as social intranets – and team members can follow what others are doing on their activity streams. Newer tools like Opzi and MindQuilt can also emerge as a enterprise version of Quora, the popular Q&A site. Recruitment: HR has been quick to leverage social media to “Broadcast” vacancies. The next level would be actively creating and nurturing communities of practice shaped around skills where hiring managers can gauge level of skills of people and also develop them (Disclaimer: The author works with BraveNewTalent, a platform that helps organizations do that) HR policies: Using a social tool which leverages crowdsourcing ideas from employees can help HR in co-creating processes and policies – and raise acceptability when they are finally rolled out. Dell’s EmployeeStorm is a great example by which employees give ideas on everything in the company. This is a satire of the trendy term, Curation. Note: apologies to the PG language in the labeling. Parody shakes up the boundaries of taking ourselves too seriously, especially in social media with #curation trending, heh.
Satire is a lesson, parody is a game. ~ Vladimir Nabokov
Excerpt:
In response to the original Mashable article, "S**t People Say", the scoopit team Ally Greer and Axelle Tessandier ...did a parody on 'S**t Curators Say".
...hilarious. It's good to laugh at ourselves!!
Also see the video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-W-9P6rOnU Via janlgordon Bruce Eckel covers what Open Spaces are how they are run, and resolves many misconceptions about 'Unconferences'. 10 seconds into this video, and you'll see the first of the mechanics for how it works, as well as lessons that Bruce has learned in doing UnConferences. Even though this video is titled, "Open Spaces" - it really is about running an Unconference, step-by-step, using Open Space concepts. The two concepts are a bit different. Open Space tends to be about developing actions as take aways focused around a central theme or issue. It is not necessarily focused primarily on learning and exchange, although it CAN be, as I will be demonstrating in a learning & dialog focused 30 minute Open Space demonstration/learning event at a panel/open space combo event at our April, 2012 session for the Assn. for Change Management Practitioners in Las Vegas. UnConferences are about learning and dialog, in an open, self-directed format where participants co-create & co-own the outcomes. Here's a collection of UnConference videos, interviews, and how-to resources that you might find useful, as deemed by my perspective as a facilitator and change strategist/organization development practitioner: Two views of What is an UnConference? Brief video Show and tell, photos of an unconference in action. Video I (part of a series) of healthcare & teamwork UnConference in action. How to run a great UnConference session. How to prepare to attend an UnConference, especially if you might be facilitating dialog in an UnConference session. 
Networks, people and business continues to intertwine themselves gently and fiercely, especially on Pinterest. People don't want brands in their face, except for, perhaps, a favored few. That may be enough for Pinterest. . I use ScoopIt for business & Pinterest for fun / people networks. Check out my own boards on Pinterest and find out why, along with the review of Pinterest's success below. Also, my low-carb chocolate cake Pinterest referral link is here. . Excerpts:
. Pinterest curation in action:
. Pinterest should be thriving a year from now . The author suggests 30 million users next Thanksgiving - and spawning hundreds of copycat startups in other verticals.
Curated by Jan Gordon covering "Content Curation, Social Business and Beyond"
Read full article here: [http://bit.ly/ysH3kI] from AllTechie News Via janlgordon |
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