Group items tagged

Social Return on Investment (SROI) Primary purpose SROI aims to help organisations understand and manage the social, environmental and economic benefits (value) that they are creating. It is a measurement approach, developed from traditional cost-benefit analysis that captures the economic value of social benefits by translating social objectives into financial measures and focuses on the most important sources of value as defined by stakeholders.1 The SROI model developed by nef is designed to promote the inclusion of all stakeholders' voices in the way organisations make decisions about allocating resources.

List 40 resources of use in managing staff interested in social media

List of guidelines appropriate to the use of social media

Pointing to the 'Social' and the 'Network' in making the case for social networking (twitter edition) Posted on April 5th, 2009 admin 10 comments I recently did a presentation for a senior administration group on campus at UPEI and, in combination with some very good questions from PatParslow about how I talk about organizing my twitter account, I figured it would better mark my learning and potentially prepare these thoughts for a more deeply thought article to post it here and get some feedback from you fine folks if the topic interests you.

As a follow on to the discussion of social learning and formal learning in Long Live … great post by BJ Schone - Have LMSs Jumped The Shark? I constantly hear people (across many organizations) complain about their learning management system (LMS). They complain that their LMS has a terrible interface that is nearly unusable. Upgrades are difficult and cumbersome. Their employees' data is locked in to a proprietary system. Users hate the system. It's ugly. (Did I miss anything?) We've recently seen LMSs shift to include more functionality, such as wikis, blogs, social networking, etc. I think they're heading in the wrong direction. I don't really understand why LMS vendors are now thinking they need to build in every possible 2.0 tool. If I want a great blogging platform, I'm going to download WordPress (it's free and has a huge support community). If I want a great wiki platform, I'm going to download MediaWiki or DokuWiki (also free and they have huge support communities). And when it comes to social networking, as a co-worker put it, "Do they really think I'm going to create a 'friends' list in the LMS? Seriously?"

Brilliant post outlining elements that make up social software.

Another introductory post on the elements of social software, well worth a read and considering when carrying out your trials.

Daily Awesome Tips, Tricks, Cheats And Review!! Twitter Toolbox: 70+ Awesome Twitter Apps, Mash-Ups, Plugins And Services with 2 comments Twitter is hot and making an impact on social networking on the web. With the recent Twitter race between Ashton Kutcher and CNN as well as Tweetie just released for the Mac, Twitter is becoming more and more significant in the social networking and social media world. It is no wonder Twitter is a great platform for many awesome extensions to develop. In this post, we will show you to 70+ Twitter apps, add-ons, services, mashups and plugins to enhance your Twitter experience. Please help us spread this post on Twitter if you liked this article!! All of the Twitter apps listed below are free unless otherwise stated:

The adult learners we work with face a difficult conundrum: Their social world is constrained by the technologies they know how to use and vice versa: The technologies they know how to use are limited by their social world. For many people, a solo exploration of the online world can be arduous, insecure, and time-consuming. In an age characterized by increasing access to information and communication technologies, and by learning through these technologies, such issues acquire a great significance. This is particularly true when we view learning as a social experience and not one of absorbing information. In this article, we explore a design for learning that includes connecting people across time and distance so that they develop practices for sharing and creating information and knowledge rather than just acquiring it.

Social network analysis (SNA) is the mapping and measuring of relationships and flows between people, groups, organizations, animals, computers or other information/knowledge processing entities. The nodes in the network are the people and groups while the links show relationships or flows between the nodes. SNA provides both a visual and a mathematical analysis of human relationships. Management consultants use this methodology with their business clients and call it Organizational Network Analysis (ONA). A method to understand networks and their participants is to evaluate the location of actors in the network. Measuring the network location is finding the centrality of a node. These measures help determine the importance, or prominence, of a node in the network. Network location can be different than location in the hierarchy, or organizational chart. We look at a social network, called the "Kite Network" (see above), developed by David Krackhardt, a leading researcher in social networks. Two nodes are connected if they regularly talk to each other, or interact in some way. For instance, in the network above, Andre regularly interacts with Carol, but not with Ike. Therefore Andre and Carol are connected, but there is no link drawn between Andre and Ike. This network effectively shows the distinction between the three most popular individual network measures: Degree Centrality, Betweenness Centrality, and Closeness Centrality.

Twitter Set Theory & The Wisdom of the Group Wednesday, April 9, 2008 Several weeks ago I was introduced to an idea that I have found to be profound in its simplicity but complex in its implications. In an informal discussion about educational technology at EduBloggerCon West, Steve Hargadon described the kind of learning that is taking place in today's social networks. Interestingly enough, I caught the discussion via Ustream (and participated remotely within the Ustream chat), demonstrating yet another facet of this idea. I will paraphrase what Steve has come to call "the wisdom of the group": You don't need to have everybody in the room in order to have a good conversation. In other words, once you reach a certain number of people - local experts, if you will - you can have very rich dialog without requiring that all of the experts be present. Steve has found this to be true in many of the social networks that he frequents, and I have found it to be true in Twitter. In the days following our discussion, I have drawn up several diagrams that I think demonstrate additional dimensions to this concept (they also fit in nicely with this fine collection).

Amazing blog post looking at the evolution of social software.

Worth a look around this blog, has some excellent posts!

I recently read a very interesting post by Terry Anderson, Edublogers as a Network of Practice. Network of Practice - a distributed aggregation of members who share some common interests and values, but their correspondence and especially face to face meetings occur much less often or not at all. Leadership and activities in a NoP are emergent and usually informal. NoP members interact sporadically and develop their network in an informal and spontaneous manner that is occasioned through blogs, social software based communities, perhaps a face-to-face or online conference, newsgroup, mailing list or other shared social networking interactions. Membership in a NoP is voluntary, usually open, often transitory and likely many of the NOP members are strangers to each other.

Excellent book covering the take up of social software in enterprise/business

Template for Building a Small Powerful Network December 15, 2008 · 58 comments networkThis post is somewhat inspired by a thought Jeff Pulver tossed out as an aside at his Social Media Jungle prototype in Long Island a few weeks ago. Hat tip to you, Jeff. Jeff Pulver said this: "We're making our own dial tone." In such a typical Jeff Pulver way, he tossed out a little idea that had been bouncing around his head, but that he hasn't rolled into any particular context yet, so I'm going to run with it. I've got an idea that came to me tonight about Twitter (amongst other social networks), and I'm going to share it with you: take that dial tone idea and build your own network. We're sitting on something because we're still in the "gee whiz" mode. Let me explain.

Yochai Benkler's wealth of nations book online Next Chapter: Part I: The Networked Information Economy » read paragraph Chapter 1: Introduction: A Moment of Opportunity and Challenge 1 Information, knowledge, and culture are central to human freedom and human development. How they are produced and exchanged in our society critically affects the way we see the state of the world as it is and might be; who decides these questions; and how we, as societies and polities, come to understand what can and ought to be done. For more than 150 years, modern complex democracies have depended in large measure on an industrial information economy for these basic functions. In the past decade and a half, we have begun to see a radical change in the organization of information production. Enabled by technological change, we are beginning to see a series of economic, social, and cultural adaptations that make possible a radical transformation of how we make the information environment we occupy as autonomous individuals, citizens, and members of cultural and social groups. It seems passé today to speak of "the Internet revolution." In some academic circles, it is positively naïve. But it should not be. The change brought about by the networked information environment is deep. It is structural. It goes to the very foundations of how liberal markets and liberal democracies have coevolved for almost two centuries.

"One of the top 10 questions in social media marketing asked is "How do we kick start our community?" This post aims at providing some resources for brands that are preparing their community strategy. The old adage of the field of dreams isn't true -if you build it-they won't neccesarily come. Brands must have a kick start plan to be successful with their community. Below, I'll list out some practices I've heard from companies that have had successful communities, and I'd ask you chime in and add more ways, let's get started, I'll be as specific and actionable as possible."

mike wesc purpose driven research project on anonymity kansas uni ethnography/social anthropology on web 2.0 trends

"The Center for Open Innovation, a unit of the Institute of Management, Innovation, and Organization at UC-Berkeley, conducts scholarly research and engages corporate leadership in three key areas: Open Innovation is the use of purposive inflows and outflows of knowledge to accelerate innovation. With knowledge now widely distributed, companies cannot rely entirely on their own research, but should acquire inventions or intellectual property from other companies when it advances the business model. Open Business Models create value by leveraging many more ideas, due to their inclusion of a variety of external concepts, and can also enable greater value capture, by using a key asset, resource, or position not only in the company's own business model but also in other companies' businesses. Services Science, Management and Engineering integrates management, social and cognitive sciences, computer science, operations research, and engineering to drive innovation, competition, and quality of life through service systems."

"As a matter of fact, the questions that zip through my mind everytime I think of how I can improve my own skills at community building, are so many that I always end up with more unanswered doubts than solutions. * How do you nurture engagement inside your community? * How do you keep the community going? * How do you get people to socialize inside a new community? To get some answers to these critical questions, I have briefly taken hostage online facilitation and community-building expert Nancy White during her last Rome visit, a few days ago.Nancy is a truly experienced person in this area and she always speaks out of the ongoing in-depth experience she has with real communities, both online and in real life. Her answers are non-technical, pragmatical, and if you are not into community building yet, quite enlightening."

Anecdote is an Australian consulting firm that specialises in helping organisations to tackle complex problems like organisational change, learning and project evaluation. We help to create the conditions for insight and empowerment. Anecdote can help organisations when traditional methods have failed. Better still, we can help you to avoid failure. We use a range of contemporary but proven approaches that draw on group intelligence, participation, complexity thinking and the power of narrative. We believe that everyone in an organisation has something valuable to offer in making improvements and our techniques draw on this priceless and diverse resource. Our techniques are based on the disciplines of complexity science and knowledge management and include business- narrative, storytelling, communities of practice, social network analysis and open space technology. In fact Anecdote is regarded as a world leader in the practical applications of business-narrative.

Personal and Group Learning Using Web 2.0 Tools : eLearning Technology In my previous post, I examined Personal Learning for Learning Professionals - Using Web 2.0 Tools to Make Reading & Research More Effective. That post focused primarily on how Social Bookmarking tools such as del.icio.us or Yahoo My Web can be used as part of Personal Learning. In this post, I want to focus on a specific scenario that involves Personal and Group Learning and how Web 2.0 tools apply to this need. Scenario - a learning development department in a mid size corporation has five staff members. They want to define an eLearning strategy that will look at (a) the business needs of their company and internal clients, (b) their performance and learning needs, (c) their learning strategies, and (d) what they need to do from a services, technology, process and people perspective to support this strategy. They will be creating this strategy over the next few months and have many strong feelings among the group about different things they can and should be doing. The strategy will ultimately be presented as part of the fall planning cycle and be used as part of budget justification. It will also be used to help communicate with internal clients about the services they provide and how they can work with these clients. They also want what they define in the strategy today to live on and evolve over time. In order to accomplish this, they need to learn quite a bit about where things are today in their business and in eLearning and where they are going in the future.