Group items tagged

article by Diane Stafford at Kansas City Star, 9/20/13 on whether to use Facebook for work connections. It is not a clear progression of tips. Nor does it start from the very first thing one should do: find out about the workplace policy on using social media. 1. Let your boss ask first (?? meaning don't initiate?) 2. Check out how co-workers link (makes sense) 3. Ask first (makes sense to ask workers f2f about connecting) 4. Review your profile (looking for professionally harmful information on pages--makes sense to do regardless of Facebook friends at work) 5. Set privacy settings (yes, good practice to set privacy settings)

Harold Jarche from 2014 on engaging knowledge artisans. "Complex environments are the new normal. Relationship building is needed in order to share complex knowledge. Implicit knowledge takes time to share, so time has to be set aside for sense-making, reflecting, and conversing. These are significant workplace changes, but can be mastered with a stable foundation of PKM practiced by interdependent and autonomous knowledge artisans. When everybody is engaged in sense-making, then any organization can better sense where it needs to go."

Jarche compares Nick Milton's Boston Square with Ask, Tell, Search, Share with his sense-making and seeking and sharing activities. November 2011 Jarche says: Seeking and sharing conversation without any conversation around it would only serve to create additional noise with no signal. It's the individual context, gained through conversations, that provides the real value.

Very nice skill compass for lifelong learning by Online Internet Institute 1. Collaboration/communication--using a variety of technology tools and techniques for organizing people into effective ad hoc teams 2. Exploration/evaluation--making sense of the Internet, by learning how to survey the field and assess what's available 3. Navigation/research--strategies for seeking and finding good data and 4. synthesis/presentation--taking what makes sense and using it to make meaning

great picture of how we make sense of things via Jarche's Friday Finds. Would it look any different if a woman did it? :-)

" 5 Reasons Why Job Boards Aren't As Effective Anymore Don Goodman November 24, 2015 Job Search At one time, job boards were the way to go for job seekers. It's where you could post your resume for employers and recruiters to view, and apply to job openings. But today, it's a different story. Related: Reactive Vs. Proactive Job Search Strategies Job boards are simply not as effective anymore since there are social media outlets like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter where you can pretty much network your way to the right contacts. The fact is, job boards have a 2-4% effectiveness rate whereas networking has over a 50% effectiveness rate." More than 85% of employers use Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) to review and rank resumes according to skills, experience, keywords. Companies use internal algorithms, so out of an average of 400 resumes using these measures results in only 10 - 20 even looked at. Most hiring managers and recruiters use Linkedin first. Job board resumes are still viewed, but chances are the info is outdated so relying on Linkedin makes sense for recruiters. Niche job boards are worth going to, but to be more productive tie into direct networking through the right contacts.

" 5 Reasons Why Job Boards Aren't As Effective Anymore Don Goodman November 24, 2015 Job Search At one time, job boards were the way to go for job seekers. It's where you could post your resume for employers and recruiters to view, and apply to job openings. But today, it's a different story. Related: Reactive Vs. Proactive Job Search Strategies Job boards are simply not as effective anymore since there are social media outlets like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter where you can pretty much network your way to the right contacts. The fact is, job boards have a 2-4% effectiveness rate whereas networking has over a 50% effectiveness rate." More than 85% of employers use Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) to review and rank resumes according to skills, experience, keywords. Companies use internal algorithms, so out of an average of 400 resumes using these measures results in only 10 - 20 even looked at. Most hiring managers and recruiters use Linkedin first. Job board resumes are still viewed, but chances are the info is outdated so relying on Linkedin makes sense for recruiters. Niche job boards are worth going to, but to be more productive tie into direct networking through the right contacts.

Reflection blog post by Nancy White on 1.9.13 on her Project Community course that she co-taught at the Hague. Offers many insights including this jewel below on what the learning design must bring together: "The other aspect of the design was to bring three elements together: sense making discussions about the subject matter (synchronously in class and asynchronously on the class website), insights from weekly "guests" shared via 5-10 minute videos (to bring a variety of voices), and action learning through small group experiences and team projects. I know there are strong feelings about team projects, but building collaboration skills was part of the course learning objectives, so this was a "must do." And we spent time talking about the how - -and reflecting on what was and wasn't working as a vector for learning these skills."

blog by Harold Jarche on the Connected Workplace, 4.15.2013 Excerpts: "Implicit knowledge is best developed through conversations and social relationships. It requires trust before people willingly share their know-how. Social networks can enable better and faster knowledge feedback for people who trust each and share their knowledge. But hierarchies and work control structures constrain conversations. Few people want to share their ignorance with the boss who controls their paycheck. But if we agree that complex and creative work are where long-term business value lies, then learning amongst ourselves is the real work in organizations today. In this emerging network era, social learning is how work gets done." ..."Personal knowledge management (PKM) skills can help to make sense of, and learn from, the constant stream of information that workers encounter from social channels both inside and outside the organization." ..."Collaboration skills can help workers to share knowledge so that people work and learn cooperatively in teams, communities of practice, and social networks." ..."Leaders need to understand the importance of organizational architecture. Working smarter in the future workplace starts by organizing to embrace networks, manage complexity, and build trust."

blog post written June 20, 2011 on I.need.reflection, time to make sense of learning. Love the list of starting prompts for reflecting on a learning lab or experience.

Blog post by Martin Weller, The Ed Techie, November 15, 2013, on Thrun's enlightening on MOOC learners failing to complete the courses.

Love this cogent blog post by Jonathan Rees on why MOOCs are failing --because people need the social supports of learning online or in the classroom. published November 15, 2013.

An article for BBC by Maggie Jackson, September 2009, about our inability to pay attention in an age driven by speed through technology "Still, I'm worried. These digital age wonders will be squandered if we can't think critically, research well, and evaluate the data-floods we now have at our fingertips - and these are precisely the skills alarmingly lacking among both digital natives and older generations. Half of college students can't judge the objectivity of a website. Workers now switch tasks every three minutes, half the time interrupting themselves. As David Nicholas points out, we spend our time online 'power-bouncing' from info-snippet to data-point. And this propensity to rely on point-and-click, first-up-on-Google answers, along with our growing unwillingness to wrestle uncomfortably with nuances or uncertainties, keeps us stuck on the surface of the 'information' age. We're too often sacrificing depth for breadth in the ways we make sense of the world. Yes, we've always had 'power bouncing' and distraction. And surfing or multitasking may have an important place in 21st-century society as strategies of learning. But going forward, we need to do much more than hopscotch across the web, split-focused and pulled this way and that by choice distractions. We cannot mistake fragmented, diffused attention as avenues of higher thought. Instead, we need to do better at cultivating - perhaps resuscitating? - deep focus, keen awareness and meta-cognitive 'executive' attention - the skills crucial to creativity and problem-solving. "

An amazing interview with Maria Popova of Brain Pickings, July 2013 Highlights: What is your area of expertise as a writer or online publisher? I'm not an expert and I aspire never to be one. As Frank Lloyd Wright rightly put it, "An expert is a man who has stopped thinking because 'he knows.'" Brain Pickings began as my record of what I was learning, and it remains a record of what I continue to learn - the writing is just the vehicle for recording, for making sense. That said, one thing I've honed over the years - in part by countless hours of reading and in part because I suspect it's how my brain is wired - is drawing connections between things," "Do you believe in "writer's block"? If so, how do you avoid it? I think the operative word here is "believe." If you fixate on it, it'll be there. It's kind of like insomnia - the more you think about not being able to fall asleep, the less able to fall asleep you become. It's different for everyone, of course, but I find that you break through that alleged "block" simply by writing. As Tchaikovsky elegantly put it, "A self-respecting artist must not fold his hands on the pretext that he is not in the mood." The writer's creativity … Define creativity. The ability to connect the seemingly unconnected and meld existing knowledge into new insight about some element of how the world works. That's practical creativity. Then there's moral creativity: To apply that skill towards some kind of wisdom on how the world ought to work."

Harold Jarche continues to rock my world! October 21, 2013 How do we keep an informed citizenry when we are already choosing TV news sources that affirm our existing points of view? His post began to worry me until I saw that it was ultimately a plug for his PKM workshop. Excerpt: With the consolidation of web media companies, where many, and soon, most of us will be getting our information, it will be increasingly important to build diversity into our own personal and professional learning networks. This may get difficult as more mainstream sites amalgamate their feeds and sources into something similar to Googlezon. Therefore, in this emerging network era, we will need to connect to other people, not centralized information sources, for our own sense-making. Diversity of people in our networks will ensure diversity of thought. This is something that even web media companies cannot control, as long as we maintain control over who we connect to.

part of the interview with Sonia Simone and Jerod Morris at Copyblogger following their decision several weeks ago to close down comments on the Copyblogger blog site. Excerpt: "I don't put my business assets on a platform that I don't control. So I don't put my content on a platform I don't control unless I have it somewhere I can keep it and benefit from it. I wouldn't post original content to Facebook. I would just never - it doesn't make a lot of sense, other than just a post, a simple throw-away kind of a post. So our content lives on our domain, in our e-mail lists. These are assets we can control. " I'm not sure exactly what she means by "content lives on our domain, in our e-mail lists." Maybe it's as simple as it's Copyblogger's stuff, they own it, it's only used to achieve their business purposes and it isn't original stuff that is published elsewhere or stored there on someone else's platform for digestion and use? Blog post also introduces "digital sharecropping" to me. Interesting note about Google-Plus, too. "The nice thing about Google-Plus is I'm notified when someone actually mentions my name, or if I'm following that discussion then I'm notified within Gmail or Google-Plus, any one of the Google products. So it's nice in that way. There's a lot more ease of use. "

Interesting blog post for removing ability to comment on blog posts at Copyblogger by Sonia Simone, 4/2014. Seems that conversation has shifted from blogs to other venues such as Google+ and Twitter ... Copyblogger wants to shift comments to author's blog sites. Final reason is to get out from under the spam which they estimate is about 95% of the comments posted. This "experiment" as they called it interests me because it seems to elevate the role of aggregation tool to scan the web for references to one's work on a regular basis. And it is in line with some of the cMOOC approach--to let the conversation occur anywhere, then capture and make sense of it afterwards.

interesting list of tools, none of which I have heard of, although their functions make sense to me

Good blog post on Slack ins and outs and uses

Love this post by Seth Godin on "too long; didn't read" mentalities as we all proceed in the "checklist mode" of grazing here and there but never stopping long enough to read, understand, and make sense of things. He mentions the importance of "trusted curators" and how it is up to us to decide how to invest our time. Implications for WLS: building dashboards, prioritizing, culling, controlling the incoming flow are all important skills to master for online work. We build on old concepts--dashboard for online focus, leading online--and become trusted curators too to provoke curious second and third thoughts leading to conversions on our site. Excerpt: One option is to read incisively, curate, edit, choose your sources carefully. Limit the inbound to what's important, not what's shiny or urgent or silly. The other option is to assume that you already know what you need to know, and refuse to read anything deeply. Hide behind clever acronyms, flit from viral topic to flame war, never actually diving in. It appears that this is far more common than ever before. Here's what I've found: When I read in checklist mode, I learn almost nothing. It's easy to cherry pick the amusing or the merely short, but it's a quick thrill with very little to show for it.

Written by Jeff Haden, Inc. Magazine columnist, June 2, 2014 This blog post makes sense to me. We should consider these ideas in evaluating our Studio future this month.