Social Media for Working & Learning

Integrate Tokbox and Etherpad.

ReadWrite Enterprise has a great posting today on integrating Tokbox and Etherpad.

"TokBox is basically a video chat service that adds a flavor of a social network. You can friend other TokBox users, embed it in Facebook, or use the desktop Adobe AIR app. What it didn't really have was an easy way to work with others on a document. Including EtherPad is the ideal way to fill that hole in the service."

Find out more here: TokBox & EtherPad: Video Chat Gets Real-Time Document Editing

Import your Google Docs to Slideshare

Slideshare recently rolled out the ability to import and share documents from Google Docs on SlideShare. For now we support importing presentations, documents and pdf files.

Just follow the steps outlined in the SlideShare blog posting.

Related SMIL resources:

• Presentation sharing & SLIDESHARE
• Collab docs & GOOGLE DOCS

SocialToo

A number of the big technology blogs have been posting about SocialToo's new Facebook app, SocialToo Status, so here's my own short posting about it.

SocialToo is intended to help you become "a social networking power user. Keep your follower lists in sync across networks, and learn more about your relationships. Send surveys to your followers and more!"

According to the SocialToo blog, SocialToo status can be your "central hub for posting to Facebook and Twitter".

Read more analysis here:

• Publish Your Facebook Status to Twitter With SocialToo - Mashable, 24 August 2009
• SocialToo Launches App That Allows You To Publish From Facebook To Twitter -TechCruch, 24 August 2009

What are the evolutionary stages of a social media evangelist?

Steve Radick reflects on the stages he went through in this recent blog posting in Social Media Strategery: The Evolution of the Social Media Evangelist, writing

"Since that first day back in 2006, when I realized the opportunities that social media presented me, my company, and my government, I have evolved from an opportunist to a leader (I hope!), and I can only hope that I’ll continue to evolve in the years ahead. Here are the seven evolutionary stages that I went through as a social media evangelist"

1. The Opportunist
2. The Idealist
3. The Pessimist
4. The Workaholic
5. The Egotist
6. The Teacher
7. The Leader

Which stage are you at?

Finally, he asks: "So what’s the next phase?  I’m not real sure at this point ... My hope is that social media will just become so ingrained in people’s lives that it will be time for a new evolution to take place, an evolution that uses social media to help further an even greater cause.  Maybe that’s when you enter the “Mentor” phase…"

Gathering examples of use of social media for learning

In a posting yesterday, I said that I was about to set up a way to gather and, of course, share examples of the ways that organisations (businesses, non-profits and education) are using social media tools to promote, encourage and/or support "learning" (in its widest sense) internally (for own staff and students) as well as externally (for customers, students and others) - whether it be to offer a more informal, social approach to learning or to complement and extend more formal, course-based learning approaches.

I've decided the best way to do this is to use a Google Docs form and collect them in a spreadsheet where users can easily view and sort responses. So below you will find the form embedded in this posting if you'd like to contribute and start the ball rolling.  Once I have gathered a number of responses, I will, of course, share the URL.

Non-profits leading the way in use of social media

In June 2009 the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research completed a longitudinal study on the usage of social media by United States charities. The study compared organizational adoption of social media in 2007 and 2008 by the 200 largest charities in the United States as compiled annually by Forbes Magazine. The results?

This new research shows that charitable organizations are still outpacing the business world and academia in their use of social media. In the latest study (2008) a remarkable eighty-nine percent of charitable organizations are using some form of social media including blogs, podcasts, message boards, social networking, video blogging and wikis. A majority (57%) of the organizations are blogging. Forty-five percent of those studied report social media is very important to their fundraising strategy. While these organizations are best known for their non-profit status and their fundraising campaigns, they demonstrate an acute, and still growing, awareness of the importance of Web 2.0 strategies in meeting their objectives.

You can download a copy of the research either as a PDF or a DOC at the link below:

Still Setting the Pace in Social Media: The First Longitudinal Study of Usage by the Largest US Charities

All things Elgg

In response to requests from a number of my clients and blog readers, I have just set up a brand new blog called All things Elgg, where I will be posting about news and resources to support the implementation, customisation and use of the open source social media and collaboration platform, Elgg, with a  particular focus on its use for learning and working within businesses and education.

I will also be featuring some Elgg implementations and how they are being used for learning and working, so if you would like your site to be featured, just let me know by emailing: jane.hart@c4lpt.co.uk.

Using Wordle safely

Wordle is a great little tool: simple yet enormously effective.  It lets you easily build word clouds from content.  Here's one that I produced of my review of 2008: 100 great articles to read, the titles of which I fed into Wordle to generate the following word cloud.

You now see Wordles everywhere you go - on blogs or other websites.  Wordle has become very popular and in fact it is currently ranked joint 33 in this year's Top 100 Tools for Learning. 

There have, however, been some concerns about how it can be safely used in the classroom, since the homepage might display inappropriate images.  But now, Jonathan Feinberg, the Senior Software Engineer at IBM who created Wordle, has addressed these concerns, and if you read his recent blog posting, How to make Wordle safe for classroom use, you can find out how to configure an institution's "site-blocking" software to keep Wordle safe for classroom use.

Social media use by universities and businesses

Via a posting on David Hopkins' E-Learning Blog Don't Waste Your Time I came across a link to a list of UK Universities on YouTube on Liz Azyan's blog. 

Whilst looking around Liz's blog, I also found the following interesting postings:

• List of UK university Twitter accounts
• List of UK university Fan pages on Facebook<

BTW: Liz is undertaking research to understand how social media is being used in UK HEIs - and you can participate in this survey here

From the lists above it seemed that most of the examples are of the use of YouTube. Twitter and Facebook accounts as external marketing tools - and so the research reminds me a lot of Peter Kim's wiki which, since September 2008, has been gathering examples of social media marketing by corporates.

My own interests and research are focused on gathering specific examples of the ways that organisations (both business and education) are using social media tools to promote, encourage and/or support "learning" (in its widest sense) internally (for own staff and students) as well as externally (for customers and students) - whether it be to encourage a more informal, social approach to learning or to complement and extend more formal, course-based learning approaches.  Following Peter Kim's approach (above) I am going to set up a wiki to gather and aggregate examples of social media tools for learning. Let me know - jane.hart@c4lpt.co.uk - if you'd be interested in contributing.  I'll make another posting when it is ready for contributions and viewing

SMIL related resources

• Building a social media/learning strategy
• Social media reading list

Execs don't want to be "friended" by their colleagues

A recent survey by OfficeTeam, a staffing service specializing in the placement of skilled administrative professionals, asked 150 randomly selected senior executives in the 1,000 largest companies in the US the following question:

How comfortable would you feel about being ‘friended’ by the following individuals on Facebook: Your boss, your co-workers, people you manage, clients, vendors?

These were the responses:

	Your boss	Your coworkers	People you manage	Clients	Vendors
Very comfortable	19%	13%	12%	7%	6%
Somewhat comfortable	28%	38%	32%	34%	23%
Not very comfortable	15%	13%	15%	17%	24%
Not comfortable at all	32%	28%	33%	33%	38%
Don't know	6%	8%	8%	9%	9%
	100%	100%	100%	100%	100

I think there are a number of factors here:

1. Although personal and professional online personas/identities are colliding; individuals often want to maintain a distance in an organisational context, and not "muddy the waters"; and that there is a clear need for organisation-specific social media platforms
2. The term "friend" is in itself a very powerful one with a very clear, meaning, and is often not considered appropriate in a business context.

When working with clients, on business implementations of the social media and collaboration platform, Elgg, we have addressed these factors in the following ways:

• We impress on staff that the collaboration platform is for organisational and professional working and learning - not for private socialising - that is best done on other public sites like Faceboook
• Where a relationship between individuals is to be established on the collaboration platform, we have renamed the term "Friends" to "Colleagues", "Contacts" or "Connections" as we have seen that staff are much happier at establishing connections with Contacts or Colleagues within an organisational context

Related SMIL resource

• Social Media Guidelines & Policies