Social Media for Working & Learning

My social learning presentations - on Slideshare

I've been asked by a number of people where they can see my presentation on social learning that includes the slide on social learning models.

You'll find the presentation here in this Slideshare widget together with other recent presentations. It's called "Supporting formal and informal learning" and is the 3rd in a series of 3 on social learning.  #1 is "From E-Learning to Social Learning", and #2 is "Using Elgg as a social media platform" - also available in this bundle

| Get your SlideShare Playlist

Google Docs - improvements for students

The Office Google Blog has a posting about improvements to Google Docs

"As interns on the Google Docs team this past summer, we were excited to be able to work on making Google Docs that much more useful for students like us. We've now added a bunch of back to school features which should help our fellow students make the transition from summer to school that much easier — and we hope they'll be useful to you non-students as well!"

Improvements include an equation editor, super- and subscripts, translation features, "go to page" for surveys created, and this video to show how collaboration can even help out with "extracurricular" activities:

Read the posting for full details

More about Google Docs:

• Google Docs reading list

Update on my social models posting

There has been a lot of interest on my social models posting, that I just wanted to mention that I will very shortly be offering my "building a social learning strategy" workshop online - via our Social Learning Environment, SoLearn - powered by Elgg. This will be the second social learning resource, the first will be "Introduction to Social Learning Environments.

I'll be posting more about them again shortly, but for a preview: you can find out more here

Social Learning Models

When I help organisations understand how to incorporate social media into their formal e-learning content to create formal social learning, I explain this can be done in 3 different ways as shown in this slide from a presentation I use:

However, I also impress that (1) won't work that well - it'll be like the early days of e=learning when online learning was bolted onto formal courses - it just wasn't used!  Social aspects need to be well integrated into a course to ensure that they arean  integral part of it (2), but furthermore a collaborative approach (3) - where the course is focused around working together rather that the content itself - is a very effective model.

Dave Wilkins has just written an article for Learning Circuits - Learning 2.0 and workplace communites - where he describes three similar models:

1. Embedded model
2. Wrapped model
3. Community model

Related resources

• Social learning reading list

• Find out more about my social learning consultancy here.

29 September Update:

Want to see my social learning presentations? Here's the posting

Get links from your Twitter feed as RSS: Readtwit

Keeping on the RSS theme, I have just come across this clever little Twitter app, ReadTwit (via MakUseOf.com).

Readtwit filters your twitter feed to links only, resolves link destinations and publishes the content as an RSS feed. You can then use any feed reading software / service to read twitter posted content along with the rest of your feeds.

Duplicate links in the same time-frame are grouped together. No more retweets overwhelming your link browsing activity.

Readtwit

Related resource:

• 180+ Twitter apps

9 ways to check RSS feeds

Yesterday a posting on freewaregenius described 9 different ways to read RSS feeds - and some of them are quite interesting!  I'm going to list the different ways below, but for full details (including examples of the relevant tools) you need to check out the posting itself (link below).

1. Using a web based reader
2. Usinng a desktop aggregator
3. Using a desktop widget
4. As tabs on the edge of your desktop
5. Include a dockable area on your desktop
6. As post-it sticky notes
7. Embedded into your wallpaper
8. As scrolling stock-tickers across your screen
9. As email in your inbox

Nine ways to check RSS feeds (including some unusual ones)

Related resource

• RSS Reading List

Using Google Calendar

Google Calendar is the most popular online calendar, well, according to our Top 100 Tools for Learning anyway, but are you using all its functionality to best effect. 

One of the pages of the Social Media In Learning Tookkit deals with collaborative calendaring with Google Calandar

And this article today from Mashable explains How to stay organised with Google Calendar, is another useful resource.

How to use Twitter on Campus

I am constantly being asked how Twitter can be used in an educational or training environment, which was one of the reasons I wrote my earlier posting, Twitter in the Classroom: 10 useful resources.

Today OnlineColleges.net has produced a great list of 101 ways to use Twitter on campus - showing how teachers, administrators as well as students can use Twitter for study help, group projects, catching up on news around the world and on campus, public relations and recruitment, library announcements, and more.

101 ways to use Twitter on campus

SMIL Handbook & Toolkit related resources

• Micro-blogging with Twitter
  
• Twitter Reading List

UPDATE MARCH 2010  See my new resource How to use Twitter for Social Learning

How companies are benefiting from Web 2.0

Over the past three years, McKinsey has tracked the adoption of Web 2.0 technologies, as well as the ways organizations are using them. This year, they wanted to get a clear idea of whether companies were deriving measurable business benefits from their investments in the Web. Their findings indicate that they are.

Additionally, the data from the McKinsey survey has been consolidated into a interactive tool that links the data from the survey and charts it to the emerging trends in Web 2.0 adoption.  The interactive tool focuses on some of the survey’s core questions — what technologies and tools companies view as most important to what kind of investments, if any, organizations plan to make in Web 2.0 in the future.

The survey examined the business use of 12 technologies and tools: blogs, mash-ups, microblogging, peer to peer, podcasts, prediction markets, rating, RSS, social networking, tagging, video sharing, and wikis.

You can read about the Global Survey Results in the McKInsey Quarterly here. However, you will need to register for free to access the full article and view the interactivetool)

Jajah's Twitter voice call service

JAJAH has announced that it is launching a new service that allows users to make calls by using twitter.

Here's a demo of how it works ...

During the beta phase the calls are limited to two minutes, US numbers only, and are free. If you would like to get notified when the service goes public, follow @Call.

Jajah