TG@CF – Page 7 – Thought grazing

Once upon a time in the past

I go away on holiday and look what happens – you get sloughed (a new verb I do declare).

There are real worlds, virtual worlds and ideal worlds. Which one do we all want to inhabit? Or at least which one do I want to inhabit? Can I do so though? No. So …

… that is why I developed a well-honed slice of pragmatism to go with my undoubted large slab of idealism, vision, passion and excitement (forgive the hyperbole). Being pragmatic is both a protection to self and a way-ahead for all. You know the answer, it’s just you have to engineer the route by which nirvana is delivered. Yes, I am saying that serendipity CANNOT happen in the enterprise, it can only happen to the individual – that’s why we do need to find and develop those that will become the emissaries of new ways of working, and whilst doing that we must NOT lose faith, and NOT lose track of the way we believe things SHOULD be … because as a colleague once said (and it is from my favourite film, so I should know) “if you build it, they will come”. We’re not talking about a Field of Dreams though, we’re talking about change that will improve the working practices for the next generation of University staff, and the exposure to new ways of working that our students will desparately need this year, let alone next year – that’s how fast the pace of change actually is.

Postscript

I’ve just completed a questionnaire for a colleague who’s doing an MSc and her final question in the survey which referes to the use of social media tools was

25. Could you suggest any other ways in which these tools could be used to engage you more effectively in the work environment?

The real issue is not so much the tools, but more the culture within an organisation; the need to change that culture so that change is embraced which in itself includes empowering the worker to look at what they’re doing themselves and question/challenge it. So engagement is hugely important but in many ways empowerment is even more important.

Engagement is a precursor to marriage; it is the period of examination and exploration of self and partnerships. If engagement is successful, a successful partnership (marriage) usually follows. There’s not that much different in the workplace. You can’t engage with someone in isolation, it is with a view to partnership working, so engagement without a vision/belief that it will lead to partnership is bound to fail.

Therefore the use of “tools” can be an aid to establishing the viability of the partnership. Essentially this boils down to seeing how communication and collaboration (shared working) can best be developed. So the tools are not the problem, it’s the desire to seek partnership through shared working that is the “missing link”; crack that one and engagement becomes meaningful.

Two tools you should have a look at

Been experimenting with a couple of tools recently:

Evernote – a means of saving scraps of information (from webpages, photos, pdfs, scans, etc) into a repository that is then available to you from the “cloud” – really useful if you move about; are working on a document; want to access it from anywhere … and it’s not the final article. Sort of multi-media equivalent of a post-it sticker that you can get at, anytime you want. Available for both windows and mac, so you can use it to transfer info between platforms also. If the document/project is more than just ephemeral then you could transfer it into another favourite of mine – dropbox.

The other one is – tungle.me – a very clever scheduling and calendaring tool. This enables you to have sight of any number of calendars eg Sametime, Gmail, Yahoo mail, Entourage/iCal (and the contacts associated with these systems) all in one place and then to invite people to meetings, or allow people to book meetings with you, on the basis of your published calendar. For instance you can see my availability at http://tungle.me/davidharrison – it doesn’t show what I’m doing (hope I’m not revealing too much).

However, for those on the move; or those using multiple calendars – this could be a godsend. One thing to note though. When you setup your tungle account, if you want to sync with Sametime, DON’T use Google as your identity provider. The Tungle widget that sits (running in the background) in the Notes client doesn’t know how to handle OpenID and/or anything other than simple username and password. So, regretably, you have to set up a tungle account – I learnt this from experience … I now have two tungle accounts – one of which I won’t be needing for too much longer 🙂

Shared services by stealth

A colleague (Huw Gulliver) was talking to me the other day and he was recalling the “good old days” when we got things done by talking to each other and realising that doing things together just made plain sense. In some situations the idea was so strong that the business case was easy to make and it was then easy to secure external funding to do it – the Welsh Video Network being a case in point; in other cases it was more a case of sharing expertise and working collaboratively together to just get things done. At other times the funding was there, we just had to work together to deliver the solution – the Metropolitan Area Networks of North and South Wales being good examples.

What these projects did however was to encourage IT staff in different institutions to work together towards a common goal in their joint interest. This is the thought I’m seeding/reminding you of today. It’s not a great revolutionary thought, but it’s one that has to be shared because in times of gloom and doom the natural tendancy is to look inwards and think about preservation, rather than think imaginatively (outside the box) and progressively. So that’s where the “big idea” that Huw shared with me comes in.

What if all the institutions in Wales were to share rackspace as a policy rather than thinking of a mega data centre type initiative. You would get disaster recovery on the cheap. In the good old days we used to look for sites that ran the same hardware/software to provide such a service, and very few such schemes actually worked. The beauty of this idea is that the hardware is owned by the home, not the hosting, institution; you’re just borrowing rack space. The electricity charges are offset by you hosting for someone else. The network charges are insignificant, given our exceptional wide area network in Wales. All you need to do is move kit around. Here comes the trick!

Starting from this point, which is self-interest business continuity, you can so easily ramp it up to be off-site data storage with those sites that have the capacity providing additional rack-space at a cost far less than could be found commercially. The trouble with traditional shared service initiatives is that the first step – “giving it all away” – seems so scarey. Doing it this way lets you review your decisions and options every step of the way.

Think about it!

Last Cafe before Christmas

So we’re nearly in December, and this Friday – being the first in the month – brings around the next Social Media Cafe event (hashtag #tgsmc from now on).

What’s happened in the last month, apart from me having a bit of leave and learning a bit more about photography which is forcing me again to think about blogging, social networks and CONTEXT. I’d thought I’d put that one to rest … but I haven’t, and I’d like to talk to you folk about this on Friday at the Grad Centre from about 11.00am on.

I’ve also talked to some other folk at Newcastle and they’re interested in the concept of #thoughtgrazing and #tgsmc so I’m going to go and talk to them when I get back from Australia with @joenicholls. [Now there’s a country (according to my son who lives there) who are way in need of social networking!! :-).] In particular Joe’s ideas on tasks, extended digital literacies, and core’n’chore resonated well with folk from the Netskills team when I met them at a Conference just recently.

Joe and I also wondered whether any one wanted to talk about mobility. What does this actually mean for learners and researchers. What opportunities and challenges does it bring? What’s the role and responsibility of the provider of service (content or tools) to meet their aspirations and requirements.

So we have a couple of topics to get you thinking – but you’ll hopefully bring your own.

This’ll be the last #tgsmc of 2010. We’ve met three times. I’ve polled for days and Friday seems to be a favourite; but knowing that not everyone can manage that day, we’ll try and set up an alternative #tgsmc – maybe even at a different venue. What do you think?

Finally, what about you becoming an author on this blog. Please let Joe or I know, and we’ll add you to the list of folk who can post to the site. You’d be very welcome!

Collaboration, wikis, open source and more

A lot of the conversation at todays “cafe” was centred around wikis. Rachel from the Grad Centre attended for a while and we hopefully gave her some ideas as to why and how it might be a good idea to investigate using a wiki as the repository for their operational procedures. She’s looking to rewrite them all and it would appear a good project for collaborative authoring.

She particularly liked this diagram from NASA, which circulated again today in a post …

… I think as a diagram it so graphically shows why email is NOT a collaboration tool (as if any of us ever did); but the post quite thoughtfully suggests that the problem in getting wikis established in the enterprise might more be to do with the perception that a wiki is a website (with all that carries with it in terms of governance). If it could be positioned as a service that augments an email system it might appeal more to corporates because that would place it nearer their comfort zone. Of course as many at the “cafe” said, the diagram to the left is a simplification of reality, and if you add cc’d and even bcc’d users, and users the document might be forwarded to, then the possibility of a cohesive and meanigful collaboration is distant indeed.

Anyway, it caused some mirth, some consideration and hopefully provided some assistance for Rachel.

Prior to that we’d been discussing software that allowed collaborative authoring in meetings, or learning sessions. Joe Nicholls had been experimenting with sync.in whilst Mike Johnson had been doing likewise with typewith.me. They appear to be identical and appear to be a product of Google wave activity. Worth a look and full revision history is provided through URLs.

Mike was also keen to talk about dialogue; how you engage with students, encourage them to participate and he spoke to me about a number of themes which I’d be hugely grateful if he’d expand as a comment to this post … please Mike! He also introduced discussion on motivation and reward for encouraging participation in group activity. He’d considered chocolate; he’d heard about virtual stars added to avatars; what can you do to recognise “good behaviour”?

The next issue was how you handle the disappearance of an externally hosted service (such as drop.io) that you might have “recommended” to staff or students. Can you wash your hands once you’ve given an introductory task – hopefully making them aware of what they should be doing at the same time as using the service to protect their information, or do you have a responsibility to be pro-active once you’ve given some advice. We didn’t achieve consensus on that one but agreed that education and training was vital – new literacies indeed; and that we did have a responsibility to alert when we became aware of a failed service – beyond that some disagreement. Should we indeed be pro-active at all, offering to find solutions and alternatives, for instance?

Finally, there was some discussion on the emergence of open source as a more plausible alternative to commercial offerings. Yes, we do use a lot of open source, but mainly in the back office and not visible to users. Would we want to replace our VLE software, or our collaboration suite with open source offerings? What would the issues be in moving in that direction? What is the support model that would be required? We ran out of time and agreed that it would be a good topic for a chat at a later “event”.