An online notebook
Open Source Schools is a site that launched sometime last summer, I think, but has now had quite a bit of a makeover.
It’s chock full of great advice and resources on how schools can make use of open source software – and there is plenty in there that other organisations or individuals could pick up on too.
This Friday (9th January 2009) the Improvement and Development Agency and LARCI are holding an event entitled Performance management plus: the next stage of performance management for operational improvement. Sounds like heavy stuff, but with a great mixture of speakers and workshop sessions I’m sure it will be a great day.
I have a little involvement with the event, though, because one of the people behind the event is IDeA’s own social media evangelist Ingrid Koehler, who fancied applying some of the ideas from my work in Sweden with Cisco to this event, and another one which is coming up at the end of the month.
To this end, we have created a site very much along the lines of the Cisco08 one (if it ain’t broke, right?) with a few modifications. There is going to be some blogging, bookmarking with delicious, flickr photos, video interviews and of course the Twitter backchannel – all aggregated on the front page. The tag to use in any content you would like to contribute is ideaperf – so tag away!
We really going to try to apply some of the principles described by David Wilcox in terms of creating a ‘social learning space’ – we want to make it possible for those not attending to play a part in what happens at these events – and for the conversations and shared learning to carry on afterwards for as long as is required.
So, anyone with an interest in local government performance management – do visit the site before, during and after Friday’s get together: share what you know, and find answers to your questions!
From Rich Millington:
A moderator keeps things normal. A moderator removes the extremes from the community. Moderating isn’t as hard as moderators would have you believe. You can typically find community members to do it.
A facilitator makes it easier for the community to communicate. A facilitator takes the community through a process, and does it well. A facilitator points out common objectives. A facilitator draws out opinions from less-vocal members. A facilitator helps the community tackle any stumbling blocks.
I think you should be a facilitator.
(I love Rich’s blog, by the way. It’s a recent find for me, but his short, pithy, confident posts containing an idea and very little flannel just work for me. Wish I could write this way…)
Photo credit: Greenboy
Great post by Steph on comments, community and moderation:
…as more people start to see the web as place for self-expression in their own spaces and other people’s, hearing the interesting voices in the crowd is only going to become more important.
More great stuff from David Wilcox musing on the experience of social reporting in Portugal. Whilst there, he was lucky enough to come across Etienne Wenger, a highly regarded thinker in the field of knowledge management and learning, who I first came across due to his promotion of communities of practice.
My conclusion, inspired by Etienne Wenger – above – is that social reporters can aspire to be “social artists” who help create social learning spaces where people can work together on social issues. It’s something anyone can do, with the right attitude and some skills, but I think social reporters should definitely make it a key part of their work.
It would appear that Etienne’s thinking is taking him away from clearly defined communities into a more informal arrangement of learning through sharing as part of wider networks: the ‘social learning spaces’.
This is fascinating stuff, and as I am currently putting together a programme of workshops to help civil servants understand what they need to do to engage with the social web, I wonder how these social learning spaces might be implemented as a part of that.
Here we are seeing different elements of the way the social web can be used – reporting at events, sharing knowledge across networks, collaborative learning, online storytelling, engagement activity between government citizens – merging together into one, like a big Venn diagram.
I think this makes all of us who use the social web on a regular basis networked learners. Every tweet, every Flickr photo, every online video, every shared link, every blog post adds to the sum of what we can know, and we have this knowledge served up, directly to us hundreds of times a day. We probably aren’t even aware that it is happening, but by a process of ambient osmosis, it is.
Of course, what is required with any of this is the willingness to collaborate and share, and the awareness of that fact that we all need to benefit from this networked learning. The technology is just an enabler. But who wouldn’t want to be involved with an initiative that has so much to offer?