Get posts by weekly email:
Donald Clark on 2,500 years of learning theory
Thanks to the top people at Learning Pool, here’s a great video of Donald Clark talking about learning theory through the ages.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7t4uDHQqWk
Dave Briggs
An online notebook
Dave Briggs
An online notebook
Monday, 10 November, 2014
#Donald Clark on 2,500 years of learning theory
Friday, 7 November, 2014
Building my own community
Apologies for the light blogging of late. I’ve just been super busy and – if I am honest – a bit lacking in inspiration.
Anyway.
I’m starting a new online community based around people like you: folk who read this blog, get my newsletter and take part in my webinars.
I’m guessing that we all have quite a lot in common – problems, solutions, stories, knowledge – and that it makes sense to share what we have as a group.
Also I will be creating special content to go into this community that won’t be on my blog or other online spaces – all of which will be created based on what you, the community, ask for.
Right now for example, there’s a video tutorial explaining how digital capability is being approached at the Department of Health, where I am working at the moment.
I’m not building something huge here. My aim is to have a nice, small, manageable group of people who all contribute and help each other out. I’ll leave the empire building to others 🙂
If this sounds like something you would like to be a part of, just head over to the community where you can sign up for an account.
I look forward to chatting with you!
Thursday, 23 October, 2014
Minimum viable community
I was invited by James Cattell the other day to accompany him to a meeting to talk about what the best community software platforms are.
I think we rather disappointed the people we talked to, in that neither of us could recommend a particular system.
Instead we both advocated, in effect, a minimum viable community. Start with the simplest, lowest common denominator technology available. Something you know that everyone has access to, and they are used to using.
When people start bumping against the limitations of the technology, they might start suggesting new ways of doing things. This is the time to start thinking about what else could be done – when there is a user demand within your community.
The point is that picking a technology winner too early will put off some of your users – whether because they don’t like what you’ve chosen, or they aren’t comfortable with it, or because it doesn’t work for them.
Concentrate on getting members for your community and get them engaged, and when they start to want to do new things, let them guide you.
If you’re interested in building and managing online communities, you might like to sign up for my free upcoming webinar on the subject!
Wednesday, 8 October, 2014
Webchat – what next for digital engagement? 10th November at 11am
It’s been a while since I’ve run a live chat, so it’s probably a good time to do another.
As for a topic, I think it would be really interesting to have a look at digital engagement and where things might be going in the future. After all, we are all pretty comfortable with doing commentable documents, online surveys, Twitter chats and the like – but what’s the new thing? How can we make this really useful?
If you’re interested, the chat will be happening on this page, on 10th November at 11am and will last for about an hour.
If you visit the webchat page, you can sign up with CoverItLive to get a reminder nearer the time.
Look forward to seeing you there!
Be opinionated
To make things happen, it helps if you have opinions.
Apple are a great example of a company that has opinions. They express those opinions in their products, and like most opinions, some people don’t like them – but that’s fine.
For instance – lots of people moan about the lightning cable used to charge iPhones and iPads – why don’t Apple just use micro-USB like everyone else? The answer is because Apple is of the opinion that micro-USB isn’t good enough, hence the need to design their own.
Apple have made lots of similar decisions based on opinions – like whether the original iMac needed a floppy drive (nope) or if laptops need CD/DVD drives (nah).
GDS is equally opinionated. As an organisation, they have views on the way websites should work, and how they should be made. You might not agree with them, but there’s no doubting where they stand.
Opinions help in two ways. Firstly, they set you apart from the crowd (this can work in a good and a bad way, of course, depending on how appalling your opinions are). Secondly, they help you to move on.
Here’s a real world example. At the Department for Heath, I’m working on digital capability, as are lots of other people in lots of other organisations. Everyone has different views on what digital means, and what capability means.
Again, that’s fine. What we’ve done though is to have an opinion on what those things mean, and how they should be delivered. Quickly coming to this opinion has enabled us to move forward quickly, with the confidence that comes of having a good idea where we want to get to.
We’re not so opinionated, of course, that we can’t change direction if we need to. The joy of an agile approach is being able to respond to feedback and experience.
By taking a position though, and executing on it, we’ve been able to kick start our capability programme. Not everyone may agree, but then they probably never will.
So if you find yourself in a situation where a project is stalling, perhaps the thing to do is to have an opinion about it. After all, you have to start somewhere.
Wednesday, 1 October, 2014
Achieving digital transformation workshop
This workshop will equip anyone involved in digital transformation and channel shift projects with the skills and tools they need to deliver fantastic results.
The workshop will be led by the needs of those attending, focusing in on those areas of strategy, leadership, delivery and capability that have been identified as of key importance.
Things that will be covered include:
- How to design and deliver an effective digital strategy for your organisation
- How to design online services people actually want to use
- How to manage technology projects in an agile fashion to reduce risk and increase user satisfaction
- How to design capability programmes to provide people with the digital skills and confidence they need
Who should attend this workshop?
- People leading change programmes within their organisations
- Folk who are working on digital capability programmes to improve their colleague’s confidence is using technology effectively
- People delivering channel shift to encourage services users to switch to more efficient ways of delivery
- Those wanting to understand better the role senior people can play in digital and transformation
Much of the background thinking that informs this workshop can be found in the 10 ‘Think Digital’ principles I developed, and which you can find out more about on my website.
For a sneak peak, the video below is a recording of a webinar I gave in September 2014 discussing digital strategy, leadership and capability:
Monday, 29 September, 2014
Get your levels of engagement right
When I delivered the Civil Service Learning digital engagement for policymakers course with Steph Gray, Steph put in a really neat slide which explained that different people have different needs from any one engagement exercise.
Some people are happy to just know a bit more about what is going on. Others want to be able to have their say. Some people don’t want to be bothered about it at all!
This is an important thing to remember when trying to engage people with your policy, campaign, event or service. A single digital solution will put off as many people as it attracts.
Planning a digital engagement exercise needs to include consideration of each different audience, what their needs are, and what they are able to offer.
For those that just want to know more, try a clear English version of your policy to help people understand what you are trying to do.
For those who would like to be involved but perhaps don’t have the expertise to contribute in a major way, provide some kind of interactive quiz or exercise to allow them to give their overall view without getting bogged down in detail.
Then, for those with deep knowledge of the policy area you are engaging with, provide easy ways for them to be able to share that knowledge and their views – through a nice survey or commendable document, say.
The important thing is to do the research and planning to begin with – who will have a view on this? What will they want to do? How much understanding do they have?
Once you’ve done this, it ought to be much easier to design engaging tools to help make it happen.
Friday, 26 September, 2014
What will a VirtualGovCamp session look like?
We’re probably due an update, not least because people keep asking me about VirtualGovCamp – and one of main topics people are querying is how on earth this thing is going to work.
To reiterate some of the things I have previously written about this, VirtualGovCamp will live and die by its asynchronicity. That is, nobody will have to be in the same place at the same time to take part. People can access the content and the discussion at any time they want.
That means that there will be very limited use of live interactive stuff like webinars, hangouts and so on. They aren’t banned, necessarily, but they are not the basic, core way people will interact.
In terms of platform, it has to be WordPress I think. So, every ‘session’ will be a WordPress page. The person who suggested the session, who will be called a facilitator, will add content to that page to help inform that discussion.
That content could be made up of videos, text, images, audio, presentations and so on. It could be content that the facilitator has produced themselves, or bits and pieces they’ve found elsewhere on the web, or indeed a mixture of both of those things.
Then, conversation and stuff takes place in the comments. Simple as that.
Now, if a facilitator really wants to do something live, then that’s fine, but the output would need to be embedded in the page so that others can still comment afterwards.
More on how this will all be organised next.
Have you signed up to show your interest in VirtualGovCamp yet? Do so with the form on the homepage!
Northern Futures
There’s an interesting bit of open policy work going on at the moment with the Deputy Prime Minister’s office working with the Policy Lab and Open Policy Making team, who are both based at the Cabinet Office. I’m lucky enough to be involved in a small way, too.
It’s called Northern Futures, and is all about finding ways that the northern cities in England can work together to compete with cities around the world.
The elements of open policy making here are an online ideas generation site, and a series of policy jam sessions.
The ideas site, based on Delib’s excellent Dialogue App tool, allows anyone to submit their own suggestions for answers to three questions:
- What are the North’s greatest strengths and weaknesses?
- Where do we start?
- How do we speed up growth?
The best answers to these questions will be taken forward to the policy jams. There will be eight jams taking place at the same time across eight cities in the north, each looking at their own ideas and producing iterations on those ideas, and potentially prototypes too.
I’m delighted to be helping out with the process and will be facilitating the policy jam that will be taking place in Hull. It will be the first time I have been back to the city since my graduation!
The Hull event will be taking place at the city’s History Centre, which looks like a cracking venue. I’m hoping we will get a whole range of people attending – strategists, policy experts, technologists and so on.
The other cities involved will be Manchester, Leeds, York, Sheffield, Newcastle, Liverpool and Lancaster. You can express an interest in being involved by signing up on the Eventbrite page. Note – signing up here doesn’t guarantee a place, it’s more an expression of interest.
If you’re up for a challenge and would like to get involved in a pretty meaty policy initiative, then this is a great opportunity. Get on the ideas site and share your inspiration, and come along to one of the policy jam sessions – especially the one in Hull, which will be brilliant and almost certainly the best of the lot.
Thursday, 25 September, 2014
Why writing helps
One of the things that I love about being a blogger is the encouragement it gives me to write.
Writing helps.
It’s fair to say, I think, that if you want to get good at something, then writing about it is a key part of the learning process.
You don’t even have to do it online, or even on a computer. Having a notebook you can put thoughts and reflections down in on a regular basis will do wonders for you in terms of thinking through problems and assessing what you are doing.
If you have an idea for something, making yourself write it down, think about the words you use and how you articulate it, will help you spot what’s good and what’s not so good about it.
As I said, you don’t have to do this on a blog. But there’s an advantage to sharing your writing online.
It adds another level of thinking critically about your writing. Knowing that other people could well be reading makes you think a bit more about each phrase and each sentence. It sanity checks your ideas – if you’re embarrassed to be blogging about it, maybe it’s not such a great solution to your problem.
This obviously works for individuals, but it works for teams too, and organisations. Share with people what you are thinking and what you are doing. Force yourself to articulate it in terms that will be clear to those that are reading them.
It will help improve your work and your understanding – even if nobody else ever reads it.
Tuesday, 23 September, 2014
The need for internal digital evangelism
If you’re going to make your organisation sit up and take notice when it comes to new, digital ways of doing things, you need to get out there and sell them.
Pretend you’re a techie startup trying to sell your product to your organisation.
Get on every team meeting agenda that you can. Speak at every senior leadership team meeting. Come up with new and interesting angles and stories that will pique people’s interest, whilst still hammering home your core message.
Have chats with as many people as you can to find out what is going on in the organisation, make connections, build links, put people in touch with each other. Fins out what their pain points are and think how digital might help solve them.
Produce an email newsletter to send every week with interesting digital stuff in it that will enthuse and motivate people to give digital a go.
Find a way to use internal systems – maybe the intranet, or a social tool like Yammer, or even the staff magazine – to promote your digital agenda to people.
You might not have a specific product or service to sell, but you still want people to change the way they do things – and they will need convincing.
So try pretending that you are that little startup wanting to land a big contract – and get selling.
Monday, 22 September, 2014
Using Trello to help run a workshop
I’m a bit ambivalent about Trello as a project management tool – I know others love it, but me, I prefer something that looks a bit more spreadsheety.
If you’ve not heard of Trello – here’s a video that explains it.
Anyway, I did manage to make use of Trello in a pleasing way during a session at Channel Shift Camp, which I facilitated, which was called ‘transformation ticklist’.
The aim was to produce a checklist of things that really ought to happen when redesigning a product or service. With only 45 minutes we weren’t going to all the whole thing done, but we could at least make a start.
My original plan was to use a traditional post-it note and flip chat approach, but being lazy, I didn’t fancy doing the write up afterwards. What else could I use to get the same effect?
I settled on Trello. I created a new project board, cleared it of all lists bar one, and displayed it on a big screen in the room so everyone could see it.
The first thing we did to start building the transformation ticklist was to have people shout out ideas for things that need doing in a transformation project, in no particular order. All these were recorded in a list as individual cards in a list called ‘activities’ in Trello.
Then we identified the stages we’d need to go through that each of the activities could be put into, and these were created as new lists on the board.
The final activity was spent taking activities from our first list and distributing them around the various stages.
You can see the public version of the ticklist. Also email me if you’d like access to it for editing and so on.
What went well
Using Trello for this workshop went pretty well. People liked the idea, possibly because it was a bit new, and it certainly saved time on writing up, messing about with post-its and so on.
What went not so well
The system isn’t as hackable as pen and paper. We wanted activities to take place across the life of our ticklist, rather than being part of a linear process and this was difficult to make clear. Also, the writing on the screen was too small at times for people to be able to read comfortably.
I’ll definitely be trying this again in future, and would love to hear if others give it a go!
Think Digital webinar 2: Strategy, Leadership and Capability
I ran my second webinar this morning, based on the first of my Think Digital principles. I think it went ok.
Here’s the video recording:
And here are the slides (here’s a PDF version if you need them):
http://www.slideshare.net/davebriggs/think-digital-strategy-leadership-and-capability
Sunday, 21 September, 2014
The soul of a new iPhone
So I got my new iPhone 6 on Friday – don’t judge me, I was due an upgrade anyway – and have been using it all weekend.
Here are some early thoughts.
1. The size – it’s a bit too big. I didn’t go for the ludicrously sized plus model, but even so. This thing is a lot bigger than the iPhone 5 I upgraded from and it’s just – just – slightly too big.
I have to stretch my thumb to reach the top layer of icons and it isn’t comfy. I know I can double tap the home button to bring them down, but at the moment this isn’t coming naturally to me.
Also it’s too big to fit comfortably in the breast pocket of a shirt, every time i move, it threatens to fall out. Annoying.
Another factor with the size is that there is no way I can put one of those oversize cases that double as an extra battery on this thing, so will need to find a new way of carrying emergency charge around with me.
2. The camera – is excellent, but I cannot believe they have released it with the lens poking out of the back of the phone like it does.
There’s a lot of nonsense written about post-Jobs Apple, but this is one of those things that would never have been released while Steve was in charge. It’s ugly and means you absolutely have to put a case on this thing if you don’t want to knacker it.
3. The storage – I went a bit mad and ordered the top storage option of 128gb. When I found out everyone else was getting the 64gb model I felt a bit daft, but not now.
It holds pretty much my whole iTunes library, as well as every app I would ever want, plus a load of podcasts, and a few downloaded episodes of Peppa Pig for those moments – and I still have 30 odd gigs free. Love it!
4. Some apps aren’t working – am finding I am having a lot of trouble with quite a few apps. Is this an iPhone 6 thing or an iOS 8 thing? I don’t know.
I restored the phone from an iCloud backup of my previous one, and a fair few apps either didn’t download properly at all or crashed when I tried to open them. Deleting them and reinstalling fixed most but not all.
The Chrome browser, for instance, refuses to work for me. Hopefully they will update it soon.
5. Touch ID is something I love, and I’m surprised by that. This is where you can unlock your phone by just holding your thumb over the home button to identify yourself.
My previous iPhone didn’t have it and I was always a bit sniffy. But it seems to work really well, really quickly, and I’ve got used to it right away.
What next?
Those are just my initial thoughts and I am sure I will be able to add more about how I end up using this phone differently to my previous one.
It would be great to hear how others are getting on with theirs in the comments!
Friday, 19 September, 2014
Lacking leadership
Recently on my visits to councils and to conferences, and in the conversations I have with people across the public sector, leadership in digital has been identified as an issue.
I think the problem is that within many organisations, there’s nobody with sufficient clout taking the digital agenda forward: identifying the vision and setting out how people can get there.
Part of this is because digital doesn’t easily fit into any of the slots of the traditional organisation chart. It’s definitely not IT, nor (just) communications, and probably not (just) customer services.
Perhaps the closest fit would be within the organisational development bit of HR.
To kick start an organisation’s journey to become truly digital, having an inspirational leader in place is, I think, vital.
I’ll be talking about this in more detail this coming Monday, in a free webinar. Sign up here.
Wednesday, 17 September, 2014
Communicating customer access
I’m at Channel Shift Camp in Birmingham today, organised by my good friend Nick Hill.
It’s an opportunity for people involved in customer services in the public sector to talk about ways of delivering services using new channels, such as online.
The point for organisations is that online channels tend to be a lot cheaper than phone or face to face; for the customer, hopefully the experience is quicker and more convenient.
The first session I attended was a very interesting one about how to communicate the benefits of using new channels for contacting councils and so on to users of services.
The problem was soon identified of the quality of the new service being sold. Often the user experience of online public services is pretty bad – to the point where most people would rather phone up or turn up to an office than try and figure out how to use them.
After all, think about the big, successful online services, like Google’s search engine, or Facebook, or Amazon. When have you seen an advert, or a poster, trying to convince you to use them? Probably never, and yet we do in our millions, because it’s better.
It was mentioned that it might be possible to ‘nudge’ people into using online channels by doing things like hiding the organisation’s phone number and address on the website, so people have to use the web service.
That is not nudging! It’s bullying.
Users ought to be able to access a service in whatever way they prefer to. The job of the organisation delivering that service is to design it so that their preferred channel is also the one their customers would choose.
So to start with there is a need, I think, for communications folk to challenge those asking them to promote a service to ensure that it is actually an improvement on the traditional alternatives. If it isn’t, then trying to persuade people to downgrade their user experience is not really a goer.
In other words, the service ought to sell itself. To do that, it needs to be designed with the user at the centre, meeting their needs and solving their problems first, and not those of the organisation.
Monday, 15 September, 2014
Change is hard
It isn’t said enough, I don’t think, that change – particularly in big organisations – is hard. Really hard!
If it wasn’t, it would be happening all the time.
At events there are regularly discussions that go on along the lines of ‘my boss just doesn’t get it’ – tales of woe where someone wants to do something new but is stopped by management or bureaucracy or a combination of the two.
What makes a someone a real force for change is the ability to get knocked back, dust themselves down, and have another go.
Again, and again, and again.
It won’t happen the first time, or the second time. It might not even happen at all in one organisation – you might need to move on to get the chance.
But nothing worthwhile is ever easy and if you’re committed to making a difference, you’ll recover from setbacks, never get too disheartened and keep coming up with new ideas, new strategies and new ways of persuading.
It’s easy to have a go and give up. The ones who make the difference are those who stick at it.
Sunday, 14 September, 2014
How to show utter contempt for your users
I was never a regular user of Whatsapp, the mobile messaging app recently purchased by Facebook for gazillions of dollors, but now I’m never touching the thing again.
Why?
Well, after a recent update, every single time I open the app, I am greeted with this:
It’s an annoying pop up thing telling me to turn on notifications for Whatsapp.
Only, I don’t want to. I’ve never had them on, and I don’t want them on now.
I cannot, however, turn off this nagging screen. It appears every time. It would appear the only way to get rid of it would be to switch on those damn notifications.
Well, that’s not happening. I won’t be bullied by software, for goodness’ sake!
So those few people i converse with on Whatsapp I will start to chat to on something else, and Whatsapp is gone from my phone.
If you’re looking for a replacement, Glassboard is a great bet. Not that well known and not overly polished, but a nice indie solution.
The lesson here is to let your customers use your system the way they want to, not the way you want them to – else they might just go elsewhere.
Update: the app store on my phone tells me there is a new version of WhatsApp is ready to download. And guess what?
At least they are listening.
Friday, 12 September, 2014
Use what you already have
When planning a new project or activity, it’s easy to decide to get something new.
For instance, you might see it as the perfect opportunity to buy a cool web service to help you deliver this piece of work.
Or maybe you know that you could do a great job customising WordPress to do exactly what you want.
Hold on for a minute, though. What have you already got available to you that you could use to make this happen?
It might not be the perfect fit you would like in a perfect world, but it might be good enough. It might also come with a few advantages:
- you can start work right away
- no problems with access or other IT issues
- your users will be more likely to be familiar with the way it works
- there will be internal knowledge of the system to help you get stuff done
I’ve an example to share in a future post, where I resisted the temptation to do something new, and instead used what was already there and already familiar, in my work at the Department of Health.
Thursday, 11 September, 2014
Loving lurkers
I couldn’t agree more with Mozilla’s Laura Hilliger:
We can’t force people to participate, and if we really care about educating people, we shouldn’t try. We should build and design for the people who are participating, and we should be careful to ensure that the lurkers feel welcome. We should create safe spaces of learning and mentorship where even those who don’t complete the call to action still start to develop trust in us, in our products. The fact is you are always a lurker before you participate, so we should be careful not to push people away by implying that they don’t count if they aren’t like us. If we work to love our lurkers, maybe some of them will find their reason to participate.