Monday, 17 March, 2014

So, you think you want social media training?

whiteboardIncreasingly, following a bit of a chat, it turns out you don’t.

I’ve been delivering training on digital tools, including social media, for a fair few years now. I’d like to think I’m quite good at it, and that those who leave my training sessions get a lot out of it.

One of the most frustrating things, though, is when at the end of some training, a learner will ask ‘so, will we actually be able to use this stuff?’ or ‘this has been great, but until I get these websites blocked I won’t be able to use anything I’ve learned’.

Gack!

What’s happening is that there is an acknowledgement within an organisation that they need some additional digital capacity, so they send people on a course. Trouble is, the strategy, or vision, isn’t in place for the organisation – so those skills are going to go to waste.

Instead, if you want to spend some money on this stuff, it’s better to spend it first on developing some idea of where digital fits into your organisation.

One of the first commissions WorkSmart has received has been to do just this. The original brief was for a series of workshops explaining how to use the popular social media tools. Discussing it, though, everyone became aware that there was a piece of work to do first.

So, we’re running an agile little project, made up of a couple of workshops and some online deliberation and collaboration. The aim at the end will be to have a draft strategy document, outlining how the organisation can use digital tools and techniques – including stuff like agile project management and user centred design.

Along with that there will also be a process defined for rolling this kind of capability out across the organisation, using internal expertise rather than bought in training. Hopefully this means that the learning activity will be scalable and sustainable, and most importantly of all, everyone will know why they are doing it.

Sunday, 16 March, 2014

Working openly on the web

dougbelshawThere was a nice guest post from Doug Belshaw from Mozilla on Brian Kelly’s blog last week.

Entitled What Does Working Openly on the Web Mean in Practice?, it told us a bit about Mozilla’s culture of openness and how it ties into web based working.

Here’s a quick quote:

Working open is not only in Mozilla’s DNA but leads to huge benefits for the project more broadly. While Mozilla has hundreds of paid contributors, they have tens of thousands of volunteer contributors — all working together to keep the web open and as a platform for innovation. Working open means Mozilla can draw on talent no matter where in the world someone happens to live. It means people with what Clay Shirky would call cognitive surplus can contribute as much or as little free time and labour to projects as they wish. Importantly, it also leads to a level of trust that users can have in Mozilla’s products. Not only can they inspect the source code used to build the product, but actually participate in discussions about its development.

But you really ought to go and read the whole thing.

Simple private mobile communities with Glassboard

gbGlassboard is a neat cross platform (iOS, Android, Web) app that helps people to communicate within teams while on the move.

You download the app – or use the web version – and create a ‘board’ which is where you post messages and files. Then you invite people to join that board, and only they and you have access to what is posted there.

Even better, you can choose to have people join by using an invite code rather than receiving a specific invite. This means that, for example, you could create a board for all the members of an email newsletter to join to be able to chat. Just include the invite code in the email, and all those who you want to have access can do so.

It works really nicely on smartphones – the web interface is a bit clunky, but then, it’s made for mobile I think. It also is a nice, more lightweight alternative to a Yammer network, which can sometimes feel like taking a sledgehammer to a nut, I find, when all you want to do is have a quick chat now and again with a group.

Glassboard is free for 3 boards. For unlimited boards and a few other features, you can go premium for a very reasonable $5 per month.

Saturday, 15 March, 2014

WorkSmart podcast – Episode 1 : The rough and ready first attempt

In this first effort at podcasting, I talk about podcasting. Oh, and audiobooks, and an actual paper book, too.

With thanks to Lloyd Davis for the inspiration.

Listen using the player below:

Or you can:

Here are some links to stuff I mention:

Hope it’s fun, or interesting. I’d settle for not a total waste of time, to be honest.

Friday, 14 March, 2014

Add-ons for Google Docs and Sheets

Google has snuck out some rather cool new functionality to its cloud based productivity suite Google Drive.

Called add-ons, you can now use them to add extra functionality to your Google Docs and Spreadsheets experience.

Here’s a video explaining it all:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZqX6ocwHWU]

So what are these add-ons and what do they do?

Lucky for us that Lifehacker has produced a list of the best ones. They include:

  • HelloFax, which lets you fax a Google Doc without leaving the app
  • Mapping sheets lets you take a spreadsheet full of address information and put it all on a Google Map
  • UberConference – lets you set up and run a conference call from within your Google Doc. Great for collaborating across distances
  • Track Changes – gives you reviewing tools a bit more like those you are used to in Word

These are just some of those currently available – it will be interesting to see what will come in time as developers get to work.

Five for Friday – 14 March 2014

linksFive for Friday is WorkSmart’s weekly roundup of interesting stuff from the week’s reading.

  1. About change, defaults and disruption – “large organisations are racing against start-ups to stay relevant”. Great stuff from Anne McCrossan
  2. Creating a minimum viable product using WordPress – Chris Lema on using WordPress to throw together prototype services
  3. 5 More Unexpected Ways to Work Smarter, Not Harder – useful ideas. Thanks to Dan Slee for the link.
  4. Is it time to quit your job and launch that new start up? – nice video from Bethnal Green Ventures via the Nominet Trust
  5. Forrester argues piecemeal digital transformation won’t work – interesting research. Lovely quote: “Dabbling with digital isn’t the route to success”.
Did you know that WorkSmart has a Pinterest board where loads of cool stuff is shared?

Tame your Twitter stream

tame-itNot sure how I had never come across this before, but Tame is super useful!

You set up an account as with all these services, and then connect to your Twitter account. Tame then goes away and comes back with a dashboard style view, in three columns.

The columns display the most popular links being shared by the people you follow, the most popular hashtags being used, and the most popular accounts being mentioned.

It’s a simple idea, but for those moments when you don’t have time for much more than a quick glance at Twitter, it gives you a fast summary of what’s popular in your stream – which might be all you need.

Here’s a video to show how it works:

Wednesday, 12 March, 2014

WIN! ‘The Myth of Innovation’ by Scott Berkun

photoThe Myth of Innovation by Scott Berkun is a great read on the topic of technology and innovation. It’s little Ruth’s favourite bedtime read!

From the blurb:

This updated paperback edition of the classic bestseller, takes you on a hilarious, fast-paced ride through the history of ideas. You’ll learn to transcend the false stories that deceive many business experts, scientists, and much of pop culture, with history based lessons on how to invent, create and deliver on your own ideas. You’ll have fun while you learn:

  • Where ideas come from
  • The true history of history
  • Why most people don’t like ideas
  • How great managers make ideas thrive
  • The importance of problem finding
  • The simple plan (new for paperback)

Since its initial publication, this classic bestseller has been discussed on NPR, MSNBC, CNBC, and at Yale University, MIT, Carnegie Mellon University, Microsoft, Apple, Intel, Google, Amazon.com, and other major media, corporations, and universities. It has changed the way thousands of leaders and creators understand the world.

Find out more about it on the book’s Amazon page.

I’ve a copy of the new paperback version of the book to give away. All you have to do is sign up to become a member of WorkSmart – which is free – and on Friday 21st March I will draw someone at random to send the book to.

Don’t worry if you have already signed up, as all members will be involved in the draw.

Tuesday, 11 March, 2014

Capsule – the acceptable and useful face of CRM

capsulecrm‘CRM’ or customer relationship management is one of those IT phrases that can put the fear of God into people, and with good reason.

There aren’t many people who have managed to avoid the organisational carnage that attempts to deploy CRM can cause. Careers have been left in ruins, consultants missing in action, businesses killed along the way.

But it really doesn’t have to be that way! In fact, using a small scale, lightweight CRM have been incredibly helpful in getting all manner of projects done.

My favourite is CapsuleCRM. It enables you to very simply keep contact records and assign various bits of information to them. It also helps you keep a database of the emails you send them, and helps you to organise your workload by attaching tasks to people.

You can also create cases, where tasks, people, notes and files can all be held together in one place. These can be used as a case management system relating to an organisation or person you are working with, or can even be used as a rudimentary but effective internal project management tool.

Finally, there is a free app that you can use on your smartphone so your contacts, notes and tasks are never far away.

Of course this is a CRM so there are some sales pipeline features in there as well. They may not be of use to you. But that’s ok – either don’t use them at all, or think up some other way that those features might be helpful to you.

With pretty much any project where you need to keep a track of people and your interactions with them, having a lightweight database like CapsuleCRM around can be super helpful. CapsuleCRM has a free tier, so you don’t even need to pay for it, or it’s just £8 per month per user if you want to unlock extra storage and so on.

Monday, 10 March, 2014

Putting together an online course

notetakingAs part of the membership perks of WorkSmart (not got your membership yet? Sign up here!) I am putting together a free online course on digital personal productivity.

Something to look forward to then, but also an opportunity for me to share what I’ve learned when putting it all together.

Here are the steps I found myself going through.

1. Choose your software

I was driven in this regard by the fact that the WorkSmart site runs on WordPress, and I really wanted to make sure my online learning courses tie in with the membership system on the site.

So I had a few WP based options to go for, and in the end chose WP-Courseware. I was heavily influenced in this decision by this excellent walk through post from Chris Lema – who is a great blogger to follow if you’re interested in WordPress and online learning.

2. Pick your topic

Choosing the topic for an online course is pretty important, because not every subject maps all that well to the online learning environment.

You also need to consider the level at which you are pitching the course, which again will determine whether or not putting in online will work effectively.

I find online courses – at least those of the type I am planning – work best for introductory level topics. Often more in depth learning requires some kind of interaction with the learner to find out exactly what they need, which often can be bespoke to a particular project they are working on or an issue they are encountering.

3. Write your outline

Outlining is a great discipline for planning any kind of project, but for putting together a course which has a hierarchy of content, it’s absolutely vital.

An outline is a document that is broken down into hierarchies. You can make one very simply with a bulleted list in a Word processor, with each level of the hierarchy being indented appropriately in the list.

However, a proper outlining application is better because it will allow you to drag and drop items into the right order. It facilitates the process of bashing in ideas and then sorting them into a proper order.

WP-Courseware splits a course into modules and units, so with my outliner I can easily have a document where each module contains units, all indented in an appropriate way. To help me identify what’s what, I tend to preface each item in a list with what it is, in squared brackets, such as [Module] or [Unit] to make it dead easy to see where something fits.

I use OmniOutliner, a desktop application for the Mac. However, Fargo is free and web based – and also excellent, so is a good place to start.

4. Create the content

Creating content for a learning course in WP-Courseware is dead straightforward – you just populate what looks very much like a WordPress page. So it’s dead easy to slot in text, images, video and other embeddable media.

Whether writing blog posts or putting together courses, I always like to write my content in an application other than WordPress. It makes me feel a little less hurried, for some reason.

One thing my course won’t include is any traditional e-learning modules. This is largely because they can be time consuming, and costly to create and often require the use of dedicated software that right now I don’t have access too.

I’ll be sticking with text, images and video mostly, with perhaps the odd embedded presentation thanks to Slideshare.

5. Plan your tests and quizzes

Have a good think about the types of assessment you want to do. Again, a lot of direction here will come from how much involvement you want on a day to day basis.

You can have assignments and so on that learners submit, and you can review. However, given that this is a free course and I hope that lots of people will take it, I’d rather any assessment is done by the users themselves.

So I will be using quizzes at various points in the course, to help learners check that they have got the important information from each unit. I write the questions and the multiple choice answers down, and check them with someone else to ensure they make sense and aren’t too patronising.

6. Put it all in place in a safe environment

Here’s one I wished I had thought of earlier! Rather than putting all this on a live site and developing in the open air, as it were, it’s far better to get your course created, filled up with content and tested in a safe environment.

In other words, duplicate your site and host it somewhere safe, either locally on your laptop or desktop machine, or on some hidden away web hosting that nobody will be able to access.

It’s always easier to make mistakes when nobody is looking and when your new course might not be one you want to be made available to the general public – see point 7 below – this is especially important!

I ended up using MAMP on my Mac to run a local version of my site that I could tinker around with to my heart’s content.

Then WP-Courseware makes it really simple for me to export my course from my local copy, and then import it into the live environment.

7. Decide how people will access – free / paid for etc

I want to boost the offering for my free membership level, so for this course I am happy to give it away free to members.

Membership on this site is handled by Paid Memberships Pro, which makes it incredibly easy to make certain pages and bits of content accessible to only members.

In the future, if I want to make some courses available for a fee, it will be easy enough to add another membership level which will handle all of this.

8. Make live

Once you know everything is working probably, set it live. Before you start promoting it though, it’s a good idea to use a test account to make sure everything is working on the live site as well as it did on your development version – just to iron out any final snags.

9. Promote!

My aim with this free-too-members course will be to increase the number of people signing up to WorkSmart, along with adding a bit of value for those who have already joined.

With this in mind, I really want to promote its existence, and so when the time comes I will be using social media, email newsletters and lots of other mediums to tell everyone about it and how they can access it.

10. Track performance

Finally, it’s important to track performance. Again, WP-Courseware does this for me, letting me know which users have started the course and how far they have got.

If most people are dropping out – particularly during a short course – it might be worth contacting them to find out why, and making some changes to the course.