pkm – Dave Briggs

Interesting links – 18 Feb 2021

February 18, 2021

I find interesting things to read, bookmark them, save a chunk of text as a quote, and then occasionally copy and paste it all into a blog post, so you don’t have to.

Digital Inclusion Toolkit: now live

Leeds and Croydon Councils recently won central government funding to create a comprehensive and collaborative how-to guide for digital inclusion.

Link

Delivering and accelerating in a pandemic – DWP Digital

Within DWP Digital our Technology Services team designs, builds and operates that platform, and in the last 10 months has ‘moved mountains’ to keep those services going.

Link

Working Smarter Field Guide

Learning informally and socially means connecting our individual work with our teams, communities, and networks. It requires honing our curiosity and seeking out different perspectives and ideas. It takes more than individual sensemaking to understand complex situations, so we have to find others to challenge our assumptions and learn at the edge of our professional abilities.

Link

The tiny video toolkit

People ask me [Coté] how I do the tiny videos. I hope to do a screencast at some point, but in the meantime, here are some notes.

Link

Announcing our new digital skills training offer – MHCLG Digital

We’re inviting local authority staff to apply for one of 10 certified courses with FutureLearn, covering a range of topics such as accessibility, design, decision-making and leadership. We’re testing the water with a small number of licenses and courses, but if we get enough positive feedback we’ll look to purchase more and make it an ongoing thing.

Link

Link roundup

July 4, 2013

I find this stuff so you don’t have to:

Link roundup

June 1, 2012

I find this stuff so you don’t have to:

The learning organization: an often-described, but seldom-observed phenomenon | Harold Jarche – "What should a true learning organisation look like?"
Connecting and engaging inside your organisation – "Social networks are inherently bottom up and user powered. In IBM, BlueIQ worked because it had buy-in from the very top. You need both otherwise time is wasted overcoming resistance."
Local 2.0: How digital technology empowers local communities | The Young Foundation – Useful report covering how digital innovation can impact on communities.
The order I check things | Stephen Hale – I love reading how people do this stuff!
Cutting down on cookies: practical tips | Puffbox.com – Useful tips from SImon Dickson.

Bookmarks for September 20th through October 1st

October 1, 2010

I find this stuff so that you don’t have to.

Social intranets: Enterprises grapple with internal change – Great stuff on deploying social tech within big organisations.
Open Government Licence – "You are encouraged to use and re-use the Information that is available under this licence, the Open Government Licence, freely and flexibly, with only a few conditions."
Four roles for social media in workplace learning – "Whether or not l&d professionals or senior managers embrace social media doesn't really matter in the long run, because there is no turning back, only futile resistance."
Anthologize – "Use the power of WordPress to transform online content into an electronic book."
“The Case for Personal Information Empowerment”: Mydex publishes groundbreaking White Paper – Worthwhile reading. I don't entirely agree, but a cogent argument.
GCHQ spooks top UK Linux installations | THINQ.co.uk – "Whispers in the courtly corridors around Westminster, the seat of British government, have it that British intelligence uses Linux because it is secure, good at number crunching, and doesn't cost much to deploy."
A framework for the social enterprise – Useful and interesting white paper on knowledge and learning within large organisations.
Government Should Do its Own Data Homework | Jeni’s Musings – "It cannot be the case, long term, that you need to be an expert hacker to reuse government data."
Behind the scenes at ShapeYourPlace.org – Great stuff from Paul Henderson on the techie bits behind a nice local government social media engagement exercise.
Meeting the public sector communications challenge – "But what public sector communicators need to do is continue to demonstrate the value of communications, not as an end in itself, but as an agent for making things better for the public."
Open Courses: About 10 Weeks Seems To Be It, Then? – Great post from Tony Hirst on open courses and online learning.
Open Government as a Means to Shake the IT Suppliers Landscape – "…I have not (yet) seen any sustainable business model coming out of government “app stores”."
Where do the good ideas go? – "Given the challenges we face as a country and as a planet, there’s a tremendous opportunity to make crowdsourcing really work here and now. But it will take courage, patience, and a process which taps into the varied time and talents of the crowd, in its widest sense."

You can find all my bookmarks on Delicious. There is also even more stuff on my shared Google Reader page.

You can also see all the videos I think are worth watching at my video scrapbook.

Technology, learning and knowledge

September 27, 2010

I had a good time up in Scotland last week, and enjoyed putting together and delivering my talk at the Learning Pool event we ran – which saw a great turnout.

My discussion focused on the use of technology in a time of immense change and budget pressures, focusing on not just the use of social media in communicating and engaging outside the organisation but also how such tools can be used internally to improve the way everyone works.

Not exactly ground breaking stuff, but I think it is certainly an area that few organisations in the public sector have right and also one where genuine benefits, cashable and otherwise could be realised.

Think about it. With talk of budget cuts of up to 40% we are going to be seeing huge amounts of change in terms of personnel, with early retirements, redundancies etc. The issues as I see them are around:

Knowledge and learning – how do you record and share what the people working in the organisation know? How to capture what’s in the heads of all those staff likely to leave?
Change – how to keep staff engaged with large scale change programmes?
Talent – how to make the most of the people that are left. Where are the hidden gems in your organisation, and how much money might finding them save you?
Innovation – how are ideas shared and assessed in the organisation?
Collaboration – how much duplication of effort is going on? How can communications be improved within teams, departments, the whole organisation, even multiple organisations?

Effective use of social software is no panacea and won’t see all the problems of government disappear. However, current usage is so limited I believe it could have a genuinely substantial transformative effect. I’m hoping to be writing a bit more about this in the future.

One other thing I covered in the presentation is around the development of technology from mainframes to today’s smartphones. Two things are apparent:

Technology is getting smaller and more personal
As it does so, the ability for a central authority to control it diminishes.

How does this affect what I was talking about, in terms of organisations using social tools to work better? I think the key is to focus on the personal aspect of this. Don’t try to force people into using specific workflows to achieve what are generally pretty personal tasks. The way people like to record their learning and knowledge differs, so don’t assume the same tool will work the same for everyone.

Rather, be as flexible as you can, and ensure that as an organisation you can loosely join the small pieces of your employees’ shared knowledge and learning.

Here are the slides – ignore the title on the first slide, I moved on pretty quickly from that.

Learning and Technology and stuff

View more presentations from Dave Briggs.

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