A good day today. Met some good people, and all of the presentations were good.
Great live Second Life demo from Decka Mah (aka Lindy McKeown) to end the day. She also introduced us to PicLens – a cool Google plug-in for image viewing. Second Life is definitely a usable environment for learning, but the interface probably has a way to go yet to be really seamless. One thing to remember – it really works best as a synchronous learning environment – you have to be there at the right time. One neat application – a virtual city for immersive language learning.
You’ve heard of blended learning? Well, with Second Life, you can have “mixed reality”.
Some of us got a Twitter commentary going. See the tweets here – and a couple of rogue ones here.
Chieftech mentioned this site as a good source for info on RSS for the enterprise – he has also blogged about the day.
Lots of other good stuff, but I really need to make sure I am all ready to present my workshop tomorrow. A few parting thoughts that caught my attention, (somewhat paraphrased) from various presenters today:
- “So there are photos of me drunk on Facebook. So what if a prospective employer sees them? If they don’t like it, then I don’t want to work there, anyway!”
- If only 10% of the staff are editing Wikipedia, then don’t introduce a wiki to your organisation. If 50% are already on Facebook, then provide an internal directory with editable profiles.
- Start small. Don’t give people too much variety at first.
- A great way to reduce email traffic is to charge for emails, and give each staff member a limited budget.
- World email traffic volume has just dipped below social networking traffic.
- If you stop people from saying what they want to say on internal online forums, they will just talk somewhere else.
- Enterprise 2.0: a journey, not a destination.
- “Change is driven by feelings” (John Kotter).
Oh, and I nearly forgot:
“Let them own it, and they will protect it.”
