I have this horrible tendency to close the door on what was old and move on. School, jobs, neighbors, etc. And I feel real bad about it.

At a workshop in North Carolina last month one attendee I was having breakfast with told me it was a trait of Scorpios (which I am). I looked it up.

“Part of the negative side of the Scorpio nature is a tendency to discard friends once they cease to be useful, but the decent native is aware of, and fights this tendency.”

Geesh. Cease to be useful? Sounds like an old shoe.. I guess if I ever gave up this platform (blogging) for communicating, you’d all be old shoes. Old Manolo Blahniks of course because you are all so very classy : )

Social Networks are Scorpio-friendly. They foster relationships and help you make and keep connections.

One example of this was an interview I conducted for the Qualitative Research class I took this past semester. I interviewed someone who attended our IiL07 conference in an effort to explore her experiences with the online community portion of the event. (We used Leverage Software and a Facebook group to support the conference).

She explained how at past face-to-face (f2f) events she ended up with a stack of business cards that went nowhere after she got home because she got busy with work. However, with online social networking she is staying in touch and feels this online element increases the likelihood of staying in touch with the people she met. The ‘tendency to discard’ is less likely. The effort it less.

Connections are a beautiful thing to support lifelong learning – a trait we hope our learners develop. What better way to continue the conversation- to continue learning – than to stay connected.

You may want to consider how social networks can work for those one-time events you coordinate at your organization – especially those that include people outside of your organization. Shortsighted maybe, but I never used them in conjunction with a one-time face-to-face event made up of people who seemed not to be otherwise connected. I imagined social networks being used in organizations more for established work groups (everybody in this department), for projects involving people across work groups (for those working on this new implementation), for those with shared roles (leadership), and for those working through a specific curriculum (bootcamp for newbies).

For example, I once coordinated a group event (that included some training) for a group of claims adjusters who were periodically called into service for a catastrophe – hurricanes, etc. This was a group from various companies, geographic locations, and levels of experience. I guess looking back my shortsightedness came from working in a closed environment. Outsiders (those that didn’t work for the company) were connected to the organization by email cc’s and that’s about it. Think how much employees would have learned from experts in the area of handling catastrophes had there been a community. And, it would have been therapeutic for working under those high stress conditions.

The increased sense of connectedness that has been suggested by the research around blended learning provides some credibility. Although my qualitative research project was not full-scale and by no means can be considered definitive, it does provide some interesting avenues for further research.

Perhaps this is all no-brainer stuff but with 1/3 of corporations blocking social networking sites like Facebook, bringing online social networking in-house is probably one of those battles you want to pursue even if you have to look for a behind-the-firewall solution.

Hitchhikr, a tool mastermind by David Warlick, is a sweet tool we’re trying out at the conference. Scroll down to the IIL07 conference on the right side navigation and check it out…aggregated feeds, photos, and cloud tags. Coolio.

Richard Nantel, Harold Jarche, and I filled in for a speaker who could not make his conference session on blogs and wikis. All 30ish people in the room left with blog set up. Here’s Wally Larsen’s first post. If you get a chance check it out and give him an ‘atta boy.

Brandon spoke about innovation – innovation being the single biggest factor for who succeeds and who fails. And innovation in action as an improvement…implementing something new….without fear. He talked about innovations outside of learning and our need to grab the cat by the tail…this is a great analogy for the spirit of the conference.

Live blogging…could be random.

I am listening to Stephen Downes…with slides on
Slideshare…watching the backchannel chat on a second screen. Great – funny- audience participation creating some unplanned laughs. This is messy learning in progress and it’s good.

Innovations in Learning (IIL07) group photos are on Flickr. Enjoy!
Conference Tag IIL07

Well (sentences are rarely good when they start with well), the pre-conference bootcamp that Harold Jarche and I did today left me wanting to re-do the entire thing. I believe the looseness (of an “unworkshop”) was not well received by the attendees. It seems several in this group wanted more structure. I’m left licking wounds and restructuring.  Big sighhhh. Thank goodness Harold was there. When I felt stuck in the mud he pulled me out. : )
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I have to say I was a bit surprised at the number of people who raised their hand when Tom Crawford asked if anyone had played Dance Dance Revolution (DDR). I mean, the average age of the attendees at Tom’s keynote must’ve been 45! I did raise my hand though…and I’m 44. But some people, I just couldn’t picture dancing.

Conversations among attendees about the biggest technology disruptions in the past 100 years included the computer chip, the Internet (of course), plumbing, electricity, TV, telephone, railroad….and as far as learning technology in the last five years, Google was the top ranked. In the bigger scheme of things, plumbing is right up there ; )

For me, Tom’s big message wasn’t about technology…it was about people. It’s the peeps not the technology. Great keynote. Very inspirational. I look forward to his session tomorrow. Earlier tonight, at the poolside reception here at the conference, he shared some interesting demographic information on gamers. The guy is passionate about technology, brilliant and a total geek to boot. He blogged about the conference here. Too cool. And this video is too cool…supplied in the event you don’t know what DDR is.

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