Australia

We are currently seeking input for Gov 2.0 Taskforce Project 8

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 11:31:01 +1000

Headshift is currently completing a project for the Government 2.0 Taskforce, to develop online engagement guidelines and a Web 2.0 toolkit for Australian government agencies (see the brief - PDF or RTF format).

Our approach for this project involves creating use cases for online engagement that will underpin and connect the two main outputs from this project into something that will give some practical guidance to people working in the public service.

We've already been reaching out to people about these use cases, both in person and online through forums like the Gov 2.0 Australia mailing list, to get feedback and ideas. So if you are working in government and would like to provide feedback or have information to share, please get in touch.

Recording of our Designing for Adoption webinar

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 08:18:01 +1000

A recording of our Designing for Adoption webinar is now available on Atlassian.tv:

The slides themselves are also available on SlideShare.

We invited people to ask questions during the Webinar and here are some pointers to further reading:

Mark Morrell describes how BT has used a different coloured global navigation bar to help users distinguish between published corporate content and user generated content on the intranet;
You can read more about the Freshfields example here and also Lee Bryant's and Ruth Ward's (of Allen & Overy) slides from their Allen & Overy case study presentation at the 2007 Perfect Information Conference;
There are also more Confluence case studies here and I also recommend reading about Clifford Chance's experiences with Confluence.

If you have a more technical orientated question of the type that was covered at last month's Confluence User Group meeting in London, please let us know and we can put you in contact with one of our brilliant Confluence ninjas.

And of course if you have any other questions or comments, please add them below.

Webinar: Designing for Adoption - Friday 23rd Oct @ 9am (Sydney time)

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 12:15:45 +1000

This Friday morning (9am, Sydney, Australia time), Anne and I are excited to be presenting a webinar for Atlassian. We will explain the benefits of customising Confluence and how applying a user-centered approach can help to overcome the typical barriers of enterprise wiki adoption.

We will be covering:

The benefits of using Confluence as an enterprise social computing platform;
The user's perspective and barriers to wiki adoption;
Taking a user-centred design approach with Confluence; and
Examples of user-centred design for Confluence from Headshift's portfolio.

To attend this webinar, please register here.

Note: please check your local time zone for this webinar while registering. The webinar is being hosted across the International Date Line.

A Wiki Case Study: Replacing a Static Intranet at a Law Firm

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 20:45:53 +1000

A few months ago we announced the release of the Social Networking for the Legal Profession report by the Ark Group, which was written by Headshift's Lee Bryant and Penny Edwards.

The London team recently followed up the release of this report with a special 'Insight Event' for the legal profession last week, which include three of the contributors from the report sharing their experiences. They were:

Mark Gould - Head of KM, Addleshaw Goddard;
Stephen Perry - Head of Knowledge and Business Development Systems, Freshfields; and
Sam Dimond - Director of Knowledge, Clifford Chance.

You can also read Penny's summary of Mark's presentation on how social software helps to close the loop on knowledge management in law firms and on Stephen's presentation, 'A portrait of the social intranet' (including his slides).

Because I know everyone loves a case study, I'm going to focus on Freshfields as Stephen outlines exactly why they moved from a traditional intranet to a wiki - all of which I'm sure will sound very familiar to you:

They had out-of-date content that was difficult to find and complex to maintain;
The intranet was sucking up time and effort to manage; and
It was hard to use.

These are pretty common challenges with first generation intranets. Quite naturally, users had become dissatisfied with the intranet and this was reflected in usage rates.

But rather than trying to fix something that was inherently broken (e.g. tidying up the content, reviewing the information architecture or simply throwing a new Web CMS at the issue), instead with some help from Headshift they decided to try a light weight, lower cost Web 2.0-based platform - in this case, a Confluence wiki.

Quoting from Penny's summary, the results have been:

Previously, the firm had around 40-50 global editors. Now there are around 2000 people contributing to 270 spaces. There are approximately 20,000 pages, with 1200 updates a day. The diverse and regular contributions helps to keep content fresh and up-to-date.
The platform also links people, ideas and insights, building up a rich network that is beneficial to both firm and individual.
There has been minimal training (more in the nature of hand-holding) to get people over initial hurdles.
People's feedback indicates that they now feel better informed about what's happening in the firm, about the sectors that they follow and clients that they work with.

Of course, we don't simply drop in a wiki and walk away to get this kind of result. Picking a suitable social technology is key, but it also has be supported by an appropriate social computing approach to implement it.

UPDATE: See Sam's presentation and notes for some implementation tips.

Regardless of your industry, I think that this kind of result speaks for itself about the potential for a social computing-based intranet. The question is, what's stopping you?

Powered up Downunder!

Wed, 02 Sep 2009 15:54:17 +1000

While we were asleep downunder, the Twitterverse was going wild with the announcement of the Dachis Group's acquisition of Headshift - followed by a series of blog post commentaries.
Rather than re-post what Social Business Design is all about, I thought I'd share some of the conversations that have been occuring and then situate these comments into our local context.

Here's a selection of blog posts that attracted my attention - in no particular order - and apologies to those I haven't represented - happy for you to add a link to your post in the comments area of this post:
From Neville Hobson: Is Social Business the new Black
From Luis Suarez: Executing Enterprise 2.0: Dachis Group acquires Headshift
From Tim Bull: E2.0 may be hype, but Dachis is joining the gold rush
From Larry Hawes: Social Business leaps forward with Dachis Group acquisition of Headshift
From Gil Yehuda: Dachis + Headshift = ?

And posts from the Headshift/Dachis team that will explain more about what we're all doing:
From Lee Bryant: Power Up! Level Completed!
From Jevon MacDonald: We are growing!
From David Armano: Dachis Group expands internationally with Headshift
From Peter Kim: Welcome Headshift!
From Kate Neider: Dachis Group Ecosystem Expansion

Nearly 18 months ago I convinced Lee & Livio that a presence in the Australian / S.E. Asian region was a significant opportunity worth exploring...and reflecting upon our journey, I believe we've brought a level expertise informed by experience and best practice from Headshift UK to the region.
We've been actively sharing and building best practice in areas such as the development of Government 2.0, where Lee and James' contribution - ReBooting Australia - to the Centre for Policy Development is part of a submission to the Government 2.0 Taskforce.

Our growing cutsomer base extends across FMCG social media monitoring, innovative social learning networks, internal communication implementations and intranet re-developments. While a number of these social software projects enable the sort of collaboration we understand to be "Enterprise 2.0", this announcement signals a very important leap forward - not only in our powerful ability to execute these projects on a global basis, but that we are moving the conversation from being centred around technology as the solution to being about a fundamental change in business process as we enter the next phase of enterprise social business practices.
The HOZ (Headshift Australasia) team, as a member of the Dachis Group, are exhilarated by the broadening of opportunities and extension to our existing capabilites. We're currently scheduling some conversational events, if you'd like to know more contact Anne or James.

Upgrading Democracy in Australia - Reboot needed

Tue, 01 Sep 2009 17:48:38 +1000

The Centre for Policy Development is an independent Australian public interest think tank. Lee Bryant and I were invited to submit an article for the latest edition of their Insight Magazine, which became available online today. The theme for this edition is:

the brave new world of open government, open access to government information, collaborative policy development, democratic renewal and all the amazing initiatives conjured up by the idea of Government 2.0.

It includes contributions from a range of politicians, academics, activists, and even a few consultants like us! Our piece, Rebooting Australia, was based on Lee's column for Reboot Britain, but rewritten to address the Australian context for Government 2.0:

Lee Bryant and James Dellow, of Europe's leading social technology consultancy, Headshift, propose the application of some 21st century solutions to Australia's problems - use government spending to seed innovation; harness people power for rapid, iterative improvements to policies and services; and, of course, open up access to government data.

This edition of Insight also formed a submission to the Government 2.0 Task Force, so it was great to be part of that process too.

Social innovation gardening

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 21:26:42 +1000

I wrote this short piece about the relevance of Government 2.0 to service delivery at a local level:

The exciting dimension of Government 2.0 is the impact it can have on communities where Local Government is at the front line, along with other community service agencies and organisations.

Of course, it is at this service delivery end that many people start to point out the deficiencies of all this technology evangelism. People working directly within disadvantaged communities or who are involved with the delivery of community services want to see tangible examples of how this new technology can actually help them to do their jobs better. For example, what use is Twitter to an elderly person with dementia, or a refugee that can't read English?

Read the rest on Local Government Focus.

Reframing practice: creating social learning networks

Thu, 13 Aug 2009 17:16:19 +1000

Anne has recently been published in Emerald's peer reviewed Development and Learning in Organizations: An International Journal, with an article looking at social learning networks:

The future of online learning lies with the development of social learning networks, but the value will only be experienced if organizational learning practitioners re-frame their practices to enable learners to share, collaborate, build knowledge, network and learn.

Unfortunately, we can't provide a copy of the article but I'm sure Anne would be more than happy to discuss it over a coffee if you are interested.

SharePoint or Wiki?

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 16:08:46 +1000

This article was originally published in the May/June 2009 edition of Image & Data Manager magazine.

Archimedes famously told us that with a long enough lever and fulcrum to rest it on, he could move the world. The story of designing next generation intranets that are based on social computing principles, what some call, "intranet 2.0", is also locked in a similar paradox: in theory just about any Web-based collaboration or information sharing tool has the potential to be a social computing platform, if only we have enough time and budget for its development.

Microsoft SharePoint is a great case in point. Massively successful, the free version of the SharePoint 2007 family, known as Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (WSS), has slipped into organisations and has found itself embraced by users and IT departments alike. In many organisations, SharePoint may have been the first collaboration solution they had experienced as an improvement to networked file shares and email.

However, Wikis have also grabbed the attention of many organisations. Despite being a decade old technology, it was against the background of the Web 2.0 that Wikis finally appeared on the corporate radar. They offered a revolutionary "every page is editable" alternative to expensive or rigid Web and document management systems. And just like Windows SharePoint Services, there are many 'free' wiki software options available as open source.

More recently, Wikis have evolved beyond the core "every page is editable" concept to include other social computing features such as social networking, tagging, mashups, discussion forums, blogging, activity streams and even microblogging. In this respect, some wiki solutions can now defined more as social computing platforms and less narrowly as lightweight Web content management systems (WCMS).

SharePoint as a social computing platform

You might be surprised to hear me question SharePoint's capabilities when we consider that many of the foundational features in Windows SharePoint Services are intended to support collaboration. Office SharePoint Server 2007 also provides users with My Sites, which supports social networking. But while there is no doubt many organisations are happy with SharePoint's collaboration capabilities, when it comes to enterprise social computing that level of satisfaction depends very much on how you define collaboration.

For example, 'conversational collaboration' is a relatively new phrase to enter the lexicon, but it is reflective of the increased awareness by collaboration specialists that there are in fact many different styles of collaboration - some of which revolve around 'documents', while others are more social and revolve around people networks, activity and communication.

In the case of SharePoint, the style of collaboration it supports out of the box is very much a product of its ancestry. SharePoint has evolved through the combination of different products into the platform we know today as SharePoint 2007. In particular, its origins in SharePoint Team Services and SharePoint Portal Server 2001 mean that it was originally architected to be a user-driven environment for document-centric collaboration by ad hoc groups of users.

This is still very evident in the current version of SharePoint. Sites can be created that the system administrator can delegate control over to a group of users without compromising the overall security of the whole SharePoint system. For this to work, SharePoint uses a site collection and site hierarchy model that creates self-contained sites and often further sites within sites. Functionality like blogs, wikis and discussion forums is then available to be deployed within individual sites.

While this is a strength in terms of supporting a user-driven collaborative pattern for teams, experience now tells us that left uncontrolled SharePoint can go wild. This ends up creating both new information silos and a management nightmare for the IT departments.

A critical success factor in large or complex SharePoint implementations is now generally accepted to involve strong system governance that includes templated sites, centralised meta-data and strict controls over what users can actually modify in their site design. Unfortunately, these sensible SharePoint management controls run counter to the emergent spirit of real social computing.

The modular fashion in which blogging, wiki and discussion forum functionality is provided in the hierarchical site framework also tends to fragment conversations and relationships between different types content. Just as file attachments live in document libraries, each wiki page, blog post or discussion thread also lives in its own particular folder type. This again reflects SharePoints' document-centric architecture.

And while its true that My Sites provides a social networking layer for SharePoint, this does not fundamentally change its underlying anti-social document-centric nature.

Designed for social computing

The first wiki appeared in 1995, well before Tim O'Reilly imagined 'Web 2.0' or Clay Shirky coined the term 'social software'. However, with some justification we can claim that the wiki concept actually helped to define and create the model for social computing*.

More recent interpretations of the wiki concept have taken this model and refined these features, for example rich text editing and adding fine grained security features, or integrated other social computing concepts like blogging, discussion forums, tagging, social bookmarking, social networking, mash ups and microblogging. In some cases, the wiki has matured into what might be better called a social software suite. But fundamentally, even when we add new features, a wiki is engineered to support social computing from the ground up.

Of course, before we get carried away, not every wiki solution is equal either - for example the online wiki comparison site, http://www.wikimatrix.org, lists over 100 different wiki products broken down by different licensing models, technical specifications and functional capabilities.

While we can depend on Microsoft products like SharePoint to work in Microsoft-based environments and take into account enterprise computing requirements, the same does not apply to wikis.

For example, Mediawiki is a popular open source wiki but reflecting its origins and its intent as what we might consider to be pure wiki, it currently lacks a native rich text editor (although they are working towards one) and even the creators will tell you to look elsewhere if you need fine grained access control. Mediawiki also needs an open source database back end to go with it, where as there are other wiki solutions that will work with commercial database products.

The commercial version of the Social Text takes an alternative approach - while Social Text runs on open source technology (e.g. Linux), it is delivered either as hosted solution or a fully managed hardware appliance. Unlike MediaWiki, out of the box Social Text provides support for widgetised dashboards (based on the Google OpenSocial standard), tagging, social networking, activity streams and blogging. Social Text have also been particularly innovative with introducing integrated spreadsheets and microblogging to their wiki (including a desktop microblogging and activity stream client).

Atlassian Confluence on the other hand runs on J2EE and works with commercial databases like Oracle, DB2 and Microsoft SQL server. It is highly customisable and where functionality is missing, it can be extended through plugins that are managed from with the administrators console. Confluence also supports tagging, blogging and activity streams and social networking. Users can also access powerful macros to customise or add in-page functions like calendars, special formatting and other actions.

Picking the right wiki software is not necessarily difficult, as the options for an enterprise deployment can be narrowed down quickly. However, it is important that the wiki software selected supports the social computing functions you intend to use it and that it can be customised easily for those requirements without breaking functionality.

Customisation is still important

One misconception about wiki software is that you are stuck with the basic layout and raw look and feel that comes with it out of the box. However, the vast majority of wiki software allow some form of customisation to style, layout and navigation, although to a lesser or greater degree depending on the particular product.

While such customisations might be considered to be purely cosmetic and therefore unnecessary, in fact the need to tailor a wiki for an organisation is probably more important than when designing a traditional static intranet site.

Not only do these customisations help to reflect key organisational messages (e.g. branding), but more critically they help to provide 'scaffolding' for information and collaboration where users can work. Without them, an out of the box wiki is effectively a blank sheet - people have no idea about what they should be doing in it or where to start.

Tip: If this sound like over engineering the wiki-approach, the overhead and risk of tailoring a wiki is far less that trying to do the same with SharePoint because the underlying social computing functionality and socially-orientated information architecture already exists. Also, once you have established this 'scaffolding' you can move quickly to deploy your wiki and work directly with users to finalise the Wiki's structure. You can read about some read some real life Wiki-customisation case studies in Headshift's project files.

And the winner is...

By now it should be clear that if you pick the right wiki platform, it is by far the superior option for building "intranet 2.0" solutions. It is important to realise that such a wiki is a better choice over SharePoint not just because of the functionality it provides, but because its native social computing architecture lends itself to an customised implementation that can be achieved quickly, more effectively and at less cost.

However to be fair to SharePoint, while its document-centric collaboration capabilities for teams may have opened the door for it into many organisations, it is often chosen for its broader portal capabilities that support transactional business needs like document and records management, business process management and business intelligence.

This may mean that SharePoint is going to be part of your organisation's information system whether you like it or not. If this is the case, then you are faced with a much harder choice. Either begin down the road of customising SharePoint or allow a wiki to stand side by side with SharePoint. In fact, this is an option where ever a legacy Web-based application or specialised Web-based information management tool exists (like a document management system).

Considering enterprise wiki vendors like Confluence and Social Text are partnered with Microsoft and provide SharePoint connectors, is deploying a wiki along side SharePoint such a crazy idea after all?

*In its purest form, a wiki reflects a collaborative pattern that is: Focused on efficiency and ease of use; Encourages contribution of user generated content and permits the information architecture to evolve overtime through this participation; Maintains content quality and integrity through social, rather than systemic controls; and Manages content in a way that is Web page-centric (and not document-centric).

Don't short change online citizens

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 10:57:04 +1000

If you follow me on Twitter, you will know I've been critical at times of the Australian government's recent efforts to embrace Government 2.0 and more technology-supported participatory approaches. So far I have been generally disappointed with the examples I've seen to date, including the Prime Minister's own efforts. Personally I feel that online citizens are being short changed.

Surely, you might think, I should be encouraging these early steps? And perhaps I don't understand the difficulties of change in the public service? These are all reasonable excuses. But rather than treating my comments as a criticism, I would ask that you try to think of them as a kind of tough love instead.

There are three key areas where I believe Australia's Government 2.0 efforts are failing right now:

Making Government 2.0 about the use of Open Source software - Don't get me wrong, Open Source has a role to play, but in itself building a Website on Open Source doesn't make government more accountable or participatory.
Not getting the basics of social media right - Many of the examples I've seen don't support the basics of 'social' in social media. There are plenty of successful social media patterns to follow, so I really can't see any excuse not to learn and build on those patterns.
Poor user experience - In sites that are explicitly geared to participation in a political process it needs to be both easy to participate and clearly demonstrable that participation will lead to an outcome (even if that outcome isn't one that every user might agree with).

The last issue really gets to the point of my Public Sphere 2 presentation - Government 2.0 isn't about e-Government and simply Web-enabling existing processes of engagement. Instead its about supporting engagement and participation processes that don't already exist. This doesn't mean I don't welcome e-Goverment initiatives, however transacting with government online is an area I'm confident that Australian governments at all levels are actually quite capable of doing.

Experimentation with Government 2.0 is fine, but its a poor excuse to not do things as well as they could.

Photos from our Social Media Breakfast

Fri, 31 Jul 2009 20:33:44 +1000

We enjoyed a great morning of discussion and conversation at our Social Media Breakfast last week, which was hosted by Marketing Elements at The Vault, at Fox Studios in Sydney.

You can see the rest of this photo set over on Flickr.

If you couldn't make this breakfast session this time or if you are based outside of Sydney, please let us know if you are interested in attending a similar breakfast in the future.

More on social networking and the legal profession

Thu, 23 Jul 2009 16:08:24 +1000

The New Lawyer has provided a bit of a taste of some of the findings in our recent Social Networking for the Legal Profession report, which was written by Lee Bryant and Penny Edwards at Headshift and published by Ark Group.

If you are looking to explore more around this topic, but haven't yet grabbed a copy of the report there are some great posts from Lee and Penny touching on social networking and other social computing for the legal profession specifically.

First, I suggest you start with Lee's presentation from Legaltech New York in February this year - you can see his slides and read his notes on Five Things Every Legal Practice Should Know About Web 2.0. I love this quote from Lee's slides - aimed squarely at "conservative lawyers" worried about social networking:

"Social tools are not all about personal blogs, throwing sheep or sharing what you had for lunch"

Next read Penny's series of posts:

Of course, if you prefer please feel free to get in touch with either Anne Barlett-Bragg or myself if you would like to know more social networking and the legal projects Headshift have been part of.

Evaluating social computing options? Some local knowledge can help

Wed, 22 Jul 2009 15:58:52 +1000

Other than Atlassian (who started in Australia and happen to have an office in Sydney), many of the newer enterprise social computing vendors don't actually have a local presence in our part of the world. So does this mean you are stuck with talking to an overseas office if you want to ask some questions or simply get a demo?

Don't worry - you can simply come and talk to us instead ;-)

You might be surprised to know that as well developing custom code for client projects and using other open source software, we also work with fully commercial and commercial open source products too. Sometimes we develop custom solutions based on these products, and at other times we provide other types of strategic and organisational consulting services for these products if they are being managed in-house.

Some of leading products we work with include IBM Connections, Microsoft Sharepoint, Attensa, Confluence, Movable Type, Newsgator, Wordpress, Socialtext, Jive Clearspace. Because many of these vendor move quickly, we are constantly experimenting and talking with them so we can understand their capabilities. We are also constantly evaluating new and emerging solutions, like Elgg.

For example, Jon Mell in our UK office and I frequently swap notes about the enterprise social computing space and over on the original Headshift blog, Jon's most recent blog post provides an update on how Social Text's Signals product is developing. I've been playing with Social Text myself this week, as I'm particularly interested in their desktop tool. However, Headshift also recently upgraded its own Confluence wiki and it has a whole set of new and exciting features too.

At Headshift we apply a user experience driven approach to designing social solutions, but we do also appreciate that enterprise customers often want to evaluate solutions from a commercial (e.g. what kind of support will we get) and architectural (e.g. how will it fit with current systems) perspective.

As Jon mentions in his post, please get in touch if you would like to know more about any of the products we work with. We can:

Demonstrate these solutions (or even help with a quick, low cost pilot);
Share our experiences of using them to build social computing solution for clients; and
Talk about options for integration and hosting in your IT environment.

Introducing Shelley Gibb

Wed, 15 Jul 2009 10:06:53 +1000

Today I want to introduce another important member of our local Australian Headshift team, Shelley Gibb (aka Mollybob).

Shelley is an Online Community Management Specialist with qualifications in HRM and e-Learning. She is currently studying Masters degrees in Adult Education and e-Learning at the University of Technology, Sydney.

Previously Shelley was the Learning and Development Officer at Coates, a role which is centred around increasing the access to learning opportunities for the Coates workforce. She has responded to this challenge by introducing a socially focussed e-Learning strategy based on the needs of geographically dispersed learners with a limited level of digital literacy. A case study based on her work at Coates was published in The Australian newspaper this year.

Shelley is also an active member of several online communities based around e-Learning and other interests, and has been a moderator for the Australian Business Women's Network MentorNet program.

To help you get to know Shelley a little better, I asked her a few questions about her background and interest in social media and social computing:

Who are you and what is your role at Headshift?

I am quite a few things. Perpetual student, life long learner, novice photographer. I tend to bring my experiences and perspectives from these other parts of my life to my role as a community manager at Headshift.

How did you get interested in social media and social computing?

I didn't have any understanding about anything social online until I participated in an e-Learning course using social media a few years ago. At first, the experience was a little confusing - teachers asking for my informal thoughts? asking me to share these thoughts with others? Such ideas were totally alien to my other experiences as a student, but through my experience in those classes something just clicked and I've never looked back.

In your view, what are they key impacts social media and social computing are having on organisations?

To me, social media and social computing are changing the way we see knowledge in organisations, that is, power is increasingly being viewed with the perspective of how knowledge is shared, rather than what knowledge single individuals keep to themselves.

What special skills from your professional background do you bring to how organisations make use of social media and social computing?

I have a learning and development background which I am very passionate about and coupled with with my interest in social computing. I think I bring a focus on the "human" element of social computing, and an understanding of some of the factors that can motivate or inhibit the participation that is essential to the success of any social media initiative. I think my studies also contribute to my work as I like to apply theory to practice in my work.

What most excites you about the potential of social media and social computing?

It has the potential to change the way we do things. Dramatically. I think it has the potential to personalise what can be mass produced face to face experiences, and in doing so creates shared knowledge and structure.

Can you tell us about some notable experiences of using social media or social computing?

From a personal perspective, my world felt like it opened up when I started getting online more. I found a whole group of people with similar interests to share ideas with, and I don't think I'd be working as I am at the moment had it not been for those positive personal experiences. I find sharing ideas with others online really motivates me to contribute and think about issues from alternate perspectives sometimes.

What are the blog posts, books or articles that have most helped to shape how you think about social media and social computing?

For me, the most influential ideas are those that have prompted me to think, or triggered bigger ideas, they are also those that I often find myself referring to when explaining social media to others.

If I were to make a quick list of work I have referred to most commonly over the past year, I would have to include the following:

Gilly Salmon's Five Stage Model - I often find myself referring to the need for a moderator when building online communities, and explaining how that role changes over time, at which point I often refer to Gilly Salmon's book e-Moderating, in particular, the five stage model.
Leigh Blackall's work on digital literacy - Something else I refer to probably just as often is Leigh Blackall's digital literacy, in combination with the NCVER digital literacy model because I think it is important to respect community members and recognise their backgrounds both in design and moderation. Some of the more memorable learners for me have been those with low levels of digital digital literacy and high levels of enthusiasm.
Stephen Downes on e-Learning 2.0 - My beliefs around social media can be underpinned with the popular Stephen Downes quote that "Web 2.0 is an attitude". The technology will only get us so far, after that, people need to share for things to work.
Etienne Wenger on Learning Communities - I really like Etienne Wenger's 1998 book, Communities of Practice and find many of the ideas just as relevant in the current technological landscape as they were then, in particular, I think Wenger's quote "Learning cannot be designed: it can only be designed for" is especially true and extends out beyond learning toward interaction.

BTW These questions were very much inspired by Martin Koser's expert profiles on the Enterprise2Open blog.

Social Media Breakfast on 29th July 2009 in Sydney

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 17:04:44 +1000

If you are reading this blog, I'm sure you are aware that social media is not an overnight fad - it is here to stay and it will no doubt evolve and change again as technology continually advances.

Headshift and Marketing Elements are abreast of this change and wants to share its knowledge through a Social Media Breakfast it is hosting in Sydney on Wednesday 29th July 2009 at Fox Studios:

What: Beyond Twitter: International perspectives and trends in social media

Bring your communications strategy up to date with helpful discussion on how to use social media channels to better engage with your stakeholders online, build brand visibility and enhance online reputation.

Topics include:

Social media as a cost effective marketing tool
Recent trends and results in international social media studies
Implications for Australian organisations
Latest, truly engaging techniques to connect with consumers through social media

Who: Anne Bartlett-Bragg, Managing Director, Headshift Australasia.

When: Wednesday, 29th July, strictly 8am start - 9.30am
Where: The Ideas Vault, Fox Studios, 14 Driver Ave, NSW 2021
Cost: $10 per person
RSVP: info@marketingelements.com.au by 10 July (limited to 35 people)