There is a lot that the business world can learn from NGOs in general. And vice versa, I am sure. We all know that. But if there is anything that I have learned just recently that certainly has stroked a chord with me in terms of what would be rather critical and paramount for enterprises (whatever the size) to, finally, understand and embrace in equal terms, is to stop being both rather patronising or paternalistic and, instead, just shut up and listen. After all,  "[…] In economic development, if people do not wish to be helped, leave them alone". Why? Well, it’s all about respect, really.  Servant Leadership can take you, and will take you!, very far, if done correctly; that is, when it’s done around the passion of local people (i.e. employees, knowledge workers, citizens and what not), who have got a dream to become a better person. That’s why empowerment, as a concept, in the business world, is just such a fully loaded word and so very broken, as my good friend, John Wenger, wrote, not long ago, over at "Why you can’t empower someone". What we can do, instead, is go ahead and help people find the knowledge, so that they are capable of pursuing their own goals and outcomes based on their own passion(s). That’s why enablement trumps empowerment time and time again. After all, it’s pretty simple I suppose, if you look into it. You just can’t empower people per se and get away with it, as if nothing happened. Eventually, and perhaps without realising about it too much, that’s when you become rather patronising and paternalistic altogether showcasing you know way better than everyone else, when that may well not be the case, and therefore you think you can still retain that position of power, status, decision making and entitlement, and, therefore, respect, even if you never had it in the first place, because you never show it for others for that matter. See? There is a lot to learn from NGOs. At least, from some of them.  What we can do, essentially, is to enable them (knowledge workers) to empower themselves to be the leaders of change they want to become. And become yourself, in the process, a facilitator, understanding that they won’t succeed alone and that they would need to find partners to be able to strike for the magic. And you are their partner. Apparently, "planning is the kiss of death for entrepreneurship", so what you would want to do, instead, is perhaps invest in the community aspect of getting work done together, as partnerships driven by openness, transparency, collaboration, knowledge sharing, respect, passion, common purpose, etc. etc. away from the traditional hierarchical silos, where applicable, and start working together towards that notion that work happens around communities and networks versus the traditional top down (now obsolete) hierarchy and that "The future of every community lies in capturing the passion, energy and imagination of its own people".  Again, there is a whole lot the business world (And everyone else, in general, for that matter) can learn from NGOs and earlier on this week I myself had that very same wonderful opportunity while bumping into this particular TEDx Talk by Dr. Ernesto Sirolli (Special thanks to Roxanna Samii for sharing it along!) under a rather evocative and suggestive title ("Want to help someone? Shut up and listen!"), where he comes to present with lots of charisma, humour, wit and plenty of drama, an overall incredibly passionate speech about the advantages of working in small local groups or local communities for maximum impact, through facilitators who help inspire entrepreneurship where it matters, as partnerships with different people who may well have different skills and talents, but with one key aspect in mind: that is, instead of you or me or us doing the talk we just keep quiet, shut up, and listen to those folks who we may need to help, eventually, find the knowledge as well as the resources they need for them to pursue their own passion(s) further along:    There is a whole lot more than I could say and write about regarding this absolutely stunning presentation by Ernesto (roughly about 17 minutes long and very much worth while watching altogether!) with lots more to learn and reflect upon, but there is one thing that has stuck with me big time so far and that I am surely going to embark on from here onwards: you know what they say about doing plenty of research beforehand about your potential clients or new prospects, specially, with the emergence of all of these digital tools, so that you are as well prepared as you should, right? Well, to me, while I continue to do that, I am now also scheduling some time off to watch Ernesto’s presentation to remind myself, over and over again, how there is a great chance for me to help those potential customers succeed big time by just shutting up and listening with intent first to what they would want to do, what business problems to address or what new business opportunities to explore, than just myself doing all the talk, thinking that I know better than them. The big ah-ha moment for me, after watching this talk, is that I don’t. I am just a helper. An enabler. A people enabler. One of the many out there who can, hopefully, help find the knowledge you may need through relevant networks and communities with a specific single mission and common purpose: to help you change your world with not only the knowledge and resources you may have available, but also through the communities and networks we are all part of.  After all, you are your (social) networks, and the networks are you, so we better start paying more attention to them, keep quiet and listen both actively and carefully. Remember, "Hierarchies are only as smart as the smartest gatekeepers. Networks are smarter than the sum of their nodes".    Written by Luis Suarez Chief Emergineer and People Enabler. A well seasoned Social / Open Business evangelist and 2.0 practitioner with over 15 years of experience on knowledge management, collaboration, learning, online communities and social networking for business; and has been living, since February 2008, a (work) life without email challenging the status quo of how knowledge workers collaborate and share their knowledge by promoting openness, transparency, trust, sustainable growth, engagement, connectedness and overall smart work. He can also be contacted over in Twitter at @elsua or Google Plus.

A couple of months back you would remember how I put together a blog post over here on an upcoming business trip I was about to embark on heading to Prague, by mid-June, to speak a couple of times at the Social Connections VI event (#soccnx). A few of you have asked me over the course of time whether there were some recordings made available of the different presentations and all along I mentioned that they would become accessible online, eventually, since they were all recorded live, while we were there. It was just a matter of time, and a bunch of hard work to make it happen. And lo and behold, here we have got them, finally, available at the Social Connections Vimeo site and they are looking very good, indeed! So, I guess, it’s now a good time to make your favourite picks and start diving into some really good content! That’s right, depending on what your various interest areas may well be like, you would have a chance to go into the Agenda of the event, as a good refresher, even in case you may not have made it face to face, and pick the topics, breakout sessions or keynote presentations you would be most interested in and start hitting the Play button to enjoy some of the really great quality content that was shared across over the course of a couple of days. What a privilege we all had! Prague, on the brink of summer, stunning location, amazing networking events throughout the entire conference, plenty of very knowledgeable, brilliant and amazing folks talking about some of the topics they are truly passionate about and an amazing team putting it all together to make us all feel just at home. Stunning!  I had the true honour of speaking at the event a couple of times and I enjoyed both of them tremendously! To me, it was a little bit like a homecoming of sorts, after nearly 5 months since I went independent and left IBM to start my own new adventure(s), because I had the wonderfully unique opportunity of catching up with former colleagues and good friends, business partners and lots of amazing customers I had worked with over the course of the years (even while at IBM). That’s what User Groups events have got. That special flair of an incredibly strong sense of community that goes beyond the borders of vendor(s), customers (and their firewalls) and business partners. It’s like one massive online social network coming together face to face to talk, converse AND learn about what they are truly passionate about, i.e. becoming a Socially Integrated Enterprise with no attachments in between, like marketing and vendor speak, practitioners with their own agendas and what not. Purely an intense two day long learning experience of passionate knowledge (Web) workers wanting to make the world, their world, a better place by sharing, collaborating and innovating out in the open.  So when the smart folks organising the overall event asked me whether I would like to be the closing keynote speaker for Day Two, I just couldn’t say "No!", could I? Of course, I accepted such generous offer and the wonderful opportunity of picking up a topic that is dear to my heart, even though I may start sounding like a broken record, and cover it during the course of nearly one hour: Employee Engagement. And the end-result of that presentation can now be watched through online as the recording of the keynote has just been made available a couple of weeks back under the title "From Adaptation to Engagement, Luis Suarez". A copy of the slides can be found as well over at Haiku Deck, in case folks may well be interested… Here’s the embedded code of the recording as well, so you can watch it at your own pace. Hope you folks enjoy it just as much as I did delivering it:  From Adaptation to Engagement, Luis Suarez from Social Connections on Vimeo.   Oh, and if you care to watch another recording of a fun session we did as well while at the event, you may want to take a look into Pardon the Interruption (Fast-paced Social Business Panel Discussion). In case you may not know about the innovative format from this panel session, it’s one that’s been championed by my good friend, and fellow IBMer, Louis Richardson, who introduced it at IBM’s Lotusphere event a couple of years ago and that, basically, puts on the stage a moderator and 3 other panelists who get to answer a good number of questions (Usually from the audience) around Social Business in under a minute. Fast paced, straight to the point, and lots of knowledge sharing in a single round of Q&A.  This time around the moderator was the always insightful Stu McIntyre, then we had a client (Brian O’Neil), a vendor (Luis Benitez) and an independent advisor (yours truly). And for the rest an exhilarating, good fun, very insightful 40 minutes of experiences, know-how, and lots of knowledge sharing from three different worlds colliding with one another to become one: a Social / Open Business.  Pardon the Interruption (Fast-paced panel discussion), Stuart McIntyre & Luis Benitez & Brian O’Neill & Luis Suarez from Social Connections on Vimeo. Needless to say that I am back for plenty more! How come? Well, I had a wonderful time all around (As you will be able to see from both presentations, never mind the massively inspiring networking that always takes place while at such events), as well as very much worth while catching up with good friends, customers and business partners. And, just recently, they have announced Social Connections VII for mid-November this year, and taking place in Stockholm, Sweden, a city I have never been to so far and I think it’ll be a good time to check out more in depth, don’t you think? Will you be joining us as well? Hope you will. It will be good fun seeing you all there! Here’s the link to the Registration page. Oh, and don’t leave it for tomorrow! Places fill up pretty quickly and before you realise it, BOOM! They are gone! Just like that!    Written by Luis Suarez Chief Emergineer and People Enabler. A well seasoned Social / Open Business evangelist and 2.0 practitioner with over 15 years of experience on knowledge management, collaboration, learning, online communities and social networking for business; and has been living, since February 2008, a (work) life without email challenging the status quo of how knowledge workers collaborate and share their knowledge by promoting openness, transparency, trust, sustainable growth, engagement, connectedness and overall smart work. He can also be contacted over in Twitter at @elsua or Google Plus.

Over the course of the last six months it’s been quite an interesting experience, to say the least, being asked, on a rather frequent basis, why did I leave big corporate life at IBM, specially, with the last round of dream jobs, to instead build my own business into the unknown with that inherent flair of uncertainty, specially, given the current times we are living in, and still have no regrets about moving on into that next adventure, whatever that may well be like. Well, after all of that time I guess I am now ready and have a proper answer that I can go by with and that pretty much describes the main reason(s) why I decided, after 17 years, it was time to move on: doing what you love. Well, those words are not really my own, but from the one and only Jim Carrey, when earlier on in the year had the wonderful opportunity, for all of us to witness thanks to the wonders of the Social Web, to deliver the commencement address at Maharishi University of Management’s class of 2014 doing quite a phenomenal piece of work in terms of describing what life should be all about. At least, what he himself makes out of it. I tell you, you got to love commencement addresses. They can well be quite an inspiring and motivational round of resources to remind you why we are all here in the first place in terms of finding our very own purposes and meaning on what we do. Jim’s is right up there in terms of how it can elevate your spirit(s) to think different AND act different by reminding each and everyone of us as to why we make certain decisions the way we do and describe pretty much how vast majority of that decision making process is, actually, driven either by love or fear. Here is a snippet of what I mean and that pretty much describes that whole process in the words of Jim’s own father, which are, if anything, nothing short of pure brilliance. If not, judge for yourselves:  "I learned many great lessons from my father, not the least of which was that you can fail at what you don’t want, so you might as well take a chance on doing what you love" Whoah!! Can it get better and more profound than that?!?! Oh, yes, it surely can! Take a look into this link that contains the full commencement address (A bit over 26 minutes), and which will be totally worth while watching in its entirety. And if you would want to, you can also take a look into the Transcript of Full Commencement Address where you will be able to read through his entire speech. Absolutely stunning!  I’m not going to tease you much longer nor to spoil it for you by sharing plenty of the golden gems he shared across that 26 minute long speech, but while watching it through I just couldn’t help remembering a very recent blog post that my very good friend, Rob Paterson, put together under the rather thought provoking title "The Call to Adventure - Is This You Too?" and which pretty much describes that inner urge from each and everyone of us of "becoming the change". At the heart of the matter though is for us all to figure out if our decision making process strikes either for love or fear, for that matter, and how we learn to live with that decision, regardless of the outcome. I guess 3 years after I wrote Welcome to the Social Enterprise Awakening I am only now starting to comprehend the reach and full potential of the disruption of all of these emerging technologies and social networks not only in a business environment, but also in our society as a whole. I can probably say that it took me 14 years to perhaps realise about it, but then again, I suppose that, subconsciously, back then when I wrote that piece, I was already telling myself something that stroke my brain really hard as well when a couple of months back Seth Godin wrote: "It’s probably easier and certainly more direct to talk to yourself about loving what you do." And forget about everything else, because, regardless of what people may well tell you, it’s no longer worth your time, effort and energy to pursue those endeavours you may well not be truly passionate about. Yes, indeed, it’s all about the passion, after all, about figuring out what kind of passion you have, its real true meaning, along with purpose, how eventually you get to find it, and how you, at long last, put it into action.  I guess that’s essentially what my "in transition" period has been like, since I went independent, if I were to describe it in just a few words, but perhaps much more interesting and intriguing is the overall journey itself, that call to adventure that Rob referred to in the above shared link, of doing what I love doing, even though I’m only now just getting started with it. You see? One of the things I have learned over the course of the years and perhaps I am now fully embracing in its whole measure is how "Life Is Too Short For You To Get Good At What You Don’t Want To Be Doing". And whenever that happens, it’s time to move on and become the change, because, eventually, it’s not the final destination what really matters, but the actual journey. That is, that awakening phase we all get to define for ourselves. And, remember, we are not alone. We have never been alone, since our networks are just within reach of a post, a phone call, or a simple face to face conversation. In short, it’s our collective choice of whether to go for rather a conservative decision or a bold move and from there onwards make the most out of it. Hopefully, the latter. Yes, that’s what I am currently working on… And you?   Written by Luis Suarez Chief Emergineer and People Enabler. A well seasoned Social / Open Business evangelist and 2.0 practitioner with over 15 years of experience on knowledge management, collaboration, learning, online communities and social networking for business; and has been living, since February 2008, a (work) life without email challenging the status quo of how knowledge workers collaborate and share their knowledge by promoting openness, transparency, trust, sustainable growth, engagement, connectedness and overall smart work. He can also be contacted over in Twitter at @elsua or Google Plus.

And nearly four months later… I am back to blogging. Again. And for how long this time around? I just don’t know. We will have to wait and see, but, I tell you, if I were to describe what 2014 has been like so far for yours truly, as we are coming close to its end, I would probably be able to describe it with just a couple of words: "in transition". Frankly, I never thought it would be that way, or that it would take this long for it to be completed, specially, on a personal level, but you know how it goes, you make lots of exciting plans ahead of you in terms of what you would want to do and focus on and then life does its own thing and makes sure none of them eventually work out the way you intended them to in the first place. Well, at least, one thing did work out in the end though: at long last, and after a massively long hiatus (that is now over, by the way) I am back to blogging. Why? Plain and simple. Because I needed it. 2014 is one of those years that I will be remembering for a good number of different reasons (good and bad, in equal terms), but, mainly, because, if anything, it has been a year of change for myself, both on a professional and personal levels. And, as we are in the process of wrapping things up for another year (Goodness! Does time fly when you are having plenty of good fun or what?!), I thought what a better way to resume my blogging mojo than perhaps put together this article where I can reflect on a rather personal account of what has happened month by month sharing some of the highlights (and lowlights!) as an opportunity to not only go through a rather needed cathartic and reflective moment of sorts for myself, but also as a chance to consider that "in transition" period, finally, over, done and dealt with. Time to move on … Oh, talking about moving on, I am sensing this entry is going to be rather long, so I am thinking that if you aren’t really interested in following up with the different thoughts and reflections of what 2014 has been for me so far, I would suggest you stop reading now, and come back to the next post I will be putting together shortly as well now that I am, finally, back to writing. No worries, no offence taken if you move on. I totally understand it. What’s about to come up shortly is perhaps a bit too personal any way; an exercise of self-introspection to help me understand better what’s happened this year and venture into what 2015 may bring forward. It’s an exercise I have been looking forward to engaging with for a good couple of months, since the last post I shared over here. So I better get on with it then, don’t you think? Again, no offence if you would stop reading from here onwards. or if you decide to unsubscribe from the blog altogether after all of this time of silence. There is a new spirit, a massive transformation in the making, a rebirth of sorts, coming along to this blog as well that I will be writing plenty more about over the next few entries and it may well not be what you may be interested in reading, after all. It’s going to be good fun though as I will be rediscovering the true spirit from this blog from way back when it was first born in October 2005 as I get to celebrate its 10th year anniversary next October. Who knows… You’ll tell me, I’m sure. So let’s go! Let’s do it! January Christmas holidays. As usual, the time of the year where I take extended holidays (have been doing that for the last 15 years and counting…). However, this time around a little bit of a special one, since upon my return, on January 20th, I announced, after 17 years of (big) corporate life, I would be leaving IBM, my former employer, and embark on to whatever my next adventure may be like. Not knowing exactly how things would work out eventually, whether I’d be landing safe and sound, whether I’ll be able to justify what’s been my working life for the last of those 14 years as a social computing evangelist or whether I may be able to stay right where I am without having to migrate elsewhere, given the current poor state of things in this country. Lots of uncertainty, indeed, but at the same time plenty of excitement about the new adventures, whatever those may well be. About the change itself, about the new bits of fresh air coming along about figuring out whether I still have got a chance to do something else for the next few years outside of the well established comfort zone I have grown into over the last decade or so. But then … life kicked in, as home care of a rather close family member continued throughout the whole month. Not much of a holiday, after all, as I got to experience, in full force, the initial shift of priorities kicking in and, officially, beginning the "in transition" period… February Reflection month. Spent vast majority of the time reflecting on what I wanted to do next, whether it was working for another vendor in the Social Business & Enterprise Social Networking space, or work for an international business, or work at a startup or, eventually, set up my own business. In the end, and after much thought put into it, I decided to go from one extreme to the other and from having worked 17 years in one of the largest and most complex IT environments out there (through 6 different Lines of Business and dozens of project teams) I decided to set up my own advisory firm around Social Business & Digital Transformation, Knowledge Management, Learning, and Online Community Building. Was that the right choice? I don’t know. Nearly a year later, it looks like I may have made it, after all. But can I sustain it for the next few years? Or was it just the beginner’s luck of someone starting up hoping for the best? I still haven’t been able to answer those questions and I suppose it may need to wait way into 2015 to confirm it. What I knew for sure back then was that I needed something different than whatever I was involved with over the last 17 years. Shifting work environments of similar traits was not going to do it. At the same time, I knew I also needed to have a Plan B and may be a Plan C as well, both of which I haven’t resorted to just yet, which may confirm that initial decision as the potential correct one, if there ever was one. Home care, after nearly three months, finished up on a high note and everything was back in order, although too close for comfort! Phew! March The start of my next adventure. Going solo, as they call it, although I have never been, nor felt, alone, as some people say when you are just getting stated with a new career. Having cultivated and nurtured social networks over the course of the years (As an opportunity to build further up on the collective digital footprint of those friends who you care about and who, in return, would care back), I spent lot of time catching up with folks, whether face to face, or virtually. A very much worth while doing exercise, since it helped me rekindle plenty of those personal business relationships as well as come to terms with the fact and comprehend how plenty of people move on from you, once you stop being enterprisey with no corporate tag attached at the back of your neck, and, how, instead, you meet up other new, but equally interesting and fascinating people you feel you would have never met working in a corporate environment. The "in transition" period fully kicks in by then, as I started working on the pipeline of my own business; trying to figure things out, as I go along, as an independent freelancer, realising the massive learning curve I had just embarked on. Things will never be the same anymore. Excitement is peaking up by the minute as the first potential client prospects help me build that so-called pipeline. No income yet though. Uncertainty makes an entrance. Again. Do I need a Web site to describe my services and myself and hope for the best or will just my Social Web presence (including this blog) be good enough? I still don’t have my site up and I keep wondering whether it’s necessary, or not, in the age of the Social Web, specially, for the kind of work I do. [Oh, don’t worry, there *is* a Web site in the making, right as we speak, so I guess I may have answered for myself that question… Yes!, you do need a Web site for those people who do not know you just yet to get to know you eventually before they will engage through other digital channels!] April Resumed travelling for business (to a couple of conferences, mainly), but this time around, and for the first time since I can remember, as an independent advisor. The business world changes around you. Or you change. Or both for that matter. I don’t know. Things are no longer the same, that’s for sure! You start seeing things through a different lens and all of a sudden you notice how your opinions, thoughts and reflections run free, unbiased, uncensored. Liberating to no end. Hugely refreshing and soul rewarding at the same time. The pipeline for potential work keeps growing, but still no income. Excitement still high though, mainly through the rekindling of those personal business relationships, while forming new ones, as my close social networks morph along to meet, connect and share (with) the new me. Uncertainty starts crippling in, but it doesn’t bother me. Still doesn’t today. A new world to discover and enjoy opens up every single day. Opportunity takes a new meaning. Self-discovery regains strength on everything I do as I try to figure out the what next and, most importantly, the whom with.  May Travelling for business to present at conference events continues to take place, although starting to appreciate, and quite a lot, how the frenzy of biz travelling from back in the day (i.e. almost always on the road) is no longer there, so I can start enjoying travelling again with a pace that just feels right! Yes! The every other week on the road mindset, all of a sudden, drops almost dead and, instead, I get to appreciate how wonderful it is to travel the world, still today in 2014, to meet up some rather beautiful and amazingly talented people. Still one of the things I appreciate the most from my past corporate life, even though it’s no longer happening with the maddening frenzy as it used to be, which means that every time I travel nowadays I enjoy it even so much more. Pace is everything. Pause is the killer. Time is all we got left as the new currency, so making the most out of it, day in day out, takes a whole new meaning altogether. Apparently, I have become a nowist. And I am enjoying it quite a bit, because who knows what will happen tomorrow or the day after? That’s just too far into a future we can never grasp, nor comprehend accordingly, so why bother? Why not enjoy the now as much as we possibly can? And let the worrying about the future for a later time… Pipeline work continues to build up helping me realise, finally, how important it is to constantly keep moving, regardless. Multiple touch points, follow-ups, conversations, social networks and other groupings or associations, etc. No waiting times. If it comes, it comes, if not, we’ll just keep moving along. It will come back at some point, eventually, if it needs my attention, help and support or further involvement. Still no income. Uncertainty grows on the third month in a row without revenue starting to make me wonder whether I made the right decision back in January about moving on. The excitement of the new adventure, the unknown, and what may potentially lay ahead, day in day out, still keeps trumping it all though. Life moves on and so do we. No turning point back. That’s what decisions do for you. You just keep moving on. The constant learning never stops. Regardless. June Surprise, surprise! Huge month ahead! Finally, I got to discover and fully experience what, till today, have been my two main sources of income as an independent advisor: 1) Client work and 2) Hosting face to face workshops around Social Business Adoption & Digital Transformation. Yay! We are back in business! Phew! Was starting to get worried to see how some work streams I initially thought were perhaps going to help me generate some earnings didn’t produce a single dime. Nothing. Zip. Nada. And, yet, on the other hand, and all of a sudden, BANG! first round of revenue kicks in from a work activity I never thought I would be able to pull it through, but there it was … Extremely happy AND hugely relieved. The adrenaline rush of your first client kicks in confirming what you initially felt may have been the right move from the start. [What were those other work streams I thought were going to generate $revenue$ but didn’t? Well, I will blog about them on a separate entry, as I think they deserve their own attention and perhaps additional discussion. You will see what I mean when I share that post across. It will be a bit surprising and very much thought provoking, at least, in what’s meant for me ever since I went independent] July Client work continues. Incredibly exciting and enjoying it tremendously, realising how lucky and privileged I have been to have worked with such a group of rather smart and talented group of clients, and very excited at the same time about helping them accelerate their own collective digital journeys starting it off as a personal transformation. Business travelling for client work picks up a notch or two as well, summer holidays kick in and that feeling that August will be a slow month starts to settle in. Unfortunately, life, once again, had other plans in the making… August Home care for a loved one. Again. Seriously, 2014 has been one of those years that will be rather tough to forget and for a good number of reasons! I couldn’t wait for it to be over, done and dealt with and off we go into 2015. Being stranded at your own home place takes a whole new meaning for the following three months of daily home care for the rest of the family and yours truly. Priorities get reshuffled big time: home nursing, looking after the household, Boira (our Belgian sheep dog), shopping, day to day work (to keep paying bills) and that strange feeling of a much more profound change in the making, building up more and more by the day, once you realise the village you once loved and moved into, because of how much you enjoyed the atmosphere and sense of closeness and proximity, is no longer as charming as it used to be. Quite the opposite. I lost 6 kgs that month. Running every day for an hour kept me going as that was the space where I could get back my sanity from the frenetic day to day craziness of life taking over. It felt great, as it helped me go back to my expected weight that I lost during the course of the Christmas period just a few months back. September Still heavily involved in home care, although the worst was already over (Thank goodness!). Business travelling, after the summer break, resumes itself and additional client work comes along at a nice pace. The reshuffling of priorities and focusing on other more mundane work streams / aspirations, essentially, coming back down to earth, so I could keep paying the bills, results in me having to move on from Change Agents Worldwide. I will miss them, I still do every day, but, you know how it goes, life goes on and has got other plans for you that most of the times you just can’t control, nor manage, but embrace them and hope for the best of potential outcomes. This was one of them that I needed to prepare myself for. Time is the new currency, remember, and massive disruption starts lingering around in the horizon, right as we speak: after 10 years, we are, at long last, moving! Oh, the adrenaline rush of a much needed change kicking in again! Gotta love it. Yes, house hunting begins… A new home beckons a much needed change. A new light. A new life. Eventually, together. October Revenue keeps coming along nicely, helping me not having to worry too much about how we’re going to keep paying the bills. Grateful to no end. Eternally. Work is pretty much focused on helping clients achieve their goals in their own digital transformation journey(s) as well as face to face workshops (as already mentioned above). Things are starting to become more steady and pipeline continues to consolidate with 2015 already in the horizon and looking very good. Or so it seems… For the first time in over 10 years though, it’s time to move on again. Change happens in many ways and this one of finding a new home was no different. It was the end point of the period I have been calling in this blog post as "in transition". By the end of the month, after two to three weeks of heavy search all over the place, we, finally, had a new home. Boy, do I love this place! We were born to live in it right from the start for real! Just brilliant! Just what we needed to conclude that phase of our lives and move into the next one, whatever it may well be. November Within just a few days since we found the bungalow, i.e. our new home, we finally moved in! I still can’t believe how lucky we were in finding such a gorgeous place! Of course, I will be sharing some pictures both in my Flickr and Instagram accounts. Perhaps it was our lucky shot at that point in time, but so very much needed altogether, after such an interesting year gone by so far! Conference month kicks in in full force so it looks like moving in needs to slow down a bit while I get to do a bit of business travelling around Europe. After Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels, Barcelona, Zaragoza, Madrid, London, Prague, Zurich (twice!) it is now time to check out Stockholm, Madrid (again) and Zurich (for the third time!). Not sure why there seems to be this obsession by conference organisers to put together all of their tech events either in March or November. It must be the winter! Do them in March to get people out of their homes right as spring kicks in or by November before everyone hides for the remaining of the year as winter approaches fast and furious. It’s crazy! Either way, loved the travelling to all of those cities and even more when the prospect of coming to a new home made it all really worth it. But then another nightmare came through. As if I didn’t have enough with the rather tumultuous personal life throughout the year, my daily work was just about to be hugely disrupted. To the point where I haven’t recovered just yet from it and it may still take a while. Apparently, I have been forced, to put it mildly (by my telco / ISP) to go through this excruciating and horrifying experience of not having a landline, nor ADSL connection, at the new place, meaning that every single day that has gone by since November 7th (When I requested a landline / ADSL transfer) I have been losing revenue for not having worked with clients while collaborating remotely through the Social Web. Yes!, 45 days and counting… Apparently, this is what you get in exchange of 10 years of customer loyalty spending about 175€ to 200€ per month steady for all the services I have contracted with them. And the worst part of it all? Well, that it is not over yet. 45 days later, I am still waiting for someone at that ISP to fully understand and comprehend the kind of damage they have done to this independent freelancer who happens to live off the Internet (as a remote knowledge Web worker) for his day to day work. Apparently, as a customer, that’s not important. After all, it’s not their revenue (they still get paid for not providing any kind of service!). It’s my own. Yes, you are guessing it right. There is a blog post coming up where I’ll be detailing what it is like living without access to the Internet when it’s your primary means of income while a Queen Between stands in the way not wanting to address and fix the issues sooner rather than later. December Phew! 2014! The Year That Was, indeed! Still without connectivity at our new home and surviving on a hugely expensive data plan for my mobile which runs out incredibly fast given the demands of my Web work and where my telco / ISP has decided that, as a token of generosity, they have extended my monthly quota of 4GB at a lovely price increase I just can’t resist paying for it. Yes, I guess gratitude from their side is taking a new meaning I should fondly remember over time. Anyway, that separate blog post will detail plenty more what’s been happening so far, or better said, what’s not been happening… For now I bet I will be spending the remaining of the year musing about the new exciting adventure(s) at work. The amazing people I have been meeting throughout the year and who have made it a rather special one (Yes, you know who you all are!). The excitement of doing what I love doing, finally, has kicked off the uncertainty into no-man’s land. And although current pipeline work for 2015 has been abruptly halted to a standstill by my local ISP blocking me from accessing the Internet to do my job, I am hopeful the issues will be sorted out soon enough to be able to enjoy a Christmas break I will be treasuring to bits after everything that has happened this year: 2104. The Year of Change. Massive change. Finally, the most important thing, at least, to me, that clearly helps me understand what we are all up to in our personal lives with the odd distraction here and there: caring for one another. Indeed, home care, at long last!, is also now over! A thing of the past and, thank goodness!, everything worked out all right in the end, despite the initial hurdles and health scares! Our new wonderful home has done the rest in the healing process making up for a superb end of a rather interesting and challenging year, both on the professional and personal levels, and where I have learned perhaps the most important lesson to date: life has its own plans and ways of developing things further and only thing we can all do is to adjust and adapt accordingly, and make the most out of it all, while having plenty of really good fun! Life is just too short not to enjoy it the fullest. Today. Don’t leave it for tomorrow. And if that means I am a nowist, be it. After all, it’s Christmas and a good time to get back plenty of the social life we just didn’t get a chance to invest in this year with all that’s happened. It’s never too late, I know. Life keeps moving on and with it all of us, whether we like it or not. I guess it’s now time for you folks and me to move on, too! I suppose it’s good enough for today as a yearly catchup update of sorts, where I can share with you all what’s been happening so far this year and why there has been, at times, extensive periods of silence from yours truly while I was focusing and spending my time fiddling with other priorities. For those of you who have stuck around thus far into this blog entry, please do allow me to share with you all a sincere token of gratitude for sticking around. It’s hugely appreciated and I’m certainly looking forward to resuming plenty of the online interactions we used to have in between those periods of quietness.  I’m now back business as usual (At least, for as long as I can without blowing away the monthly mobile data plan) and while I get to put together the next blog posts over here, as an opportunity to resume my blogging mojo, I thought I would share with you all one other major highlight that I went through earlier on this year that I think you might find interesting as well. It’s a podcasting recording. Perhaps one of the most thorough and intimate interviews I have recorded in a good few years. The interview was hosted by the wonderful and incredibly smart Michael Hicks from the My Way Podcast show. During the course of an hour we got to discuss plenty of the key experiences that throughout the years, starting off at a rather early age!, have shaped and nurtured who I am today: Luis Suarez. It’s that kind of a rather personal podcasting episode where plenty of the nuggets I talked about may not well be known, if only, but a few rather close friends. My Way Podcast is "committed to telling people’s stories" and I guess that’s just what we did: narrate my story. So, if after reading this rather long post you still feel like going for a good listen of what I have been up to in the last two decades, with lots of personal touch points, and hilarious anecdotes, feel free to head over to the podcasting episode and have a listen. I can guarantee you would have a good laugh or two in between some pretty interesting insights we talked about and shared across around "confidence, working in a team, why it’s important to work in customer service, how and why he no longer uses email at work, working remotely, pursuing multiple interests to find what you are really passionate about, how he uses his blog as his external brain, his recent switch to freelancing, and so much more". Hope you enjoy it and from here just a special thanks to both Michael Hicks and Amber Robbin for making it possible! What a wonderful finishing touch to quite an exhilarating year and here’s to plenty more for 2015 and beyond! Written by Luis Suarez Chief Emergineer and People Enabler. A well seasoned Social / Open Business evangelist and 2.0 practitioner with over 15 years of experience on knowledge management, collaboration, learning, online communities and social networking for business; and has been living, since February 2008, a (work) life without email challenging the status quo of how knowledge workers collaborate and share their knowledge by promoting openness, transparency, trust, sustainable growth, engagement, connectedness and overall smart work. He can also be contacted over in Twitter at @elsua or Google Plus.

Imagine if all of a sudden you decide to embark on an experiment where you try to figure out what it would be like to live without access to the Internet over a certain period of time not only for your day to day work, but also for your personal life. Complete switch-off from everything online. Would you be able to do it? And, if so, for how long? Imagine if that experiment then turns out to be, eventually, the worst of nightmares as it becomes your new reality and for much longer than you anticipated and your work that depends on it (as a knowledge (Web) worker) goes into an unpleasant halt you just can’t get out of any time soon. Would you be able to hold it for any much longer? Well, don’t imagine, that’s the story I’ve been going through myself in the last few weeks as I got to experience, first hand, and in full force, how Movistar killed the Web Star. There are times where one’s patience starts to run out. You know, you try really hard to be patient, you always aim for doing your very best at it, but you still run out of it nevertheless no matter what. Well, mine just did. And it is not pretty. Reality kicks in. After 52 days (Yes! 52 days exactly today!) of waiting for my local telco / ISP provider, Movistar (Telefónica), to, finally, get their act together and transfer the old existing landline and ADSL connection to my new home place in another town I can now confirm how Movistar itself treats over 10 years of customer loyalty: really sorry, but it looks like you are pretty much screwed and we just can’t care less for you nor your working needs. Tough luck.  See? That’s what Queen Betweens do. Or, basically, what single monopolies tend to do over the course of time: squeeze their customers to no end charging them through the roof for their own profit for services you can’t use fully by constantly ignoring your needs while providing you with everything but a delightful experience. More of a horrifying experience, if I may add. Why? Because they can. Because they can’t care less about who you are, what you do, what your needs and wants may well be or what the potential consequences of their exponential incompetence at failing to provide what they themselves call "good" customer service may well be. They don’t. They can’t. They won’t. Ever. 52 days and counting… This is the story of a 10 year long loyal customer of a local, nationwide, telco provider who has had just about enough of being treated like utter crap, mostly because, you know, I am just A customer. Like any other customer. So who cares, right? I am just incredibly easy to ignore and delight accordingly, apparently. Remember those good old times from over the course of last 2 to 3 years when plenty of businesses have been pouring down our throats their lovely marketing messages about how we are living in a hyper connected, always-on, digital mobile world where businesses can now provide individualised and incredibly customised excelling experiences to clients based on their needs and wants? Well, let me tell you something: what a bunch of bollocks! At least, for Movistar, as it’s taken them over 50 days (and still counting!) to accommodate the needs of one of their many customers. And the answer I keep getting back is that the issues will be sorted out really soon. 52 days later, *nothing* has happened other than being charged over 250€ for a set of services I just don’t have. Not even a single "We’re sorry for the inconvenience" coming through! The thing is that I am not A customer. I mean, if I were a client who may not have had an urging need to use the Web and the telephone as his primary means of income and revenue, I would probably be ok without the phone nor the Internet for nearly 2 months. The thing though is that I *am* a knowledge Web worker and, as such, I pretty much *live* on the Web. I do have a constant need to be hyper connected, always online, so I can carry out work with clients, wherever and whenever they may well be, while collaborating and sharing our knowledge together over the (Social) Web. Yet, I can’t, because Movistar, apparently, after 10 years of being loyal to them, still doesn’t know me, nor my needs or requirements to conduct knowledge Web work. Yes, apparently, 10 years aren’t enough to get to know who your customers really are. Troubling, really. And frustrating to no end! The end result? Me losing customers (and revenue!!) every single day gone by so far! With the move to the new home, and as some kind of cruel punishment by Movistar inflicted upon myself for wanting to start a new life (You can probably sense now how frustrating things can get when you are excited about moving to a new home, but yet you can’t work at it as I’ve done over the last 12 years as a remote worker!), I have lost the opportunity to constantly keep working on the pipeline for 2015 for new work, which was the original plan for this month, December, for yours truly. I have also lost the opportunity to continue working with current clients because we just can’t hold up any kind of knowledge work like collaborating remotely through digital tools, video conferencing, conference calls, etc. etc. Everything is on a stand still, except for paying bills, of course. Even those to Movistar itself for a service they keep failing to provide across for nearly two months now.  The thing is that in terms of remote customer support through Twitter, SMS messages, phone calls and what not, the client experience has been incredibly delightful. The fire extinguishing activities keep mounting up by the day and the folks behind @Movistar_es keep doing a good job in taming and containing my patience from turning into rage, although lately, the responses and keeping me up in the loop is starting to fall behind, probably because they are getting just as tired and frustrated as I am right now as we speak for not seeing the issues getting sorted out any time soon. Bless them for the superb piece of work they are doing in camouflaging the utterly crappy service Movistar is providing to this customer at the moment. Bless them for totally understanding my problem, or so they tell me, of not being connected and losing revenue day in day out, and doing their best, which, apparently, hasn’t resulted in much happening anyway, as I am still without a landline nor ADSL, after a few weeks gone by, but I am still paying for that lack of service. Oh, the many joys of the Community Management Team. See why that whole system is broken? Bless them for trying though, they have just been eaten alive by the system along with yours truly.  It all started on November 7th, 2014, when I requested the transfer of the landline and ADSL to my new home place and I was told the whole process would take between 5 to 20 days. I told myself, perfect timing, as I will be travelling for the remainder of November to 3 different countries to do work for clients, and upon my return it would all be installed and ready for me to carry on with my job. Wishful thinking. On the same week I got back I got a phone call from one of the local technicians telling me that the place where I now live doesn’t have any more free physical telephone line connections, so they would need to put a new box, which may require another 5 to 20 days for it to be processed. Panic mode kicks in as December starts and I can’t do any work any more from my home office. Yes, I know, I have been stealing the wi-fi at friends’ homes for pretty much any kind of urgent work, but it’s been incredibly embarrassing to admit to them how much money I get to spend for a service I’m not getting while I’m using theirs. Frustrating to no end that here we are, last day of 2014, and we still have got these connectivity issues in a more hyper connected and always-on world that ever. But is it really? Apparently, it isn’t! Weeks go by and I get another phone call where I am advised that things are going to be a bit tough because to get a new box is going to be challenging as they are no longer investing in copper, by in fibre (which will take still a few more months to come where I currently live, so not a choice), and the whole process of funding, just for that box, would need to kick in. There aren’t any guarantees, I got told and at that point the first glimpses of desperation and rage kick in as I keep telling them they just can’t cut me off the Internet grid, because of a box. What am I supposed to do with my job as a knowledge (Web) worker?!?!?! Please! Can we get a sense of reality kicking in on the kind of impact such decision would be having not only upon myself, but the family I’m trying really hard to sustain without falling apart into pieces? Apparently, not! A few days more go by and I got another phone call where I’m told they finally got the confirmation the box funding went through, the request was processed and it’s just a matter of a day or two for a local technician to come along, install it all, and we are back in track. No, we aren’t. I was advised that on December 29th, the local technician would be coming along and do the magic. Alas, no magic happened, I am afraid, only a steady increase of being ticked off about what’s happening. I just can’t believe it. I’m still disconnected and not a chance to know when exactly it would all be fixed, specially, during this Festive Season where everything seems to go on a pause till after January 7th. My goodness! Can I wait for another 2 to 3 weeks?!?!?! No, I can’t! I need to start working again and pronto! But you have got the 3G / 4G on your mobile plan, right? Yes, I do, but that’s not been very helpful, either, as I currently have got a 6GB quota allowance per month that, given the kind of work I do, I pretty much basically burn it all out in about 2 to 3 days and, once again, here  I am, back to stealing friends’ wifi connections at their own homes. The level of embarrassment and apologising keeps increasing by the minute. Desperation increases a notch or two when you realise it may well be about mid-January next year when it all may be fixed, if at all (as I was wrongly? advised on another phone call not long ago, where I thought it would be mid-December… No, mid-January, apparently). Unreal! You can now see why I have pretty much run out of patience already, right? Well, it gets much worse! Because the mobile telco is the same ISP that’s supposed to fix the issues (i.e. Movistar) and I am only getting charged more and more money by extending the mobile quota of data. But "what about public wi-fi spaces where you live in the south of Gran Canaria that you could use?", you may be wondering, right? Well, once again, no good news, I am afraid, as Wi-Fi Finder tells me there aren’t any around me within a close distance and I can only go into a hotel to pay for a daily fee speeds that would take me back to the late 90s. Yes, I’ve tried it already and it’s not even a mild option to consider.  "Of course, you know, that happens to you because you live in paradise island and people are on holidays over there!!!", you may be thinking as well right? Really? Here we are, once again, coming close to 2015 and we still think that way? Let me share with you all the incredibly huge missed opportunity by that same telco / ISP provider AND the various local government organisms AND perhaps also the European Union in their so-called efforts to digitised Europe on what they are missing by not working the magic of free public wifi spaces across the board. Go back 10 to 15 years ago, when you use to go on holidays to sunny paradise islands in the middle of nowhere. How did you get in touch with your family and loved ones back then? A long distance phone call, reverse charge, perhaps? A postcard? Complete silence till you got back? What do you do nowadays when you go on holidays? How do you keep up with your loved ones and share with them what a wonderful holiday you are having and find out how they are doing as well instead? I bet it’s not a phone call, or a postcard, or just complete silence. I bet it’s all pictures, video clips, snippets you feel inspired to create and then share them across the Web by costing you an arm and a leg in hugely expensive roaming charges or countless hours of hunting down a decent Internet connection somewhere. Over the weekend, as an example, I was eating lunch at a restaurant when a guest, an older lady, asked the owner whether he had free wifi or not and when he said he didn’t she humphed and left the place (lost another customer right there!) reminding me, once again, about the huge opportunity of not thinking that the Web should start to become as pervasive as electricity is nowadays… Even a right! No, it’s probably better to remain a monopoly by some telco providers as I am currently stuck in this situation. Unless Movistar transfers that phone line I won’t be connected through ADSL / wifi any time soon. I can’t go to any other telco providers as they hold the physical line work themselves. I can’t go to Internet satellite providers as they are even pricier and for rather poor connectivity coming along. I just can’t live on 3G / 4G unless I drastically change my working habits, or perhaps even find another kind of job, which has crossed my mind over the course of last few days as I keep contemplating Plan B & C that I have written about in a former blog post. See? This is how screwed up the whole situation is that I have to contemplate the prospect of changing my entire career and look for other job opportunities where being connected is not very much needed, but just a nice-have thing to have for when you come back home from work. And all of that due to the sheer incompetence of a telco / ISP that just doesn’t care much about the potential impact of their non-service to their customers even though they are paying loads of money for services they are just not using!  That’s the main reason why I have been offline for vast majority of the time since I shared my previous blog post and while I thought I would be coming back to the social grid shortly, it looks like it’s not going to happen any time soon. Even worse, I don’t think I’d ever get a single response to this blog post, never mind getting the issues sorted out in a timely manner (Remember, 52 days and still counting…). It probably even won’t be noticed, because, you know, after 10 years of being their customer, they just don’t know me much. They don’t seem to have enough data of myself, throughout all of this time, to make an educated decision of fixing the issues as soon as possible, as they have now screwed this customer for good.  A couple of years ago I blogged on how Social Business is all about People to People Business and, ironically, featuring Movistar themselves as a success story. Oh, my goodness!, how naïve I was back then! I guess I can now withdraw those words from here onwards and confirm, sadly, that Movistar is everything but a people to people business. It’s more of a Queen Between with an urging need to die a slow and painful death pretty soon IF they keep on working this hard to disservice their loyal customers! Yes, I’m an optimist and I know there is hope, but will they, finally, get their act together and help me before I move on? The clock is ticking… Time is the new currency. They have already lost 52 days and counting …     Written by Luis Suarez Chief Emergineer and People Enabler. A well seasoned Social / Open Business evangelist and 2.0 practitioner with over 15 years of experience on knowledge management, collaboration, learning, online communities and social networking for business; and has been living, since February 2008, a (work) life without email challenging the status quo of how knowledge workers collaborate and share their knowledge by promoting openness, transparency, trust, sustainable growth, engagement, connectedness and overall smart work. He can also be contacted over in Twitter at @elsua or Google Plus. [PS. If you happen to have read this article, currently live in Playa del Inglés, Gran Canaria, and can offer a coworking space with a decent Internet connection where I can start working right away or if you think you can help out with my current connectivity issues, please do get in touch. I would love to talk with you!]

Today is, officially, my first day at work for 2015 after the Christmas holidays. I am writing officially on purpose, because after 61 days I am still waiting for Movistar (That Queen Between that always wants to get paid, but fails to deliver on customer service big time!) to come by my new place and install both the landline and the ADSL connection, so I can resume my knowledge Web work I have been forced to put into a halt for over 2 months now. Latest news I have from the fire extinguishing community management team at Movister_es on Twitter is that they will finally make an appearance (or so I am hoping!) on January 16th. Yet no-one from the technical team has contacted me to confirm that appointment. Instead, they seem to have mastered the skill of lying to this customer left and right throughout all of that time to the point where, at long last, it will have a price to pay: my loyalty. Or, perhaps, even worse, my trust. After all, how can I ever possibly trust my local telco / ISP again for helping me carry on with my job as an independent freelancer (autónomo, in Spain), working remotely from his home office, when they have locked me down for all of this time without a single apology or concern about the huge impact they have incurred upon this family where I am the solely source of income at the moment. And, instead, they take the route of lying day in day out as it is their business as usual modus operandi. It’s always been. From 5 to 20 days to get it all sorted out, initially, to another 5 to 20 days to finally get it done and dealt with, to December 29th, to now January 16th (Perhaps?), all along I have been told they would make it all happen relatively fast. Yet, 61 days later I am still waiting… But that’s not the worst bit of it all, because earlier by mid-November last year I got a phone call (One of the many pointless interactions I have had so far!) from a rather helpful and supportive lady telling me they have acknowledged the request to transfer the phone / ADSL line and that it will be taking place by mid-January. Yes, MID-JANUARY 2015!! So why bother with all the lying to this loyal, faithful 11 year long customer over the course of weeks through regular Twitter Mentions & DMs, phone calls, SMS messages and what not if right along from the start *you* knew exactly when it will all be addressed and fixed and since it was going to take over 2.5 months of rage, angst, impatience and unsettling unhappiness all around for yours truly I guess it was better to lie to this customer in order to tame the frustration. Bollocks!  Let me tell you something, my dear Movistar, if you keep claiming you happen to be a people to people business, i.e. a successful Social Business, one who cares about their clients and their needs, about your own employees and their well being, one who aims at changing the landscape of B2C (if there ever was such a thing like that!), one who simply cares, there is one little thing you may want to add to your vocabulary from now onwards: never lie to your customers. Be willing to engage in a two-way, meaningful, open, transparent conversation where you are willing to acknowledge the shortcomings of your already appalling customer service, so that you might be able to spark that sentiment of empathy you now have long lost from yours truly, because you just weren’t ready to face the reality: you are everything BUT a social business. Sad state of things, really, if you can’t handle the simple fundamentals of what it is like being an Open Business through openness, trust and authenticity. Yes, it’s going to take me about 2.5 months to get back on track and be connected to the Internet, once again, thanks to you, Movistar. In the mean time, I can tell you I have gone through some rather interesting and colourful times that will make me remember you not very fondly for a long while, but, right now, there is just something out there for you to worry about quite a bit more: my trust in you and your services, because if you cared about your customers and keep aiming at building one’s trust in you, I can now confirm you have totally lost mine and it will take you a substantial amount of time AND effort to repair it. I know for sure though you won’t even think a single time in investing your always lacking resources. Why should you, right? After all, who am I? I am just A customer. One of the many millions you keep saying you are serving to the point of delight, but fail quite remarkably at it time and time again by ignoring their own needs and wants, just because you feel we should be obliged to you for offering the service of being connected to the Internet. According to you, it should be our privilege to be your customer, like we owe it to you, but, alas, you know what?, at this point in time, that trust and loyalty from yours truly you have accumulated over the course of over a decade is now lost and long gone forever to the point where you will now become a primer example of what a so-called social business should not be doing at all. You are the perfect case of the anti-social business mindset. Your weakness? Not the lack of resources, nor the lack of customer service skills and know-how while trying to fix your customers’ problems, but something much more fundamental and key to every single Open Business: never *ever* lie to your customers.  You know, they will eventually find out. I just did.    Written by Luis Suarez Chief Emergineer and People Enabler. A well seasoned Social / Open Business evangelist and 2.0 practitioner with over 15 years of experience on knowledge management, collaboration, learning, online communities and social networking for business; and has been living, since February 2008, a (work) life without email challenging the status quo of how knowledge workers collaborate and share their knowledge by promoting openness, transparency, trust, sustainable growth, engagement, connectedness and overall smart work. He can also be contacted over in Twitter at @elsua or Google Plus.

Here I am, once again, incredibly frustrated and very irritated I got disconnected from the Internet last week Friday, as I blew up my monthly data allowance on my mobile phone for the zillionth time over the course of last few weeks. I got a bit tired of asking friends to use their wifi again and again, so I could continue with my day to day work routines, never mind as well embarrassing myself showing up at a local coffee shop time and time again while the monthly bill keeps getting more and more expensive with all of the additional beverages. Oh well, one more week to go… Indeed, one more week to go before Movistar finally shares some mercy upon myself and decides to treat this customer with some decency by hooking up both my landline and ADSL connection after nearly 2.5 months of much anticipated wait. I just can’t count the days anymore…  Indeed, I just can’t count the days after having endured such level of sheer incompetence and utterly appalling customer service while earlier on today I had a chance to reflect and muse on a conversation I had with a very good friend of mine, back at the beginning of 2014, as I was just getting started with my new adventure as an independent advisor around Social Business and Digital Transformation where we talked, rather extensively, about what it is like being a freelancer in today’s more complex than ever working environment.  I trust his judgement quite a bit, since he has been a freelancer himself in the IT industry for over 35 years and still going strong, so when we, finally, had a chance to talk through Skype, I knew it was going to be a rather intense, massively entertaining, hugely enlightening and incredibly helpful learning experience. And, boy, it surely was! We talked about lots of things about what to expect and what not, about what may work and what may not. We talked extensively of what it is like living in this brave new world of uncertainty and make the most out of it, but if there was a single point of discussion I truly cherished (even to today) as one of my key learning highlights from 2014 was the subject of who my new boss would be from there onwards, now I was no longer a salaried employee at a large big corporation.  We had a good laugh when, as we got started with that conversation, I mentioned to him how in my last project with my former employer at one point I had up to 11 different management lines before I could reach out to the top, that is, the CEO of the company. And of those 11 different bosses I often found myself having to report to several chains of command to keep them in the loop of what I was doing for my day to day work. Never mind how things would have been much much different if they themselves would have been working out loud,  narrating their work (just as I was!), instead of being stuck in their own email Inboxes. Oh well, that’s a story for another blog post coming up on the incredibly inspiring and rather refreshing egalitarian power of social networking tools in helping knowledge workers ignore the hierarchy, flatten the organisation in order to get work done more effectively.  The thing is this good friend of mine mentioned how, despite the uncertainty that will be now part of my daily life, plenty of things will become a lot simpler in terms of figuring out who my new boss may well be from there onwards. The only one I would need to pay attention to. A surprising and rather refreshing change even, because, in his words, my new boss as a freelancer and independent advisor is no longer my organisation, whatever that may well be, as the traditional hierarchy disappears into thin air since that artificial construct is no longer needed, nor relevant. My new boss is not going to be my fellow peers / colleagues / social networks or what not, not even perhaps the so-called influencers in the market, vendors, analysts, business partners and whatever other groupings, but, eventually, and right to the heart of the matter, my boss would be the one and only to care for and delight to no end: my customer(s). Wise words, indeed. Who would have thought about that, right? I mean, if you go out there and ask a few people to tell you who their boss is I bet "My customer(s)" is probably going to be the very last answer you are most likely going to hear. And yet it’s the only one that we should be caring about. The only one that matters. The one we all keep coming back to work for every morning doing what we love doing: serving our clients with a delightful experience and, of course, in a timely manner.  Right at that moment, while we were still conversing and enjoying very much the ongoing dialogue, I realised that sentiment of my customer(s) as my new boss(es) will become my new mantra ever since I went independent and I have never gone back. As a result, and almost after a year going by, I have had the enormous privilege and true honour of having worked with some pretty amazing and rather smart clients who throughout our interactions in 2014 (and beginning of this year already!) have helped me grow not only in a professional level, but also on a personal level. Who knew?  Who knew that bosses / managers could have that effect on you? Who knew that perhaps in the traditional big corporate world we may have had the wrong end of the stick all along? I mean, how many of you folks out there would consider your immediate boss today your customer and not the individual you are directly, or indirectly, reporting to? I am certain not many. The thing is that you may be thinking that since you don’t have an external job to focus on, specially if you are not in sales or marketing, you really don’t have any customers to worry about, as you may be working in internal projects. But how about if we got it all wrong right from the beginning? You see? We are all providing a service, whether internal and / or external, and as service providers everyone that we are serving then becomes our customer and therefore our new boss. Imagine if we could all get to ignore everything else and just focus on the customer as your new manager.  Well, here I am thinking what that may have been like over the course of the last 2.5 months when I first requested a service from Movistar where I wanted to transfer my already existing landline and ADSL I got contracted with them and move it to my new home place, 10 minutes away from the old one. As a service provider you would expect they would go the extra mile for their new boss to provide him with a delightful experience, don’t you think? Yet, apparently, they have been looking elsewhere, inwards, stuck in their paperwork, without resources, providing everything but a delightful client experience. More of a nightmare, if I may add. And perhaps that’s been part my fault as well for not stressing out deep enough the impact I have been suffering from their disservice, as I have no longer been able to carry on with my day to day knowledge Web work activities, losing several opportunities already of incoming revenue in the last two months and still counting… Last week Friday I cancelled one of the many services I had contracted with Movistar for a good few years. Perhaps that’s how I should have made myself heard right from the start vs. patiently awaiting for them to look outside vs. inwards. It won’t be the last one. Currently, I am compiling the various different services I have got contracted with them and over the course of the next few days / weeks / months I will be terminating each and every one of them. I guess I will be firing them all away! I have been saying for a good while now how employee disengagement is a rather serious business problem to tackle in today’s corporate world. Mostly induced by disengaged managers, if you look deep enough into it beyond the initial marketing hype currently going on.  So when your loyal customer, i.e. your new boss, actively disengages away from you by cancelling service after service, due to your rather poor and devastating skills about proper customer service, I guess it’s time now for you to figure out what’s happening, look around, go outside, engage in a meaningful conversation where you can work harder to solve their business problem(s) and see how you may be able, perhaps, to re-engage them back. If ever. If you still care, that is.  The clock is ticking… It has been already for a good few weeks and this customer, yours truly, is just about to have enough of being your boss really, my dear Movistar. Thus, what do you think? Time for us to depart ways and move on? Well, it’s up to you… Like I said, the clock is ticking and I just might be waiting for your response to re-engage me back. You know what needs to be done and, this time around, in case you may not have noticed it, there is a deadline. Friday, January 16th, 2015.    Written by Luis Suarez Chief Emergineer and People Enabler. A well seasoned Social / Open Business evangelist and 2.0 practitioner with over 15 years of experience on knowledge management, collaboration, learning, online communities and social networking for business; and has been living, since February 2008, a (work) life without email challenging the status quo of how knowledge workers collaborate and share their knowledge by promoting openness, transparency, trust, sustainable growth, engagement, connectedness and overall smart work. He can also be contacted over in Twitter at @elsua or Google Plus.

And after 69 rather long, frustrating and somewhat infuriating days of a much anticipated wait … HABEMUS INTERNET! Yes!! You are reading it right. After nearly 2.5 months of waiting for Movistar to, finally, get their act together, I am now, at long last, properly online through my regular landline and its corresponding ADSL connection. I know this may sound a bit silly and everything, but, boy, I am just such a happy camper. Excited, even, to no end like a young kid in a candy store for the first time not knowing exactly where to start just yet, as I get to witness how 2015 can now begin for yours truly with today as my first official day back at work. Relief. Much relief. That was my initial feeling last Friday afternoon, when the local technician came along to patch things together one final time before I was back in business. And what a journey it has been all along! I am not too sure I will be very willing to go through it again at some point in time, specially, since it has been everything but pleasant. Everything but delightful. Nonetheless, if there is anything that this whole experience has taught me over the course of weeks is to embrace the opportunity of highlighting how key and fundamental for an overall excelling client experience would be the whole notion of ownership. Allow me to explain … Once upon a time, on November 7th 2014, to be more precise, I moved out to a new place, right in the city centre of Playa del Inglés, (Gran Canaria) 3rd largest city in the Canary Islands during high season, thinking that I’d be much better connected to the Internet in order to be able to carry on with my knowledge Web work. Wishful thinking, I suppose. I mean, how naïve can someone be to expect that if you go to a much larger city you are bound to assume to have better, faster, cheaper Internet connection. No, not going to happen. Not likely if the ISP is Movistar. During the course of the following 67 days (Yes! 67 days!) a lot of things happened in the mean time that, if anything, only helped increase my frustration and rage to levels I have never experienced over the course of the last 18 years I have been online and in multiple cities and countries, as I witness how every day that I was not online I kept losing an opportunity to generate some more revenue, resulting, in the long run, to having lost three (potential) clients along the way. If you have been reading this blog for a little while now you may have read already the couple of blog posts I have put together on the topic. This entry is the follow-up one to them all as on the 67th day something happened. I got to talk to a human. For the first time. And it was weird, because he wasn’t even a Movistar employee but a sub-contractor from Montelnor who was basically just as surprised as I was for being the first person I talked to face to face and who pretty much showed up where I live as his boss told him they were running out of time on the complaint I apparently raised (I don’t recall having made such claim in the first place, so probably someone did it for me, after nothing happening for 67 days in a row, who knows…) and therefore they needed to act. And pronto! I was in trouble. Big trouble as he kept explaining how the place where I now live was not wired at all and the telephone box was a complete mess. And it certainly was! I saw it and too bad I didn’t think of taking a picture to see the messy situation of how this particular telco looks into the whole concept around maintenance of infrastructure. Or the lack of, better said. What a real mess! According to this technician’s words I was in trouble, because the place where I now live was not wired and that was beyond his control. Nothing he could do or influence to make the necessary adjustments. The local technical service from the complex where I live needed to patch me up instead, apparently, according to his colourful commentary. Meet Frank. Although not his real name, he is the guy from the technical service. A quick short visit, an explanation of the problem I have, a fast and rather thorough look here and there at where the problem was and off he goes! Bang! On to solving the problem. Next morning, while I was working at a friend’s home stealing, once again, their wifi, so I could meet up a couple of clients I will be visiting this week in Madrid, he shows up with one other technician from the same subcontractor company and before I could blink on my way back home the whole house is fully wired and ready to go! Whoahhh! What a difference owning your customer’s problem makes! The next day, the subcontractor technician who was there the day before worked out the final piece of magic and after a couple of hours fiddling here and there the landline gets installed, and I FINALLY have got an Internet connection. And the nightmare is, at long last, over! 69 long days are now a thing of the past! Yay!! No, wait, DOUBLE yay!! Needless to say that Frank did a superb piece of job (and got a lovely tip as a result of that!) in showing and demonstrating first hand to both the Movistar and Montelnor (the subcontractor company) technicians and customer service / support teams one of the fundamental traits of delivering a delightful client experience, regardless of whom the client may well be: no matter what, as the service provider, you always own your customer’s problem. No exceptions. And that is essentially where both Movistar and Montelnor failed big time to deliver. They never even attempted a single time to own my problem (i.e. the transfer of a landline and ADSL from my old home to my new one, never mind the additional services contracted and already paid for, like Fusión, which I am still waiting for it to be completed, by the way!). Yes, I know, I am one of the 22 million customers Movistar has, but it is of no excuse really to make a single customer wait for nearly 2.5 months before having their needs or business problem(s) solved. And that’s what total ownership of your customer’s problems is all about: becoming responsible and accountable for your client’s needs and wants, something that Frank understood really well right from the beginning and who within the course of a single day got everything sorted out. Flawlessly and in a heartbeat and always keeping me in the loop of what was happening so I would know the due progress just as it happened. Why can’t companies that claim to be customer centric get this? Why can’t companies that keep claiming they work really hard on providing excelling client experiences, but fail to deliver, become more accountable and responsible for putting actions behind the (useless) marketing words they utter all over the place time and time again? Plenty of people out there keep saying how we are entering the age of the most personalised, individualised and customised client experiences than ever before, yet it’s got to be Frank, who has been working as technical service for over 35 years, the one who keeps demonstrating on a day to day basis what owning your customer’s problems is all about becoming more customer centric, more accountable and responsible for your work and eventually more human. Why can’t companies become more like Frank? Why can’t companies become more human by showing more empathy and engagement when dealing with their customer’s problems? Why can’t Movistar be one of them? Movistar, are you really listening? I hope you are, because otherwise I think you may have just lost another customer …     PS. Oh yes, the picture I have shared above, as part of this blog entry, is the actual speed test I did right after I got connected the Web through ADSL and, I know what you may be thinking… gosh, it’s awfully slow for today’s standards, I suppose! Well, yes, it certainly is! But I guess it’s better to have such speeds than having no Internet at all, like I have just gone through for nearly 2.5 months! But it gets better, because once again Movistar failed short on the expectations raised, because when I first moved to this new place I was advised I would be enjoying speeds of up to 10 Mbps download (Not lightning fast either, but a minor improvement!) and instead this is the current speed I’m getting and it won’t go any way further up at this point time at all. So I better get used to it, I was told. The alternative would be rather ugly. Fibre. What about fibre?, you may say, right? Well, according to this very same technician from Montelnor I can just simply forget about it, because by the time it arrives right where I live, right in the city centre, I will probably be bored by then… Talking here of waiting times for over a year or much longer, IF we are lucky! Arrrggghhh We will just have to wait and see…  I guess, in the mean time, I can get to enjoy the current speeds from my 3G / 4G mobile phone: I suppose this is the current rather appalling and extremely poor state of things of a telco / ISP infrastructure like Movistar’s, where the local 3G / 4G speeds of your mobile device are FOUR times faster than the regular fast ADSL line back at your home place. As Benjamin Zandler would probably say, "How fascinating!" Not!   Written by Luis Suarez Chief Emergineer and People Enabler. A well seasoned Social / Open Business evangelist and 2.0 practitioner with over 15 years of experience on knowledge management, collaboration, learning, online communities and social networking for business; and has been living, since February 2008, a (work) life without email challenging the status quo of how knowledge workers collaborate and share their knowledge by promoting openness, transparency, trust, sustainable growth, engagement, connectedness and overall smart work. He can also be contacted over in Twitter at @elsua or Google Plus.

We recently began a project called, "Mastery of Aging Well: A Program for Healthy Living".  The funding for this project came from the USDA and the principle investigator and content provider is a very well-respected associate professor tied to OSU Extension.  From a very pragmatic standpoint, the PI’s stated goal at the beginning of the project was to take her content and represent it in a more compelling, web-based format that would incorporate multimedia.  This was an exciting prospect for our group as we have graphic artists, photographers, videographers, journalists, editors and a few instructional designers.  We chose to develop two separate tracks for the content: One option was what was termed "Tier 1″ and would represent a pared down version of the content and very little user interaction. "Tier 2″ would reside within OSU’s E-campus site and would cost the user a fee for access to this more robust set of media assets, i.e. videos, interactive games and other user-centric tasks that focused on knowledge retention and assessment. So, after selecting Adobe Presenter as the most appropriate (and efficient) authoring tool to port the content into a web-based format, we began to think through some of the instructional design considerations for our baby boomer target audience: How many of our users would have access to the Internet and be relatively comfortable with web-based conventions that define navigation and content organization?  We had some poll data that we were able to look over and also extrapolated based on some of OSU’s past experience with online gardening classes. Overall, we felt that it would be reasonable to assume that the vast majority of our users were at least comfortable with the basics of browser navigation.  Beyond that, we assumed accessibility would be extremely essential in the design of the course. How should we handle the basic ergonomic/usability issues with this audience (design mapped to audience need): font size, icon choice, pacing, etc? In short, we were forced to ask a lower-level question: "How much should we accommodate versus migrate or progressively encourage towards adoption? This was an interesting question and as you can imagine, our scale leaned heavily towards accommodation.  While there is a relatively large corpus of literature around workplace accommodation and usability, availability of research on this topic as it relates to Baby Boomers and Instructional Design seems scant. There is quite a bit of anecdotal information on how baby boomers adapt to new electronic media-here are a few examples: Janet Clarey’s Blog (see the bottom for references and interesting discussion)Reeves, T.C. (2006). Do Generational Differences Matter in Instructional Design? Department of Educational Psychology and Instructional Technology (EPIT). Instructional Design - Considering the Learning Needs of Older Learners (Instructional Technology and Distance Learning Journal, 2004) Tom Johnson’s Blog .  While there is quite a bit of discussion and focus on "digital native" versus "digital immigrant", the primary focus of much of this work is how traditional learning institutions need to adopt to meet the needs and expectations of the digital native. In our case, our target audience would be primarily 55 and over and be coming directly to the course via a recommendation from their local extension office or a website like Oregon AARP. As we looked more closely at these questions, we asked ourselves, "Has anyone else focused their research work on this area? Are there any principles of Instructional Design that could help guide us with this specific target audience?" Pate, Du and Harvard in the article Instructional Design - Considering the Cognitive Learning Needs of Older Learners, state: "Research has provided evidence that mental decline is not a consequence of aging.  There is hope that continued learning prevents or delays mental decline.  Results also show significant improvement in memory and confidence in one’s mental abilities through personal physical and mental fitness…The greater challenge is to position education as an essential practice for quality of life across the lifespan." So, in many ways, we need not assume that baby boomers are starting with less cognitive capability than younger end-users and in some ways, if as Clark et al suggest, existing long-term memory plays the more important role in true learning potential, then older learner might actually be starting with an advantage in terms of their ability to relate new content to existing mental cognitive schema or experiences.  However, this provides very little information regarding an optimal approach as it relates to usability and ergonomics.  On that level, we simply assumed that we should aim for the highest level of accessibility possible to ensure audio, visual impairments were taken into account and also a certain level of unfamiliarity with aspects of the electronic medium.  In other words, we used 24 point Arial font, organized graphical assets in predictable and uniform ways, ensured these assets were separated with generous amounts of space, placed large font topic headers above large images, included the narration on the right rail area if a user wanted to read the narration, simplified the navigational scheme so a user could simply enter the course and then watch the presentation with very little navigational interaction, ensured the use of color enhanced readability and so on. What metaphors of communication are primary to this demographic and how could we leverage characteristics of this medium to help bridge the gap between web-based and print-based communication? In many ways, our metaphor for our "Tier 1″ phase of the content resembled the TV as opposed to a typical web-based interactive E-learning course.  "Tier 2″ would include more of this web-based interactive content and would assume more explicit instructions for completing the course would be provided to the end-user. We also received comments from several users early on that suggested they were expecting video or TV-like interaction on the screen and that there were times when they saw a still photo and didn’t immediately understand the person in the photo was not the person doing the audio narration.  Our overriding hope was that what we lost in interaction and user-mediated learning, we would make up for with accessibility and familiarity of the presentation format. We also had to balance our cost and time requirements against benefits and user needs and quickly landed on Adobe Presenter as a "rapid development" tool to help port PowerPoint content to a web-based environment and add audio narration, videos, SWF files and other objects with relative ease. What types of questions could we ask during our pilot testing to ensure our anticipated design choices were consistent with our end-user needs? We obviously asked about all of the usability issues mentioned above. Additionally, we expected the unexpected and tried to collect open-ended information about the user’s motivation and feelings about the content and medium. Feel free to email us if you’d like to see the actual pilot test questionnaire. Is there a significant different between technology fluency for seniors who live in urban areas of Oregon compared to those who live in rural areas? This is something that we still need to better understand. How much should we slow down our course pacing or repeat content for this audience to help ensure content retention? Some designers use one image every seven to ten seconds. We generally tried to introduce a new photo and accompanying bullet points every 10 to 20 seconds. We therefore slowed down the pace considerably.  The audio narration was obviously not slowed down in any way. How would the inclusion of images, videos and other assets influence the learning experience of this audience relative to the core content? In other words, would they the images helpful, distracting? So far, the comments that we’ve received thus far are that the images add to the learning experience. Generally speaking, for modules that have 40 slides, we generally have 90-110 photos, or 2.5 photos per slide.  Slide audio length varies from about 40 seconds to 90 seconds. Should we "auto-navigate" the course for this population in our Tier 1 approach or, force the user to click the advance button from slide to slide? Since our Tier 1 modules do not include any interactive elements, we decided to have the presentation play automatically.  A user can pause the presentation at any given point, but, we felt that it was advantageous to leverage the TV metaphor for the more basic treatment of the content and simply auto play the module. So far, our end-users seem to prefer this approach for Tier 1 content. How would learner affect or motivation influence our population’s perception of E-learning? Would they have more hesitancy or negative affect compared to a younger population? If so, how could we help address this via course design? This obviously plays into the different decisions we are making about the design of the course, the navigational scheme, usability factors and content organization.  We will be conducting our larger-scale pilot test soon and will have more concrete evidence to go on.

In this blog, we will do our best to share some of the interesting and compelling examples of how technology can be used for both information dissemination; and, more relevant to our domain, for instructional purposes.  As mentioned, we are an academic department that has a rich and successful history in the world of print publications and several members of our blogging group (Jeff, Bob and Mark) are tenure-track faculty who see blogging as another channel of scholastic activity.  Our larger group of colleagues routinely produces news articles, journals, magazines and Extension or Ag-related websites.  We have more recently begun to focus on web-based multimedia and E-learning as methods to communicate with our target audience and with every new project, we find that new forms of media expand the range of our group’s ability to innovate and work together in ways that we have never done before. We believe that the confluence between our audience’s needs and our group’s skill sets is a fertile environment to explore issues of how technology overlaps with user engagement, access, and accomodation; so, we hope that you will enjoy this blog.  Please don’t forget to subscribe if you would like content updates.

In future postings on this blog, I will talk about new frontiers in science education publishing. But today I’d like to take you back to an earlier era to celebrate a previous revolution in thinking made possible by science publishing. This year marks the 200-year anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, the famous English naturalist. Charles Darwin (photo in public domain). But it is not On the Origin of Species, Darwin’s breakthrough work on natural selection, to which I refer. Instead, I draw your attention to a lesser known work, The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms. In this, his final book, Darwin presented his observations on the role of earthworms in forming fertile topsoil. The book on such a small subject met with a large reception. Thousands of copies were sold. The publication gave rise to a new understanding of the biological complexity of soil. The previously seemingly inconsequential earthworm would forever after be known as the little hero whose feeding, burrowing, and defecation serve to regenerate, aerate, and naturally plough the precious natural resource of soil. The improved understanding of worms and soil health resulting from Darwin’s writing remains relevant to gardeners and agricultural producers today. In today’s world, publications are just one of many mechanisms available to communicate scientific knowledge to audiences. Videos, for example, are quickly becoming a new standard in science communication (see http://www.scivee.tv/). New audiovisual, modular, and interactive communication technologies can help us engage audiences with 21st century sensibilities and expectations. But I don’t think anything can compare to the power of a well-written publication. Using the old art of writing, authors can still present their thoughts, just as Darwin and countless others have before, and readers can enrich their own thinking and learn something in the process.

In future postings on this blog, I will talk about new frontiers in science education publishing. But today I’d like to take you back to an earlier era to celebrate a previous revolution in thinking made possible by science publishing. This year marks the 200-year anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, the famous English naturalist. Charles Darwin (photo in public domain). I’m not talking about On the Origin of Species, Darwin’s breakthrough work on natural selection. Instead, I draw your attention to a lesser known work, The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms. In this, his final book, Darwin presented his observations on the role earthworms play in forming fertile topsoil. The book on such a small subject met with a large reception in 1881. Thousands of copies were sold. The publication gave rise to a new understanding of the biological complexity of soil. The previously seemingly inconsequential earthworm would forever after be known as the little hero whose feeding, burrowing, and defecation serve to regenerate, aerate, and naturally plough the precious natural resource of soil. The improved understanding of worms and soil health resulting from Darwin’s writing remains relevant to gardeners and agricultural producers today. In today’s world, publications are just one of many mechanisms available to communicate scientific knowledge to audiences. Videos, for example, are quickly becoming a new standard in science communication (see http://www.scivee.tv/). New audiovisual, modular, and interactive communication technologies can help us engage audiences with 21st century sensibilities and expectations. Charles Darwin (photo in public domain). But I don’t think anything can compare to the power of a well-written publication. Using the old art of writing, authors can still present their thoughts, just as Darwin and countless others have before, and readers can enrich their own thinking and learn something in the process.

Don’t look now, but perhaps the next industry to be undone by robots is education. OK, maybe not.  After watching a video clip of the HRP-4C’s Frankenstein-like ambulation, you can more easily conjure up images of terrorized children running out of their classroom when the new substitute teacher shows up with lesson in head. OK, so visions of robot faculty may seem fanciful and far-fetched, but virtual "mediators" of E-learning or web-based environments have become more prominent as the technology behind avatars has become more powerful and affordable for the average user (US News story). So, why the initial hesitation and angst when you hear "avatar"?  Perhaps it’s Clippy, the talking paperclip. If you don’t remember Clippy, he was one of the earilest incarnations of "avatar" technology and lived on the top right corner of Microsoft Word.  While cheerful in appearance, he annoyed us half to death by riddling us with random Microsoft Word trivia. Thankfully, today’s avatars come in many shapes and sizes and to put it simply, many of them look quite good—case in point—CodeBaby’s avatar software. CodeBaby may be a but pricy if you’re scouring for freeware, but it’s still at the top of my list.  CodeBaby has some excellent examples of how you might use avatars in an E-learning course or online environment. More than anything else, CodeBaby’s authoring tool and avatar end product drive home the point that avatar technology has come a long way since Clippy, and is getting very close to being a powerful tool for E-learning designers. Another tool to build online avatars is Second Life. David Miller’s Subquark blog provides some interesting examples of how he and others are using Second Life in E-learning contexts and creating avatars to augment learning environments. You might also look over Learning Light , which has a more comprehensive list of avatar vendors. So what about E-learning or instructional value? One of the more recent papers on the use of avatars in E-learning comes out of Stanford. In this article, Byron Reeves suggests that avatars can help serve as important contributors to "socially intelligent interfaces". The avatar can help with navigation, build trust with the user, explain concepts and instantiate a company’s brand via a face and voice. Within our department here at Oregon State University, we have recently begun to ask ourselves if we can leverage avatars in courses or in web environments where we feel we would like to build a more personal and branded experience. Take a peek at this example, which uses Adobe Captivate and CodeBaby’s authoring tool. What do you think? Do you find any of the examples listed here compelling? In what type of environments could you imagine using avatars?

Flip Videos. You either love ’em or hate ’em. These remarkably compact and easy-to-use Flip Video cameras are a natural result of what has been called the "democratization" of video. Many professional video producers are skeptical of these little cameras and the power of instantly distributing video around the world using the camera’s built-in USB connection. They quickly point out the limitations of the technology and the mistakes often made by amateurs who post their productions for the world to see. As a professional video producer, I can sympathize with them: I am very conscious of the elements of quality video production—professional lighting, sound, composition, and editing. But getting professional can mean getting out your wallet. Professional video production is not cheap—the old adage that professional video costs a thousand dollars per finished minute is likely a low figure nowadays. What I care about most is getting out the story using video. It’s a powerful medium that now comes in a lot of shapes and sizes. Yes, some of them are going to be expensive, and need to be. But what fascinates me about the Flip Video is the power of storytelling it puts into our clients’ hands. Our client is typically an Extension educator who doesn’t have a big budget. They may have only limited experience with video. But what they do have are compelling stories to tell: how-tos on thousands of topics from growing tomatoes well to aging well. One only needs to look briefly at YouTube to see millions of viewers watching "unprofessional" videos. Last spring I was asked to participate in a local video festival, where I screened a program I produced for the Natural Resources Conservation Service that had a price tag of $40,000. The NRCS distributed over one thousand DVDs, so it’s safe to say that perhaps 5,000 people saw the video. The next presenter at the festival showed a 10-minute production on climate change that he produced for less than a hundred dollars and put on YouTube. At the time of the festival, over 550,000 viewers had seen it. Do the math. As communications consultants, what we can do is help our clients to feel comfortable expressing themselves and their work with video, and not hold them accountable to the professionals. The Flip Video does just that. With a push of a button, an Extension field agent can capture a complex process, a unique interview, or short demonstration, return to the office, download it to YouTube, and put the link on their web page. This will pull more eyeballs to the web page, where more information will be read and more learning will occur. In our shop, we began loaning Flip Video cameras to our clients to encourage this. Video—once a complex, expensive process with high distribution costs—has become as ubiquitous as the cell phone, and a highly accessible and powerful teaching tool that educators anywhere with an Internet connection can’t afford to ignore. By the way, you can view the global warming YouTube video here. -Jeff

When I worked as director of publications at the Soil and Water Conservation Society, I set up the SWCS network. Within minutes of invitations being sent out, people started joining, posting information, and forming groups on a variety of topics of interest to them—conservation photography, water quality monitoring, cover crops, etc. The networking technology was a necessary component, but one of the most interesting aspects of the network was the social experience. Members of the network began voluntarily taking on the responsibility of welcoming other new members. Old friends who hadn’t seen each other in years, separated by geography, "bumped into each other" in forums in which they shared an interest. The content generated in the network was user-centered. The old model of experts delivering information to audiences was, in this context, replaced by a network of individuals sharing information according to the needs of the network members. So, I started thinking, social networks are social and technological, but are they educational? To answer that question, I had to start to understand the concept of social learning. Social learning Social learning "is based on the premise that our understanding of content is socially constructed through conversations about that content and through grounded interactions, especially with others, around problems or actions" (John Seely Brown and Richard P. Adler in EDUCAUSE Review). In short, you are more likely to learn if you have an opportunity to ask questions, discuss with others, and apply the information in a social context. Bingo. These are exactly the features that social networking technologies make available to online communities. But that obviously isn’t all you need. Social networking has been weaving its way into almost every Internet environment, but most instances are not what you would call educational. Another necessary component is content, and that requires knowledge and expertise. Social networks and the publishing industry One of our traditional vehicles for transporting content knowledge from experts to audiences has been publishing. If the objective is to communicate content to audiences in ways that the audiences actually learn, "social network publishing" may be a more effective mechanism than traditional publication publishing because it taps into the power of social learning. Periodical publishing seems a particularly likely candidate for migration to a social network because the audiences served are existing communities with shared sets of interests—whether they be regional, topical, or demographical. In fact many publishers in the past few years have been redefining themselves—and their audiences—using social media. Does this sound familiar: Yesterday you were a subscriber. Today you are a member of a network. Yesterday you were a reader of newspapers, magazines, or books. Today you are a participant in your communities of interest. Many publishers now see themselves in a new role vis-à-vis their audiences. They are now providers of "opportunities for edification and involvement rather than just a provider of serial subscriptions" (David Leslie in the Journal of Mammalogy). Here are some examples: Newspapers You don’t have to go far to find a newspaper that has implemented a social network to provide its readers/subscribers opportunities to comment on stories, post photos, or join forums on their favorite topics. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s network is called "My.STLtoday." Here in Oregon, the Willamette Valley newspapers recently launched a community network, "Midvalley Voice." The newspaper model of social networking often capitalizes on a local community’s interest in being involved in local news, photos, sports, etc. Magazines Some magazines with a loyal following around a specific interest area have successfully broadened their relationship with readers—from subscriber base to membership community. For example, Rolling Stone’s community network allows members to review albums and "participate in forums with Rolling Stone editors." Kiwibox is an online magazine and social network in one. The target audience, teens, can build their profiles, establish relationships, and consume and contribute to content. Scouter is a publication and online community for people involved in Scouting. The network allows members to read articles, join forums, and post comments. The viability of magazine-based social networks seems to rely on the community’s passion for the topic. Journals Science publishing has also entered the brave new world of social media. The Nature Publishing Group, for example, hosts a very active social network. Members can self-select regions and topics to participate in groups and forums of interest to them. Many professional and scientific society publishers are using social network technologies to enhance member benefits in ways that complement their publishing activities. The American Chemical Society network allows members and subscribers to network with colleagues, share recent work and ideas, and participate in discussion forums. Who is going to provide our social learning networks? Some of the potential benefits of "social network publishing" are on the publisher’s side—improved target marketing, increased brand exposure, strengthened customer loyalty, etc. Publishing companies may or may not be able to tap into these benefits enough to overcome the financial challenges that currently face the publishing industry. But it doesn’t need to be the traditional publishers who shoulder the transition to social network publishing. In the context of educational publishing, for example, universities or nonprofits could facilitate social networks that bring together content experts, communicators, and interested audiences. These ideal learning-focused social networks would be member-centered (member interests and needs determine what information is generated and what form it takes) and socially interactive (the content is socially processed as members add and share information). In other words, social learning, thanks to technology.

If visual media is king within the world of online instructional technology, then one of its most loyal subjects would be Pachyderm. Pachyderm was developed back in 2003 by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, New Media Consortium and the Institute for Museum and Library Services. Since then, Pachyderm has grown up into a full-fledged collection of different templates and features that allow you to incorporate video, text, audio and graphics into a multimedia presentation. Since Pachyderm’s formative years were spent in the world of art museums, its true strength is conveying visual meaning, oftentimes at the expense of how text is rendered. This is partly evidenced by the small font, text fields and reductionist-like menu structures available in the template-based navigational schemes. But, don’t hop off the elephant quite yet. Pachyderm Logo Did I mention that you don’t need to be a multimedia developer to create a relatively sophisticated Pachyderm multimedia presentation? And don’t fret quite yet about the aforementioned limitations; a new version of the software with significant enhancements is making its way around the corner soon. Truth be told, when I produced my first Pachyderm presentation I realized that a Flash-produced equivalent of my one-day-long Pachyderm project would most likely have taken much, much longer; and keep in mind that I develop multimedia for a living. Of course, if I had used an authoring tool like Flash, I would have had much more flexibility to introduce different types of objects in a more customized presentation. However, most of the assets, i.e. images, videos, that I placed in Pachyderm felt appropriate for the environment since the Pachyderm end product is tightly organized around a uniform look and feel and the constraints that exist in the tool seemed reasonable. In a world where most educators simply don’t have the money to hire a multimedia developer, Pachyderm fits a definite need for educational communicators and students. Here at Oregon State University, we initially rolled out Pachyderm in the Department of Agricultural Sciences. Our plan is to provide Pachyderm training to a group of early adopters who are equipped with Flip cams and very basic video editing skills. A key part of our training is to help encourage Pachyderm users to focus on specific topical themes; just as the California State University System has already done with great success. I would suggest looking through the Merlot Elixr Pachyderm examples. My favorite examples from this list are from a sign language class at CSU and a brilliant Social Documentation Overview project at Cal State Dominguez Hills.  Note that in both examples, the use of visual media is really the glue by which the narrative coheres around a solid core. Our department is already heavily involved in advancing a more "democratized" movement of amateur video producers (see Jeff’s Flip cam post), and with Pachyderm we can now provide a powerful tool for faculty across campus to blend their video with other graphical and textual content to create a cohesive digital narrative that can convey meaning in a compelling manner. Even though Pachyderm utilizes open-source code, which many people equate with "freeware", it’s more probable that your early efforts to introduce Pachyderm to your community will not be entirely without cost or significant effort, requiring some assistance or monthly hosting from the New Media Consortium. In short, it’s not a trivial task to set up the Pachyderm software on a development server; especially if you seek to scale this as your user base grows. As we move into the next phase of bringing Pachyderm to our campus, one of the most important issues will be to ensure that our early adopters understand that Pachyderm is best suited for digital narratives or short treatments of a narrow topic or theme. We hope to leverage existing examples from CSU and other universities to help demonstrate how Pachyderm has been used effectively in other academic environments. If you’re just getting started with Pachyderm, you may want to check out Jeff’s presentation about Pachyderm.

Oh no!  Someone let the cat out of the bag - using Facebook too frequently saps your intelligence and degrades your academic performance.  OK, maybe not an exact translation of Dr. Karpinski’s recent study out of Ohio State University, but it’s not as far off as you might think. According to this recent study, "Facebook is frequently used by 85 percent of undergraduate students; and 52 percent of graduates. Furthermore, Facebook users, who usually studied between 1-5 hours a week, had GPAs between 3.0 and 3.5; as against GPAs between 3.5 and 4.0 of the non-users, who generally devote 11-15 hours a week to their studies." While Dr. Karpinski avoids drawing a direct correlation between Facebook usage and academic performance, her data suggest that the amount of time students spend on Facebook versus homework impacts GPA.  Go figure.  Which begs the question:  Is Facebook anything more than an online watered-down version of the public square?  And more specifically, would the closest real-world metaphor for Facebook be the library or the mall? The real-world mall experience is primarily about community- a place where stores instantiate the public square to move product.   In the case of Facebook and many other web 2.0 sites, it’s hard to not see the parallel. When was the last time you found a better deal on something in a mall compared to Amazon.com (holiday deals aside) or some other online retailer? I know, I know, everyone is doing it- Facebook is one of the most visited websites on the planet, but, pushing a product? First, let’s compare the business model of the mall and that of Facebook, Twitter, Digger and other web 2.0 sites.   Revenue is generated by "tenants" and advertisers to offset the cost of public square upkeep, i.e. the food court, roofs, benches, air conditioning, walkways, and other areas where people interact.  Interestingly, it appears that like many failed malls, Facebook, Twitter, Digger and other sites are spending more to maintain and expand their infrastructure than they are taking in.  Sure, these sites might become profitable some day, but let’s deal with reality in the here and now.  When thinking through how educators might leverage sites like Facebook, Twitter and other web 2.0 sites, it’s important to put things in perspective and remind ourselves that technology has always been the vehicle and not the destination (when kept in perspective), and it can be a challenging endeavor when we put the cart in front of the horse and begin to prioritize the private good (corporate objectives) over the public good, especially within higher education. TV is the ultimate venue for showcasing the pros and cons of this type of partnership.  Devaney and Weber’s article on private versus public good is also a solid touchstone to help frame this type of discussion. Not that everything has to be educational, and for me personally, I find Facebook extremely helpful to message people or receive notifications about upcoming events.  However, when my list of Facebook contacts grew too large, I began to feel "Facebook fatigue" and the word that came to mind as I watched more and more trivial user status information fill my profile was "communotainment."   Assuming that I’m not alone and that there are numerous people who care about their friends’ moment-by-moment Facebook or Twitter status (tongue squarely inserted in cheek), is it that surprising that "communotainment" sites like Facebook ultimately end up displacing activities like homework when its usage is left unchecked?  Not entirely convinced? Watch the recent program from Frontline on how South Korea is trying to help their tech-savvy youth to balance "communotainment" with the rest of their schedule.   This issue of maintaining balance is something worth pondering as we look towards how best to "program" or shape tools and new media that enable virtual community and more important, retain elements of "public good" beyond just social interaction. For those of us who work as technologists in the world of higher education, I think we have an important part to play in helping demonstrate how virtual community can be leveraged to meet educational objectives and meet the need many of our students have for community.  This could be more clearly demonstrated by providing online, compelling content that has been vetted by the university and allows students to quickly and effectively form associations with each other.  At present, the tools of choice in most distance education programs are usually Blackboard, Moodle or other content management systems.   While it is true that this software has evolved, many of these tools resemble the distance education tools I was using 10 years ago when I was in graduate school with some web 2.0 add ons.  Where is the new paradigm to build more robust community in the world of online higher education?  In higher education, we often balance privacy requirements against the other needs of students, and for justifiable reasons, privacy requirements trump most other considerations.  Fast forward to 2009 and we are now assessing the consequences of this imbalance between privacy, access and relevance and how we should respond to market conditions that are not very tolerant of our predicament and are demanding more agile and innovative approaches to meeting our user’s needs—community being perhaps the most important. With the continued encroachment of the private sector into the world of higher education, I am very optimistic that new ways of doing online instruction and building community will take hold.  Having said that, I think that it’s more likely that in the not-so-distant future, the toolset that makes up a standard distance education course will include not just the core course management system, but will include a larger virtual community site built with an authoring tool that resembles the feature set found in Ning (micro-community tool), more Instant Messaging capability among students and more explicit access to larger groups of past students via virtual communities and repositories of relevant student-produced content, especially video.  This is how more and more of our students experience the world and where the center of their epistemology finds expression. Students will and should become more involved in collaboratively architecting classes and providing some sort of historical memory to a class as it develops over time and grows to accommodate the work of past and current students.  I found some very compelling examples of this in the Pachyderm links referenced in my last post.  This is where web 2.0 and new media hold amazing potential and where we should expect more student involvement in the traditional and non-traditional class experience. Just as we see happening in the private word of virtual communities, interest in content domains and student needs relative to these domains will drive engagement, growth and retention rather than the exclusive student-side requirement to receive course credit.  While I’m sure that this is already happening in various educational institutions, I am guessing that this is still more the exception than the norm.  My fear is that until we provide this level of community and education to distance education students (and ultimately to our on-campus students)  we will see "communotainment" sites like Facebook gain more and more popularity and continue to exacerbate the difficulties our students face as they try to balance their need for community with completing their homework.

Using small, modular components as the building blocks of educational programs is nothing new to curriculum developers. But many relatively new technologies such as widgets and micro-blogs now provide greater options for delivering educational content in tiny sizes to massive audiences. In nearly every media, "the short version" seems to have growing cachet as users experience growing demands on their time and attention. The 60-second "microlecture" has recently gotten some attention as a possible viable new format to replace to the traditional college course lecture. Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station has responded to the needs of the short attention span culture with "Microdocs": 2-3 minute video documentaries. These videos demonstrate that the minute is the new hour. But do they go far enough? Is the second is the new minute? Widgets—with their ability to disseminate small packages of regularly refreshed content—lend themselves well to educational "fact of the day" applications. Other technologies focused specifically on mini-learning applications are growing in availability as well. For example, educators can use commercial technologies such as Nanolearning to package their educational material into small learning objects. Where does that leave the educational prospects of text on a page? Writing-for-the-web guru Jakob Nielson has studied how users scan web pages.  He found that online reading follows an "F" pattern—that is, people read less and less as they scan down the page. Users often read only about the first two words or 11 characters of a website’s links and headlines. How can educators teach people to write sentences and paragraphs if people don’t read sentences and paragraphs? Meanwhile, the average American adult has at best an 8th grade reading level. So, should materials targeted for the general public be written at a grade school level? Does teaching to these trends (giving them the short version) lead to reinforcing short cuts? What about the value of inspiring attention and aspiring to depth? How small is too small? And how can one microlearning experience be connected to larger educational outcomes?

I recently had a family vacation turn into a nightmare. But that nightmare was mitigated in part due to the power of social networking. There is a lot of discussion about the value of Web 2.0 tools in educational settings. But I want to share this decidedly personal experience about how a social networking tool—a blog— helped my family make it a through a time of extreme emergency and stress, both physically, and emotionally. My wife takes her first sip of water after surgery. While staying with friends in Bonaire (in the Lesser Antilles, part of the A-B-C islands, 50 miles north off the coast of Venezuela) my wife suffered a life-threatening infection to her lower intestine. While Bonaire has a relatively effective local hospital, it quickly became obvious that my wife would need more sophisticated health facilities if she were to survive. Skype was literally a lifesaver in the resulting frenzy of phone calls to contact our stateside insurance carrier and coordinate international communications between the hospital in Bonaire and distant health providers. Within eighteen hours, I was able to arrange an air ambulance to retrieve us from the tiny island and fly us to the nearest qualified medical facility in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. But now I found myself three thousand miles from home in an unfamiliar place with no friends, no family, no connection to the community, and my unconscious wife going into surgery. That’s when I found a whole new dimension to social networking. A friend called to offer support, and told me about CaringBridge, a nonprofit, free online service developed to keep friends and family connected during critical illness, treatment and recovery. CaringBridge offered what amounted to a well-designed blog where I could publish our story to friends and family, keep them informed of progress with journal entries, and post pictures taken with my cell phone. As much as I liked phone calls from concerned friends and family, it would quickly become exhausting to repeat our drama to each caller. The blog solved this problem elegantly. And most importantly, the blog provided a means for others to post messages in a guestbook, that I (and later my wife) and site visitors could read. It was here that I recovered my connection to friends and family that sustained and guided me through some very difficult emotional terrain. The power of a social network lies here, in developing community. I have been very involved with Web 2.0 technologies, both at work and in my private life; but this particular incident will stand out in my memory as the most powerful on-line experience I have ever had.

Many people think of Twitter as ego-centric micro-blogging: "Hey, world, I’m at McDonalds eating a Big Mac for lunch." Yeah? So what?!! Twitter is called micro-blogging because it limits the user to just 140 characters, and as the above example illustrates, most tweeters use these precious characters to provide the world with a slice of their life. The reason Twitter keeps tweets to 140 characters or less is that it uses the cell phone text message standard, providing anyone the ability to tweet from their cell phone. If you are really interested, here is the Twitter article at How Stuff Works. Twitter can be used as an effective communication tool. Many people tweet with interesting factoids or websites they stumble upon. Others use Twitter for customer service questions or to listen in on what others are saying about their company or organization. Take a look at Lifehacker’s blog post on Six Ways to Use Twitter. An Oregon company, GoSeeTell Network, is enabling visitor bureaus to use Twitter to answer tourism questions from the general public, letting brand enthusiasts (i.e., local citizens who follow the visitor bureau) tweet to answer the questions. Someone might post a question like, "I’ll be in your city this weekend, where is a cheap place to go for a few hours?" A potential response might be, "Take the light rail to Forest Park and walk through the award-winning rose garden or take metro bus #12 out into the valley and taste some amazing wines." University admissions departments could use Twitter to let current students answer potential student questions about the school. The Extension Service could enable Master Gardener volunteers to answer gardening questions via Twitter (and reach a younger audience at the same time). Many universities around the U.S. are using Twitter to keep people informed about campus-based news. For example, Oregon State University is leveraging social media with a Powered By Orange campaign (essentially a what’s happening at OSU campaign) that encompasses a website, Facebook group, Linkedin network and a Twitter account. The campaign is intended to educate current and potential students, their parents, alumni and faculty about the cool things happening at OSU (including news items that don’t make the traditional news media). And Online Degree World has created a list of the Top 100 University Tweeters where you can find out what other institutions are doing with Twitter. Written by Mark Crossler and Dave King

Here’s a PowerPoint presentation I posted to Slideshare about how the generations in the U.S. move through time, from 2000 - 2030, based on Census Bureau population data and projections: U.S. Generations: 2000-2030 By Mark Crossler, OSU

What did I learn about E-learning development when I worked at Netflix six months ago? Before I share some thoughts, let’s look at the numbers.  Just this year, Netflix sales have topped 910 million dollars with 414 full-time employees at the helm. Seem improbable? Welcome to the 21st century and the consumer side of information management as a service—as these numbers suggest, it can be extremely profitable. Sure, Netflix also pays workers who ship DVDs and answer customer service lines, but the main focus of the 414 full-time employees is ultimately to tame the customer-facing website that enables the latest movie titles to land in your mailbox or play on your computer.   Is it possible to design viable E-learning courses at a company like Netflix where business moves at the speed of light? The quick answer is "yes," and "no."  Having an amazingly short development timeline constantly forced me to isolate the most important steps of the deliverable creation process and collapse as much of my process around these key areas.  Content review, prototype evaluation, user testing? Check, check, and check.  High-end aesthetic treatment, dynamic navigational scheme, lots of formative evaluation? Not so much. A lightning fast development model is usually the only option on the table for an environment that is adverse to process and time expenditure since its web-based "storefront" reorients itself as quickly as a desert landscape in a windstorm.  There’s nothing inherently wrong with this business model: Who doesn’t love the service that Netflix brought to the market? The reality of unreasonable time-to-market timelines can be a bit painful for E-learning professionals who generally prefer a highly detailed and systematic approach, which assigns equal value to each phase of a project. However, the reality is that the overlap of business and audience needs shift in sync with the rapidly changing technological environment—the audience demands more as technology affords more; and both are in constant flux when it comes to web-based information media and services.  In terms of E-learning at a company like Netflix, this usually meant the approach and toolset needed to accommodate quick content adaptation, incorporation of highly modularized "just-in-time" content, and tweaking assessments post release (usually a major faux pas) to accommodate newly prioritized learning objectives (ouch).  Ultimately, it also meant that if I had 40 hours to create an E-learning project, as much time as possible would obviously go into content creation and review. For those readers who aren’t familiar with nuances of rapid E-learning development, Tom Kuhlmann has one of the best blogs on this topic—The Rapid E-learning Blog.  For a deeper dive into trends shaping 21st century training in the content of information complexity, buckle your seatbelt and check out this post by Harold Jarche and Jay Cross. Thankfully, E-learning professionals have an increasingly larger tool box to help move an organization towards being responsive to this kind of fluid environment.  Non-linear, needs-based approaches to organizing content have become more popular and this has been fortuitous for E-learning developers as this can often help solve some of the aforementioned challenges.  So, my first suggestion for those working in this kind of E-learning environment is to have an up-to-date awareness of what rapid E-learning authoring tools exist.  Check out Tony Karrer’s blog for a nice list.  For those of us working in higher education, the same need to qualify and constantly update your tool set is as important.  For digital narratives or short stories, it’s hard to beat Pachyderm, especially with the new version around the corner.  Beyond the world of the learning management system (Blackboard, Moodle, etc.) relatively new systems-oriented platforms like eXtension are offering up more opportunities for Web 2.0 content. Compressed timelines forced me to rely more often on tools like Captivate, Presenter, Camtasia, and Pachyderm than my favorite application, Adobe Flash. I also learned from my time at Netflix that I truly did not initially grasp the depth of fluency the Millennial Generation has with technology.  My E-learning deliverables were developed primarily for Netflix Customer Service employees (about 300 individuals) who were generally in their early 20s.  I quickly found that this audience did most of their problem solving using virtual tools like IM chat (even though they sat a hundred feet from each other), demanded participation in creating the content and were exceptionally quick learners with all forms of technology.  The only consistent competency gap with this group was in writing skill. It’s not entirely surprising to me that the current trend at many universities is to pump more money into writing programs in an effort to help improve the writing skills of the incoming Millennial Generation students.  Case in point, St. Johns University recently converted 20 writing instructor positions to tenure-track (Subscription required).  Also, check out Mark Crossler’s recent Electronic Papyrus post on the topic of cross-generational characteristics. Netflix as a whole encouraged participation across job roles and I found I was often able to leverage the technical savvy of the Millennials to help create modules and job aids for larger E-learning courses.  For example, a larger project focused on Silverlight technology forced me to temporarily manage a group of 7 or 8 technical support agents to help me develop web-based content over a two week period.   This collaboration allowed me to meet short deadlines, increase participation and helped me allocate more of my time on being more thorough with key project milestones like content creation and review, prototype creation, and usability testing—a win-win for all parties involved. Looking for creative ways to leverage the unique technical fluency of the Millennial Generation while recognizing some of their limitations with text-based content is extremely helpful.  I see this same potential here at the university.  The Millennials can and should be more active participants in actually creating digital content that has a place in a course or the larger university’s content repository.  It goes without saying that Web 2.0 tools like blogs, YouTube, Tweeter, Ning, wikis, and IM are all familiar tools to this generation and allow much greater collaboration between student and instructor. What are some approaches you have used to empower the Millennial Generation via your E-learning content?  How about Generation X and the Baby Boomers? You might start by asking your audience what types of web-based tools they use outside of your academic or business environment and whether or not some of your students, co-workers or audience members might be interested in contributing to the development of your E-learning content.  Who knows, it might just be a win-win. Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll. Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll. Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

Through the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and other agencies, American taxpayers invest billions of dollars every year into research to improve health, safety, the environment, scientific understanding, etc. The accountability of whether these investments have real impact for Americans is tied to the education and communication of research findings. It is the education/communication set of activities that "maximizes the return on the research investment; it provides value to the research product, which is intrinsically worthless" (Charles Wallace in Transportation Research Circular 488). Everett Rogers’s famous "diffusion of innovations" theory describes the process of new discoveries moving into practice through a sequence of adopters: innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards. Rogers emphasized the importance of communications in implementation. Cuts to public education funding present a challenge to the ability to broadly communicate research discoveries. While increased tuition may be justified by the private benefits that result from a college diploma, will the benefits of publicly funded research be associated disproportionately with those who can afford higher education? Or can we figure out a way to utilize technology to provide open access educational materials for the benefit of the population as a whole? The cultural movement for open (free) educational resources continues to grow. MIT received a lot of press about making its course videos and learning materials available online at no cost.  Many other institutions have also gone the open courseware route.  Stan Albrecht, the president of Utah State University, makes a strong case for open courseware: "In the tradition of land grant universities, Utah State University … provides an unprecedented degree of free and open access to the knowledge and expertise of our faculty for the benefit of every citizen of the state of Utah and every person in the world. As we enter the 21st century, services like OpenCourseWare will enable land grant institutions to more fully accomplish their missions."  An additional wave of focus on open access is starting up with Curtis J. Bonk’s soon-to-be-released new book, The World is Open: How Web Technology is Revolutionizing Education. Bonk offers more reasons why universities are offering open course materials. For example, "They are in the business to generate, archive, and disseminate knowledge." He also adds, "It is a major marketing tool for the university."  The open access movement is especially strong in the area of scholarly publishing, gaining momentum from mandates from research funding sources such as NIH.  Meanwhile, Academic Earth makes video lectures on a wide range of subjects freely available.  And the Creative Commons has a learning center with free educational resources. But what about full courses, not just course materials and videos?  Yes, that too. Several free (albeit non-accredited) universities are sprouting up under the "peer-to-peer learning"/"learning by teaching" pedagogy:  the University of the People and Peer 2 Peer University.  Ann Michael recently reported from the Society for Scholarly Publishing conference that the Google generation expects "information to be free (they see open access as their birth right)." If we (the public) are willing to publicly pay for the discoveries of research, it seems reasonable that we should demand open diffusion of the new knowledge so that it has impact for the public. Our institutions of higher education could provide these free resources side-by-side with tuition-based, degree-granting programs. Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll. Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

I think it is safe to say that for most of us the personal computer is the first place we go when we are looking for web-based information; however, new web-ready mobile devices are emerging with increased speed and are blurring the line of what traditionally constitutes a viable endpoint for digital content. Have you seen the new Verizon netbook? Is it a laptop, a souped-up PDA? Neither, it’s a "netbook"—netbooks have been around for awhile now, but the fact that this one was selling for under $200 definitely caught my eye. As the computing power of mobile devices improves and they become more affordable, the demand for content that works well on these platforms continues to grow.  Consequently, new possibilities for delivering E-learning content to mobile devices are redefining the E-learning industry in exciting ways. While many user interface and usability people have given lukewarm reviews of the Kindle, the popularity of this E-book device has revealed what appears to be strong evidence of consumer demand for this type of technology. It’s hard to find fault with the practical benefits of having an ultra-lightweight E-book that holds up to 200 books, connects to the Internet wirelessly to download content and displays text in a relatively familiar format without the flicker of the CRT monitor. A sign of things to come? Many think so, like Steve Brotman in his Vcball blog. How might a ubiquitous E-book like the Kindle and other new mobile web-ready devices reshape the world of instructional content? Smartphones like the iPhone and Palm Pre are quickly building a loyal following of application developers and end-users. The iPhone 3 will be released soon and Apple recently stated they have over 50 thousand applications for download in their App Store where over 1 billion applications have been downloaded by their 40 million iPhone and iPod Touch customers.  Until the Kindle can withstand the rigors of being tethered to a 3rd grader and Mom and Dad are willing to pay for little Johnny’s new iPhone, it’s hard to imagine these types of devices displacing the book on a large scale for the K-12 demographic (although there are numerous educational applications available for this group).  Nevertheless, let’s look at some examples of how mobile devices are already enabling new ways of delivering educational media. Michael Hanley, in his E-Learning Curve blog, offers some compelling examples of E-learning applications for the iPhone and  one need only look at the diversity of these educational "mini" applications to see how E-learning developers are already finding new opportunities for reaching a wider audience with their media. While much of the educational content developed by iPhones is created by individual developers, some companies, like Modality Inc., make it their business to transform reference materials into iPhone compatible media. Is the Kindle too bulky or a bit too expensive for your tastes? No worries, the iPhone has an E-book application for under ten dollars and a growing list of book titles. Do you want to learn sign language or how to fly a plane? Sure, "mini" apps for mobile devices can at best augment some larger and more robust instructional activity that normally occurs on a standard personal computer or within the classroom (or an airplane), but considering their cost (many are free) and convenience, it’s hard to ignore their value to both the learner and the content developer. In many ways, the popularity of the iPhone and these educational "mini" apps lends credence to the idea that smartphones will continue to take on increased importance in the educational media space. The take away for those of us who work with instructional technology? Outstanding content is still the starting point, but before disseminating this content, much greater care must be taken to understand rapidly changing audience needs and the growing use of web-ready mobile devices. Shaping content for a specific digital endpoint should obviously incorporate some level of instructional design and in many cases a basic feasibility study attached to your needs analysis. In the past, some of my projects have warranted the extra effort required to develop ancillary E-learning content or modules for mobile devices like a smartphone, whereas other projects have not. As these devices continue to become more ubiquitous, it’s probable that more and more E-learning projects will be developed exclusively for a specific mobile device like a smartphone or netbook. So, what does the E-book and other web-ready mobile devices have to do with academic institutions? Interestingly, Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com, states the main difference between the Kindle and Sony’s E-book is that the Kindle has wireless networking capability and this access to the Internet means their device enables a service.  In private industry, the survivor of a "technology battle" is not always the company with the superior technology or the deepest pockets (although the latter does prevail quite often), but oftentimes the company who can sustain their product via the most appropriate business model and make progressive adjustments to that model when needed. The Kindle may indeed be the superior product, but the main reason it has become a viable technology for end-users is primarily because Amazon utilized a superior business model to support the dissemination of Kindle-based content, i.e., a service-based model. For public academic institutions, these trends can and should encourage more attention to intentional and strategic content design. Additionally, there are surely lessons that we can learn from in this domain as public universities grapple with how to progressively translate content dissemination into a more privatized business model. As the funding from public sources dries up and the privatization of our universities seems to be shifting into high gear, discussions of what type of business model will support meaningful movement toward new methods of delivery for educational media will be more and more relevant if we hope to avoid some of the missteps taken in private industry and want to reach our audience using the devices that our end-users or students prefer. What do you think? Do you think web-ready mobile devices provide new opportunities for educational media? How might the business and revenue models used for disseminating mobile device educational content in private industry be relevant for academic institutions who are moving towards privatizing their funding sources?