There is an interesting article in today’s New York Times about LinkedIn, which seems to be making enough money to get $53 million in funding. They seem to have some plans for expanding professional services to firms, rather than following the Facebook / MySpace entertainment and purely social networks.

Having been convinced recently to spend more time using LinkedIn, I cannot say I have been able to leverage it to achieve anything yet. Can anybody share a success they have had due to using LinkedIn, so I can get some ideas how to maximize it?

Poor Richard’s Almanack. The World Is Flat. The Tipping Point (I do love the book, even though I did not like Malcolm’s presentation yesterday).

These, and a number of others, are listed in Business Week’s most interesting article. I hope some of my current and future students see this!

I have been saying for some time now that Twitter is one of those phenomena that come along from time to time that changes the very way we communicate. It does not allow us simply one more way of doing what we have been doing. Instead, it alters communication itself.

Those of us who Tweet often think and share and communicate and interact differently from before we started with the application.

I used the example in my graduate Leadership class on Tuesday night, “How many of you have cell phones?” Yes, all their hands raised. What surprised me was my follow-up, “How many of you do not have land-lines at home?” Half raised their hands. HALF! In only a few short years the importance and modality and paradigm of using a phone has changed, and in the process our connectivity and expectations and ways of communicating have changed as well.

Business Week seems to be leaning in this direction as well with their article in this week’s issue. Those of us who have been using Twitter find our ways of interacting different as well.

Case in point. I Tweeted on Tuesday night, in my graduate Leadership class, while I was demonstrating Twitter. I sent a Tweet and asked anybody out there to say hello to my class. I received 5 replies from friends and colleagues around the world who were reading Twitter and sent their greetings and encouragement in return. FIVE people. Unscheduled. Unplanned. Real-time. Try communicating to a group in any other medium and getting a response back so quickly. The speed of information exchange, idea development, collaboration, and our very approach to communication itself is now put on its head.

Where is leadership in all this? I think the question is more along the lines of new possibilities for leadership in ways we never considered. With communication increasingly flat, the sky is the limit.

Do you agree with my assessment?

Looking for a Twitter image for my class slides, I came across these. Let’s see, which ones ring most accurate?

and finally, one that feels like me around most of the people I know:

I am really looking forward to attending the online Connected Futures (cp2tech01) Workshop that begins today.

Sponsored by CPSquare, the Community of Practice on Communities of Practice, John Smith and Bronwyn Stuckey have been doing all of the visible pre-work for the workshop. The workshop leaders include Beth Kanter(who I have spoken to numerous times online, but never in this context), Beverly Trayner, Bronwyn Stuckey (who I finally met a couple weeks back while she was visiting NYC), Etienne Wenger(who I read 2 graduate degrees ago as a former professor was fond of his work), John Smith (who laughs more heartily than his screen shot avatar indicates), Nancy White (who I also took an online class with and met and worshipped twice while at Northern Voice), Nick Noakes(who I have read but have never met), Shawn Callahan, Shirley Williams, and Susanne Nyrop.

I will be focused on this workshop for the next five weeks (while I am not working, finishing a most interesting class I am teaching, Project Management for Training, and preparing for a graduate Leadership course I am teaching). What is most interesting is that I have been increasingly looking forward to this class, even more than I thought I would be. Good sign.

We are having our opening teleconference call this afternoon, and one of the questions we were asked to consider is: “What brings you to this workshop?” Simple question to be sure, but one that I have the most trouble answering because there are many reasons. I want to learn from this group of experts. I want to increase my experiences because I find myself drawn to this area. I am looking to continue even more higher education, and think this may help me grok some additional distance possibilities than I previously considered. I want to consider ways to bring this into my teaching. I want to consider expanding some of my professional opportunities with consulting and my full-time work. I hope to get some new research ideas and perhaps additional research partners. I want to be exposed to the people pushing this field along. I want to be involved at this point where this is starting to become more of a field at all. These are just to name a few, and as a reflective practitioner, there will undoubtedly be additional ones as I further consider this today.

Now, we need to consider creating a logo for this workshop . . .

Technorati Tags: cp2tech01

I was asked to consider this question:

Describe one of your own creative works and what you accomplished with it - then become your own critic and find out what you could have done better.

I looked at this question for some time, as I do not normally consider myself the most creative person. Knowing this is probably not the case, I am thinking about how I am often creative in my academic research, my professional work in instructional design and organizational consulting, my teaching, and here on my blog, the one public outlet for my creativity. 

I suppose one creative work is this very blog, as it has been ongoing since my first post on December 7, 2006. Hundreds of posts later, with my daily Tweets captured here as well, I can say that I am still capturing my daily thoughts and feelings and interests and sharing them with anybody and everybody online, whether they are interested in them or not. This blog becomes fertile ground for my experiment in reflective practice.

What can (could) I (have) do (done) better? I can censor myself less by writing in a manner that more closely resembles my spoken voice. There is little that is not public, and maintaining a personal blog is one way to own my (virtual) identity. I should probably write in my own voice more, as others who do so are quite refreshing. I think Twitter is helping with this. Restated a positive way, I can be more authentic and self-identified. Perhaps that is exactly what I am attempting with all the writing about liveblogging I have been doing? Perhaps that is why liveblogging is my next area of formal research? Perhaps autoethnographically studying my liveblogging I will learn something about media-supported live expression and self-narrative?

And I thought this question would be difficult to answer!

The Learning Circuits Blog, an online forum from Learning Circuits / ASTD, recently began a discussion about the role of instructional designers and when / how they should enter projects. They asked their monthly Big Question:

For a given project, how do you determine if, when and how much an instructional designer and instructional design is needed?

I have been an instructional designer (or rather, a Sr. Instructional Designer, thank you), for a number of years, and am not interested in explaining what the field is all about beyond stating that instructional designers systematically determine learning needs and create learning interventions to meet them (my definition). This is a broad definition because there are such a variety of learning needs within different organizations. I do not formally create eLearning in my organization because we have a department that serves that function; my time is spent doing more internal consulting and project management of the learning initiatives than anything else.

My internal consulting is somewhat Socratic, and is intended to save everybody time later on as well as clearly understand what expectations are upon me if I take the project:

• Why do you believe you need that training?
• How have you determined those people need to learn that?
• In what ways will the budget and person-power be used to evaluate the program as you are describing?

My project management of the learning initiatives is all around managing the steps in the instructional design process as they are worked on by a team. I often work with technical health content, and rather than expect me to be proficient in a field where I am not formally trained and certified, I work with experts who I move through the project and help them remain focused on the goals.

I have been following the discussions raised by the Learning Circuits blog with great interest. Cammy Bean’s blog, Learning Visions, really sparked my interest as she discussed many shades in instructional design. Yes, as she mentioned, I do create classes and specific training materials and methods at times, but that is a narrow view of the scope of my abilities (partly due to my fascination with so many items in and around organizational learning and culture). My organization prefers for me to use my skills and experiences and education to influence evidence-based learning design on a project level.

As a project manager, I always focus on meeting the needs of the end-user, rather than just the check-off list of tasks and deliverables. This is my way of responding to Tony Karrer’s discussion about the models–they are all fine, but they all fit within larger projects (that in turn fit within departmental goals toward meeting organizational strategic objectives which fulfill the vision and mission).

So where is instructional design today? I think of this within the context of the elevator speech I use to answer the question “What do you do as an instructional designer?”:

I am an instructional designer. I am an internal learning consultant who manages educational projects.

The rest of the world does not need to know how I do it with this or that model. All they care about is that the project to teach X to learn Y is done and now we have more learning that positively impacts our meeting of our organizational objectives.

I recently read a post on Andy Wibbels’ blog about shyness, and I find myself often returning to it to the extent that I had to process it in writing. Taken originally from Zen Habits, they are:

1. Introduce Yourself
2. Don’t Feel the Need to Qualify Yourself
3. Ask More, Talk Less
4. Be Generous
5. Don’t Judge a Book By Its Cover
6. Remember a Detail
7. Compliment Others
8. Think of Others

Are these factors applicable both online as well as off? Tara on Andy’s site claims they are applicable online, while Zen Habit is somewhat silent about shyness online. While I think shy behavior is shy behavior, I think the medium affects how it is manifest.

Take for example #2 above. When there is a F2F conversation, I find the need to qualify myself and “be as good or better” than others (for the sake of confidence) to be very different than if I am communicating in an online class or discussion board. I feel an awkwardness with people F2F I do not know well when there is silence, but when this occurs online I find it easier to move on (to another website, discussion, research, entertainment, etc.) while not getting so intimidated. Perhaps silence online is expected? Safe? Disengaging?

I wonder if there are not many of the same underlying causes with different ways of expressing them based on the situation? Hmm, I smell a research project here, perhaps one fitting media psychology?

I recently stumbled across an interesting website in the field of Media Psychology–Media Psychology Research Center (MPR). With an ambitious agenda and the energy to realize it, what attracted me to their work is how they approach media (with my own bias toward online and educational uses) from a variety of perspectives with the intention of studying how it relates with human behavior. I like the combination between media and psychology after spending so many years working at the intersection between media and adult education, media and instructional design, media and communication, and media as autoethnographic and narrative vehicle.

From their website, they define Media Psychology as:

Media Psychology Research Center views media psychology an interactive and dynamic relationship between humans and media

This is key to a more accurate and useful understanding of the human-media experience.

We use this model to establish domains of assessment throughout the human-media experience to more effectively assess, develop and produce positive media.

Can we really study media in any interesting way without studying how it affects and is driven by human behavior? That is one of the refreshing realizations I had when I reviewed their list of academic resources on their site. Being a lover of Amazon and continued education, I think I can spend a lot of time fleshing information and <ideally> learning from the materials they are sharing.

Now, perhaps a trackback link will encourage them to discuss their current work on their blog so they can engage the larger blogosphere!