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Here is link to my slides for the Women's Congress on March 29th:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kathleengilroy/sets/72157600034851580

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Last winter as I was preparing for a project with the American Library Association, I wrote that learners needed to become teachers and teachers needed to become learners:

In an essay on “The New Productivity Challenge,” published originally in 1985 in the Harvard Business review, Drucker rights about how continuous learning must drive productivity increases in the 21st century. Interestingly he defines learning as teaching: “Knowledge workers learn the most when they teach….We often hear that every enterprise has to become a learning institution. It must become a teaching institution as well.”

Brilliant. This completely brings together one of the paradoxes of the learning 2.0 world. Learners must learn to teach and teachers must learn to learn. Why is this so? One of the big new assumptions under Learning 2.0 is that everyone is an expert. Innovation and productivity are more likely to emerge as people all through the enterprise find small ways to make things better and then teach one another what they know. The Learning 2.0 model uses very simple tools that allow anyone to teach (blogs, wikis and podcasts) and smart filters so that the right information is flowing to the right people. This highly distributed model has been very successfully on the public internet with blogs as publishing devices, aggregators as personal filters, and things the iTunes podcast store as user-driven directories.

Little did I know how prescient this was and how difficult it would be for me to make this shift myself. Just six weeks after I wrote this post in our blog, I started a new kind of learning program for the American Library Association. ALA was looking for ways to energize its online learning programs and for ways to educate librarians about Web 2.0. Instead of guiding people through a structured learning program, we used a new model for delivering technology-based learning. In the traditional model, people work inside a course management system where all activities take place. Course participation is highly structured within this typically closed and proprietary system. The ALA “boot camp” was designed to immerse the group in the new technologies underlying the Web 2.0 revolution and to give them some guidance in exploring this new world and applying their experience to their work. Each person worked in a project team that developed new ideas for libraries based on the new technologies and models boot camp participants were using. For the boot camp, librarians were immersed in a new learning network. Each librarian was given a weblog, RSS aggregator, and technical training and support on how to use these tools to create content. Using these tools, participants built their boot camp collectively, publishing their ideas on their blogs and team wikis. A central blog portal helped people navigate the multiple threads of conversation that emerged and make connections with one another and what they were learning. Links and tags knit all of this content together. And search and RSS made the content visible and navigable, helping participants stay on top of it all. Expert content on the future of libraries was delivered via podcasts through iTunes. The boot camp was opened and closed with web/telephone synchronous sessions, where participants shared their expectations and experience.

During the boot camp the learners really took control of their experience and teaching each other. But the most powerful evidence of learners becoming teachers took place after the boot camp was over when librarians who had been in the program developed their own versions of the program:

Helene Blowers created a learning 2.0 program which really put the power into the hands of the learners. She dynamited the structure and tool box we had set up for ALA and created a completely open, self-paced learning program. Here is her curriculum:

23 Learning 2.0 Things*

(Note: Details about each task will be activated every week with posts related to each item)

Week 1: Introduction ( official start of week August 7th)

1. Read this blog & find out about the program.

2. Discover a few pointers from lifelong learners and learn how to nurture your own learning process.

Week 2: Blogging

3. Set up your own blog & add your first post.

4. Register your blog on PLCMC Central and begin your Learning 2.0 journey.

Week 3: Photos & Images

5. Explore Flickr and learn about this popular image hosting site.

6. Have some Flickr fun and discover some Flickr mashups & 3rd party sites.

7. Create a blog post about anything technology related that interests you this week.

Week 4: RSS & Newsreaders

8. Learn about RSS feeds and setup your own Bloglines newsreader account.

9. Locate a few useful library related blogs and/or news feeds.

Week 5: Play Week

10. Play around with an online image generator.

11. Take a look at LibraryThing and catalog some of your favorite books.

12. Roll your own search tool with Rollyo.

Week 6: Tagging, Folksonomies & Technorati

13. Learn about tagging and discover a Del.icio.us (a social bookmaking site)

14. Explore Technorati and learn how tags work with blog posts.

15. Read a few perspectives on Web 2.0, Library 2.0 and the future of libraries and blog your thoughts.

Week 7: Wikis

16. Learn about wikis and discover some innovative ways that libraries are using them.

17. Add an entry to the Learning 2.0 SandBox wiki.

Week 8: Online Applications & Tools

18. Take a look at some online productivity (word processing, spreadsheet) tools.

19. Explore any site from the Web 2.0 awards list, play with it and write a blog post about your findings.

Week 9: Podcasts, Video & Downloadable audio

20. Discover YouTube and a few sites that allow users to upload and share videos.

21. Discover some useful search tools for locating podcasts.

22. Take a look at the titles available on NetLibrary and learn how to download audiobooks.

23. Summarize your thoughts about this program on your blog.

This program is now being replicated at over 20 libraries across the country. It is a superb innovation over what was started at ALA in that it uses technologies freely available and has a better structure for immersion and for enabling people to teach one another.

Another participant, Meredith Farkas, also saw an opportunity for innovation:

Last Spring, while Chairing the library track of HigherEd BlogCon and feeling like it was not an engaging enough online conference model, I had a crazy idea to create a free online conference with more synchronous and asynchronous pieces to really draw people in and build a community. I refused to believe that the only way to have the great dialogues that you have between sessions at a physical conference was by going to a physical conference. Then the ALA 2.0 Bootcamp happened and I saw how close ALA came to creating a truly great online learning opportunity and yet how they really missed the mark with it. I remember Kathleen Gilroy’s comment “the larger lesson here is that if you think you can just throw together a few pieces of technology and get things to work differently you are deluding yourselves.” When I saw that, I immediately decided that I wanted to create an online course using as many open source tools as possible and it was going to be free and it was going to be something really special. I wasn’t quite sure how, but I wanted to show that it was possible.

My response to Ms. Gilroy’s comment was this:

Jinkies! If that doesn’t sound like a challenge, I don’t know what does! I don’t know what she means by “throw together a few pieces of technology” but yes, I think I can do it better (with a little help from my friends). At least I’d like to try… I just want to show that it can be done from the bottom up. Then people would realize how easily we can directly improve the profession without having to be a member of a professional organization (not that there’s anything wrong with that, but there are other ways to serve).

In response Meredith created Five Weeks to a Social Library. This also builds on the ALA model but like Helene Blower's effort opens it up and makes it more accessible. It is worth spending time clicking through the lessons and curriculum here. It is very nicely done.

I have to say that I am personally humbled by these innovations. Both Helene and Meredith dramatically improved upon what we started and I feel like I learned a lot from what they have done. They have created a truly open, learner driven model that I believe can be applied to any topic and any setting. The program we did for ALA was bogged down by its cost structure and by forcing people into closed, proprietary technologies. It also had both too much structure and too little and was top heavy in having two experts and a learning director. I love that Helene and Meredith have created a model that is completely scalable and that can be used by anybody.

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Another great graphic from Kathy Sierra on the F2F Curve and why we still go to conferences:

Inspiration from Connection:

There's mirror neurons, for one thing, and the effect of emotional contagion that happens when you're around a pile of people who share the same interest and enthusiasm. Everyone comes out re-energized. And you don't need to go to SXSW to get that benefit! Simply attending any live event–from the three-person lunch meetup to the 100-person local user group can give you the most positive effect of being at an event like SXSW.

I had a very similar experience at the Community 2.0 conference last week in Las Vegas. And what's up with Twitter. I really do not get it.

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Kathy Sierra publishes a witty set of slides from her presentation at SXSW on how to attract readers. This is not a “how-to” but rather a “how to think and have the right attitude. I agree with everything she says and have “powerpoint envy.” Take a look.

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Des Walsh has done a terrific review and analysis of all of the business blogging platforms now available to bloggers.

I highly recommend reading all ten parts of the series (six are published to date).

Part 1 - Introduction

Des starts out by building this very good mindmap of the variations and options among platforms. I'm going to start including this in my own presentations on the subject because it is the best at-a-glance view of this topic I have seen so far.

Part 2 - Sorting out the terminology

This post explains basic terms and helps differentiate the options.

Part 3 - Quick start and durable platforms

This post gives you a very good overview and comparison of Wordpress, Typepad, Blogharbor (built on the Blogware platform which we use), and Squarespace. These days when people ask for a recommendation about a blogging platform I usually suggest a Typepad blog for the small business person. But now I'll point people to this post.

Part 4 - Expanding the Mindmap

Here Des adds the free blogging platforms MySpace, bebo, Xanga, Huminity, Vox and LiveJournal to his list. I really love Vox and think it has the best user interface. If you don't mind having somebody else's ads on your blogs, Vox is by far the best choice.

Part 5 - User Types

Des outlines different user groups and looks at how needs differ among groups:

* personal

* solo business

* small business

* enterprise

* government

* not-for-profit and

* group

Part 6 - Support

A good overview of how support is handled by the platform providers.

There are four more posts planned and I encourage you to read them all.

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You can find my slides from the IMCNE Presentation on Web 2.0 for Business Advantage here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kathleengilroy/sets/72157600003090525

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Here is a link to my slides for the Community 2.0 bootcamp.

http://www.flickr.com/gp/55155517@N00/9ocV72

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I've been experimenting with Google's new Premier Apps service. It is priced at $50 per user per year and includes integrated versions of Gmail, Google Start Page, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Spreadsheets, Google Chat and Google Web Pages.

So far my experience has been disappointing, and from my reading of the Google Apps Group, I am not alone. For starters there is no simple way to merge your personal accounts into the new service. So you have to copy and paste any Google Docs and Spreadsheets you have created from your personal account into the new apps account. Sharing Calendars is a bit easier: individuals go into their personal calendars and enable sharing with the email of the owner of the Google Apps account. This is fine for us in that we have a small group of people but I cannot imagine having to do this at any scale.

The biggest flaw (and an “Apps killer” in my book) is the lack of support for secure RSS in the Shared Start Page. The start page is modeled on Google Home Page (which also lacks support for secure RSS). You add content using RSS feeds and widgets. But you cannot add secure feeds. So if you are using Basecamp and want to track your projects on your Google Start Page, you are SOL. We have a number of secure blogs and all of our projects running under secure feeds. The real advantage of the Google Apps service is the ability to integrate all of this into one view for everybody in our network. But without secure feeds in that view, we are missing the most important information.

If Google adds secure RSS support, I will pay $50 per user for the service. Without secure RSS, Google Apps is really not useful.

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Our most popular podcast, Negotiating Tip of the Week with Josh Weiss has appeared in the top 100 podcasts on iTunes.

And it is currently number 6 in business podcasts and featured under new and notable.

You can access it through the iTunes music store, or through the Negotiation Tip Weblog.

Way to go Josh.

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