I had a kick-off meeting for a project we are doing with the American Library Association yesterday. We are developing a prototype course for ALA called Library Futures. It will be delivered in a Learning 2.0 format using blogs, aggregators, and podcasts as the delivery systems and for user publishing and interface. (You can read about it here.)

I want to call your attention to one very nice thing that we have done that I plan to do for all of our new courses: build a shared set of resources using del.ici.ous. Here's how we are doing it:

Everybody involved needs a del.ici.ous account. (To sign up go here; it's free and once you get it, you'll never stop using it.) Once you have an account, then you should add a del.ici.ous plug-in to your browser. (For Firefox for the PC go here; for Firefox for the Mac, go here; for Safari go here; for IE go here.) When you have installed your plug-in, you should be able to tag any link from your browser to your del.ici.ous account.

Then you need a shared “tag” for your resource list. For the ALA project, we selected ALAL2. So now any time I come across something that I think would be useful, it gets tagged ALAL2 and saved into my delicious account.

Here's the cool part: when you click on your tag (in our example, ALAL2), you will be given the option of clicking on all items tagged by anybody as ALAL2:

By clicking on the “all” link, you get this url: http://del.icio.us/tag/ALAL2 and a list of all items tagged:

And you get an RSS feed of the shared tag: http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/ALAL2. When you add this feed to your aggregator, you will be notified any time anybody tags anything with the ALAL2 tag.

This is a great way of building a shared set of resources for a course, project, or team.

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Thomas Friedman's book The World is Flat makes the case for why we need to “learn how to learn”:

“Being adaptable in a flat world, knowing how to “learn how to learn,” will be one of the most important assets any worker can have, because job churn will come faster, because innovation will happen faster.”



Here is a recording from C-SPAN of him speaking about the book: link

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Erstwhile Otter Shimon Rura, developer of Voo2Do and Frassle, currently with Renesys, did a presentation at the Mass High Tech Leadership Council yesterday that succinctly introduced the evolving web tools we are using for our Learning 2.0 projects. Here are my notes which may include some of my own additions so apologies to Shimon if they aren't verbatim.

Evolving web tools can be described in terms of the type of communication and collaboration they improve and the resulting effects on personal relationships:

Communication

one-to many: a better newsletter, e.g., essay blogs, podcasts, videocasts

These tools enable experts at all levels of an organization to publish without an editorial bottleneck. Low cost and ease of use provide a better way of finding experts and connecting them with the appropriate audience.

one-to-one: better phone/email, e.g., Skype, IM

These tools help maintain and sustain relationships.

Because Skype is free you can leave a connection open to simulate presence.

High school students will take their IM buddy lists with them when they graduate

many-to-many: a better public forum, e.g., Yahoo groups, email lists, forums, blog communities,

By pulling together content and recontextualizing, these tools encourage communities to more rapidly self-organize

listening: a better clipping service, e.g., aggregators, blog search engines, radars, social bookmarking

These tools help you find and continually monitor the sources of information you need. We've written a lot about these tools here and here already

Collaboration

document production: a better whiteboard, e.g., wikis

productivity: a better to do list, e.g., Voo2do, [Basecamp], bug tracking, shared calendars

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I wrote recently about how I am using delicious to save, tag, and share bookmarks. This morning when I upgraded my Firefox browser to 1.5, (and added the 1.0.2 delicious extension) using delicious just got easier. One of the recommended extensions for the browser, adds link to your delicious page, along with tagging feature (so that you can tag anything that is in your browser window). So let's say I want to tag my favorite knitting store (which happens to be in Wales), Colourway.

All I need to do is click on the “tag” symbol next to my browser window, and a window pops up that allows me to tag and save the link to my delicious account:

Now this entry is listed in my delicious account:

And I notice that three other people have also saved and tagged it. I can discover not only who they are but what else they have tagged. This led me to a great farm that produces merino wool in update New York. The web site has fabulous patterns and kits at good prices.

One of the things I love about delicious is that it combines the recovery and discovery aspects of search. I can tag items for later recovery–going back to where I have been before. But I can also discover things and people I might be interested in.

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Our business has had an evolving set of mission statements over the years, but now we've landed on one that I think is going to stick. It is:

“Teaching people how to learn”

It is so simple and straightforward and resonant. And it fits with the work we have been doing.

In the past our work was really about bringing expert knowledge and ideas from places like Harvard and MIT to the “broadest number of people.” Through that work, we developed a well-honed understanding of how to be really good learners and how to use new technologies to be smart, productive and competitive. This is so important for individuals, but also for organizations and enterprises. In order to flourish in today's world, we need to re-learn how to learn.

When I give talks, I often say that I am not smarter than anybody else, but because I am a very good learner and because I have learned how to learn with the newest technologies, I often know things a bit earlier than others. That makes me appear smarter. In this world where knowledge is a commodity and the flow of new information is much bigger than any one person could possibly manage, being a good learner has become a critical skill. When we talk about Learning 2.0, what we are really talking about is how to be the best learner you can possibly be. And the best learners are  often the best collaborators. Being really good at learning is often about tapping into the collective wisdom of the right group of peers. And being a good peer is about informing the group with your own intangible, personal intelligence.

The focus of our work next year will be on bringing these ideas to our clients and peer networks. We will be working on building our own learning network so that we can incorporate as many people as possible into sharing this mission. There are many ways that you can join us: we have a couple of positions open for work here at the Otter Group. We are also building a network of experts who are using podcasting to share what they know. We currently have three podcasts going on negotiation, innovation, and learning 2.0. We are going to add three more in the New Year on personal productivity, “being green,” and “weenie nets.” We're open to including your expertise in our network, so if you have something to say, please let us know.

We are also launching a Learning 2.0 boot camp, where we will introduce your organization to the ideas and methods of Learning 2.0. In the boot camp you will have a chance to take what we are developing and apply it to how you work and learn. And we will be continuing our own Learning 2.0 podcast series to help disseminate these ideas as broadly as possible.

We will be forming an advisory board, as well as a Learning 2.0 network, where we regularly convene (virtually to start) to deepen our connections and shared learning. If you would like to be part of either of these groups, please write to me.

I'm very excited about what's coming. And I'm very proud of our employees and associates. This is a shared journey and we hope that you will find a way of joining us.

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Blogbridge is cross-platform, free, and open source. Because it is
java-based, it works on both Windows and Macs.

You can download versions of Blogbridge from this
page.

Learning 2.0 feeds



After you download, you have a few options for getting the
list of feeds we recommend for staying on top of Learning 2.0.

During the Blogbridge setup, you'll have the option of selecting the
“Learning 2.0″ collection from the starter list.

If you do not load our feeds during set up, you'll be able to add them
when you add a new guide.

You give the guide a title and then select the Learning 2.0
feeds from the collection.

And you can add individual feeds to your own collections when you
select feeds from collections.

If you have any questions about how to add Learning 2.0 feeds to
blogbridge, please feel free to email us at help@ottergroup.com.

And give us your feedback about Blogbridge.

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“Teaching
People How to Learn”

Although you may not yet realize it, we are on the verge of a huge
change in how we manage learning and information. This is the focus of our work now at the Otter Group. We have been
working on a number of very interesting projects that involve a wholly
new approach to designing and producing learning programs. We have learned a
lot. In light of one of the key principles of what we are calling
Learning 2.0: Learners become teachers, it is time for us to start to teach.

We like to think of Learning 2.0 as a new “system” for learning that is
built on web services interoperating through open standards and
application programming interfaces. 

The tools are rapidly
advancing and they will continue to radically improve over the coming year as
Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo start to battle it out for control of the
new world of aggregation and information management. Microsoft has
signaled this shift in the language it has chosen for its new operating
system: Vista. While “Windows” looked inward and down into the personal
hard drive, Vista looks up and out into the wide world of information
on the horizon (and beyond…). Google is moving the other direction
with its new Google desktop program, which links the wide world back to
the desktop. They are both moving towards the same idea of the desktop
becoming a center for managing aggregation, information sharing, and
connections with other people and information.

Blogs and blogging
were the beginning of our journey into this new world. And they
represent a new paradigm for what we believe will be the software and
communications model on which the networked information economy runs.
Blogs are the beginning of giving form to enormous information flows we
now need to manage. Blogs and the “publish/subscribe architecture” on
which they are built, offer things that will be critical to work:
convenience, ease of use, a common format and language, information
aggregation and filtering, and persistence and searchability.

A desktop aggregator is another tool. It's what you might call “Tivo” for your desktop.

Our Learning 2.0 services will help you reorganize your electronic
learning into a cheaper, better, faster, system. A typical project includes:

Setting up aggregators for your employees that are
populated with channels for learning.

Then, using weblogs, podcasts, and persistent search we will help you
develop new ways to produce content for these channels:

Our Learning Directors will help you manage these new learning networks
so that you achieve your objectives.

Please contact us for further information about how you can transform
learning in your organization.

To read further, please take a look at “The Path to Learning 2.0”
(link)

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We are writing and talking about Learning 2.0 as the focus of our new work. In a series of posts, I'd like to describe in detail what we mean by Learning 2.0 and how it will unfold and evolve. It now looks like there have been three dominant modes in how we have navigated the Internet. They are Browse, Search, and Subscribe. I began browsing in 1995 when all traffic on the web was flowing through Netscape's portal site. I have been trying to remember when I first started using Google. I think it was in the late 90s. Certainly by 2000, I was deeply in search mode. And I started using an aggregator in early 2004. Now I use my aggregator almost as much as I use search. And I use search inside my aggregator and persistent search, where I create an RSS feed from a search result that then is updated in my aggregator, through google, pub sub, and msn.

Charles Fitzgerald at Microsoft nicely articulated the benefits of subscription in his article, From Browse to Search to Subscribe:

But when you subscribe, software does things on your behalf. It automatically grabs stuff you’ve expressed an interest in (and in the future software smarts probably will do a pretty good job of finding things you might have an interest in). Discovery and navigation disappear once you’ve found something worthy of ongoing attention. Software bridges delivery with the consumption experience and lets you interact on your terms. With RSS, instead of having to visit a wide range of web sites in order to read blogs, people can subscribe using newsreader software that will retrieve and present those data feeds. You can read them at your convenience. They are available offline so you can catch up any time. You can sort or search them. Most newsreader software is pretty simple today as blogs are designed to be read by people. But newsreaders will get smarter and enhance the consumption experience….There are all kinds of interesting feeds that might be consumed by software, which then does something for us. Software updates and patches. Event calendars. Business data. Traffic flows. Search queries. Stock prices. All can be subscribed to as feeds and then software can party on that information to our benefit – personalize, analyze, visualize, manipulate, aggregate, synopsize, prioritize, etc. The subscribe model promises people a more valuable experience with much less effort. The old rallying cry of Information At Your Fingertips is no longer a dream. We all have access to more information than we could ever possibly process. The challenge now is sifting through oceans of information to get the right stuff and, equally important, then be able to take the appropriate action and do something with the information.

In the article, Fitzgerald references Tivo as another subscription model. When I talk about aggregation and subscription, I like to use the analogy of Tivo, but for your desktop:

In his very good podcasts about aggregators on our Learning 2.0 tip-of-the-week podcast series, Glen Mohr explains how subscription can replace email and search. I think the subscription model is going to overtake the desktop and become the dominant mode for the foreseeable future. It appears that a war is brewing over the desk top real estate, as the desktop becomes an aggregator or the aggregator takes over the desktop. Google and Sun are teaming up on one side to offer a set of services to compete with Microsoft. Microsoft with its new office live is also starting to compete on the service side. And the name they have chosen for the new operating system, “Vista,” is an indication that they too see the desktop as aggregator. Windows looked down into the computer. Vista looks out to the horizon.

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Here is a recap of my first experience using RocketPost - a new full featured blog posting tool.

The Setup Wizard asks you to name the blog as you set it up. Why
doesn't it just retrieve the name when you give it the blog host
address and account info?

After asking you for the name of the blog, then it asks whether
you have a blog on the Internet. BlogHarbor is a choice but Blogware is
not. So for Blogware users who are not BlogHarbor customers, it is
confusing when it asks for a BlogHarbor user name and password which is
actually the Blogware user name and password.

It retrieved the entire list of all my Blogware blogs but then
only allowed me to choose one from the list to set up. I have a ton of Blogware blogs
that I maintain and just want to be able to set up all of them at once.

I chose my
internal company blog (the first one in the list) even though I had
entered Mohr Blog (my personal blog) at the first prompt, just to see
what would happen.

It asked me if I wanted to retrieve old posts so I told it to retrieve my last five posts. No posts were retrieved.

I tried the “Set up blogs” option from the Tools menu and
changed the name of the blog in RocketPost to match the name of the blog on Blogware. Still
not able to retrieve posts.

I set up my internal company blog. Still not able to retrieve posts for that either.

RocketPost has a far more robust editor than any other blogging client I have used.

1. It counts words as you type.
2. It allows you to attach a date and timme to your post so you can
   post to the past or the future. With BlogJet I have to post as a draft
   and then go into the Blogware interface to adjust the date before
   publishing.
3. It has a strikeout formatting button - useful for corrections
4. It allows you to insert Web Service tags such as Google or Google Images

5. blogblog

   Glen Mohr

   The
   photo editor seems great but we'll see what it looks like when it
   posts. I set the picture here with as left justified and gave it
   margins of 10. For some reason the word “blog” was added on either side
   of the picture. Then I edited the picture and set the margins to zero.
   The words “blogblog” then moved to the top of the picture. Not sure
   where they came from. But just being able to edit a photo on the fly is
   fantastic.

6. Another nice feature is the “continue reading break” except I'm not
   sure where the text goes that you type after the break. I would expect
   it to put everything above the break into the excerpt field and the
   full post into the body field.

Editor is very easy to use. I added a drop cap to this paragraph.

Here is a left pull quote that I did with one paste and click:Just being able to edit a photo on the fly is fantastic

I'm not sure how the spell check works becuase I wasn't able to get it to find any of my misspellings.

I'm going to try a file attachment as well becuase I've always had
trouble getting attachments and photos to come through to Blogware when
posting with BlogJet. glenmohr.JPG (4 Kb)
Ok

, that's a problem. When I insert a file attachment and then hit
return to go to the next line and continue typing, for some reason the
first couple characters of what I type following the file attachment
are added to the link to the file attachment - see “Ok” above.

I'm going to try the file attachment again: glenmohr.JPG (4 KB)

This time I hit two line breaks after the attachment link and that seemed to work.

Now I'll post.

As you can see, neither the photo nor the attached file came through.

Everything below the “continue reading” break did not make it onto the blog. I'm not sure where it went so I took out the break.

I just went back into the RocketPost editor, to add this.You can
easily tell if a post in the editor has been published becuase the
permalink shows up.

The feature that immediately caught my attention with RocketPost is
the abilty to post to multiple blogs at the same time. I haven't seen
this in any other blogging client and would be very useful. I tried to post this article to my internal company
blog and my personal blog at the same time but could not find any menu
choice to do that.

When I checked the RocketPost window that displays all my blogs, I
discovered that the old posts, only three instead of the five I had
requested, had been retrieved. Perhaps it just took a while. No option
there either to post to multiple blogs simultaneously.

The online help told me to add the URL for my blog to the images
settings to ensure that pictures get uploaded. When I went to do this,
I discovered it was already set correctly, so no help there.

I also can't find an option to switch blogs while I am editing a
post. I frequently start writing a post and realize I'm set to publish
to the wrong blog. With BlogJet I can just go to “manage blogs” and
change blogs without haveing to start over.

I called up an old post copied the text, started a new post for a different blog and pasted in the contents. Then I modified it and tried to post. RocketPost did not like this. It would not post and kept giving me an “internal error” message. Also it started using about 96% of my CPU's capacity until I shut it down.

So, RocketPost has a lot of nice features but is not yet working right for Blogware.

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We have continued our series on aggregators (or newsreaders) with the latest episode in our Learning 2.0 podcast.

In the last episode Glen Mohr explained the basics of aggregators – what they do and why you should use one.

This week Glen explains how aggregators organize and filter to help you seek information more widely and use it more efficiently.

Next week’s episode will compare the features of aggregators to help you choose the one that’s right for you.

In the final episode we’ll explain how to take the next step: using an aggregator as a social networking tool. Aggregators are an essential tool for managing relationships with people in your personal and professional networks - helping you to

• Develop larger, deeper social networks with more people from outside your organization
• Know who to go to for critical information, and
• Establish yourself as a source of advice and information

You can access the podcast from the Learning 2.0 Tip of the Week weblog. The podcast is also available on iTunes.

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