Last week marked the start of my work for Sun Microsystems. I’m being dubbed an “instructional designer” and I’m charged with researching social learning and virtual environments. At the moment we are working on a couple initiatives, one which includes facilitating knowledge allocation and sharing among Sun employees. I imagine an environment similar to Netvibes or iGoogle, where the user can freely drag-and-drop and add content as they please. It may even be worth modeling the UI after the UIs of either of these services since they seem to be so popular and user-friendly (I love my Netvibes homepage… makes my life on the Web much more convenient). I think it will be important for the environment to be as non-restrictive as possible. Not only does this include being able to freely arrange content, as you please, but also having the ability to freely import feeds from elsewhere, such as BBC, CNN, or your favorite blog. Not sure if the latter will cause security issues. In addition, having the ability to change the design of your CLE (collaborative learning environment) with regard to your favorite color, etc. would be a bonus to make it feel more uniquely “yours.”
Does anyone who uses iGoogle, Netvibes, or a similar service notice anything about those environments that they would like to see improved? I don’t use Netvibes’ bookmarking and rating functions often, but I think such tools would be useful in a CLE for Sun employees. I think the reason I don’t use them on Netvibes is cuz I don’t feel a sense of community on Netvibes yet… I know they’ve tried to improve this, but I don’t think it’s quite there. For Sun, however, the sense of community may be greater since it will be a walled garden of sorts, more of a bounded community.
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Hi Adam-
I love what you’re describing here; the many pieces loosely joined/mashup idea.
To answer your question, I think that sense of community is what’s also missing on my iGoogle. Although I’m a member of several social networks (like Ning and Facebook), and I tweet, blog, access internal company portals, use an rss aggregator, as well as email and Skype, use co.mment, and tag, etc. I just use the bookmark widget on iGoogle to access them all. I still have to go to each of them and login. So, my community is ‘out there’ but easily accessible. I believe part of the problem is SSO.
Anyway, I believe that sense of community will be easier to foster within a corporation, even a large one like Sun, because you already have a group with a common bond – employment (or customers, whatever…).
As an aside…I assume you have an LMS, off-the-shelf e-learning courseware, webconferencing, resources, etc. How is that handled in this mashup?
BTW…welcome to ID. We need more anthropologists in the field. : )
Hi Janet, glad to have you in the conversation.
What exactly do you mean by LMS. I assume you mean Learning Management System? Can you flesh that out some more? Getting involved with ID is like learning a new language! I always have to have the “natives” explain things to me so I can translate them into my own language =). Just off the cuff, I think everything should be modular, it’s own widget. So for web conferencing, a widget that houses the application would be ideal, or at least a link of some sort that would execute the application either on the web or from your computer. Not sure if this is possible, but it should be =).
The grand vision is to have a portal to your life on the web and with your company. Since the OpenID options out there aren’t quite solid enough yet, we still have to rely on bringing the content to us via feeds, etc. An inhouse portal built off iGoogle or Netvibes would be great. However, I wish I knew more about the security risks of importing outside feeds (e.g. from your favorite ID blog) because I think that’s important to the whole environment. Because if you can’t do that then the inhouse CLE just becomes Yet Another Social Network.
Oh no! You are being sucked into the vortex of the learning/id world with our seemingly endless use of acronyms. Yes, in this context I mean learning management system, specifically commercial systems that are either installed or hosted but that sit behind the firewall and are not open source. I suspect Sun has one or more LMS and was wondering how you were thinking about handling all the content that typically resides within the LMS (management of instructor-led classroom training, e-learning courses, physical resources, etc.)
Security is always a big issue. That and corporate culture which often is hierarchal and siloed. Good luck in the new job. Looking forward to reading your blog.
Seems to me, at least based on the work I do in the environment I’m in, you need two things:
1) A place to share things
2) A place to converse about what’s being shared + talk about other things
#1 is fairly easy. You set up blogs and wikis for a variety of purposes. One could be for sharing links another for collaborative ideas etc. Wikis can function pretty well for collaborative working space and for ease of use content management.
#2 is a bit more complicated. I’ve written down some ideas about the library I work in. This is a concept that I’ve wanted to try to develop for a long time now, but have never had the opportunity. Individual portals, as mentioned above, lack the social element. So, in a working environment I advocate attempting to create a communication portal. It would be based on the concept of creating a place for employees to go to communicate. The key here to me is integrating it with #1 and creating a variety of integrated forms of synchronous and semi-synchronous communication. In my work place everyone is sitting in their office working on something, usually email, only to emerge to go to one of many many meetings every week. I see a need to provide connection while working, especially while developing ideas, in an online format. An unintended boon to all this would surely be a shot at reducing the amount of email by providing places for more synchronous communication. It would also be an excellent way to teach/train employees about best practices in regard to what medium of communication is appropriate in what circumstance. These last two points I see as having an effect not far away from crippling the organization by making it very stubborn and inflexible.
@Janet – I think the best idea, keeping security a priority, would be to create the CLE modeled after the iGoogle, Netvibes environments, then pull in the public content instead of vice versa. Like I said, not sure what kind of security threat this poses, but it seems safer than pulling private content into a more open environment like iGoogle and Netvibes (although this would be much easier, of course, since the platform already exists and I’m all for using what I already have). Does your company have any sort of CLE like this? If so, how do they deal with these issues?
@Kevin – I hear you. Do you think an online-status indicator would be beneficial in a closed work environment like the ones we’ve been discussing? I feel like they might give you more sense of community as you can “see” others “in” the virtual space with you. Here’s an article I came across a while back, you may have seen it, that talks about the benefits of using IM @ work. You might find it interesting. http://tinyurl.com/3nb5yp
Congratulations! That sounds like a wonderful job and a great learning experience. I like the idea of this project a lot and see immediate usefulness as an educator.
What do I want from a digital lifestyle aggregator?
1. Granularity of user defined fields and settings
2. Sophisticated privacy settings (otherwise I won’t use it at all)
3. User friendly TOS
4. User focused UI (rather than developer focused UI)
5. Stability!