The Platform Google

Posted on May 13, 2013 by Tom Spiglanin

I like to look at the fundamental nature of things like, “What are social media?”  All their core, each social medium is first a medium, which means a communication channel that enables storage and transmission of information. What distinguishes social media from others (such as broadcast media) is the social aspect – they integrate mechanisms that enable two-way interaction between individuals or groups.

twitter-bird-blue-on-whiteTwitter is a social medium, and one of my favorites. Wikis are social media. Instant messaging, text messaging, and email also clearly represent social media. So do blogs and YouTube, where the social interaction may be highly asymmetric but threaded discussions (comments) in the context of the content makes them social.

The way I see it, Facebook, LinkedIn, Yammer, MySpace, and a host of other social networking sites are fundamentally different – I call them social platforms. Not everyone agrees with this distinction (for example, here), and maybe platform isn’t quite the right term, but there’s a big difference in the way I interact with people in those environments from how I interact with people via a single medium.

Social_Media

By Paola peralta (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

My distinction? I log into what I’m calling platforms and interact with others predominantly within the context of their unique environments. Virtually everything takes place within one window. Taking Facebook as an example, I can check-in to a place, tag people, share a status update, and/or share a link from within the environment. I can also chat and send messages. In ways, the environment (the site) aggregates multiple media to create the platform. If I don’t log in, I’m not “resident” in the network; I may contribute to content by posting from third party apps on other media (for example, FourSquare or Instagram), but I don’t tangibly contribute or derive value from it.

Of course I have to log into the media I use often, like email and Twitter, but business needs routinely drive me to do so. I’m so often resident on those networks that I often call that process authentication rather than logging in, not to mention I can use any number of client applications for each. I find I need a disciplined practice to stay resident on Facebook or LinkedIn and Yammer.

plus-badgeWhich brings me to Google and Google+. People have commented that Google+ is, “Far behind Facebook,” in terms of many things – its interface, ease of use, features, and so on. I don’t agree. Google has not-so-secretly build a solid platform by focusing on fundamentals and doing them all reasonably well. I log into my email, and across the top of the screen is a ribbon with many Google services at my fingertips. Google+ is a no-brainer and opens immediately after email. Instant messaging is available, and when it’s open on my Google+ tab it also opens on my Gmail tab. I switch tabs and forget which Google application I’m in at any given moment.

Then there’s Google Drive, where I can store documents and edit many, even creating new documents using the Google Docs applications. I can share from there as well to work collaboratively while discussing and/or commenting from the context of the document. Amazing, and social.

On that banner I also access my YouTube channel, Maps, News, my Calendar, and more. All one click away, all in the routine of my normal business processes.

Love them or hate them, Google has built an incredible social platform. Their various media, social as well as broadcast, live in separate tabs on my browser, they’re just not aggregated into a single window. The fact that I’m resident on the Google platform daily in the course of business is so important to me that I’ve made a conscious effort lately to contribute as much as possible to content on Google+, and I already derive nearly as much value from it as I do from Twitter. It’s even the primary way I interact with others about my blog posts.

What do you think? Google fan or not, I’d love to hear your thoughts. Fans use the G+ tab below; others can use the WordPress comment tab.

Thanks for reading!
@tomspiglanin

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oneQube SmartStream as a Twitter Chat Client

Posted on May 10, 2013 by Tom Spiglanin

oneQubeInternetMediaLabsI don’t usually write about tools, but there’s been a lot of talk on Twitter about the potential demise of Tweetchat, and those of us who regularly engage in Twitter chats are rightly concerned. This morning I was introduced to oneQube SmartStream from Internet Media Labs, hearing it might be an adequate replacement. Once on their home page, I registered with Twitter, set up an account in about a minute, and was impressed by what I saw. As serendipitous events go, I happened to then see a post by Brandie McCallum that she was planning to use SmartStream in Twitter chat in less than 30 minutes. We engaged, and I joined too. I was very impressed.

What follows here isn’t a so much a review of oneQube SmartStream as some of the great features I experienced that you’ll likely want to use when joining Twitter chats. It’s in beta testing (based on the URL), so the tool will surely continue to evolve and improve, but there’s so much functionality already included that this seemed worth sharing.

Basic Features

  1. By default, SmartStream shows your own Twitter feed. It doesn’t update automatically, instead showing a blue bar at the top of the window with the number of updates and “@ mentions” waiting to be seen. Click it to show them.
  2. streamcontrolStream Control is where you can toggle this behavior from the default “queue” to streaming. This is also where you set the stream refresh speed (5, 10, and 20 second options).
  3. There’s a Tweet button to compose and send a tweet.
  4. There you will also find a link shortener (qub.me, very cute).
  5. You can add a hashtag in the appropriate place and click Set Hashtag. Yes, it’s that easy to join a Twitter chat.
  6. When the hashtag is set, your tweet window appears at the bottom of the main window – nice.
  7. Reply, Retweet, and Favorite are no surprise. They automatically load the hashtag too, and include all the people mentioned when replying (but this includes your own Twitter handle at the moment, which will likely be corrected). This is a very nice feature, since it’s easier to remove a name than add it back manually.

The #sart panel

sart

The #sart panel (click to enlarge)

  1. When starting, SmartStream shows the “#sart” panel, where you can quickly see what hashtags are active in your stream and how many people are tweeting with each. There are also tabs for active participants and recent links.
  2. I’m specifically highlighting the Participant tab om #sart, which shows who’s active in your stream and how many tweets posted by each. That’s so useful to me specifically because it’s difficult to see everything with the standard Twitter client. That feature alone may make SmartStream a default tab on my browser when it opens.
  3. #sart also shows 15-minute trends for number of tweets, participants, and links shared.
  4. The above feature takes on particular significance when the hashtag is set. This will be very useful for Twitter chat managers to see when conversation is sagging and it’s time for the next question.

Hover Features

I found myself a little like a kid in a candy store as I discovered more of SmartStream’s features. Some of the best in terms of user experience are here.

  1. HoverLinkMouseHover over any person’s Twitter handle (either in the heading or body of a tweet), wait a few seconds, and that person’s Twitter bio appears in a small window. Nice.
  2. Links show as they’re stored in Twitter’s stream, shortened by its URL shortener, t.co. Hover over any link, wait a few seconds, and a mini preview of the link appears. Even nicer.
  3. I’m not entirely sure how this works, but one link had been shortened by ht.ly before posting to Twitter. ht.ly was blocked at my firewall, so I couldn’t get to the link using any client I use today, including the Twitter web client. Nonetheless, the SmartStream preview worked perfectly, and the original URL appeared in it. Clicking that link opened the original URL with no problem whatsoever. Amazing.

Qubit

qubitUnder each update in the stream you’re viewing is Qubit, a menu loaded with some really useful features.

  1. Profile Plus – click this to open an expanded profile for the person who tweeted the update. It includes basic profile information, along with a fairly large number of recent Tweets. There’s even a “follow” (or unfollow) option in the top-right corner of the window making it just that easy to follow/unfollow someone without changing clients.
  2. Highlight – clicking this adds orange bars on either side of all tweets by the person selected. You can highlight more than one person in a session. This is extremely useful in Twitter chats – use it to highlight the person sending chat questions or any participants you enjoy engaging with.
  3. Block – Not that I would ever use this feature, but you can block any individual’s tweets from showing in your stream. It does NOT block them on Twitter, just in that instance of SmartStream. Reload the page to confirm their tweets have returned.
  4. Focus on hashtag – At the top of this post I described how to set a hashtag. Even cooler, if a post has multiple hashtags, you have multiple choices here in Qubit.
  5. Find Content/Focused Content to Share – click this and SmartStream quickly searches for and locates content from the Web to share. I didn’t explore this much, but Content seems to bring a range of options based on the person who tweeted the update. Focused content appears to search based on the contents of the update itself. More experimentation required for this one.

Transcripts

  1. savetranscriptOne button transcript creation. Boom. Those who organize chats will LOVE this feature.

That’s a pretty long list of useful features for one Twitter client, not to mention those are what I found after only a hour or so using it. I’m sure I missed a few things, and I’m sure there will be additional features and refinements in the future. To read more about oneQube SmartStream features, visit their features page.

oneQube writes on its “About” page, “Once you get over a few hundred followers, it becomes increasingly difficult to find the “Signal in the Noise”, making it harder than ever to make and manage meaningful connections with consumers, fans, or other businesses. OneQube™, from Internet Media Labs, changes all that.” It looks like they’ve succeeded.

Thanks for reading!
@tomspiglanin

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Serendipity – An Aptitude for Luck?

Posted on May 9, 2013 by Tom Spiglanin

Serendipity2I admit, I love the word Serendipity. It rings magical, of good fortune and happy happenstance. Without much thought, I recently wrote that serendipitous discovery was one of the ways I learn, but somehow I felt I’d cheated. Serendipity alone wouldn’t necessarily lead to learning something useful, would it?

When in doubt, I turn to my favorite learning tool, Google search. I was “right” on the second part of the definition, but Dictionary.com adds something more:

ser·en·dip·i·ty [ser-uhn-dip-i-tee]
noun
1. an aptitude for making desirable discoveries by accident.
2. good fortune; luck

Come again? How does one have an aptitude for luck?

Louis Pasteur said, “…chance only favors the prepared mind,” implying there was no such thing as luck in the work he did. He indeed had an aptitude for it. He was deliberately looking to see something important when it presented itself. Somehow a diamond in the rough came to mind, and having an aptitude for making lucky finds begins to make sense.

Seek-Sense-Share and Personal Knowledge Management

Harold Jarche concludes in PKM in 2013,

“Disciplined personal knowledge management brings focus to the information sea we swim in. The multiple pieces of information that we capture and share can increase the frequency of serendipitous connections, especially across disciplines and outside organizations.”

There’s no question that increasing the frequency of our connections with the outside world is essential today. There isn’t an organization on the planet where there’s more knowledge within its boundaries than outside them. But simply increasing the frequency of those interactions isn’t enough if it results in an unmanageable deluge of information. We need to be better prepared.

Personal Knowledge Management, particularly the tenets of seek-sense-share (which Harold recently referred to as the “breathing in, breathing out” of PKM), is the path toward having a prepared mind, and therefore having an aptitude for recognizing valuable learning moments when they present themselves. The increasing volume of information we encounter means we need to equally increase the efficiency with which we do our sense-making to more quickly distinguish the diamonds in the rough from rocks.

Serendipity, it seems, favors the prepared and connected mind.

Thanks for reading!
@tomspiglanin

Image courtesy Fotopedia user Kevin Trotman

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What is an Online Community?

Posted on May 2, 2013 by Tom Spiglanin

CommunityI thought I knew. Others thought they knew. Someone must be right, but that implies others are wrong. So, what exactly is an online community, and how does it differ from an online network? I’ll start off with some thoughts but invite you to join in the discussion through comments below or on Google+ here.

First, I need to start with my motivation, which was writing the discussion post for #chat2lrn (see it here). I’m also very much a believer in using online communities for developing and improving workplace learning solutions, and frequently engage  in two communities. One is very small and private, on Skype, with maybe 30 people, half of whom are usually online during the day. The other is the ASTD Instructional Design Community on Yammer. I engage in each of these in very different ways, but they both offer something unique and special that my personal learning network doesn’t. What I’m having a harder time with is eloquently describing what that is.

I threw out a spontaneous question during the hour-long #chat2lrn Twitter chat asking whether participants thought our chat was a community, a group, a network, or something else. Laura Payette (@ljwp) and Sarah (@sarah_korbel) say it depends. Fiona Quigley (@FionaQuigs) and Meg Bertapelle (@megbertapelle) said for them it was a network. Zephyr Learning (@ZephyrLRN) feels it’s a community. Julian Stodd (@julianstodd) said he sees this #chat2lrn as, “an example of a spontaneously forming emergent community. It will create a narrative and move on.” Four different responses from six people.

The lack of consensus may stem from our use of classical metaphors to describe modern online constructs. According to Wikipedia, “Community usually refers to a social unit larger than a small village that shares common values. The term can also refer to the national community or international community.” The Oxford Dictionaries writes that a community is “a group of people living in the same place or having a particular characteristic in common,” as well as, “a feeling of fellowship with others, as a result of sharing common attitudes, interests, and goals.”

So now I’ll put out my sense of a few of things that characterize an online community, based on the above and some of what was shared in the #chat2lrn (transcript is here):

  • Shared interest (attitudes, interests, goals)
  • Conversations that take place within the community that any member can add to
  • A shared desire to build the community through sharing information, knowledge, and wisdom
  • A willingness to support one another (fellowship)
  • Residency (living in the same place) – and like a physical community, you likely don’t know all of the other residents but have a respect for their unique contributions

Of all of these, I see residency as a key aspect that distinguishes online communities from networks. I must reside within my community to participate in it. While my personal learning network has many aspects of community (because I built it that way), I don’t reside within it except on occasions like during Twitter chats in the manner Julian described in his tweet.

So that’s my take, but let’s not let that end the conversation. Comment below, or jump over to my Google+ post to discuss further.

Thanks for reading!
@tomspiglanin

 

The accompanying image courtesy flikr user Nooku

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Does Vine Have a Place in Learning & Development?

Posted on May 1, 2013 by Tom Spiglanin

Vine_apps_logoVine is a mobile service from Twitter that enables capturing and sharing short (six second) videos. It currently requires an iPhone or iPod Touch – it’s not on the Android platform as of this writing – and there’s no third-party pathway to post videos to Vine, not even through a Web browser.

According to Twitter’s announcement on their blog, “Like Tweets, the brevity of videos on Vine (6 seconds or less) inspires creativity. Now that you can easily capture motion and sound, we look forward to seeing what you create.” I’d like to see what we can create too, particularly in the field of Learning & Development (L&D), and I’d love to hear and share your ideas.

First, here are a few attributes of the Vine app as of this writing:

  • It records video when you press the screen.
  • You can press the screen the entire six seconds, or you can stop recording and resume.
  • I don’t think there is a limit to how many finger presses you get.
  • While quick finger presses result in an interesting visual of fast-changing images, they also result in a very annoying “thumping” in the audio track.
  • You can switch between front and rear facing cameras at any time.
  • You can switch apps and return to your recording at a later time (but don’t kill the running app or you’ll have to start over).
  • When complete, the videos loop.
  • Listening to a repeating 6-second video with a voice track was annoying. Very annoying.
  • There’s no way to re-record the audio track or replace it in any way.
  • There is no ability to edit your video.

I’m sure there are other key attributes I haven’t yet considered at this point. Now what can we do with this for any aspect of L&D? Here are a few of my initial thoughts.

  1. Convey a concept (i.e., things that move in the wind, things that fly, things that are green, things that are metaphors for something else HT @JaneBozarth).
  2. Show a series of visual examples of a given topic.
  3.  Show historical progression (i.e., phonograph, 45, LP, cassette tape, 8-track tape, CD, mp3 player, iTunes, etc.).
  4. Show an assembly at various stages.
  5. Tell a (very short) story – it should be visual.

Note too that you add a caption when posting to Vine and can simultaneously post to Twitter. This allows “tweet-sized” commentary to be added to your video. I think of this as “context” as demonstrated in my second ever Vine post (below).

I’m sure there are many, many more ways L&D can use Vine videos in “training,” but it’s apparent from my initial experiences with the app that you need to plan the work, decide what you want to accomplish, practice with the app, figure out what each shot in the video is going to be, and then execute that plan flawlessly or be prepared to start over.

Mark Twain once said, “I didn’t have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one instead.” The same seems to be true of Vine videos – creating a 6 second masterpiece will take much longer than 6 seconds.

Thanks for reading!
@tomspiglanin

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How We Learn

Posted on April 27, 2013 by Tom Spiglanin

Those of us working in the field of Learning and Development continually look for ways to create meaningful experiences that our customers/employees/co-workers can learn from. It’s often useful to look at how we learn ourselves. Do we learn well from sitting in a classroom or do we normally learn through some other means?

This past week provided some great example for me. I learned three very useful new things, and I learned them each in different ways

Serendipitous discovery

GoogleStuffI was drafting a blog post for the 3 May #chat2lrn Twitter chat and wanted to transfer it from one computer to another. The easiest path was to email the file to my Gmail account. When I opened the email, I had the option to view the file, so I did. Then I noticed the “Add to Drive” button and decided to give it a shot. Once saved, I discovered I could convert and edit the document in Google Docs with one mouse click (“Edit online”), and then share the document with others. I set sharing to “Anyone with the link” and sent the link to other members of the #chat2lrn crew. Minutes later, anonymous viewers appeared in the Google Docs window. Shortly thereafter, emails began arriving with comments. As I was making adjustments to the document online,  more emails arrived from people commenting back and forth how cool it was to see the document changing in real time. Within an hour, the post was completed – I never even downloaded it, which was my original intent.

Social learning

The next day, I was working on a framework I could use with my workplace colleagues to extend their engagement with employees who attend face-to-face classes. I started by creating two diagrams using PowerPoint, then decided to share the concept with my personal learning network of peers around the world. I knew the power of sharing on Google, so I uploaded the file to Google Drive. I edited the document using Drive and, after initial surprise how well the PowerPoint was converted, enabled sharing and posted the link in our close-knit community. A few online members asked me to invite them directly via Gmail, which I did. The next thing I knew, we were chatting through instant messaging as well as asynchronously through comments (which are really threaded discussions). Both features are attached to individual shared documents in Drive, and the three of us involved had learned about them together, sharing our discoveries as we made them and exploring them for ourselves.

A Challenge to learn

Later that evening, I engaged in the Twitter chat #lrnchat on the topic of, “Using Video for Learning.” Shortly before the third question was posed, JD Dillon posted the following Tweet:

20130427-115617.jpg

Vine_apps_logoI’d never heard of Vine, but I figured it would be fun to take up JD’s challenge. Moments later I learned (from Google search) that Vine is an app and network from Twitter that, “lets you capture and share short looping videos.” While I caught they have a 6-second limit, I didn’t read all that carefully because I was in a hurry. I immediately picked my subject and recorded a 6-second video with my iPhone, transferred it to my Mac desktop, and tried in vain to post it to Twitter (as I would post a photo to Twitpic). Failing, I returned to Google search and this time found the Vine website, whose home page is just a logo and a button to download the app from Apple’s App Store. That was quickly installed on my phone and, a couple presses of my finger and some dialogue (that I could improve on) later, I’d finished my first Vine video and posted it to Twitter with the #lrnchat hashtag. Awareness to application in under fifteen minutes, all in response to a challenge.

20130427-150005.jpg

How we learn

The descriptions above represent three learning moments in two days. Two happened at home and one at work. All were social and informal. Like the vast majority of our learning, each of these moments happened naturally in response to a need, a want, or just happened. We should take time to reflect more often on our own learning moments, think about what motivated us, and find ways to apply our own lessons to benefit others. Most importantly, we should apply more of what we already know about how we learn.

Thanks for reading!
@tomspiglanin

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