Lesley Anderson

CIO Recommendations
Using Social Networks for Professional Development

Before making recommendations regarding the use of social networks for Professional Development, we believe it essential to address three main areas common to these types of networks. This is important to ensure all staff involved has clear understandings of social networks before investigating tools that may be valuable for this purpose.

Issues involved with using social networks for professional development in the workplace.

Goals:
Successful professional development using social networking requires clear goals decided
upon by staff members from all levels.  Goals should be evaluated regularly in order to ensure their achievement and relevance. It may be necessary, during such evaluation, to make changes to the goals or the methods being used to reach them, if either are deemed unsuccessful.

Policies and Rules:
These also need to be clear, and a sense of ownership and worth is created when all staff is involved.  Rules and policies should be freely available -  in hard copy and online form.  Providing explicit rules helps maximise productivity and ensures accountability by increasing the likelihood that all employees remain on task, are aware of accepted best practice, expected standards of interaction and communication and personal responsibilities. 

Trust:

• Initial training, should occur face-to-face involving members from all company levels allowing trust to be developed amongst staff from the beginning.
• Allowing time for more informal chat between members further develops elements of trust and confidence in all aspects of the network
• Involving all stakeholders in decision making and planning should occur in the initial stages and agreement reached regarding a time line for implementation
• All staff members should have a presence within the network, abide by rules and guidelines and be given the opportunity to comment, share talk and discuss. Doing this encourages collaboration, improves teamwork and demonstrates that everyone is valued.
• Following company policy, a clear distinction should be made between work-based and personal social networks with only members of the company staff joining the network or using appropriate tools if sensitive material is to be discussed.
• Staff should be acknowledged for using the networks and the achievements they make in Professional Development to help with group momentum.

Support:

• If social networks are to be implemented, reliable technical support must be constantly available to users.
• Support should also include offering of staff training to maximise use of the network and familiarity with it and any supplementary tools being used.
• Time also needs to be factored in as staff still requires time to access the social network to participate in the professional development or professional discussion.
• Differences across the company community should be catered for.
• Items such as
• distance and time zones,
• culture and language
• staff ages
• differing hardware available
• varying broadband speeds
• need full consideration if social networks are to be used effectively.

Security:
All measures should be put in place to ensure privacy and security for members of the network and any tasks they are working on. These should be laid down clearly within the company policies

Web 2.0 tools (blogs, wikis, podcasts and video lectures) used to complement social networks.

A variety of Web 2.0 tools are available to support the use of social networks we have listed some here:

• Blog sites are useful for adding announcements, scheduling meetings, new information or links to websites, uploading documentation - such as course outlines and expectations. Blogs can also be used as a way of keeping track of or up date with a project as it goes through development. Staff members should be encouraged to subscribe to RSS feeds for any of these sites in order to keep up with changes that may occur within them.
• A wiki can be used for collaborative writing of policy documents and submissions.
• Podcasts could be used for delivering tutorials or revising other professional development experiences and allows this to be done by staff members in their own time.
• Video lectures could be used to reach all members of the network and replace face to face meetings with experts when this is difficult in real-time due to distance or availability.

It is important to note that most social networking sites have a selection of Web 2.0 tools available for use. 

Developing and sustaining a work-related social network.

To develop, establish and sustain a work related social network for professional development the following needs to be taken into account:

Planning considerations

• Good planning in the initial stages will set the tone for the development of and the ability to sustain the workplace network. Through liaison between working parties decisions are made about goals, professional development, use of personnel and scheduling.

Support Considerations

• Ongoing technical support is required ensuring the smooth running of the network.
• Support with the initial use of software - making sure all staff members have necessary skill in both hardware and software use.
• Setting aside of time for professional development within working hours
• Demonstration of support of the implementations to all workers by company executives.
• Acknowledgement of network members and their skills and achievements and how these will occur.

Budget considerations

• What the company’s budget is for the exercise - as this will have bearings on which social networks are implemented as well as their, development and sustenance.
• Costs to the company - as many social networks have extra costs associated with them to increase their functionality, these must be budgeted for.

Security considerations

• Differentiation between work-place and personal use of social networks should be clear
• Policies for which tools are suitable for particular tasks and communication need to be clearly stated and adhered to, with consequences in place for any breaches.
• The company must evaluate Risk vs. Reward - email is quicker than snailmail and has a quicker cyclical turnaround - instant messaging is quicker again yet all methods carry risks of ‘leaking’ sensitive information.

In providing professional development experiences for staff, we have found that there is no one  ‘best’ option for the job. However, a ‘mashup’ of different applications may be the best viable option. In this regard, four social networking tools have been researched to determine the possibility of using these tools to provide professional development experiences for staff.  We have listed below, our investigations into these social networks for your consideration:

Skype is software using VOIP(Voice Over Internet Protocol) to allow communication over the internet for free between users who have it installed. Skype allows computers, or other devices  to become phones. Calls can also be made to landlines and mobile numbers at minimal cost beginning at 3.1 cents per call. 
Skype software is free, easy to download, has an interface that is ‘user friendly’, and works across major operating systems and with most computers. It offers features such as instant messaging, one-way screen sharing, file transfer and audio/video conferencing. It would be an excellent tool, as is, for both local and global office communications. If sensitive information is being dealt with and security is to be considered, Skype can be switched through a telephone PBX system which will allow closer monitoring of calls and types of information being exchanged.

Second Life is a multi-user virtual environment where people log into a virtual world and take on virtual personas known as avatars.  In the three dimensional environment users interact with each other either by text or audio. There are a variety of useful professional development tools available such as an instant chat facility, audio recording and playback and video and hypermedia presentation software. It is also possible to provide links to blogs, wikis and other internet sites. Second Life requires fast internet connections and up-to-date computers with good video cards and whilst Second Life enables professional development to occur with participants around the globe time zones can become a difficulty if collaboration is required.  Setting up a work related Second Life network is very expensive with significant development and running costs.  

Facebook is a global networking site where people can connect with others by sending messages and engaging in asynchronous chat.  This is an advantage when connecting with people in different time zones.  Facebook is relatively simple to use and provides the users with the capabilities of using a variety of different tools such as wikis, blogs and podcasting. In terms of using Facebook for professional development the advantage is that membership to a particular network is by invitation only - this is particularly useful when discussing sensitive issues online. A possible disadvantage of using Facebook for professional development is that employees may be tempted to use the social networking site for personal reasons during work time.  To overcome this  and to ensure worker productivity is not lost there would have to be a clear set of guidelines that is followed by all employees.  

Ning is an online platform for people to create their own social networks around specific interests with their own visual design, choice of features and member data. With that in mind, it is a great starting point for a work-related social network. Its basic features include: 

• A blog for each individual member of the Ning.
• A discussion forum.
• A photo upload feature.
• A basic chat room.

Beyond these features, Ning allows its network creators to add additional applications to their network that allow them to customise the network more in line with their users desires. As of May, 2009 additional applications have been made available to network creators, including wiki creation and TokBox, a live video chat service. By using Google’s OpenSocial API’s Ning has made application creation or porting to Ning easy for developers, turning an already well-rounded Web 2.0 application into the perfect vehicle for a knowledgeable and patient network creator to establish a work-related social network.

Meeting 7

Tonight we got together and finalised our recommendations. Even though it has been a hard slog and each member of the group has had their challenges, I think we have really pulled together as a group to create them. It has been amazing watching that final document evolving over the last couple of days and see how contributions were made for the good of the group and its overall goal - not for individuals. No-one was precious about the writing and we edited and revised what went on the page as well as discussing in the chat window of Etherpad, about the best way to go about things, whether things looked right or made sense. Overall, I think that this was probably the best learning session of all - thanks to RedPod members Liz, Ben and Mel.

Meeting 6

Wow, I am actually quite blown away after tonight’s meeting. I really think RedPod outdid itself tonight. It has been a pretty long haul this semester for most of us. Personally I have found the constant input quite difficult - with two subjects at CSU, a family to cater to as well as work. I know I will never take on this workload again and I began to think that none of it would come together.

It looks like we have just abou achieved it after tonight, though.  This was our meeting to put together all our findings and make some recommendations to our CIO in our Podtask scenario. As we needed to be able to edit our work together we decided to meet in Etherpad so we could take advantage of the interactive pad we could use to write on together. Our meeting began at about 8.30 - had to be a little later because Liz is an hour and a half behind us. We chatted and worked and chatted and roused each other and worked some more and joked around a bit.  Our meeting ended just after 11.00pm and we had the major part of our document done. I was impressed with the way we collaborated on this document it was a great job. Not so good was Etherpad, we had quite a few issues with it dropping in and out which was a nuisance, but, as we were all determined to get this done - we worked around it.  I am hoping to get into Etherpad again tomorrow and do some tweaking so that our document is just about ready for another meeting tomorrow night to finish off.  An excellent, productive, meeting.

PS - Liz and I have both spent some time on Etherpad today and we have a great document nearly ready to be published.  Tonight we should zoom through to get it finished.

Meeting 5

Just the girls met tonight, as Ben was busy, being a Satuday evening.
Mel and I met together first as Liz wasn’t able to join us until a little later - due to the time difference.

I helped Mel with setting up pages in the blog we have set up at http://redpod.wordpress.com/.  We had made a group decision to create pages for the blog instead of using categories as our information will be static and we need to access it all in one place.

Mel had the blog site open and I helped her with step by step instructions on how to set up a page, write to it and publish it as Mel hadn’t used Word Press previously.  I actually enjoyed the interaction and seeing the blog change as Mel worked on it at her end and I was checking it to see how she was going.

Meeting 3

After Ken’s message back to the whole group - prompted by Liz’s email to him, I’m guessing - all seems well for RedPod again. As teachers, we are used to setting up collaborative activities and it makes sense to us to approach this task in that vain. We had a great discussion tonight about just what collaborative activities are and how they are set up and organised. 

Now that everyone is on the same page and happy with the direction we are taking we can move forward with the main part of the task - the research and investigation. I am working on the use of Skype for Professional Development and I have started looking at lots of different websites already.

I’m hoping to have something ready to post to the blog ASAP.

Meeting 2

I have been hanging on to my reflections on the Pod meetings - don’t know why. 
Thought it was time to publish them.

After this group meeting all the members were left feelin quite confused and unsure of exactly what we were going to do.  At the end of  the last meeting we thought we had it covered but further discussion opened up a whole can of worms. We are now unsure whether our original plans will actually cover all aspects of the task and the subsequent assessment.

We made a decision, that Liz would email Ken again and get a little bit more information and clarification - just to make sure.  This is a bit of a nuisance as we all really want to get started with the task.  We are working well together, though and the discussions are great.

I’m sure we’ll be on our way soon.

Meeting 1

As the date for our pod assignment was getting closer and we seemed to have little success facilitating meetings RedPod decided to meet on Friday 2/10/09 at about 8.30 pm using Skype as a meeting network.  We decided to use Skype as we had been chatting on it and found it a successful way to talk to each other. That time was chosen because one of our members - Liz Evans lives in Darwin N.T. and we needed to take into account the time difference.

The decision to meet was made by three of the pod members - myself, Liz and Melenna as we chatted on Skype the night before. We all felt we needed to make a start on our assessment and my thoughts were to try and get it up and running before my school holidays finished.

The pod has 2 other members - Ben, who was unavailable to attend and Shin for whom we had no contact details as this member didn’t appear to be using the forum and had not attended any previous attempts to meet.  We did post a message to the subject forum, just in case either of the other members were available.

During our meeting we did make some decisions about how we would address the assessment.
We decided to create a new blog purely for RedPod and use it to write our ideas and recommendations for the final assessment. This blog would become our group’s collaborative space and we would have all our research and information in one place.
We also decided to post reflections on the assessment, and logs of the meetings to our personal blogs.

We made these decisions knowing that other members of the pod needed to be informed and contacted - Liz volunteered to do this and I volunteered to create our new blog using WordPress.
http://redpod.wordpress.com

Our group also decided to take a social network each to begin researching in order to make a start on our assessment and meet again on Wednesday 7/10/09 at about 8.00pm for first discussions.
I created our blog and customised it a little to be suitable for the pod and I also created some categories to get us started.

Here we go…………

Social networks case study

Who is following who? Exmaine the blogs in your POD and
work out the map of Followers/Following relationship.

This Social Networking diagram shows the group of followers of the blogs belonging to RedPod.  It is colour coded according to the Pods all followers belong to.

Assign each person a letter in the same order as they appear in the dialogue as a, b, c .. etc.
For your chosen extract, draw the social network diagram and build the same matrix of 0 and 1’s as per figure 1. Descibe any patterns of people’s interactions that you discover.
If you were to repeat this analysis on another set of blogs from another POD,
would you find the same patterns?
Why or why not? [HINT - changes in context and process may be just some variables to consider]
Support you opinion with any of the reference provided or with others you find.    

The RedPod meeting that this dialogue was extracted from and from which the data was extracted was certainly full on.  In fact most of the meetings our Pod has held have been the same.  I did notice, as I looked over the dialogue that we talk about a lot of other things besides the task at hand but there seems to have been great discussion about what we have been doing, how we are doing it and what we have achieved.  This discussion was highly motivated too All members contributing at some stage, to the discussion, is reflected in the table above.  We all talked to each other at some stage of the conversation.  The diagram is fairly mundane as is the table.

One thing, these items don’t show is ‘how much’ each member of the group contributes to dialogue and conversation.  Perhaps a diagram with weighted edges as suggested by Hallinan[i] in the second of her lectures - “Networks” would better do that?    Weighting or colour coding edges could certainly aid in showing which members of the group were most actively engaged during discussion and interaction.

The type of dialogue is not reflected - agreement or disagreement, questioning or explanatory, or reveal relationships between group members. Tone certainly is not evident and that is difficult to gauge from text alone - unless it is obvious that someone is unhappy with what is going on in a discussion and expresses it adequately.

The way I have displayed my social networking diagram is not indicative of the direction of conversation either.  It basically makes the statement that at some stage during the conversation person A spoke to person B. Having the table in front of you helps a little - in this case we know that person B did speak to person A but we don’t know where in the conversation this occurred.

There are certainly factors that I believed influenced this and other of our Pod discussions.
The timing of our meeting - we had not yet started with our pod work and had had a few hiccups with how we would approach the work and workload in order to fulfil the requirements of the task set for us.
With a general feeling of urgency and need to complete work within a time frame it is much easier to get discussion happening and keep it on track.
Time zone differences - we had to make the most of the time when we were all able to get together to discuss things as one of our members is one and a half hours behind us. Not that it has caused any real problems, but I do think it makes us frugal with the time we have together.
The nature of the work - knowing that this is assessment material also helps to keep us efficient with our meeting times and stay relevant to the goal we are trying to achieve.
Size of the group - only four members discussing things over distance, makes the discussion much more productive and makes all the data look neat and tidy - there’s really not that much to handle.

If these restraints and pressures from outside the group were not there, if we had unlimited amounts of time to work together and get our task finished, if we had to communicate across a huge group of people over distance and were not all working toward a common goal,  things might well be different.  Kirshbaum[ii] talks about complex systems as being self organising - they adjust naturally to increase their efficiency and effectiveness, in response to so many stimuli from the environment around them as well as being affected by the nonlinear change that happens within them. It is amazing that all of it occurs without us even realising it.   

 [i] Hallinan, J 2005, Introduction to Complex Systems, <http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/~comp4001/>, accessed 21 October 2006.

 [ii] Kirshbaum, D, 2002, Introduction to Complex Systems, <http://www.calresco.org/intro.htm>, accessed 21 October 2006.

I decided to actually take a look at a larger dialogue to compare with my original data. 
This table and the second Social Networking Diagram have been generated from dialogue from the group’s Etherpad discussion on the 5/8/09 and, even though there is only double the number of members in this discussion excerpt the picture is quite different - in both the table and the diagram. I remember feeling at the time, how disjointed the meeting felt as members of the group came in and left randomly.  The table also shows dominance by a couple of the group members and the dialogue actually reflects this - with their names coming up more often in the conversation.  It also shows polarising to a certain degree - this was quite early in our semester of work and people were still finding their way, getting to know others and understand how things would work.

Research and evaluation in Government 2.0

1. Summarise the use of

• 1. Wiki drafts of papers for public discussion and
• 2. Twitter in Government.

Wikis appear to be a favoured way of creating some documents where public discussion is to be included. On the Public Sphere2  site. http://wiki.katelundy.com.au/PublicSphere2 an outline is given of the steps that were undertaken to create a collaborative document on - Government 2.0: Policy and Practice - which would ultimately be given to the Gov2.0 taskforce when it was completed.  Use of a wiki was central to this process, enabling people from throughout the Australian general public to have their say about the topic by adding to the wiki file.  This has also been the process for Public Sphere3 and other Government bodies are embracing the idea of public forum set up in this way with a view to decision making being collaborative with and transparent to the general public.

Twitter also seems to be gathering momentum for use in such forums. Both the Public Sphere reports mentioned above and passed on the Gov2.0 taskforce included documentation of twitter feeds in which members of the government and public added comments and information to the discussion taking place. On all the Gov2.0 sites are icons for twitter encouraging people to follow the government on it. Read the rest of this entry »

Is social networking a business model?

What are the arguments for and against social networking being classified as a business model?

There is certainly a lot of talk on the web about business models and whether social networking sites could be classified as having one. Firstly, tracking down a definition of a business model that I could understand - as a non-business person was challenging. I finally got some satisfaction with this definition. A business model is -
“A description of the operations of a business including the components of the business, the functions of the business, and the revenues and expenses that the business generates. ” http://www.investorwords.com/629/business_model.html

It seems that a business model is generally about how a business will generate revenue to sustain itself and satisfy anyone who has financial interests in it - monetization. Some models and the problems they may face with regard to social networking follow in the table below. Read the rest of this entry »