browse vs distribution
Fatal attachment Tim Gibson suggests you watch out for the disease of pointlessly formatting
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or the last few months I have been trying to build a number of different online communities with a view to finding out how learning might be better negotiated across groups of like-minded people. Some of the projects are defined by interest, some by organisation
and some by function. None of them has been a walk in the park. As is too often the case we have been so busy doing the job, there is less time than we would like to think about how we’re doing it, how we feel about what’s happening and how we might better engender the kinds of sharing that genuinely add value to the participants and to the organisation. In my spare few moments I have been researching the triggers and barriers to adoption, growth and success. I’ve learned that collaboration tools hold great promise even though forums and wikis in particular are still woefully underexploited in the enterprise, and so too is RSS;
Old ways are beguiling, closed systems hide latency and comfortable practices bury into our subconscious to convince us that what we’re doing is really valuable even though it probably isn’t
that to be really effective blogged content needs always to be related back to the business context; that business leaders have to be roped in; and that bookmarks and comments can really help people to solve problems in collaborative fashion. Although I’ve found many such useful hints and tips I keep coming back to a fundamental dilemma which is this: many Generation X knowledge workers like the old way of doing things so much that they fail to give the new the chance it deserves. Old ways are beguiling, closed systems hide latency and comfortable practices bury into our subconscious to convince us that what we’re doing is really valuable even though it probably isn’t. Forgive me while I get a couple of things I’m wrestling with at the moment off my chest. They are 1) the fact that a lot of people still find it hard to move away from working with information that’s distributed to working with information that’s browsed, and 2) we spend inordinate amounts of time pointlessly formatting documents (typically for onward distribution), hoping to compensate for a relative lack of value in the raw message by making it look and feel as good as possible. Witness the well known phrase “All style and no content”. These two things are logically separate but together they massively get in the way of the organisation that’s determined to get more efficient.
Your use of Office Stop reading now if you are innocent of all charges and I apologise for wasting your time. You’re probably a Generation Y reader. For those of you still with me, think about your own use of Microsoft Office products, for example. I have used
e.learning age february 2014
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