Comments on Bunchberry & Fern: Leveraging the virality of bold brain-friendly lea...

Thanks for stopping by, Donald. You're absolut...

2009-12-17T13:45:47.819Z

Thanks for stopping by, Donald. You're absolutely right of course. This was originally two posts but I split it up because it got a bit long.

Hope the second part clears up what I think about the 'sit back and admire your handiwork' part.

Slightly crestfallen that you couldn't follow it. But thank heavens somebody lets me know. I've noticed a few Tweets complaining about my writing style and I am trying to tone it down (a bit). Must try harder.

Michael, I completely agree with you about the 'add content' stage. (see above)

I'll add a decent link in to your Permission Learning post when I publish the second half of this.

Which I've just done. http://www.bfchirpy.com/2009/12/how-to-make-your-intranet-suck-less.html

I particularly like this post, especially "In...

2009-12-17T12:52:55.853Z

I particularly like this post, especially "Instead of pushing people towards consultants and trainers and clunky eLearning courses, you reap the rewards of your employees socialising and learning from each other. " It sums up the potential of social sites as (probably quite incidental, or even accidental) learning spaces.

I also see Donald's point above, my suggestion is to leave out the step "Add content" altogether, site design and successful implementation could ensure that use of the site organically builds content.
However, contrary to Donald's view, I don't see social sites as a 'knowledge dump' environment. Instead it is the very social nature of these sites that builds community and in turn motivates people to freely share knowledge. It is not 'on the chance that someone might come along'. Charities have also found that this works, (see the Heath Brothers book, Made to Stick) They describe how people donate more readily when they believe that their money is going to a specific (pictured) needy person rather than to some broad charitable organisation. On social sites such personalisation is helped by profile photos and short bios, it's true, people like to help real people.

Finally, I also agree with Simon that 'change agents' and the push approach are unlikely to work, as people tend to push back against pushing. I also alluded to this in the post that Simon kindly linked to in his post, in particular the term I coined, Permission Learning, http://bit.ly/b0xSR .

I was having a little trouble following your "...

2009-12-16T17:53:29.906Z

I was having a little trouble following your "Frankenstein" style post, but what caught my attention the most was

- Design a learning resource (eg a wiki, intranet, LMS/VLE)
- Add content
- Add in a bit social networking magic (friending, commenting, <3-ing)
- Sit back and admire your handiwork**

The problem is that it basically follows the the old KM way of capturing knowledge -- build a system for people to populate and Voila!!! They will spend their time filling it up!

However, people do want to help others, but they are not going to waste their time doing "knowledge dumps" on the chance that someone might come along and use it.