It’s been a ripper of a week. I was introduced to new ideas and discussions that got me excited so I thought I’d cover them off in one blog post although I could easily write a post about each interaction.
Skype with @twofacedHR Lady Vanessa Wiltshire
It seems awkward to write her Twitter handle (because she is anything but!) but I was privileged to Skype with Vanessa Wiltshire one early morning. She was a delight to speak to as you could see and feel her passion about the future of work and how she felt compelled to make a personal, positive change in her life but in doing so help others in her field. What struck me about Vanessa was her authentic, open and genuinely caring nature. Here was someone who was out to make a difference – and she is.
I follow her on Twitter but was unaware of the social community she inspired with HR professionals in Australia to create the HR Talent Community. Some of my own personal learning network had forwarded to me the recent BRW article, “How Two Faced Lady Built a Business From Nothing But Contacts” . Her story intrigued me because it resonated with me – as it did with many others but I had to know more.
After speaking with Vanessa and asking her questions about her vision of HR Talent Community, she crystallised and refocussed some thoughts I had about the intention of my own meetup group for learning professionals around Australia, Third Place.
If you work in the field of Human Resources and interested to learn more about this community refer to the HR Talent Community website.
The Emotional Contagion Facebook Exercise – Which Then Spurned More Interest Around Privacy and Data Security
Tuesday night saw my lounge room set up as a film studio. I was kindly invited to be part of a panel for a video podcast to talk about, “Facebook Tries to Manipulate Emotions for Science. Ethics, MIA?”
I’ll blog about this in detail at some later time when the video is published but I spent the last two weeks reading and watching articles, blog posts and videos about Facebook’s Emotional Contagion exercise. I had my own thoughts about this but figured I’ll ask my network on Twitter and on Facebook about what they thought.
I got more responses on Twitter but on the whole, my family and friends were overly not too worried about it all – the general reaction was “Meh” – not enough to warrant deleting their accounts. Me on the other hand, I started thinking about what COULD happen if my data was compromised. I started thinking of Big Brother. 1984. Conspiracy Theories. “Data Farms” (these two words together are so ominous).
(While we were holidaying in Waikiki some weeks ago, my husband read George Orwell’s 1984 and he would stop and read various sections out loud to me. “Doesn’t this sound like our government today?” “Isn’t this relevant to us today? “I can’t believe how much of this book is true about us today” – so much for light holiday reading but nevertheless it’s like all the jigsaw pieces of the puzzle are falling into place. Tad scary).
So it set me off on a period of research, discovery and exploration of how I can be more proactive around the use and sharing of my data.
I stumbled upon Ross Dawson’s article, “Will the Respect Network Enable Us to Take Back Control of Our Lives?” about the new The Respect Network which piqued my curiosity and within minutes I signed on for my own personal cloud name, downloaded SocialSafe and linked my social accounts on SocialSafe as well as adding my frequented sites on Meeco.Me all while surfing within Google Chrome Emmett extension.
It’s enough to make you pull out your hair frankly – or get off the grid.
OzLearn Tweet Chat
I moderated this month’s OzLearn tweet chat on “The Value of Bench marking in Learning and Development”. My initial thoughts was that the topic would be hard going so I promoted it across my networks to invite more people to join us to make the conversation robust. I agreed to moderate the tweet chat because I had my own perceptions of bench marking (I didn’t agree with it) but thought that this would be a good way to break down some of my assumptions.
In a way, it did. It challenged my own thinking because I had a negative experience of bench marking practices internally. What were touted as bench marking opportunities in a couple of organisations I have worked for in the distant past were merely dressed up as junkets to travel overseas with no real learning shared or applied back into the workplace.
I changed the questions to include more questions in the one tweet and delayed the time I tweeted them out to get people talking.
We had over 440 tweets with cross conversations and dialogue that settled by the end of it into the unspoken realisation that we don’t benchmark learning practices – and sometimes, we didn’t even know what other companies and market sectors such as vocational education were doing in the space!
Watch out for the Storify link that will be tweeted out soon by @TanyaLau
For those in the learning function in Australia, consider submitting your responses to the “Towards Maturity Global Benchmark Briefing Australasia” survey.
Third Place Google Hangout
You may have seen some test photos on Twitter this week as I was playing around with Google Hangouts running in and out of rooms in my house testing out the hangout functionality. One of the irritating things about Third Place is that I’d love to meet the people in person who come along to the various events. Of course, I can’t get to Newcastle, Sydney, Adelaide or Brisbane often so I thought the next best thing would be an invitation to a Google Hangout so that interstate members can all meet each other online as well as learn more about this tool.
It will only be a private hangout initially as a pilot and it will go for an hour. There’ll be opportunities to introduce ourselves, share our “what’s our tipple?” (it will be on at 8pm so I’m sure they’ll be people with glasses of wine or hot chocolate) as well as playing around with the different apps. I hope it will be a fun way to meet everyone online.
(@Tanya Lau is also exploring the opportunity for co-working spaces in Sydney for Third Placers. Our Melbourne co-working events are laid back events where people can bring along their work, use the group to quickly solve any problems, pitch ideas to. People come along for the half day or drop in. If you know of any co-working spaces in Sydney, please drop a note to Tanya).
The New Culture of Learning by John Seeley Brown & Douglas Thomas
I downloaded this book onto the Kindle after hearing Nigel Paine’s From Scratch podcast review and read it in a few days. I could have highlighted every sentence of that book but it made me realise that this is the space I want to play in.
He mentions that the
“New culture of learning is based on three principles (1) The old ways of learning are unable to keep up with our rapidly changing world. (2) New media forms are making peer-to-peer learning easier and more natural. (3) Peer-to-peer learning is amplified by emerging technologies that shape the collective nature of participation with these new media”.
He uses the term ‘collective’ to imply a collection of people, skills and talent that produces a result greater than the sum of its parts – but that it is different from a communities which are passive. “In a collective, people belong to learn.”
Once again this book resonated with me about my intention and vision of Third Place and came up with the realisation that my Third Place is my third place. I don’t want to make it into my Second or my First Place as it will lose all interest for me.
Falling Off My Chair
Yesterday I got on www.seek.com.au. It’s an online job board that I scan every few weeks just to see the “lay of the land”. For the first time in my life, I saw an ad for a Social Learning Consultant and nearly fell off my chair.
It’s a call to arms.
Someone has asked the question. Someone is thinking about it.
I’d be interested in how this plays out in the learning and development field in Australia because not only will there be an engagement piece around encouraging employees to be independent learners – but it will be how to engage the actual L&D teams themselves!
Watch this space.
Other Stuff…
Well in between all the meeting people, I have been working on a couple of service offerings that I can start to promote and sell over the next few weeks. It all stemmed with the question, “what’s my niche?” and how I kept coming back to the answer, “I want to help people learn how to become independent learners for their own contexts”.
I’ve come up with some quick ideas around personal coaching at the local level but more detail will follow up soon.
Have a great week!
Sounds like a great mission statement
Hi Helen! Really interesting to hear about all of these things (this is one of the things I like about your posts – getting a handle on what you’ve been up to!); all kind of separate, but ultimately also related.
I took the opportunity to follow the link to the BRW article on Vanessa Wiltshire as I was interested to find out more after you told us about this HR community that had a lot in common with Third Place. As I read the article I totally understood why it resonated – so close to your Third Place story. This bit in particular, really resonated and sounded A LOT like Third Place to me (particularly in light of some of the background conversations we’ve been having re disassociating with vendors etc):
“The value of the community is that it is based on personal relationships and is more like a highly engaged club of people who like to discuss things than a passive audience for companies that want to sell them products and services.”
I saw some posts about Respect Network…even after reading the post, I still don’t think I get it…?! You might have to explain it to me….(maybe at the google hangout!)
Thanks for the shoutouts re OzLearn and Third Place. I have some ideas about how the coworking thing might work; Michelle Ockers is interested so we will likely try to plan something together. Keen to hear how it’s been going for you in Melbourne. Our Sydney group tend to be more employees or contractors in orgs than freelancers / consultants so I’m thinking perhaps we might use it as an opportunity to share challenges, collaborate on possible solutions, share stuff on new things we’re trying – I’d like to think of it as an opportunity to do some cross org collaboration – opportunities that can really only happen when individuals break out of their organisations and meet with their PLN in informal situations like this.
Interesting about the social learning consultant job ad – I think I saw either that ad too, or another which had a reference to social learning in it recently…I am noticing talk on social collaboration platforms becoming more mainstream – so perhaps some organisations are realising that activity needs to be supported and sustained purposefully beyond just implementing the platform. Interesting times…
Thanks for the reply Tanya. Yes, there were so many similarities with Third Place and that’s why I wanted to touch base to see how it would work for us. My whole premise of Third Place was encapsulated in that quote. I don’t want our group to be sold to anymore. I want us to be empowered to inspire change or solve learning problems and this is done by having a place where we can talk, chat, show and share what we’re doing and how – and making new networks into our niche areas.
The Respect Network is totally different. It’s taking charge of your data and privacy online and not having it in the hands of the few who sell our data to big companies to advertise to us. (Lately I’ve been reading more about this after the Facebook Emotional Contagion debacle).
No worries about co-working – do what you can aligned to the needs of the group. You may be interested to explore the #_Unbound concept instead with this? It may work better if there are people in their own org. That is, everyone works for a certain period of time at their own organisation but uses social tools to link into others working in their org? For an hour or so? Don’t know how you go with firewalls and the like….maybe through webex?
I agree with you regarding the job. The trend is picking up!!!
thanks for the unbound reference – I’ll check it out. It certainly sounds interesting – but yeah not totally certain if it will work through the firewall (although I am sometimes surprised what does and doesn’t get through…). Hmm, I’ll have to take another look at that respect network, I just don’t think I understand how it works…!? I probably need to look at it again…
Thanks Tanya. I like the concept and I’m thinking it has a lot of merit because it’s not just centred on one group – eg the learning and development group. It’s open for everyone across the organisation. If I was to put my ‘positive’ hat on it would mean that we connect across organisations and teams for that day/hour/time through the use of social tools (eg LinkedIn) or through virtual meeting tools to share what we’re doing and working on. Great and positive idea!
Now if I was going to put my ‘organisational’ hat on. There’s going to be some questions. I can just hear it now. “Who is involved?” “Are they our competitors?” “What are you sharing?” “How do we know that our people aren’t giving away any IP?” “Why are you using organisational systems and tools during work hours?” “How is this your role/job?”
As someone now who is NOT in an organisation, I saw the value as I can get the co-working community I’m part of (not Third Place – although I would extend the invitation to Third Placers) to get involved. This means a direct connection between internal staff with external people who are in start ups, or want to connect with people within the company. It may even mean connections between business and potential new clients? Or business directly meeting/listening to customers.
I;d be interested to find out how the other Unbound sessions overcame any organisational barriers.
Hi Helen,
Yes…I was trying to ignore the little organisational voices in my head but you brought them to my attention. I can totally hear similar questions too. I’m thinking of it as not really That different to drawing on your PLN for research or feedback on a work related problem or challenge, But I guess we both know that PLNs in organisations are also fraught with the same / similar questions. And I don’t know, maybe if I read the fine print on our social media policy something like this could possibly be interpreted as a breach. Sometimes I wonder whether my involvement in Third Place might potentially bring up similar questions if it was scrutinised – maybe it would depending on who was asking….
It’s the sort of thing that makes me a little angry and frustrated sometimes – all we’re trying to do is leverage from collective knowledge and experience outside the organisation to improve things inside the org, and often rather than encouragement and interest the response is a slap down to get back into your pigeon hole. I do think it’s a matter of time before people (managers?!) and organisations start to change (they won’t have any choice) but the transition can be a little difficult for the rest of us….
I haven’t taken a look at the Unbound linkedin group yet but I wonder if we could pose the question there to canvass other people’s experiences of organisational barriers to get some more feedback on this?