I was startled awake this morning.  Someone was ringing the doorbell at 5:30am.

I opened the door and in bolted my husband.  He was angry that the taxi he had booked to drive him to the airport had not arrived and he was going to miss his flight.  He had been standing outside the house waiting for it to arrive and didn’t have the house keys with him to let himself in quietly. While he was on the phone to the taxi company again, I was mumbling, “There’s an app for that. There’s an app for that”.

Needless to say, the app doesn’t work when you’re pressing buttons half asleep.  The second taxi was there by the time it took me to locate the app, sign in and figure out how to use it.

Today on the first day of Work Out Loud Week this is what I worked on:

• Finished off and published my latest blog post: How to Use Social Tools for Learning Experiences.  It had been sitting in my draft folder for some days before I added some photos and did the final proof before I published it.
• Rehearsed the webinar that I will give tomorrow to a group of lawyers on “Being a Connected Lawyer”.  The webinar focusses on the “why” of social networking and how it helps them service their clients as well as directly contribute to the strategic objectives of their firm.  Yes, there’s a demonstration of Yammer, their Enterprise Social Networking platform in the mix…but as I keep saying, it’s not about the tool, it’s about WHY use that tool and HOW to make it work for you and your company….
• Coached Marilyn Snider (@malmade1) on using social tools to build influence.  Marilyn is a Global Learning Consultant who helps schools embed and plan global competencies into their curriculum such as economic development and sustainability. This helps their schools to operate in a more globally connected manner. If you are interested to learn more from Marilyn, feel free to connect with her on LinkedIn or alternatively stand by for her posts on her new website and business over the coming days: Be Think Global. (Isn’t that such a fantastic name?). Needless to say I explained WOL Week to Marilyn and she will also be participating this week!
• Although I didn’t read the report (but will do so in my own quiet time), I downloaded the NCVER Report How Do Large Organisations Measure the Transfer of Knowledge Delivered by Blended Learning by Peter Bender from the Australian Tax Office.  Peter had interviewed me some time ago on the work I designed, developed and implemented on a Skills Coaching Program for the Mortgage Transformation Project.  I had blogged about my work and how I did it with the collection of blog posts.  The program was successful and then implemented across the organisation so that the same approach could be used across all departments.

And that was just the morning….

In the afternoon, after a quick trip to the shops to stock up on some ingredients for Christmas lunch (yes, like a squirrel, I’m hoarding rice flour, fruit mince, caster sugar, crackers, shortbread….because I know that the supermarkets will run out of some ingredient when I need it the most….but I digress)…

• Contemplated a niggly issue with another client on how to encourage their teams to use the SharePoint Community Site.  For the last week, we wondered why SP2013 was not showing ‘notifications’ (much like Yammer does when you follow People, Tags, Conversations, or Files).  The problem was that unless the user can set up a notification to receive via email, it’s unlikely that they will go to SP as the “first port of call” instead still rely on email to act as the trigger for them to visit SharePoint.  SP 2013 works slightly differently to Yammer as we’re slowly finding out.  You can follow People, Tags, Conversations and Documents as well as follow replies from posts you have placed into Community Sites and they all go into your “Following” Newsfeed.  You can then set up email notifications for this newsfeed (but you cannot directly set up email notifications for separate items as you can like Yammer).  However, today I experimented with the SharePoint Newsfeed app that I downloaded from iTunes into my phone and synchronised my Newsfeed and saw that we actually may not need the notifications. Why?  Everyone in this team walks around with their smart devices.  It may be a matter of showing them how to download the app and accessing their newsfeed via their device thereby negating the need for email notifications.  As they are on the go, the app seems to be the quickest way to access your community…  For those interested in these references:
  • Changing Your Newsfeed Settings in SP2013
  • Use the SP2013 Newsfeed App on Your Phone

• Planned a trip to Canberra for Thursday to meet a potential new client and undertake a needs analysis around using social tools to create communities for their Association.
• Undertook various administrative tasks such client invoicing and scheduling meetings into the calendar as well as finalising the Third Place booking for this Wednesday where we will have up to 20 people come along for social networking drinks (and dinner for those who want it) to meet Laura Overton, Managing Director of Toward Maturity out from the UK. If you’re interested in coming along, there’s still a few more places available.  Details here.

By this time it’s 3:30 pm.  I think I’ve earned a break so I head off to my parents home and have a long and in depth discussion about the economy, G20, ISUS, and the impact of automation to current employment workforce and planting tomatoes… Strangely, my father asks me….”So what’s Meetup?”

Later….

While I’m eating dinner, I start to draft a high level design document for a client to develop a Social Learning Guided Experience for their national teams that we call “The Work, Learn and Connect Program.”  After spending over an hour on it, I’m knackered.  Time to go and sit in front of the television and zone out…

I haven’t been on my daily walk either….argh!