Next week I'm doing a Webinar for Extension Professionals, a remix of 10 Steps to Association 2.0 which was a remix of Marnie Webb's Ten Ways Nonprofits Can Change the World. I'm having to quiet some inner Gollums while working on the presentation materials. I'm nervous. I'll be using a new online learning platform that I haven't used before and the participants are a slightly different audience than nonprofit staff or at least I think.
My initial remix thought (wrong) was to look for examples that were related to agriculture, but the extension is so much more. The themes science, environmental, nutrition, economic development, children, youth, parenting, and leadership are very much appropriate as this conference agenda from the NACDEP and ACE/NETC shows.
So, now is the fun part ... looking at the ten steps and overlaying these themes in search of examples! I'm creating a powerpiont for the Webinar and an accompanying wikispace, but wanted to put out this blog post for any feedback.
The session outline is as follows:
- Introduction
- Machine Is US/ing Us (video) (transcript)
- Overview slides of what is Web2.0 (remix from Social Media and Nonprofits Presentation)
Core theme
Listening - Responding to what people are saying about the topic or the program. Extension programs track blog conversations and respond.
Openness - A willingness to share information and content, also known as transparency; planning is discussed and user participation is welcomed. Extension programs use wikis, flickr, blogs, tagging, and other tools to share information and content.
Social Interaction - People can have conversations and create content together. A blog with the comments feature enabled allows or sharing photos in flickrs allows Extension program participants to discuss plans and programs.
Sharing Content is freely available for use and reuse. By using tagging and RSS extension programs are able to exchange information and share content freely.
It's messy
- Web2.0 adoption strategies (remix from Association 2.0)
Step 1: Find People
Why?
- Personal learning and reflection on and about your instructional topic
- Outreach for your program or to connect with potential supporters
- Guide your students to conversations and resources
- Research to incorporate in instructional materials
- Collaboration on student projects or other ways
- Hiring people
The power of Web2.0 is the ability to connect with kindred spirits who share your interest. The social web makes it easy for your find people with exactly the same passion.
How to find them? Use Technorati, a blog search engine. While google and yahoo have blog search features, Technorati is the considered the recognized authority on tracking blogs, It finds out who is saying what right now and is currently tracking over 75.2 milllion blogs. Bloggers frequently link to and comment on other blogs, creating the type of immediate connection one would have in a conversation. Technorati tracks these links, and thus the relative relevance of blogs, photos, videos etc. Technorati rapidly index tens of thousands of updates every hour, and monitors live communities and the conversations they foster.
To good news, you don't need to write a blog to find people and to participate in the conversation. An excellent first small step is to just identify the blogs that are hosting those conversations on the topics that interest you or inform your work. Technorati is very easy to use, no more difficult than typing in a few words and hitting search button.
Here's how to search on Technorati.
Discovery Exercise (from 23 things)
- Take a look at Technorati and try doing a keyword search for Nutrition or fill in your Extension topic/subject area in Blog posts, in tags and in the Blog Directory. Are the results different?
- Explore popular blog, searches and tags. Is anything interesting or surprising in your results?
- What did you discover and how can you incorporate it into your practice?
Let's say I'm leading a youth group or course about nutrition and being healthy for at-risk youth. Let's say I want to encourage some conversations about a healthy diet. Here's just three people/content connections on this topic that I found from Technorati search:
A search on "tags" lead me directly to a YouTube channel from the Youth Health Alliance and a series of youth-created videos on nutrition, including the one above that explains why it is better to drink green tea versus software drinks.
Urban Sprouts School Gardens - a program that teaches youth to plan, grow, and eat vegetables from a school garden.
Eating Fabulous
Step 2: Thinking Outloud
You can find out what other people are saying or thinking about your topic, community, organization, program or issue area.
Web 2.0 tools can provide quick and dirty market research tools or the ability to do an environmental scans for strategic planning. This can inform the way that you are already doing marketing and outreach. An example? Are you spending organizational resources writing outreach materials to your program participants. Read what people are writing about in your topic area and use that information to inform your outreach effort. You arenât doing something different - same staff, same tasks - but you are doing it a bit differently. Adding a new data point to it.
Another example. A nonprofit organization that provides support for homeless in Northern, CA found references to homeless people on restaurant blogs and used what they learn for a fundraising campaign.
Or suppose you were leading a program to educate young people about violent behavior in dating relationships. What if you wanted to present this topic through an authentic lens of community youth? You could use technorati to search for young people blogging about this topic. Or what you wanted to launch a 4-H Youth Enterpreneurship program? What could you learn from reading these blogs and engaging in a conversation with them? (Found from this Technorati Search)
- Youth Entrepreneurs
- Business Opportunities Web Blog Network
- Julia Kantor's Blog
- Networking Insight Blog
Many organizations are keeping tabs of what is being said about their organization or programs on blogs and responding directly, telling their side of the story. Here's an example from the Red Cross.
You can scan and track what people are saying automatically using Technorati Watchlists
Discovery Exercise
1. Brainstorm a couple of search terms that you would like monitor.
2. Write a sentence or two on why tracking these topics would be useful. How will you apply the information?
3. Set up a watchlist in Technorati and check it regularly. (Later I'll show you how an efficient way to keep tabs on your watchlists using a RSS Reader)
Step 3: Leave Bread Crumbs
You don't necessarily need a blog to engage in a blog conversation. When you find the
people and you find the issues, participate. Leave a comment on a post.
Let those writers know that they've found a reader in you and you think the topic is important. This is an excellent "pre blogging experience."
Be thoughtful and be authentic. Don't just say "I agree" or "I disagree." Think through why. When you take the time to comment on a post, you become part of the blogger's community and if you are writing a blog, they will most definitely read your post and perhaps become a reader of your blog. So, don't forget to include a link back to your blog your web site.
Coolcat Teacher's Comment Like a King or Queen has some excellent points on how to disagree respectfully as we don't always agree with one another and through discussion we often learn. Her points:
1. Will it make a difference?
2. Is my perspective already shared in the comments?
3. Start by genuinely complimenting the blogger in some way and point out where you do agree.
4. Point out each area of disagreement and why in a brief, non-rantish, professional manner.
5. NEVER: Be sarcastic, rant prolifically, curse, or personally attack a person.
Finally, here's a screencast on strategic blog commenting, although a lot of the advice is mostly for those who already have a blog, much can be learned.
Discover Exercise
1. Track a couple of blogs related to your topic or organization
2. Leave one comment a day or every other day for a couple of weeks by making blog tracking a part of your workflow. Say, for example, do it for a few minutes after you finish your email.
3. In composing your comments, remember the points above.
4. Don't forget to include a link to your web site or blog (if you have one, but wait a minute ..see next step)
Step 4: Start Blogging!
Now that you've done exploring of the Web2.0 world, reading and commenting on blogs, it's time to start blogging.
- Blogs are just websites that are easy to update
- Publish brief articles about your selected topic on a consistent basis.
- New articles appear at the top, so your visitors can easily read what’s new - diary metaphor
- People who read your blog may leave you a “comment” or response to your article, while others may link to it or email you privately.
- Blog software makes it easy to frequently add new articles to your blog and for visitors to comment or link to your article.
The best approach is to learn blogging is to create a personal professional development
blog - a blog you use to write reflections and learnings about your
subject area or personal learning goals. Your first blog could even document your learnings and reflections about Web.20! Some organizations start off
with department or group staff blogs. Do this before before a classroom
blogging project or external organizational blog which is more visible.
- Professional development - reflect and learn about your work
- Connect with peers, "thinking outloud, thinking allowed"
Examples
Jerry Thomas's Blog: http://extensiontrends.ag.ohio-state.edu/
Kevin Gamble http://blog.k1v1n.com/
Deb M Coates: http://www.extension.iastate.edu/mt/dcoates/
Jason Young: http://rambleon.org/
Ryan Pesch's Farm and Produce Blog: http://peschfarm.blogspot.com/
There must be others?
Discovery Exercise:
1. Think about the three C's of blogging: Competency, Comfort, Capacity
2. If you have any fears about putting a personal/professional blog out there for the world to browse, read this advice for "Would Be Bloggers" , take a deep breath, and go set up your blog. Sometimes it helps to have a colleague or blogging buddy.
3. Getting the software set up is easy and it is free, using blogger. Here's a screencast to show you how. Another free blogging platform is wordpress hosted. If you have a small budget, you might consider a blogging platform like typepad for the ease of use. (That's what I use and why I use it)
Step 5: RSS As Information Coping Tool
RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication. RSS makes it possible for you to âsubscribeâ to content on a blog and other web resources so you donât have to visit the blog to check for updated content content. The content is delivered through ânews or web feeds into an RSS Reader or software that gathers all the news feeds in one place where you can scan/read them quickly. (The news feeds are created by some behind-the-scenes code called XML. Most blog software can generate a RSS feed with the click of a button - you donât have to know how to create the code.)
Just think about the web resources you consume
every day. It takes time to visit those sites and find what you want to read! What if all those sources were in one place and you didn't have to search for new
information on the page youâd already seen or read before⦠and without
having to consume a lot of time clicking through to each web site. Would
that be beneficial to you? That's what an RSS reader lets you do!
Using a reader allows you to focus more reading, scanning, identifying patterns and picking out the important information you need!
Consuming Reading Feeds
RSS Feeds for a Blog or Web Site: Look for that orange logo on a blog or web site. That means you can subscribe.
RSS News Search Feeds: You can create an RSS feed on a search term. Say you want to track mentions of a particular public issue or news item. You can create an RSS feed that would work 24/7 and bring any news to your desktop from Google News or Yahoo News.
RSS Feeds for Blog Searches: Getting a regular feed of
searches for a particular topic or even your own name or blog url is
easy with Technorati. You simply set up a watchlist and subscribe to
the feed.
RSS Feeds for Search Engine Searches: You can create an RSS feed from search of the web via google.
How to find feeds to read?
- Search technorati with the goal of finding a small number of blogs that are about your topic and are regularly updated
- Add feeds from blogs they recommend or that you discover from visiting the blogs of commenters
- Ask your colleagues what blogs they read and subscribe to those blogs
- See if there are RSS feeds from your frequently visited web sites
- Subscribe to your Technorati Watchlists that you set up
Discovery Exercise:
1. Set up your bloglines account
2. Add the RSS feeds of blogs you want to track
3. Put a sticky on your computer monitor that says "check RSS Reader" and check it every day after you answer your email.
4. Read your feeds. Identify one that you would like to blog about.
Additional Exercises
Discovery Exercise from Learning 2.0:
Setting up and using a Bloglines Account
Discovery Exercise from Learning 2.0:
Finding and subscribing to feeds in your topic area
Remember:
- It's a habit shift to incorporate using a reader into your daily workflow.
- Start slow and master the reader first and start with just a few feeds to read
Step 6: Share the Face of Your Program
Take photos with your digital camera and share them on your web site or blog and ideally, in Flickr. It lets you tap into a stream of people who care and may be committed to your organization, cause, program, or subject area.
Photo sharing websites have been around for over a decade, but Flickr was one of the first photo sharing services to use keyword tags to encourage connections between photos and users.
You can open an account on flickr for free (although if you get a professional account you can upload more photos) and start using it in minutes. But it is best to learn how tags work on flickr, what groups are, and all the clever things that people and organizations are using Flickr for:
- Resource for presentations (can easily search in Flickr by cc license) - For example, you were seeking out photos for a presentation on "Nutrition" or "Organic Farming"
- Documentation or How To
- Tourism Campaigns or celebrate a place or county or state
- Fundraising presentations
- Photo Sharing around an organization's programs/mission - Global and National Youth Day
- Fundraising Campaign - Street Kids
- For teaching and learning
Some examples of flickr groups found in flickr that relate to Extension themes. Can you find more?
- Recipe Swamp Group
- Economic Impacts
- Rotary Youth Exchange Program
- Nature Conservancy
- Flickr Farm
- Organic Produce and Farmer's Markets
- Growing and Eating Local Foods
Discovery Exercise
1. Set up a flickr account and learn the basics
2. Set up the "Blog This" feature
3. Take a photo of something in your office that you'd like to blog about and upload to flickr. Blog about it using the "Blog This" option. Add your blog post url to the description.
4. Use the search feature on flickr to find photos that are similar to yours. Leave a comment on the photo.
5. Use the groups search feature on flickr to find a group and join it. Send the photo the group photo pool.
More Discovery Exercises
http://plcmclearning.blogspot.com/2006/08/5-discover-flickr.html
http://plcmclearning.blogspot.com/2006/08/6-more-flickr-fun.html
Step 7: Use Tagging To Share Resources
Tagging and social bookmarking can be useful techniques to easily share your information resources with colleagues or co-workers.
Tagging is an open and informal method of categorizing that allows users to describe web resources with keywords. Unlike library subject cataloging, which follows a strict set of guidelines, tagging is completely unstructured and freeform, allowing users to create connections between data anyway they want. Tagging helps found things stay found as well as facilitate the wisdom of the group.
Del.icio.us is a popular social bookmarking manager which allows you to bookmark a web page and add tags to organize and retrieve your bookmarks. The power of Del.icio.us is the social aspect, which allows you to see how other users have tagged similar links and also find other websites that may be of interest to you. You can think of it as having 24/7 access to another users filing cabinet, but each user's collection of bookmarks helps to build an rich knowledge network.
Clay Shirky said "Unstructured labels, placed by user as mnemonic aids. How can I go back and find this? But interesting effect: the tags of millions of users are available. A tag is a label, but it's also a stream. If I pull 1000 links tagged programming, what additional tags appear and at what frequency?"
Resources:
Beth's Tagging Screencast
Discovery Exercise
1. Set up a del.icio.us account and learn the basics or watch this screencast
2. Add the bookmarklet so you can easily save bookmarks into delicious
3. Go out and bookmark a half dozen web resources into del.icio.us. Describe the resources with as many tags as you need to remember the item, plus the tag "extension2.0"
4. Explore and discover other bookmarks using this guide
5. What resources or people did you discover?
Step 8: Understand The Power Remix Culture and User-Generated Content
Producing, remixing, commenting, and classifying are just as important as the more passive tasks of searching, reading, watching, and listening on the Web today.
Remix culture is a term used by the Creative Commons founder Larry Lessig to describe a society which allows and encourages derivative works. Such a culture would be, by default, permissive of efforts to improve upon, change, integrate, or otherwise remix the work of copyright holders. Lessig presents this as a desirable ideal and argues, among other things, that the health, progress, and wealth creation of a culture is fundamentally tied to this participatory remix process. It is an idea closely tied with the term user-generated content and creative commons licensing.
You may be wondering whether copyright laws and remix culture are at odds with one another. A nonprofit organized named Creative Commons has made it easy for content creators to share or protect their work by developing flexible and voluntary "some rights reserved" copyright licenses for creative works. There are six different flavors of Creative Commons licensings that have various degrees of restrictions on how people may use your work. Here's how the Creative Commons licenses work.
One small example of how the licensings supports remixing. This presentation is a remix from Marnie Webb who subsequently remixed the remixed! The visuals used on the wiki (Except for the screen captures) came from flickr photos that were licensed using the Creative Commons attibution license which means I can use them freely as long as credit the creator.
Nonprofit organizations, libraries, and educational institutions are experimenting with "user-generated" or community-powered campaigns. Examples include Creative Commons Swag Contest and Fight Hunger Video Contest. My experiment with user-generated content is here.
What does this mean in an educational context?
- Create collaborative, student-authored resources. Take a look at the Horizon project for some excellent examples of this.
- Enable public feedback on assignments. Photography students use Flickr to post, organize, share, and critique their colleaguesâ work for each assignment. The professor provides feedback on the site to each student for each assignment, and an in-class critique brings the discussion into the classroom. Here's an example from a class project the New School.
- Give to communities and encourage idea sharing. Invite your audience to share what they already know as the Voter's s project did.
Discovery Exercise #1:
1. Search through flickr for photos that have Creative Commons licenses that you might use for educational materials or presentation.
2. Read the license
3. What do you need to do to use the photo legally in a blog post?
Discovery Exercise #2:
1. Search through YouTube for a video to illustrate a blog post or to write about
2. Cut and paste the code into your blog post
Discovery Exercise #2:
1. Browse through this list of resources about user-generated content in an educational context from the Horizon Project Wiki. In thinking about tagging, flickr, and rss tools, what are some ways that you can collaborate with others to create content or have your students create content?
Step 9: Wiki Wiki
A wiki is a collaborative website and writing tool that allows people to easily contribute, delete and edit content. Think of it as the track changes feature in word, but on the web so that anyone who has access can contribute. Wikipedia, the online open-community encyclopedia, is the most well known. The growing adoption of wikis in educational. library, and nonprofit environments is mainly due to the benefits offered.
Wikis can be excellent tools for any collaborative writing or knowledge capture project where you can capture the wisdom of the group in an online document that is accessible or viewable to others. Think of wikis of a good tool to collect information or knowledge. For example, you can use them for people to add their names to an RSVP list, add themselves to a directory, or write an article, FAQ, or manifesto together. Wikis are great for cutting down email overload. Other benefits:
- Anyone (registered or unregistered, if unrestricted) can add, edit or delete content.
- Tracking tools within wikis allow you to easily keep up on what been changed and by whom.
- Earlier versions of a page can be viewed and reinstated when needed.
- And users do not need to know HTML in order to apply styles to text or add and edit content. In most cases simple syntax structure is used.
Resource Collection off a listserv: http://www.simteach.com/wiki/index.php?title=Second_Life:_Non-Profits
Directories: http://www.globalsonline.org/wiki/article/BridgeBlog#Global_Index
Collaborative writing off a listserv: http://docs.google.com/View?docid=ajqc7js7j79_bddng9xhgqzpm
Collaborative Educational Content: http://collaborate.extension.org/wiki/Main_Page
Collaborative Projects: http://horizonproject.wikispaces.com/
Conference Note Taking
http://siliconvalley.wikia.com/wiki/Notes_from_the_Non-Profit_Boot_Camp
Organizing a conference - sign up, program, archive
http://podcamp.pbwiki.com/Boston
Wiki Issues
Change Issues
http://beth.typepad.com/beths_blog/wiki/index.html
1. Browse through the Extension Collaborative Wiki
2. Get comfortable with using the wiki software
Step 10: Understand the Power of Open Tools Web-Based Productivity Tools
Each of these steps so far have to do with you, as an individual, but you also work in an institutional setting. True adoption of Web2.0 at the enterprise level will take individual experimentation and stewardship. But there are some small learning steps you can take now to learn about Enterprise 2.0 and the trends driving it.
Enterprise 2.0 is the term for the technologies and business practices that liberate the workforce from the constraints of legacy communication and productivity tools like email. It provides business managers with access to the right information at the right time through a web of inter-connected applications, services and devices. Enterprise 2.0 makes accessible the collective intelligence of many, translating to a huge competitive advantage in the form of increased innovation, productivity and agility.
API stands for Application Programming Interface, but don’t even worry about what it is yet. But if you are purchasing a database or Content Management System, find out if the API is open. It shouldn’t be the most important consideration but, if you have the option, it should be a deciding factor. Looking at using some of the free tools on the internet? Check to make sure they have an open API.
Open APIs are one of the hallmark features of Web 2.0 services. They allow developers to tap into external data and repurpose it, creating a new tool "mashed-up" from previously separate ones. Content used in mashups is typically sourced from a third party via a public interface or API Many people are experimenting with mashups using Google, eBay, Amazon, Windows Live, and Yahoos APIs.
There are a lot of things that are built on top of other tools. They don’t stand alone but work specifically with other software services. If you start really using a particular service, find out what others have built to make it even more useful. This is where the open APIs come in. If you’ve been following this as a progression, you know which you are most interested in, which is most useful to you and your organization. You made sure it had an open API (right? you did that, right?). So now, go to Google, plug the name of the tool in and the words third party. One of the top three results is going to point you to some enthusiast who is maintaining a list of useful add-ons. Go through them and see if they work for you.
Examples of Mashups
Tornado History Project The Tornado History Project is a searchable, sortable database of
tornado statistics based on official National Weather Service (NWS)
tornado records from 1950-2005 and googlemaps.
Chicago Crime Maps; Another googlemap mashup with crime statistics.
Full Stop Campaign
http://www.nfp2.co.uk/2006/10/13/be-a-full-stop/
Further Reading
Netsquared Conference Mashup Panel
http://netsquared.org/2006/conference/conference-sessions/Mashups
Presentation from Panel
http://gtmcknight.com/conferences/2006/netsquared/
Michelle Murrain
http://www.zenofnptech.org/2006/10/web_20_part_vba.html
The other types of tools that you can explore are called online productivity web-based applications (think word processing and spreadsheets on the web). Their availability and use in the workplace has dramatically increased over the past two years. Why? These tools provide users with the ability to create and share documents over the internet without the need of installed desktop applications. Some technologu gurus suggest that web-based applications are the , while others think web-based applications have their place, but not in the office. But no matter which side of the office suite platform you side with, on this both sides seem to agree; web-based apps have their place.
Web Office tools:
- Address Book: Plaxo
- Bookmarks: del.icio.us
- Calculator: Google
- Email: Gmail
- Calendar: Google Calendar
- Documents and Spreadsheets: Zoho
- File Manager: Box.net
- Images: Flickr
- Personalised homepage: Google
- RSS Reader: Google Reader
A much larger list can be found here, Web2.0 Awards.
Benefits
- Extremely easy document sharing and collaboration - just think about how often you’ve worked on a shared document and struggled to figure out the changes made by another author…
- Familiar, intuitive word processor and spreadsheet interfaces
- Availability from any computer with an Internet connection (i.e. no need for local copies, CDs, flash drives, etc.)
- Versioning by saving a history of changes (who and when) that can be viewed and compared
- Ability to save local copies if desired
- Ability to import and export documents in various file formats
Drawbacks
- You need to move outside your comfort zone
- Hard to select the right web tool for the task, especially when some but not all of these online tools can integrate with each other and/or synchronised with other software.
- Sustainability of online tools is difficult to project, given that some of these tools could disappear from the Internet at any time.
- Security issues around entrusting your organisation’s data to a third party like Google
Further Reading:
Miles Maier: The Great Office2.0 Experiment
Learning 2.0: Online Productivity Tools
Summary
Now, your moving around the web in meaningful, deliberate way. Your are responding to people, leaving comments, sharing the face of your organization. You are using RSS to track it all. You are a web 2.0 guru-in-training. Share your path. When you find something interesting enough for you to click take the two extra steps necessary to share it with your friends and supporters via tags or your blog.
This is the longest and most informative post so far to me :)
Posted by: Wanna | April 18, 2007 at 11:51 AM
Hi Beth,
Thanks for including my blog post in which I discuss my company's youth mentoring program, Future Founders.
Posted by: Jason Jacobsohn | April 18, 2007 at 08:41 PM
I think that one reason your Fantasticness Award is so appropriate is you're not afraid to say that you're having to quiet inner Gollums. We're all feeling lots of pressure these days, and it's relief for someone just to say so.
This is a great presentation and it's so cool you'll make a wiki available. The problem is there's enough information for a 9 week course in it.
I think it will be good to highlight the parts of it that encourage small ways to get involved. It's pretty easy because you've put them right at the beginning of each of your steps.
I suspect some in your audience will get a sinking feeling, just feeling overwhelmed. So frequent encouragement and reminders they don't have to do it at once, rather that actual involvement makes things easier all around. And that actual involvement is fun.
Good Luck! And as always thanks for sharing your work. This is a very valuable document for people in all sorts of occupations.
Posted by: John Powers | April 18, 2007 at 09:34 PM
John,
Thanks for the suggestions.
I'm always concerned with overwhelming and too much information. The way I try to balance that is to create a detailed "leave behind" blog post or wiki.
The slides I've created don't include all this material or show everything for every step. This post is more like the "leave behind" for people to go back to after the session and explore on their own.
Posted by: Beth Kanter | April 19, 2007 at 04:52 AM
Holy smokes! This is so comprehensive!
Posted by: Alan | April 19, 2007 at 11:55 PM
Alan,
This was my first draft, brain dump and I took the comments to heart and did some major chopping. There's still a lot more I could chop ...
http://extension20.wikispaces.com/
Posted by: Beth Kanter | April 20, 2007 at 05:11 AM