Posts Tagged 'IBM'

Upcoming Events: informal learning, changing our world

Published February 21, 2009 non profit Leave a Comment
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Somehow I have got myself involved in a few special events over the next few weeks :o

1. Inspecht HR Futures Conference this Thursday in Melbourne. I’ve put together a presentation to showcase some of the work IBMers are doing in the area of informal learning, web 2.0, virtual worlds along with some insights into my own personal experience, and tips for creating a successful informal learning experience.  If you intend to register, let me know as I can give two people a discount of 30%! I’m looking forward to hearing some of the other speakers including Stephen Collin’s observations from TED.

2. International Women’s Day event “Renewing Ourselves Changing Our World” hosted by the Global Dialogue Center, Women in the Lead. I am so honoured to be on a panel for this event for women around the world. I’m participating in the second half  “changing the world” at 7.30am Sat 7 March Melbourne time (talking about the Women’s Investment project)and there are some AMAZING speakers. From their blog:


It’s a NEW DAY!
Renewing Ourselves; Changing the World
Friday March 6 from 1:00 p.m. - 5:30 p.m. ET
(10:00 a.m. – 2:30 p.m. PT)
Location:
Online at the Women in the Lead at the
Global Dialogue Center CONFERENCE CENTER
This special day is a gift to women everywhere sponsored by Women in the Lead at the Global Dialogue Center in partnership with Women’s Radio. There are no fees, but you must register to get the login information to set-up your computer and to attend.

WAYS TO LEARN MORE…

  • Listen to our personal audio invitation Click HERE
    from Founders, Debbe Kennedy, Global Dialogue Center and Pat Lynch, Women’s Radio
  • It’s a NEW DAY – PDF Brochure with link to register.

Our focus will be on women’s leadership, professional, and personal development. We’ve planned two dialogue themes: 1) Renewing Ourselves so we are ready to contribute and lead the way at this time of both crisis and opportunity. 2) Changing the World …an inspiring exploration of how we can put our differences to work to build better organizations, healthier communities, stronger families, and a better world for everyone than we know today. We also have extraordinary women leadership trailblazers and role models to inspire our conversation from regions around the world, including accomplished thought leaders…

SPECIAL GUESTS…
We have extraordinary women leadership trailblazers and role models you will not want to miss. They will be joining us to inspire our conversation from regions around the world, including…

United States Congresswomen Barbara Lee representing the 9th Congressional District in California
http://lee.house.gov/

Harriet Mayor Fulbright, President, J. William and Harriet Fulbright Center
…Fostering peace and justice through education and collaboration
UNITED STATES
http://jwhfulbright.org/

Daphne Nederhorst, Founder and Executive Director
SAWA Global Empowering unknown leaders in the world’s 50 poorest countries
http://www.sawaglobal.com
CANADA

Cécile Demailly, co-author, Women @ Work No. 10:
Networking: The New Ariadne’s Thread
http://www.europeanpwn.net/index.php?article_id=54
Building awareness of the power of women networking.
Founder and Executive Consultant, Early Strategies
FRANCE

No FEES, our gift to you, but you must register to receive
HOW TO ATTEND information for logging in ONLINE to the event
and the audio options available to you. Space is limited; reserve your seat.
Invite a friend!

Registration LINK: https://www120.livemeeting.com/lrs/0000011799/Registration.aspx?pageName=fj56g81t7lbj242g
Allow a few seconds for the link to open.

3. Shout Out Social (of course) a fundraising event I’m coordinating with your help, for Opportunity International. The event will be hosted by Horse Bazaar, featuring a digital wall show and positive video messages about using your creative voice for positive change. I would love for you to be my guest. Sat 14th March 5-7pm. Free Entry, donation box for your tax deductible donations and pledges will be available.

Who says blogging is a waste of time? When you end up being involved with events like these, you know that your (enjoyable) investment was worth the effort!

The challenge for a Smarter Planet

Published November 24, 2008 inspiration , smarter planet , web 2.0 Leave a Comment
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I was just reading James Governor’s interesting post on Monkchips (Redmonk) about a Smarter Planet; an initiative IBM has been sharing recently about working together to address important global healthcare, energy, and economic problems, amongst others (full disclosure – I  work for them.) IBM Chairman and CEO Sam Palmisano said about Smarter Planet:

“We need to practice a new form of leadership. Think about these systems, no one owns the systems. Which is part of the complexity of driving the change to make them more effective. So, to make this happen, you need collaboration. Everyone has to come out of their lanes, it’s true for business and for politicians and academic organizations. People have to come together and form these partnerships of collaboration to work together to solve these problems. And yes, they are going to have to move out of their comfort zones.”

So it gets you thinking, “what does that mean for me?” Mike Wing writes on the IBM Smarter Planet Blog “

I’d suggest three ways:

  1. Go Web 2.0. Embrace the long tail.
  2. Look at your own area of responsibility through the lens of ’smarter planet,’ and see what this frame lights up… what it transforms… what it could expand.
  3. Personally engage in the big-picture societal work that is newly possible.

Sam’s speeches so far have been directed to leaders. For them, the challenge is to seize this moment, to embrace the world’s eagerness for change and use it to be bold, game-changing.

But as families, as neighbors, as employees, as partners, as suppliers, as scholars, as global citizens… we can seize the same opportunity, too – the chance to change our lives, our work, our communities, our future. And the way to do that is to participate, to co-create, to network, to jam. The key is to understand that these amazing new capabilities make the planet’s infrastructure available to the individual, to every individual, without regard to wealth or physical location or power.”

I’m personally inspired to see where this might all lead. It’s exciting to be part of projects where people chip in their time to share knowledge, new ideas, finances and capability to make a difference. And right now, it’s happening in a rapid and dynamic way, aided by technology. Recently I caught an episode of Iconoclasts featuring Dean Kamen and Isabella Rosselini (2006). Kamen reflects on invention and his passion “Life is so short. Why waste a single day of it doing something that doesn’t matter, that doesn’t try to do something big?”

I think what IBM is articulating is an opportunity for each one of us to take stock of our world, then to dream, imagine and to take intelligent action, now.  I bet you have more to offer than you even realize :)

Notes from Physical and Virtual Learning spaces

Published November 19, 2008 learning 3 Comments
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Yesterday I attended the IBM/Melbourne Uni Virtual and Physical Learning Spaces public forum, which was also broadcast live in Secondlife. During Professor William (Bill) J. Mitchell’s keynote speech, he discussed the Stata student street project – a purpose built public space with free wifi (there is free wifi throughout MIT), designed for informal and open collaborative meetings. He spoke of the evolution of architecture, the shifting roles of libraries as a source of information and as a meeting place, influence of ubiquitous computing on public spaces & architecture,  and the walls of authority that are tumbling down through the rise of emerging backchannels like Twitter.

Student Street at MIT – image originally uploaded by MIT

There was plenty of other interesting content throughout the day as each working party presented their findings, and attendees were given the opportunity to discuss further during Breakout sessions.

The Architectural Determinism party discussed opportunities for the creation of policies to create comfortable, safe ergonomic spaces with free wifi for students to collaborate. For instance, the potential to convert existing public spaces and university gardens to include powerpoints and tables, so that students no longer need to balance precariously against sculptures, juggling their laptops, multiple phones and sandwiches while trying to collaborate.

The Fragmentation and Recombination working party talked about “seamfulness” and the creation of “beautiful seams” so that fragmentation of Learning Management Systems, devices, storage and access could be exploited. I’ve been thinking about this a bit lately; how we instinctively try to recombine and integrate or create a “home” for things but how there is something quite wonderful about the fragmentation of the web. I really liked this idea of seamfullness. The questions raised yesterday included “which seams are important? Who should manage it?”

Our Segmentation and Integration working party highlighed events as a common theme in the creation of communities and the importance of enablement, purpose and resource.

Community Engagement was an interesting theme, with the discussion around physical icons in public spaces (for instance artwork, water fountains etc) as memorable and formative in the development of community spaces.

The Control working party posed questions around the shift of power from staff to students, the growing need for staff to develop facilitation skills, informal spaces on campus, and the diminishing role of the uni in the social dimension of the “university experience”.

The concept of “Bazaars” as an exchange of ideas, swapping and linkages was put forward by the Teaching and Learning boundaries working party, and I believe it raised some interesting discussion during the breakout session!

Overall, there were some great observations and insights from all participants. Emerging themes that I noted from the event:

  • Enablement of individuals to use technology, to collaborate, to create communities
  • Respect of the voice of the student and different learning styles
  • Information literacy and the growing role it plays in the life of students and teachers
  • Interdependency between physical and virtual learning spaces
  • Life long learners and knowledge workers. Developing a culture of learning, not just courses and content.

It was also nice to meet up with Keith De La Rue in person for the first time (not just on Twitter). Keith tweeted his own notes live from the conference.

Events, Enablement and Informal Learning

Published October 27, 2008 web 2.0 2 Comments
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Coming up on the 18th of November, Melbourne Uni and IBM will be hosting a public forum to discuss the project Virtual and Physical Spaces as Places for Informal Learning . It was great to be invited to participate in this project along with around 30 others from Melbourne Uni, IBM and a number of different organisations. Our working party’s theme was segmentation – for instance, how do you integrate and connect different segments whilst helping them to reserve their unique attributes and identities? These are a few of my own personal observations & contribution to this collaborative project.

connecting a distributed workforce

connecting a distributed workforce - originally uploaded by kolya

Physical spaces within large enterprises like IBM transforming to meet the changing demands of an increased mobile workforce. As employees work from home more often, or have a laptop and work on–site with their customer – they are less likely to have a permanent desk in the office. Groups of peers may be geographically dispersed. Additional demands in large global enterprises include:

  • Global workforce
  • Maturing workforce & retirees
  • Gen Y attrition and retention

The greater sense of connectedness can occur through online communities. Individuals are enabled through access to social computing. They can create personal profiles on social networks and use social media to share and connect with others around the globe – behind the firewall and in the public domain.

Events provide opportunities for people from different teams and lines of business to connect. Virtual events, competitions and challenges give individuals the opportunity to innovate and use their skills. Online communities become a place for connection across the company. Communities may be based upon business unit, special interest groups, projects, skills or personal interests.

Online communities are enhanced with access to social media and social networking sites. For instance Secondlife, Facebook, YouTube, Podcasting, Twitter, Ning communities, Flickr, blogging, social bookmarking, BluePages and Fringe+1

Three key considerations for addressing the issue of segmentation:

Purpose. Workplace example – IBM Values, Innovation Jam events, Beehive (Internal Facebook) Events, Group projects.

  • Decide on the types of initiatives for individuals, groups and larger events
  • Determine the benefits to the organisation and the individuals
  • Consider including strategic organisational issues and challenges for collaboration

Enablement. Workplace example – IBM Social Computing Guidelines. Give people access to the tools and and provide guidelines.

  • Provide the tools/websites/learning environments
  • Provide education “what’s in it for me?”
  • Promote awareness

Facilitation. Workplace example – Voluntary social computing ambassador roles. Departments host and facilitate virtual and physical events.

  • Nominate individuals as advocates and facilitators
  • Decide on events
  • Measure success of events

What do you think about the need for the creation of physical and virtual events, enablement and facilitation to connect segments in an organisation?

Collaborating on informal learning spaces

Published August 18, 2008 learning , web 2.0 6 Comments
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You may have seen me mention some rewarding projects I have been able to contribute to since becoming more involved in social media. Here’s one example – a working party on virtual and physical spaces for informal learning with Melbourne Uni. I’ll be contributing to the first collaborative meeting tomorrow around segmentation – creating and optimising informal learning spaces for individual (personal) and wide (generic) segments.

Anyway…this is what the project is all about.


It is not enough to build a university around the specialized needs of its academic programs; it also needs a collection of distinct gathering places that catalyze interaction and bring the campus to life -Wallsjasper, 2008

The project on Virtual and Physical Learning Spaces is a collaboration between IBM and The University of Melbourne and is investigating informal learning environments that are critical to the role and life of the University.

Alongside the University’s formal teaching spaces and buildings are informal spaces – inside, outside and virtual – that are often open to the public and support a range of learning activities, from individual study and informal group-work to socio-cultural activities such as exhibitions, cultural and community events. These activities are intrinsic to staff and student experiences at the University and are vital to the University’s role as a public education institution.

In December 2007, the project’s working group came together to consider a central question:
How can virtual and physical spaces be designed, integrated, used and understood to better support informal learning?

A Think Tank, comprising key university staff and senior IBM personnel, identified six ‘critical issues’ that should be considered in the project. These issues provide the foundation for reflection and discussion over the coming months of the project and are:

  • Architectural Determinism
  • Fragmentation and Recombination
  • Segmentation and Integration
  • Community Engagement
  • Teaching and Learning Boundaries
  • Control

In November, each Working Party will be invited to present at a Public Forum on Informal Learning Places jointly hosted by IBM and The University of Melbourne. It is expected the ideas presented in the Public Forum could be used by different communities in the own practices and endeavours.

What makes a company great?

Published June 25, 2008 brand 7 Comments
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What makes a company respected, special or important? Any ideas? If you’re up for a challenge – please answer the following three questions this week. I’ll be relaying the most informative answers back to IBM’s global marketing and communications group, who are interested in knowing your thoughts. Please leave your name, position and company details if you can (or email jasmin at wonderwebby dot com) and feel free to use video or other media to respond :) I look forward to reading the responses!

1. What company or companies do you most respect? Why? What makes them special and different from others?

2. Has “what’s important” changed over time? Did you respect different companies in the past? Why? What has changed?

3. What makes a company great? What characteristics are most important? How would you describe a truly great company?

Update: More opportunities to share your impressions of IBM over here on LinkedIn - and your experience at IBM overe here on the Greater IBM Connection

Collaboration Guidelines

Published May 14, 2008 web 2.0 5 Comments
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Two of my blogging colleagues Andy Piper and George Faulkner recently pointed out that IBM’s social computing guidelines have been published and now Sun’s guidelines on public discourse has been updated.

Give people access. Create a great company culture. Guide them.

As George Faulkner says, “This was a fantastic collaborative effort and the result is, in my mind, a reflection of some forward thinking. IBMers are on Facebook, Orkut, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc, and are on a wide variety of internal tools as well, publishing at rapid pace. Having a clear and understandable set of guidelines will only help us all to understand this new freedom as we connect with the world.”

guiding lights - a street scene at night
Image courtesy of The Paper Boat

Transforming Design

Published May 12, 2008 innovation , web 2.0 2 Comments
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A short while back, a colleague in the US blogged (on the intranet) about an innovative product design that needed particular feedback, so I spent a few moments replying. I thought this issue deserved some more publicity and input, so I spontaneously used our internal social networking site Beehive to set up a call to action; calling upon a number of people I have “friended” on Beehive to help with more ideas.

Within 24 hours people from all over the globe, from different parts of the business contributed their bright and shiny ideas, which helped my colleague move his project forward. His team now has so many things to consider adding to the design, that he’s almost not sure where to begin!

Social networks rock. I do enjoy being part of a solution and seeing ideas come together, don’t you?

a group on the moon
bright and shiny ideas in a social network
image courtesy of Boston Bill

Greater IBM

Published March 14, 2008 Uncategorized 3 Comments
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I made my guest author debut on the Greater IBM Connection blog today (an IBM alumni program blog)

It’s an odd tale about Enterprise 2.0 and the ritual of the birthday cake. You can read it here. 

Informal Learning

Published January 11, 2008 learning 4 Comments
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I’m excited about the changes happening in the learning area. You may have read that Brandon Hall announced new categories late last year, for their excellence in learning awards including:

  • Best Use of Blogs, Wikis, or Other Content-Sharing Tools for Learning
  • Best Use of Games for Learning
  • Best Use of Mobile Learning
  • Best Use of Video for Learning
  • Best Use of Virtual Worlds for Learning

Methods of learning are obviously changing, and this makes my role in Learning Services and Knowledge & Collaboration even more interesting (and challenging for the year ahead.)

I’m expecting to see more companies implement structured programs and modify existing learning models this year to accommodate informal learning styles. Many existing learning programs fail to engage the audience or harness the expertise “in the room”. I think we will see more people using blended learning models to include blogs, wikis, social networks, virtual worlds etc in more deliberate, constructive, program driven initiatives, something I’m happy to say we are already beginning to see at IBM.

As more companies allow employees access to social media, more support for management and employee guidelines will ensue. Frontline managers will be taught more about online impression management, benefits of using social networks to capture tacit knowledge and build community – and ways to facilitate attention management, trust and authenticity.

The benefits are great, especially as more people begin to work from home and move to part-time hours. So many people talk about using social media to attract Gen Y (the Net Gen), but the maturing workforce will become even more dependent on social media to support lifestyle changes.

Learning, Knowledge and Collaboration – they are becoming even more entwined and I think learning of the future will be so much more engaging, innovative, social and learner-driven. Yes, I think it should be a good year ahead!

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