Reach Further

Reach Further works with businesses, educational & membership organisations to adopt & embed social and collaborative technologies to deliver learning & commercial advantage.

For businesses and organisations, we can help you:
- save money & time;
- create new income streams;
- market and manage your own web presence;
- find and retain customers online;
- grow communities and networks of stakeholders.

For schools, colleges and universities, we can help you:
- design courses incorporating learning technologies;
- appropriate and adopt web 2.0 technologies;
- develop skills in emoderating and online tutoring;
- apply technological tools to pedagogical objectives.

For our latest news and blog posts, see below.

If you’re making plans for the year (though a bit late for actual resolutions perhaps?)  then a good thing to think about is avoiding RSI.  Learning technology and social media people spend a lot of time at keyboards and using computer mice.  What would be the one thing that would seriously affect your ability to work? RSI!

If you’ve ever had a scare and found your fingers spasming from keyboarding or your shoulder seizing up because of mouse use, then I won’t have to tell you how important it is to protect yourself from RSI.  I have seen the consequences of RSI and that made me much more aware.

But new technology comes out and you find yourself using technologies in different ways – for example my ergonomic chair and keyboard don’t do me much good now that I’m working on a laptop away from my desk most of the time. So it’s got to be a good time to review your working practices.

1. Don’t work crazy hours – take breaks from using the computer for this reason if no other! Limit non-essential computer use – if you work at a computer all day, playing computer games all evening is probably not the best hobby.
2. Take regular breaks – 5 minutes every 30-45 minutes is a good rule of thumb – and in that 45 minutes get up and move around. (Get a coffee, visit the water cooler, do some filing…)
3. Stretching exercises, e.g., http://www.mydailyyoga.com/yoga/rsi.html
4. Optimize the ergonomics of your working environment: check your seating position, the angle of your keyboard.  Change your behaviour: e.g., customize your mouse settings to use it occasionally with your other hand or use keyboard shortcuts.
5. If you think you may have symptoms – see a doctor and/or physiotherapist as soon as possible

Helpful links

• The Health and Safety Executive’s pamphlet on Using VDUs.
• The mouse is biting some computer users (BBC)
• Ergomatters.co.uk RSI blog
• AvoidRSI.com
• Lots of Twitter folk suffer from RSI  blog post from RSI-relief.com
• Laptop Ergonomics for Mobile Professionals from PC World magazine

A presentation using appropriate images can really make a statement for maximum impact (see Presentations that make a statement). Preparing such a presentation - finding just the right images - can, however, take longer than just collecting a few bullet points in black on a white background or a standard Powerpoint template.

So where can you find the best pictures?  There are lots available on the Web - but remember that most pictures are the copyright of someone, even on the Internet (even if it doesn’t say so), and you should be sure that you have permission to use the images in the way that you intend, particularly if it will be a public presentation.

So how can you get copyright-free images?

• Free image galleries (e.g., SXC the Stock Exchange, Free Images Gallery,
• Pay for images from a commercial collection (e.g. iStockPhoto.com or Fotolia)
• Use images that have creative commons copyright licenses attached (be sure they are OK for commercial use), e.g., you can search Flickr and specify such images.
• Create your own: especially if you’re prepared to practice a bit with your camera

If you do use someone else’s work in a presentation, article or blog that is posted on the web or published anywhere, no matter where it comes from, it is good practice to credit the copyright owner/photographer and — where possible — inform them that their work is being used and what for.

These aren’t really New Year’s resolutions, but things that any small business owner would be well advised to do as soon as possible and then review regularly:

1. Google your own name, your business name and/or product name(s). What websites come up on the front page and can you improve your entry on those sites? View the later pages: what are people saying about you?

2. Look into how the Web can save you money. Social media optimisation can replace at least part of costly marketing campaigns: perhaps you can use web applications or cloud computing to reduce the cost of software.
3. Can you be more green about the way you do business? Can you resist printing off documents, recycle, travel in a greener way?
4. Look for opportunities: startups especially can go into high growth during a recession, some of the reasons being: because there is less competition, finance may be cheaper, and you’ll start up lean and motivated.

Here are some more ideas:

Guy Kawasaki suggests testing out your service from the point of view of a prospect or customer and has other helpful pointers.

Robin Grant offers Five social media New Year’s resolutions for your business.

Bill Murphy, managing director of BT Business, looks at small business technology for 2009.

Give your business a kick start in 2009 with these straightforward business practices.

1. My HTC TyTN II

OK, so it’s hardware, but it enables me to be part of the mobile social Web: I can check email, read my RSS feed, use Twitter and surf the Web for information whenever I want, wherever I am.

2. Wordpress

Having a blog (or blogs) is essential to take part in the huge conversation that is the blogosphere, and to follow up and give your own spin on current trends and topics of interest. Wordpress is my favourite blogging tool. It has some great features and is perfectly adequate to base one’s whole website on – especially for an individual or small business. I recently converted Reach Further’s 6-year-old e-learning blog, Periodic Fable, from Blogger into Wordpress.

3. Drupal

Drupal is a ‘quick’ way to create websites with lots of social features. As it is open source software, there is a helpful user community to get you going and you can choose from a variety of commercially supported options if you want a really “instant” solution.

4. Wrike

Wrike is a to do list and project management tool on the Web. It’s part of Reach Further’s “cloud”. Reasons why we adopted Wrike: we can copy Wrike in on our emails and automatically create a task in the appropriate category - and then it sends you a handy “to do” list every morning! All staff in our small consultancy can assign one another tasks, and keep track of our own and others’.

5. Twitter

I’ve posted before and will post again about Twitter. A kind of miniblogging application based around what used to be known as status messages, each message you post or read is limited to 140 characters. Via Twitter I can keep up to date with what lots of people are doing in my area (elearning, community and social media): the links and comments people post and the conversations we all have are invaluable.

6. Twitter tools

There are a lot of tools now available to help you get the most out of Twitter. Some I have tried this year include: BeTwittered (putting Twitter in my iGoogle page), Tweetlater (to schedule tweets and automate follow tasks), LoudTwitter (putting tweets in a blog) and Twitterfeed.

7. Yammer

Like Twitter, Yammer is a micro-messaging/status indicator application but it is based around a particular email domain, and is private, so you can communicate within a company or organisation

8. Google Reader

An RSS reader is another essential to keep up with the buzz. I probably subscribe to far too many RSS feeds from blogs and other sources, but scanning through them in Google reader, especially on my TyTN, is another great way to keep myself up to date.

9 Ning

I’ve been using Ning for the ELESIG community I run – bringing together academics, practitioners and researchers interested in evaluating the learner experience. It is free – but not open source. As an element of a distributed network it works very well. There are other free social networking solutions available - people are saying good things about wetpaint, which started out as a wiki but has grown into a complete (albeit wiki-based) social solution on the SaaS model.

10. The community

What’s most important, of course, in social media is the community of people who use it. It wouldn’t be much use following people on Twitter or via RSS if they weren’t saying interesting and useful things. One’s business practice can be changed overnight by reading about someone’s discovery or inspiration. Thanks, everyone!

Frederick Taylor wrote The Principles of Scientific Management in 1911. His principles became known as Taylorism. He was the original proponent of the time-and-motion study, and setting up clear workflow processes. This was developed into a process of essentially getting workers to function like a machine. His principles included:

• Develop a “science” for every job, including rules motion, standardized work implements, and proper working conditions.
• Carefully select workers with the right abilities for the job.
• Carefully train these workers to do the job, and give them proper incentives to cooperate with the job science.
• Support these workers by planning their work and by smoothing the way as they go about their jobs.

Now observers are reporting on an adaptation of these principles in “Digital Taylorism”, which aims to make workers more like computers, with tasks timed down to the nanosecond.

Digital technologies monitor keystrokes, emails, workplaces are under surveillance with an under-reported assault on privacy. Continuous monitoring and an emphasis on results takes all control away from the employee.

By digitising intellectual work practices, companies aim to get a “working knowledge” that is independent of the people involved. Individuals’ working knowledge related to their jobs may end up no longer valued if processes are valued more than expertise.

So what’s wrong with this scenario?  It can be deskilling and dehumanising. Employees who feel they are cogs in a machine will not be an engaged and contented workforce, and a process that suits one group or individual may not be the most efficient way for another to work. So it’s inflexible. And in a fast-changing situation like that faced by most businesses today, that’s the last thing management needs.

A talented and engaged workforce with the ability to solve problems and adapt, draw on, share and develop expertise and knowledge, will equip a company far better to survive the downturn. Flexible and agile workers with a variety of experience and the skills to apply knowledge and approaches appropriately are the kind of people who are needed, as well as a selection of training and professional development opportunities to leverage their potential.

I went to a seminar the other day where the speaker had a great presentation full not of bullet points in black on white but of interesting images. He’d taken a real leap into being more innovative with presentations - going well beyond “death by powerpoint” and bullet points.

Less is more in this case - the images were relevant to the speaker’s points - he spoke to us, not just reading his slides - and he’d obviously put a lot of effort into preparation.

There are a lot of reasons to overhaul your presentation style, based on recent research and best practice. Some key points are:

• Use more images - to make an emotional connection with your audience in a way 8 lines of unreadable text can’t
• Ask questions instead of giving statements - it makes the audience think about what you’re saying and remember it
• Pause, and give time for the audience to think about those questions
• Use video or charts, and colour to increase your impact - but avoid unnecessary animations and transitions
• Think “If your audience could remember only three things about your presentation, what would you want them to be?” And make sure those three things are clear.
• Keep it simple!

More helpful information:

Presentation Zen - with some great examples as well as tips

Since Reach Further is a company advising on social media, community solutions, e-business and e-learning, we deal with innovative Web applications quite often. We regularly evaluate various solutions that can help our clients save money and time. We were looking for an efficient, Web-based task and project management software when we came across Wrike. We liked  it so much that we adopted it for our own team, and we’re finding that it works very well to support our remote and flexible working practices and management of multiple projects. We find it handy to be sent an email every morning detailing our tasks for the day - and it’s very convenient to be able to update or set a task by simply forwarding an email.

Reach Further now features as a customer story on the Wrike website.

Andy Roberts recently posted an excellent comment on his blog about how not to use online communities. It’s well worth a read.  His point is that you can’t just pop into a community and use it like a noticeboard, once - especially not for what is essentially an advert.  (”You’ll all be interested in this training course/product/service …”) Online communities, networks or communities of practice are collections of people with similar interests and/or concerns, and they are very useful as a way of spreading the word and establishing your online identity. But to make a impression you must be part of the community, not just trying to take advantage of it.

Do:

• Join relevant online communities and forums.
• “Lurk” (read without posting) in the community for a while before first posting to get a feel for it.
• Reply to messages in the community, particularly if there is a request for information or advice that you can genuinely respond to.
• Offer to sponsor or advertise in a community that is particularly relevant to your area of business. It may be more effective to offer a question and answer session or to be a “resident expert” rather than paying for a banner advert of some kind.
• Offer sample products for the community to review (and accept the review they come up with - even if it isn’t all good! It’s up to you to make sure your product stands up to a test). Make such offers via the community manager or moderator, not directly to the members.

Don’t:

• Join a community merely to post adverts for your business. That will not endear you to either the community manager or the members - and they are the people you need on your side, you want them to use their influence to support you rather than against you.
• Drop in on a community once to post an advert or ask for help.
• Join a community merely to advertise your own community or website - ie poach the members (very bad form!).
• Post anything in a community which is not relevant to their main focus, eg discussing Macintosh software in a PC forum, or screenwriting in a community for poets.

Tailor-made solutions to workplace learning better reflect the needs of the workforce in today’s companies. Recent research has shown that upskilling and learning in the workplace is vital if Britain is to compete with an increasingly talented workforce in emerging countries. Elearning can play a key role in this.

Key findings of the research from the Teaching and Learning Research Programme included:

Generic solutions rarely meet exactly the needs of a particular company. As Reach Further has found when talking to clients, companies are aware that there are a lot of learning materials available but a customised solution is needed for each workplace and each worker.  A better approach is to offer personalised advice on learning and situating the learning very practically in the actual workplace and work experience of the learner(s).

The pressure of external regulation is a catalyst for increased learning, and training employees in compliance is an opportunity to introduce a raft of opportunities for staff to improve their skills and knowledge and to work together to externalise “intrinsic knowledge” - to make available to everyone in the company the knowledge that is in a limited number of people’s heads.

A focus on qualifications such as NVQs and  diplomas is out of kilter with the needs of employers and industry who want workers with relevant skills and training which generic qualifications do not necessarily offer.

Finally, employers need help to create more effective learning environments - this means both a learning culture in the organisation and the technical and skills infrastructure to support learning. Reach Further’s learning environments are welcomed because they are simple to use (eg., the Moodle virtual learning environment, open source (therefore free and inexpensive), and eco-friendly and time-saving (no travelling or hiring of conference facilities). Our learning strategies are also very practical through providing collaborative, flexible and adaptable learning opportunities as part of communities of expertise. Learning technologies can be harnessed to make technology enhanced learning opportunities available right on the employee’s desk in the workplace.