Reach Further

Amplified individuals are the new superheroes in organisations and networks. They are the people who embrace new tools and applications, try out new practices, experiment and make them work. Others in the organisation can then follow on behind, taking advantage of their research and expertise.

Such individuals present a huge opportunity for small business as they amplify what small businesses do really well - they establish relationships of trust, understand niche markets and are entrepreneurially agile in exploring new areas.

Amplified individuals can make up for what small businesses lack - overcoming problems of finding and retaining staff, training, access to capital, negative perceptions about small and new businesses, and limits of infrastructure.

Such people are highly social, providing social filters for massive amounts of information - they allow small business to filter information. They typically use very effectively tools such as social bookmarking and social networks - in fact networks form around such people and they are able to tap into and contribute to the communal intelligence - the “wisdom of crowds”. Find the amplified individuals in your sector and/or local business community and you have a huge benefit.

Or perhaps you aim to BE the amplified individual, providing useful information and the benefit of early adoption and experience via blogs, Twitter, networks, events, social bookmarking etc.

Andrea Saveri spoke about this at the NLAbs Social Networks conference back in summer 2008: Amplified individuals, amplified organisations: an emerging small business ecosystem (Slideshow)

Online conferences are BIG these days. Some organisations have been running virtual conferences for a while and others are just starting out, or experimenting with an online element to a face-to-face conference.   Technology has moved on a lot and there are a variety of options for online conferences and webinars, from asynchronous discussions to live audio conferencing and web-conferencing.

Some of the advantages of online conferences include:

• Cost effective - they’re generally cheaper
• You don’t have to pay for transport
• You don’t have to take the time needed to travel
• Online conferences are green and cost-effective in this downturn
• You have the opportunity to attend more conferences
• Can hear keynote speakers and practitioners you might never encounter any other way
• Can share information and experience with peers

Disadvantages include

• It’s very easy to decide you don’t really have time … or to do something else while you’re “listening”
• The networking opportunities are possibly negligible, at the most different - and possibly less significant
• You have to provide your own lunch and coffee!

I’m even attending the 2008 Elluminati Community Conference (today) for users of Elluminate.

From 4-7th November JISC is holding the  Innovating e-Learning online conference 2008 online, Learning in a Digital Age - Are we prepared? Its themes focus on the productive and energising tension between the tried and tested and the wholly innovative. e-Learning may now have established a foothold in learning and teaching, but are the demands of delivering the curriculum restricting its innovative potential? How can we plan to ensure the best possible e-enhancement of learning in the future?

Also in November the Learning Futures Festival starts - that’s run by the Beyond Distance Research Alliance as part of their 4th International Conference on  ‘Learning Futures’. This year’s event is taking the form of a festival with both online and face-to-face events throughout November, December & January.

Tuesday 21st October 11 am - noon BST. Seminar title: Mobile technologies for education in development contexts - challenging the obvious, with John Traxler, Reader in Mobile Technology for e-Learning (School of Computing and IT, University of Wolverhampton). In the seminar John will talk about his work on mobile learning in Kenya, the lessons learned and their transferability to other developing country educational contexts.

To book a place just comment on this post (We will keep the comment private if you so wish)

More info

At Reach Further it’s one of our fundamental beliefs that bringing people together helps solve problems. Our vision is “bringing people together online, to share, to work and to learn”. Whether you call it social media, social networking, Web 2.0, online communities, the blogosphere, ebusiness or any of the other buzzwords, what it’s about is bringing people together to share what they know and to solve one another’s problems in a variety of domains from elearning and education to diversity in business.

There are many people working hard to apply social media principles to the non-profit sector in working for social good - American Beth Kanter is one and David Wilcox in London is another.

One of Reach Further’s projects is a community for elearning researchers and professionals around the world. We manage the ELKS (E-learning and Knowledge-Sharing) community for the Beyond Distance Research Alliance at the University of Leicester, on behalf of the UN’s Global Alliance for ICT in Development, with partners from Sri Lanka, Chile, Uruguay, South Africa, Sweden, Italy and the UK, and members all over the world. ELKS is a global group of practitioners and researchers sharing information about how learning technologies can be used to bring education and training to all the citizens of the world, rich and poor, and to provide a vehicle for us all to learn from one another. It isn’t all about low-cost and low-tech elearning options but those are obviously crucial.

Webinars and free courses bring together academics and teachers from all over the world. Topics might range from how to use wikis so that Universities with minimal bandwidth (and minimal electricity) in Africa can collaborate internationally online, to how to use e-tivities in discussion forums as simple portable elearning objects. Our next webinar will be about mobile learning, which has revolutionised learning in places where there is no traditional IT infrastructure:

Mobile technologies for education in development contexts - challenging the obvious, with John Traxler, Reader in Mobile Technology for e-Learning, Director, Learning Lab, Conference Chair, mLearn2008 Ironbridge, Associate Editor, International Journal of Mobile & Blended Learning (School of Computing and IT, University of Wolverhampton). Date and time to be confirmed [UPDATE: Tuesday 21st October 11am - 12 noon]. Please join ELKS to find out more.

If you are a practitioner or researcher in elearning in HE anywhere in the world, or with an interest in elearning anywhere in the world, you can become a member of the ELKS community by contacting us. All we ask is that you contribute as much as you gain.

This is a post for Blog Action Day - Poverty (October 15th 2008)

Whether you’re trying to improve your work/life balance or focus on growing your business or just get fitter, setting goals is a great way to start the journey. Once you’ve set your goals it’s useful to be able to keep track of them. Ian Smith has created a useful goal tracking application on the Web. As usual for web-based applications, there’s a free version and a subscription version. Joe’s Goals

http://www.yammer.com/

One of the disadvantages of using Twitter for business is that if you want to have a closed group - perhaps to talk about a project with your project team - everyone has to set their updates to be private, and then you can’t use the same account for a general public status update.

Yammer is an application that is like the “Twitter for business”. It’s a way to share status updates with your co-workers. Within the company, and only within the company, everyone can keep in touch. Only employees with a valid company email can join a company’s network. It’s based heavily on email addresses, but that should be OK for most companies, although it’s not suitable perhaps for working with a distributed group of freelancers and associates (unless you can give them company email addresses).  I can see it being useful, but I won’t be leaving Twitter just yet as there are also distinct benefits of being part of a wider network.

Planning is well in hand for tomorrow’s Women on the Web in Leeds (17th September). This all-day conference at exciting venue NTI will bring together over 40 businesswomen. A Forward Ladies event, it is sponsored by NTI and Reach Further, who are organising it. With Meg Pickard as our keynote speaker and a galaxy of local businesswomen sharing their tips and tricks on how to use the Web to further their business, it should be an enjoyable day looking at how women can make the most of the Web for work, learning and play.

Use the Web to:

• Save time
• Save money
• Create new income streams
• Make friends and influence people!

A few spaces still left, booking is available at the Forward Ladies’ website.

On the BBC’s dot.life blog, Rory Cellan-Jones recently discussed whether or not Brits can make any money from blogging.   While there are various quotes from Ashley Norris, previously of Shiny Media who is convinced the UK situation is too small and parochial for bloggers to make money, Cellan-Jones is slightly more optimistic.

It probably isn’t  possible to replicate the success of the big US blogging companies, but there is certainly money to be made with blogging as part of a portfolio of skills, for example, for journalists and social media consultants - and, I would add, as part of a strategic online marketing policy for any business.

Blogger Patrick Altoft is quoted with some excellent advice for any blogger: what is at the heart of good and successful blogging is that: “You have to develop your own niche, you need to break news, you need to write stuff that nobody else is writing.”

Four good reasons why customers like brands to have online communities and use social media:

1. Consumers are interested in sharing their experiences – both bad AND good. People like to tell others about the brands and products they like – in one study up to 60% of those questioned said they had passed on details of a brand to up to 20 other people.
2. Customers are interested in having a dialogue directly with the companies behind the brands they buy, and want to share their own ideas on new products and services.
3. Customers like to find out what new products are coming out, and they are always keen on special offers.
4. Customers like being consulted. Businesses have direct access to their customers to ask questions, poll opinions and try things out.

Twitter is a quick messaging or microblogging service. Basically it’s like a web-based texting or short message service. You have 140 characters to say something briefly.  Your series of short messages or “tweets” becomes a record of what you are doing and thinking that other people can “follow”. Many Twitterers mainly put out “what I am doing now is…” type “tweets” and hearing someone’s on the train is not fascinating.  But if a colleague is looking at a new web app or a competitor is reading a new book on your subject, maybe it’s worth joining in and becoming a Twitter user.

It has a variety of uses that could be beneficial to your business, including:

1. Following gurus  in your field and people you admire, and even competitors.
2. Asking questions or throwing out any problems you’re grappling with.
3. Marketing and promotion to any customers who use Twitter – put out brief news and special offers, or alert people to your new web content.
4. Finding out a bit more about your contacts and facilitating closer relationships – when you give someone your business card that’s often the end of it, if you can get them to follow you on Twitter (and use Twitter wisely) then you will always be in contact with them.
5. Keeping in touch with flexible or travelling workers.

So why not see what it’s like? Sign up at twitter.com and if you’re already there why not follow me on @helenrf (http://www.twitter.com/helenrf) and let me know what you’re doing!