Although Boston, Austin and Silicon Valley are home to both companies and personalities considered to be heavyweights in the Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, Social Business, Technology, Open Leadership, Social Learning and Social Media spaces, — phew — I’d like to introduce you to Vancouver – or, as I’d like to rename it, Vancoolver. Although biased, I truly believe there is something in the water at the home of the 2010 Winter Olympics. Let’s start first with the companies. Invoke Media (makers of Hootsuite) Ryan Holmes et al are ahead of their time. The social media dashboard juggernaut app known as Hootsuite is used by the NBA, Fox and even the White House. They build other web-based apps too, and there’s no telling what they’ll dream up
social Archive
While I was enjoying a separation from the external world of social media this past summer, George Siemens of Athasbasca University, authored a very stirring if not controversial post entitled “Losing interest in social media: there is no there there“. After finally dusting off my mental cobwebs and getting around to reading articles, research and blog posts that I missed over the summer, George’s post was, by far, the one that got me thinking the most. At over 80 comments strong, (mostly professional, some venomous) it seems to have ignited a rather distinctive debate. Is social media simply used to emote, distribute, vent and network or is it also used to enhance the knowledge base and thus to further the cognitive depth of society? Is it substantive?
Dear Mr. Machado, Your story is heart-warming. Thanks so much for taking the time to write the email, sharing your story, and posing your question about a ‘connected learning’ environment. In the spirit of collaboration, I’ve taken the liberty of responding to your request via this blog posting versus another email, but have kept you anonymous. First of all, congratulations to you and your wife on 13 years of marriage. That is fantastic given today’s world of Arnold Schwarzenegger. I’ve had the benefit of being in both profit and not-for-profit education arenas and know all too well the predicament you face. You want to bring a ‘connected learning’ platform to fruition, yet, you do not have the funds or staff to implement one overnight. Perhaps
Dear Mr. Pontefract, I would like to know your opinion on a few problems I´m facing in my E-learning 2.0 project. I know that you are probably very busy at the moment and one thing you can do is to “delete” this e-mail but I will try to tell you a short story about me that hopefully will help me to win your attention for a few minutes. Storytelling is the only resource I have to try to communicate my message and add value to it, so here is the story… I was born and raised in a working class neighborhood in South America. Since I was little I knew that I would be a teacher, I had the opportunity to go to a good