We have made a modest beginning to the eCube experiment. In the first month, we have had 26 posts from 10 authors besides me. Additionally, there have been 24 comments posted. So the team is participating.
As I mentioned in my previous post, eCube is an experiment in reflective learning using Web 2.0 tools. This is also an experiment to bring in a learning culture in the organization, and an attempt to solve the business need of enhancing skills of a large diverse and divergent team of instructional designers and content developers.
I started by simply creating a team blog and inviting people to start contributing to this blog. Some of the things that have worked:
- I initially invited a few people who I thought should contribute. I was also recommended some names of people who might contribute. So I quickly included them and that helped.
- I sent regular reminders to people to contribute to the blog. I created a list of potential topics that authors could write on.
- Using Google Reader, I share posts that I think might be useful to the group. I have an RSS feed of my shared items on the eCube blog.
- To initiate more participation, I have added Outbrain’s rating widget. A little widget displays the most popular posts on the blog.
- Added a link to the eCube blog on the employee portal within the firewall. This has added more traffic to the blog.
- Peer push - as authors contribute I get requests by others to be added as authors to the blog.
I am still learning to use wikis. Hopefully I will be able to integrate this experiment with the corporate wiki in the near future.
Related posts:
Michael Martin – Creating an Organizational Culture of Reflective Practice
Tony Karrer – PLE and PWLE posts
Ray Sims – Motivation for Technology Adoption by End-Users
I discovered
ratings by Outbrain and am loving it. Very simple to install on your blog, it puts an unobtrusive widget to allow readers to rate your posts. The software is still in beta stage so somethings aren't easy to find on your own. You need to write to them to get your ratings report on their site. And you need to add an extra bit of code in the widget to make the most popular posts visible on your site (add
var OB_showMP = true; as first line after script language tag).
But all in all, a great little widget to interact with readers.
Clive Shepherd writes in defense of page turners and I agree. It is not that page turners as such are boring but the way content is written and presented makes it boring. And the same could well happen to content with high level of interactivity.
To me content in any form needs to be engaging. Engaging content is more important than interactive content. I tell my team Harry Potter book is engaging, and it doesn’t have an iota of interactivity. In my personal learning environment, I read many blogs. None of them are interactive yet all of them are very engaging. Does interactivity make the content engaging? Not necessarily. I have seen many courses with interactivity for the sake of interactivity. Even interactivity needs to work towards making the content more engaging.
As I continue with my collaborative experiment eCube, I am attempting to integrate and popularize the organization Wiki. I am finding working with Wiki much harder than working with a Blog. I find Wikis more complex and less user-friendly, which sort of defeats the purpose I guess. With my blog, I find I have more control over what I want, how I want the content to appear, and linking other content in my blog. Wiki seems to present me complex codes to create a meaningful page. While I guess once I learn the ropes of Wikis I will be able to make the most of it, but for now the learning curve of the Wiki is much steeper. My worry is that my usage of Wiki will be limited to reading and not contributing.
Is it just me or are Wikis actually harder to learn than Blogs?
