I Can't Wait to Sign up for Second Life!

Seriously. When Nicole was offering to cover SL in class, I was underwhelmed, thinking SL is so three years ago and very uninteresting. But I went along with it, in part because I knew I'd enjoy the other modification on offer, the Twitter section.

The readings in preparation for class have completely turned me around. The most impactful articles were both career related - I am so fixated! The other readings and interviews were very interesting and made me more interested in checking out SL, but the news that IBM and the UK government are using SL to recruit and process recruits intrigues me. It's another way to market myself to potential employers, and I'll take anything I can get!

Looking forward to class, and trying to keep myself from signing up before then. Would that be really bad if I did?

Widget Lab

This blog post is in support of the ITEC 656 Widget lab. The lab mentions:

Using "Block Quotes"
Since many of you are referencing text from other articles, "block quote" formatting looks very professional. It's available on the formatting toolbar within Blogger. When you click on the blockquote icon, it will give you the HTML code. Put the quote between them (e.g. "This is a quote.". Be sure to put some text before and after the block quote so you can see how the will be formatted.

Here's an image:




And here's a funny video:

What's Wrong With Kids These Days?

I feel like the age old lament of where did we go wrong with the current generation is at the heart of both of our readings this week.

The sexist and ageist commentary Riley put out there made it easy for me to discount anything he has to say. I think Lessing has a good point: a classical liberal arts education is not valued in North America the way it once was. We are as a result less educated about our own cultural history. My dad is frequently horrified at how little I know of classical music and literature and blames my schooling for my gaps. Riley writes:

Whilst it may be easy to mock the utterances of hundreds of millions of bloggers
and social networking site users, the 21st century will be remembered as the
time that communication was democratized, a time where the power of a few was
replaced by the power of many.

Didn't we say that about the Gutenberg Press too? That worked out well in the long run. If we allow the big telcos to compromise Net Neutrality, and don't protect our Internet, we could now be in the golden age of democratized online communications. In the future, the fast Internet will be for huge publishing conglomerates willing and able to pay for fast throughput (much like wide print distribution of today), and the rest of our communiques rendered online equivalents of leaflets and brochures taped to telephone poles because of intentionally throttled bandwidth.

Keen's article is interesting because he looks at authority and expertise, and where those things come from. As I tweeted this week, I love that I can quickly and cheaply see what my good friends think about a topic, and also see what the NY Times, CNN and random blogger wackos are writing about it. I value the diversity of opinion, and try to keep myself from insulating myself amongst writers of a single point of view.

For instance, up until right after I'd confirmed that I was pregnant, I was pretty sure that what I wanted was loads of painkillers, hospital setting, yada yada for my birth experience. Then when all of a sudden it was going to be real, and I was really responsible for this new little human, I thought some people are really against medications for childbirth. I started doing a bit of reading, and found that when you have an epidural, you're effectively paralyzed from the waist down. That's not cool. So I kept reading, and found a lot of reasons, largely selfish ones, for choosing natural childbirth (at least that's the plan, if all goes well). If I didn't have access to all of this diversity of opinion, I might not have found it so easy to come to my own decision and feel like I really owned it.

So I don't buy that the Internet makes you stupider - I think it's a lot of other stuff, cultural, curricular, community related things - and it, like Twitter, is what you make of it. You can hang out in the ghettos of myspace and nexopia, and compare notes on your drug consumption, or you can participate in a community of ideas and thought.

Where do you find intelligent and thoughtful discussion on the Internet? Let's have some link love! My bookmarks are available at http://delicious.com/xxcaro - be warned that there are a lot of childbirth and breastfeeding links there, if that's going to make you uncomfortable. My bookmarks don't necessarily contain only intelligent and thoughtful discussions, but I've bookmarked them for some reason or another...

Homework is Hard!

That is, it's hard to complete efficiently. If I just read the articles, thought about them, took some notes, did the assignments, wrote about them, it would be easy. But this evening I've spent three hours bouncing back and forth between the readings, my resume and LinkedIn profile. Oh and Facebook and Twitter, but that's more just my own little attention deficit problem more than anything.

The readings are too relevant and helpful to me right now, about to set off of my next job search! I never thought I'd write that either. It's just distracting - I'm so forgetful now that if I don't do something right away, I'm worried that I won't ever do it. So I read Guy Kawasaki talking about how to use LinkedIn, and I feel I have to run off and implement what I like of his ideas (a lot!) in my profile right away, like making more information public and searchable.

One of Guy's tips reminded me that I have had LinkedIn used on me while interviewing a prospective employee. He'd looked up my profile and realized we were from the same part of the world. I knew that from his resume, but I was a little surprised that he knew it too! Since then, I've started doing a bit more online reading about prospective hires, but when I find unprofessional info, like a goofy public Facebook profile, I try not to let it affect my judgement of the person too much.

The Fast Company Brand Called You article is a great reminder that I need to work on defining and capturing my brand - I recently signed off an email to an old friend (who works in public sector IT in the region where I want to work, so it's important to get a bug in his ear) saying to "keep me in mind if you run into anyone looking for a generalist geek/communicator extrodinaire." I don't think that's quite it, but it's a start at a label for myself.

I was happy to re-read Penelope Trunk's piece on networking, as it hearkened back to a classroom discussion we'd had about the need for humor. Trunk writes it's not necessary to be witty, but to be nice and a good listener, to do some good networking. We were talking about humor in the context of blogging, but I think this translates well to blogging, as a way to network: if your blog posts are respectful and well written, and they show that you're paying attention to your blog topic/subject, they are going to be more interesting and valuable to the reader. (Trunk isn't blogging at Yahoo anymore, but you can catch up with her on her own site. She reminded me as well that I need to be commenting on non-school related blog posts as a way to increase my brand visibility. It's just a bit tough right now, because I'm supposed to be doing homework!

This is a bit off topic, but reading the Get More Out of Conferences piece left me looking around for the heavy use of Twitter at conferences these days...and then I realized it was written in 2007. Guess they hadn't heard of Twitter yet! (Ok, it's mentioned, but only as a post event tool)

So, the readings this week, all of them, have been really useful and inspiring. I'm frantically bookmarking the really good stuff in case we lose access to the readings after the course ends. And of course, I'm hoping that I'll remember why I bookmarked them!

What do you think your personal brand is? How are you promoting it? What do you think mine should be saying?

Photo credit Alessandro Pucci

Even more about trust

It's interesting that something as old fashioned as trust keeps coming up as the theme for me in a course on social networking. Or maybe it's predictable?


The way I read our ITEC656 readings is by opening a new tab for each reading, and then reading each tab, starting from the right (in effect, reading from the bottom of the list to the top). So I read the older How Many Reviewers... article about Yelp before reading Review Site Yelp Draws Some Outcries of its Own this evening. As I was reading the first article, I was remembering that I'd read of some very fundamental criticisms of Yelp somewhere, and I hoped that this would be addressed.



I was glad to see the trust issue addressed in the second article (which I think I'd read previously). It sounds like Yelp has a lot of potential, but they need to work out a policy where the readers, reviewers and reviewees are confident of the accuracy of the posts, and have a recourse when they feel something has been done unfairly.


Probably something with some transparency would do the most good. I'm thinking of the moderating and meta-moderating system using at Slashdot.org where readers moderate comments about news articles, and other readers rate (meta-moderate) the moderations, as a check that someone's not being overly subjective in their moderations. I think it works pretty well, or it did back in the day when I spent a lot of time reading comments. Perhaps something similar would work for Yelp. It works because it's fairly transparent and people understand how it works, whereas the Yelp system sounds like it's shrouded in mystery.



Trust is required for social media to work: I need to trust Facebook to not sell too much of my personal information before I will join, I need to trust my friends that I add to my profile to not spam me or abuse my declaration of our relationship, and I need to trust the reviewers I read on Amazon (I don't use Yelp) that they are real uninvolved consumers rather than vendors or manufacturers.

I've made purchasing decisions purely based on reviews posted to Amazon - that is, negative reviews have turned me off of an item, if I feel the issue reported is important to me. Funny though thinking about it: I am not as easily swayed by positive reviews. I think I may intrinsically be not trusting the good reviews as easily as I trust the negative ones.

What online service do you trust, or not?

(Photo credit HG Rules)

Post full o' Love

My classmates and I are learning about blog post tags and giving each other link love. I'm delighted to discover the wonders that exist in Google Insight, where you can learn about popular search terms people are using.

My wondrous classmates include:

• Brontislava
• Samar
• Heather
• Lauren
• Jackie

I'm going to have some fun with some labels for this post now... See below...

It's all about Trust

Yesterday at work, a programmer im'd me to let me know there were problems in a system for which she is responsible. I thanked her, and informed my staff of the problem being a known problem, so they didn't call her and bother her while she's working to fix the problem.

A little while later, she im'd me again to let me know that the problem had been fixed and that everything should be working. Again, I thanked her and updated my staff.

A year or two ago, she wouldn't have thought to reach out to me to highlight a problem in her system - I think because she didn't know what I'd do with that information, and she didn't realize I'd work to protect her while she's working on the problem. We have a trusting relationship and I really value that.

The Communities of Practice article talks about how knowledge sharing won't happen without trust. I couldn't agree more. I've carefully cultivated my relationship with her, and many other programmers and administrators in our department, so that they feel like they can trust me to tell me the truth about what's going on in their systems.

I was so effective in building a relationship with one of my coworkers that he was really offended when he heard from a third party that I was pregnant - he expected to have heard it directly from me:

Coworker: I hear you have news

Me: Well, what have you
heard?

Coworker: That you're spawning!

Me: That is
true. You saw my announcement on Facebook right?

Coworker:
Facebook? Bob told me at lunch.

Coworker: I'm hurt. I thought we
were tight!

Me: We are!

I'm not sure our relationship is going to be the same going forward. He's been distant and slow to respond to me lately. I hope we don't return to our previous state of "fragmented knowledge networks" as we had been previously.

Speaking of trust, I'm not thrilled to read the Hansell article about Google turning my inbox into a social network. I disagree that the people I email most frequently are the people who are most important and close to me. Classmates are a great example - we are constantly emailing back and forth, but I honestly (sorry guys!) don't want their messages to be placed more prominently than the rare but cherished email from my sister or grandmother. They're not big writers and I always open messages from them first when they appear. If they do implement something like this, I hope it will be something I can turn off. Since the article is from 2007, perhaps it ended up in the bitbucket of interesting ideas.

The article does raise the interesting question of how we trust our web mail provider to be a bit more tight lipped about our personal data than a social networking site. A friend of mine told me recently that her Hotmail account has been "enhanced" with some sort of personal profile web page - I think it must be the Windows Live Profile - and without realizing it, she had uploaded photos to this profile page. Her husband alerted her to what had happened. They weren't problematic photos to be sharing, but she didn't realize she was doing it - and I think she now trusts her Hotmail account and Windows software a little less for sharing information she definitely wasn't expecting to be shared.

How has trust or lack thereof affected your ability to share information at work?

Social Capital

These readings got me thinking about so many things! The Gladwell article on Six Degrees of Lois Weinberg inspired me to update my LinkedIn profile, where I am connected with many of my weak links, and start emailing them to make sure everyone knows that I’m relocating in a year and will be looking for work. I’m thinking of sending a link to the article along with these messages, as a gift and food for thought for those who may not have read it yet.

In Six Myths About Informal Networks, Cross, Nohria and Parker write that “engineers and scientists were roughly five times as likely to turn to friends or colleagues for information as to impersonal sources.” This immediately rang true in my mind (though of course I'm not an engineer nor scientist, just a geek) – in my workplace, the people I rely on for assistance are the ones I consider friends.

However, it also occurred to me that the people I like and consider friends in my workplace are largely people who I feel are my equals in terms of dedication to our mission and work. Those co coworkers I don't consider friends or at least friendly, I go to with problems as a last resort, and they have become coworkers of last resort in my mind because of their general unwillingness to be helpful and sometimes, unfortunately, due to their lack of knowledge. I am often, as predicted in the article, closer with people similar to me in age, though oddly not in gender – I think that’s just a function of there not being many women working in IT from which to pick.

I run a service desk in a medium sized IT department: we are the customer facing side of the organization, and when there are problems with systems, infrastructure or applications; our customers call my staff and me to let us know they are having problems. My staff and I have the responsibility to identify and then notify the person in charge of the problematic system. Because of the complexity of our systems, the initial diagnosis is often tricky. With some programmers and administrators quick to say it’s not my problem, we sometimes have to provide proof of the cause, or cajole them into reviewing logs on their systems before they investigate possible problems.

In The People Who Make Organizations Go – or Stop, Cross and Prusak discuss how informal networks can help a company function, and a few roles (central connector, information broker and boundary spanner). They present these networks as a new way of operating – I’m not sure they’re right about them being new, as the cliché “It’s not what you know but who you know” probably wouldn’t be the chestnut it is, if it were just us Gen Xers and Millennials that started forming and using informal networks in the workplace.

In my workplace, we have some substantial internal boundaries, due to various past events, leadership differences and restructuring. Across those boundaries, wariness and mistrust is more common than collaboration. Some of my colleagues who have worked for the organization twice as long as I have don’t know the names, let alone roles and skills, of people on the other side of those boundaries.

I’m not sure if I’m a central connector or an information broker – I lean towards the former, but arguments could be made either way – but it’s a part of my work that I really enjoy. I think I’m effective at it partly because of my nature as an extrovert and partly because management largely supports me in what I do. A year ago, a newly hired executive started telling anyone in our IT group “we all work for the service desk,” predictably winning my support!

However, regardless of how you label how I do my job, when I approach programmers and administrators, more than a few will good naturedly say “Uh oh, here comes the service desk,” essentially inviting me to interrupt whatever they are doing to let them know about a problem with one of their systems. More often than not, I’m just stopping by to gather information or say hello, but for those who get what I do and respect my connection with our customers, it makes my work easier and more pleasant.

These days, coworkers come to me with a wide range of requests, knowing that while I don’t really run any particular system nor am I a programmer, I do usually have a good idea of who can answer their question or fix their problem. I’ve noticed that lately, my coworkers have even started coming to me with questions about things outside our IT department, such as HR and other organizational policy. Because I have built good relations outside of our group, I can usually direct them to the right place.

I will be sorry to leave! In a short time, I’ve built a great network of people here I know and trust, and I’m dreading not only abandoning them, but rebuilding my network at a new organization, and making all the gaffes and faux pas that I need to make to learn my way around. I hope I will feel so connected and trusted so quickly in my next position.

First Post: Academic Integrity Pledge

Hello readers! I am a student writing this blog for a class.

On my honor, all posts on this blog are my own.