You may think I’ve been unusually quiet recently, but I’ve been diverting my energies into other channels, including a guest spot at Simply Communicate a site that collates advice, toolkits and templates covering every aspect of internal communication inside organisations.
Here is a taster:
Internal blogging can give us:
The ability to get to know our colleagues as people and individuals encouraging give and take.
An easier way of building networks of like-minded or useful people.
An easy way to find out what colleagues are working on (and joining the dots with our own work).
An easier way of finding out what people extracurricular interests and skills are (and harnessing them).
The ability to scan the internal environment, take a reading of the organisation’s mood, and spot and pre-empt issues.
An easy way to get a rounded sounding on ideas and test out theories or approaches – both by yourself by beginning to articulate ideas for the first time, and with others as a community of interest which helps to test and build the idea.
And congratulations to vblogger of the month, Casey Leaver, for getting the most views in the video blog series on “What YouTube taught me” for Getting abreast of your health.
Wonder why videos with sperm and breasts in the title got the most attention?
This summer we asked everyone in the team to pitch ideas for quick, finite, projects. They had to:
Support at least one of the org’s strategic aims
“Change, create and innovate” (Ian likes a nice cheesy slogan.)
Which is why I am currently pulling together a focus group of 14-17 year olds so that we can consult them on what is cool.
Probably not the word ‘cool’ as another colleague has already pointed out.
The idea is to showcase academic knowledge and expertise, thus proving that we are a ‘proper university’ through quick and dirty films to upload on You Tube.
So far, so good. The info has to be visual, that’s a given. But it also has to be something forwardable, blogable, viral. And that’s where our teen consultants will hopefully come in (we are sweetening the deal by offering training and participation in production if they are interested).
We want the films to be facebooked, myspaced, bebo-ed, forwarded and whatever else they get up to. But they have to be good enough – otherwise we look like a try-too-hard uncle.
Doing well on recruitment – but borderline terrified about what to do with 10-15 teens when I get them here. So – this is a brainstorm.
Get them to show us the best that are currently doing the rounds and explain why they are good.
Present them with a set of suggestions and allow them to sneer at them.
The Open University has launched a YouTubeTM Channel with over 300 videos to extend its commitment to broadening access to education. YouTube is the leading online video community that allows people to discover, watch and share originally created videos.
OUView went live yesterday [Thursday]. Video taken from OU courses is available on the OULearn Channel and features household names such as broadcaster Sir David Attenborough and inventor James Dyson. Videos cover subjects from arts and history to science and nature, in bite-sized chunks of 2-3 minutes each.
OULife is a channel for the OU’s staff and students to upload their own videos – from graduation ceremonies to video blogs. The launch includes a series of video blogs where OU staff and students talk about what they’ve learnt from YouTube.
Here is my contribution “Wot I learnt from YouTube”.
My colleagues Stuart Brown and Jed Cawthorne have pointed me in the direction of this post, and it certainly chimes with some of the amorphous and ongoing debate going on here.
There’s a lot of tinkering going on using Facebook and a variety of other Web 2.0 tools – but as yet only a nascent framework for how it all pulls together.
The benefits of some of the individual projects are clear – for example a “What OU courses have I done/am I doing?” application for Facebook could help students to support each other peer-to-peer within a cohort who may never meet face to face. The argument for students is an easy one though. And besides which, in the context of this job outside my remit.
Looking at how it relates to staff is another matter. You could argue the same benefits with a dispersed workforce: 40o0ish people nominally based in Milton Keynes, 7000 Associate Lecturers (our terminology for tutors) across the country and substancially more still in the 13 Regional Centres. But then that comes down to having the right applications to achieve the right things.
Which is where you run slap bang into the argument about using official data (to fuel such applications) outside the Firewall and on a service run by a third party provider….
The bit that intrigues me generally though, is the profile system – this links into my trombinoscope/staff directory thinking which is as applicable here at the OU as it was at Warwick. This is where I think the real gold is in the way that Facebook works. But it’s still only the principle, rather than the specific tool, that interests me.
So, potentially over to Stuart and his CIPR Diploma Project, to investigate..
Another thought: how long will it be until Facebook starts licensing closed versions to organisations in a similar way to Google and Multimap? Is it worth building an all-singing all-dancing staff directory that works on the same principles as Facebook if there’s a possiblility of using the tool itself?
Finally, a work version would avoid the issue of determining the varied permissions on your embarrassing party photos!
I’d like to make it clear from the start that this is a completely uninformed view as I have seen none of the current series of I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here.
But I was utterly astonished when I heard that Lynne Franks was going to be taking part.
“I’m going to stab her in the middle of the night and take hers,” Janice growled. “You don’t think I’m kidding, I’ll eat her t**s. I’ll fry up those big old boobs.”
Janice Dickinson (who apparently used to be a model) on Lynne Franks last night.
But then I googled “Lynne Franks” this morning, and it became clear that this is part of a sustained profile raising campaign. Rarely is she mentioned the the media without her key message – her SEED venture.
So, as long as she can keep her cool in the jungle, not so daft after all….
You may think I’ve been unusually quiet recently, but I’ve been diverting my energies into other channels, including a guest spot at Simply Communicate a site that collates advice, toolkits and templates covering every aspect of internal communication inside organisations.
Mainly, it needs tags but nobody can be arsed (and multi-accounts is NOT the answer)
This summer we asked everyone in the team to pitch ideas for quick, finite, projects. They had to:
I’d like to make it clear from the start that this is a completely uninformed view as I have seen none of the current series of 
To misquote Madness.
And