An #msloc430 Working Out Loud Week May 4-10

We’re experimenting. May 4-10 will be working-out-loud week for graduate students in MSLOC 430, the course I teach covering enterprise social networks, work and learning.

On Twitter, watch the #msloc430 #wol hashtags.

Here’s how we’re set up.

The main topics

The course is part of the Master’s Program in Learning and Organizational Change at Northwestern University. Graduate students are all working professionals who are exploring, with me, the potential impact of ESNs on how we think about work, change and learning in organizations.

To do so, we ask ourselves questions like these:

How might innovations coming out of open, networked courses – including MOOCs – change the way we think about leadership development in organizations?

How might crowdsourcing be used as part of an open course? Or open design processes (think Open IDEO)? Or working-out-loud?

What might virtual communities-of-inquiry teach us about approaches to project team collaboration or continuous professional development?

Why these questions?

When we look for new ideas that leverage ESN technology to truly transform the way we work and learn, we see two things:

• Innovations addressing how we work or solve work-related problems coming from business and management practitioners – like working out loud, idea jams, crowdsourcing, and open design.
• Innovations addressing how we learn coming from education or organizational learning practitioners – like MOOCs, connected courses, virtual communities of practice and communities of inquiry.

Our goal is to think about these two streams of innovations as one. To explore the potential innovation that comes from criss-crossing domain boundaries.

The schedule

The current class meets for an intensive, on-campus session May 7-9. We go all day (and into the evening) on May 7 and 8 and a half day on May 9. That time period will be our most active working-out-loud period as we consider the topics noted above and begin to work on potential new innovative ideas (i.e., what might happen if we mash up open design and cMOOCs?).

Look for some of us to get started and active beginning May 4.

The networks

We have layers.

An enterprise network: All of our graduate students have access to The Hive, our implementation of Jive ESN software for teaching and learning. It is a private community for 220+ graduate students, faculty, staff and alumni.

Students enrolled in MSLOC 430 as well as any other community members interested in our working-out-loud week can work-out-loud within The Hive.

An open network: Our network of collaborators, friends, fellow practitioners on Twitter, blogs and LinkedIn.

I’ll be working-out-loud from here and joining in on Twitter. Working-out-loud about working-out-loud.