Warming up to the official start of #msloc430 Working Out Loud Week May 4-10

I’ll be here, narrating some of my own work and thoughts on this effort as we go through the week ahead. But we’re already witnessing the kind of experimentation that a short-burst work-out-loud event seems to inspire – both on Twitter and within our graduate program’s private enterprise social network. And what can happen when you do, in fact, have a safe place to share.

A couple of samples from Twitter activity that began earlier this week:

https://twitter.com/carlakarijolich/status/594607134613983232

So…yeah. There is a paper due this weekend.

Kudos to both Carla and Tracy for embracing the opportunity to see what might happen if they work (and think) out loud more publicly.

Watch the #msloc430 #wol hashtag combination this week on Twitter to track our progress and join in the conversations. We’ll be covering topics of how organizations might innovate work and learning practices using enterprise social networking (ESN) – but you may also see some work-out-loud appear in the stream from other members of our extended community, working on…well…whatever they are working on.

I am beginning to see this within the ESN we use as the online learning environment for our program. In “The Hive” – our ESN – I posted a blog post and discussion thread inviting the entire community of students, faculty and staff to work out loud with us May 4 -10 within The Hive and/or on Twitter or public blogs. I asked that they consider a couple of questions:

• What are you working on this week (May 4-10) that you want to make visible to The Hive community?
• How might you benefit from the community and/or how might your working-out-loud topic benefit the community?

(A hat-tip to Hillary Boucher of the Community Roundtable team for inspiration on these questions).

We are already beginning to get an interesting range of work-out-loud topics. Some related to graduate school work. Some not.

The Hive is a space, as one student noted about a year ago, where “learning trumps perfection” when it comes to posting. I suspect that our working-out-loud experiment within The Hive will benefit from this mentality – and the fact that community members have a history of posing questions and facilitating informal discussions about topics of interest outside of formal class activities.

What will be interesting to observe is how and where working-out-loud participants may draw the line between what is shared with a peer community they trust (within The Hive) and what they choose to push out to the wider, public web.