It is International Working Out Loud week. Which is serendipitous, as it coincides with my usual routine of a) having a lot of half-baked ideas about how to tweak the course I teach that begins in January (#msloc430) and b) waiting until the last possible moment to put it all together.
So here we go again.
My goal this week is to bring msloc430.net closer to completion. The site is my first attempt to put out a centralized class blog that syndicates student blogs as well as other interested “open” participants – practitioners or students from outside my class who wish to contribute their thinking or work products.
The “work product” bit is something that I really want to address this week. In the course, students work on potential innovations for leveraging enterprise social networks (within organizations or extended organizations) to do work or work-related learning differently. After exploring different models of doing work or learning in networked environments – for example, crowdsourcing, personal learning networks, MOOCs, communities of practice – students think about combining and tweaking these models to create something new. For example: What would a model of learning look like that combined and crowdsourcing and personal learning networks?
The bit that I want to work on this week is defining a template or some recommendation on how we might describe these new models. What I’d love to end up with is a growing list of new ideas that integration different existing models of work and learning. But it should be more than just a list of combinations; it should define and describe a new “model” in a way that might be useful for practitioners who are interested in adopting it.
How much detail is best for that use case? And are there examples that use visual representations (as well as some text) that might be fit for this purpose?
Jeff Merrell 
Interesting project Jeff – if you are open to some collaboration with me .. . we might get an interesting project going.
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Tell me more! Yes, would in interested in collaborating. I still do have to work out some bits related to how this fits with my class structure (modifications based on lessons learned from last year). But it all needs to come together by late December.
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I think of working out loud as an amplifier for other structures such as CoPs and virtual teams. It’s like having a meeting in a radio broadcast booth instead of in a conference room. Your intended audience will still be there because they know it’s a regularly scheduled program, but you will also pick up listeners who were just cruising down the highway hitting the scan button and happened to stumble across something interesting to them.
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Great analogy, Dennis (and no surprise, coming from you). What I really like about it is that it takes out the tension created by the feeling that you MUST listen into all the stations, and absorb it all. Cruisin’ is much more enjoyable. 🙂
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