To Tweet or not to Tweet?

They say that the capital building was all a-twitter during President Obama's February 24th speech. Some tweet gems reported in the national media included stunning commentary on the setting up of the Teleprompters.

As if we didn’t know it already, it turns out that some of what is posted on social media sites like MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter can be plain drivel.

In days past (cue nostalgic music), blogs and page postings were seen as a neat way of injecting a personal flavor into one-to-many communication.

No longer. Now, you can hire someone to post your tweets for you. That’s right, professional microbloggers are available to keep your followers posted on your whereabouts, your lunch menu, or the latest web site where you waste your time. Kurt Soller at Newsweek describes in his article Twitter, Unmasked, how famous celebs are recruiting stand-ins to keep their legions of followers entertained and connected. What? You mean that really isn’t Britney Spears sending me messages? Not likely. (According to Seller, a whole group of twitter followers was recently disappointed to learn that the tweets they had been receiving from the Dalai Lama were, um, not actually from the Dalai Lama).

As this phenomenon continues to expand, it seems everyone is getting into the act. Dell Computer reportedly has 130 Twitter feeds going out from a small army of Tweeters (Tweetsters? Twits?).This has given birth to yet another dotcom business: Twit4hire (slogan: Don’t be a twit, hire one instead). They suggest that their microblogs will communicate with your customer base as frequently as you like-- daily or even hourly.

I don’t know about you, but I can’t imagine following a brand that sends me hourly updates on their products. You’d really have to be really, really into Dell Computers or Ledo Pizza to sign up for such a service.

Not So Fast.

Frederick business owner Jon-Mikel Bailey has a different take.

"As a business owner in the web development and SEO world I find Twitter to be
incredibly useful. But, I would say this could apply to anyone in any
business category. For me, I "follow" a lot of thought leaders in my
industry on Twitter. Because of this I have access to their expert opinion
first hand, every time they post something. I have found incredibly useful
articles and connected with some very interesting and helpful people by using
Twitter daily.

The other benefit of Twitter from a business standpoint is the
exposure you can get for your company, brand, website, etc. If you post
useful information to those that follow you, you gain trust and respect, more
followers and maybe even some leads. You can also promote your website or
your blog, without pitching or selling.

I think the biggest mistake people can make with Social Media is that they jump into it with no plan of action, no strategy. Don't think of it as a game, this should be an extension of your marketing think of ways to use tools like Twitter to drive more targeted traffic to your site."

--Jon-Mikel Bailey at www.woodst.com

I am curious to see how this shakes out as it seems that Twitter has made it past the novelty stage, but like email, it could become a double-edged sword.

-Dave

Difficult Conversations

Problems aren’t generally easy to talk about – that’s part of the problem! It may be that the most important skill for people in organizations is the ability to work through difficult conversations to come to agreement and understanding.

Serious disagreements? Perceived favoritism in the ranks? Turf battles? Distrust the boss’s decision-making? Outspoken or silent resistance to authority?

Talk about it!

Having conversations about these high emotion topics doesn’t have to be difficult. In the right environment, employees with the right skills can learn to work right through the thorniest of challenges.

The right environment means a workplace where employees feel safe sharing their personal views and opinions, and are encouraged to do so. The idea is that if all of the relevant perspectives have been shared openly, decision-makers can make the very best decision. Concerns never raised have led to depressingly numerous tragedies like surgical mistakes and building collapses. Most organizations do not face situations as dire as these, but you can be sure that undiscussed problems have a real cost.

Employees who have the skills for difficult conversations will know how to manage their emotions, work together to ensure mutual respect, really listen, speak persuasively and assertively, and make collective decisions that have the ever elusive “employee buy-in.” When emotions start to run high, it’s easy to lose track of the fact that usually we all want the same thing – organizational success. If managers and employees remain calm and work their way through disagreements, when it comes time to make a decision there won’t be any surprises and all parties will be informed.

Some managers and leaders understand these things naturally, but many need some help getting there. The good news is that with some training and management attention, good communications skills are habit-forming.

-Marc

Alt-Texts

A collective sigh of relief from college students and their parents is being heard across the country.

To ease the pain of climbing tuition rates and accumulating student loans, colleges are exploring ways to cut the cost of textbooks.

As most any college student or parent will tell you, a new textbook can easily cost over $150. When taking 4 classes, a student may need to shell out $600 or more.

At Frederick Community College here in Maryland, Mick O’Leary, the Executive Director of the Library, has brought together a group of faculty and administrators to explore the use of Alt-Texts (his term).

Alternative textbooks are electronic college-level textbooks. They may be open source (free!) or low cost alternatives to the traditional printed book. Students can either download and save the electronic text (usually in a PDF format) or pay a relatively small fee to have the publisher print, bind, and ship a copy.

Naturally, there are not electronic versions of most of the printed books found in a college bookstore. Publishers have to send their kids to college, too. Switching to an alt-text will usually require a college department to sift through a rapidly increasing number of alt-texts before deciding to switch books.

-Dave


Alt-Text Web Sites
Open-Source Textbooks and Other Materials

Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources
This is a clearinghouse for information and resources on “open educational resources” (OER) and open texts. Its primary goal is to identify, create, and/or repurpose existing (OER) as open textbooks and make them available for use by community college students and faculty. The site has list of OER Web sites, and list of open textbooks that may be suitable for use in community college courses. The list is arranged by discipline and has contains links to a few hundred texts in many disciplines.

Community College Open Textbook (CCOT) Project
The Community College Open Textbook (CCOT) Project is a one-year feasibility study in partnership with the Foothill-De Anza Community College District, the Monterey Institute for Technology and Education (MITE), Rice University’s Connexions, University of California College Prep (UCCP), Flat World Knowledge (FWK), California State University System’s California Digital Marketplace, the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME), the High Tech Center Training Unit, and the Student PIRGs. The goals of the CCOT Project are to centralize critical open textbook information for use by community college professors and other interested parties and to document sustainable workflow approaches for producing, maintaining, and disseminating open textbooks. CCOT has a collection of 150 texts under review; the list itself is posted on the MERLOT site, described below.

Connexions
Connexions is an environment for developing, sharing, and publishing scholarly content on the Web. Its Content Commons contains educational materials for everyone — from children to college students to professionals — organized in small “modules” that are easily connected into larger “collections,” or books and courses. Connexions has also taken the next steps in the digital world by implementing permanent versioning: all content that has ever been placed into the Connexions repository is still in the repository. Connexions has several thousand small learning modules, and 400+ collections, covering all subjects.

Flat World Knowledge
Flat World Knowledge has text books for free online, and sells low cost supplements, including print, audio, by-the-chapter, and more. Its catalog has 27 books in business and related subjects.

Global Text Project
The Global Text Project will create open content electronic textbooks that will be freely available from a website.
It has 50 texts and other documents on variety of subjects.

Make Textbooks Affordable
This is a highly selective list from the “Make Textbooks Affordable” advocacy site in the above section. It has several dozen texts representing many disciplines, but with concentrations in math and science.

MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching)
MERLOT is a leading edge, user-centered, searchable collection of peer reviewed and selected higher education, online learning materials, catalogued by registered members and a set of faculty development support services. MERLOT's strategic goal is to improve the effectiveness of teaching and learning by increasing the quantity and quality of peer reviewed online learning materials. MERLOT has 200+ open texts in many disciplines.

The Open Knowledge Foundation Wiki: Open Textbooks List
This is a Webography of links to open text collections. It lists 17 sites, including comprehensive sites such as those described here, as well as specialized, single-topic lists.

Textbook Revolution
Textbook Revolution is the web’s source for free educational materials. This is a student-run, volunteer-operated website started in response to the textbook industry’s constant drive to maximize profits instead of educational value. TBR’s mission is to drive the adoption of free textbooks by teachers and professors.
It has 250+ textbooks and other educational documents and materials.

OER Commons
OER Commons is the first comprehensive open learning network where teachers and professors (from pre-K to graduate school) can access their colleagues’ course materials, share their own, and collaborate on affecting today’s classrooms. Open Education Resources (OER) are teaching and learning materials that are freely available online for everyone to use. Examples of OER include: textbooks, full courses, course modules, syllabi, lectures, homework assignments, quizzes, lab and classroom activities, games, and simulations. OER Commons has 100+ postsecondary textbooks on variety of subjects, as well as thousands of items on all subjects for K-12 and postsecondary.

Online Mathematics Textbooks
This one-person project lists seventy-two college university-level mathematics textbooks, course notes, and other documents. Many are legacy items.

Stellar Performance

If a job description and a paycheck were all that were required to have high performing employees, we managers could surf the net or play golf every afternoon.

Of course, it takes more than that to get the best from people.

Here is a management aid that I call the 5 Points of Stellar Performance.

1. Have clear goals or outcomes
2. Ensure proper tools and materials
3. Ensure proper knowledge or skill
4. Provide feedback on performance
5. Encourage motivation to perform (reward systems—and no penalty for performance)

Unlike some management aids, using one or two points while ignoring the others won’t help much.

For example, having all the right tools, knowledge, and skills won’t ensure high performance is there is no motivation to perform. I’d argue that while all five make good sense individually, you need to think in terms of the whole package.

Number 5 I find kind of interesting; while it’s easy to conceive of reward and incentive systems designed to encourage productivity and performance, some systems actually work the opposite way. Sometimes employees are inadvertently penalized for doing what the organization wants.

Who issues punishment for good performance? It’s not just government bureaucracies. It is possible for any organization to issue penalties for doing all the right things. Examples of how this might occur are 1) employees are chastised for taking too long with a customer 2) a transaction requires that they waste time on nonproductive activities such as executing steps in a process that add no value 3) they have to complete additional paperwork 4) someone else takes the glory for putting up the numbers (as in the regional sales manager gets the big bonus).

Say an employee is evaluated on the number of customers served, and each customer requires in processing paperwork. If the employee is compensated only on a standard work day with no incentive pay or increased hourly earnings, it stands to reason that the more customers served equates to less you are paid per customer. The more productive you are, the more stress you have, but with a relative drop in compensation for increased productivity.

This scenario may result in sloppy, incomplete, or missing customer records

It’s not always easy to construct a reward system where compensation is tied directly to performance. Most people will trade the hunter- killer thrills of a straight commission for the stability of a salary. The challenge for managers is to identify the motivation and incentive package that works for each employee.

-Dave