Green Tea Ice Cream

One thing I really screwed up on when I replaced our old intranet with an instance of MediaWiki was in not organising comprehensive staff training

• in how to use the wiki
• in basic online KM best practice
• in pretty much anything.

Effectively, I gave a few presentations, trained a few key people, shouted encouragement and threw the switch.

Big mistake.  I knew it at the time but low bandwidth and over-enthusiasm can be a deadly combination.  The consequences have been a bumpy road to widespread adoption (though that’s happening!) and the training that I’m delivering now having a necessarily strong remedial flavour.

My current “side” project is been introducing the wider use of social media platforms - Facebook, blogs, social tagging and so on - in advance of launching our own socially enabled platform before summer (more of that on another day).  This time, I’m trying to get the training in first.  But that brings up another problem - how do you focus a half day’s training when the audience a) has vastly differing comfort levels with the internet in general (or even with IT) and b) when covering any one subject in depth short-changes a half dozen other pieces of the jigsaw puzzle.

There’s no easy answer to that, not when you need your teams to be at home with social media and “Web 2.0″ as a whole rather than in any specific way.  With the first session I ran, I went for a hands-on overview, taking people through registering for del.icio.us, booking and sharing sites with each other and using sites such as Technorati (or del.icio.us) to find interesting, relevant content.  We then looked at how this content could be aggregated and shared via tools like Google Reader (and I even remember what RSS stood for!)  The second half focused on blogging, setting up a blog, discussing how a group of people could co-manage it and how the tools looked at in the first section can be deployed to keep a steady stream of interesting content and ideas going.  Was it relevant?  I hope so - all the people who took part are engaged in communcating careers information to an ever widening range of people through many different channels (and I try to be mindful of the need to keep it relevant…).

Hands-on social media for beginners in three hours - how does anyone else do it?  If I’d encountered the e-toolkit wiki first (via Beth’s Blog), I might have approached things very differently (or maybe not).  Meanwhile, at least I’m not the only person who sees wikis as an ideal entry point.  The main practical problem I encountered was the sheer volume of sign-ups I needed to get people to use (because very few of them had their own).  Oh for widespread adoption of OpenID.  And for OpenID to geta teeny bit friendlier for the non-cognescenti.