ap of Butterfly’s Wings in Social Media Sets off Hurricane in Search for Business

I'll be trying out Daniel Eliasson's BlogPing plugin for Joomla over the next few days.  It sends a ping to popular blog search and aggregation sites (in fact you can add the URL of any site that offers this service) anytime there is new content in a particular section of your site.  I used a truncated version of the list here:

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://rpc.newsgator.com/
http://rpc.pingomatic.com
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://www.newsisfree.com/RPCCloud
http://www.newsisfree.com/xmlrpctest.php

I'll be checking back in after it runs for a while with my reactions.

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I've been doing some research on how Worthington Industries used storytelling to improve it's safety culture.  In the research, I ran across the OSHA acronym DART (Days Away, Restricted, or Transfered).  It's a reporting method that provides a pretty comprable number regardless of company size.  Here's a bit on how it's calculted:

Days Away, Restricted, or Transferred (DART) Rate: The DART rate
includes cases involving days away from work, restricted work activity,
and transfers to another job. It is calculated based on (N / EH) x (200,000)
where N is the number of cases involving days away and/or restricted
work activity, and/or job transfer; EH is the total number of hours worked
by all employees during the calendar year; and 200,000 is the base
number of hours worked for 100 full-time equivalent employees.

For example: Employees of an establishment, including management,
temporary, and leased workers, worked 645,089 hours at the worksite.
There were 22 injury and illness cases involving days away and/or
restricted work activity and/or job transfer from the OSHA-300 Log (total of
column H plus column I). The DART rate would be (22 / 645,089) x
(200,000) = 6.8.

The DART rate is now used instead of the Lost Workday Injury and Illness
(LWDII) rate.

FROM: www.safex.us/_data/resource/DART%20Rate.pdf

Yesterday, I had the privileged to sit in on a professional development workshop for Assistant Principals provided by CARPE-DIEM, a partnership between the NYCDOE and with the Office of Collaborative Programs of New York City College of Technology CUNY.  The workshop was taught by Mathematic Professor Estela Rojas who has been piloting "learning communities" as a key strategy to improving student retention and outcomes.  The early results of her work with City Tech freshman has been promising, improving continuance by 11% in the first two cohorts.

One the train to the workshop, I read The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age (Davidson & Goldberg, 2009), a collaboratively written report and experiment on participatory learning across online social networks [ want it? Free Kindle Edition, Free PDF, paper back click widget on right].  The report touched on how the academic establishment should, and in some cases does, support participatory learning.  However, it is clear than the hundreds of thousands of dollars spent by institutions to WIFI campuses, build tech labs, and extend the classroom into cyberspace  still largely misses the fundamental shift in learning that has taken place.  Individualized learning -- with it's focus on competition, close-end products, standardization, and hierarchical authority -- has given way to a much more social, open-ended, diverse, and flat mode of engaging information.  In short, learning institutions have not seen much fundamental change since the Middle Ages, and they've gotten away with it for centuries through the three previous information revolutions.  But the speed, extent, and power of the current revolution is a potential extinction episode for these institutions unless they wake to deeper environmental truths.

This put well into words a growing concern that the current educational institutions are failing our student most, not in the content that they do or do not teach, but in that they do little to prepare youth for the Participatory Age that is dawning.  Businesses are now growing their capacity to learn and work in participation as the central strategy to cope with the rapid and discontinuous change around then, but they lament scarcity of these survival skills in the emerging workforce.  Faced with this adapt or die, businesses will find a way to cope, even if they must build this capacity in workers themselves.  I just hope learning institutions wake to respond to this shift before it finds them sleeping in the cocoon of bureaucracy.

Much credit goes to innovators like Dr. Rojas and the authors of The Future of Learning who are working to wake the giant.

According to a January survey by AmEx OPEN, 60% of small business owners believe growing or maintaining their client relationships is the most important priority in the coming six months.  On the other hand, seven in ten owners say they will spend the same or less on growing and improving their business, reports a Februrary Discover survey.  While these figures represent an apparent contradiction, they speak to the cache-22 many small and medium enterprises (SMEs)  now find themselves in.  Their instincts are dead on: the recovery is going to take a while, so things will remain tough.  Survival means growing your audience, strengthening your brand position, beefing up your offering, and building customer loyalty, all at a time when there is little to no money to make it happen.

How can SMEs meet these priorities with no new spending?  If their strategy for gaining and retaining business is through improving "hard values" -- more and better products, greater media presence, technological innovation -- there is no way forward that's not going to take quite a bit of cash.  On the other hand, much can be done with "soft values" -- improving customer experience, quality of service, worker motivation and efficiency -- that can build loyalty in the existing client base and employ the uber-powerful marketing force of word of mouth (WOM).

I've been doing a bit of research about informal learning for the Story Clarification resource I've been working on.  (I used a story about Toyota in the original version that -- in light of the company's current PR storm -- must be replaced.)  I came across the following quote that I thought described well the criteria by which informal learning is judged (think learning webs, wikis, social networks, and communities of practice):

IBM's Steve Rae posits three gravitational forces for informal learning.

The first force is access. The learner has to know the opportunity exists, the costs are reasonable, and it fits her requirements. The second force is quality: production values, ease of use, what I was looking for. These two forces account for but 40 percent of the gravitational pull. The dominant factor is walkaway value. This includes what's-in-it-for-me, timeliness ("latency"), time savings, economic value, outside incentives, punishments for not doing it, and participation. Steve finds that these three forces can pinpoint the Achilles heel of an informal learning initiative 80 percent of the time (personal communication, 2005).

From: Jay Cross, Informal Learning: Rediscovering the Pathways that Inspire Innovation and Performance. 2007 Pfeiffer and Company. Chapter 2 available online in PDF: http://informl.com/book/chapter2.pdf (accessed 3/5/10). PDF Marked Creative Commons.

Davenport offers this insight about how knowledge workers want to work:

They generally "don't like to be told what to do, . . . work best when working with other people in social networks, and are better led by example than by explicit management" (Thinking for a Living, How to Get Better Performance and Results from Knowledge Workers, 2005 Harvard Business School Press, p. 14).

Sure pegged me.