Social Networking Providers

If your assocation has decided to incorporate an internal social network (“white label network”) — a network that resides in your Web space, attached to your Web site and usually connected to your AMS, as opposed to FaceBook, LinkedIn, and other publicly-available systems — then you’ll want to get your hands on this new white paper from Socialfish.

Maddie Grant and Lindy Dreyer have pulled together a great starting point for anyone considering implementing a system. Drawing from interviews with key vendors, the 50 or so page document summarizes the companies and their systems, with details about the features, backend structures (important to make sure members will be able to access the system and you’ll be able to provide it), pricing models, and contact information.

They intentionally didn’t provide one of those checkmark charts, but you might decide to create your own in order to sort through the narrative comments.

And keep in mind that these are vendors Socialfish knew to contact — rather than a comprehensive representation of all available vendors and systems. Keep your eyes and ears open to any other companies you hear about, because this is not a complete list. The white paper provides a good model for the sorts of questions you can ask to begin exploring those companies.

More than that — make sure you have done your homework! You won’t know what you’re looking for if you don’t know what you need.

It’s like ordering at your favorite restaurant — you could order everything on the menu (it all sounds so good, right?!), but that gets expensive and you’ll be full before you get through everything.  Going in with an idea of “what you’re hungry for” will help you narrow your choices and make the best decisions.

Get your copy of the white paper here: http://socialfish.org/wp-content/downloads/socialfish-vendor-whitepaper.pdf

Busy Strategizing

Though all has looked quiet on the surface, it’s been very, very busy behind the scenes at the aLearning Blog. Here’s what’s been going on: aLearning: A Trail Guide for an Association’s eLearning Strategy.

Yes. A book. A book about three seemingly disparate things: Associations. Strategy. eLearning.

It’s the book I wish I’d had when our association headed into online learnig — and me, with experience developing elearning! So I can imagine how lost many association execs and learning professionals feel when they need to sort it all out.

No wonder so many associations lack a workable elearning strategy, as Jeff Cobb discovered in his newly-released report. His blog summarizes the issues very well. I agree with his advice:  ”…start viewing e-learning as s strategic part of your mission and your business and begin treating it like the substantial, long-term asset it could become.”

 aLearning: A Trail Guide for an Association’s eLearning Strategy will be available in 3-4 weeks. From lingo you need to know, to deciding whether an LMS is necessary for you or not, to conducting needs assessments and scans, including deciding what you need to offer and the best modalities for each topic (yes, Learning 2.o is discussed), all the way through to estimating costs, issuing an RFP and selecting a vendor — this book includes activities, charts, examples, and a case study to help you work through each step in the process as you go.

You’ll end up with  more than a workable (and flexible) strategy — you’ll have covered some essential steps necessary for creating your business plan as well.

If you’d like more info on the book, please e-mail me directly. Watch for more here soon!

Learners Forget

Okay, I’ll confess up front I can’t find the article, but we’ve seen the data that discusses how much learners forget as soon as they walk out the door (or close the asynchronous course), and how much more they fail to retain over time.

So we help them plug the holes with Web 2.0 — or my new favorite reference to these online tools, Social Learning — so they can connect with each other for answers, update their personal learning environments by blogging or podcasting or capturing their new knowledge on their wikis, or saving the links to their social bookmarking sites…. right?