Our guest speaker was Eugene Lee, the CEO of Socialtext.com, an Enterprise Social Software Vendor. During this lecture with our group, we discussed:
1) How Business is Using Wikis: Inter-user connectivity, which is better that just adding content
2) Discussed our own activity streams through sites including twitter.com, Facebook.com, delicious.com, igoogle, RSS feeds, etc.
These sites are great because they help you avoid having to scrounge around looking for a particular bookmark, page etc. which saves you time, effort, etc.
3) Social content has radically changed our attitudes about what we need to know as well as need to share. The term “work in public” comes to mind.
4) Blogs (Socialtext, networking, signals, Dashboard, etc.) are all integrated into one environment. One has the opportunity to tag signals and show how they work together.
5) Reputation by association. Using these tools and websites will possibly improve your brand
6) “Connectidness” = having conversations all the time. At work, privacy and security may be a concern. Focus on certain subjects, eg. just for work rather than personal use. Content enables more social behavior
While I understand the use of SocialText.com, the group did have concerns which it discussed about what’s the use for all of these sites. To me, these were legitimate questions as I am not sure I’d be interested in twittering all the time or letting everyone know what I’m up to. Sometimes it’s just nice to get off the computer and have a real, live, 1-on-1 interaction with someone, either via the phone or in person.
Finally, here are a couple of Wikis which may be used in education:
And just in case you’d like to see a video on Wikis with that guy humming a catchy tune:
