According to Shirkey that is the thesis for his book Here Comes Everybody. The ways that people come together in ways they couldnt before. I posted one other talk by Shirkey below so I wont integrate the video, but this is where he states his thesis for the book. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J80PE1h9OuA
While Shirkey's book gives a lot of great examples I went searching on the web for specific workplace applications. With the Net-Gen workers coming up one might expect them to use the same tools they have grown up using for work purposes.
For example: http://www.brandon-hall.com/workplacelearningtoday/?p=45 . In that site, the McDonald franchises use social networking to solve the "case of the buns that wont rise." In this case, one franchise has buns that wont rise and post it in a social net work and others then chime in they have the same problem. They finially figure out the why. Before social networking this would be much more difficult.
Another example using social tools for workplace is linkedln. I've resisted joining for a while but finally started my network today as an experiment to see how it works this semester. Anyone want to network with me there?
Still another example of social networking affecting or maybe more importantly being integrated with business is ebay. Without the seller/buyer rating (nothing more than social feed back) it might have affected the success of the business itself. While I cant speak for everyone, I know I look at the seller's rating before I buy from them. If they have poor ratings I dont buy. In this way it helps keep the quality and expectation of the products sold on ebay.
Ok, this is a start of examples of using the internet for social learning. Anyone want to add other examples? I'm open to any experiments on internet learning on here as well. Ideas?
I can't see in your post now what made me think of this, but a classic study about the value of distributed networking and/or cognition looked at photocopy repair people and how they worked. I remember hearing about it in grad school, but it didn't make it into my database. John Seely Brown (presumably who had done---or written about---the work that I remembered wrote about it in Growing Up Digital.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.usdla.org/html/journal/FEB02_Issue/article01.html
Sadly, he doesn't cite the study, that I remember hearing about or reading, but it's pretty interesting. Look for "anthropologists" on the page above.