Recently, I went to a very interesting session at the Berkman Thursday Blog group. Luis Villa presented some of the new tools and learning environments that are part of the H20 Project at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Their site summaries the goal.
“These projects seek to answer the surprisingly difficult questions of what to do with a classroom once it is wired and how to help teachers, unobtrusively but effectively, inspire and lead their students through the use of networked technologies, fostering online intellectual communities with innovative tools that fundamentally differ from existing educational systems.”
From what I saw, there seems to be much potential for business applications. This should not be surprising as learning and knowledge sharing is a new success factor in business, as well as the classroom. I continue in their words:
“Our vision is to encourage the growth of a more open set of intellectual communities than those spawned by the traditional university system. In particular, we focus on the ideal of introducing inventive methods of interaction to allow these communities to form in new ways.”
This is exactly where business in moving to, more open collaboration. And the good news is that you can also use these tools inside the firewall to promote collaboration within your organization, such as IBM has done with tools that follow the same general theme found in blogs, transparency combined with searchable archives. See IBM’s Social Software Initiatives: Blogs, Wikis, Tagging, and More – Part Three- Internal Applications.
They have a number of tools but the one that excited me the most was the H20 Playlist. These lists are inspired by the wikipedia, iTunes, and del.icio.us and they offer a shared list of readings and other content on a topic of intellectual interest. This could be a course syllabus, but is certainly not limited to this use.
Anyone can create a playlist. The top three when I looked at the site were on Web 2.0, Books on Hurricanes, and Poetry Basics. The first one, officially called “UDL and Web 2.0: Confronting the Drunk Librarian” has a comprehensive list of content related to Web 2.0. These playlists have more structure than del.icio.us. There can be sub-sections and annotations. When looking at a playlist you can also see links to playlists:
- by the same author
- that influenced this one
- derived from this one
- with the same items
- with the same tags
The playlist concept would be a great personal and enterprise knowledge management tool with lists of great proposals, deliverables, etc. around specific topics or work efforts. You can also follow the above threads to see who is working on similar issues and the challenges they face. You can also see the most influential and most viewed playlists among other features. You can subscribe to an RSS feed for a playlist and also send a playlist to a colleague.
I think this tool really captures the spirit, openness, and large potential of Web 2.0 or whatever we want to call it. I would add it to the poster children of web 2.0 I wrote about earlier, More on Web 2.0: Some Poster Children and Why. They also have a Berkman Geekroom blog for those interested in the technical aspects.
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