The potential however is huge, especially when you are professionalizing your drawing skills. If you are confident in your drawing, a recording of a drawing with the Livescribe pen can easily be re-used to publish. Low-fi, but strong for giving insight and sharing knowledge.

A short howto:

1. Draw and record in the Livescribe journal (make sure to record sound, otherwise it will not be possible to playback the drawing session)
2. Upload the drawing to Livescribe Desktop and use a screen record tool or service (I used screenr.com) to make a screenrecord of the playback. Make sure not to record sound if you do not want to.
3. Convert the mp4 file to wmv or avi if needed (I used convertfiles.com)
4. Use a simple movie editing suite (I used MovieMaker) to speed up the playback (I did 4x) and to tweak the brightness to lose some grey lines. You could add some music as well.
5. Done. See me result below.

Any additional thoughts / applications? Would be great to automate the steps described above, but once you know how to do it, it is an easy and quick process.

For teams to work together effectively, a series of boundary conditions have to be met. Based on our own experience and combining a few existing models, we have in Future Workspaces come up with a model for team effectiveness. We use this model to analyze how well a team works together and to advize where process improvements or innovative technologies can help a team to be more effective.

Central in the model is individual readiness: the individuals in the team have to be willing and able to work together. Between the different individuals there have to be positive relationships. Other key aspects are having clear goals, clear roles & responsibilities, a common way of working, organisational embedding and strong leadership. Click on the image above to see a more detailed description of these aspects.

We are currently validating checklists for each of these individual aspects – such checklists can be used to gain a deeper understanding of the situation or to compare the situation before and after an intervention.

I am curious to hear which models you use around team effectiveness!

(cross-posted on blog.tailorable.com)

Ok, we all go through some kind of learning curve before grasping the potential of Twitter. It’s like buying new pencils: after the excitement of the beauty of the pencils is gone, you still have to determine what to draw. The same goes for twitter, as tool in the new information age.

You start with saying “on my way to work”, “heavy traffic”, “coffee is cold”. Then you start asking questions “anyone knows a good restaurant here?”, “what phone should I buy?”. You find out that nobody is answering, because nobody is following. You read @guykawasaki’s powertips and start follow a bunch of (sometimes self declared) twitter guru’s. You become addicted, because a lot is happening, you retweet now and then and people start following you. You are in.

It becomes some sort of part of your normal information space.

But then, interesting things happen. You start conversations, meet other people via twitter, ask questions and get answers, cross link people. You become Social.

And?… You also find out that there is a downside.

From nature, I have a habit of wanting to help people. So if people in my timeline ask a question, I tend to give an answer. Sometimes I put effort in getting this answer to them, by searching info or thinking about it. What I see is that allmost nobody thanks me for it. Not that I am in desperate need of compliments, or something, but I just wonder if they get too much answers, do not read mine, find the answer wrong or just don’t think they should answer.

What is your experience?

From consuming content, the web user has shifted to creating content while conversing socially about it. The media which meet these social requirements have been christened Social Media. Some examples are the sites YouTube, Facebook, Wikipedia and Twitter. Social media might have an important role in the future of knowledge management. A great benefit that many of social media possess is that they can be great at gathering, storing and spreading all sorts of knowledge. This benefit is being put to use in organizations and has the potential to become a very interesting communication channel. Knowledge management is being put to use in countless shapes and is in a constant evolving process.

As a graduate student at GriDD I am researching effects of the social media phenomona microblogging in organizations. Microblogging is a variant of blogging which allows users to quickly post short messages on the web for others to access. These messages can be restricted to a certain number of individuals, sent exclusively to a specific contact, or made available to the World Wide Web. Twitter is probably the most well known microblogging platform currently available on the web.

To find out if implementing microblogging in an organization has an effect on knowledge sharing, a pilot with the microblogging application WorkVoices has started at TriMM interactive media. I am conducting two surveys and will be hosting a few focus groups to gain the necessary insight in the motivation of the active and non-active users. The first survey has been dispersed and the responses are coming in. The second survey will be spread out in a couple of weeks. When the results are in they will be analyzed. Of course the final article will be shared!

Since API’s and RSS are really taking of, the only thing you really need to aggregate all the available information into usable datastreams is a nice programming environment. This is exactly what Yahoo Pipes is, very intuitive and easy to use, create powerful datafeeds in minutes… Check http://pipes.yahoo.com/ and our GriDD tweets RSS built with it http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=bLE24Pt23hGlFqB5McohGg&_render=rss

This very cool Google Maps mashup shows shipping movements on a global scale. Zooming in on specific regions you can see what ships are there and when clicking one, you see photo’s of the ship, its destination, it track. Very nice application! Check: http://download.hellenicshippingnews.com/img/all_google_map.html

Begrijp beter met Visueel Denken.pdf (122 KB)