Kathleen Gilroy, The Otter Group

Notes on a presentation from the Collaborative Learning Conference 2005

Enterprise Use of RSS for managing information by Kathleen Gilroy (from The Otter Group )

Prefers the term 'learning network' to 'learning community' – as believes the tools we are using currently to communicate online are better suited to network functions than communities.
Dissatisfaction with CMS tools that they were using, so discarded them in favour of blogs and RSS. Advantages- simplicity and convenience, ease of use. Talked about own use of RSS Aggregators - within the business about 30 blogs exist, so is an easy way of keeping up with what is happening in the business and had cut the email load by about 30%.
In 2004 started to use in elearning for clients. RSS Radar - aggregate from a wide variety of sources according to set criteria - eg from search engines. Used for blog with Year 8 Students as they built a kayak as a class project. Piloting a Blogging and Enterprise RSS project for Merrill Lynch blog post here http://www.ottergroup.com/blog/ELearning/_archives/2005/3/15/437148.html . Otter Group was brought in originally to provide an elearning solution – they moved from a content delivery system to supporting performance of course participants. Through this they observed a dramatic improvement in quality of participation and volume, which they attributed to the visibility given to students ideas (mostly) and also ease of use of system (less). Good business outcomes came from the program overall – more and better product development ideas that then were actually implemented, development of a high performing group.
Enterprise RSS - installed on a server behind the firewall. integrate with email, web, pda, cell phones. aggregates information from wide variety of sources and distributes according to rules. Enterprise can set rules about which information is available to staff to choose from, and also staff can add other sources – eg own blog, other web resources etc
Productivity is increased through:
- better information aggregation and routing
- more targeted and personalised information distribution
- better sharing of knowledge and learning
- better tracking of information and sharing.
Comments:
Benefits I see largely for workers whose roles are enhanced through the availability of information and news, i.e. Knowledge workers. Application for learning could be best for a workflow learning situation? Is this system an implementation of workflow learning or e-performance support or something else again? Fully searchable, have multi-user blogging - great for small workgroups eg project teams. RSS Radar - one Oz example for education is the Edna resource searches in RSS. Replacement for sequenced learning programs? - delivery of learning objects through enterprise RSS system - for linear, information transfer approach to learning. In combination with the use of individual or small group blogs this may be OK, but not on its own. So this system has a wonderful potential for distributing and sharing information - which may lead to learning. In the discussion following Nancy White’s keynote, there was debate about what constitutes learning or membership of communities as opposed to simply reading information from a particular source. I would like to see Kathleen's point about using the system for sequenced learning fleshed out a little more to get a handle on what is in these learning events. Are there associated tasks, what support and facilitation is wrapped around them?