Friday, January 09, 2004
Your alma mater: Your competitor?As an e-Learning entrepreneur, you should be aware of potential competition from colleges and universities, especially if your market is individuals. It comes down to competing on price or competing on value. Bet on value to win. -- BB The Collegiate Way: Residential Colleges and University Reform. This is the third posting related to questions about the future of higher education. This issue may seem far afield from the main focus of the EduResources Weblog, which is online instructional resources, but it isn't because the growing availability of free online resources directly challenges campus sites to demonstrate that they can offer more than students can obtain for themselves through self-study. (Click here to read the full posting -- the link above goes to The Collegiate Way's web site.) [EduResources Weblog--Higher Education Resources Online] 11:50:34 PM 
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Dialog as learning.I maintain that dialog is one of the main ways that people in organizations learn. Check out Roger Schank's work on stories. -- BB (Addendum: Quick summary of Schank's book, Tell Me A Story.) Dialog is a resource. Denham Grey: Shared tacit knowledge formed in a community through conversation and dialog is a very valuable corporate resource, well-protected from competitors, impossible to copy and requires special conditions to replicate elsewhere. Very well said. I'd never thought about dialog (dialogue?) in this way, but it makes plenty of sense. Actually, I'd argue that dialog can also be seen as a personal resource. The individual has a monopoly over all those pieces of shared context he has with the people he has dialogued with, inside and outside his organization. [Seb's Open Research] 10:06:10 AM
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Social network software.Social network software has been getting a lot of attention lately. Is it a good thing or not? I think it's always good to add a channel through which people can find you, especially if you are a small business. Some people are suspicious or nervous about sharing their rolodexes. My view is that those who share thrive, those who hoard die. I'm on LinkedIn - search for me as William Brandon, and please add me to your network. -- BB "Get yourself out of the mind set of social network software for the sake of social network software and start thinking about how adding a social networking component to existing systems could improve them."
Follow the links from JZ's post to find a lot of discussion surrounding this debate. And see the argument that my colleague Stephen offers to the view that there is a disincentive to sharing one's connections: "If the value you create is based on 'knowing', then your livelihood will be undercut by someone who has the same knowledge - in this case, the same (or similar) network of contacts - and who shares it freely." (By the way, my primary point of presence in social networking systems is here, on Ryze. Ryze is one of the oldest systems alive today - it was launched in 2002. Worth a login if you have yet to try one of those systems...)9:49:40 AM
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Last update: 10/8/2005; 1:00:56 PM .
