CEdO 535 - Week 5: Other apps

This class has come at exactly the right time for me.  As I have referenced several time before, our company is embarking on a change to our most critical piece of software, and the ramifications from this will touch everyone in the company.  It will create a great need to manage the organizational change, and will require a training program that can address the many different jobs and levels of experience in the company.

One of the biggest challenges that we have been able to identify is the different groups that our training will need to address.  We have many young workers who are familiar with technology and who will have no problem picking up the software, but we also have many people who have been working at the company for 20 or more years, and have been using the old software system for that entire time.  These people will have a harder time adjusting to the change, and providing them with training and support will be critical to the success of the project.  I was thinking of this issue when I read a statistic from Chapter 9 of the book.  The fastest growing segment of Facebook users are people over 55.  Chances are a good percentage of our older workers are already familiar with Facebook and Social Networking.  If we can just find a way to provide them with a similar resource within our company, then that could be the basis for an organizational change and training program.  Security rules mean that we will probably not be able to use Facebook itself, but we might be able to leverage an internal social networking site.

The social networking site would also serve as a portal to many of the other training materials, including blogs, video blogs, screen casts that demonstrate common business functions of the software, and a host of other possibilities.  We could also use it as a way to link to the more formal training materials, including PowerPoint presentations, video recording of training sessions, and other documentation.

The biggest takeaway I have from this week is the wide variety of Web 2.0 applications that are out there.  As part of our assignments we had to discover and evaluate another Web 2.0 app.  I chose WeToKu, which is an online video broadcasting app.  It also allows interviews, where two users are sharing a face to face conversation (via webcam) and broadcasting the result to a wide audience.  This looks like a useful tool, but the bigger lesson is that there are many tools available.  As the web grows and changes, some companies will come and go, and a tool that you might have used will no longer be available.  We have already seen that in this program, as some of the websites we used a year ago are no longer around.  However there will usually be new and better services available, and teachers will need to be prepared to look for the other possibilities.