Submitted by Bob Cole, MIIS

The Teaching & Learning Collaborative in coordination with the Digital Media Commons at the Monterey Institute is training an army of podcasters.  The one unit, fifteen hour workshop titled Digital Media for Change meets Friday afternoons from 2-4pm.  Participants are exploring new communication skills with digital media with a particular focus on affecting change.  We’re reading and discussing the workshop text by Garr Reynolds, PresentationZen, and we have gathered online on a homegrown social network hosted by Ning: http://dm4change.ning.com.  Participants will be helping the Institute build our capacity to capture campus events, speakers, and other stories that distinguish our community and reflect our mission.  We’re building an army of graduate students, staff, and faculty to help us!  And yes, we like cupcakes.

As the workshop coordinator I am using this as an opportunity to experiment with alternative course management tools and blogging.  We welcome any and all who might be interested in what we are up to, so please feel free to join us on our Ning, or grab the RSS feed for the Dm4change blog that is being piped into the main page for workshop updates and thoughts from yours truly.

I have been personally experimenting with Twitter, the micro-blogging tool.  After nearly a year, I’ve discovered there is immense value in personal and professional learning networks.  I ‘follow’ edtech professionals, NPR news, teachers, and the humor of ICHCheezburger. With Twitter I am able to post 140 character ‘tweets’ of insight, listen to others, and crowdsource an idea or question. Now that I’ve nearly summited the Twitter adoption curve (see left), I’m evangelizing with students and colleagues here at MIIS.  Trouble is it’s an uphill battle.

This, however, changed recently when a TLC colleague, Sarah Springer mentioned a new tool in a brief conversation.  She said something about a crowdsourcing tool named Yammer.  I didn’t write it down or Tweet about it, but it did stick in my mind.  I went and checked it out online.  Essentially, Yammer is an enterprise Twitter for in-house collaboration, and maybe a gateway tool for future Twitterers.  We’ve slowly invited like-minded staffers, students, and faculty to join in on the sharing.

An added feature that Yammer offers is the ability to tag posts with hashmarks.  So, it I share an event I could include the #event tag and my yammer msg would be added to that tag archive, very much like blogging categories or tags work as well.  I can even follow a given tag in Yammer and receive a digest e-mail of activity.

I’ll continue to tap into my Twitter network as beohbe, but am excited by the possibilities that Yammering in-house learning and sharing will bring as we continue to experiment with communication and collaboration tools here in Monterey.