Hopefully, that was constructive,
Greg

On a side note, I like how you framed the innovation, support, and marketing as other kinds of learning. A few of us within Mzinga have been arguing the same thing for about 18 months internally, and people finally started seeing the light about six months ago, which is what is leading us toward a unified future. (Which I guess goes to show that sometimes “Wisdom of the Crowds” means “Tenacity of a Few to Say the Same Thing A Lot…” ; )

Anyway, good thought as always. It will be interesting to see what new models and best practices emerge from this period of transition.

Dave, thanks for the thoughtful response. I agree with pretty much all you say. I definitely support the notion of moderating across social media, and recognizing what people contribute.

I agree that I don’t want my social media tools disaggregated, but not sure I want it completely integrated with my LMS, and not my CMS, vice versa, or anything else I want to have. And I’m not sure I want an LCMS versus an industrial strength CMS, an industrial strength LMS, and an industrial strength social media environment, or where to do the tight and where to do the loose. I’m leery of the all-singing all-dancing too (a Swiss Army knife is handy, but it can’t do everything, and I have a tool box in the garage).

Don’t get me wrong about Mzinga in the learning space, I don’t mean targeting the learning market exclusively, I do mean learning in the broad sense, formal and informal, which includes innovation (in my mind) and support. I hadn’t considered marketing, I confess, but conversations with the customer are social learning. So the social media side of Mzinga is fully implemented, I just don’t see the reason for the LMS to be critical, as opposed to say a CMS, or whether they should be disaggregated and coupled along task roles: one system for social, one for managing the formal, and another for managing content. Or whatever. Just as you make the case that seeing an individual from a whole picture, so does Vignette’s point about seeing all content, whether formally produced or informal as a unified whole from the point of view of knowledge management and generation.

It gets back to your diagram: the community or Amazon model, what’s at the center? I like something BJ Schone said, about having it focus on the task/goal/objective. What do people need to do?

And I could be wrong, this is thinking out loud :). Thanks again.

Here are some of the less obvious gluey parts to consider around this question: do you want to have multiple moderation models? If your profiles are shared (as they should be), shouldn’t you also recognize that contributions across multiple media might be coming from the same person and therefore moderate their posts and them in a unified way? In other words, if I post inaccurate or inappropriate content in one media like discussion forums, wouldn’t we want to be able to quickly see other posts and contributions by this same person across other media like blogs, wikis, comments etc… to see if there is a pattern, or if other related content has been posted but not reported? I think the answer to this is a resounding yes. Unfortunately, this is pretty much impossible to do across multiple loosely coupled systems. On the other hand, with a common platform in a shared database with shared profiles, this is reasonably easy. We do some of this kind of stuff already.

We might want to do all of the above for positive reasons too, like showing someone’s full activity feed so that I when I see a post by Clark and decide to visit Clark’s profile, I easily see all the other posts, contributions, and comments Clark has made, thereby strengthening social networking, expertise location, and knowledge discovery.

I also see a future where we have a unified view of the formal and informal learning that a customer, partner, or employee has consumed or shared, and related analytics that show their contributions, their network, their influence, and their mentors. This gets to reputation management, recommendation engines, and analytics. Someday, I want to be able to see key contributors, key influencers, and key connectors in my community. This future isn’t all that far away in a unified world; we’re on the verge of some of this today (and I’m sure our competitors are too ; ). I can’t even imagine how we get there in a loosely coupled world.

I just don’t see “loosely coupled” as an enterprise-grade strategy either now or in the future. I could be wrong. What I do see are enterprise-grade platforms that manage all the stuff I mentioned, but still enable blogs, comments, discussions etc… to be disintermediated and embedded in various other platforms like intranets, extranets, web-sites, portals etc… That has a ton of value in my mind and is something we do today but are looking to extend.

One final brief point, in a couple places you noted, “Mzinga is clearly targeted at the learning space, being integrated with an LMS.” While I understand why you might have this perspective, Clark, it’s not entirely accurate. We have some very significant social media and community customers as well like Disney, Fox, ABC News, Ford, All State – some pretty big names. Some of these are marketing oriented, some are support, some are about innovation, and obviously some are about employee development and customer training. In any given month, over 1 billion social media interactions are handled by our site.

We’re also one of the largest moderation companies around today, providing moderation-only services even for competitors’ communities. In terms of strategy, what we’re driving toward is the integration of the formal learning and performance technologies with the social media and community technologies to provide a true Social Enterprise Solution. The Social Learning Suite we released in February was really just phase one of this overall effort. You will see more from us on this front over the Summer. Stay tuned.

Taking some of these LMS or CMS tools and building in ‘2.0’ features is also wrong-headed. I’ve seen some experiments where things like discussion forum exercises were taken out of Moodle or D2L and moved into something like a Facebook group or page for that course. It’s worked remarkably well because it’s a little piece of customizing something learners are already doing. While this may be more appropriate for college or high school students, it’s probably workable in the enterprise too.

I think what starts to really make sense is to think of social networks in terms of simply that – social networks. They can be leveraged for learning or any other activity, and that’s where building connections through APIs may make some sense. It’s far more logical to give people useful tools in a network framework and build upon things they’re already using for learning purposes.

As for knowledge grown and shared? I think you can look at that in a lot of different ways, but make sure that the data created remains the IP of the person or people who created it. In my mind the LMS of the future will allow learners to publish and share what they want.