I was having a long conversation yesterday afternoon with someone who is just returning to work after five years away, raising children. She was pondering on how to ‘get‘ Twitter, how to do something meaningful with social media and how to help curate and create a social learning community. Mainly she was worried about being out of touch, which was, of course, a red herring.
It’s easy to get out of touch with technology, but we rarely get out of touch with storytelling: it’s at the heart of how we communicate, how we build relationships, how we share and how we learn. And i’d imagine that children help you to keep your storytelling skills very much up to date. The technology? Well, it’s important, but it’s transient. I couldn’t even start to list all the apps, social bookmarking, social media management and mobile devices that i can’t use. It’s a long list! But it’s not the be all and end all of things: good storytelling is your trump card.
It’s a question of how we add value within the community: what facts are you taking, what knowledge do you have, what are your experiences and how are you reflecting upon all of that? How are you adding value.
That’s the real question, not the question of whether you can learn to use the technology. It’s easy to learn that bit.
Our reputation, our value within social learning spaces, is based upon our ability to do more than just churn information. We need to be able to find things out, but we need to be able to do things with that information, and we need to be able to change our stance and style according to the situation. One size no longer fits all: we are in a constant state of flux and only the agile will thrive.
I particularly like Harold Jarche’s thinking in this space: too many good thoughts to list, but do connect with his blog if you can. He constantly explores dimensions of this changing environment and is bringing some strong models to the question of how we add value in this area (with his Seek/Sense/Share model).
The question of value is an important one: it’s easy to be prolific, but being prolific in itself add nothing, indeed, it may actively detract from one’s reputation. Saying something of value is better than trying to say everything.
I use the word ‘curation‘ deliberately, although i guess the role of an editor would be just as valid: newspapers don’t print everything that they find out. They go through a process of validation and cross checking. They select an appropriate journalist to investigate and they try to find an angle on the story. It’s about the storytelling, not just the facts. I can find the facts out from a range of sources, it’s the interpretation that gives the facts colour and, possibly, relevance.
We can easily end up focusing on fact, on experience, on knowledge, but the real value comes through reflection and the ways that we add value.