Author: Shannon Turlington
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Hell is repetition: The theme of cycles in science fiction
Recently, I have become fascinated with the notion of cycles. We humans tend to regard everything linearly, with a beginning and an end, because that is our individual experience. But taking a wider view, we can see that events tend to happen in cycles, that an end leads inexorably to another beginning. It’s easiest to…
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Finished! The project I’ve been working on for the last 6 months
Since I’ve been working part-time for the last few months, I’ve tried to focus my efforts on just a small number of very distinct projects. One of them was our big deliverable for this, our final year of the Capacity Project: the HRIS Strengthening Implementation Toolkit. The Toolkit is a distillation of everything we’ve learned…
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Is social networking learning?
Image by luc legay via Flickr A colleague of mine recently asked this question, which sparked an interesting discussion on our Yammer network: Is social networking learning? Especially in the context of organizations, how can social networking be used for learning? I certainly use social networking tools like Twitter and blogs for informal, personal learning…
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A wiki’s power comes from participation
It always amazes me when I visit wikis like Wikipedia or Lostpedia, and I see how a group of dedicated volunteers can collaborate to create a truly impressive body of knowledge. Now that I have been using a wiki in my own work, I have a better understanding of just what a powerful tool it…
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The micro-blogging stream
As I mentioned in a recent post, we are using Yammer in our organization to share what we are doing with a geographically dispersed team. It started out really strong, but participation has fallen off somewhat, unfortunately. I am still hopeful that this will prove to be a worthwhile way of forging connections between dispersed…
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Lost as book and the books of Lost…
I don’t write about television much, if at all, on this blog. So you probably don’t know that I am obsessed with the television series Lost. Lost, however, is very literary television, which is why it appeals so strongly to me. This is a show that is known for being confusing and misleading, but it…
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Yet another reason why publishing is in trouble…
Ok, time for another rant. I was in the bookstore the other day–I won’t say which bookstore, only that I was buying a coffee, not a book–and I happened to notice something that precisely illustrates what I happen to think is one of the fundamental things wrong with big, conglomerate publishers. Which is that they…
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We are just sharing already
Recently, I posted a link to this article: Planning to Share Versus Just Sharing. The post struck a chord with me, because I have been involved in so many initiatives in my organization to plan how to share. We are a nonprofit with a large contingent of academic staff; we believe in sharing, theoretically. We…
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Can social networking hurt your job prospects? Or help them?
Over the weekend, I saw yet another non-story on the morning talk shows about how careful you should be about what you post online because it may come back to bite you. The story was filled with warnings about how everything you put on the Internet is permanent, and all potential employers are spending their…
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How to get started in the Web 2.0 world
Image by Daniel F. Pigatto via Flickr I have a colleague who’s interested in bringing some of our organization’s knowledge management efforts into the Web 2.0 world, and she wanted to know how to get started. My advice was, before getting an organizational blog or setting up a wiki or something like that, that she…
Shannon Turlington 