Hitting the Road to Talk Social Media

The OpenSesame team is incredibly proud of our partnership with LINGOs (Learning in NGOs), a leader in providing learning and development resources to humanitarian organizations like the Red Cross, Habitat for Humanity and CARE. These organizations do life-saving work addressing crises such as the current famine in Somalia. As a result of their dispersed areas of focus, many of their staff members are isolated geographically from their peers and colleagues.

As a social media enthusiast, I’m eager to demonstrate the incredible value that social networks can offer to people - who are isolated physically - in connecting them to communities of practice who share their interests and challenges.

We have been working with LINGOs to share resources about getting started with social media for learning, including sharing a guest blog post on using social media for learning and problem solving and sharing our “Beginning Twitter for Professionals” courses. This week, LINGOs communications manager Marian Abernathy has graciously invited me to make a presentation on getting started with Twitter for learning at the annual LINGOs members meeting.

I spent the weekend putting the finishing touches on my presentation, and I am looking forward to the meeting with Tom Kuhlmann and learning leaders from a variety of incredible organizations working worldwide. I’ll share my slides later this week.

Meanwhile, the OpenSesame executive team is headed to California today for the fall Chief Learning Officer Symposium, where they will give a talk on emerging technologies for learning. We’ve also got a great surprise planned for the Networking Reception on Wednesday night. Stay tuned for details.

Finally, we’ll have some hoodies at both events - come and find us if you’re still missing the essential OpenSesame component of your fall wardrobe.

Update: 

After enjoying a wonderful two days with the LINGOs crew and their members, I'm sharing - as promised! - my slides and links to additional resources for learning about using social media for professional development: 

• My slides
• My series of blog posts on social learning
• "Beginning Twitter for Professionals" (Parts 1 and 2) 
• Information about #lrnchat
• Ford's social media guidelines

Thank you so much to all of you who attended! And please let me know if you have any questions at all.