Hello there everyone! I hope all of you are preparing for a romantic and playful weekend - afterall, it is Valentine’s Day tomorrow, and there's a whole weekend to celebrate it! For those in the United States - a long weekend ;-)
I have some exciting news to share with you - LIDO Telecom Essentials is well on its way to becoming Telecom Essentials 2.0! And as readers of my blog, I am inviting you to be part of of what promises to be an wonderful adventure, resulting in dynamic knowledge exchange and potentially rich friendships between a group of people bound by their learning experiences with LIDO, as well as their interest in, if not love of, telecom and the ICT universe.
My project now is to focus on expanding the Telecom Essentials 2.0 Learning Center – which will allow me to serve your learning and knowledge needs in a fashion consistent with how ICT technology is redefining every possible industry – going Web 2.0.
I’ve got many of the pieces in place already – my blog, RSS feeds to selected telecom news sources, top industry blogs, and ICT podcasts. Telecom Essentials podcasts are in production, and soon we'll be offering mLearning -- just-in -time learning for those on the go! But right this minute, I’m building a social network for Telecommunications Essentials – and with the members we already have, it’s a veritable ICT Think Tank!
So I have two invitations for you. First, it is my pleasure to invite you to join me on LinkedIn! My connections constitute the members of our social network. And already some are inviting their connections to join as well!
I’m also inviting you to join my Telecommunications Essentials Group on LinkedIn. This is where our discussion forum resides. You need to join this group in order to participate in discussions and knowledge exchange. And I also invite you to join my Telecom Trainers Groupon LinkedIn -and its not just for those in education, there will be a lot about learning 2.0, ICT in education, and the psychology of learning, with helpful advice on how to accelrate your own learning process!
With this project of mine, to build our network, I have now experienced first-hand, the potential, and speed, of social networking, which I’ll address below! Meanwhile, I have the privilege of seeing the member’s profiles when they join, and I am so impressed with our network. I already know that all of you will be able to find answers to questions that come up for you within this group – there is someone for everyone! And I have questions for so many of you! Let me share the highlights.
· It is comprised of the professional and academic space – it will be a multigenerational forum – which should make it all the more exciting – with the applications LinkedIn Supports, there is opportunity to address the visual and kinesthetic learners in our group by sharing presentations using SlideShare. And I’ve just added the poll application – and your first poll – please do cast your vote!
· It is comprised of wide range of talents – executive, scientific, engineering, sales, teaching, and more. With personal interests to boggle the mind!
· It is comprised of a very diverse range of disciplines – software, wireless, switching, higher education, military, network operations, legal, financial, too many to mention - although all focused on ICT.
· It is a worldwide group – as LIDO is a global company, with members from all continents – although we are still waiting for Happy Feet to join J For those that may not know, Happy Feet was the name of a Penguin in a beautiful animation film, meaning I have not gone to teach in Antarctica yet, but I’m hoping!
· And, quite importantly, most of you share me in common – you have either read my book, attended my seminars, used by elearning, or visit my website – and as such, you all have something rarely found in a social network – a common foundation for what you have learned about telecom, at least from me, made special by your own knowledge and what you have learned about telecom since Telecom Essentials! Of course this will be less the case as more people join by virtue of recommendations, but there will always be a core of my students as well, so please do use the forum to ask questions about topics from my learning materials if you wish to!
I also see so many great matches for discussions and friendships when I read your profiles – honestly its making me feel like a matchmaker! Hopefully you will discover each other over time, but I may, from time to time, bring you together in the forum by introducing a question and asking for your response :-)
As you can see, I’m excited about my LIDO 2.0 adventure – and in a few short hours, I was convinced me that it will be a most thought-provoking, educational, and enjoyable journey!
Just to make the point – when I say a few hours – I mean it. When I sent out my initial heap of invitations, within 2 hours I had 60 acceptances! Now, less than two days later, we have 200 new members in our network! And by virtue of your connections, we have 30,000+ mind shares between us.
Now, it is very important that you also join both our groups - Telecommunications Essentialsand Telecom Trainers . I humbly ask that you join, and indeed participate from time to time. With our group of almost 300 as 2-18-09, and growing daily, there are enough of us to keep a great dialogue going, and achieve the goal – knowledge exchange and connected knowledge to expand our ICT IQ!
I invite you all to treat this as an experiment – our own personal experiment on the power of social networking, as well as the pitfalls, while also creating a rich telecom and ICT resource for questions, advice and/or collaboration!
If you aren’t familiar with the whole 2.0 ecosystem, take a look at my powerpoint presentation ‘Innovations to Gain the Edge: The Learning 2.0 Ecosystem” – its posted on my profile page on LinkedIn. While it addresses Learning 2.0, the concepts are the same, and the web 2.0 technologies are the same, so you will get a good summary of web 2.0, as well as what our mission with this social network is about! You can also Download Innovations to Gain the Edge PDF[Compatibility Mode]
Once again, I invite you to join our growing community, given the members, its bound to be a dynamic forum of telecom thinkers – I like to think of it as the LIDO ICT Think Tank – an educational cooperative of the world’s most committed telecom thinkers J
Happy Valentine’s Day
Lili
Comments