Fond Farewell

Martin Weller managed to blog about this first with his post Goodbye to Two Colleagues - As with Martin I’ve been avoiding using this blog for personal posts however I’m making an exception in order to say a fond farewell to Ross Mackenzie.

Ross is leaving the Open University (N.B. he is not retiring, nor being made redundant!) – he is leaving to pursue higher ambitions and explore. During our time together at the Open University he is someone who has regularly made my working life much more bearable, especially over the past few years, by providing interesting back-channel conversations on twitter and email during meetings which usually turn out to be much more productive than the meetings themselves!

Ross has achieved many valuable things for the university. I still remember Promises (can’t remember which bits of this acronym are capitalized, or indeed what it stands for!) which was about conformance of an online presence for modules across the curriculum. I think that was a real achievement as previously everything was much more bespoke, hand crafted an unsustainable. This project paved the way for the VLE which was another one of Ross’s achievements ( I was also drafted in to advise Martin Weller with the groundwork about what an institutional VLE should include…. the old Sakai v Moodle debate and loosely coupled v tightly integrated – those were the days!).

I worked with Ross most recently to get VLE changes completed to upgrade to Moodle 2 and incorporate many new features (called RAP – Roadmap Acceleration Programme – accelerated because it achieved three years worth of work within one year!)  - I remember Ross was the person who first expressed support for use of personas – and I’ve tried to take that work forward and we’ve had some success with this although there’s more still to do to get personas embedded, however without Ross they might not have been explored at all.

… it hasn’t all been about work. It has also been about having someone who is prepared to speak up in favour of educational technology and who is prepared to look for  a ‘yes’ when the easiest answer (but not the correct one) is to say ‘no’. I value having Ross as a colleague over the past many years – for the anecdotes and witticisms that make my work enjoyable.

…I wish him all the best on his travels to Arctic landscapes in search of elusive beasties that might eat him (hopefully not) and I expect that our paths will cross in the not too distant future.

magile

iSpot logo

I’ve been busy. Sorry. Very unbloggy recently. My contribution to the blogosphere and Twitter has been pathetic. Where was I?

Magile? = Mobile + Agile?

One of the reasons has been that I’ve been managing a project over the past year to create a participatory science mobile app for the iSpot project www.ispot.org.uk - actually it’s taken more than a year and we’ve had a bit of a bumpy ride with this one. I’ve documented the process in a conference paper that I’m pleased to say has been accepted for mLearn 2012. There’s a ‘stable beta’ version on the Google Play store, it’s really only a proof of concept as the more innovative pedagogic/technical features such as ‘around here’ (geo-spatial data about observations within a specific locale presented through a map view) and the posting of comments and identifications about other peoples observations are part of the new version which also has a fantastic user interface.

The paper focuses mainly on the reasons for creating a mobile app for participatory science and about the types of functionality and design considerations required during app development. I’ve quite pleased with the result. The paper iSpot Mobile –  A Natural History Participatory Science Application is available through the OU’s Knowledge Network.

If you’d like to try out the stable beta app (for Android) visit the Google Play app store (direct link to app) however before I move on from the app (there’s lots more I want to say about it but I’ll write a new post when the new version is released shortly) I want to conclude by saying that creating this has been an extremely liberating process. The work reminded me of the kind of hand crafting of HTML we did back in 1994/5 when building bespoke websites viewable through Netscape (if we were lucky) on our own custom built web servers based on Windows NT.  Thats what building this reminded me of, and I think that the HTMl5 v native issue will eventually get resolved but at the moment as Zack Epstein explains in his post the jury is still out! – which makes development expensive but hugely rewarding.

ispot mobile

 

I’m going to be blogging more about iSpot as we’ve got a busy 18 months ahead with this project. It’s part of the Wolfson OpenScience Laboratory project and has funding to internationalise, personalise, incorporate a social layer, work better for novice users, work via mobile, be interoperable or embeddable (through APIs) with other sites and services, and incorporate new ecology functions through funding from the The National Lottery, Garfield Weston Foundation and British Ecological Society respectively.

I’ve created a technical roadmap for iSpot to explain all this and I hope to regularly blog about what is happening throughout the next three years of that roadmap.

Lots to do I better get started.

Magile = Magic + Fragile?

Acquisitions and Mergers

I have been reading with interest the posts about Blackboard’s recent aquisition of MoodleRooms. There’s a good article by Christopher Dawson about it for ZDNet Education. The creation of an Open Source Services Group headed up by our old pal well known by the OU crowd – Charles “Chuck” Severance of Sakai fame. I think he’ll do a great job and he is upbeat about the Blackboard finally listening to his message about “ think[ing] more broadly about the LMS market”.

I’m sure I’m not the only one however that feels a little uncomfortable about the acquisition (and possible merger?) of these. The quote by Martin Dougiamas is interesting

“The decision of Moodlerooms and NetSpot to work under Blackboard may sound very strange at first to anyone in this industry…but it’s my understanding that these three companies have some good plans and synergies. I’m happy to say that Moodlerooms and NetSpot will remain Moodle Partners, and have promised to continue…participating in the community…and contributing financially to Moodle exactly as they always have.”

I think it’s a very interesting move by Blackboard. It reminds me of the Microsoft approach of the 90′s where they saw best-of-breed and acquired them to be merged into their ‘market leading’ technology group.

My feeling is that if all the organisations can remain pure to their ideals and founding principles then this should be treated as a positive move to financially support the onward development of the products and services. There is a little demon on my shoulder thought that’s whispering in my ear that Blackboard are not being altruistic in this venture. They are owned by a private equity firm. It’s a good move for them, it’s hedging their bets. It’s playing the percentages. It may however reduce consumer choice down the line.

Overall I’m not quite as upbeat about this as Christopher Dawson. I see this as a power-play by one of the giants in the LMS arena however a saving grace might be the fact that we’ve got a good guy in Chuck and a mature Open Source Community. If they don’t like a product they’ll build a better one.

I’m not for a proliferation of LMS’s but I am pro choice and I think we should be able to have interoperable systems and services without having to buy whole product suites. If Dr Chuck can manage to make that happen then I’ll buy him a drink. Possibly two.

Community Engagement

We ran an eLearning Community event on 18th October to explain the new learning systems roadmap and the direction of travel for OU learning systems – by “we” I mean that the presenters were myself, Liz Burton-Pye, Head of Learning Teaching and Quality Office and Rhodri Meredith, Project Manager (Business Change) in Learning and Teaching Solutions. The event was well attended with over fifty people from across the University and all from a range of different backgrounds.

Firstly the three of us gave short (*cough*) presentations to explain the “Where we are now” with Learning Systems, “Where we’re going next” (i.e. the new Roadmap) and “Over the horizon”.

Here are my slides from the event which set the context of the workshop which took place after the presentations (and a brief break of tea and coffee).

Future Learning Systems presentation oct 2011

For the workshop we split people into five tables. Each table represented one specific “scenario”. The scenarios were as follows:-

•  The Qualification is Everything
• OU Goes Global
• Informal Learning is Cool
• Learning is Disaggregated
• Employers Just Want Key Skills

These were picked because they were the five most popular scenarios rated by people who visited us back in March at the Open University “Learn About Fair“.

We were keen to try to get a good representation of staff from across the OU at all the tables and we had at least five people at each table. Every table was co-ordinated by a facilitator (i.e. someone who knew in-depth about the scenario being developed).

We gave each group a set of persona cards. The persona cards are representations of typical types of OU student (for more on this use of personas see the “How we use personas” blog post that I publish earlier ).

We asked people to then take each persona in turn…

…and answer the following questions to map the personas against scenarios using a form similar to the one below..

We engaged in some very interesting dialogue. When we finished each table then spent five minutes summarising what they had learned. There were some stimulating discussions and I know that I can’t do justice to them within a simple blog post but I’ll try to synthesise the main ones that sprang up during the workshop…

Informal Learning is Cool

Some people will use informal spaces to engage with a professional community (Martin) and as a means to an end. Some may not have time for informal study initially due to time pressures (Abila). However others like Jason who have had a bad experience with formal learning may find informal learning stimulating and engaging and structure can be applied later to keep him on track. The idea of having “Informal with badge” may be appealing, especially to those leisure learners like Margaret. Career oriented people may stay clear of informal (Win) but generally Digital Literacy may be a concern with  some personas and be a barrier to them engaging with informal learning.

The Qualification is Everything

Some learners may want to begin with an Openings module for various reasons before going through to qualification (Abila and Josie). Jason would want to build gradually perhaps through a diploma or certificate first. He would also benefit from community engagement and informal mechanisms to keep him stimulated and on track. Some students (like Rachel) may be put off by the level of commitment required.

Learning is Disaggregated

People like Win would like the flexibility as she maybe cannot commit to specific times (e.g. for assessment) but may also require structure so may be mixed blessing by going through disaggregated route. David may prefer structured approach but may also wish to choose an alternative assessment model as he may not favour continuous assessment.  Josie and Regi may both favour flexibility in their start and end times for different reasons. Some learners like George may be overwhelmed by disaggregation (this feeling over being overwhelmed keep recurring and is a known issue with a more small pieces approach).

Employers ‘Just’ Want Key Skills

Students use context for interest and engagement and learn key skills in the process. Do they need key skills personally or as a University should we provide them for others and are they useful? Split into two camps of learners who broadly agree that key skills would help with confidence building (Abila and Jason) and useful to have appropriate skills for marketplace (Martin). And those that disagree such as Rachel where the subject is more important to keep her focussed and the leisure learners such as Margaret who do it for the love of knowledge.

OU Goes Global

This was summarised through learner stories….

Student Story 1

In middle of studies, travelling and emigrating requires flexibility and ability to learn on the move. Use of mobile and internet cafes. Local partnership provides language adaptions and contextual content, using local payment and currency – makes use of Open media – setting different prices for different parts of the world.

Student Story 2

24/7 support very important of shift workers, added benefit and advantage, same for those with families. More flexible assessment due to shift work but students ‘hopping around’ is difficult for continuity of online advantage e.g. real time/ synchronous collaboration. Student follow paths/self-directed learning versus collaborating with others. Depends on nature of module. Put in as much variety to accommodate all.

Tutor Story

Tutor generated content from diverse tutor community (local knowledge). Good local examples from students.  Want local study but want it accredited. Uses mobile (or wifi) light versions of content but not interested in rich media. Tutor group listings via mobile or text alerts. Similar to email services currently on studenthome/tutorhome.

Summary

The overarching themes to emerge from the workshop were therefore :-

1. Learners need to be digitally literate enough to engage. We need to ensure they are provided with mechanisms to achieve that (handholding).

2. We could do more around exploring informal learning with “badging” to provide status associated with having understood material without having to go down a formal assessment route.

3. Flexibility and structure are both important so need to be built into the solution. The scenarios do not stand alone so a lot of the final discussions were about how they could be combined for greater benefit.

4. We need to be careful not to overwhelm potential learners. The “chocolate box approach” may seem appealing but actually just confuse people.

5. Feedback following the event is that some of the community wanted an opportunity to have an open ended discussion around the talks and topics arising. My suggestion is that people post into the discussion on Cloudworks associated with the event (..remember this is a public space!)

My special thanks to Chris Pegler for organising the eLearning Community events and providing us with design ideas, persona cards and event facilitation which made this event so effective. There are some more photos of the event on Flickr…

http://www.flickr.com/photos/22884083@N04/sets/72157627885953291/with/6294169279/

How we use Personas

Personas, scenarios and narratives have a long history in user centred design. Within the OU the intention is to use personas, scenarios and narrative as a methodology underpinning the production life-cycle of new learning systems, from conception through to design, development, testing and post production promotion.

We are confident that personas, scenarios and narratives can be used in this way as historically they have been used in formal development through Unified Modelling Language (UML). UML methodology has been applied to enterprise project partnerships with SUN Microsystems, Microsoft and IBM to create systems that were mapped and tested against use cases developed during the design stage. We also know from research within the OU that personas have been used as a method of explaining complex systems without requiring users to have specialist knowledge. Workshops using personas were successfully used in 2002 by Alexander Muir to explain complex system changes to the S292 module team.

Personas: A tool that helps build a picture of users

A persona, based on available data, is a fictional but relevant and realistic user.  In most cases, personas are synthesised from a series of interviews with real people, then captured in one page descriptions that include behaviour patterns, goals and skills, with a few fictional personal details to bring the persona to life.  Personas state situations in student terms, which are easily understood, as opposed to theoretical-educationalist terms, which require specialist knowledge.

A persona is a description of a person that defines a target user group. The best way to define a persona is to talk to real learners and use their feedback to build a persona for each target group. For example:

• Jane Smith, 35 years old
• Has 3 children, all in secondary education
• Works full-time as a research assistant making a decent living
• Separated from her husband
• She has limited disposable income and no real savings

It is important to remember that personas define a range of user types and, when applied with attributes (below), should create a spectrum of target users of your services, hence you should avoid overtly stereotyping based on bias rather than factual data. “Stereotyping a persona is a danger that should be avoided, as stereotypes are based on bias rather than on factual data. Personas explore ranges of behaviour rather than seeking to establish an average user.” (Cooper & Reimann 2003).

Within the OU we have conducted interviews with learners to identify typical student types, we have also revised the persona set based on the information from the Monitor report and we have tested the personas against real learners visiting the labs to conduct user testing on our products. This ensures that the characteristics and methods of interaction are correctly described.

Personas: Attributes

Personas may have additional attributes applied to them to bring in an additional contextual element which can be applied across the whole range of personas. For example within the OU we’re considering the extent to which we should apply accessibility attributes that describe the range of accessibility challenges that people face with using OU technology. These attributes can then be added to test a scenario against a wide range of people with accessibility issues. Attributes may also include other contextual information (location, ethnic background etc.).

Scenarios: A description of the learning system needed to achieve a particular goal

Typically scenarios describe the experience that a user (persona) has with an organisation. In our context however we’re using scenarios as the description of the type of service being provided for a user to achieve a particular goal. So, in our context the scenario is a ‘system’ in a UML use case and the persona is the ‘actor’ who is using that system.

OU scenarios are shaped by conditions that will have an impact on the future system landscape outside of the user conditions; these include socio-cultural considerations, economic conditions and internal and external drivers for change. A scenario in the OU sense describes a ‘possible future’, for example systems that support qualification rather than modular study.

Scenarios then are not mutually exclusive and the learning systems must support the full range of scenarios that are delivered through the roadmap.

Narrative: Focus on activities that help achieve these goals

The key to a good user experience is to build a lasting relationship between the organisation and the learner. You do this by focusing on activities that will help the learners achieve their goals. To do this, walk through a scenario for a persona and see where they require your assistance to move toward their end goal. Start by defining the activities they might do, and then identify touch points where they interact with your organisation (e.g. public web site, Twitter, iTunesU, Openlearn). Next think about the services your business can provide to help them and what underlying structures you need to provide those services. To start the scenario for Jane, it may look like this:

1. I want to research financial plans for college funds…
2. Uses Google to search “financial plans for college funds” and one of the results points to an article on your website…
3. I want to know what things I need to think about for college funds…
4. She reads the article and clicks on a link for a planning calculator…
5. I want a calculator that is easy to understand and use…

This is just a small part of a narrative for Jane. It describes the activities Jane is doing and the supporting services the organisation is offering to help her. This example is very high level.

Narratives: Cover more than websites

Defining narratives for learners is about more than just designing a learning system; it is about all the ways they can interact with the OU. A learning system website doesn’t stand alone – it’s the entire cross channel experience and it needs to be seamless. By creating personas and defining scenarios and user narratives, you can create your student learning experience to meet the needs of your target groups of learners (backed by the research conducted by Monitor) and how individual learning services are interrelated with the rest of the OU business communication channels.

Narratives and Personas: Using these to test and ensure quality

Through a series of iterative user testing cycles you can test the services being developed against the range of personas. You can do this through ensuring that the users interacting with the system cover the range of target learners and through conducting expert peer testing using the personas to ensure that the systems achieve high levels of usability and accessibility.

Personas, Scenarios and Narratives: A method to promote and explain

Narratives and personas are important and effective tools for professional development and disseminating changes within systems, which have been used successfully in the OU previously  as a method of describing complex system changes (e.g. see S292 above). These techniques were also used during the 2011 Learn About Fair to explain complex learning systems by describing a set of scenarios in a simple but effective way. We expect to continue this work by incorporating elements of personas, scenarios and narratives within Learn About Guides, Learning Design and Curriculum Business Modelling work, alongside other professional development resources, using them to describe changes more effectively to both academics and learners. The diagram below describes a learning system life-cycle.

Conclusion

The main risk when applying these techniques is that the people involved in the design, creating and dissemination of services don’t engage or understand the concept of personas and narratives and their importance in creating better services, this leads to a further risk that the tools are not applied holistically. To use these tools effectively you need to have all stakeholders fully briefed and trained in applying these within your organisation. Within the OU we conducting three personas workshops during September and October 2011, co-ordinated by Online Communications, to explain the concepts to all OU stakeholders and to explore the best methods of applying these within the OU. We  also held an eLearning Community event in October where personas were applied as a tool to help people begin the process of creating the stories that accompany the scenarios. (further blog post on that event to come).

The real power of the methodology described above is realised when it is applied to system engineering and design, and applied throughout the whole system life-cycle, and through this establishing systems and processes that are proven to meet the needs of the users. These techniques aren’t new and some of the concepts date back over eighty years however the application of these methods within the OU is new and therefore needs careful nurturing to ensure they are correctly embedded into OU practice.

References and further reading

Cooper, A., & Reimann, R. (2003). About face 2.0: The essentials of interaction design. 2nd Edition. New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons

Cooper, A. (1999) The Inmates Are Running the Asylum, 1st Edition: Sams

Norman, D.A. (2002) The Design of Everyday Things. Basic Books

Krug, S. (2005) Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition, New Riders Press

Neilsen, J. (1994) Guerrilla HCI: Using Discount Usability Engineering to Penetrate the Intimidation Barrier http://www.useit.com/papers/guerrilla_hci.html

Neilsen Norman Group, Usability Return on Investment http://www.nngroup.com/reports/roi/

Pruitt, J., Tamara Adlin, T. (2006) The persona lifecycle: keeping people in mind throughout product design, Elsevier

A list of scholarly articles on “Personas and scenarios” http://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?q=personas+and+scenarios&hl=en&as_sdt=0&as_vis=1&oi=scholart

JISC (2010), Assembly on personas and User testing: Blog post http://academic-networking.blogspot.com/2010/03/assembly-on-personas-and-user-testing.html

Woods, W. (2011) Personae Gratae: Blog post http://technocrapy.wordpress.com/2011/06/26/personae-gratae/

Community Spirit

Where I live...

I live in a small community in a historic and picturesque village on the outskirts of Milton Keynes.

The community has gone through up and downs, and most notably when a local man Paolo Sicorello disappeared earlier this year, he was well known in the community and, for example, went to school with my wife so most people knew of him or his family. I was amazed by how quickly the whole community got behind the search for him. There was a Facebook campaign and groups out organising search parties, with the help of the police, again coordinated through Facebook.

Eventually he was found dead in the canal, he had fallen in and drowned. His Facebook campaign became a memorial site and there were some absolutely wonderful stories and heartfelt outpouring on the site which I think his family really appreciated.

Recently I’ve again seen some of that community spirit as we’ve had problems with a group of travellers. These are not the nice sort of travellers. These are the damaging property, thieving, fighting in public and littering type of traveller. I know the other type exist as I spent some time with courteous travelling folk in my distant youth. These ones are a breed apart.

Anyhow the travellers moved in and the community started to find things going missing and property being destroyed.

We have two ponies which graze on local paddock land owned by the Parks Trust and the travellers took particular interest in the animals. They started marking up the signs on the bridleways as if they were planning to use these as a way to get to the paddocks at night. Another horse owner found a plait in the mane of her horse. A sure sign that travellers are interested in stealing it as they use the plaits to find the animals at night.

The good thing was how the community seemed to rally together. People informed local land owners straight away and the manor park lands ware closed to the public. People went out checking on their walks for anything out of the ordinary and kept watch on each others property.

The police were informed within hours of the travellers arriving to a new site (they kept switching sites but staying in our area). Community Support officers patrolled the area and the parks trust rangers also did patrols of the paddocks. We even had local security firm come and agree to do patrols of the paddocks for free and put up signs on the gates to deter criminals.

Of course the measures were not infallible and we did have a chain a padlock stolen. Thieves actually broke down the fencing to remove the padlock and chain from next to the gate. The parks trust rangers thought it was an attempt to test how easily they could break in and how quickly we’d respond. The rangers phoned around and arranged for contractors to replace broken items and we texted them the crime reference number after we telephoned the police and the parks trust sent the police the images of the damage via their mobile to use to support a criminal damage claim as well as theft if the criminal is ever caught.

Since then nothing further has happened. The parks trust are considering installing CCTV surveillance on that area if there’s any further trouble and the police are using the local paper to inform people to keep a look out and raise awareness. The travellers have now been moved on by the police so we’re keeping our fingers crossed that they don’t return.

I do love the humanity I see displayed around me – both on-line where digital media affords different and new types of community interaction and in the real world where people use ubiquitous and ambient technology, mobile phones,digital cameras and text alerts to help the community. This type of community has existed for thousands of years but the wonder is how the newer technology has become an integral element of the community spirit.

Plus ca change

I’ve been using Google+ for a while now and I’m starting to build up a bit of stickability with it. There are already millions of guides and resources building up around it, a bit like the buzz surrounding launch of an Apple product. Including Mashable resources, the Google+ guide and Professors use of Google+ in classrooms to name three I’ve read recently.

The launch of Google+ put me off a little, because it was much like that of Google Wave in that there was a kind of limited public release surrounded by lots of PR and buzz. Luckily they moved quickly to a more open release as I was complaining that the whole concept of circles seems diminished if you can’t share with other Google people who are excluded from the release.

Lets start with Circles…

I enjoy the circle concept for allowing me to place people and share with different groups. I don’t on the whole enjoy categorising people though and I started to try it at the beginning and quickly just moved everyone into my ‘friends’ circle. I have however more recently received some requests from people I don’t know so well and have set up a circle for them. I also move people between circles and so I’m becoming familiar with the paradigm. I do think it’s a bit like Grainne Conole said in her recent keynote at MoodleMOOT about the evolution of people and technology and I’m wondering how much I’m adapting my behaviour to suit the product.

There are ways to do ‘friend’ grouping within Facebook and friends of mine who are adept at Facebooking do set up groups to share specific things with. I’ve always said that I find the cognitive overhead of this a bit much for what are, in effect, just my public outpourings. In general within Google+ I tend to share with everyone but there have been occasions where I’ve selected groups to share with and so the intuitive method Google+ have devised to allow this may well mean that I start doing this more often and therefore the metaphor is more like one of entering different rooms or online forums where you pick the forum you want to post to and go there to do it.

The streams are quite Twitter like, although at the moment more like Facebook because there aren’t too many people posting however I expect as the numbers grow the ‘streams’ will really start flowing and managing that will be like dipping in with twitter. I’m sure that Google have done testing to see that under heavy usage the important stuff does actually surface using the +1 concept and the fact that you can select the groups (circles) to view but I don’t think there’s enough usage yet to really get the impression of how this will pan out.

I like the fact that you can post longer posts than with Twitter. Twitter is good in limiting you to say thing succinctly but there are times when you need more words to express yourself than Twitter allows easily. I’m very verbose though (as you can tell from this post!). The lack of limit though means that there is more scope for pedagogic  application.

What about Hangouts?

I tried using the hangout feature (not sure that I like the name!) but quickly came unstuck as the whole thing crashed on me. I later discovered (thanks to colleagues who investigated further) that the problems arose because of the local firewalls at work that blocked me from hanging-out. I think this may be a problem for Google if they want to get it used more widely as corporate firewalls will simply not allow it. I’m not generally one for social video sharing as I prefer to mong around in scruffy clothes and unkempt hair when using social sites at home and wouldn’t want the effort of having to become presentable to chat to people. Note to Lord Sugar – That’s why the Amstrad video phone never took off.

So how does it shape up overall?

I like the integration with other Google products, this may well be the killer move since so many people use Gmail or Google Docs regularly. I think that Google+ mixed with Google Apps for Education for example will make a very interesting a dynamic suite for constructivist learning.

I think that on a simplistic level Google have done something that could be considered as much of a social experiment as it is a technology breakthrough. Are people evolving to think more overtly about the groupings they share information with or do they just want to be public and open with everything as they can with Twitter?

I’m still unsure about whether I’ll be sticking with Google+ in the long-term as I tend to spend most of my ‘cognitive overhead’ time in Twitter and even then most of that as a consumer rather than a producer of information, I especially like reading the postings by my peers but also like the feeds coming from tech news services etc. This flow is important to me. What Google + allows though is the movement of information easily between social groups and this may become something extremely useful. It will require the evolution of people and product and it will also require a tipping point where organisations start adopting it so that we get a mixture of social space and feeds of useful information.

For me the jury is still out but I’ve stuck with it for over a week and I logged into it before either Twitter or Facebook this morning so perhaps that is a sign of things to come.

I’d like to know what other people think of it.