ThirdForce Blog

Hospitality and Leisure Sector using Social Media

Social media is real life and no longer considered a passing fad. Look no further than the hotels you stay in, the restaurants like those at Whitbread where you dine and the airlines you fly on for proof. More often than not, there’s a Twitter and Facebook account possibly even a Foursquare presence behind the company in question.

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Spreading Ideas

Learning revolves around the transfer and spreading of ideas and information between and amongst individuals. Imagine what the consequences would have been if the bright soul who first sparked fire to life had been a bashful individual and kept the information to themselves?

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Breaking down communication barriers

Web usability guru Jakob Nielsen has recently completed a new report that highlights how real execution of informal learning tools in the enterprise or "Enterprise 2.0" is still rare at this point. The issue is that in order to use informal learning tools the organisation must "cede power" in the quest to break down communication barriers.

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Webinars – A Cool Marketing Tool

I still get excited when I think of how the Internet has so completely changed the way we communicate and collaborate with each other. I still have vague memories of sending emergency telexes, which if anyone else can remember back that far will recall the challenge of keeping them short and concise and remembering to use the word stop! If only text speak had been around in those days.

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Groundswell in an e-learning 2.0 world

In the 1990s, it was common to hear that "the Internet changes everything." This was to act as a warning to companies who were slow in putting up websites and making e-commerce available to their customers. Ten years later the Internet has expanded exponentially, it now is the Marketing Department. Most companies of size have websites, e-commerce, and dabble in e-shot marketing. But despite all these moves, businesses are in danger of losing control of the Internet-fuelled conversation about their products and services, putting their reputations at risk. Enter the groundswell as an unstoppable force, one that today's companies must understand and embrace.

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Lies, damned lies, and Wikipedia…

An interesting experiment by 22 year old Dublin student Shane Fitzgerald recently generated a healthy debate around the use of the Internet by journalists, and particularly Wikipedia. The same debate can essentially be related to all users of the Internet as a source of information. For those not familiar with the experiment, Shane was keen to see how journalists source their information for news pieces. On hearing of the death of French composer Maurice Jarre in March, he promptly edited the composers Wikipedia page to include a made up quote – “One could say my life itself has been one long soundtrack. Music was my life, music brought me to life, and music is how I will be remembered long after I leave this life. When I die there will be a final waltz playing in my head, that only I can hear.”

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wikiHow – the world’s largest how-to manual

It continuously amazes me how we ever survived in the pre-internet days. Where did we go for the information we now have available at the press of a few buttons? I came across wikiHow the other day, and it made me think how far we have come in how we interact with each other on a global scale. Online collaboration is growing rapidly, with more and more people sharing information on every topic imaginable. If you haven’t visited the site already I recommend a look, it’s amazing the things people are posting up there.

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Twitter a free research portal.. maybe?

I've been doing some research on Twitter, the only place to be these days it seems, and putting in some random searches on learning, specifically subject areas relevant to ThirdForce. The results are amazing and in fact could be compared to carrying out an independent survey.

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Happy to be included in eLearning Learning…

ThirdForce is included as a source on the community information portal eLearning Learning - www.elearninglearning.com.

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Culture 2.0 – Enlightenment via Technology

The rise and fall of Europeana – the European digital library, museum and archive. It launched with fanfare and collapsed shortly after due to too much traffic to the site. A great idea if only it worked!

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