The Net Generation in Class

Been spending some time this week reading the fantastic, 'grown up digitial' by Don Tapscott.

It really is a great book and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in understanding how Generation Y, or the Millennials, or the Net Generation, or whatever you would like to call the group born between 1979 and 1997 will forever change education delivery, workforce management, social networking, and collaboration.

To me the key points I have taken from the book center around the ways that Gen Y students generally prefer to be 'taught'.  The classic mode of delivery with the teacher in front of the class expounding his or her words of wisdom which the students dutifully transcribe and hopefully successfully regurgiate later on for the exam. This method is tired, old, and frankly boring for everyone.

Gen Y students want to to give their opinions, insights, and help to co-design the curriculum and content.  They are much more comfortable in a collaborative environment, and will gladly assist and help each other in their efforts.  They have the tools to explore and inject concepts and content from everywhere.

A key takeaway for me as the insructor is to stop talking so much, start listening and start asking more questions. 

In class I introduce a number of technologies like Performance Management, Succession Planning, wikis, blogs, and microblogs.  But rather on 'telling' the students what they are used for, perhaps I need to spend more time having the students tell me what these tools can be used for.

I think, then we will both learn more, and be better for the experience.

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Talent Management and Google

This announcement from August got by me, but I think it is interesting and worth noting.  SuccessFactors markets a suite of Talent Management applications ranging from Performance Management, to Compensation Management, to Employee Development.  They announced a new integration with Google Talk to enable real-time chat via the Google platform as well as Google Calendar to leverage a centralized scheduler as well as Google docs and Google Maps. See a screen print below of a Google Chat dialog embedded in a SuccessFactors dashboard.

The interesting thing to me is how a mainstream, entrenched Talent Management platform is opening up to the Google platform, recognizing that many employees are either already using these Google services, or that organizations are starting to encourage the blurring of the internal vs. cloud services.

Another benefit of a platform like SuccessFactors opening up to Google, is the relative ease embedding these Google services in other applications like wikis and blogs.  So a workgroup or organization could set up a shared Google calendar once, and leverage the same calendar in their talent system (SuccessFactors), their internal wiki and perhaps their blogs or other web sites. 

I love to use wiki technology (especially PbWiki) for this ability, and I think it is likely that more and more internally focused applciations will begin to support this simple interoperabiltiy.

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