More to come early January latest.

One of the important aspects in all parts of our life, but specifically in our professional life, is to stay informed. While this was done in previous times using only a limited number of sources and resources, it has become a typical aspect of today’s knowledge workers to ensure that we are not overwhelmed by the offerings of information. The number of emails in your inbox is increasing, calls are happening all the time and there are numerous channels for news which are competing for getting your attention.

And yet, this diversity of information sources and formats might fulfill a demand which is present in our desire to stay informed. As is true with so many things in life, there are multiple ways to achieve the goal of gaining more expertise and/or keeping current. And doing so might be done by reading books, surfing to some blogs, getting input from listening to webinars or watching videos created by other experts.

Differentiated learning from my perspective means to enable people to use the best vehicle for them. Also, some format present a better approach for certain needs than other. Examples: Sharing best practices might go very well in a discussion, which could be recorded and listened to live. Last minute updates would be nicely done through blogs and up-to-the minute discussion can be facilitated not only in conference calls but also using Chat/Instant messaging.

So an effort for all Technology companies is to ensure that their field has the ability to keep updated and hence providing that multitude of formats is playing well in that arena and it also supports the needs of a flexible workforce (working remotely, different timezones, different access).
Formats that can be offered are eBooks, Blogs, Wikis, Video, Chat, Forums and not to forget the other formats like “real” books, newspapers, magazines etc.

Nicely fitting into this is the idea of asking experts to share their way of keeping up to date. This has the advantage to get real world lists of information which are proven by colleagues. Similar to recommendation lists on existing online-shops this is something that fits well into the human nature to check what others are doing and it has the additional benefit of enhancing networking between people with common interest. This further drives establishing networks of expertise.

A great combination is to actually use Social Web techniques to propagate this information to the employees. So in contrast to just put this information up on a webpage, how about putting this on a wiki, enabling the “crowd” to update and enhance this information (building a “wisdom of crowd”) and through comments drive ongoing discussion amongst experts. You can also then use RSS for these pages so people are informed about those areas that they are interested in (in contrast to do mass-broadcasting) and if you have micro-blogging in youur company, you might even use that to inform about updates or new additions.

Communities in is new, Web2.0 and related, form (like Facebook) and also mikro-blogging efforts (like Twitter) provide a new and nearly real-time ability to stay on top of the developments in areas which usually would be remote to the audience.

Example? See this: One possibility for the interested person to follow what is happening at NASA is to join the respective Facebook groups like Nasa: 2Explore which even can provide the feeling to be part of that group. While the standard website of NASA is also well done and regularly visited by myself, the Facebook group through it’s direct feed and posting drives people into being part of a virtual community.

The effort of being interested, the ability to stay connected has driven positive developments in all parts of societies and thus moved forward lot of areas. It has enabled people to contribute their ideas more rapidly than before even though they were originally not working in these areas and it has also enabled companies and public organizations or agencies to more directly get feedback from the society as well as explain their visions.

One of the passions of SpaceFan is to look into the possibilities of virtual communities and the expanding abilities provided with new technologies and see what these can contribute. The above is only a first outline of why this topic is of interest to me and it shall be expanded upon.