This week, some of the instructional materials focused on mentoring Millennials and their need for finding work that is personally fulfilling to them. Such an environment fosters an expectation of constant feedback and rapid success in the workplace (Meister & Willyerd, 2010). In return, Millennials are perfectly willing to give their whole attention to learning what they need to know to achieve success, but the demands they will make of their employers towards this end can be daunting to a generation that may not be familiar to the particular ways that this younger generation are used to receiving information. As Meister and Willyerd put it, "they want a road map to success and they expect their companies to provide it." The authors identified three approaches to mentoring this fast-growing workforce population that fits with their collaborative lifestyle: reverse mentoring; group mentoring; and anonymous mentoring. Of these three approaches, the one that immediately jumped out at me was the second approach--group mentoring--as it happens to coincide with a new initiative I am currently involved with in my own workplace.
The group mentoring section of the Meister and Willyerd paper talks about two companies (AT&T and BT) that set up online platforms so that mentors could work with several individual at the same time. This is very similar to the direction that USC is headed with its new offering of "Spaces," a collaborative platform and so much more. Originally designed by Moxie Software as a customer centric enterprise social software suite, the rationale provided on the company's web site sounds suspiciously like the needs specified by Meister and Willyerd: "[Customers] are increasingly online and demand responses in real time--often via their mobile devices and social media." Sounds like Millennials to me!
One of the biggest drawing cards for Spaces is its ability to seamlessly integrate with the various social media spaces (Facebook, Twitter, etc.), that represent the Millennial persona of being highly social and using a myriad of tools to share their experiences with the entire world. Here's a screenshot of some of the features included with the Spaces suite:
USC "Spaces" was first introduced at an EdTech forum hosted by the Center for Scholarly Technology (part of USC's Information Technology Services division) on December 8, 2011. In the announcement, "Spaces" was described as "a feature-rich collaborative platform that provides a space for faculty and staff to collaborate with an easy-to-use set of integrated online tools. Based on the specific needs for higher education, USC "Spaces" incorporates the following features taken from the full suite show above:
- Discussion forums that can be created by anyone for anyone on the “Spaces” system
- Easy to create public or private groups
- Shared calendars for events
- Three clicks to create a blog
- Easy -to-use wiki with no need to learn markup language
- Document sharing with versioning
- Basic project management tools
- Email notifications
- Great system-wide search features
Since USC "Spaces" is currently still in limited campus deployment, it is not yet being advertised as a full-scale offering by ITS. However, since my department is moving forward with establishing a Spaces "community," I was able to see an online demonstration of it last week. The closest comparison I can make is that it is like Google Docs on steroids. In addition to allowing sharing of and collaboration on documents, it also offers many of the same community features we currently enjoy on the Moodle platform of our online graduate program...all in one place!
Susan Metros, USC professor and Associate Vice Provost/Associate CIO for Technology-Enhanced Learning, recommends USC “Spaces” as a solution for creating a private discussion group for the following reasons:
- USC resource (hosted)
- Easy to use, set up your own resources
- Notifications sent for any activity you “follow”
Wow! I have to admit that after being exposed to all of these new platforms through this program, I've definitely been fascinated by all of the online options out there and continual ways to increase personalization of experience through what used to be generalized as an impersonal Internet experience! I couldn't see your pix (could be my server) but it sounds like through programs like your "Spaces" there are a myriad of choices for how the people can reach out and find questions, provide answers and great examples, and learn new skills!
ReplyDeleteI used to manage millennials and truly felt that 75% of my job was managing them, when it should have been skewed more to "leading by example" and having a system like this would have given me a great resource to direct them to for learning at their own pace and learning a lot of the programmatic stuff that doesn't change, but have a resource to brainstorm the stuff that does or requires change.
My only question would be whether the Gen Xers would get it because I have to admit that I wouldn't probably have understood the full potential had I not been in this program and witnessing the power of these online networks.
Another reason to love USC!
Sarah,
ReplyDeleteThanks for your response. I'm sorry you can't see the graphics, though. The tool is really lovely to look at. To answer your question regarding Gen Xers, according to our reading this week (specifically, Erickson), since Xers grew up with technology (albeit, not as immersed in it as Millennials), they would actually prefer to have something that, while it might take a little longer to master, would provide them with "one-stop shopping." This seems to be becoming the wave of the future...one provider to take care of all the services you need, rather than getting separate pieces from multiple providers. I think people's reluctance to buy into a single provider is for the same reasons that consumers sometime resist bundling of services such as cable, internet access and phone service. Or a better example would be the all-in-one electronics systems that used to be available (i.e., TV with built-in VCR or DVD player). What do you do with the unit when one piece breaks down but the other is still good? I think we need to get over that thinking when it comes to online services and recognize that a single provider makes for a better user experience.
K