You know you're going to fail...

I was at a conference this week where the speaker was touting the organization's shiny new web site that would be rolled-out very soon. Of course, it was going to solve all of the problems the organization was having with people not working together. At the conference I was at the week-before-last I heard someone saying the same thing, "We're are totally revamping our Web site so that people will work together better." If I had a nickel for every time I heard someone say that some new tool was going to solve their collaboration problems, I could treat you all to a round of drinks.

I came across a great blog post this morning at Inkling Markets where Nate makes a great point-- Enterprise 2.0 - Tiger Woods would kick your ass with 3 golf clubs:

Tiger Woods could walk into Kmart, grab 3 clubs from the cheapest, shittiest bag of golf clubs in the store and still kick your ass on the course.

Why?

Because it's not about the tools.

If you're having trouble getting people to work together no tool is going to fix that. People who are truly motivated to work together will find a way to get it done no matter the tool. If your groups are not working together now they're never going to work together unless you solve your people problems first. Before you spend a ton of time and money on technology-- invest a lot of time in conversation.

Who will win the College World Series?

Please jump into the prediction market:

Powered by Inkling

Open Education: University of Michigan shows how it is done

What a great initiative coming from the University of Michigan: open.michigan

Open.Michigan is a University of Michigan initiative that enables faculty, students, staff and others to share their educational resources and research with the global learning community.

That this effort isn't being initiated by Michigan's land-grant university is sad. When the history is written, that the nation's land-grant universities were so slow to get on the right side of the open education movement is going to be seen as a blunder of epic proportion. The open education movement should have been an idea birthed and totally embraced by the land-grants. Instead we've seen it resisted. It's very very sad to see such an opportunity to have gone totally missed.

BTW, I have written Michigan State University twice now asking for an explanation for the copyright statement attached to their OpenCourseWare site. Compare Michigan State's all-rights-reserved licensing to the Creative Commons statement found at the University of Michigan. Shameful!