Steven Milstein’s Blog Onboarding folks onto social software, 10 minutes at a time.

There are no screw-ups, just Versions

Cynapse's Version control alleviates collaboration and adoption fear factor - at least among 11 and 12 year-olds.

My last post - Kicking off social software in Sara’s elementary school illustrated how Six Graders - 11 & 12 year-olds, were quick to adopt social software in their elementary school. Now that they had some fun over the holidays, the real work needs to start.

In order to make myself perfectly clear, I created an internal wiki page for them called The Project's 5 Ws. Basically, the students had already agreed to:

The Deliverable is the modified version of Cynapse's Best Practices Guide, entitled Cynapse's Best Practices Guide for Elementary School Students. The Students will work in teams and collaborate on modifying the existing content to suit their own scenarios / use cases / user stories, so that other students can benefit from their experiences and ease their adoption of social software.

Deliver The Deliverable within 3 months & their elementary school will continue offering the social software service.

While I've only presented 3 Lunch & Learns so far, I fully intend to retire in the very near future. While I do love presenting, demoing & fielding their questions, or, concerns, I think it's time for them to step-up & take over. There are 13 features - like blogs, wikis, calendar events, status logs, etc. for the students to document. I explained the concept & values of Agile self-organized teams & gave them until next week to decide which features they want to adopt ownership for. So next week should be my last official Lunch & Learn. From then on, the students will take turns presenting, demoing & fielding their own questions, or, concerns.

In addition, I asked them to start blogging about their everyday experiences, including those using/adopting Cynapse's cyn.in social software. The more content they contribute, the easier it will be for everyone to succeed.

In conclusion, I gave them a very quick introduction into Cynapse's content management - wiki editing & version control. I meant to record my demo but unfortunately, didn't have the connector for my laptop, so I used the teacher's laptop instead - which didn't have Jing - screen recording software, installed. I suggested it would be a nice surprise if we were able to deliver less-than-5-minutes How-To videos - like the one above & offered to help them out.

What do think? Will this small group of 11 and 12-year-olds succeed?

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