Trying to find ways to manage information overload

I am an intensely curious person, with a strong, bordering-on-obsessive need to learn as much as I can on any topic that piques my interest. It’s actually not enough for me to just get a surface-level look at something, unless I decide it’s boring or of no use to me. It’s an all-or-nothing kind of thing. Annoying, really. I’m aware of this and I can’t help myself, and the only thing that stops me from trying to soak up everything is the limited time that I have in my day to attend to, oh, LIVING.

I have a feeling I’m not alone, and in fact it’s probably a very common affliction. So, what can I do about this?

Lately I’ve started working on a presentation for my team about how we can extend our reach into the internal and external communities with the education we currently produce, and encourage the use of social learning tools that are currently available in the environment. Seems like learning 2.0 is a big buzz word for progressive companies these days, and it’s only going to get bigger. As employees who need to actually WORK and PRODUCE during our 8 hours at the office each day, how do we keep up with learning? More importantly, how can we retain and apply this new knowledge?

It all boils down to time and efficiency. I should list out all of the tools I’ve used in the past for learning, to help me get a better sense of the big picture. Maybe I can learn a little about my own fact-finding, knowledge-seeking habits.

Joined some groups on LearningTown

Well between blogging, tweeting, reading the news on my PageFlakes pages, and oh, being away from the computer to have a life, I’m not sure I have time for much more. But I joined a few groups on LearningTown anyway, I’m really curious to see what kind of discussion arises from this arena.

Using PBworks (PBwiki)

I’ve always believed in using web 2.0 tools for collaboration and communication. It’s just so much more efficient and effective than traditional tools like whiteboards and email.

Just yesterday I was explaining to a friend how wikis work. It’s weird how the concept of the wiki has been out for a very long time now, and yet it seems there are still a lot of people that have not yet heard of it. Originally I think it was just a way for people to access, create, and update a bunch of web pages as a group, but I think the founder of PBworks explains really well on the PBworks blog how this concept has really evolved: “The product has evolved well beyond the definition of a ‘wiki’. What we have now is not just some user-friendly generic wiki; it’s an increasingly full-featured hosted collaboration environment, used by tens of thousands of companies around the world to get their work done.”

And that’s why I love wikis. I recently set up a couple of wikis using PBworks and have found it was a really great place to asynchronously collaborate with my cohorts. At work, we’ve used other wiki services that have worked almost as well (I still like PBworks best so far). I can upload files, organize files and pages in my own folder structure, and track changes to any of the content using RSS feeds.

I wish I had this tool when I was a student. I wonder just how much further I could have gone in my learning if I could have used a wiki to share my notes and ideas with fellow students. But why wish? As adults we’re constantly learning, and certainly in the world that I’m in (web, media, and elearning development), it can be an invaluable tool for sharing information between like-minded peeps.

Twittering

Lately I’ve been really hooked on Twitter.

My first impression of Twitter, before I tried it out, was that it would be a complete waste of time for people that have a strange need to air out their personal lives, and for voyeurs who have a need to know what others are doing on a daily basis. I was proven wrong when I realized that it could be used instead as a social learning tool.

As a person that is generally curious in nature with a huge appetite for learning and a desire to contribute to the overall knowledge pool on the web, I am finding Twitter to be an invaluable source of new tidbits of info. Unlike blogging on the usual blog sites, which can take a lot of time and thoughtful writing, Twitter is an excellent alternative that frees you up from having to think too hard about your posts and allows you to just get to the point in 140 characters or less. I love it!

As soon as I created my account, I downloaded Twhirl to use as a desktop (AIR) app for twittering, and so far it’s worked out really well. For the first few days, I enjoyed seeing new tweets popping up in the corner of my screen — it wasn’t too much of a distraction, and in a way I felt like I was multi-tasking because I was working and staying up-to-date with new information at the same time. It’s starting to get to be a bit much though, the links that people are sharing are becoming a little TOO inviting, so I think I’m going to back off for a bit.

Twhirl

I just downloaded TweetDeck (also an AIR app) on a recommendation by Nick Floro in his really informative webinar on social media today. It’s a little more usable than Twhirl, at first glance anyways, as it allows you to switch from a single-column view of the latest tweets to a three-column view that also displays replies and direct messages. The notifications are much smaller and appear in the top right corner of your screen, which I like.

TweetDeck

Using Mindjet MindManager Pro

This week I’m working on a new Flash project – we’re creating a new eLearning activity that has people dragging and dropping different parts of a process into a sequence. After the sequence is complete, the learner can then click each part of the process to launch an explanatory animation or video (depending on what decide to use for this piece), followed by one or more questions.

Because I’m still fairly new to the OOP approach and AS 3.0 (I’ve created custom classes before, but still used a largely procedural approach to coding AS 2), I decided to use Mindjet MindManager to help me plan out the different classes needed in this activity. So far, I love it! It allows me to add text markers that I can customize to indicate the super class that each class is extending, as well as the container object that it will be instantiated in. I’m also using it to draw out relationships between the various classes.