Tomorrow, I am heading to Vancouver for the 14th annual World Conference on E-Learning in Corporate, Government, Healthcare and Higher Education, better known as E-Learn. It lasts all next week. It is, generally speaking, a meeting of a very large group of e-learning/online education and training practitioners and academics. I hope to meet a few new people, and also to learn about what’s the latest of the latest in the world of instructional technology.
On Thursday at 5:15PM in “Room 7” (which turns out to be Junior Ballroom C), I will be giving a presentation on the social-networking-based mentoring system that I am developing. I hope you attend!
I am also attending about 27 presentations given by others, mostly on virtual worlds (like Second Life) and social networking. The plan is to post a short descriptions of highlights from each day’s presentation here, on neo-academic, each evening. But we all know well that usually goes.
I’ll be attempting to post live updates of talks on Twitter, especially on the #elearn channel, but because I’ll be out of the United States, I’m not sure how useful my iPhone will be.
If you’re attending and would like to connect, just e-mail me or tweet my way (@rnlanders).
In an example of technology run amok, Fistful of Talent reports on a tendency for current employers to use credit checks as part of the application process. I think the impetus for such use is the increased ease with which one can conduct a credit check – fire up the web browser, and a few clicks and social security number entry later, a whole lot numbers get dumped in front of you. Seems like a good value (lots of information for little effort), so why not?
Well, because it isn’t really such a good value. Credit is only a proxy for the personality traits and other characteristics that I suspect most hiring managers are actually interested in: integrity, follow-through, ability to take responsibility, and so on. And if that’s the case, why not assess them directly? Personality-based integrity tests, for example, are relatively inexpensive and show no adverse impact1 , so just use those!
Any specific piece of information about a person you are trying to get from a credit report can be gained by more direct methods. Want to know about follow-through? In a structured reference report/letter, ask references to describe a situation where the subject did or did not follow through well on a project. Then, ask for more details about those events during a structured interview. Problem solved, and you didn’t even have to ask yourself whether spending 7 years to pay off a car loan is good or bad in relation to job performance.
And let’s not forget that beast lurking in the shadows, the potential lawsuit. Consider this final thought from FFoT:
And here’s where it really gets ugly: U.S. Representative, Steve Cohen, of Tennessee, found that many of the credit challenged were “young people, seniors, minorities, and divorced women.” Ok, so maybe ‘young people’ and ‘divorced women’ don’t constitute a protected class . . . but you’re playing with fire in regards to ‘seniors’ and ‘minorities’. Roll the disparate impact dice too many times and you just might come up with snake-eyes.
- Ones, D.S., Viswesvaran, C., & Schmidt, F.L. (1993). Comprehensive meta-analysis of integrity test validities: Findings and implications for personnel selection and theories of job performance. Journal of Applied Psychology, 78, 679-703. [↩]
A recent article at Scholarly Kitchen pointed me to another piece at sciencebase about the lack of successful online social networks for scientists.
A quick analysis of online social networks, such as LinkedIn and Xing would suggest that a mere 1 in 7 [14%] research scientists use such tools as part of their work. This contrasts starkly with the business world where uptake is up to 88%.
I’m not sure this is quite a fair comparison; scientific social networks are specifically designed for research collaboration, while the 88% of employees using social networks are likely not doing so for business purposes – if that number is really that high, I’d be quite surprised. The real comparison is the number of employees using social networks as a matter of business versus the number of scientists using them to communicate with research partners. And unfortunately, I don’t think that kind of information is available.
It does beg the question – why aren’t social networks more popular among scientists? As I tell my graduate students in as cliched a form as possible, we are a “people business” – our field centers around communication to and from our clients, our coworkers, our employees, and each other. Online social networks should only make that easier. But in I/O Psychology, the closest we have to a successful social network is a LinkedIn group, and discussions there seem to center around practitioners promoting their products and graduate students hunting for internships and research guidance that their advisers cannot provide.
Why hasn’t uptake been faster? Even the number of I/O blogs is limited; you’d think that psychologists talking about their own ideas would be quite popular! But I think this quote captures it well:
Krueger believes there needs to be a major cultural shift if online networking is to take on a bigger role. “Scientists really don’t like discussing their thoughts and ideas in the public domain (both for scooping and patent issues),” he points out, adding that there may be an assumed lack of security on internet-based social networks and a time-wasting aspect in that there’s nothing gained from time spent online when conferences and meetings provide all that many scientists feel they need. “For adoption of new technologies in science, it has to be an order of magnitude more useful than current tools,” says Krueger, “We just don’t have the time to waste learning new tools that only marginally increase our productivity.”
So while social networks might improve productivity and communication, the perceived cost is too high. It takes time and effort not only to learn how the network functions, but also to actively participate – and that’s time taken away from other, theoretically more important work. Unless logging in connects you to every other scientist, the value is simply too low.
That means that social networks will have to reach some sort of critical mass before mass adoption by the scientific community will take place. It took several years for all of the major social networks to reach that point – a slow rise over a few years followed by a sudden acceleration. Scientists (including organizational scientists) are in general a little more skeptical than the average Joe, so perhaps we’re just seeing a lag time between the two populations.
So to that end, I have jumped in. Behold, my academia.edu homepage. The question I have now: what next?