I just read on the New York Times website "A Teacher on the Front Lines as Faith and Science Clash" by Amy Harmon and am just blown away by the story, and by the dedication, talent, and patience shown by David Campbell, the high school biology teacher featured in the article. 

Campbell helped draft new standards mandating the teaching of evolution in Florida high schools because he felt that the “The kids are getting hurt” by not being exposed to “the organizing principle of life science.” He then had to put his money where his mouth was by teaching biology to the sophomores in his own school, at least some of whom had religious beliefs that made them hostile to many of evolution’s ideas. 

The article is fascinating for many reasons, but for me its real punch came from reading about Campbell’s work to do exactly what teachers are supposed to do: open students’ minds and get them to see things in a new way. As I read I realized that I could never have succeeded at Campbell’s task. I came to the end of the article humbled, and reminded of the great teachers I’ve had who put in (I now realize) endless hours trying to figure out how to best make a big idea appeal to a young mind.

Please read it, let us know what you think, and give some kind of thanks for teachers like David Campbell.

I’m thinking about using the following two quotes and two paragraphs to wrap up my book on Enterprise 2.0. What do you think? Do the quotes capture something essential, or at least interesting, about the organizational use of emergent social software platforms? Are there better ones that I should use instead? What words from which smart people guide you as you think about the implications of the new technologies? Leave a comment, please, and let us know.

Emergent social software does not appeal to those who prefer answers to questions, and destinations to journeys. It appeals instead, I think, to people to follow the Czech dissident (and later President) Vaclav Havel’s advice to "seek the company of those who search for truth [and] run from those who have found it." Enterprise 2.0 will resonate with people and organizations who seek a conversation rather than a speech, and who agree with the British political philosopher Michael Oakeshott that "Conversation is not… a contest where a winner gets a prize…; it is an endless, unrehearsed, intellectual adventure in which in imagination we enter a variety of modes of understanding the world and ourselves.  And, we are not disconcerted by the differences, or dismayed by the inconclusiveness of it all."

There are new technologies available to support and sustain this conversation, and ample reason to believe that it will leave organizations better off. It is up to the leaders of an enterprise to decide if they want to open themselves up to the conversation.

Twitter is a Web 2.0 entity –  a combination of a website, background technical infrastructure, and human community –  founded in late 2006 and already extremely popular. There are over 1.24 million known Twitterers as of today, according to the TwitDir directory service.

Twitter is a free service that lets members broadcast short text updates, known as ‘tweets.’ Tweets may be no longer than 140 characters, and can include links (free services like TinyURL and Snipurl are available to take very long URLs and shorten them so that they can be included within tweets).

Members can broadcast as many tweets as they like using any mixture of mobile phone text messaging, mobile phone client software like Twitterberry, desktop client software like twhirl, or the Twitter website.

And what happens to these tweets?  Where do they go?  Who reads them? Members use Twitter to sign up and receive the tweets of any and all other members who are of interest to them, a process known as ‘following.’ Extremely popular members such as Robert Scoble can have tens of thousands of followers, all of whom will see all of his public tweets. Newcomers to the service might have none, in which case their tweets will vanish into the ether, unconsumed by anyone. So Twitter communities are self-organizing.

And the tweets themselves are entirely freeform. The only restriction is the 140 character maximum; within that limit members are free to tweet away.
The service’s last major wrinkle is its interesting conflation of channels and platforms with person to person and group-level messaging.  As I wrote earlier,

Software giant SAP kindly invited me to a CEO conference earlier this year in Frankfurt (I have done paid speaking engagements and consulting work for SAP in the past, but this conference was purely for purely for intellectual interest). During the event I recorded an extemporaneous 15 minute talk on our research examing the links between IT investment and recent changes in competition in the US.

The video is now available on SAP TV. Here’s the link (click on the text saying "White-board session about the impact of information technology on companies – on how they perform and how they compete." ). I apologize for all the ‘ums’ and ‘ahs’ and frantic miming when I couldn’t think of what to say next, but it’s a decent and short introduction to the work. Check it out if you have 15 minutes, and let us know what you think, please.