You haven’t seen much of me the last couple of weeks, but it’s all good.   I’ve been busy applying DS106 to my income producing job at 3M.  Because of what I’ve learned over the last few months, some directly from the CogDog himself, Alan Levine  behind the scenes, some from the DS106 course work, some from other on-line participants, I have been able to incorporate several new digital communication tools like Storify, Twitter, blogging, WordPress, HTML and GIFs to increase my effectiveness as a business opportunity and technology analyst.  Here I was thinking I was “goofing-off” and having too much fun with my DS106 obsession.  Then wham… the week before I leave for my annual fall meditation retreat up in the Rocky Mountains everything falls into place.

• My boss likes what I can do with Storify and has given me permission to try out the business level subscription for a couple of months.
• I built a new WordPress website in just two days that will provide an excellent user interface and location for me to organize the company analysis information I gather for my business group, Energy and Electronics, at 3M.
• I’m establishing a new external on-line presence as Rochelle Lockridge the professional 3M employee: (@rllockridge Twitter handle) which is separate from my personal digital presence as Rockylou.  RLLockridge@mmm.com will be keeping up-to-date on what’s happening with the technologies and companies she needs to follow.

Without this course and the people who make it what it is, I never would have been able to do all of this.  Everything has come at the right time, with the right people showing up in my life, when I didn’t even know I could benefit from this kind of help.  I’m glad that I read about DS106 while studying about MOOCs for a 3M project and got in touch with Alan Levine.  The rest is history. 🙂

So that brings me to the present and moving into the future.  I’m in the process of co-organizing a final project for the 3M-DS106 Salon around collaboratively creating a video documentary (for lack of a better term) that shares our experiences and projects that we will then post to YouTube.  The group has lost momentum over the last few weeks as the greater DS106 community was working on audio.  This will perk them back up. And I’m hoping even some of the 3M “lurkers”, as we’ve been calling them, get involved too.

My plans are to ask them what else they want to learn about and practice with respect to digital communication tools and our internal social platforms, and then build that into the way we create the video.  We will most likely be using many of the same sorts of collaboration tools we used during the making of the DS106 radio programs- like Google Docs, Google Hangouts, Skype, Twitter – but with our internal 3M versions of the tools: share drives, Level 3 Global Crossing, SPARK, IBM Connections Communities.  It might be fun to have a few other DS106ers who’ve been following my little experiment and have been commenting to participate in some way too.  Maybe creating a video clip or doing a recorded Skype “interview” with me that we can include.  If you’re interested contact me.

If this goes well, it will be made public and it might be of value as an introductory tool for others who plan to be working with industry “inside the firewall”. Or perhaps as supporting data  if you need to show your school administrators why the skills taught in DS106 are relevant when your students graduate and enter the business world.

DS106 has made a significant impact in my life that makes me want to share it with others.  This is yet another way to do that.  Oh… by the way… I do plan to keep the 3M-DS106 Salon open and run this again.  Hopefully with another external course going on, but will do it on my own if need be.