The last two days EMC held its 2nd annual Innovation Conference, right in the Education Services building. I was lucky enough to be given a last-minute invite to the conference. I attended last year’s conference (as a judge, not sure how that happened!), and both times the event has been very energizing and encouraging.

You may be thinking: wait! This blog is all about education! Why would Gina go to a geeky engineer science fair? Well, I am a geek. Our group writes technical training, so all of us are very technical and geeky. It is great to have a different connection to the engineering folks we work with to get our product training ready for consumption.

Plus I had two submissions of my own! They were both education based. One was very very innovative – in fact several of the finalists submitted a key piece to my idea. Next year I’ll try to geek it up more and hide my education side. 🙂

After the conference, we had a meet-up of some of the social media types at EMC. Besides myself and Brian Rosenthal, Dave Spencer, Polly Pearson, Mark Twomey, Steve Todd, Dave Graham, Stu Miniman, and Radha Sekhar were there.

As we talked, I started thinking about the connections we have. The connections started with our internal social media site, EMC ONE. Then we moved to external social media like Twitter and Facebook. These social connections allowed our unseen business connections to surface. Here’s a quick concept map:

I’ll try to break it down:

• 4 of us had Innovation Conferences entries (One of us won 2nd place!)
• 3 people are in Engineering (one Distinguished engineer)
• 2 people in Education Services
• 2 people in Sales
• 1 person in HR, and 1 person in the CTO office
• 4 of us do work supporting the Resource Management Software organization
• We represented 3 different countries
• 8 of us are on Twitter, and 7 of us blog (which is how we all met)

It’s clear to me social media breaks through organizational silos, and as an educator this is critical. If one of the biggest competitive advantages right now is how fast your workforce can learn, educators need to be able to find the information they need in a true cross-functional manner.

So CCK08 people, how can Connectivism be used as an instructional method that connects and tunnels through these organizational silos?

Here’s a picture of the group (minus “the Daves”)