The sixth course is my second minor course, and it’s one that’ll always stick by me if I think back on my time at the Hague University of Applied Sciences. The entire course was devoted to the Working 2.0 (Enterprise 2.0, Het Nieuwe Werken). During the following 10 weeks we had 10 groups of students that all had their own assignments, but one way or another these assignments had something to do with the main subject of the course. Doing this course was a lot of fun, because besides doing our projects and having interesting lectures, we also visited numerous companies or had guest speakers coming to the Uni to explain a few things about Working 2.0.
Overview
Course: Werken 2.0
Completed: Febuary 2011
Gained Knowledge
Understanding the Werken 2.0 concept
Understanding Social Media
Social Media tools (Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, My name is E, etc)
I had no idea at all what I would be doing the coming 20 weeks. Together with Quiriën and Roy I went to the first day of the course full with confidence. Untill that day I had the disbelief that I would be learning something about the inner workings of Facebook, and make something similair, technically. Oh, how wrong I was. When I entered the class room for the first time I was surprised by the sheer number of students that were already in the classroom. It was beyond normal, over 50 students signed up for the course and packed themselves into the classroom. During the first college day (which took almost all day) we had an interesting presentation from Jan Krans, one of the leaders of this course. The entire course we would work according to the ways of Working 2.0. Everyone would do projects that were created with the working 2.0 flavor. Also everyone was “forced” to use certain Social Media tools. Twitter, Facebook, Delicious and G-Mail were some of the tools that we had to use during the course.
I have had many realizations during this course. One of the first ones was the significant use of Twitter. Prior to the course I had the opinion that Twitter was useless. “I am now going to the grocery store”. “Brb, showering”. What is so fun about that? I think more than half of Holland still thinks like this, but since I have used Twitter for these 10 weeks, I have started to see the significance behind this Social Media tool. It is extremely easy to get in touch with people, for example. Suddenly you are talking, helping and getting in touch with folks you otherwise never would have seen before. I was very motivated to “Tweet”, especially since the rest of the class was just as motivated as I was. Because of this I also started to use Facebook more, thus making my first steps to create my own social network on the world-wide interwebz. The first serious steps, anyway.
The course started with the forming of groups. Everyone was free to create their own groups. Q, Roy and I immediately formed our own group along with a couple of others. When we finally formed the group it was time to pick our assignments. Everyone was able to pick an assignment for an actual customer, an actual outside company. There were no projects for the school, which weren’t going to be used much anyway. No, names like KPN/Getronics, KLM, Microsoft and T-Mobile were dropped during the choosings. How cool is that?! We first chose to do an assignment for Microsoft, and I was very anxious to get started.
The following weeks were filled with colleges, guest-workshops and company visits. People from a lot of different companies came to the Uni to have a presentation for us. People from MobyPicture and MyNameIsE(Nu Cardcloud) dropped by and I visited the Open Innovation Festival 2010, Igluu and Seats2Meet (which is now one of my favorite places to go), and I even paid a visit to the headquarters of Hyves. We also had trips to T-mobile, IBM, Ator Origins and Cisco planned. Everything was a lot of fun and very informative. With every visit and every presentation I gained another perspective on Working 2.0 and I saw how a lot of the companies applied the ideals of Working 2.0. After a few visits to different companies I came to the most important realisation of this course: I am already grown up with the Working 2.0 mentality. It didn’t really occur to me until then. My whole life I have been trying to work time and location independently. Things that were taught during the course already came natural to me, even though it was weird to see that many companies struggled with the ideals and mandates from Working 2.0. People had to get used to it or didn’t saw any purpose to Working 2.0 whatsoever.
The Microsoft Project didn’t really go as planned. Microsoft never came was an assignment for us, even though we tried our best to make contact with someone from the company. Jan Krans had the contact information, but he couldn’t manage to make contact either. Eventually we dropped the Microsoft assignment and changed to an assignment from KPN/Getronics.
We did this change just before our Christmas Vacation. This meant that we only had a couple of weeks to finish the project. KPN/Getronics wanted a survey among the nearly-graduated students. This survey had to bring the facts up to the surface about what these students expected from their future employers. Should these employers/companies change their ways for the new generation of employees, or should the new generation of employees change their ways for the companies. Within a week we made the survey through Google Documents and held the Survey in our class. 45 people reacted to it, which was enough for us to at least give an indication about what the new generation of employees thought about their employers and Working 2.0. We’ve written a report about this (it is in Dutch however), which you can read/download here.
The one thing I am more excited about however, is the fact that I contributed into the publishing of the book: Het Nieuwe Werken volgens Generatie Y. One of the projects in the course was the creation of a book that was filled with the experiences of the Digital Generation about Working 2.0. The book was published through a real Social Media platform: Ten Pages. You write a manuscript for your book and upload it to Ten Pages. Once you did that, you have roughly 4 months time to sell 2000 stocks for 5 euro’s each. Once you’ve sold all the stocks, Ten Pages will look for a publisher for you and your book will be published once it’s ready! We sold all the stocks in about 2 months. It went slow at first, but once we all started to use Social Media to spread the word, all the stocks were sold in no time! The last 1000 stocks were sold within a week or so, while the first 1000 stocks took well over a month!.
This course was without a doubt the most fun 10 weeks I’ve had untill now. I’ve realised a lot about myself and the business world around me. I’ve also learned a lot about the different perspectives of many companies about working 2.0, and I have definitely learned a lot about Working 2.0 in general.