Acknowledgments
Adecade ago, my advisor, Dr. Simon Priest, and I dreamed of a day that we could facilitate team-building events online with people from around the world. We dreamed of creating a “digital ropes course.” We tested the ideas and got amazing results with initial audiences, such as increasing trust between two people by more than 20 percent with a short 30-minute video conference. A team at Boeing generated more than 150 e-mails in just 20 minutes as part of an experiment in accelerated ways of learning how to work with one another. Dr. Priest and I formed a company called Virtual Teamworks (virtualteamworks.com), but like many great ideas, it was simply before its time. Thirteen years later, the American Society for Training and Development (http://astd.org) declared 2010 the year of social media as a viable training vehicle. The year 2011 was named the year of mobile learning, or mLearning.
How Twitter Made This Book Happen
I have presented team-building sessions at the ASTD national conference for many years, and in 2011, I proposed a brand new session called TweetTeams: Twitter-based team building. I used a Twitter-based tool called HootSuite to promote the session throughout the conference. I opened a free 1-hour consulting session to get anyone on Twitter prior to the presentation, and I brought four new iPad 2’s to let people borrow during my session so they could create all new content.
What happened is team-building magic that can happen only with technology. ...
