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Clark Quinn’s Learnings about Learning

Archives for April 2009

Learning Twitter Chat!

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Blame it on Marcia Conner (@marciamarcia), who’d been participating in Twitter chats for journalists and editors.   She found them educational, and prodded a couple of us that maybe we should create the same sort of thing to talk about learning.   We visited a few other chats, and it seemed worth experimenting with (it’s our duty, after all!). One thing led to another, and here we are:

The first learn chat happens *this* Thursday, 5PM – 7PM PT, 8-10 PM ET.   What do you have to do?

To participate, you need a Twitter account, and then at the annointed time you can:

a) go to TweetChat where you use your Twitter account information to login, and when prompted for the room name, say lrnchat,

b) use Twitter search for the hashtag #lrnchat and put that in all your posts if you want your tweets to be part of the chat, or

c) use Twitter apps like Tweetdeck or Tweetgrid to seek out comments from other chatters.

Make sense?

I expect for this first chat we’ll talk about twitter itself and the tweet chat process, as well as identifying possible topics for subsequent chats.   The success of previous tweet chats has depended on a regularly scheduled time, so that time on Thursdays will be a regular gig.   It’s like a chatroom, but using Twitter (low overhead).   There’ll be a moderator for each chat to toss out questions and keep us sort of on point.

Hope to see you there!   Please feel free to spread the word to other learning, development, performance professionals who are on Twitter.

Clark Quinn (@quinnovator)
Mark Oehlert (@moehlert)
Marcia Conner (@marciamarcia)*

*Who tidied my prose

Real Community?

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I’ve been reading John Taylor Gatto lately, and one of his points is interesting to me from the perspective of social media.   His claim about schools is that they’re dehumanizing (deliberately).   He claims that many of our institutions (and he means more than schools, but groups, organizations, etc) are really networks, not communities, and can’t provide the nurture we need from others: “Networks do great harm by appearing enough like real communities to create expectations that they can manage human social and psychological needs.”

This got me thinking about social media, and how often we call them online communities, but the question is: are they really?   At the same time, Marcia Conner was asking for examples of how someone’s Twitter/Facebook (T/FB) comments have changed your opinion of them.   Personally, I have to say that, in general, the extra ‘human’ bits that show through in T/FB have fleshed out some people I haven’t met and now want to.

Blogs tend to be more formal (tends, mind you), while Twitter and Facebook cross the boundary into informal.   LinkedIn and Ning networks that I’ve participated in professionally are just that, professional.   And maybe then not worthy of being called communities?   What’s critical in making the transition from network to community?   Certainly people will help one another out (Tony Karrer talks about how he uses networks to ask questions), but you might not ask for help on a personal issue there.   Or would you?

Your mileage may vary, of course.   So two questions: is there a difference between a community and a network, and is it important? And, if so (and I’m not certain, but leaning to the answers being yes and yes), should we keep them separate, have different ones for either, and can we have real community virtually?   I’m inclined to believe that you can have real community online, but it’s not the same as a network, and that may not be a bad thing.   You   have to work with lots of people, but only with some of them will you want to share your problems, beliefs, and values. It’s the latter that’s a community.   And while networks are valuable, communities are precious.

Getting Revolutionary: LC Big Q

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The Learning Circuits’ Blog Big Question of the Month is whether and how get ‘unstuck’, when you’ve got a lot to offer and it’s well beyond what they expect you to do in your job.

This actually resonates with two separate things, some thoughts around ‘being revolutionary’, and a previous post based upon a similar complaint that triggered this month’s question (must be a lot of understandable angst out there).   The previous post was about trying to meet unreasonable expectations, and the individual wasn’t getting the support they needed to do the job the way it should be done.   Similarly the big question was triggered by someone knowing what should be done but feeling trapped.

The thread that emerges, for me, is that training departments can’t keep operating in the same old way, despite the fact that formal instruction doesn’t have to die (just improve).   Incrementalism isn’t going to be enough, as optimal execution is going to be just to stay in the game, and the competitive advantage will be the ability to innovate new value to offer.   It’s just too easy to copy a successful product or service, and the barriers to entry aren’t high enough to prevent competition.   You never know when a viral or chaotic event will give someone a marketing advantage, so you’ve got to keep moving.

Trying to keep to the status quo, or slowly expand your responsibility is going to fail, as things are moving too quickly. You have to seize the responsibility now to take on the full suite of performance elements: job aids, portals, social learning, content and knowledge management, and more, and start moving.   It still has to be staged, but it’s a perspective shift that will move you more strategically and systemically towards empowering your organization.

And back to the tactics, what do you do when your clients (internal or external) aren’t pushing you for more and better?   Show them the way.   While I’ve learned that conceptual prototypes don’t always work (some folks can’t get beyond the lack of polish, even when you’re just showing the proof of concept), try and mock up what is on offer, and talk them through it. Help them see why it’s better.   Do a back of the envelope calculation about how it’s better.   Bring in all the factors: outcomes, performance, engagement, learner experience, whatever it takes.

Then, if they don’t want it, do your best within the constraints to do it anyway (write better objectives, practice, etc. even if they won’t appreciate it), and live with what you can do.   And, truly, if you’re capable of more (not more work, better/smarter work), and it’s on offer but continually not accepted, it probably is time to move on.   Don’t give in, keep up the fight for better learning, your learners need it!

Social Media Goals

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I spent yesterday touring the Web 2.0 expo (part of the time with fellow miscreant Jay Cross), and it led me to think a bit more about social media tools and approaches.   After touring the floor, having lunch, and touring the floor some more before the keynotes, my reflections have to do with hybrids and implementation.

We were prompted to visit Blue Kiwi, which is probably the leading European social media platform.   Talking to them, and the others there (Vignette & Lithium) has me reflecting more broadly.   Mzinga is clearly targeted at the learning space, being integrated with an LMS.   Vignette, on the other hand, started as a CMS for KM, but then added social media around it.   Drupal is an open source CMS that’s been used for social media, and Elgg similarly started as an open source portfolio tool but has expanded.

It’s an interesting question about whether to keep your social media separate from your other tools, or to couple them with some other core functionality. Vignette’s story about building on their core content management system supporting knowledge management makes sense from the point of view of mining value out of the discussions. Yet, for a learning group, Mzinga’s integration of formal and informal learning is also plausible.   And, of course, there’s now Sharepoint’s integration of social tools around resources.

On the other hand, a pure focus on social networking may be the more natural framework, but how do you get power to leverage the content generated?   Coupling them makes sense if you’re coming from one direction or another, but I’m trying to integrate formal, content management, knowledge management and more into a seamless ecosystem.   Do you integrate, or do you have APIs to couple capabilities?   On one hand, an integrated solution is less work than an integration exercise, but on the other hand, I don’t expect there to be one all-singing-all-dancing solution.   Tony Karrer, riffing off of BJ Schone’s post which emphasizes making things work and play well together, looks to LMS vendors partnering more, and I reckon that loose coupling makes sense.   However, I don’t know if having a separate app for blogs, wikis, and all works, as you want profiles and discussions to be integrated, so reckon you do want a social media environment, or you’ll have to use a lot of glue.   I’m still wrestling with this.

What definitely makes sense is having an implementation strategy for success. Lithium was advertising ‘successful’ communities, and so I naturally inquired about their approach.   They said that they don’t start small, because to succeed you need critical mass.   I asked about incenting the connectors and content producers, and they indicated that was part of their strategy as well.   They indicated that there was a VIP room exclusively for big contributors where they could hobnob with the C-suite.   Getting the C-suite to actually play struck me as a success factor, but hard to guarantee a priori.   They almost seemed more a services firm though they did claim to have a solution as well.   (I have to admit that their firm’s title, however, makes me think of chemical psychotherapy, not a great mental image.)

As a contrasting approach to success, Blue Kiwi’s pricing model is based around the activity in the system: if you’re not using it, you’re not getting value, and consequently you shouldn’t pay. Their threshold seems low: 2 accesses a month constitutes chargeable activity, whereas I would say 2 a week would be more indicative, but the cost for that activity is relatively low.   What excites me, however, is the notion of measuring and trying to charge for the activity as an indirect measure of value.   A more direct measure, the knowledge grown, seems to be a really exciting opportunity.

I’m realizing that what’s really important is the knowledge shared, and grown.   I reckon that optimizing performance is going to be just the cost of entry, and the competitive advantage will be the generation of new opportunities.   The key, then, is accelerating the growth of accessible actionable knowledge.   So that’s what I’m focusing on. How about you?