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Clark Quinn’s Learnings about Learning

Transforming Business: Social Media and Conversations

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In a conversation with my ITA colleagues (we keep a Skype channel open and conversations emerge daily), we revisited the idea that there’s a higher perspective that needs to be highlighted: social media is a business engine, both internally and externally!   Jane Hart’s been helping clients with social media marketing, and this has been an entree to talk about social media for working and learning.

The point here is that conversations are the engine of business.   (I mean conversations in the broad sense of discussions, collaborations, partnerships, productive friction, and more.)   We converse, therefore we work.   Just as, internally,   innovation, research, new products etc are the results of interaction, so to are the external aspects of business. Market research is listening to customers, branding is conversations about value propositions, negotiations with partners and suppliers, RFPs, it’s all communication. And, the Cluetrain Manifesto has let us know that with the internet and more open information, we can’t control the conversation, we have to be authentic and engage in open communication.

So if we move up a level, we recognize that both internally and externally, to succeed we need to facilitate conversations.   We need a social media infrastructure that allows stakeholders internally and externally to negotiate mutual goals and collaborate to achieve them.   The successful organization needs to fundamentally rewire itself into a wirearchy.   He who communicates best, wins.

Communication is fundamental to human nature; we’ve developed the ability to accelerate our adaptation to the environment by communication.   We’ve moved from evolution to invention.   We interact, therefore we are.   I’ve largely been focused on internal dialog, but it’s clear that from an executive perspective, you need to realize that communication is fundamental, and social media is another technology lever to move the earth. We’ve been doing it with the phone and email, but there are so many more powerful tools to augment those now. We moved from the buggy to the automobile, and we can (and should) move from email to a rich social media environment. If we want competitive advantage, at any rate.   And you do, don’t you?

Social InFormal – it’s the network!

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Yesterday, I talked about how social added to formal learning.   Today I want to extend social learning learning to informal learning.   When I talked about the value social adds to formal, it was about processing the information in richer ways, to help facilitate learning.   However, the value proposition for informal learning is different.

We can start, however, with formal learning, because I see learning as a continuum from formal to collaboration.   We start with designed activities to generate productive processing, but then we could and should want that learning to extend out into the community, where the fostered understanding can take root and grow.   It’s about having others improve on what we start with in a virtuous cycle (just as Dave Ferguson added breed to my original seed, feed, and weed).

While our individual learning might involve a portal with resources and search engines, our social learning goes beyond this.   We again see expressing ideas and adding feedback to others, but now it’s very task-focused, particularly in collaboration.   Further, we can specifically ask for help and pointers, and track others’ information that serve as virtual mentors for us.We are our network.

And it’s this latter, this collection of people who we’ve come to recognize as valuable, as well as those we may not even know about but input into the same mental space, where the deliberate and serendipitous collide to provide synergistic value.

This is a slightly different cut on it than Harold Jarche captures, focusing more on the processes of working than the organizational role, but in both cases, it’s still about the network.   It’s about what the network can add to our ability to do.

And, of course, it’s about putting in place the infrastructure that enables performers to tap into their network as easily as they can tap into organizational resources, so that the focus is on the task, not on the tools.

Social Formal – it’s the processing!

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In thinking about the benefits of adding social to formal learning for a presentation I’ll be giving, I realized that the main reason to extend social activities into formal learning is for the additional processing it provides.   While there is processing individually, social interaction provides more opportunities.

The types of learning processing that matter for learning are personalizing, elaborating, and applying.   All of this can be done individually. We can: restate what we understand, write up what the content means to us personally, write up how the concept could be reconsidered, and apply the knowledge to solve problems.   Our goals are retention over time ’til the learning is needed, and transfer to all appropriate situations.   Applying it is the most useful, but it’s a probabilistic game.   We work to increase the likelihood that the learner will succeed (even with criterion-referenced approaches, some may not make it).

Those forms of processing are useful, but feedback is better. Diana Laurillard, in her book Rethinking University Teaching had a conversational model where the learner articulated their understanding after performing and then the instructor could provide feedback. This doesn’t always scale well, however.   Are there other things we can do?

Well, how about if we require learners to put out their thoughts to each other, and then have them comment on the other’s thoughts? There are additional processing benefits here.   First, learners are listening to other, possibly wrong or different interpretations, and they have to review their understanding of the material to provide feedback.   Internalizing that monitoring of the concept is really useful to create a self-improving learner! So, just having them comment on each other is a first step.

However, having them having to negotiate a shared understanding is better. Having learners work to create a shared definition or response to an extension question means that they can’t just ‘agree to disagree’, but have to work to a compromise. That knowledge negotiation is a very powerful tool to get them to reprocess the concept and refine their understanding.   Thiagi, for example, has a whole suite of training exercises that are specifically design to get learners working together to reprocess information.

And, if we are after meaningful skill shifts (and we should be), then having them actually apply the knowledge to solve a problem or create a response to a contextualized performance should be our ultimate task.   Here, learners have to work together to determine not only their understanding, but how it applies to a particular circumstance, committing as a team to their solution. With the right amount of ambiguity in the process, learners will have to wrestle with the issues to create a response.

The outcomes from social learning extend and augment individual processing in ways that make the material more memorable.   They not only have to create a response, but they have internal cycles of feedback and refinement that are more than any realistic cycle of assignment and formal feedback can provide.   And, typically, the only cost besides social media is the ability to develop meaningful tasks.

Look, we know that information dump and check doesn’t work.   Processing does.   Processing together is more engaging and more effective, and usually quite cost effective.   What more do you want?

What is the Important Work?

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When you look at the changes going on in society, and the implications for business, you realize that there are some significant changes going on.   This isn’t news: things are moving faster, we’re having less resources available, our competition is more agile, the amount of relevant information is increasing, customers are more aware, the list goes on.   Does this mean something fundamental, however?

I want to argue that it does. Not surprisingly for regular readers, I think that the nature of work is changing.   The success factor for businesses will be, increasingly, the ability to:

  • continually innovate
  • conduct useful research
  • experiment
  • learn from mistakes
  • create new processes
  • solve problems
  • create new products/services/offerings/markets/businesses

In essence, to do the important work faster.   Call it knowledge work, call it concept work, the point is that execution will only   be the cost of entry, innovation will be the necessary differentiator.   The fact is, our brains are really good at pattern matching, and bad at rote work. Training people to do rote work is a dying enterprise. We should be reserving our brains for making decisions, dealing with ambiguity, and working together to create new understandings. That, increasingly, is the important work. And facilitating that work is job number one.

Now, I recognize that there’s a lot of work and businesses out there that are doing just fine as they are.   But that’s not the way to bet.   That’s likely to change in a relatively small window.   Some have postulated it on the order of 5 years.   No matter how cool your innovation is (c.f. the iPad), look how fast competitors come out (within months). That’s not a sufficient barrier to entry. And the work that’s not the important work?   Well, that could and should be outsourced or automated. Rote work isn’t how you add value, and create margins.

So, the important question becomes, how do we get the ability to do the important work?   And that, my friends, is why the ITA is on a crusade about wirearchy, personal knowledge management, social media, informal learning, and new L&D skills.   Because the only way to do the important work is to enable the power of your people. You need to get out of the old hierarchical ‘one thinks for many’ world, and start recognizing the importance of organization culture, of facilitating communication and collaboration, of enabling the necessary elements.

We believe that recognizing the inherent value of individual and collective capability, and honoring it with meaningful work and the best support, makes for more enjoyable and successful organizations.   We’re seeing the possibilities, tracking and developing the methods and tools, and helping organizations make the transition.   Are you ready to do the important work?

Hit ’em in the gut first

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I’ve argued before that you need to emotionally hook learners even before you cognitively activate related knowledge.   I reckon that learners are more likely to be open to any manipulation you might provide if they understand viscerally why something’s important before they are informed cognitively.   Some new research might support this argument.

An article points to a theory proposed by two philosophers that interprets a broad range of cognitive phenomena in terms of human communication and argumentation. In particular, some reliable flaws exhibited in our thinking, such as confirmation bias, are hypothesized to exist because we’ve evolved to be able to argue for our beliefs. We argue, therefore we are.

This isn’t to say that we can’t evaluate arguments effectively under the right contexts (when we have no bias or when we’re searching for ‘the truth’), but that when we’re creating arguments we are likely to be suboptimal from a logical standpoint, but very good at trying to marshal the evidence in a particular direction when we care.   As the authors make clear.

My particular take on this, however, is that we should ensure to marshal a convincing case about why this learning is important or our learners may make a convincing case to the contrary.   Hook the learner’s interests and motivations, and the rest of the work will be easier.

And, of course, I’m making my case in the same way they argue we should, but that doesn’t undermine the quality of the reasoning ;).

10 Social Media Rebuttals

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Jane Hart posted a tongue-in-cheek video by Ron Desi of 10 reasons why you should not have social media in the organization, and is collecting rebuttals.   I figured I should weigh in, so as not to be left out ;), but I’ll go on and list 10 reasons why you should want social media in your organization that aren’t aligned with the reasons not to! But first, the rebuttal:

10. Social media is a fad.

Communication has been at the core of being human since before the campfire.   Augmenting our capabilities with technology, using tools, yeah, that’s not new.   So using tools to facilitate communication is just natural evolution.   Was the computer a fad? The internet a fad?   Busted.

9. It’s about controlling the message.

You can’t control the message, and social media isn’t going to change that.   They   have phones, email, hallway conversations, parking lot conversations, and the social media cigarette break.     I won’t even go into why you’d want to control the message, because that comes up later in the list.

8. Employees will goof off.

This is redundant with the previous one. They’ll still have phones, email, paper, etc, e.g. lots of ways to goof off.   They’ll goof off regardless if you haven’t given them meaning in the work, but social media won’t affect it, yay or nay.

7. Social Media is a time waster.

They already have social media (email, phones, etc).   Are they wasting time with them, or using them to work?   Same argument as before: they’ll waste time or not, depending on the work environment, not the tool.   You have to make the environment meaningful and valuable, regardless of the technology!

6. Social media has no business purpose.

Again, they already have email. Do you use email for business?   What might they do with the ability to ask questions, provide hints, suggestions, and pointers?   To work together on a problem?   Business is communication.

5. Employees can’t be trusted.

See previous responses.   The tool doesn’t matter.   Either they can be trusted, or they can’t (and if they can’t, you’ve failed, not them).

4. Don’t cave into the demands of the millennials.

The generational differences myth has already been busted.   The evidence is that what the different generations want out of work really isn’t that different. What workers want are ways to achieve meaningful goals, and they want whatever tools will help them.   If there are new tools, get those tools into their hands!

3. Your teams already share knowledge effectively.

They may share as effectively as they   have been able to, but why would you limit them to what has been possible?   Why not empower them with what is now possible?

2. You’ll get viruses.

That’s a risk with all IT, and your IT department should block that at the firewall.   You don’t block other IT, you still have email, and ERPs, and other software.   Why would you treat this any differently?

1. Your competition isn’t using it, so why should you?

Aren’t you looking for every competitive advantage you can?   Why would you even think of not considering a possible advantage?

So let’s now turn this around, what is the advantage we’re talking about?

  1. You can do more work.   The tools provided are magnifiers of effort.   Tools in general are augments of our ability, and new tools mean either new abilities or more abilities.
  2. You can do more work independent of distance. Social media provides new tools to work together, independent of geographic location, so you can get contributions from the right people regardless of where they work and live.
  3. You can do more work independent of time. Social media tools are asynchronous as well as synchronous, so work can continue as needed.
  4. You can work faster.   The barrier to working quickly, the time for communications to percolate, is dropping. We can put richer media through faster.
  5. You can communicate better.   The richer media mean you can more effectively transit the message.
  6. You can collaborate better. The tools support not only communication, but also shared efforts on a single output.
  7. You can learn* faster. Learning’s critical, and by sharing that learning more seamlessly, the organization makes fewer mistakes, and fewer repeated mistakes.
  8. You can learn deeper. Your learning now is more richly connected through information resources, people and shared representations.   The dialog can go to a whole new level of understanding.
  9. You can innovate better. Learning faster and deeper means more problems-solved and more ideas generated, improved, and developed into solutions.
  10. You can succeed faster. The only sustainable edge will be the ability to out-learn your competitors.

Why wouldn’t you want to get more power in the hands of your people, to not just survive, but thrive?!?!

*Note that I do not mean formal learning here, I mean the broad definition of learning, and very specifically the type of learning that means exploring the unknown and creating new understandings: problem-solving, research, experimentation, creativity, innovation, new products, new services, new markets, new businesses.   That’s the type of learning needed, and needing facilitation.

The LMS Debate rides again

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Well, Saba called me out in an semi-anonymous (there’s a picture, but I don’t know who of, and there’s no name – in social media?) blog post on the LMS debate (a bit late to join the fray, no?).   I was surprised by the way they referred to me, but there you go(ng).   I made a comment which is awaiting moderation, but I’ll give it to you here in the interim:

I don’t know who to thank for this post, but glad to see it.   I would like to point you to a subsequent post:   When to LMS about why I don’t have a problem with the functionality, I have a problem with the philosophical stance.

Formal learning is necessary, and tracking it can be required, but it’s a small picture. When you look at the larger picture, as you talk about: user-generated content, etc, the notion that you can *manage* this activity becomes somewhat ludicrous.   And you don’t want to manage it so much as support it.   It’s the move from being an ‘instructor’ to a mentor, a facilitator.

I look at your list of capabilities, and I see support, and facilitation. Hear hear!   Great stuff.   It’s not management.   If you’re doing it task-centric, and community-centric, you’re doing it right, but then it’s not course-centric, and really you’re no longer coming from the perspective of where LMS emerged from.

Yes, Dave Wilkins of Learn.com and Tom Stone of Element K have already argued that the label is still needed in the marketplace, but I’m really trying to shift the way people think about what their role is, and to me using the label LMS is a major barrier to shifting out of the comfort zone.   And to me, that’s not just a game of semantics, it’s a fundamental perspective shift that’s necessary and desirable.

Yes, kudos to your customers who are getting much broader leverage from it than I‘m worried about. But despite your claim that my concerns are ‘old news‘, the results my colleagues saw at a recent elearning event in the UK, Allison Rossett‘s recent survey results, and my own client experience suggest that way too many organizations are still seeing things in the old way.

So, what do you think?

Collaborative co-design

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In my previous post, I mentioned that we needed to start thinking about designing not just formal learning content, or formal learning experiences, but learning experiences in the context of the informal learning resources (job aids, social tools), and moreover, learning in the context of a workflow.   I’d sold myself on this, when I realized just where my ITA colleagues would draw me up short: it’s still the thinking that we can design solutions a priori!

Things are moving so fast, and increasingly the work will be solving new problems, designing new solutions/products/services, etc, that we won’t be able to anticipate the actual work needs.   What we will need to do, instead, is ensure that a full suite of tools are available, and provide individuals with the ability to work together to create worthwhile working/learning environments.

In short, tying back to my post on collaboratively designing job aids, I think we need to be collaboratively designing workflows. What I mean is that the learning function role will move to facilitating individuals tailoring content and tools to achieve their learning goals.   (And not, I should add, to ‘accreditation‘!)

And that’s where I tie back to Explorability and Incremental Advantage: we need easy to use tools that let us build not just pages, but environments.   The ‘pods’ that you can drag around and reconfigure interfaces are a part, but there’s a semantic level behind it as well. No one wants to get tied to a) learning a complex system that’s separate from their goals, or b) depending on some department to do it when and where convenient for the department.

Obviously, providing a good default is the starting point, but if people can invest as much as they want to get the power they want to configure the system to work the way they want, with minimal assistance, we’re making progress.

So that, to me, facilitating the development of personal (and group) learning environments is a valuable role for the learning function, and a necessary tool will be an easily configurable environment.

Co-design of workflow

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I’ve talked before about how our design task will need to accommodate both the formal learning and the informal job resources, but as I’ve been thinking about (and working on) this model, it occurs to me that there is another way to think about learning design that we have to consider.

The first notion is that we should not design our formal learning solutions without thinking about what the performance support aspects are as well.   We need to co-design our performance support solutions along with our preparation for performance so that they mutually reflect (and reference) each other. Our goal has to be to look at the total development and execution of the task.

The other way I’ve now been thinking of it, however, is to think about designing the workflow and the learning ‘flow’ together.   Visualize the formal and informal learning flows as components within an overall workflow.   You want the performer focusing on the task, and learning tools ‘to hand’ within the task flow.   Ideally, the person is able to find the answers, or even learn some new things, while still in the work context. (Context is so important in learning that we spend large amounts to recreate context away from our existing work context!)

The point being, not only is formal learning and informal learning co-designed, but they’re both co-designed in the context of understanding the flow of performance, so you’re designing the work/learning context.   Which means we’re incorporating user-interface and user-experience design, as well as resource design (e.g. technical communications) on top of our learning design.   And probably more.

Now, are you ready to buy this?   Because I’d talked myself to this point and then realized: “but wait, there’s more. If you call now, we’ll throw in” an obvious extension. To be covered in the next and last post of this series (tying it back to the context of explorability and incremental advantage I started with in my last post.

Explorability and Incremental Advantage

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During a summer internship at NASA, many years ago, I met a researcher who was conceptualizing the interface property of ‘explorability’. I can’t claim that I accurately can communicate the nuances of Jean-Marc Robert‘s model, but I was intrigued with the notion. The idea that interfaces could differ on the extent that they supported experimentation and subsequent comprehension seemed valuable. The requisite property would be predictability, requiring consistency, and learnable interfaces would empower users.

A related concept is Andi diSessa‘s ‘incremental advantage’, where he proposed that interfaces should elegantly allow the investment by a user to learn more to provide more power. So his Boxer software environment supported gradual addition of concepts to yield more computational capability. The underlying notion of ‘the more you learn, the   more you can do’ again seems like a user-empowering concept.

Fast-forward a few years, and as a newly-minted academic using HyperCard for student interface design projects, I recognized that the notion of buttons, fields, and backgrounds provided a reasonable implementation of the ideas of explorability and incremental advantage. I proposed that the key idea was supporting correct inferences about how to make things happen. Interestingly, the English-like nature of HyperTalk supported both some correct and some incorrect inferences about making more complex logic.

As a side note, a combination between software design supporting a strong conceptual model, and software training that builds the model (not rote procedures), strikes me as a learning approach that is far more powerful but seldom seen.   Similarly for other learning outcomes, models are powerful thinking tools that we do not leverage sufficiently.

The reason I mention this is two-fold; I want to bring this concept to light, and to build on it. As I mentioned before, I think we need to make editable environments to support collaborative tool building. This will become more important, going forward, for reasons that I intend to elaborate across two subsequent posts. Stay tuned!