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Getting Pragmatic About Informal

5 June 2012 by Clark 2 Comments

In my post on reconciling informal and informal, I suggested that there are practical things L&D groups can do about informal learning. I’ve detected a fair bit of concern amongst L&D folks that this threatens their jobs, and I think that’s misplaced. Consequently, I want to get a wee bit more specific than what I said then:

they can make courses about how to use social media better (not everyone knows how to communicate and collaborate well)
share best practices
work social media into formal learning to make it easier to facilitate the segue into the workplace
provide performance support for social media
be facilitating the use of social media
unearth good practices in the organization and share them
foster discussion

I also noted “And, yes, L&D interventions there will be formal in the sense that they‘re applying rigor, but they‘re facilitating emergent behaviors that they don‘t own“. And that’s an important point. It’s wrapping support around activities that aren’t content generated by the L&D group. Two things:

the expertise for much doesn’t reside in the L&D group and it’s time to stop thinking that it all can pass through the L&D group (there’s too much, too fast, and the L&D group has to find ways to get more efficient)
there is expertise in the L&D group (or should be) that’s more about process than product and can and should be put into practice.

So, the L&D group has to start facilitating the sharing of information between folks. How can they represent and share their understandings in ways the L&D group can facilitate, not own? How about ensuring the availability of tools like blogs, micro-blogs, wikis, discussion forums, media file creating/sharing, and profiles, and helping communities learn to use them? Here’s a way that L&D groups can partner with IT and add real value via a synergy that benefits the company.

That latter bit, helping them learn to use them is also important. Not everyone is naturally a good coach or mentor, yet these are valuable roles. It’s not just producing a course about it, but facilitating a community around these roles. There are a lot of myths about what makes brainstorming work, but just putting people in a room isn’t it. If you don’t know, find out and disseminate it! How about even just knowing how to work and play well with others, how to ask for help in ways that will actually get useful responses, supporting needs for blogging, etc.

There are a whole host of valuable activities that L&D groups can engage in besides developing content, and increasingly the resources are likely to be more valuable addressing the facilitation than the design and development. It’s going to be just too much (by the time it’s codified, it’s irrelevant). Yes, there’ll still be a role for fixed content (e.g. compliance), but hopefully more and more curricula and content will be crowd-sourced, which increases the likelihood of it’s relevance, timeliness, and accuracy.

Start supporting activity, not controlling it, and you will likely find it liberating, not threatening.

Reconciling Formal and Informal

24 May 2012 by Clark 22 Comments

Recently, there’s been a lot of talk about informal learning, which ends up sounding like formal learning, and this can be confusing. So I’ve been trying to reconcile these two viewpoints, and this is how I’m seeing it.

There are really two viewpoints: that of the learning and development (L&D) professional, and that of the performer. Each of these sees the world differently, and we need to separate these out.

Let’s get formal learning out of the way first. Performers know when they’re on deck for a course. They’re even willing to take courses when they know there’s a significant skill shift they need, or when they’re novices in a new area. If you’ve addressed the emotional side – motivation and anxiety – they can be eager participants. And L&D knows formal learning (all too well), they know how to design and develop courses (or think they do; there’s a lot of bad stuff being produced under the rubric ‘course’ that’s a waste of time and money, but that’s another topic).

Now, let’s move on to informal learning, as this is where, to me, we have a conflict.

The performer is focused on the tasks they need to perform. When they’re practitioners in the area, they’re much more likely to want the resources ‘to hand’: job aids, information, wizards, etc. This also includes search engines, portals, and more. Further, they’re likely to want people when that’s relevant: coaching, mentoring, answers that aren’t yet codified, finding new ideas and solutions. The latter, resources and people, are to them informal learning. They’re answers, not courses.

Now, from the perspective of the L&D group, job aids are formal learning. They’re designed, developed, and delivered. They’ve got the ‘secret sauce’ provided by folks who understand how we perceive information, work, learn, and more. So here we have a mismatch. Now, not all L&D groups take ownership of this area, but they could and should. (While I think portals should be too, it’s less likely that the L&D group has a role here, and that too should change.)

Then we move to the social side: communication, collaboration, and more. Here, L&D and the performer are largely in agreement, this is informal learning. However, there’s really another mismatch. L&D tends to think there’s little they can do here, and that’s a mistake. They can do several things: they can make courses about how to use social media better (not everyone knows how to communicate and collaborate well), share best practices, work social media into formal learning to make it easier to facilitate the segue into the workplace. They can also provide performance support for the social media, and be facilitating it’s use. They can unearth good practices in the organization and share them, foster discussion, etc; seed, feed, weed, and breed. (And, yes, L&D interventions there will be formal in the sense that they’re applying rigor, but they’re facilitating emergent behaviors that they don’t own.)

This latter, the use of social media in the organization for work should happen, as that’s where the continual innovation happens. As I say: optimal execution is only the cost of entry; continual innovation is the necessary competitive differentiator. Formal learning helps execution, and so does performance support, but innovation comes from social interaction. And L&D groups shouldn’t leave innovation to chance. They have a role to play.

There’s one more confounding factor. Adding social into formal learning is worthwhile, but folks might get confused that doing so is also informal learning, and it’s not. Having requirements for personal reflections via a blog, discussions via forums, and collaborative assignments via wikis, and more, to facilitate learning are all good things, but certainly from the view of the performer it is not informal.

So, when you hear someone talking about informal learning and it sounds like formal learning, realize that they may be missing this final piece, the perspective of the performer. L&D can and should take on informal learning as well, but it’s not helpful if they think that just doing performance support and adding social into formal learning is all that needs to be considered as informal learning.

That’s the way I’m seeing the confusion emerge. Does it make sense to you?

Reimagined Learning: Content & Portfolio elaborated

10 April 2012 by Clark Leave a Comment

In a previous post I laid out the initial framework for rethinking learning design, and in a subsequent post I elaborated the activity component. I want to elaborate the rest a wee bit here. Two additional components of the model around the activities were content and then products coupled with reflection.

One of the driving points behind the model was to move away from content-driven learning, and start focusing on learning experience. As a consequence, the activities were central, but content was there to be driven to from the activities. So, the activity would both motivate and contextualize the need to comprehend some concept or to access an example, and then there would be access paths to the content within the activity. Or not, in that there might be a selection of content, or even the opportunity or need for the learner to choose relevant content. As with the activity, you gradually want to release responsibility to the learner for selecting content, initially modeling and increasingly devolving the locus of control.

A second component is the output of the activity. It was suggested that activities should generate products, such as solutions to problems, proposals for action, and more. The activity would be structured to generate this product, and the product could either be a reflection itself (e.g. an event review) or tangible output. It could be a document, audio, or even video. If the product itself is not a reflection, there should be one as well, a reflection. Eventually, the product choice and reflection piece will be the responsibility of the learner, and consequently there will be a scaffolding and fading process here too.

Note that the product of learner activity could then become content for future activities. The product could similarly be the basis for a subsequent activity.

The reflection itself is a self-evaluation mechanism, that is the learner should be looking at their own work as well as sharing the underlying thinking that led to the resulting product. Peers could and should evaluate other’s products and reflections as an activity as well (getting just a wee bit recursive, but not problematically so). And, of course, the products and reflections are there for mentor evaluation. And, as activities can be social, so too can the products be, and the reflections.

While digital tools aren’t required for this to work, it would certainly make sense from a wide-variety of perspectives to take advantage of digital tools. Rich media would make sense as content, and this could include augmented reality in contexts. Further, creation tools could and should be used to create products and or reflections. Of course, activities too could be digitally based such as simulations, whether desktop or digitally delivered, e.g. simulations or alternate reality games.

The notion is to try to reframe learning as a series of designed activities with guided reflections, and a gradual segue from mentor-designed to learner-owned. Does this resonate?

Reimagined Learning: Activities elaborated

9 April 2012 by Clark 3 Comments

I’ve been reflecting on the new learning model I proposed earlier, and want to share some elaborations with you. In this case, I want to elaborate on the notion of activities, and some associated properties.

First, I think it’s important to recognize that gradually, learners will take more and more ownership of choosing activities. If you’re an adult past college, you choose (with, perhaps, some guidance and support) what professional development you do: you choose books to read, conferences to attend, even perhaps choosing mentors whether agreed upon or stealth (people you follow via their blogs or tweets). We shouldn’t assume learners will have that ability, and our curricula should make explicit what good activity criteria are, and helps learners develop those skills, gradually handing off the responsibility for choosing them, with gradually released scaffolding.

Another important property of these activities is that they embed, possibly at multiple levels. So, for instance, a project to develop a prototype might have component activities to capture and represent the results of the initial analysis, and then an initial concept, and then an initial storyboard, all before the prototype is developed. Each of those would be activities with deliverables or products, and evaluation or reflection. And the prototype might be an activity that is part of an activity to develop a full application. There are lots of ways in which activities could be related.

Finally, activities can be individual or social. They can be assigned to one person, or to teams or workgroups to accomplish. The products of activities from individuals might feed into a group project, or vice-versa as well. The products of a group activity would be a group product, though the reflections could be individual or group, and there could be subsequent individual products as well.

The point is to have as widely varying description of an activity as possible, to support flexibility in designing learning experiences.

As implied in the initial post, these activities should generate products, and reflections as well, which are important for being able to provide feedback, helping shape learners’ understanding. I suppose I should dig into that more, too?

Social Learning, Strategically

4 April 2012 by Clark 5 Comments

Increasingly, as I look around, I see folks addressing learning technology tactics; they’ll make a mobile app, they’ll try out a simulation game, they’ll put in a portal. And there’s nothing wrong with doing each of these as a trial, a test run, some experience under the belt. However, in the longer term, you want to start doing so strategically. I’ll use social media as an example.

Talking with my ITA colleague Jay Cross at lunch the other day, it occurred to me that I was seeing the same pattern with social media that I see elsewhere. When I think through many instances I’ve seen, heard of, or experienced, I see them addressing one issue. “We’ve put in a social media system to use around our formal learning.” “We’ll buy a social media platform to use for our sales force.” And these aren’t bad decisions, except for the fact that such an initiative has broader ramifications.

What I’m not seeing is folks thinking enough along the lines of “social media is a platform, and we should be looking at how the investment can be leveraged.” I’m not seeing enough focus on using every tactic as a step on the way to a ‘workscape’ (aka performance ecosystem). You want to be building the infrastructure for working smarter, and every move should be developing that capability. You want to be getting closer and closer to workers having tools to hand, the resources they need to get the job done.

To empower workers, you want to have the tools for communication, e.g. video sharing, blogging micro- and macro-, discussion forums, etc as well as the tools for collaboration, e.g. shared documents and expertise finding, arranged around tasks and interests, not around silos. To free folks up to get the job done, they need to be able to work smarter.

And you want to align what you’re doing with organizational goals, define metrics that will impact key business metrics, provide governance with partners both fundamental and strategic, leverage other organizational initiatives (oh, you’re putting in a CMS? With just a small additional effort, we can use that to facilitate sharing of information…), etc. It’s time to start thinking strategically, if you want to really move your organization forward. There’re a number of steps: advanced ID, performance support, mobile, each taking on another facet, but arguably the biggest benefit will come from bringing together the talent in your organization. Why not?

Probably the best first step to take is to start using social media in the learning unit, so folks there ‘get it’ (you got to be in it to win it, as they say re: the lottery; guess that’s why I wasn’t one of the 3 winners :). That’s a strategic step that can drive the rest. And you can take the slow path and figure it out yourself, or accelerate with some assistance, but it’s really time to get going. So, what’s stopping you?

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