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Thinking through social learning

24 March 2011 by Clark 5 Comments

In preparation for our webinar with Citrix and the eLearning Guild, I’ve been thinking through the benefits of learning socially, specifically for formal learning. I’ve articulated before that I think it’s about processing, but I like to try to capture my thinking in a graphic, and hadn’t done so before. I did so now, and thought I’d share it.

In this representation, an individual, in creating an output such as a blogpost or a response to a discussion question in a forum, or a response to an assignment, has to do some reasonably robust processing. Typically, by going from thought to an external representation, you find that you’ve got some gaps and have to fix them. Eventually, however, you come up with what you think is right. And you submit it, say, in formal learning, and eventually may get feedback from an instructor.

But consider where you share that representation, and someone else comments in a way that indicates a different perspective, say in the discussion forum or to your post; then you may have to rethink what you said in light of that alternate viewpoint. You have to do some additional processing.

Then go further: suppose that a team has to come with a convergent answer. Then you might get a number of cycles of expressed viewpoints, additional processing (by all members of the team), sufficient to come to an agreed-upon view. Then you have lots of alternate ideas, and re-processing going on. That, to me, is the power of social learning. In that process of negotiation, you are thinking again and again about a topic, let alone with additional input and viewpoints.

Now, there are lots of nuances that have to go into this, such as designing an assignment that has enough ambiguity or challenge to have sufficient variety in viewpoint, but not so much as to lead to an inability to eventually agree.

This, of course, also is what happens in informal learning, if we end up discussing a problem to solve, or even just blog our thoughts and get comments. As Jay Cross says, the most powerful learning technology is conversation. It’s even better, however, if there’s a resulting artifact, a representation that captures the understanding, as the externality reduces the opportunity for misinterpretation.

So, does this representation make sense to you?

Business Social Media Benefits

11 March 2011 by Clark 1 Comment

For the Australasian Talent Conference that will run in Sydney May 24-26 (where I’m speaking), they’ve been drumming up interest with a press release. As a consequence, I’ve been doing some interviews, some live, some via email. For the latter, I was asked to address the question: “what businesses can learn from allowing employees to access social networking sites, and how allowing social networking can benefit businesses?” My answer:

People are no longer just what they know, but also who they know. It’s the network. If you block social media at work, they’ll take the ‘social media cigarette break’ and step outside with their phones (you can’t stop the signal), because they need their network to answer questions, share ideas, and more. When you can get connected to the person you need, get answers to your burning questions, connect to colleagues who can mentor, morally support, and more, you find that doing without is no longer acceptable. Personal story: wanted to know about a piece of software and tweeted it, received an answer from the person who wrote it in 3 hours offering to answer any of my questions!

People might be concerned with what folks share, and there are two answers. First, there are corporate equivalents: for every Facebook and Twitter there’s a behind-the-firewall and/or industrial strength and secure solution. Second, investigations into people misusing social media and making inappropriate comments show rare violations. If you’ve got a company with the right culture where the mission is clear and people are empowered, folks just don’t violate sensible guidelines.

There are important reasons to be using social media in connecting with customers, and at least as much by empowering employees to get their work done. To succeed, you need to do more than just plan, prepare, and execute. There isn’t time. You need your employees to continually innovate, problem-solve, and more. This happens collaboratively and through communication – conversations are the engine of business – and consequently success is going to be predicated on empowering employees to work together to continually improve.

If you’re in the Antipodes, or nearby, it looks like a good event. If you are interested in attending, using my discount code ‘CQ11’, will get you a 10% discount. Hope to see you there!

Thinking Social

7 March 2011 by Clark 1 Comment

In talking about the 4C’s of Mobile, the last one I usually mention is ‘communicate’. Communicate isn’t last because it’s least, but instead because it leads us furthest afield, into the areas of social learning, which has many ramifications in many ways: organizationally, cognitively, culturally, and more. However, it is of importance for mobile in terms of thinking about how and when to take advantage of it. It is also something that the Internet Time Alliance is wrestling with.

We strongly believe in performance consulting, that is getting to the root cause of the organizational problem, and determining whether the problem is skill set, information, motivation, or whatever. This is a necessary step before you decide your intervention. However, the current models of performance consulting seem to be missing a couple of things. For one, they are not particularly good at engagement, at least in the formal learning setting, and trying to understand the audience’s interest. More importantly here, they also seem to lack consideration of when a social media solution might make sense.

As a preliminary step, I went back to some material I have from my workshop on mobile learning design. One of the activities is thinking about when you might want to consider a social solution, to connect to someone to communicate, rather than have a prepared solution. My initial thoughts were that you might want to connect when:

the content is highly volatile
the situation is likely unique
the cost of access is low
the need for personal touch or mentoring is high

These make sense to me, but I’ve no reason to believe the list is comprehensive. However, it is a starting point for thinking about when you might want to provide access to a social resource, whether a directory of appropriate people, or consider providing communication tools.

I might extend the list with:

when the situation is likely new
when there is an expert
when the situation is likely to be complex.

Here’s a tougher one: when would you think the situation would likely need a collaborator, instead of an expert? What’s the trigger?

As I said, I’m just starting to wrestle with this. What ideas do you have?

Jane Hart’s Social Learning Handbook

24 February 2011 by Clark 1 Comment

Having previously reviewed Marcia Conner and Tony Bingham’s The New Social Learning, and Jane Bozarth’s Social Media for Trainers, I have now received my copy of Jane Hart’s Social Learning Handbook. First, I’ll review Jane’s book on it’s own, and then put it in the context of the other two. Caveat: I’m mentioned in all three, for sins in my past, so take the suitable precautions.

Jane’s book is very much about making the case for social learning in the workplace, as the first section details. This is largely as an adjunct to formal learning, rather than focusing on social media for formal learning. Peppered with charts, diagrams, bullet lists, and case studies, this book is really helpful in making sense of the different ways to look at learning.

The first half of the book is aimed at helping folks get their minds around social media, with the arguments, examples, and implementation hints. While her overarching model does include formal structured learning (FSL), it also covers her other components that complement FSL: accidental and serendipitous learning (ASL), personally directed learning (PSL), group-directed learning (GDL), and intraorganizational learning (IOL). The point, as she shares Harold Jarche’s viewpoint on, is that we need to support not just dependent learning, but independent and interdependent learning. And she’s focused on helping you succeed, with lots of practical advice about problems you might face and steps that might help.

Jane has a unique and valuable talent for looking at things and sorting them out in sensible ways, and that is put to great use here. Nearly the last half of the book is 30 ways to use social media to work and learn smarter, where she goes through tools, hints and tips on getting started, and more. Here, her elearning tool of the day site has yielded rich benefits for the reader, because she’s up to date on what’s out there, and has lists of sites, tools, people with helpful comments.

This is the book for the learning and development group that wants to figure out how to really support the full spectrum of performers, not just the novices, and/or who want to quit subjecting everyone to a course when other tools may make sense.

So, how does this book fit with Jane Bozarth’s Social Media for Trainers, and Conner & Bingham’s The New Social Learning? Jane B’s book is largely for trainers adding social media to supplement formal learning, where as Jane H’s book is for those looking to augment formal learning, so they’re complementary. Marcia and Tony’s book is really more the higher level picture and as such is more useful to the manager and executive. Roughly, I’d sell the benefits to the organization with Marcia & Tony’s book, I’d give Jane B’s book to the trainers and instructional designers who are charged with improving on formal learning, and I’d give Jane H’s book to the L&D group overall who are looking to deliver more value to the organization.

They’re all short, paperback, quick and easy reading, and frankly, I reckon you oughta pick all three of them up so you don’t miss a thing. You’d be hard pressed to get a better introduction and roadmap than from this trio of books. Let’s tap into this huge opportunity to make things go better and faster.

Building Stronger Organizations

17 February 2011 by Clark 1 Comment

A recent Ross Dawson blog post included a mention of building flexibility: “the more flexible the organization, the more able it is to succeed”. Which reminded me of some work I assisted Eileen Clegg with on extremophiles that we wrote up for Marcia Conner & James Clawson’s book, Creating a Learning Culture .

Along the lines of the biomimicry field, Eileen was inspired by her scientist husband’s work on organisms that live in extreme conditions of heat, salt, cold, and more. We riffed on five mechanisms and their corporate equivalents:

ionic bonds: stronger bonds built upon attractions of opposites
context-sensing: reading the environment for cues to change strategies
heat-shock proteins: released under extreme conditions to repair structure
inoculation: bring in what challenges you
symbiosis: finding strategic partnerships

The reflection was that the mechanisms we were suggesting then, to make companies more resilient, were actually strategies making companies more flexible and adaptive. It’s been a number of years, so it’s interesting to me to see what we were recommending back then and it’s even more relevant now:

leverage human complexity: encourage diversity and use it to drive richer solutions
develop ‘wise’ information technology: use technology more strategically to complement our capabilities
encourage always-on cross-mentoring: have mentoring networks to provide support across tough times and develop people in multiple dimensions
tapping social and value networks: reach out across organizational boundaries to partners and customers and eliminate blockages
strategic community-building: facilitating information flows

These are just the sort of activities I continue to push in conjunction with my ITA colleagues, to build flexibility in organizations to, as Ross says, achieve “competitive differentiation”. Wherever your inspiration may arise, the solutions appear again and again: find ways to motivate and empower people because you care about them and what you are doing, and they will provide you with valuable outcomes. What ways are you seeing, trying, and finding useful?

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