Earlier this month, Charles Jennings, Harold Jarche, Jay Cross and I got together, virtually, to represent the Internet Time Alliance for a discussion around organizations and social media with Xyleme Learning. Dawn Polous elegantly and eloquently hosted us, providing the starting questions and segueing between the comments.
They’ve gathered them up in a series of podcasts, and if you’re curious about what we’re up to, I recommend you go have a listen.
The Big Question of the Month is “How do I communicate the value of social media as a learning tool to my organization?”. Now, this is late, but it’s because I’ve been getting ready for and then attending DevLearn (as always, was a great event), but Jay Cross and I spent a day talking about this issue in the larger picture of social learning in the media.
Then, in last night’s #lrnchat, the question was asked again as part of the usual 3 question format. So, I decided to pull out my tweeted contributions and elaborate on them a bit as my response. These are the unique answers, not including my responses to others, re-tweets of poignant statements, and snarky comments.
don‘t talk about social learning, talk about innovation, problem-solving, creativity, research, experimentation…
As Andrew McAfee told us in his keynote, the term ‘social learning’ isn’t going to carry a lot of weight where it matters. You need to talk about benefits. My message is that learning should be considered as a very broad umbrella, as it should include all those activities where we don’t have an answer and have to ‘learn’ one. Therefore, I feel quite comfortable talking about the outcomes of informal learning: innovation, problem-solving, creativity, research, experimentation, design, insights, new products, new services, and so on.
focus on: biz case; need to go beyond execution to continual innovation; collective intelligence.
Organizations don’t want concepts, they want results. In this case, talk about the concrete outcomes of collective intelligence. Greater rates of new product and service generation. More problems solved, and more c0mplex problems solved. More valuable ideas generated. Hearing from more members of the organization. Talk about impacting those things that will make a difference to organizational success.
I point others to @dwilkinsnh excellent list of success stories: http://bit.ly/K16NU
One of the things that helps is having good case studies. Dave Wilkins has collected quite a few in his blog, and more are popping up everywhere. In particular, showing that the competition is doing it (as one of our workshop attendees intended to do) is a good incentive, and having relevant ones for the particular initiative you choose is important.
standard org change: start small, focus on a good success story, leverage the er, heck out of it
Speaking of initiatives, really the same strategy that goes for most organizational changes holds true, in general. Start small where the cultural tendencies are supportive and there’s a fairly obvious positive outcome to be had, and get a win. Then use that to argue for more initiatives.
It’s not easy, there are lots of factors to gaining success, but in the long term it’s really adapt or die. The most agile will win, and agility comes from aligned inspiration. Good luck!
Andy McAfee gave us a lively and informative presentation on his view of Enterprise 2.0. Punctuated by insightful examples, he defined Enterprise 2.0 as “”use of emergent social software platforms by organizations in pursuit of their goals”, and characterized it more simply as ‘bringing web energy into organizations’.
Along the way, he emphasized points about emergent behavior, inherent altruism, emergent process, developing innovation, the intelligence of crowds, and real business benefits. A 20% improvement in innovation was one concrete result. He also warned us of the ways to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.
BTW, Cammy Bean’s has posted a prose recitation of the talk. With no further ado:
Yesterday I attended the Social Web incubator Bar Camp of the W3C, focusing on issues in web support for social media. It was a small group, overall, but an interesting group, including folks keen on issues like technical underpinnings (discussion of FOAF, RDF, etc), and folks with an interest in more applied topics like enterprise, health, and journalism.
The issue on the table is what sorts of standards might be necessary or desirable to support social networking on the web in interoperable ways. One statement that resonated was a comparison between the social web and social networks as being analogous to open space versus silos. As a general rule, if someone can lock you into their proprietary approach, you are subject to their whims. If, instead, there are open standards, you’re free to approach things in different ways. For example, email took off once one email standard took hold and allowed different systems to interoperate. On the other hand, proprietary standards may provide the capital and motivation necessary to invest in the development of advanced features (e.g. the ability of Linden Labs to continue to expand Second Life capabilities as they grabbed market share).
The internet as an open standard (e.g.TCP/IP) has allowed for the development of other standards on top. If not for the http standard, we wouldn’t have have the world wide web. However, continued development is needed to meet new needs. So, for example the Salmon project was represented, which is trying to make a mechanism whereby any comment on a piece of web content, regardless of location and tool (e.g. blogging about someone’s Flickr picture) could be aggregated back to the original content to maintain the discussion.
This can be real propeller-head stuff, e.g. it was admitted that RDF’s uptake has been hampered by a difficult syntax. Even Sir Tim Berners-Lee, responsible for the http protocol, admits that the // in the protocol isn’t necessary, and regrets it. I no longer can get down in the weeds, but fortunately understand it well enough conceptually to talk intelligently about the requirements and see the opportunities.
And opportunities there are. The next generation, I believe, so-called web 3.0, is when we move to system-generated content. The discussions that occurred on pulling together useful information to the benefit of organizations, like adding valuable information as a response to your searches and discussions. Rules operating on data by description has powerful capabilities, e.g. the way Amazon provides mass customization. There are entailments, of course; taxonomies and ontologies need governance as do other content activities.
Naturally, some of it was more approachable than the geek speak, such as the fact that social engineering was as important as semantic engineering, for example that clever interface design can mitigate getting users to tag content. Similarly, problems that can arise from bad behavior may be better solved as cultural issues rather than technical ones.
The folks there were fabulously knowledge, for example a post-meeting request for ontologies around project management and pharmaceuticals were richly answered. While much of this stuff is still in development, the opportunities are coming, and having the necessary understanding on hand to capitalize on it is important. Note that these people are working to make this stuff work for all of us. Truly valuable and much to be appreciated.
My recommendation is to be aware of the possibilities and requirements. While you are likely not quite ready to take advantage of it (and there are already opportunities, seriously), you don’t want to do anything that would subsequently make the opportunities harder to capitalize on. So look into your content data engineering from a semantic point of view as well, and prepare for some truly awesome capabilities.
A number of years ago, I co-wrote a chapter with Eileen Clegg called The Agility Factor, that appeared in Marcia Conner & James Clawson’s excellent collection of organizational culture articles in the book Creating a Learning Culture. The focus of the book was on empowering organizations to be nimble in a context of increasing change.
Eileen’s husband is a marine scientist studying deep sea vents and the creatures that live there. In biology, organisms that can live in such extreme heat, or in bitter cold, or extreme salinity, etc., are known as extremophiles. They have a number of mechanisms that allow them to succeed, including stronger ionic bonds, sensing and reacting to changes in the environment, special proteins for extreme circumstances, inoculation mechanisms to cope with toxins, and special partnerships.
In the chapter, we talked about organizational equivalents to these extremophile mechanisms, including tolerating diversity, monitoring the environment, extreme mentoring, and more. We’re talking about it tonite at a special event, and I reread the article to see what we said then and to reflect on it in light of the subsequent years of experience. I saw several ways in which to augment the thinking we had then.
In thinking about ionic bonds, it’s not only about the diversity (polarity) adding strength, but it strikes me that it’s also about alignment. Diversity is particularly valuable when the different abilities and experiences are pulling in the same direction. It’s important to share and inspire a belief in what the vision is.
On the topic of sensing the environment, I’m reminded of the result from the CLO survey Jay Cross and I did to accompany our Chief Meta-Learning Officer article, where 60% of those who responded thought that their people weren’t talking about the outside trends that shape their business. If people aren’t aware, they can’t adapt! There must be support for individuals to not only self-improve, but to be connected the broader trends in their fields and the organization’s area of endeavor.
Starting from the heat-shock proteins that kick in when things are extreme, I’m mindful of how we need a shift from information presentation or skill-creation to learning facilitation and mentoring. Organizations can’t provide everything employees need anymore, but they can provide support for developing skills for learning, and coping. I’m reminded of how Outward Bound got started, where older mariners were surviving situations that younger, presumably healthier ones weren’t. Which reinforces the call for more ubiquitous mentoring that we argued for back then.
The inoculation approach to toxins sparks two thoughts. One, while we need to tolerate diversity in experience and skills, I suspect we can’t tolerate those who do not buy into the vision and the mission. In my own experience, I’ve seen how the naysayers can undermine organizational effectiveness. Yet incorporating new approaches can be extraordinarily valuable. As I’ve argued before, the approach to take is not to try to appropriate so-called best practices, but instead to understand and contextualize best principles.
And finally, in thinking about symbiosis, one of the revelations has been to see the benefits organizations have found by increasing their dialog not only internally, but externally with partners and customers. The advantages of more transparency and communication, if coupled with a sincere desire to truly listen and respond, are considerable.
It’s always a revelation to re-read something written several years ago and reflect on your thinking then. I’m always amazed (and, mostly, pleased) with what I find. Organizations need to reinforce their culture and learning mechanisms to make themselves more agile and more resilient, and that adaptation is possible on principled grounds.
The Learning Circuit’s Big Question this month has to do with the increasing prevalence of internet access during presentations. The context is that during presentations it’s certainly possible that your audience is multi-tasking, and the question is; what are the implications? In live presentations, the increasing prevalence of wi-fi or phone data means laptops and/or smartphones can be online, and in virtual ones there’s typically a number of other applications available at the same time.
The audience can be doing things related to the presentation, like live-blogging it, tweeting it, or taking notes (I’ve been known to mindmap a keynote a time or two). They could even be looking up words or phrases mentioned by the speaker, or the speaker’s bio, or related material. Alternatively, they can be doing other things, like checking email, surfing the web, or other, unrelated, activities. Particularly in online presentations, there could actually be live chatting going on in a side-channel.
Are these activities valuable to the listener? Are they valuable to the presenter? Certainly, note taking is (though it doesn’t take connectivity). There’re results on this, particularly if you’re re-representing the material in different ways (mind maps, or paraphrasing). Blogging is, effectively, note-taking so should be valuable too, and tweeting may also be valuable (any studies? Research topic!). Certainly looking up things you don’t know so you process the rest of the material could also be valuable if it doesn’t take too long. And the reprocessing and seeing others’ thoughts from chat could be valuable. Even playing solitaire can be an advantage to listening, if you’re taking up some extra cognitive cycles that might otherwise lead you off into related thoughts but away from the presentation (likely only true if it’s just audio).
On the other hand, it might also add an intrusive overhead. Multi-tasking has been shown to provide a performance decrement. Related activities help, but unrelated activities will hinder the ability to process. It may be that you can get so caught up in the chat, or the search to comprehend a term, that you lose the thread of the discussion. And if it’s complex, the cognitive overhead might prevent you from actually being unable to make the necessary links. Certainly the tasks that aren’t content related are an intrusion.
So what’s to do? There are possible actions on both the part of the presenter/organizer, and on the part of the audience. For the audience, it’s got to be a personal responsibility to know how you learn best, and take appropriate steps. If note-taking helps you focus and elaborate, do so. If tweeting, blogging, or mind-mapping does so, rock on. If you really need to focus: put away the laptop and phone and focus! It’s for your benefit! Really, the same is for students. Now, individuals may not be as self-aware as we may desire, but that’s a separate topic that needs to be taken care of in the appropriate context.
For the presenters or organizers, as the most onerous step they could prevent wi-fi access. However, increasingly others are benefitting from the tweets from conferences and the blogging as well. I think that’s overly draconian, an implicit sign of distrust. If the presentation doesn’t match the audience interests, they should be able to vote with their feet or their minds. As I told a medical school faculty years ago, you can’t force them to attend, taking away the internet might make them resort to doodling or daydreaming but while you can lead a learner to learning you can’t make them think. It’s up to the presenter to present relevant material in an engaging manner.
As a presenter, you can actually use these channels to your advantage. As a webinar presenter, I like having a live chat tool. I monitor it, and use it to ask questions. In the last presentation I gave, it was awkward when a moderator had to read me the questions from the audience, and I couldn’t ask a general question an just survey the stream. I realize it’s difficult to both present and monitor a chat stream, and not all presenters can do it, so having a moderator can be a benefit. But stifling that flow of discussion could be a bane to those who learn better that way.
I haven’t had a tweet stream monitor in a live presentation yet, and it could be harder to pay attention to it, so again a moderator could help. In smaller sessions you can have interaction with the audience, but in larger presentations, it might take someone to follow it and summarize, though having a monitor that the presenter could see easily could also work.
However, it seems to me that you can’t force people to pay attention with or without technology, providing a rich suite of ways for people to process the information is valuable, and it can be a valuable source of feedback during the presentation.
Which leads to the new skills: for audiences, to know how you best process presentations and take responsibility for getting the most out of it; for presenters to improve their presentation skills to ensure value to the audience and support richer forms of interaction with the audiences; for moderators to track and summarize audience feedback in various forms; and for organizers to support these new channels.
There’s no point in trying to stifle technology affordances, the real key is to take advantage of them. If we have to learn, adjust, and accommodate, it’d be awful boring otherwise! :)
At the upcoming DevLearn conference, Jay Cross and I are holding a pre-conference workshop titled: Be the Future of Organizational Learning: Become a Chief Meta-Learning Officer. We already know we’ve got critical mass in terms of signups, so we’re excited about the possibilities, but we really want to do our best to ensure we deliver a valuable experience.
Based on the principles from our CLO article on the topic, we’re intending to make it a real hands-on, wrestling with the issues, talking about specifics, and bolstering the discussion with data from close to 200 respondents to the survey that was associated with the article. We want attendees to not only be informed, but empowered to go back to their organizations and make a meaningful impact.
Though we’ve ideas on what we think is important, we’d really like to hear what you’re expecting, are concerned with, would like to see, etc.
There’s a social networking site for DevLearn, and I’ve created a group for this session. I’d welcome you going there and beginning to talk up things like what you’re seeing, what you’re worried about, and what you’d like to get out of the session. Of course, you’re welcome to comment here, too.
I’ll be speaking also on the topic in a concurrent session as well, on mobile design with David Metcalf in Judy Brown’s Mobile Learning Jam, and with Richard Clark on pragmatic mobile development, but those are topics for another post.
I’ve always found eLearning Guild events to be worthwhile, and given the lineup I think this one will be as good as ever. Hope to see you in the workshop, or at least at the conference.
In some client work I’m doing, I’m helping out an effort to establish a Web 2.0, social, informal, [enter your own bizbuzz phrase here] strategy. Despite the hype, this looks to be a real value proposition for them. They’ve serious needs in terms of deep knowledge retiring, acquisitions to integrate into a streamlined operation, and more.
As a consequence, I’ve been talking to folks within this large organization who are embarked on various social media efforts. Some are instituted from different organizations, like under the CIO, and others have emerged from the learning function with the organization. The interesting thing is how the actions are blurring the notion that there are tight boundaries between formal and informal.
In two separate cases, the solution emerged as a realization that the ability of the learning organization to continue to meet the growing rate of change (both in the rate of changes, and the increasing complexity), is not keeping up with the need. There’s also a recognition that empowering the users to take control is a real opportunity. In one case, they’re rolling out a wiki that they’re initially populating, but are already in the process of devolving access and the ability to contribute. In another, they’re making accessible the resources for users to choose what to film or software activity to capture, to make their own little ‘learnlets’ and make available.
Is this performance support? Is this formal learning? Is this social or informal learning? It doesn’t matter! What matters is that these are areas where the learning function can and should contribute! However, it’s blurring the line between control of learning design, responsibility for curriculum, and more. And this isn’t an abrogation of responsibility, but instead a necessary extension of the learning function scope, on principle, and a pragmatic response to a changing world.
There was a separate instance where the KM group was developing a wiki for similar needs, e.g. the growing body of knowledge. However, there were two reasons why they could benefit from the learning function as well. For one, they’re focusing on developing rich semantic underpinnings that will facilitate smart search and rule-driven complex behaviors (read: opportunistic and customized information). This is great and important work (I love this stuff, it’s Web 3.0), but they won’t actually be putting in useful information for another year! There’s an immediate need that needs to be addressed here. The second one comes from when they are ready to move forward; they’ll benefit from the learning function’s experience in both gathering knowledge and in supporting rolling out access to the learners themselves.
There was also a definite recognition that the proliferation of resources was a problem to make accessible, and to govern the lifecycle of, and to message the updates. These are clearly central roles, and require an understanding of learning. And more. I’ve argued that learning designers need to understand information architecture and information design as well, and this only reinforces that message, but, those fields share much foundational knowledge and the extension isn’t onerous.
The bigger picture is to go beyond the individual initiatives, figure out ways to scale the approaches enterprise-wide, to make the breadth of resources systematically organized, and to remove redundancies and inefficiencies. By coordinating the technical sophistication of the Information Services group with the learning function (and other strategic alliances), this organization has a real opportunity to tap into the collective intelligence of it’s employees, and get a handle on the continuous innovation that will be required in the increasingly competitive market. But it only happens by some systematic work to streamline the effort, otherwise there will still be bottlenecks to effectiveness and redundancies to hamper efficiency.
There’s still a role for formal at one end, and I haven’t really exposed the alternative mechanisms supporting the far end of collaboration, but here I wanted to focus on the gray area in the middle and the necessity of not trying to artificially create a boundary.
I received in the mail an offer for a 3 book set titled Improving Performance in the Workplace. It’s associated with ISPI, and greatly reflects their Human Performance Technology approach, which I generally laud as going beyond instructional design. It’s also by Pfeiffer, who is my own publisher, and they’re pretty good as publishers go. However, I noticed something that really struck me, based upon the work I’ve been doing with my colleagues in the Internet Time Alliance (formerly TogetherLearn).
The first volume is really about assessing needs, and design, and it includes behavioral task analysis and cognitive task analysis, and even talkes about engagement strategies in simulation and gaming, video gaming. The second volume includes performance interventions, and includes elaerning, coaching, knowledge management, and more (as well as things like incentives, culture, EPSS, feedback, etc. The third volume’s on measurement and evaluation.
All this is good: these are important topics, and having a definitive handbook about them is a valuable contribution (and priced equivalently, the whole set is bargain-priced at $400). However, while I don’t have the book to hand to truly evaluate it, it appears that there are some gaps.
In my experience, some issues are not behavioral or cognitive but attitudinal. Consequently, I’d have thought there might be some coverage. There was a chapter in Jonassen’s old Handbook on Research in Ed Tech on the topic, and I’ve derived my own approach from that and some other readings. When they get into tools, they seem to miss virtual worlds, and they seem to have a repeat of the straw-man case against discovery environments (many years ago it was recognized that pure discovery wasn’t the go, and guided discovery was developed). It bugs me that I can’t find the individual authors, but I do recognize the names of one of the editors. But these aren’t the biggest misses, to me.
Overall, there seems to be no awareness of the whole thrust of social and informal learning. Ok, so Jay’s book on Informal Learning is relatively new, and the concrete steps may still be being sorted out, but there’s a lot there. Or perhaps it’s covered in Knowledge Management (after all, Marc Rosenberg’s been deeply involved in ISPI and wrote the Beyond e-Learning book). Yet it seems a bit buried and muddled, and here’s why:
I’m working with a client now, and one of my tasks is surveying how they’re using social media. A group responsible for technical training (and they’re an engineering organization) recognized that they weren’t able to keep up with the increasing quantity and quality of changes that were coming. Rather than do a performance improvement intervention, they realized that another opportunity would be to start putting up information and inviting others to contribute. They put up a wiki, and first maintained it internally, and then gradually devolved some of the responsibility out to their ‘customers’.
The point is, how does that fit into the traditional paradigm? And yet, increasingly, we’re seeing and recommending approaches that go beyond the categories that fit here. I wonder if their metrics include the outputs of enabling innovation. I wonder if their interventions include expertise finders and collaboration tools. I wonder if their analyses include the benefits of ‘presence’.
Times are changing, faster and faster. I think these books would’ve been the ideal thing, maybe 5 years ago. Now, I think they’re emblematic of a training mindset when a larger perspective is needed. These come into play after you’ve identified that a formal approach is needed. They use a phrase of a ‘performance landscape’, but their picture doesn’t seem to include the concepts that Jay includes in his ‘learnscape’ and I as the ‘performance ecosystem’.
I recently attended the 3DTLC conference, as I reported before. Chuck Hamilton presented on his (IBM’s) take on affordances on virtual worlds. Given that I’ve opined before, I asked for more detail on their take, and he was kind enough to forward to me their definitions. I like what they’ve done, but it led me to try to refine what I see as some confounding (they actually separate several of their 10 into two separate ones), and try to capture what I think are core, what can be enabled, and what then arise from those capabilities.
I start with what I think are the core affordances of virtual worlds, that there’s a 3D world, that you can visit, and that’s digital. From there, I see that you can enable others to be there (social), you can enable action (agency), the world can be kept around (persistent), and it can be made accessible broadly (e.g. through the internet).
If you choose to enable those (and you should, in most cases), you get some emergent properties. Chuck talked about a universal visual language, and you certainly can both tap into, and establish, visual cues. The scale does not have to be real, but can indeed scale down to and up to any size you want, in part or all.
You can choose to be anonymous, but if you don’t and choose to have a representation that is active over time, you can establish a reputation.
By being active, you can also enable practice opportunities such as simulations, scenarios, and games. If agency includes not just interaction, but creation, and you have social, you can have co-creation (one of the most exciting opportunities for informal learning). The persistence of your activity creates the opportunity to capture traces for reflection, e.g. ‘after-action review’.
The fact that it’s digital means it can be augmented with external capability: media, applications, and more. Also, you can be at least geography-independent, if not chronologically-independent.
This is a preliminary stab at trying to trace the initial, potential, and consequently emergent affordances, by no means do I think it’s the definitive answer. Feedback solicited!
