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’.

Yesterday I talked about the seeding, feeding, and weeding necessary to develop a self-sustaining network. I referred to supporting the activities that we find in natural learning, for both formal and informal learning.   The goal is to align our organized support with our learners to optimize the outcome.   In thinking about it (and borrowing heavily from some slides by Jay Cross), I discerned (read: worked hard to fit :) 7 C’s of learning that characterize how we learn before schooling extinguishes the love of learning:

Choose: we are self-service learners.   We follow what interests us, what is meaningful to us, what we know is important.

Commit: we take ownership for the outcomes.   We work until we’ve gotten out of it what we need.

Crash: our commitment means we make mistakes, and learn from them.

Create: we design, we build, we are active in our learning.

Copy: we mimic others, looking to their performances for guidance.

Converse: we talk with others. We ask questions, offer opinions, debate positions.

Collaborate: we work together. We build together, evaluate what we’re doing, and take turns adding value.

With this list of things we do, we need to find ways to support them, across both formal and informal learning.   In formal learning, we should be presenting meaningful and authentic tasks, and asking learners to solve them, ideally collaboratively.   While individual is better than none, collaborative allows opportunity for meaning negotiation.   We need to allow failure, and support learning from it. We need to be able to ask questions, and make decisions and see the consequences.

Similarly in informal learning, we need to create ways for people to develop their understandings, work together, to put out opinions and get feedback, ask for help, and find people to use as models.   By using tools like blogs for recording and sharing personal learning and information updates, wikis to collaborate, discussion forums to converse, and blogs and microblogs to track what others think are important, we provide ways to naturally learn together.

Recognize that I’m taking the larger definition of learning here.   I do not mean just courses, though they’re part of it.   However, real learning involves research, design, problem-solving, creativity, innovation, experimentation, etc.  We absolutely have to get our and the organization’s mind around this if we’re going to be effective.   So, look to natural learning to guide your role in facilitating organizational learning.

I like going to conferences: exchanging ideas, meeting new people, and just variety.   However, I haven’t been on the road since early June for any conferences, after running a workshop at ASTD’s international conference and then presenting at DAU/GMU’s Innovations in eLearning Conference.   But it’s that time again.

First, Jay Cross and I will be presenting on the Chief Meta-Learning Officer article we wrote at the Fall CLO Symposium Sept 28-30.   We’ll be riffing on the results of the survey we made available as part of the article, looking at what folks are saying about how their organization is learning.   There are big opportunities for organizations to improve how the facilitate and leverage their employee ideas, and we’re hoping to help that vision come forth.

At DevLearn (Nov 10-13), Jay and I will be running a 1 day workshop on how to be a Chief Meta-Learning Officer, and I expect we’ll capture some of the process and outcomes that led my attendees at the elearning strategy workshop to say things like “powerful and overwhelming – in a good way!”,   “Very current for today‘s priorities”, “extremely useful … I learned so much”, and “Really makes the shift from just
learning and takes it to performance.”   While it’ll focus more on the social and informal, that’s where a lot of opportunity is, and it’s really a whole shift about thinking of the learning organization’s role.

I’ll also be presenting the performance ecosystem in an abbreviated form as a concurrent session. I will also partner with Richard Clark to talk about pragmatic mobile development.   I’m looking forward to it.

I was also reflecting about what makes a good conference.   I don’t know about CLO (my first), but I love the Guild events, and I was trying to figure out why.   I think it’s because they do as good a job as anyone at making the event a good experience for all: attendees, exhibitors/sponsors, and speakers.   Others come close, but they really strike the best balance.

From an attendee perspective, you want speakers that cover the breadth and depth you want, for different levels of experience, and access to vendors without being hammered with pitches.   As a speaker, you want to maximize your exposure if you get to speak, and be treated like a valuable contribution. I can’t speak what it’s like from a vendor perspective, but I reckon it’s fair access to attendees without onerous costs or restrictions.   Somehow, the Guild events strike this balance the best, from my perspective as a speaker and attendee.

The ongoing success suggests others feel the same. I was just reviewing the speaker list, and see that in the very first timeslot, you’ve got Allison Rossett going up against Ruth Clark and Ray Jimenez, among others!   That’s a pretty heady lineup.   The topics are similarly spread to be as interesting as the speakers, with user-generated content, rapid elearning, mobile, games/simulations, and more.   And again, that’s only the first timeslot!

I’ll be online presenting in October and again in January, but for someone who’s in elearning, I still value the face to face time when I can get it.   Hope to meet you at one of these, please do introduce yourself or say hi!