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Clark Quinn’s Learnings about Learning

Guff: a conversation in 3 parts. Part 1

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A: Looking up from reading.   “Guff!”

B: Curious.   “What‘s guff”

A: “All this social learning stuff.”

B: “Really, you think so”

A: “Yeah, I mean, learning‘s learning, and who needs to make a ‘social‘ out of it?   We‘ve got courses, if they want to be social in the classroom, fine, but all this hype about social learning is just a way for consultants to try to sell old soda in new bottles.”

B: “So you think learning is about courses”

A: “Sure.   What else”

B: “Well, let me defer that answer, and ask you another question.”

A: “Oh, so you‘re one of those, eh?   Answer a question with a question?   Ha.   Go ahead, shoot.”

B: “If learning‘s not important, what is”

A: “That‘s easy, nimbleness.   We‘ve got to adapt, innovate, create, we need to be faster than the rest.   Heck, they can clone a product in months, or less. You‘ve got to be agile!”

B: “So just executing isn‘t enough”

A: “Heck no!   You‘ve got to have the ‘total customer experience‘ locked down, and that means optimal execution is just the cost of entry.   Thriving is going to require continually introducing improvements: new products, new services.”

B: “OK, let‘s get back to your question, what else learning might be.”

A: “About time.”

B: “So, think about that innovating, problem-solving, creativity, etc.   That‘s not learning”

A: “No.”

B: “Do they know the answer when they start”

A: “No, or they‘d just do it.”

B: “Right. The answer is unknown, they have to find it. When they find it, have they learned something”

A: “Alright, I see your game. Yes, they‘re learning, but it‘s not like courses, it‘s not education!”

B: “Right, courses are formal learning.   That‘s the point I want to make, using the term ‘learning‘ to just talk about courses isn‘t fair to what‘s really going on.   There are informal forms of learning that are just the aspects you need to get on top of.”

A: “Oh, okay, if you want to play semantic games.”

B: “It‘s important, because this ‘social learning‘ you call guff is the key to addressing the things you‘re worrying about!   Formal learning serves a role, but there‘s so much more that an organization should be concerned about.”

A: “So here comes the pitch.”

B: “And it‘s straightforward: do you want to leave that innovation and creativity to chance, or do your best to make sure it‘s working well?   Because the evidence is that in most organizations it‘s nowhere near what it could be, and there are systematic steps to improve it.”

A: “C‘mon.   Can you tell me someone who‘s doing it well”

B: “Sure.   Just a few small firms you might‘ve heard of.   Intel‘s used a wiki to help people share knowledge.   Sun‘s capturing top performance on video and sharing it.   SAP‘s getting customers to self-help and contribute to new product ideas.”

A: “Sure, the tech companies, but how about anyone else”

B: “Caterpillar‘s got communities of practice generating ROI, Best Buy‘s getting a lot of advantage through internal idea generation, the list goes on, and those are only the ones we‘ve found.”

A: “Ok. I suppose it makes sense, but still, that label…”

B: “I hear you.”

Intensive and Extensive Processing: Making Formal Stickier

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I’ve been thinking around the ways to use social learning to augment formal learning, and it’s bringing interesting things together.   The point is that there are things that make formal learning work better, and we want to draw upon them in smart ways.

We have, as I pointed out in the Broken ID series, elements we know lead to better learning: better retention over time, and better transfer to all appropriate situations (and no inappropriate).   These things include activating emotional and cognitive relevance, presenting the associated concepts, showing examples that link concept to context, having learners apply concept to context, and wrapping up the experience.   Several things, however, facilitate the depth and persistence of the learning: intensive processing, and extensive processing.

By extensive processing, I mean extending the learning experience.   I’ve previously talked about how Q2learning has a model where they can wrap a variety of activities together to describe a full competency preparation, including different forms of content, events, feedback, etc.   The point is that a single event has a low likelihood of achieving meaningful outcomes.   We need reactivation, as massed practice isn’t as effective as spaced practice.

There’s nothing wrong with a F2F session, if you can justify the opportunity & logistical costs, but it’s typically not enough by itself.   You’re better off making sure everyone’s on the same page at the start, reactivating later, doing individual assessment and looking for ways to help the individual afterward as well.   However, we want to extend the time spent in processing the concept and skills, not necessarily in quantity, but qualitatively from one big mass to many smaller activations.   Will Thalheimer does a good job of helping us recognize that breaking up learning works better, but we need to take more concrete advantage of the potential of technology to support this.

The other area is increasing the depth of the processing. There are activities that can be done individually, and some that are facilitated by social as well.

I’ve previously talked about how we can use social tools to facilitate formal learning, but I want to go a little bit deeper.   I suggested three forms of processing: personalization, elaboration, and application. For personalization, I have used in the past that learners keep a journal where they have to regularly reflect on how the learning is relevant to them (and a blog is a great tool for this). It occurs to me that there are three good ways to have them do this. I suggest a recommendation of 3 reflections per week for traditional learning, and for learners who need a guide, 3 different types of processing including how what they’ve learned explains something in their past, how it suggests what they’ll do differently going further, and/or how it connects to something else in their life.

That latter is a personal version of the more general task of having learners elaborate the content.   Thiagi has game frameworks that extend processing, pretty much content independently, and these are good, but there are more content-specific tasks as well.   You can design questions that require learners to reprocess the information specifically in relation to how it’s applied.   This can be to take a position on a controversial issue, or have them connect it to another concept (really helpful for setting up a subsequent concept), or explore a facet or nuance.   Discussion forums can be good here, ideally   having learners posting their own response before going in and seeing others (and having them comment constructively on one or several other posts).

Obviously, practice applying the concept to problems is the most important form of processing. While the best practice is mentored real practice, the problems with that (cost of mistakes, scalability of individual mentoring) mean games (or, to be PCâ„¢, immersive learning simulations) are another great practice.   However, don’t forget the reflection!   Reflection is an important form of processing after action, and one of the technology-mediated benefits is being able to capture individual performance and debrief it.

Another meaningful form of practice, particularly for knowledge work, is having a group work together to resolve a problem.   Providing a challenge that mimics one in the real world (e.g. responding to an RFP) that has enough deliberate ambiguity to generate productive discussion is great.   The discussion where learners are forced to come to a shared understanding that’s reflected in their response is highly likely to be fruitful, particularly if you’re careful in the design of the activity.   I recall an academic colleague who responded to my query about not using games by relating how expensive digital production was, but how inexpensive group activity was.   Again, a social augment to facilitate deep processing.

With a focus on creating meaningful processing, we can ensure that when we need to design real skill shifts (another story is ensuring that’s this is such a situation), we will think about ways to intensify, and extend, the processing to truly achieve the outcomes we need.   Ok, have you processed that?

Mining Social Media

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One of the proposed benefits of social media is the capture of knowledge that’s shared, taking the tacit and making it explicit.   But really, how do we do this?   I think we need to separate out the real from the ideal.

The underlying premise is that we have an enlightened organization that’s empowering collaboration, communication, problem-solving, innovation, etc (what I’m beginning to term ‘inspiration’ in all senses of the word) by providing a social media infrastructure, learning scaffolding, and a supportive culture.   Now, all these people are sharing, but are we, and can we be, leveraging that knowledge?

The obvious first answer is that by sharing it with others, it’s being leveraged.   If information is shared with the relevant people, it’s been captured for organizational use by being spread appropriately.   That’s great, and far too few organizations are facilitating this in a systematic way.   However, I’m always looking for the optimal outcome: not just the best that is seen, but the best that can be. So how can we go further?

The typical response is using data mining that focuses on semantic content: systematically parsing the discussions, and using powerful semantic tools to attempt to capture, characterize, and leverage information systemically. (Hmm, you could map out the knowledge propositions, and link them into coherent chains and then track those over time to see significant changes, even regularly re-sort to see if different perspectives are changing…oh, sorry, got carried away, enough adaptive system designing :).

In terms of social media systems, while there are analytics available, semantics are not part of it, as far as I can see.   Further, I searched on social media mining, and found out that the first international workshop will be happening in November, but it’s not happened yet. There’s an interesting PhD thesis on the topic from UMaryland, but it’s focused on blogs and recommendations. In other words, it’s not ready for prime time.

The point is, that machine learning and knowledge mining mechanisms are in our future, but not our present.   Don’t get me wrong, there are huge possibilities and opportunities here, but they’re a ways off.   So, are we back to the best that can be?   I want to suggest one other possibility.   The systemic mechanisms are nice because, set up properly, they run regardless, but there’s another approach, and that’s human processing.   For all the advances in technology, our brains are still pretty much the most practical semantic pattern matching engines going.   So how would that work?

Well, let’s go back to the role that learning professionals play. We’ve already looked at how they could change as learning units take over responsibility for the broader picture of learning in the organization.   Learning professionals need to be nurturing social learning, and that means being in there, monitoring discussions for opportunities to draw out other members, spark useful feedback, develop skills, and more.

Well, they also can and should be looking for outcomes that could be redesigned/redeveloped/reproduced for broader dissemination.   They should be monitoring what’s happening and looking for information that’s worth culling out and distilling into something that’ll really bring out the impact of that information. Turning information into knowledge and even wisdom!

Yes, that’s a greater responsibility (though it’s also fun; you shouldn’t be in the learning space if you don’t love learning!).   It’s a new skill set, but I’ve already argued that.   The world’s changing, and the status quo won’t last long anyway.   So, while you can just allow and hope that individuals will perceive the value of the information created, and even facilitate by encouraging people to participate in all the relevant communities (which will likely cross role, product/service, and more), there’s a step further that’s to the benefit of the organization and the learners.

We’ll steadily build support for that process, but it will be facilitated, and advanced, by individual practice to complement, supplement, and inform the mechanistic approaches.   Don’t ignore this role; plan for it, prepare for it, and skill for it.   Responsibility for recognizing should be shared, so that the individuals in the network are also doing it (for example, retweeting valuable information), and that’s a learning skill that should be developed.

Here’s hoping you find this valuable!

Rethinking Virtual Worlds

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I guess I have a visceral aversion to hype, because my initial reaction to ‘buzz’ is focusing in on the core affordances and disparaging mistaken uses of a new technology.  However, I do eventually open to taking advantage of the affordances in new ways. Case in point: learning styles.  I pointed out the flaws in the thinking several times, and then rethought them (without removing my previous views, I looked for the positive opportunities).  Now, preparing for a presentation, I’m rethinking some of my stances on learning in virtual worlds.

I’ve previously opined that there are two key affordances in virtual worlds: the spatial and the social, and that the technical overheads mean that unless there’s a long term relationship, the associated costs really argue that you should be hitting both.  I’m not changing that, but I was wondering what we might do if we did try to leverage those key affordances deliberately to support learning.

Taking a slightly cheeky approach, and quite willing to discredit presenting powerpoint presentations ‘in world’, I’ve tried to think through some subordinary, ordinary, and potentially extraordinary approaches to learning in a virtual world.  That is, opening learners up both cognitively and emotionally, presenting concepts, having examples available, creating meaningful practice, and scaffolding reflection.  What might we do?

Starting with pedagogy, I think a standard instructional design (read: presentations) is clearly subordinary.  An ordinary pedagogy might be a problem-based approach, but a really extraordinary approach might be to create a full immersive storyline in which the problem is embedded, turning it into a game world: a World of LearnCraft.  The idea is to mimic more closely the urgency typically felt when applying the knowledge in the real world (where it counts) by creating a similarly meaningful storyline to develop the associated motivation.  Then embedding resources in the story would scaffold the learning.  Of course, what I’m really talking about is game design ;).

Working with concepts, just presenting them is subordinary. Ordinary would be having them explorable, mapping them out in space, maybe with a scavenger hunt asking learners to find answers to questions embodied in the model.  A truly extraordinary approach would be to have the learners co-create the concept representation, using the collaborative creation capability available at least in Second Life.

Just having a poster for an example seems subordinary.  Having an example ‘gallery’, where you can examine the problem, the approach, and the results would be an ordinarily good approach. Ideally, the example could have the conceptual model layered on top of the decisions, mapping them to represent how th concept played out in context.  Beyond that, however, having the example be truly exploratory, where you could make certain decisions and see how they play out, and being able to backtrack (particularly with annotation about the mistakes the original team made) would be really extraordinary.

Practice is where we can and should be looking to games.  While having a quiz would be truly subordinary (if not maniacally mistaken), having a problem to solve ‘in world’ would be an ordinary approach. Again, having the problem be situated in a storyline, as the overall pedagogy, would be truly meaningful.  It’s easiest if the task is inherently spatial and social, but we certainly can benefit from the immersion, and building in social learning components can lead to powerful outcomes.

I’m somewhat concerned about trying to make reflection ‘in world’, because it’s inherently an ‘immediate’ environment.  It’s synchronous, and it’s been documented where normally reflective kids can go all ‘twitch’ in a digital environment.  It may be that reflection is ‘best’ when kept out of the world.  But for the sake of argument, let’s consider external reflection to be subordinary, and consider what might be ordinary and extraordinary.  Surely, having an ‘in-world’ but ‘post-experience’ discussion would be the ordinary approach.  Again, co-creating a representation of the underlying model guiding performance would be a really powerful reflective opportunity.

You still want to make some very basic learning decisions about virtual worlds.  If you don’t have an inherent expectation that there’s a long-term relationship with the world, the technical and learning overheads to facility in using the world would clearly suggest that you should seriously ensure that the payoff is worth it (like if the learning outcome is inherently spatial and social) and otherwise consider alternatives.  After that, you want to ensure that you’ve got meaningful practice.  That’s your assessment component, and you do want them applying the knowledge.  I suppose you could have the world be for concepts and examples, and have practice in some other format, but I admit I’m not sure why.  Around the practice, figure out how to embed concept and example resources. Finally, seriously reflect on how you support reflection for your learners.

Serious learning can and does happen in virtual worlds, but to make it happen systematically is a matter of design, not just the platform.  Fair enough?

Virtual Worlds & SCORM

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I was invited (thanks, Eilif!) to attend SRI’s workshop for ADL on SCORM and Virtual Worlds (VW) today.   I furiously tweeted it (check out the #adlvw hashtag), but now it’s time for reflections.   Represented were a number of people from various VW vendors (at least Qwaq, Second Life, Thinking Worlds), as well as SRI and ADL folks, and Avron Barr representing LETSI.

In case you don’t know, SCORM was developed to be a way to support interoperable content for learning.   However, the demands have grown. Beyond interaction, there’s a desire to have assessment reportable back to an LMS, and as our digital content resources grow larger, to address data quantities that go beyond download.   Angelo Panar from ADL   helped us understand that there are myriad ways that SCORM doesn’t scale well to handle things other than stand-alone objects. Peter Smith from ADL emphasized the importance of game-based learning, and the potential of VWs for meaningful learning.

Ron Edmonds from SRI nicely summarized the intersection: SCORM is standardized and interoperable, VWs are in competition and have vastly different models. The question is, what is the relationship between the two? Eilif Trondsen nicely characterized the situation that learning spans a gap from formal to informal.   SCORM’s highly focused (as of now) on asynchronous independent learner experience, but VWs are about social interaction, and are platforms, where learning experiences can be built.

The questions they were trying to answer were how to design learning experiences and measure/assess them, and then to decide what role SCORM plays.   It occurred to me that there are no unique issues to VWs except the social, so one particular solution is that the problems for SCORM and social media need resolving, and then can be ported to VWs without requiring a unique VW solution.

Another issue is the level of granularity.   If you design a collaborative exercise, and the interaction and collaborative response to reflection questions are what is key for the learning, then it’s a very different situation than when the goal is tightly constrained responses to very specific situations, e.g. the difference between training and education.   Back to the continuum Eilif was talking about, it seems to me that we can match the level of definition of the measure to the desired outcome (duh!).   However, SCORM has trouble with free-f0rm responses, so we get into some issues there.

The obvious ‘easy’ answer is to have SCORM just be a mechanism to introduce existing content objects ‘in world’.   That’s what a number of platforms have done, whether having SCORM objects appear as objects, or an embedded browser presents them.   A more complex alternative is to have an instructor or the learner respond via a custom interface with a response that’s relayed to an LMS using SCORM protocols. But can we go further?

I’ve argued in the past that social interactions should be a design feature only if the learning objective includes social components.   However, I also pointed out today that the VW may only be part of the solution, and when we look at the broader picture of the learning experience, we may well wrap reflection outside the world.   So then our learning model needs to include more than just content presentation, and we start veering off to Educational Modeling Language and the IMS Learning Design specification, which really isn’t yet a part of SCORM (but arguably should be).

Really, our learning categorization has to include activities as broad as mentoring, coached real performance, and social interaction, as well as content exposure, and interactive activities. It needs to span VWs, social media, and more.   It’s about developing learners richly, not just presenting a prix fixe menu.

I’m mindful of the conversation I had with Adam Nelson from Linden Labs (one of many fruitful conversations at the breaks that helped frame the thoughts above), and I asked whether his role for enterprise learning applications included my broad view of learning, that it’s not just about formal learning, or, worse, just ‘training’, but includes mentoring, discussions, all the way to expert collaboration.   That’s not necessarily what we need to track, but we do need to see the results, to look for opportunities (adding value as facilitators, not just content producers).

It’s clear that ‘in world’, we can have the equivalents of most social media, e.g. collaborative persistent spaces with representations and annotations are a richer form of wiki.   A shared element was the ‘overhead’ in virtual worlds, so the question is whether the affordances of virtual worlds are worth the investment.   I still believe that’s an issue of whether the domain/task is inherently 3D and/or that this is a long-term relationship so the investment is amortized.   There are lots of factors.   Still, it’s an intriguing idea to think that we will be able to interact, communicate, and collaborate in technology-augmented ways that aren’t possible in the real world. Of course, we’ll be able to do those in the real world too, largely, via ARGs (as I previously commented on the connections).

There’s a broad gap between what our tools enable, and what standards are ready to support.   The ultimate question was what the role of ADL would be.   I reckon it’s early days for VWs, so the role in this regard is, to me, track what’s happening and look for patterns that can be extracted and codified for ways to add value.

It’s the wild west or a goldrush right now, and the outcome is still to be decided.   However, the learning potential is, quite frankly, awesome, so it’s an exciting time.   Here’s to adventure!

Conferencing Reflections

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Last week I presented a workshop on strategic learning as an opening act to ASTD’s 2009 International Conference (ICE), which was followed by DAU/GMU’s Innovations in eLearning (IeL) conference.   It was a study in contrasts, and a great learning experience.

Obviously, the focuses (yeah, focii, bugger it) are different.   ICE is huge, and for all training and development, while the IeL conference is smaller and focused on elearning.   There’s much more to see at ICE, but it’s also appears to be run as a revenue opportunity, where as IeL is designed to provide the latest thinking to a select community (DAU & GMU stakeholders), and appears to be a cost-center.

ICE should be able to be interpreted as a ‘state of the industry’ snapshot, representing the audience’s interests and needs.   As such, there are some serious concerns.   During the keynote on Blue Ocean Strategy (greatly descriptive, less prescriptive utility), colleagues overheard audience members asking “what’s in it for me?”     I can’t think of anything more relevant to organizations than looking ahead and trying to come up with answers for the increasingly turbulent times!

There were some social media sessions, and people ‘getting’ the message, likewise some other topics, but there was similarly good attendance at pretty ordinary stuff. Sure, you do need to learn about assessment, and how to cartoon (a great session, BTW), but there wasn’t the sense of urgency I reckon should be felt.

The expo hall also was scarily populated with generic leadership training, university degrees, flashy examples of elearning that didn’t have much substance, and of course the ubiquitous   ‘styles’ assessments (of which the less said, the better).   That is, plenty of other reasons to worry about the current concerns of the average conference attendee.   Aren’t they needing something more?   Support/responsibility beyond the classroom?

Granted, these conferences are planned out close to a year in advance, so it may not reflect current concerns as much as those of half a year or more ago, but it seemed little different than one I attended several years ago.   C’mon!   There were plusses, of course, not least of which were chances to meet colleagues I’d heard of or interacted with but not had the pleasure of meeting face to face, including Rae Tanner, Dave Ferguson, Craig Wilkins, and Gina Schreck, as well as reconnecting with folks including Marcia Conner and Wendy Wickham.   And I was pleased that there was WiFi access throughout the conference!   Kudos to ASTD for getting that right.   The lack of tweets from the conf can’t be laid at ASTD’s feet.   And the team (e.g. Linda, et al), keep the sales pitches in sessions to a minimum.

The IeL conference, on the other hand, was a whole different story. Way smaller, and deliberately focused on technology-mediated learning & the cutting edge.   The keynotes by Vint Cerf and Will Wright were both awesome in scope and depth, truly visionary stuff.   The sessions were more targeted specifically at my interests, and again it was a great chance to hook up with some new colleagues, including Koreen Olbrish and Aaron Silvers, and similarly connecting with colleagues like Marks Oehlert & Friedman. And there was more tweeting of sessions in this small conference than ICE, but given the audience that wasn’t as unexpected as you’d think.

I can’t say that one conference was better than the other for me or for their audiences.   I got to present what I was really interested in at ICE, versus doing a talk for IeL that met their request rather than my passion (tho’ it was within my capability and I did my usual due diligence to make it accurate, worthwhile, and at least moderately engaging). However, the good thing at IeL is that people were really looking not just at training, but at where they really needed to be for organizational learning, and how technology could help.   And that’s the most important thing, to be looking ahead.   What I missed at ICE was people really trying to do more than just their job.   And I’m perfectly willing to be wrong about that.

It’s just that I think there’s a coming crisis in organizational learning, and the answers are not doing training better. Formal learning will be part of it, but training as it’s currently delivered will not, and there’s so much more.   Here’s hoping that message starts getting heard.

Now *that* is leadership

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In my recent workshop, an attendee shared a story that I have to pass along.   He works for a company that serves a sector of the marketplace that has been core to US business, and is now in tough times.   Naturally, the employees are concerned about the prospects.

The CEO is sharing, via a blog, his ongoing thoughts on dealing with the issue. Rather than puff pieces for external readers, written by a PR hack, he’s writing authentically for internal consumption about where his thinking is going and what he and the executive team are doing.   He’s not making false promises, and the employee was very clear that there are no clear answers yet, but they’ve insight into how deep the thought processes have been about the situation, and how earnestly (and cleverly) they’re working on solving the issue. He’s even sharing the questions he’s considering.   While all the comments aren’t visible, anyone can provide input and the CEO can react.   This is powerful.

I’ve mentioned before that providing a ‘leading out loud’ record for people to follow is a great mechanism to foster virtual mentorship and share directions, and this is a really valuable way for organizations to communicate.   As Rae Tanner discussed with me yesterday as we walked around DC before the start of the ASTD main conference, imagine an organization where everyone was onboarded with a real understanding of the business (we thought a game would be appropriate), and then were able to follow the ongoing thinking.   Do you think they’d be better equipped to execute, and, better yet, contribute to organizational success? Certainly if it was coupled with a learning culture and rewards aligned with the desired behaviors.

The worskhop attendees easily ‘got’ the value of this scenario; that CEO knows what leadership is about, and is manifesting it in a visionary way.   This is what technology can facilitate. Technology is a tool, but one that provides new affordances for communication and collaboration. The opportunities to improve things individual, organizationally, and societally are awe-inspiring. Now we need to seize the initiative and make really worthwhile things happen. Are you game?

Visualizing the Change

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Over at the TogetherLearn blog, I’ve posted an article about another way to think about the benefits of social learning.   I’ve been concerned that the talk about chaos and emergent practice may seem too ephemeral to hard-nosed business decision makers, so I tried to make the goal concrete, or at least visual.

Then, of course, the important thing is the path to get there.   Check it out!

Twitter and Chaos

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Why is the world getting more complex?   Certainly, we’re getting more information, and technology is increasing the rate at which we can sense, and respond (reducing product cycle times, for instance, as someone can replicate what you’ve developed very quickly).   There’s a lot more pressure, as a consequence.   But is it something fundamental?

I was pondering Dave Snowden’s Cynefin framework (wonderful 4 minute video explaining it), particularly the chaotic domain and it’s prescription (roughly “do something, and hope to move it to one of the other quadrants”).   It’s kind of a deep concept, but basically there are: simple topics where there’s one right answer (which we ought to automate, in my opinion); complicated issues, where we need expertise; complex issues, which we can only explain in retrospect but can adapt in, and the chaotic space.

It’s the latter that concerns me, it seems to be a case of “abandon hope, all ye who enter here”.   Ok, seriously, it’s a place where the approach has to be much more experimental. I reckon it’s a place that most managers and even executives want to ignore.   And yet, I believe that the world is going more and more in that direction.   In fact, I’m beginning to believe we’re at a inflection point where we suddenly need to realize that ‘management’ just won’t cut it.   Sure, for legacy industries, for a while.   But why?   Why is this fundamentally different?

I think that things moved slow moved enough that while they really were chaotic, the general patterns were good enough most of the time. But things have increasingly gotten faster, accelerating, to the point where those seemingly random shifts are happening so fast that they undermine staid process.

It’s not the information overload, and I began thinking that it is, instead, how quickly ideas can take hold.   It’s not things that are the dominant factor here, it’s people.   People’s reactions to marketing campaigns, messages, etc are largely unpredictable, and the likelihood and consequences of something going ‘awry’ are increased.   The so-called ‘viral’ message is increasingly a disruptive factor.   And why is that?

I started thinking about how long it took for ideas to spread.   In the past, they could spread in a community by word of mouth over hours or days, depending on the ‘salience’ of the idea.   However, a community was sort of 150 people, if you take a Dunbar’s number approach.   Propagating outside of that was a critical juncture, and used to be quite hard. Someone had to travel between communities, believe, and be a good transmitter.   Print as a major shift, and so too was the printing press. Suddenly it became easier to transmit a powerful meme powerfully.     And it’s gotten easier with the telegraph, and the phone, and email,   and…

If new ideas that are powerful can take hold quickly with minimal friction, their disruptive influence is magnified.   Rightly or wrongly, a fun or powerful idea can catch fire and be a game-changer.   If there’s the possibility for almost instantaneous spread, we’re truly past the point of no return in terms of chaos.

Which brings me to Twitter.   Even the latest web page had to be emailed and there wasn’t a quick way to get the message around in a broadcast style except if the mainstream media picked it up, or you had an established network.   Spreading beyond your network was difficult.

Enter Twitter.   For the first time, a viral meme can spread almost instantaneously, reaching critical mass in the amount of time required for a few retweets.   It’s a network of one to many, and 140 chars is about perfect for ‘meme’ length.   It’s just a twitch to pass a message on.   I’m not saying Twitter itself is the force of change, I’m saying it’s emblematic of the change.

If someone’s thought captures a new thought, or plays with an existing idea in an intriguing new way, it can spread almost instantaneously. Much more so than before.   That’s a power that can be used for good or bad.   Companies should be mindful that a misstep can reach many really quickly (time to get on the ClueTrain!). And breaking news can spread before the media reach the masses (cf flight 1549 landing in the Hudson).

I doubt this idea is new, and you’re free to point out where I’m wrong or who said it before, but it struck me that this is indicative of the changes we, our communities, our organizations, and our society face.   Which leads me to think it’s time to take this phenomena seriously.   So I’ll venture a   meme, an oldie but a goodie, “World Peace, NOW!”.   Here’s hoping…

Chatting

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Last night we held the first #lrnchat, a Twitter learning chat.   As mentioned before, it was an idea from Marcia Conner based upon her previous experience with other chats and enthusiasm for Twitter. It was an interesting experience, with it’s plusses and minuses.   There were great topics, and some interesting technical issues.   The latter first:

I finally ‘graduated’ from TwitterFox (a plugin for Firefox, and a great way to start Twittering) to TweetDeck, an AIR application. It’s more sophisticated, but then it’s another application I’m running in parallel (what with iChat, Adium, and Skype all running, and now TweetDeck, Mail, and Firefox, before I’m working in any apps, I’ve got a lot of RAM and CPU cycles being sucked up.   However, I went to TweetChat, a website that provides an interface just for such chats, because it only follows your hashtag, and automatically puts it in your tweets.   That worked well.

However, what my colleague Sky (Jim Schuyler) noticed was that all those tweets were flooding the twitterverse.   In fact,   he found out about #lrnchat by a sudden flurry of tweets from some people he knew, including me and Marcia Conner (why he hadn’t seen the earlier tweets about it is a curiosity :).   That’s the downside: that all those tweets go out to your followers, who may not know what’s going on.   Harold Jarche also opined that maybe Twitter wasn’t the right tool for chatting.   It’s an interesting issue, but it’s really all about tradeoffs.   For example, Meebo is more dedicated to chat, but there’s more overhead to get hooked up (it connects all IM channels, but you’d have to be on IM).   If you’re on twitter, you saw the message and could participate. However, I admit I felt bad if anyone who watches my tweets felt inundated (let me know; valuable feedback).

I previously found it the situation that if you have new channels, new people can find ways to express themselves.   I think chat has some great affordances, as you don’t have to take turns, there can be parallel conversations going, and it doesn’t take a lot of bandwidth.   You couldn’t do it in video or audio.   There might’ve been times I wanted to draw a picture (as I did in a small TogetherLearn chat with Harold and Jay the other day).   Still, a potentially powerful channel (as I find when serving as a backchannel for a presentation).

Interestingly, the amount of activity on Twitter with #lrnchat suddenly peaking triggered some automatic signification that #lrnchat was a trend, and we got some auto-pings to fill out a definition of what #lrnchat was at What The Hashtag!   Which of course brought in some people looking for ‘action’ and to flog their personal issues.   Even in the discussion, the mention of Yammer brought in the Yammer team mentioning some of their case studies, which got a bit annoying.   The risks of popularity, I guess.

Another issue, besides tool, was whether 2 hours were too much.   While we expect some to have to drop out, or drop in late, is it useful or valuable to go that long, or would shorter be better?

However, I really liked the chat format.   As Marcia reminded us, when it gets fast, there may be too much to follow, but that you should just take the value you found.   There were some sparkling gems in the conversation, and valuable information.   It was very worthwhile.   While it may be only one channel, it certainly seems a valuable one for some (maybe those, like me, who read and/or type fast).

The topics ranged from organizational barriers to Twitter (hence the mention of Yammer as a solution maybe more appropriate for a company with more than a few people, as it has some knowledge management capabilities as well), to the value (or not) of Twitter.     We covered case studies (and the lack thereof), the nature of the necessary culture, the role of informal learning in the organization, and more.   Apparently some were able to view the archive and catch up quickly, so it’s not only a ‘you had to be there’, though I don’t know if it’s easily accessible post-hoc (going back now to both TweetChat and WTHashtag weren’t particularly useful just now).

Overall, I think the notion of having a regularly scheduled chat on learning is very valuable.   What mechanisms are the right ones, is, to me, still an open question.   So there you go: what do you think?