Learnlets

Secondary

Clark Quinn’s Learnings about Learning

Thinking Social

by 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?

Clarity needed around Web 3.0

by 6 Comments

I like ASTD; they offer a valuable service to the industry in education, including reports, webinars, very good conferences (despite occasional hiccups, *cough* learning styles *cough*) that I happily speak at and even have served on a program committee for.     They may not be progressive enough for me, but I’m not their target market.   When they come out with books like The New Social Learning, they are to be especially lauded.   And when they make a conceptual mistake, I feel it’s fair, nay a responsibility, to call them on it.   Not to bag them, but to try to achieve a shared understanding and move the industry forward.   And I think they’ve made a mistake that is problematic to ignore.

A recent report of theirs, Better, Smarter, Faster: How Web 3.0 will Transform Learning in High-Performing Organizations, makes a mistake in it’s extension of a definition of Web 3.0, and I think it’s important to be clear.   Now, I haven’t read the whole report, but they make a point of including their definition in the free Executive Summary (which I *think* you can get too, even if you’re not a member, but I can’t be sure).   Their definition:

Web 3.0 represents a range of Internet-based services and technologies that include components such as natural language search, forms of artificial intelligence and machine learning, software agents that make recommendations to users, and the application of context to content.

This I almost completely agree with.   The easy examples are Netflix and Amazon recommendations: they don’t know you personally, but they have your purchases or rentals, and they can compare that to a whole bunch of other anonymous folks and create recommendations that can get spookily good.   It’s done by massive analytics, there’s no homunculus hiding behind the screen cobbling these recommendations together, it’s all done by rules and statistics.

I’ve presented before my interpretation of Web 3.0, and it is very much about using smart internet services to do, essentially system-generated content (as opposed to 1.0 producer-generated content and 2.0 user-generated content).   The application of context to content could be a bit ambiguous, however, and I’d mean that to be dynamic application of context to content, rather than pre-designed solutions (which get back to web 1.0).

As such, their first component of their three parts includes the semantic web.   Which, if they’d stopped at, would be fine. However, they bring in two other components. The second:

  • the Mobile Web, which will allow users to experience the web seamlessly as they move from one device to another, and most interaction will take place on mobile devices.

I don’t see how this follows from the definition. The mobile web is really not fundamentally a shift.   Mobile may be a fundamental societal shift, but just being able to access the internet from anywhere isn’t really a paradigmatic shift from webs 1.0 and 2.0. Yes, you can acccess produced content, and user-generated content from wherever/whenever, but it’s not going to change the content you see in any meaningful way.

They go on to the third component:

  • The third element is the idea of an immersive Internet, in which virtual worlds, augmented reality, and 3-D environments are the norm.

Again, I don’t see how this follows from their definition.   Virtual worlds start out as producer-generated content, web 1.0. Sims and games are designed and built a priori.   Yes, it’s way cool, technically sophisticated, etc, but it’s not a meaningful change. And, yes, worlds like Second Life let you extend it, turning it into web 2.0, but it’s still not fundamentally new.   We took simulations and games out of advanced technology for the conferences several years ago when I served.   This isn’t fundamentally new.

Yes, you can do new stuff on top of mobile web and immersive environments that would qualify, like taking your location and, say, goals and programmatically generating specific content for you, or creating a custom world and outcomes based upon your actions in the world from a model not just of the world, but of you, and others, and… whatever.   But without that, it’s just web 1.0 or 2.0.

And it’d be easy to slough this off and say it doesn’t matter, but ASTD is a voice with a long reach, and we really do need to hold them to a high standard because of their influence.   And we need people to be clear about what’s clever and what’s transformative.   This is not to say my definition is the only one, others have   interpretations that differ, but I think the convergent view is while it may be more than semantic web, it’s not evolutionary steps.   I’m willing to be wrong, so if you disagree, let me know.   But I think we have to get this right.

Jane Hart’s Social Learning Handbook

by 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.

Quip: innovation

by Leave a Comment

Optimal execution is only the cost of entry; continual innovation is the necessary competitive differentiator.

When I talk strategy, I channel my colleagues in the Internet Time Alliance about the changes being seen in the workplace.   The rate of change is increasing, and the patterns we imagined we saw (and explained away when violated) are more clearly representing the chaos seen in a fractal world.   As a consequence, organizational nimbleness is a necessity.

In a time when competitors can copy your innovation in a matter of months (or less), you can’t just plan, prepare, and execute optimally any longer.   You now have to continually innovate in products and services, problem-solve faster, avoid repeating mistakes, and in general learn (big ‘L’ learning) faster than your competitors.

The learning doesn’t come from more hierarchy, bigger incentives, or more systems.   Counter-intuitively, perhaps, it comes from being more open, taking time for reflection, having better conversations,   finding ways to give people meaningful goals and giving them the space and support to accomplish them.   It’s more than a process shift, it’s a culture shift, but it can be done, and it works.

Yes, there’s formal learning, and performance support because you can’t neglect the optimal execution, but there’s also community-building, because you need the continual innovation too.   Neglect either, and you’ll fail.   It’s not about more resources (yeah, as if), but about more sensible allocation of them.

My suggestion: use technology and people in ways that maximize their contributions. People can be really good problem-solvers, particularly coupled with complementary technology, but they’re really bad at rote tasks.   However, technology, properly designed and developed, is really good at rote tasks.   Need I say more?   Hint hint, nudge nudge, wink wink.

Building Stronger Organizations

by 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?

Social Media Strategy thoughts

by 2 Comments

What is a social media strategy for outreach?   Really, it‘s about demonstrating your thinking, your values, and background. It‘s about interacting with appropriate people in ways that reflect who you are.

Here is some thoughts about how that maps out in two areas: Facebook, and Twitter.   I‘m mentioning these as two of the most viable and visible tools for social media engagement.

Twitter

Having a twitter account is a necessary start, maybe several. One might be just a daily thing people can follow, but it has to provide value.   So, for example, you might stream out an interesting bit of the day. That, alone, however, is not enough.

A second important role is to engage people.   More important than the first idea is to ‘be‘ an entity.   If an organization is on social media, and increasingly they should be,   it needs to be interactive. This is accomplished in several ways:

  • point to what the organization is doing
  • point to interesting things outside of the organization
  • re-tweet relevant stuff that others post (which requires following interesting people)
  • respond to people replying to that account.

These require resources, essentially a person or persons who handle these duties.   Done well, these activities demonstrate that there is an interesting mind and a sincere heart behind the account.

Facebook

The same is true of a FaceBook page.   Not only should people be friending it, they should be coming back to be engaged   the organization, but now also with their colleagues also interested in the organization.

There are different ways to be on Facebook: as a static page, or as a ‘presence‘ with dialogs, groups, etc.  A static page might get a few ‘likes‘, but you really want to build a site as a place to come for folks interested in the organization and it’s work.   There need to be discussions supported (and interacted with).   There need to be updates.   There needs to be a way for people to have a dialog with you.   You need information: photos, events.   Use apps to create polls. In short, it’s about interaction around the organization and it’s work.

Again, the message is that you‘re active, engaged, you really care about what you do.   And, again, it takes resources.

Twitter/Facebook Integration

These two elements do not live independently.   Your Twitter strategy should be aligned with your Facebook strategy, so your tweets point to new information on Facebook, your Facebook account reflects your tweets, etc.   Your tweets should drive traffic to the Facebook site, but not exclusively.

There‘s more that can be incorporated: blogs (I use twitter and my blog more than my facebook page, but I‘m an individual not an organization).   However, your elements shouldn‘t be too fragmented.   E.g. only have separate Twitter handles and Facebook pages if your separate initiatives have to maintain unique identities. However, that‘s a branding issue, and not a place I‘m qualified to talk about.   Once you‘ve got the identity, then you need to align your Facebook and Twitter strategies.

So, you should be doing this, and you need to be doing it well.   If you don’t do it right, you may as well not do it at all.

Social Media Metrics

by 4 Comments

I continue to get asked about social learning metrics.   Until we get around to a whitepaper or something on metrics, here’re some thoughts:

Frankly, the problem with Kirkpatrick (sort of like with LMS’ and ADDIE, *drink*) is not in the concept, but in the execution.   As he would say, stopping at level 1 or 2 is worthless.   You need to start with Level 4, and work back.   This is true whether you’re talking about formal learning, informal learning, or whatever. Then, I’m not feeling like you have to be anal about levels 1-3, it’s level 4 that matters, but there’s plausibility that making the link makes your case stronger.   And I also like what I heard added at a client meeting: level 0, are they even taking the course/accessing the system?   But I digress…

So, let’s say you are interested in seeing what social media can do for your organization: what are you not seeing but need to?   If you’re putting in a social media system into a call center, maybe you want reduced time to problem solution, fewer customer return calls on the same problem, etc.   If you’re into an operations group, maybe you want more service or product ideas.   What is it you’re trying to achieve?   What would indicate the innovation that you’re looking to spark?

Parameters for keep, tweak, or killThen, you need to find ways to measure those outcomes. You have three basic decisions to make in terms of a strategic initiative:

  • it’s working, yay, let’s keep it.
  • hmm, it’s kinda working, but we need to tweak it
  • oh oh, this is bleeding money, let’s kill it

You should set parameters before you launch the initiative that you think indicate the thresholds you are talking about.   The keep and kill thresholds likely have to do with the costs versus the benefits.   You may change those parameters on inspection of the results at any time, but at least you are doing it consciously.   And gradually your patience will or should fade.   Eventually you end up with either a leave or kill decision.

Frankly, even activity is a metric.   A vendor of a social media system uses that as a metric for billing (though I don’t think that two touches a month constitutes a meaningful interaction by a user), and if people are talking productively and getting value, you’ve got at least an argument that intangible benefits are being generated.   You could couple that with subjective evaluation of value, but overall I would like to argue for more meaningful outcomes.

And don’t think that you have to have only one. Depending on the size of the initiative and the different silos that are being integrated, you might have more.   You might check not only key business metrics, but look for impacts on retention and morale as well, if the benefits of improving work environments are to believed (and I do).   And, of course, there’s more than the installation and measuring: the tweaking for instance could involve messaging, culture, interface design, or more.

Metrics for informal learning aren’t rocket science, but instead mapping of best principles into specific contexts.   Your organization needs to find ways to facilitate social learning, as the innovation outcomes are the key differentiator going forward, as so many say.   You should be experimenting, but with impacts you’d like to have, not just on faith.

2011 Predictions

by

For the annual eLearn Mag predictions, this year I wrote:

I think we’ll see some important, but subtle, trends. Deeper uses of technology are going to surface: more data-driven interactions, complemented by both more structured content and more semantics. These trends are precursors to some very interesting nascent capabilities, essentially web 3.0: system-generated content.   I also think we’ll see the further demise of “courses über alles” and the ‘all-singing all-dancing‘ solution, and movement towards performance support and learning facilitation driven via federated capabilities.

I think it’s worth elaborating on what I mean (I was limited to 75 words).

I’ve talked before about web 3.0, and what it takes is fine granularity and deep tagging of content, and some rules about what to present when.   Those rules can be hand-crafted based upon good guesses or existing research, but new opportunities arise from having those rules capitalize on rich data of interactions.   Both based upon some client work, and what I heard at the WCET conference, folks are finally waking up to the potential of collecting internet-scale data (e.g. Amazon and Netflix) and mining that as a basis for optimizing interactions.   Taking the steps now have some immediate payoffs in terms of optimizing content development streams and looking anew at what are important interactions, but the big returns come in creating optimized learning and performance interactions.

The second part is a bit of evangelism hoping that more organizations will follow the path foreseen by my Internet Time Alliance colleagues, and move beyond just training to covering informal learning.   I’ve talked before about looking at the bigger picture of learning, because I’m convinced that the coming differentiator will not be optimal execution but continuing innovation.   That takes, in my mind, both an optimized infrastructure and ubiquitous access (c.f. mobile).   It’s more, of course, because it also implies a culture supportive of learning, yet I think this is both an advantage for business competitiveness and a move that meets real human needs, which makes it an ideal as well as real goal.

The eLearning Mag predictions should be out soon, and I strongly encourage you to see what the bevy of prognosticators are proposing for the coming year.   I welcome hearing your thoughts, too!

My path to ITA

by Leave a Comment

Internet Time Alliance logoAs my colleagues Harold and Jane have done, I thought I’d capture my learning journey that led me to the Internet Time Alliance.   I started out seeing the connection between computers and learning as an undergraduate, and designed my own degree. My first job out of college was designing and programming educational computer games, which led me back to graduate school and a Ph.D. in applied cognitive science to find out how to design learning solutions better.

That has been a recurrent theme across academic endeavors, some government-sponsored initiatives, and an internet startup: designing solutions that are innovative and yet pragmatic.   It was really brought home to me when we were recently discussing a new initiative, and while my colleagues were looking at the business opportunities, my mind was racing off figuring out how to design it.

This continued in my consulting, where I moved from designing the individual solutions to designing the processes and structures to reliably deliver quality learning experience design, what I’ve called learning experience design strategy.   However, as I’ve worked with organizations looking to move to the ‘next level’, as happened with and through some of my clients, I regularly found a recurrent pattern, that integrated formal learning with performance support and eCommunity (and some other steps).

So I was focusing on trying to help organizations look at the bigger picture.   And what I recognized is that most organizations were neglecting   eCommunity the most, yet as I learned more about this from my colleague Jay Cross, the social and informal learning were the big and missed opportunity. When Jay started talked about grouping together to address this part of the space, it made perfect sense to me.   The opportunities to have large impacts with challenging but not costly investments is a natural.   So here I am.   Based upon my previous work on games and now mobile, there are some design strategy opportunities that fall to Quinnovation, but I’m eager to help organizations through ITA as well.   Hope to talk to you in the new year about whatever is relevant for you from here.

Working Smarter Cracker Barrel

by Leave a Comment

My Internet Time Alliance colleague Harold Jarche is a clever guy. In preparation for an event, he makes a blog post to organize his thoughts. I like his thinking, so I’ll let him introduce my post:

Next week, at our Working Smarter event hosted by Tulser in Maastricht, NL, we will have a series of short sessions on selected topics. Each Principal of the Internet Time Alliance has three topics of 20 minutes to be discussed in small groups. My topics are listed below and include links to relevant posts as well as a short description of the core ideas behind each topic.

These are mine:

Mobile

Mobile ‘accessorizes‘ your brain.   It is about complementing what your brain does well by providing the capabilities that it does not do well (rote computation, distance communication, and exact detail), but wherever and whenever you are.   Given that our performers are increasingly mobile, it makes sense to deliver the capabilities where needed, not just at their desk.   The 4 C’s of mobile give us a guide to the capabilities we have on tap.

Working smarter is not just mobile capabilities, however, but also combining them to do even more interesting things.   The real win is when we capture the current situation, via GPS and clock/calendar, so we know where you are and what you are doing, to do things that are relevant in the context.

Even without that, however, there are big offerings on the table for informal learning, via access to resources and networks.

Social Formal Learning

Social learning is one of the big opportunities we are talking about in ‘working smarter’.   Most people tend to think of social learning in terms of the informal opportunities, which are potentially huge.   However, there are a couple of reasons to also think about the benefits of social learning from the formal learning perspective.

The first is the processing.   When you are asked to engage with others on a topic, and you have designed the topic well, you get tight cycles of negotiating understand, which elaborates the associations to make them persist better and longer.   You can have learners reflect and share those reflections, which is one meaningful form of processing, and then you can ask them to extend the relevant concepts by reviewing them in another situation together, asking them to come to a shared response. The best, of course, is when learners work together to discern how the concepts get applied in a particular context, by asking them to solve a problem together.

The additional benefit is the connection between formal and informal. You must use social learning tools, and by doing so you are developing the facility with the environment your performers should use in the workplace. You also have the opportunity to use the formal social learning as a way to introduce the learners into the communities of practice you can and should be building.

Performance Ecosystem (Workscape) Strategy

Looking at the individual components – performance support, formal learning, and informal learning – is valuable, but looking at them together is important as well, to consider the best path from where you are to where you want or need to go.   Across a number of engagements, a pattern emerged that I’ve found helpful in thinking about what we term workscapes (what I’ve also called performance ecosystems, PDF) in a systemic way.

You want to end up where you have a seamless performance environment oriented around the tasks that need to be accomplished, and having the necessary layers and components.   You don’t want to approach the steps individually, but with the bigger picture in mind, so everything you do is part of the path towards the end game.   Realizing, of course, that it will be dynamic, and you’ll want to find ways to empower your performers to take ownership.