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Me, ‘to go’ and on the go

14 April 2011 by Clark Leave a Comment

Owing to a busy spring pushing the new book on mobile, I’ve been captured in a variety of ways. If you haven’t already seen too much of me talking mobile, here are some of the available options:

Cammy Bean did an audio interview of me for Kineo (cut into sensible size chunks)
Terrance Wing and Rick Zanotti hosted me for a #elearnchat video interview
I also have given a series of webinars on mobile for a variety of groups, here’s a sample.

Also, with the Internet Time Alliance, we gave a webinar on Working Smarter.

Coming up in the near future:

As I mentioned before, I’ll be in Sydney for the Australasian Talent Conference talking games and social learning, and workshopping mobile and elearning strategy.

In addition, however, I’ll also be running a deeper ID session and then a game design workshop on the same trip with Elnet on the 30th and 31st of May and an event at the University of Wollongong (more soon).

In June, I’ll be presenting at the DAU/GMU Innovations in eLearning conference that’s always been an intimate and quality event.

Also in June, I’ll be running my mobile design workshop and presenting on several different topics at the eLearning Guild’s exciting new mobile learning conference, mLearnCon.

And I’ll be participating virtually with a mobile event with the Cascadia Chapter of ASTD also in June.

In August, I’m off to Madison Wisconsin to keynote the Annual Conference on Distance Teaching and Learning, as well as running a pre-conference workshop.

There’s more to come:

The CSTD annual conference in November in Toronto.
The Metro DC ASTD chapter in November as well.
Other things still on the bubble; stay tuned!

All of these events have great promise regardless of my participation, and I encourage you to check them out and see if they make sense to you. If you attend one, do introduce yourself (I’m not aloof, just initially shy). Hope to catch up with you somewhere.

Learning Experience Design thru the Macroscope

7 April 2011 by Clark 11 Comments

Our learning experience design is focused, essentially, on achieving one particular learning objective. At the level of curricular design, we are then looking at sequences of learning objectives that lead to aggregate competencies. And these are delivered as punctate events. But with mobile technologies, we have the capability to truly start to deliver what I call ‘slow learning’: delivering small bits of learning over time to really develop an individual. It’s a more natural map to how we learn; the event model is pretty broken. Most of our learning comes from outside the learning experience. But can we do better?

Really, I don’t think we have a handle on designing and delivering a learning experience that is spaced over time, and layered over our real world activities, to develop individuals in micro bits over a macro period of time rather than macro bits over a micro bit of time (which really doesn’t work). We have pieces of the puzzle ( smaller chunks, content models) and we have the tools (individualized delivery, semantics), but putting them together really hasn’t been done yet.

Conceptually, it’s not hard, I reckon. You have more small chunks of content, and more distributed performance model. You couple it with more self-evaluation, and you design a system that is patiently persistent in assisting people and supporting them along. You’d have to change your content design, and provide mechanisms to recognize external content and real performance contexts as learning experiences. You’d want to support lots of forms of equivalency, allowing self-evaluation against a rubric to co-exist with mentor evaluation.

There are some consequences, of course. You’d have to trust the learner, they’d have to understand the value proposition, it’s a changed model that all parties would have to accommodate. On the other hand, putting trust and value into a learning arrangement somehow feels important (and refreshingly different :). The upside potential is quite big, however: learning that sticks, learners that feel invested in, and better organizational outcomes. It’s really trying to build a system that is more mentor like than instructor like. It’s certainly a worthwhile investigation, and potentially a big opportunity.

The point is to take the fact that technology is no longer the limit, our imaginations are. Then you can start thinking about what we would really want from a learning experience, and figure out how to deliver it. We still have to figure out what our design process would look like, what representations we would need to consider, and our associated technology models, but this is doable. The possibility is now well and truly on the table, anyone want to play? I’m ready to talk when you are.

Business Social Media Benefits

11 March 2011 by Clark 1 Comment

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

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

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

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

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

Thinking Social

7 March 2011 by Clark 1 Comment

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

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

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

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

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

I might extend the list with:

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

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

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

Clarity needed around Web 3.0

25 February 2011 by Clark 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

24 February 2011 by Clark 1 Comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Building Stronger Organizations

17 February 2011 by Clark 1 Comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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