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Social Media Metrics

1 February 2011 by Clark 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?

Then, 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

1 January 2011 by Clark

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 Ã¼ber allesâ€ and the â€˜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

22 December 2010 by Clark Leave a Comment

As 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

12 December 2010 by Clark 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.

Death by reorg

22 November 2010 by Clark 1 Comment

Even if you haven’t experienced it, you’ve heard about it, seen it, and now it’s a epidemic. The familiar reorganization: changing management structures, reporting relationships, moving units around. It can happen infrequently, but in many organizations it seems to be a regular occurrence: every 2 years, every year, or more frequently. The expression ‘drive-by reorgs’ isn’t hard to countenance.

The reasons for reorganizations can be several, both pragmatic and political. I remember reading a screed that suggests it’s inevitable: organizations will have to align to customers for a while, until efficiency falters, then they reorganize along operational lines until customer satisfaction drops. Of course, there are the typical new manager reorganizations as well; it’s easy to hypothesize that they have to be seen to be doing something. Even if, as Petronius Arbiter wrote about reorganization: “. . . a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency,and demoralization“.

However, it occurred to me to think that reorgs may be a symptom of an approach to management that’s seeing it’s last days. My ITA colleagues have been talking about how we need to moving in a new direction, away from hierarchy to Jon Husband’s wirearchy. Reorganizations restructure the top-down approach to guiding performance, where one person thinks for several. The alternative is network approaches, where everyone understands the goals and is empowered to achieve the goals.

Really, if an organization is restructuring regularly, it’s probably a sign that it’s trying to adapt structurally to an environment that is increasingly chaotic. And that approach just isn’t going to work anymore. Organizations have to become more flexible than rigid structures can accommodate, and more flexible management approaches are needed.

Seriously, Death by Reorganization (warning, PDF) is the potential endgame. What is the alternative? Creating a learning culture of trust and responsibility, empowered with resources, with leadership that embodies a clear vision and lives the sharing of learning. Reorganizations could be the sign of failing leadership, rather than innovative leadership. Where are you and your organization?

Big ‘L’ Learning

16 November 2010 by Clark 8 Comments

We’ve been wrestling for a while about how to deal with the labeling problem. The problem is that when you mention learning to anyone but the L&D team, they immediately hear ‘training’ (and, frankly, too often so to does the L&D team). And, of course, really the issue is performance, but too often that can mean machine throughput or semi-conductor yield or something other than the output of the human brain. This has continued to be a barrier for having meaningful conversations.

I also want to address the broader suite of human brain outcomes: research, creativity, design, etc., as you’ll have read here before. The answers aren’t known, and this is likely to be the important work. Other than creating a portmanteau, or making up a new word entirely, however, I’ve been at a loss for a label.

Recently, I’ve started talking about “big L learning”. ‘Inspired’ by the fact that the Liberal party in Australia is really the conservative party (leave it to the Aussies :), so they have to distinguish between big L and little l liberal, I’ve decided that perhaps we can distinguish between little ‘l’ learning and big ‘L’ learning. If nothing else, it might get someone to ask what I mean and provide an opportunity to open up the discussion.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m more than open to an alternate suggestion, but in the interim, I’m going to keep playing with this. I’ve been wrestling with this for years, and haven’t come up with anything better. I welcome your feedback.

Engineering both the front- and back-end

11 November 2010 by Clark Leave a Comment

I had the pleasure of meeting Bob Glushko a couple of weeks ago, and finally had a chance to dig into a couple of papers if his (as well as scan his book Document Engineering). He’s definitely one that you would call ‘wicked’ smart, having built several companies and now having sold one, he’s only hanging around doing cutting edge information science because he wants to.

The core of what he’s on about is structuring data, as documents, to facilitate transactions that for the basis of services. He focuses on the term ‘document’ rather than data to help emphasize the variety of forms in which they manifest, the human component, and most of all the nature of combining data to facilitate business interactions. At the heart is something I’ve been excited about, what I call content models, but he takes much further to support a more generic and comprehensive capability.

He makes a useful distinction between ‘front-end’ and ‘back-end’ services to help highlight the need to take the total service-delivery system into account. The front end provides the customer-facing experience, while the back end ensures efficiency and scalability. It can be difficult to reconcile these two, and yet both are necessary.

This is important in learning experience design as well. Having served on either side, both, and as the mediator between, I know the tension that can result from the caring designer crossing swords with the focused developer.

I have talked before about the potential of web 3.0, system-generated content, and that’s what this approach really enables. Yes, there are necessary efficiencies and effectiveness enough to justify this approach in your learning experience system design, but the potential for smart adaptive experiences is the new opportunity.

If you’re building more than just content, but also delivery systems and business engines, you owe it to yourself to get into Document Engineering. If you’re going further (and you should), you really need to get into the whole services and information science area.

There are exciting advancements in technologies, going beyond just XML to learning focused structures on top, and solid concept engineering behind these that are the key to the next generation of learning systems (and, of course, more).

The role of the university?

27 October 2010 by Clark 7 Comments

Unhappy in many ways with the current status of education, particularly here in the US, I’ve been thinking a lot about what would make sense. What’s the role of K12, and then what’s the role of a university? Some thoughts recently coalesced that I thought I’d put out and see what reaction I get.

The issue, to me, covers several things. Now, I talked some time ago about my ongoing search for wisdom, and the notion of a wise curriculum coupled with a wise pedagogy very much permeate my thinking. However, I’m probably going to be a bit more mundane here. I just want to think what we might want to cover, and how.

Let me start with the premise that what needs to be learned to be a productive member of society needs to be learned before university, as not everyone goes further. If we truly believe (and we should) that 21st Century skills of learning, research, communication, leadership, etc, are skills everyone needs, then those are K12 goals. Naturally, of course, we also include literacy of many sorts (not just reading and writing), and ideally, thinking like a mathematician and scientist (not science and math).

However, if those are accomplished in K12 (when I’ve previously argued learning how to think might be the role of the university, and now think it’s got to be before then), then what is the role of university? Given that the half-life of knowledge is less than four years, focusing on preparing for a lifetime of performance is out of the question. Similarly, pursuing one fixed course of study won’t make sense anymore, as the fields are beginning to change, and the arbitrary categorizations won’t make sense. So what then?

I’m thinking of going back to the original Oxbridge model. In the old days, you were assigned a tutor (and advisor), and you met with that person regularly. They’d have a discussion with you, recommend some activities (read X, solve Y), and send you on your way. It was a customized solution. Since then, for a variety of reasons (scale, mostly), the model’s turned into a mass-production model. However, we now have the power of technology.

What if we moved to a system where individuals could spend some time exploring particular areas (like the first two years or so of college), and then put together a proposal of what they wanted to do, and how they’d pursue it, and the proposal would be vetted. Once approved, there’d be regular updates. Sure, there’d likely be some templates around for learning, but it’d be more self-directed, customizable, and put the appropriate responsibility on the learner.

I may be biased, as I designed my own major (UCSD’s Muir campus had a mechanism to design your own degree, and as they didn’t have a learning technology program…) as an undergraduate, and again you propose your research as a PhD candidate, but I think there’s a lot to recommend a learner taking responsibility for what they’re going to study and why. Granted, universities don’t do a good enough job of articulating why a program sequence has particular courses in it, but I think it’s even better if a learner at least has to review and defend it, if not choose it themselves.

Naturally, some domain-specific learning skills would emerge, but this would provide a more flexible system to match how specializations are changing so dynamically, serve as a model for life, and put the responsibility of faculty members more to mentorship and less to lecture. It would necessitate a change in pedagogy as well.

I think, in the long term, this sort of model has to be adopted. In the short term, it will wreak havoc with things like accreditation, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing, given the flaws we’re beginning to see in the existing system, both non- and for-profit. I reckon the for-profits might be able to move quicker, but there will be battles. And, of course, changing faculty minds reminds me of the old joke: “How many academics does it take to change a lightbulb?” “Change?” (And I *was* one!)

Naturally, this has implications for K12 too, as many have articulately argued that the pedagogy needs to change there as well, following the learners’ interests. Likewise the notion of educational publishing (where is that iPad replacement for my kid’s texts?). Those are topics for another day.

So, does this make sense? What am I missing?

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