I wrote an opinion piece over at the eLearn online magazine on the challenges educational publishers face and some ideas about the changes in thinking (and skills) they need. I welcome your thoughts.
The Formal/Informal Continuum
In some client work I’m doing, I’m helping out an effort to establish a Web 2.0, social, informal, [enter your own bizbuzz phrase here] strategy. Despite the hype, this looks to be a real value proposition for them. They’ve serious needs in terms of deep knowledge retiring, acquisitions to integrate into a streamlined operation, and more.
As a consequence, I’ve been talking to folks within this large organization who are embarked on various social media efforts. Some are instituted from different organizations, like under the CIO, and others have emerged from the learning function with the organization. The interesting thing is how the actions are blurring the notion that there are tight boundaries between formal and informal.
In two separate cases, the solution emerged as a realization that the ability of the learning organization to continue to meet the growing rate of change (both in the rate of changes, and the increasing complexity), is not keeping up with the need. There’s also a recognition that empowering the users to take control is a real opportunity. In one case, they’re rolling out a wiki that they’re initially populating, but are already in the process of devolving access and the ability to contribute. In another, they’re making accessible the resources for users to choose what to film or software activity to capture, to make their own little ‘learnlets’ and make available.
Is this performance support? Is this formal learning? Is this social or informal learning? It doesn’t matter! What matters is that these are areas where the learning function can and should contribute! However, it’s blurring the line between control of learning design, responsibility for curriculum, and more. And this isn’t an abrogation of responsibility, but instead a necessary extension of the learning function scope, on principle, and a pragmatic response to a changing world.
There was a separate instance where the KM group was developing a wiki for similar needs, e.g. the growing body of knowledge. However, there were two reasons why they could benefit from the learning function as well. For one, they’re focusing on developing rich semantic underpinnings that will facilitate smart search and rule-driven complex behaviors (read: opportunistic and customized information). This is great and important work (I love this stuff, it’s Web 3.0), but they won’t actually be putting in useful information for another year! There’s an immediate need that needs to be addressed here. The second one comes from when they are ready to move forward; they’ll benefit from the learning function’s experience in both gathering knowledge and in supporting rolling out access to the learners themselves.
There was also a definite recognition that the proliferation of resources was a problem to make accessible, and to govern the lifecycle of, and to message the updates. These are clearly central roles, and require an understanding of learning. And more. I’ve argued that learning designers need to understand information architecture and information design as well, and this only reinforces that message, but, those fields share much foundational knowledge and the extension isn’t onerous.
The bigger picture is to go beyond the individual initiatives, figure out ways to scale the approaches enterprise-wide, to make the breadth of resources systematically organized, and to remove redundancies and inefficiencies. By coordinating the technical sophistication of the Information Services group with the learning function (and other strategic alliances), this organization has a real opportunity to tap into the collective intelligence of it’s employees, and get a handle on the continuous innovation that will be required in the increasingly competitive market. But it only happens by some systematic work to streamline the effort, otherwise there will still be bottlenecks to effectiveness and redundancies to hamper efficiency.
There’s still a role for formal at one end, and I haven’t really exposed the alternative mechanisms supporting the far end of collaboration, but here I wanted to focus on the gray area in the middle and the necessity of not trying to artificially create a boundary.
The worst of best practices and benchmarking
In a recent post, Jane Bozarth goes to task on ‘best practices’, which I want to elaborate on. In the post, she talks about how best practices are contextualized, so that they may work well here, but not there. She’s got a cute and apt metaphor with marriage, and she’s absolutely right.
However, I want to go further. Let me set the stage: years ago as a grad student, our lab was approached with the task of developing an expert system for a particular task. It certainly was something we could have done. Eventually, we asked what the description was for the ideal performance, and were told that the best source was the person who’d been doing it the longest. Now, people are fabulous pattern matchers, and performing something for a long time with some reflection on improvement likely could get you some really good performance. However, there are some barriers: experts no longer have access to their own performance; without an external frame of reference, they can get trapped into local maxima; and other phenomena of our cognitive architecture interfere with optimal performance (e.g. set effects, functional fixedness). I’ve riffed on this often; it’s compiled and they tell stories about what they do that have little correlation to what they actually do. We didn’t end up taking up the opportunity. So it may be the best out there, but is it the best that can be?
And that’s the problem. Why are we only looking at what the best is that anyone’s doing? Why not abstract across that and other performances, looking for emergent principles, and trying to infer what would on principle be the best? That is, if it hasn’t already been documented in theory and is available (academics do that sort of thing as a career, and in between the obfuscation there are often good thoughts and answers). The same with benchmarking: it’s relatively the best, not absolutely the best.
I’ve largely made a career out of trying to find the principled best approaches, interpreting cognitive science research and looking broadly across relevant fields (including HCI/UI, software engineering, entertainment, and others) to find emergent principles that can guide design of solutions. And, reliably, I find that there are idea, concepts, models, etc that can guide efforts as broadly dispersed as virtual worlds, mobile, adaptive systems, content models, organizational implementation, and more. Models emerge that serve as checklists, principles, frameworks for design that allow us to examine tradeoffs and make the principled best solution. I regularly capture these models and share them (e.g. my models page, and more recent ones regularly appear in this blog).
I’m not saying it’s easy, but you look across our field and recognize there are those who are doing good work in either translating research into practice or finding emergent patterns that resonate with theoretical principles. It’s time to stop looking at what other organizations are doing in their context as a guide, and start drawing upon what’s known and customizing it to your context, and then having a cycle of continual tuning. With the increasing pressures to be competitive, I’d suggest that just being good enough isn’t. Being the best you can be is the only sustainable advantage.
Let’s see: copy your best competitor, and keep equal; or shoot for the principled best that can be in the category, and have an unassailable position of leadership? The answer seems obvious to me. How about you?
CLO Symposium
I’ve been attending the CLO Fall Symposium this week, and it’s been a great experience. I wrote it up as a blog post over at eLearn Mag. There is supposed to be more linkage between Learnlets and their mag real soon. Stay tuned!
Driving formal & informal from the same place
There’s been such a division between formal and informal; the fight for resources, mindspace, and the ability for people to get their mind around making informal concrete. However, I’ve been preparing a presentation from another way of looking at it, and I want to suggest that, at core, both are being driven from the same point: how humans learn.
I was looking at the history of society, and it’s getting more and more complex. Organizationally, we started from a village, to a city, and started getting hierarchical. Businesses are now retreating from that point of view, and trying to get flatter, and more networked.
Organizational learning, however, seems to have done almost the opposite. From networks of apprenticeship through most of history, through the dialectical approach of the Greeks that started imposing a hierarchy, to classrooms which really treat each person as an independent node, the same, and autonomous with no connections.
Certainly, we’re trying to improve our pedagogy (to more of an andragogy), by looking at how people really learn. In natural settings, we learn by being engaged in meaningful tasks, where there’re resources to assist us, and others to help us learn. We’re developed in communities of practice, with our learning distributed across time and across resources.
That’s what we’re trying to support through informal approaches to learning. We’re going beyond just making people ready for what we can anticipate, and supporting them in working together to go beyond what’s known, and be able to problem-solve, to innovate, to create new products, services, and solutions. We provide resources, and communication channels, and meaning representation tools.
And that’s what we should be shooting for in our formal learning, too. Not an artificial event, but presented with meaningful activity, that learners get as important, with resources to support, and ideally, collaboration to help disambiguate and co-create understanding. The task may be artificial, the resources structured for success, but there’s much less gap between what they do for learning and what they do in practice.
In both cases, the learning is facilitated. Don’t assume self-learning skills, but support both task-oriented behaviors, and the development of self-monitoring, self learning.
The goal is to remove the artificial divide between formal and informal, and recognize the continuum of developing skills from foundational abilities into new areas, developing learners from novices to experts in both domains, and in learning..
This is the perspective that drives the vision of moving the learning organization role from ‘training’ to learning facilitator. Across all organizational knowledge activities, you may still design and develop, but you nurture as much, or more. So, nurture your understanding, and your learners. The outcome should be better learning for all.
Learning Experience Creation Systems
Where do the problems lie in getting good learning experiences? We need them, as it’s becoming increasingly important to get the important skills really nailed, not just ‘addressed’. It’s not about dumping knowledge on someone, or the other myriad ways learning can be badly designed. It’s about making learning experiences that really deliver. So, where does the process of creating a learning experience go wrong?
There’s been a intriguing debate over at Aaron (@mrch0mp3rs) Silver’s blog about where the responsibility lies between clients and vendors for knowledge to ensure a productive relationship. One of the issues raised (who, me?) is understanding design, but it’s clearly more than that, and the debate has raged.
Then, a post in ITFORUM asked about how to redo instructor training for a group where the instructors are SMEs, not trainers, and identified barriers around curriculum, time, etc. What crystallized for me is that it’s not a particular flaw or issue, but it’s a system that can have multiple flaws or multiple points of breakdown.
The point is, we have to quit looking at it as design, development, etc; and view it not just as a process, but as a system. A system with lots of inputs, processes, and places to go wrong. I tried to capture a stereotypical system in this picture, with lots of caveats: clients or vendors may be internal or external, there may be more than one talent, etc, it really is a simplified stereotype, with all the negative connotations that entails.
Note that there are many places for the system to break even in this simplified representation. How do you get alignment between all the elements? I think you need a meta-level, learning experience creation system design. That is, you need to look at the system with a view towards optimizing it as a system, not as a process.
I realize that’s one of the things I do (working with organizations to improve their templates, processes, content models, learning systems, etc), trying to tie these together into a working coherent whole. And while I’m talking formal learning here, by and large, I believe it holds true for performance support and informal learning environments as well, the whole performance ecosystem. And that’s the way you’ve got to look at it, systemically, to see what needs to be augmented to be producing not content, not dry and dull learning, not well-produced but ineffective experiences, but the real deal: efficient, effective, and engaging learning experiences. Learning, done right, isn’t a ‘spray and pray’ situation, but a carefully designed intervention that facilitates learning. And to get that design, you need to address the overall system that creates that experience.
The client has to ‘get’ that they need good learning outcomes, the vendor has to know what that means. The designer/SME relationship has to ensure that the real outcomes emerge. The designer has to understand what will achieve these outcomes. The ‘talent’ (read graphic design, audio, video, etc) needs to align with the learning outcomes, and appropriate practices, the developer(s) need to use the right tools, and so on. There are lots of ways it can go wrong, in lack of understanding, in mis-communication, in the wrong tools, etc. Only by looking at it all holistically can you look at the flows, the inputs, the processes, and optimize forward while backtracking from flaws.
So, look at your system. Diagnose it, remedy it, tune it, and turn it into a real learning experience creation system. Face it, if you’re not creating a real solution, you’re really wasting your time (and money!).
The Performance Environment
I’ve represented the performance ecosystem in several ways in the past, and that process continues to occur. In the process of writing up a proposal to do some social learning strategizing for an organization, I started thinking about it from the performer perspective.
Now, personal learning environments (PLE) is not a completely new concept, and quite a number of folks contributed their PLEs here. However, I wasn’t creating mine so much as a conceptual framework, yet it shares characteristics with many.
I realized there were some relevant dimensions, so I added those in, including whether they tend to be more reflective or active, and whether they’re formal or informal. Note that I played a little fast and loose in the positioning to hopefully not make the connections too obscured, so it’s not quantitatively accurate so much as conceptually indicative. Also, I’m trying to catch categories of tools, not specifics. Still, I (apparently :) thought it was interesting enough to try to get feedback on.
So, what do you think? Am I missing a channel? A connection? Feedback solicited.
Guff: a conversation in 3 parts. Part 3
A: “Ok, you‘ve got me thinking about this social learning guff. But it sounds expensive as well as difficult. Suppose I need a whole social media system, some big installation. Not sure I can sell it up the chain.â€
B: “One thing at a time. First, it doesn‘t have to be expensive. You likely already have some of the social media infrastructure, and other ways can be darn near free, but of course the rest of it does take time and effort.â€
A: “Well, the cost is good news. But I‘ve got to have payoff numbers. Intangibles are a hard sell.â€
B: “I hear you. That‘s why it‘s worth it to take some time and do the back of the envelope numbers. It‘s not like you can pull someone else‘s numbers off the shelf and apply them, though there are examples that can provide guidance, like the customer numbers.â€
A: “Customers? I thought this was internal”
B: “Oh, internal‘s a big opportunity, but so are conversations with customers, supply chain partners, any stakeholders that can be the source of valuable interactions. Companies have found value crowd-sourcing new products and processes, having customer communities self-help, and even facilitating communities related to their products and services. And, of course, there have been some spectacular mistakes by ignoring social media! Have you heard about the cluetrain”
A: “As in ‘get a clue‘? What is all this, crowdsourcing, cluetrain”
B: “Sorry. Crowdsourcing is getting a lot of people to contribute ideas. It‘s the ‘room is smarter than the smartest person in the room‘ (if you manage the process right), carried to the next level. The Cluetrain manifesto was a marvelously foresightful and insightful recognition that with the power of the network, you no longer can control the information about your company, so you have to start having a dialog with customers.â€
A: “So, we need social internal and external, eh”
B: “Yep, that‘s the idea. And you figure out how much value you can get from your customers by having them provide you feedback, how much by making it easier to help themselves. That‘s on top of the benefits of reducing time to get answers and increasing the quality of internal ideas.â€
A: “Sounds hard to quantify.â€
B: “Well, it‘s not necessarily easy, but it is doable. It just takes some time, but during that time you‘ll really be exploring the opportunities to make your company more effective. There are big wins on the table, and it‘s kind of a shame if you ignore them or walk away.â€
A: “Does this mean I can take the cost of the training department away”
B: “No, but changing it. It‘s not replacing training, though having the social media infrastructure more effective. Face it, most training is a waste of money not because it‘s not necessary, but because it‘s done so badly.â€
A: “I‘ll say.â€
B: “So why do you keep doing it”
A: “Because it‘s supposed to be important!â€
B: “And it is, but if it‘s important, isn‘t it worth doing well”
A: “I suppose.â€
B: “Here‘s the picture: you hire people, but they can‘t know everything they need to, you have proprietary processes, unique products, etc. So you have some formal learning to get them up to speed, right”
A: “Yes, that‘s why we have it.â€
B: “But once they‘re had formal training, they‘re not really productive until they‘ve had a chance to put those skills into play, and refine them. They become practitioners through practice. And then with enough time and guidance, they become your experts.â€
A: “It‘s when they get beyond that novice stage that they‘re useful.â€
B: “But that‘s when you ignore their needs, and there‘s so much more you can do. Practitioners don‘t need courses, but that‘s about all we do for them, when we should be giving them tools and resources. Experts should collaborating, but the most we do with them typically is have them offer courses. It‘s broken.â€
A: “And social media will hep with those latter two, supporting practitioners and experts.â€
B: “Exactly! And it can assist in making the formal learning better too. But it requires expanding the responsibility of the training department to be a learning group, not removing the training department.â€
A: “Isn‘t this IT? Or maybe operations or engineering”
B: “Nope, they‘re stakeholders, but you don‘t want IT trying to facilitate conversations!â€
A: “Darn right. But trainers aren‘t going to be able to do it either.â€
B: “Yep, it‘s a shift, but they or at least the instructional designers should have the grounding in learning to make the shift. It‘s a new world, and some shifts have to occur.â€
A: “I‘ll say, it‘s changes for managers too.â€
B: “Yep, new skills for all in learning, new roles, new ways of working. To cope with the new world in which we have to work in: faster, more agile. Eh”
A: “Got it. Guess I‘d better get me some guff!†Grins.
Guff: a conversation in 3 parts. Part 2
A: “Remember our discussion yesterday? I‘m still leery of this social learning guff. Sure, I want my folks to collaborate. But they talk now; they‘ve got phones and email. They can get courses if they need them. Why do I need more”
B: “You‘re right that they‘re collaborating now. But are they doing it efficiently? Is what they‘re sharing accurate? Do they go to the right people? There‘re two problems: they probably don‘t have the best tools, and the probably don‘t have the best skills. The evidence is that folks aren‘t doing it well. If it‘s so critical, as you suggested yesterday, don‘t you want it optimal”
A: “Sure, but what‘s all this social media stuff got to do with it”
B: “A couple of things. First, if someone finds an answer here, do you want someone else to have to find it again over there”
A: “Well, no.â€
B: “Right. And, if someone‘s not going to the right person, or not doing good searches, don‘t you want to help them improve”
A: “Well, yeah. Obviously. Or kick their sorry backsides out!â€
B: “Retention‘s easier than recruitment, and investing in your people‘s been shown to pay off.â€
A: “You‘re right. Ok, so you still haven‘t answered my question.â€
B: “By putting in social media, we‘re providing the architecture where someone‘s answer can be shared, systematically. Rather than leave the informal, social learning to chance, we‘re facilitating it both systemically, and personally.â€
A: “Architecture, you make it sound like buildings.â€
B: “Well, it is, it‘s infrastructure that supports appropriate activity. You wouldn‘t use offices as a warehouse, and you wouldn‘t put a coffeemaker in a bathroom. The point is to use the right tool for the job.â€
A: “Great metaphor, not!â€
B: “Ok, but you get the point.â€
A: “So if I build it, they will learn”
B: “Of course not. If you don‘t have a culture where it‘s safe to contribute, they won‘t. If it‘s not safe to admit mistakes, you can‘t learn from them. If you haven‘t established the culture, identified the skills, organized the change, or staffed appropriately, it‘s not going to happen.â€
A: “Who‘s got time for that?!”
B: “Your competitors”
Guff: a conversation in 3 parts. Part 1
A: Looking up from reading. “Guff!â€
B: Curious. “What‘s guff”
A: “All this social learning stuff.â€
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.â€
B: “So you think learning is about courses”
A: “Sure. What else”
B: “Well, let me defer that answer, and ask you another question.â€
A: “Oh, so you‘re one of those, eh? Answer a question with a question? Ha. Go ahead, shoot.â€
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!â€
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.â€
B: “OK, let‘s get back to your question, what else learning might be.â€
A: “About time.â€
B: “So, think about that innovating, problem-solving, creativity, etc. That‘s not learning”
A: “No.â€
B: “Do they know the answer when they start”
A: “No, or they‘d just do it.â€
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!â€
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.â€
A: “Oh, okay, if you want to play semantic games.â€
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.â€
A: “So here comes the pitch.â€
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.â€
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.â€
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.â€
A: “Ok. I suppose it makes sense, but still, that label…â€
B: “I hear you.â€