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Clark Quinn’s Learnings about Learning

Learning Organization Dimensions

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After my post on Improving Organizational Learning Infrastructure, Daan Assen suggested that it was too limited in reference to the broader Learning Organization picture.   That’s valuable feedback, because I really mean it to be the learning organization culture and the technology infrastructure, the latter of which isn’t included traditionally in the learning organization work.   Clearly the label has some issues, as Stacy Doolittle also opined, suggesting architecture may be a better word than infrastructure.   Still, I’m not convinced that infrastructure isn’t the most inclusive term. Anyone have an opinion?

The reason I mention this, however, is that Daan pointed me to some work by Garvin & Edmondson that provides some nice characteristics of a learning organization.   It starts with three factors, a supportive environment, concrete processes and practices, and a leadership that reinforces learning.   I think this is a nice breakdown.

These components break up further, so for instance, a supportive learning environment is composed of: psychological safety, openness to new ideas, appreciation of differences, and time for reflection.   That latter one really strikes a chord with me, as that was a major barrier back when we were trying to get traction on meta-learning (and we’re not giving up!).

Concrete processes and practices breaks up into experimentation, information collection and analysis, and education and training.   I note that it doesn’t seem to capture more about informal learning than just providing the environment, and no mention is made of tools or infrastructure.   They may well have reasons for that, but it’s important to me to consider not only the environment, policies, and leadership, but also the channels.

Still, the particular focus on the supportive learning environment is a nice characterization.   You need safety, openness, appreciation, and reflection.   And your social networking tools will make very concrete any gaps in those.   When you see folks not sharing, not tolerating, and not having time, you know you’ve got a barrier.   It’s a mirror to see your organization.   So, what do you see looking back at you?

Investing in Culture

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These are uncertain times, and people are curious how to cope.   A recent webinar announcement from i4pc touted how a American Management Association survey concluded: “one of best ways to avoid becoming victim of the economy is to focus on corporate culture”.   That’s great reinforcement, as culture is one of the components of improving organizational learning infrastructure.   Of course, I recommend you take the broader steps, not just culture, but culture is key.

Marcia Conner’s presentation for the Corporate Learning Trends conference was on steps you could take even without a   budget.   Steps were to be more open, get more experts presenting, and more people contributing value.   It’s all about leveraging the existing corporate capabilities in opportunistic new ways.   Lightweight, high value. But it takes a culture where people value contributions, feel safe to share, trust one another’s opinions and values.

And one of the things social networking does is surface your learning culture.   When you provide the opportunity to share, (see the Social Learning Question Of The Day responses, great ideas about the benefits of social learning), you’ll see whether your culture is really supportive.   Of course, you’ll also have the opportunity to address it.   And social networking is one of the lowest cost investments you can make!

Shutting down capability by laying off divisions means you’ll be lagging when things pick up.   Those who invest in internal capability now will be those poised to capitalize when opportunity resurfaces. Don’t you want that to be your organization?

Organizational Learning Infrastructure

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In one of my reflection sessions (aka shower), I was thinking what it is I do.   I’ve been branding it ‘elearning strategy’, but it’s really more than that.   It’s about looking at how organizations develop competence, move to excellence, foster innovation, collaboratively problem-solve, etc.   I’ve had a tagline: “making organizations smarter”, and the inevitable (and desired) follow-up is “how do you do that?”.   However, then the easy, and uninteresting answer, is to fall into talking about elearning, performance support, mobile, portals, knowledge management, all that stuff that makes people’s eyes glaze over if they haven’t seen the light.

What I realized today was that what I’m really about is improving organizational learning infrastructure.   It’s Not About The Technology, as Jay says, though that’s a component of it.   It’s about culture, policies, processes, procedures, tools, templates, incentives, and more. It includes courses, and community, and more.   It’s about assessing the current state, identifying some long-term goals (and values), establishing metrics, prioritizing short, medium, and long term term steps, and executing against them, with regular checks.

With culture, it’s about willingness to share, trust, take considered risks, or developing that ability.   It’s about knowledge and skills how to learn alone and together, using the infrastructure.   It’s about populating the performance ecosystem with support.     It’s about identifying competencies in learning through tools and collaboration.   It’s about providing the technology infrastructure that supports finding or making answers. It’s about experimenting, looking for feedback, and iterating (perpetual beta).   It’s at the individual, team, unit, and organizational level.   It’s about being strategic first, then tactical.

There are frameworks, instruments, best practices, and more to move, but it’s definitely time to move.   I think a survival strategy right now is to invest in capability to you’re poised to move once opportunity comes around again.   So, my answer to the question “how do you make organizations smarter?” and new meme is: improving organizational learning infrastructure.   Are you improving?

Does Education Need to Change?

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George Siemens asks in his blog:

1. Does education need to change?
2. Why or why not?
3. If it should change, what should it become? How should education (k-12, higher, or corporate) look like in the future?

I can’t resist not answering.   1. ABSOLUTELY!   Let me count the ways…

K12 Education is broken in so many ways. We’re not engaging our students in why this is important, we’re not giving them problems to solve that resemble the ones that they’ll face outside, we’re focusing on the wrong skills, we don’t value teachers, we’ve crumbling infrastructure, we’ve beggared the budgets, the list goes on.

We need new curricula and new pedagogy at least. We should be focusing on 21st century skills (not knowledge): systems thinking, design, problem-solving, research, learning to learn, multimedia literacy, teamwork and leadership, ethics, etc; my wisdom curriculum.   We need pedagogies that engage, spiral the learning around meaningful tasks, that develop multiple skills.

We need this at K12, at higher education, and in the workplace.   We need technology skills infused into the curriculum as tools, not as ends in themselves.   We need teachers capable of managing these learning experiences, parents engaged in the process and outcomes, and administrations educational and political that ‘get’ this.   We need learners who can successfully segue into taking control of their learning and destiny.

Yes, a tall order.   But if we don’t, we basically are hobbling our best chances for a better world.   Look, the only way to have functioning societies is to have an educated populace, because you just can’t trust governments to do well in lieu of scrutiny. So, let’s get it started!

Significance

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Sorry for the dearth of postings, but what with last week’s DevLearn conference and this week’s (free, online) Corporate Learning Trends (CLT) conference, and background kitchen remodel, client work, etc, I’ve been wiped out by the end of every day.   Today was no different, but…

Tonite I went from my son’s soccer end-of-season party to our first of the year YGuides meeting.   At the soccer part, the coach made the usual nice speech about how the team individually developed during the season, and learned to work together.   The assistant coach made a clever poem that mentioned all the boys by name, and included some of the funny and important moments during the season. Rushing off, we managed to hit the important stuff of the YGuides meeting, with the circle, reciting our values, and creating a shared understanding (no, not some cult thing, this ain’t Scientology).

And   I was reminded of something that came up in the CLT ‘reflection session’.   The CLT is timed for Europe and America, holding sessions in the morning Pacific Time, midday East Coast Time, and evening European time.   Which is, basically, the middle of the night for the Western Pacific.   They rightly complained about access (they can view captures of the sessions, but not participate), and I decided to host an afternoon Pacific time discussion.   It’s been small but good.   Nancy White, who I hadn’t known but became a fan of based upon her presentations at the CLT conference and chat session participation (awesome multi-tasking), graciously came in to tonite’s session and really had great stuff.

Nancy was opining about her work with small teams, and I was asking about the larger picture.   My ongoing question has been about transitioning from wrapping social networking around formal learning to being members of communities of practice. In the CLT, Dave Wilkins of Mzinga talked about the ‘Amazon’ model of tools around a learning resource (as a formal learning model) and the community model of tools embedded in a community.   Naturally, I wanted to find the segue between the two.   Nancy made a great point about having a comfortable space for novices to express themselves, and an opportunity crystalized for me.   What if we used the same tools, but created a safe space for novices?   Of course, the question then is, how do we scaffold the transition, and the notion of ceremony and ritual came to me.

I looked at myth and ritual a while ago (I look at lots of stuff), searching for how we might make changes beyond knowledge to beliefs & behaviors.   What I found is that ritual is linked to mythologies about how the world works (in the sense of creation stories, not false beliefs), and signifies action in accordance with the associated values.   In more simple terms, holding transition celebrations are important acts in supporting changes.

What I think we miss in much of corporate behavior is the signification of transitions.   It may appear to be ‘hazy cosmic jive’ or too Californian, but I believe it’s meaningful.   So, I could see that the completion of a course augmented with social networking activity could include an introduction to the larger practitioner community.   The instructor becomes a shaman, training the initiate and then welcoming them to the anointed.

The funny thing is that just such symbology is what we do with our kids in the right circumstances (and we’ve lost it in so much; what I remember of high school graduation wasn’t ritual as much as farce; it’s hard to have a meaningful event with 900 participants), and is what we forget to do in our workplace activities, real or virtual. So, here’s a proposal: we do formal segues from training to practitioner Communities of Practice, welcoming the new members.

There’s so much that’s been developed across cultures about how to become a member of a community; are we taking sufficient advantage of what’s been learned?   What’s the digital equivalent of rites of passage, story-telling, vision quests, etc?   Am I going too far?   I can feel the skepticism, but somehow it feels like .   (And, yes, I’m a native Californian :).

Coping personally, organizationally, and societally

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Having just come back from DevLearn (which rocked; my hearty thanks to all participants and organizers), and now engaged in the Corporate Learning Trends conference (free, online), I’m seeing some repeated themes, and interests.   It’s a busy time, since we‘re deeply engaged in the latter, but some messages are coming through so powerfully that I’ve got to reflect on them.

In this time of economic uncertainty or outright fear, one of the resonant themes is ‘how to cope’. Marcia Conner, one of our forward thinkers, is going to be talking about the topic of coping tomorrow at 10 AM PT, and I’m looking forward to it!I believe that’s important at the societal level as well.   We need to invest in our capabilities when things are down so we’re poised to capitalize on the upswing. Jay invited me to share his breakfast byte at DevLearn on the topic.

We brainstormed with the attendees, and came up with some interesting points.   At the personal level was to be nimble, strategic, and develop yourself.   Tony Karrer talked today about investing in knowing how to use the tools effectively, building upon all the tools that Robin Good and Jane Hart had described yesterday (simply amazing tools).

The organization level of that is to develop infrastructure and capability.   Dave Pollard today talked about moving from Knowledge Management 1.0 to 2.0, empowering people to self-help. What can you do to foster creativity and innovation on a shoestring when you can’t cope with full-fledged initiatives?   Can you get a small social networking tool initiative going that can help people help each other?

A couple of recurrent themes were selling this to management, and managing the proliferation of tools.   For the former, I reckon it’s about helping more than just novices, but providing self-help.   It depends, of course, on what your needs are and consequently what you choose to implement, but the outcomes can clearly be linked to organizational goals and problems, like reducing time-to-information, increasing productive collaboration, and sharing.   For the problem of tracking the tools, I think the key are the needed affordances.   I’ve been focused on finding the affordances of the tools, but it’s another thing to think about the affordances an organization needs and map tools into them.   Briefly, it’s about collaborative representations (prose, graphics), pointers to relevant topics, etc.   More work to be done here, I reckon.

These topics are being discussed at the Corporate Learning Trends social site this week (and ongoing, hopefully) and you can join in.

Note that I think these are relevant societally as well.   We developed some serious infrastructure through the WPA, and the Interstates, and it’s crumbling.   At some point you need to build it back up (rebuild differently?) to meet the needs.   That may increasingly be things like networks (and healthcare) as well as things like bridges.   I think this is key to thinking about how to invest for the tough times; focus internally until times get good again and be poised to rebound.   It’s like your body rebuilding while you’re asleep so you can restart the new day. Of course, you need to have hoarded the resources.   May be a way short-term shareholder returns damage long-term survivability?

Here’s hoping the economic situation is short and mercifully gentle, and that you all survive and prosper!

DevLearn 08 Keynote: Tim O’Reilly

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Tim O’Reilly, Web 2.0 guru, talked to us about what web 2.0 is and led us to his implications for what we do.   He started off talking about tracking the ‘alpha geek’.   These are the folks who manage to thrive and innovate despite us, rather than because of us.   He’s essentially built O’Reilly on watching what these folks do, analyzing the underlying patterns, and figuring out what’s key.

He talked about the stories that Web 2.0 is about open source, or social, were surface   takes, and by looking at leading companies, e.g. Google, there was something else going on. It’s not just user-generated content, but mining user-generated data for value, and then adding value on top of it.   “Data is the intel inside.”

This led him to key competencies going forward being machine learning, statistics, and design.   It isn’t about well-structured data, but about finding the nuggets in messy data.   And it is about design as an “architecture of participation” that gets users to act in the ways you’d like.

His take home message was six points that boil down to watching your alpha geeks, and use them to help guide what you should be doing, to help others achieve their potential.   An inspiring message in a very geek-cred way :).

I concept-mapped it:

Learnscaping on tap

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Over several months now, Harold Jarche, Jane Hart, Jay Cross, and I have been working on getting our arms around assisting people with the informal side of organizational learning.   Ever since Jay’s book, Informal Learning, people have wanted specific ways to go about supporting this component of the organizational environment.   And we’re close to a concrete solution.

The goal is to support organizations to start implementing web 2.0, in a lightweight way.   To do so, you need an environment and support to develop competency.   We wanted to address both.   You’ve got to be trying it out, to get it, but you don’t want a monolithic solution at the beginning.

We’re providing the services, of course.   We’ve been collaborating to develop a ‘best practices’ approach that we’ll couple with an experimental focus.   We’re already trialing it in a couple of instances, and have a couple more in process.

For the platform, we similarly want it to be lightweight: easy to trial, simple, easy to expand, but solid underpinnings.   And implementing the performance ecosystem suite of eCommunity capabilities.   Ning’s an example, but we needed more flexibility and control.   We’ve identified a partner to move forward with.

I’m excited, as it’s a great group to work with, positive attitude, heaps of experience, and understanding at both the vision, the strategic and the tactical level.   It’s also a real need, which I see again and again in organizations I assist.   We’re looking to get a placeholder site up Real Soon Now, and we’re working behind the scenes to get stuff ready. We’ll be talking about it at several places including DevLearn next week, and the Corporate Learning Trends conference.   You can read up more about it, and sign up for more information here.   Stay tuned!

Cyberlearning (ahem)

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A high-powered panel assembled by the NSF has reported on The Cyberlearning Opportunity and Challenge.   With people like Christine Borgman (Chair), Ken Koedinger, Marcia Linn, and Roy Pea (to name just the ones I’ve met), you’d expect some pretty clear thinking.   (So where did they get the term ‘cyberlearning’?   Yuck!)

Defining cyberlearning as “the use of networked computing and communications technologies to support learning”, they’re obviously onto the right stuff.   I couldn’t agree more about the potential for these technologies to transform learning.   As I’ve mentioned before, the technology is no longer the barrier, it’s now our imagination and conviction.   And now that we can do anything we want, when we go back and look at most formal learning, we realize it’s based on an outdated model.

Without having read the full report, let alone reporting on it here, I did have some thoughts on their top-level recommendations, that I thought I’d recite:

1. Help build a vibrant cyberlearning field by promoting cross-disciplinary communites of cyberlearning researchers and practitioners

Regardless of label, working at this in an interdisciplinary way is absolutely the way to go.   The conceptual foundations for the categories/silos are crumbling, so too should the barriers.   I realize this is the NSF, but I hope that they’d also reach out to the Dept of Ed, corporations, NFPs, etc.   Maybe even independent consultants?   :)

2. Instill a “platform perspective” – shared interoperable designs of hardware, software, and services – into NSF’s cyberlearning activities

This is insightful.   Using their resources to facilitate, whether through grants or even requirements for projects, interoperability and (the other meaning of) web 2.0 ‘software as a service’ approach could pay off in a big way.   Society has a vested interest in an open playing field.

3. Emphasize the transformative power of information and communications technology for learning, from K to grey

I love the phrase “K to grey”; far better than ‘cradle to grave’, ‘womb to tomb’, or anything else I’ve heard.   And I like the emphasis on going beyond formal and institutional learning.   Make those skills part of the infrastructure!   I presume they mean those terms inclusively, that is it could start before K, (in some small ways only, not bashing kids onto computers, but allowing digital tech to be part of the environment), and continue after you’re grey (or I’m in big trouble!).

And it’s more.   They talk about interaction with visualizations and data, etc, but I want to also talk about bridging formal and informal, moving to an apprenticeship model with greater ways for people to interact around topics, and create communities.   They emphasize teachers, but I want to suggest that, increasingly, we’re all teachers, as well as learners.

4. Adopt programs and policies to promote open educational resources

This, to me, is really a revisitation of the ‘platform’ proposal as well.   Open API’s, open source, and open education.   We all stand to benefit, I reckon.   They’re talking about materials generated with NSF funds, but even materials used as part of NSF projects should err on the side of open materials.

5. Take responsibility for sustaining NSF-sponsored cyberlearning innovations

This last one seems like a ‘given’, but it’s really about saying that the output of NSF projects should have maintenance and extension beyond the project finish.   I like this; for NSF SBIR grants (I reviewed them a couple of times) you’re supposed to have a business plan; even pure research grants could have ‘put into action’ components in the proposal.

There are lots more specific recommendations, good ones, in the report.   It’s a bit biased towards formal education, but still is visionary.   This is a useful time to push initiatives like this, and I hope the report leads to the interdisciplinary efforts called for.

While I realize we’ve more pressing immediate concerns that might govern our near-term ‘man on the moon’ project, I still think a full K12 curriculum online would be a really cool project.   The only limits are now ‘between our ears’ as my friend Carl used to say.   If we can do anything, what will we do?

Formal learning & social networking

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After hearing Mark Oehlert and Brent Schlenker do such a great job on eLearning 2.0 at the Guild’s Summer Seminar, I got my own chance to talk about it to a corporate group, but with a twist.   Much of elearning 2.0 is about informal learning, but the organization was moving to using social networking tools to scaffold their move from face-to-face to more online learning.   So I was asked to talk about social networking and formal learning.

I started from the informal picture, however, both to introduce the 2.0 tools (their environment in particular had blogs, feeds, wikis, discussion boards, portals, and profiles), and to talk about some case studies of successes.   I led to the point that the informal participation has big upside potential, but you can’t spring it on them when they move beyond novice stage, and that wrapping it around the formal learning is a vehicle to help them become comfortable with the tools.   That is, the first reason to use social networking around formal learning is to make it part of the repertoire of the community.

I then segued to my second point, which is that social networking tools are better formal learning. To help make learning ‘stick’, to achieve our goals of retention and transfer, I have previously suggested that there are several activities that accomplish the memory elaboration, specifically connecting it to personal experience, to exercise and extend the conceptualization, and to apply the concepts to specific tasks.   Each of these can be accomplished well through social networking tools.

For example, blogs are really personal (or group) journals, and it’s easy to have a learning task to reflect a couple of times a week (for example) on what the current course means to you personally. It can be to explain things observed in the past, how it applies to current situations, or how it will better prepare people for the future.   It’s about re-activating and re-processing the information (Thiagi‘s exercises, for instance, are great at getting people to re-process information), but here adding in that connection with pre-existing personal context.   Of course, reading other learner’s blog posts, and commenting, can extend the value of the individual post.

Discussion boards are a great way to support extending conceptualizations.   Learners can be asked to post a response to a thought question (or even to have to create one), and comment constructively on someone else’s post. Well-written questions can ask learners to rethink the information in ways that the lecture and examples didn’t cover.     The point is to reprocess and elaborate the information.   Critically reflecting on another’s elaboration requires integrating their thinking with your own, for a real challenge in coming to grips with how they’ve interpreted it (and opportunity to refine one’s own understanding).

While simulations may be the ultimate learning application environment, another valuable tool are group assignments.   Having the learners respond to a challenge where, in teams, they create some written output collaboratively on a wiki is a great chance for them to have to express their understandings.   In doing so, by applying the concept to a context, they need to a shared understanding of the concept, which fosters greater comprehension.

Profiles, as well, can help individuals flesh out information about their fellow learners, and make more meaningful connections (as well as potentially track down useful mentors).   While not as rich as face to face interpersonal interaction, adding personal details helps extend their persona in ways that bring technology-mediated interaction closer to that personal exchange.

These few examples suggest how social networking not only facilitates informal learning, but can and should play a role in formal learning, for the sake of both formal and informal learning.   I’m finding it increasingly difficult to think about when formal learning shouldn’t include a social aspect (except the situation of ‘critical mass’ in totally asynchronous learning).

I’m still not convinced there’s an LMS that integrates social networking tools in a way that makes a smooth segue from formal to informal, though I know Mzinga’s making a stab at it.   You want to move to loose coupling, yet you want seamless integration.   Not sure what the reconciliation is of these.   Your thoughts?