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Clark Quinn’s Learnings about Learning

Do what you love, love what you do

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For the Working/Learning blog carnival, the topic is, as always, “work at learning, learning at work”.   Last time I participated (almost a year ago), I talked about how learning should be fun, so you shouldn’t be working at at, it really should be ‘hard fun’.   I want to expand on that topic, as there are probably characteristics that make it fun or not.

Most people who have hobbies invest time and money in equipment, practice, learning, and more. If you love what you do, it’s as much avocation as vocation, learning about it should be fun.   You’ll naturally be tapping into how to continue to learn.

For example, I love what I do, so I was thrilled to be able to follow the eLearning Guild‘s recent conference through Twitter (great as always, apparently); in particular Craig Wiggins, Eric Wilbanks, and heroically, John Zurovchak were really tracking the sessions they were in, bringing the content out and even bringing our queries in.   Their passion showed through, and fanned mine.

Of course, if you don’t love what you do (you work to live, as they say), there’s a different situation. Ideally, at least you’re doing something you prefer, and you just need to tap into the elements you like as motivation.   Frankly, while it should be incumbent on learning designers to help make it motivating, it’s also incumbent on the learner to take responsibility for learning too.   We, as learning folks, can’t make anyone learn, we can only create conditions for learning.

We should, however, be sensitive, and help our learners tap into their inner motivation, take responsibility for learning, and develop their abilities to learn.   If we do that, we’ve helped make it so you’re not working at learning, just learning and working.

Words of Wisdom*

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L&D  speaking:

We got into elearning when there were scattered experiments going on around the organization.   Of course we stopped those, as we need a coordinated approach.   We want to grow in a controlled way.

Our first move was, of course, to purchase an LMS.   A good LMS is like a fine automobile, with lots of capabilities to handle all conditions.   We selected the top of the line, to last a long time.   Two years ago it was up and running.   Our vendor was very helpful, taking the necessary time to have it optimally integrated with our IT system.   Our IT group changed the infrastructure a year ago, to *open source*   (I don‘t know what they were thinking), but fortunately my vendor says that they‘d be happy to help change the installation to work with the new services architecture.

We found out that some years ago a competency modeling exercise had been done, so we were able to populate the LMS with the roles, and the associated competencies.   Now our people can look up interesting roles from back then, and see what competencies are required. Then we realized we needed content about those competencies, so we went for the greatest volume per dollar.   You‘ve got to have all the content you can to hopefully match up with those competencies.

It became clear that the off the shelf content didn‘t cover our proprietary processes, so we needed to develop our own content.   We got a full fledged authoring suite and asked our trainers to develop courses.   They’ve become very good at taking those PDFs and PowerPoints and putting them up online with quiz questions.   Of course we have pre-tests so we can show a delta and validate our work.   It‘s amazing how quick we can crank one of these out!   We‘ve got to find more content to transform, as our team is just too efficient at it.   Now we’re looking at PowerPoint plugins.   We‘re getting more flexible, too.   We used to have SMEs give workshops, and those were attended, so we’ve purchased virtual presentation software to allow our SMEs to present online.   Who needs all this rapid eLearning stuff?   And that LMS makes it easy to schedule the presentations!

We’re doing some more trendy things as well.   Right now games are hot, and we found that one of our loading dock personnel was a talented game designer. He‘d taken a popular FPS (whatever that means) and built our offices in it, where you wandered around the premises and shot zombies (who represented managers).   We got him to scatter the words of the company mission around the premises, and you pick them up and bring them to headquarters, and when you collect them all there‘s another game where you organize them into the mission statement, and then you win the game.   There‘re still zombies running around to shoot, but now we label them as the competition.

We‘re also aware of the excitement about virtual worlds, and so we’re porting the game into Second Life.   We can‘t figure out how to build zombies, so we‘re paying our employees to act like zombies ‘in world’.   It‘s a bit of incentive to work hard so you can earn a chance to play as a zombie.

While our focus is formal learning, we recognize that all needs may not be able to be met by courses.   We‘ve checked with various departments to see if they’ve got portals of information.   So, to get product information, you go to the sales site, er, or is that engineering?   No matter, what‘s important is that the information is out there, and we provide links to all the portals (there’re hundreds) for all the courses.   However, we need to be focused: the information people need should be available internally, and if there‘s a need, they can ask us to fill it. We strictly firewall off access to the outside, as we don‘t want people getting information that hasn‘t been vetted internally.

We‘re also working on mobile deployment.   We‘ve captured the CEO speaking at the latest shareholder meeting, and we‘ve made available an audio for listening in the car   His vision of the firm, like that of his forefathers, helps us understand just why the firm is as it is.   It‘s available on our portal for downloading.   For a next step, we are trying to convert it to video.   We‘ve also developed a full ethics course for delivery on mobile phones.   There‘s the content to read, and then a quiz that can be uploaded back to our LMS.   It‘s required, so we‘re getting some interest.

We recognize the importance of community.   Beyond the phone, we have email, and we‘re trialing this new ‘instant messaging’.   We continue to track new directions.   There‘s a lot of new TLAs out there, XML, DITA, SCORM, etc.   Frankly, we‘re trying to find someone who knows this stuff.

We‘re careful to know our areas of responsibility.   When someone wants to talk expertise directories, or other KM-type activities, we point them to IT. Wikis and blogs?   We‘ve no time for a drunken Hawaiian party.   Our responsibility ends at formal learning.   Informal learning is an oxymoron.

You‘ve got to ensure you‘ve got an adequate budget, and then you fiercely protect it.   Don‘t spend money unless it will make you look good; better to hoard than to squander.   New technologies need to be touched to demonstrate to management that you‘re on top of industry trends, but going overboard can ruin a career. At the end of the day, you need to find out what the executives are hearing about, and make sure you are doing something with it.   Your job is to respond.

In conclusion, we‘ve implemented a centralized system of eLearning. We‘ve got it all there if people are interested.   Now it‘s up to the managers to get their people to use it.   Little pockets of experimentation keep popping up outside our control, but we‘re pretty good about stopping those and informing them about our capabilities.   Thanks for your time.

Any resemblance to any person purely coincidental; any resemblance to any organization purely intentional.

Collective intelligence patterns

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I had the good fortune to get to meet Tom Malone way back when he was working on what makes computer games fun (cited in my book).   I stopped by PARC (then the geek’s Mecca), and got to bask in the environment that produced the GUI on top of Doug Engelbart’s mouse.

I knew Tom then went on to be a thought leader out of the Sloan School of Management, studying office work and then higher levels of activity, leading to a recent book “The Future of Work”.   I happened to meet him again at an event at IBM’s Almaden Research Center, and he was gracious enough to remember me and discuss his work (I challenged him about his ‘guilds’, since they still can’t get reasonable healthcare that businesses can get, don’t get me started).

I mention this backstory to show the trajectory of thought leadership he’s had (and yet still remain a really nice guy).   He just spoke at the celebration of Doug Engelbart’s work, and while I couldn’t attend, I was looking for blog postings and found his slide deck.

You (should) know I like models, and he’s gone beyond talking about how web 2.0 social networking can facilitate work, to actually analyze and distill some underlying principles. In his presentation on The Landscape of Collective Intelligence, he comes up with four characteristics of design patterns (or genes, as he calls them): What (strategy), Who (staffing), How (structure & process), & Why (incentives/alignment).   This is a really nice systematic breakdown into patterns tied to real examples.

For Who, he distinguishes between a hierarchical arrangement and a crowd, the latter being a more random structure.   He focuses on the latter.   For Why he breaks it out into Money, Love, & Glory.   For What, it’s Create a solution or Decide on an issue.   How is whether you’re having it independent or dependent.   The latter two work out to a nice little matrix with collection, collaboration, many-to-many, and group decision.

I really liked his statement that “failure to get motivational factors right is probably the single greatest cause of failure in collective intelligence experiments”.   That’s insightful, and useful.

The implications for informal learning are obvious, I’ll have to think more about formal learning.   Still, a great foundation for thinking about using networks in productive ways.   Definitely worth a look.

For the record…

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We interrupt your regularly scheduled blog for this important message:

I was talking with one of the bright and lively people at DevLearn 08 (the conference *rocked*), and we started talking about different folks’ ‘styles’. She was opining about a couple of well known consultants and their credibility. I naturally asked about her perception of mine, and she was surprised to find out I was an independent consultant, thinking I was some sort of academic.

That’s not an insult, as I have been an academic and I believe that the deep background I bring to bear is not only a benefit in the work I do but also in the way I educate my clients.   However, allow me to be very clear:

I am a consultant (and, I like to think, a very good one).   It’s how I support my mortgage, HMO, and family (in that order :).   I work with organizations that:

  • need to move beyond small and isolated stabs at elearning
  • are realizing the focus is on increasing organizational excellence
  • want to take full advantage of technology benefits to innovation and execution
  • don’t want to be swayed by a biased opinion
  • want advice about what makes sense for their context in the short, medium, and long term

I offer a reliable capability to assess a need, whether tactical or strategic, and find a sound (and typically innovative) yet pragmatic solution, whether improved design, a full plan, or ongoing assistance.   This is based upon a deep understanding of cognition and technology, a lateral thinking style, an ability to learn quickly and swiftly assess a situation, and a systematic bent that tends to explore alternatives and the associated trade-offs to yield a solution that’s not ‘off the shelf’. It’s also independent, so once you’ve got a plan, you can evaluate who’s best to implement it.   It’s about melding creativity with process to yield solutions, not just ideas.   I work through Quinnovation, and with my esteemed colleagues Jay Cross, Harold Jarche, and Jane Hart through TogetherLearn.

I hope that’s clear.   If you want to know more, I’m easy to find; drop me an email, or give me a call.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled blog.

Beyond the course

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In the process of thinking through how to support informal learning, I was reminded of a diagram I created several years ago.   I started from an approach based upon philosophy that talked about acting in the world: you act in the world when you can, and when you have a breakdown you need to solve it, so you repair, and then reflect and learn so you can act more competently the next time (Ok, so it’s an idealized model). What it led me to think was that when we have a need, we first try to find the answer. If we don’t, then we have to do more extreme steps of actively trying to solve it, and then ideally we save that answer so that others don’t have to solve the same problem (see what I said about ‘ideal’?).

Without going into all the thinking (it’s elaborated more in several places, including this white paper; PDF), the point is that supporting people in performance includes not just courses, but content and job aids, and connections to people.   Note that when it moves from information need to problem-solving, the people will change because there isn’t an expert (or you’d have the answer already).

The interesting thing for me is that this provides a strong justification for using social networks in learning: wikis can be places where people can store the information about problems they’ve solved, discussion boards and profiles fill the need of finding expertise, blogs may support people in their problem-solving as well, serving as a way to share questions and get feedback.   The social network provides the rest of the support around the courses which really only serve the situation where a major skill-shift change is needed.

So, it’s probably just buttressing the obvious,   but I get a degree of comfort from taking a pre-existing model and using it to create a framework which then turns out to map to something I’m deeply involved in.   Does it make sense to you?

Extending elearning?

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A contact asked me what I saw as the link between Sharepoint and elearning, and I started to give my standard answer about portals fitting in with the whole performance ecosystem. Last I played with Sharepoint, it seemed like a portal solution; a place to deposit files.   Obvious extensions I would infer from social networking would include wrapping discussion around resources (and, of course, having a way to make the resources accessible from multiple points of view, search, and other features in support of reasonable information architecture).

However, I decided to update myself on Sharepoint features, and went to look at Microsoft’s page.   They tout collaboration, content management, and search as well as portals.   This sounds like they’re beginning to incorporate real eCommunity/social networking capabilities (they mention blogs & wikis, and expertise finders). Of course, what they have in their marketing versus what’s actually there in full capability is an open question (and I’m not bagging Microsoft here; just look at LMS vendors and them trying to match a ‘checklist’ of necessary features).   Integration with Office is, for most business, a plus.

However, I’m skeptical as it’s not as easy as just putting it all together, it has to be well done.   That may be a services issue and not a technology one, however.   The point I want to make here, however, is that augmenting formal courses with resources and eCommunity is the natural progression.

On principal, there are a number of reasons to think about this augmentation.   Some obvious ones include:

  1. When performance analysis indicates that tools are a better solution than courses
  2. When it’s a combination of tools and training, the training can/should include the use of portals, and then the resources should be available on the portals
  3. Individuals can be introduced into a community after formal learning
  4. User-generated content can be mined for new courses
  5. Courses might be made available via the portal, or at least presentations decks
  6. Media files to augment courses could be made available via the portal

It may not seem obvious to the training practitioner that this is part of supporting elearning, as it really goes beyond the event, but I’ll argue that those who don’t look to extend their responsibility to the performance at all levels of competency are limiting their organizational relevance and consequently their value to the organization.   And that’s just a missed opportunity.

Epistemology

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It came up in the Corporate Learning Trends conference last week that one person was responsible for knowledge workers who were, as she claimed, passive learners.   This is a really interesting issue, because it crosses several different areas.

In research on education, it’s been found that what learners believe about their role in learning has an impact on the outcomes of learning interventions.   That is, if learners believe that their role is to recite back what they’ve heard, or that learning ‘happens’ to them, the results are not as effective as if the learners have a belief that they have to be active in the role.

I have seen this as a college instructor, when students don’t want to take responsibility for their own learning.   I adapted by stating my expectations at the beginning, and what would and would not work in being successful in class.

This has also played a role in the success of distance learning. The early initiatives in online learning found that the students who were successful were the self-directed learners, and they increased success by focusing on supporting the learning behaviors of students.

As we talk more about creating communities where learners work together, we should not take learning skills nor epistemologies about learning for granted.   I think that, in this time of increasing change, growing information overload, shorter half-life of knowledge, etc, that the most useful information we can provide is how to be a better learner.

So, don’t just look at the tools you provide, and your culture for learning, but also consider your learners and how they learn.   You’ll be investing in them in a powerful and valuable way.   And that’s a win all around, I reckon.

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!