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Clark Quinn’s Learnings about Learning

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?

What did I learn about learning in 2008?

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The Learning Circuit’s Blog Big Question for December is “What did you learn about learning in 2008?”   It’s good to reflect, and using the end of the calendar year is a traditional time.   Consequently, I trolled back through a year of blog posts.   Whew!

I saw several recurrent threads, but the strongest one is on learning to learn.   I think we’ve seen more focus on that this year, particularly with Tony Karrer & Michelle Martin’s Work Literacy effort, and a lot of the discussion at the Corporate Learning Trends conference (most recently). It’s a theme that appeared in Marcia Conner‘s presentation, in looking at what to do in tough times.   What impressed me is how much it’s been taken on in many places and in many forms, after Jay & I were pushing it several years ago (circa 2003-2004). I’m thrilled, of course.

It’s also a theme that characterizes the TogetherLearn thinking, where it’s about helping people help themselves, but not taking the self-directed and learn-together skills for granted.   Which segues nicely into my second learning, which was about social learning.   I knew about the importance (having been steeped in Vygotsky in grad school), but it hadn’t hit home quite as viscerally as this year, and I’ve become more than a convert, in fact an evangelist, about the opportunities, both formal and informal.

Interestingly, I’m also beginning to see the emergence of mobile social, and I see that mobile was another recurrent theme in what I talked about this year.   I see more opportunities, and convergences, particularly my revelation about mobile web. Twitter, for instance, is social, can be mobile, and can be a powerful learning experience.

So, my personal learning was getting more deeply into the whole elearning 2.0 area, and it’s impact back on strategy, mobile, and even games.   And the clear implications that we’ve got to focus on learning to learn skills.   There’re some new thoughts brewing, of course, and maybe that’ll play a role in my predictions for next year.   But that’s another month’s big question.

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!

Medina keynote on Brain Rules at DevLearn 08

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John Medina gave the closing keynote at DevLearn, based upon his book Brain Rules.   He covered two of his 12 rules, on memory, and on exercise.   He spoke fast, was enthusiastic, funny, and knowledgeable.   He talked about myths of learning, and said that he didn’t think there was a lot neuroscience had to say to learning design (thankfully, cf Willingham).

One of his points was that our brains evolved to provide ongoing performance guidance over hours of constant motion (evolutionarily).   This leads to implications that are contrary to most of our learning contexts!

His first rule was about memory, and he covered the basic model of cognitive models of memory, but then pointed out that it’s about 10 years from initial exposure to fixed memory, and requires extensive repetition.   During that period, distortion can occur. This explains the rule of thumb that you have to be doing something for 10 years before you can be considered an expert.   It probably takes 10 years of doing things before they’re solidified in useful experience to apply.

The second rule he covered was the relation between exercise and learning.   It was really exercise and thinking, and there’s a positive relationship.   The difference between sedentary and moderately active lifestyles is big in terms of mental acuity.   And reintroducing it for a reasonably short period (16 weeks) can reignite.   Memory improvements take longer, like 3 years.   It works for kids too, and if they stop, it drops off.

He made several observations how revising schools would work better, sadly too true.   So, repeat if you need it to stick (a great opportunity for mobile learning), and do get exercise for your own health, and maybe have an organizational incentive as well!   Here’s my concept map (it was hard as quick as he spoke, so didn’t get all the data):