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Clark Quinn’s Learnings about Learning

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Women are Flora, Men are Fauna

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The Quinnstitute Press announces a new title: Women are Flora, Men are Fauna!

Exploiting a well-known distinction and applying it – with no reservations – to the gender split, this new book provides guidance for men and women looking for an easy answer to a complex question.   Uncluttered with boring research, this book offers simple slogans and fun ideas that will have you laughing while altering your relationships with men and women alike!

The premise is simplicity itself: women are plants, growing slowly but systematically, looking to be nurtured while sinking deep roots and taking control of their environment; men are animals, sustaining their needs in impulsive bursts. The evidence can be seen even in mankind’s earliest days of hunter/gatherer existence: men went out and hunted down prey, while women stayed close to home and harvested from the ground.

Today we see the same instincts play out in different ways, with different behavior even in the same context. Men jump between channels with the remote control, while women will settle down with a favorite show.   Men will play with the kids then leave them alone, while women will provide a persistent presence and awareness, continually nurturing.   Men will grab a bite while women will digest a meal. Men want to compete, while women cooperate.

This provides the keys to understanding behavior.   To succeed with women, you need to nurture them, take your time and letting them slowly bask in your attention.   What works with men is to tempt them with goals, and challenge them to get their best efforts in the chase. Women in the workplace need to be in positions where they can persist and slowly develop, men need to be given tasks that need quick responses and aggressive tendencies.   This guide will provide a basis for real decisions!

This new work will help you better understand the other gender, and give you tools to apply to your own relationships.   Further, this simple model will be extended to cover a broad variety of situations and topics. Written by an author who noticed the opportunity and realized that there was gain to be had from exploiting the idea as far as possible, this tome will serve as the basis for many new actions and create meaningful changes in your life.   Order today!   Movie rights are available, but that won’t last, so act now!

This is a parody, this is only a parody; if this were a real promotion there would be vibrant colored prose, appearances on Oprah, The View, Letterman, & Leno, and other signs of a real marketing budget.

The Mobile Design Workshop!

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Mobile is coming at us hard and fast. Announcements of changes in the marketplace (HP acquiring Palm in just the past week), and new devices (Google passing on the Nexus One to tout the next gen system), are coming fast and furious. The devices are out there (mobile is outselling the desktop) and the workforce is increasingly mobile (72%, according to IDC!). The question is, how do you get on top of taking advantage of mobile devices for organizational (and personal) learning?

I confess, I’m a design guy. I like to look at problems and create solutions. And I like to think that 30-odd years of practice and reflection on learning design (investigating myriad design practices, looking at design models, etc) provides some reason to think I’ve developed a wee bit of expertise on the topic.

I’m also a geek and I love tech toys. I’ve also been extremely enamored of the potential for mobile learning since Marcia Conner asked me to write a little screed on the topic 10 years ago now. It got me thinking in ways that haven’t stopped, so that I’ve been thinking and doing mobile for the past decade, and am awaiting feedback on the draft of a book on the topic for Pfeiffer.

Mobile is the killer app for deep reasons, and not surprisingly, my focus is on mobile design. As I say “if you get the design right, there are lots of ways to implement it; if you don’t get the design right it doesn’t matter how you implement it!” Design is the key. There are two things I’ve found out about mobile design:

  • you really need to think differently. It’s not about courses, it’s about augmenting (accessorizing) our capabilities, both learning and performance
  • there are some really useful models that give you a handle on thinking different.

You’ve heard me talk here before about some, e.g. the 4 C’s.

Naturally, it’s best if you work with these models a bit to really internalize them and see how they guide new opportunities to meet learning and performance needs for your folks. That’s why I’m pleased that I have the chance to offer a mobile design workshop at the eLearning Guild’s mobile learning conference, mLearnCon.

This is going to be an interactive and fun way to incorporate mobile learning into your repertoire of solution tools. Not to worry, we’ll contextualize design as well, talking about the devices, the market trends, the tools, and the organizational issues, but the focus is going to be, as it should, on design. It’s also in one of my favorite towns: San Diego, and of course there’s the rest of the conference to put the icing on the cake. I hope I’ll see you there, and get a chance to work with you on this exciting new area.

Designing for an uncertain world

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My problem with the formal models of instructional design (e.g. ADDIE for process), is that most are based upon a flawed premise.   The premise is that the world is predictable and understandable, so that we can capture the ‘right’ behavior and train it.   Which, I think, is a naive assumption, at least in this day and age.   So why do I think so, and what do I think we can (and should) do about it?   (Note: I let my argument lead where it must, and find I go quite beyond my intended suggestion of a broader learning design.   Fair warning!)

The world is inherently chaotic. At a finite granularity, it is reasonably predictable, but overall it’s chaotic. Dave Snowden’s Cynefin model, recommending various approaches depending on the relative complexity of the situation, provides a top-level strategy for action, but doesn’t provide predictions about how to support learning, and I think we need more.   However, most of our design models are predicated on knowing what we need people to do, and developing learning to deliver that capability.   Which is wrong; if we can define it at that fine a granularity, we bloody well ought to automate it.   Why have people do rote things?

It’s a bad idea to have people do rote things, because they don’t, can’t do them well.   It’s in the nature of our cognitive architecture to have some randomness.   And it’s beneath us to be trained to do something repetitive, to do something that doesn’t respect and take advantage of the great capacity of our brains.   Instead, we should be doing pattern-matching and decision-making.   Now, there are levels of this, and we should match the performer to the task, but as I heard Barry Schwartz eloquently say recently, even the most mundane seeming jobs require some real decision making, and in many cases that’s not within the purview of   training.

And, top-down rigid structures with one person doing the thinking for many will no longer work.   Businesses increasingly complexify things but that eventually fails, as Clay Shirky has noted, and   adaptive approaches are likely to be more fruitful, as Harold Jarche has pointed out.   People are going to be far better equipped to deal with unpredictable change if they have internalized a set of organizational values and a powerful set of models to apply than by any possible amount of rote training.

Now think about learning design.   Starting with the objectives, the notion of Mager, where you define the context and performance, is getting more difficult.   Increasingly you have more complicated nuances that you can’t anticipate.   Our products and services are more complex, and yet we need a more seamless execution.   For example trying to debug problems between hardware device and network service provider, and if you’re trying to provide a total customer experience, the old “it’s the other guy’s fault” just isn’t going to cut it.   Yes, we could make our objectives higher and higher, e.g. “recognize and solve the customer’s problem in a contextually appropriate way”, but I think we’re getting out of the realms of training.

We are seeing richer design models. Van Merrienboer’s 4 Component ID, for instance, breaks learning up into the knowledge we need, and the complex problems we need to apply that knowledge to.   David Metcalf talks about learning theory mashups as ways to incorporate new technologies, which is, at least, a good interim step and possibly the necessary approach. Still, I’m looking for something deeper.   I want to find a curriculum that focuses on dealing with ambiguity, helping us bring models and an iterative and collaborative approach.   A pedagogy that looks at slow development over time and rich and engaging experience.   And a design process that recognizes how we use tools and work with others in the world as a part of a larger vision of cognition, problem-solving, and design.

We have to look at the entire performance ecosystem as the context, including the technology affordances, learning culture, organizational goals, and the immediate context.   We have to look at the learner, not stopping at their knowledge and experience, but also including their passions, who they can connect to, their current context (including technology, location, current activity), and goals.   And then we need to find a way to suggest, as Wayne Hodgins would have it, the right stuff, e.g. the right content or capability, at the right time, in the right way, …

An appropriate approach has to integrate theories as disparate as distributed cognition, the appropriateness of spaced practice, minimalism, and more.   We probably need to start iteratively, with the long term development of learning, and similarly opportunistic performance support, and then see how we intermingle those together.

Overall, however, this is how we go beyond intervention to augmentation.   Clive Thompson, in a recent Wired column, draws from a recent “man+computer” chess competition to conclude “serious cognitive advantages accrue to those who are best at thinking alongside machines”.   We can accessorize our brains, but I’m wanting to look at the other side, how can we systematically support people to be effectively supported by machines?   That’s a different twist on technology support for performance, and one that requires thinking about what the technology can do, but also how we develop people to be able to take advantage.   A mutual accommodation will happen, but just as with learning to learn, we shouldn’t assume ‘ability to perform with technology augmentation’.   We need to design the technology/human system to work together, and develop both so that the overall system is equipped to work in an uncertain world.

I realize I’ve gone quite beyond just instructional design.   At this point, I don’t even have a label for what I’m talking about, but I do think that the argument that has emerged (admittedly, flowing out from somewhere that wasn’t consciously accessible until it appeared on the page!) is food for thought.   I welcome your reactions, as I contemplate mine.

Proliferating Portals

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After my last blog post, a commenter asked a pertinent question:

Many organizations/companies have multiple intranets, wiki sites, and so forth, often making it difficult for employees to know where to go when they want an answer or more information. Let‘s say you are the Director of a company‘s Education/Training department and you want to move more toward information learning. While your department creates online and classroom courses on how to use the company‘s main products, you see the need for more advanced-level training. As the Director, you want to harness the knowledge within and have the experts bring their conversations to a wiki site. You want to provide a platform for this knowledge to be shared, discussed, and build upon. Your vision is that once the wiki site is up for awhile, your instructional designers can take some of the knowledge that‘s posted and create a job aid, reference document, and so forth that could be distributed more formally.

Do you move forward with yet another wiki site and not worry about all of the other internal wiki sites, intranet, and so forth?

In general, I don’t like site proliferation, at least of one sort. I hear it all the time: I ask “are you using portals?” and the reply is “oh, yeah, we’ve got hundreds”.   Hundreds? How does anyone know where to go for what? And BTW, I’m treating wikis and portals somewhat interchangably here, as wikis can be portals, but portals are another way of users providing resources to each other, and I see technology support for communities of practice to include both the capabilities of collaborative editing of resources (wikis) and storing other relevant materials (portals). I use portal as the overarching term as well (also including discussion forums, blogs, profiles…).

The problem isn’t really the number, however, it’s how they’re being organized.   Typically, each business unit is providing a portal of their information for others to use. The problem with this is, it’s organized by the producer’s way of viewing the world, not the consumer’s. Bad usability. Which is usually confounded by only one way of organizing, a lack of ways of reorganizing, and sometimes not even a search capability! (Though fortunately that’s now being baked into most tools.)

So people wonder where to go, different units create different mythologies about what portals are useful, some sites aren’t used, others are misused, it’s a mess.

On the other hand, I do want users to seize control and create their own sites, and there are reasons for groups to create sites.   If you have hundreds of user communities, you should have hundreds of portals.   The real organizational principle, however, should be how the users think about it.   There are two ways to handle that: you can do good usability, with ethnographic and participatory methods of finding out how the users think about the world, or better yet, let the inmates run the asylum (and provide support, back to the facilitation message).

For formal information – HR, product sheets, pricing, all the stuff that’s created – it should be organized into portals by role: who needs this different information. You can use web services to pull together custom, user-centered portals on top of all this information.   And, then, you should also empower communities of practice to create their own portals as well.

So, to answer the question, I think it’s fabulous to create a site where experts can put up information, and the learning unit can mine that for things they can add value to. However, do it in conjunction with the experts and users.   Let their self-organization rule who plays and how the playground is structured, don’t dictate it from above.

I saw an example of that in a recent engagement, where a group offering software training couldn’t keep up with the changes in the software, so they started putting it up on a wiki, and now they’re devolving control to the user experts.   It’s just coping, but it’s also strategic.   Tap into the knowledge of your groups.

I laud the questioner for the desire to find a way to broaden responsibility and empower the users.   Do it anyway, do it right, but then also start evangelizing the benefits of ensuring that the other proliferation of wikis, portals, etc, are also user-focused, not department or silo focused, and suggesting portal integration as well as proliferation.

Now, does that make sense?   Is your answer to the question different?

Formalizing informal learning?

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The Entreprise Collaborative has a new question, asking whether we can formalize informal learning.   I have to say, I don’t get the question.   That is, I understand what they’re asking, and like the response they give, but I really think it’s the wrong question.

To me, it’s not about formalizing informal learning so much as explicitly supporting it versus ignoring it.   Like the proverbial ‘stuff’, informal learning happens.   Period.   To me, it is more a matter of providing infrastructure to support informal learning, and facilitating informal learning as well.

When I talk about providing infrastructure, I’m talking about putting in place tools that can be used for informal learning.   That means ways to share media (whether text, audio, or video), to comment, to edit and improve, to collaborate, etc.   Part of that supporting is looking at new tools, and seeing if they provide new ways to work.   Wikis are a major advance on top of emailing documents around in many ways, and similarly microblogs have provided new capabilities.

Then there is the facilitation of that informal learning.   I see two roles. One is optimizing the tool use, and the other is facilitating the associated skills.   For the former, tools can be used poorly or well. For example, it’s no good having portals if they’re multiple, organized around institutional silos instead of tasks, roles, or interests.   There’s a role for integrating tools into a coherent user experience.

The second role is to develop individual ability to use the tools for learning, both independently and socially.   To repeat a regular refrain, don’t assume the ability of learners to be effective self- and social-learners.   There are specific meta-cognitive skills that should be made explicit, promoted, and supported.

This, to me, is how you optimize an organization’s ability to learn: by making the environment conducive to informal learning.   In the process of facilitating, you may find opportunities to add value by taking some information and formalizing it, e.g. building a job aid around some information generated by users, or providing some guidelines about capturing videos, but I don’t think of that as wrapping structure around informal learning so much as transferring information.   Are you formalizing informal learning?   I don’t really care what you want to call it, to be honest. What I care about is empowering organizations to change in productive ways.   And that’s an important goal no matter what you want to call it.

Future of the training department

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Entreprise Collaborative, a cross-cultural endeavor bridging English and French to provide a jumping off point on organizational collective intelligence (and co-led by my Internet Time Alliance colleague Harold Jarche), is launching a blog carnival.   The first topic is: the future of the training department in the Collaborative Enterprise.

NetworkProgression

I’ve written before about the changes I see coming for organizations (e.g. here), and they’re driven by the changes I am seeing in business and in society.   Things are moving faster, and this has all sorts of consequences: it means that change is occurring more frequently, information is doubling, our competition is more aggressive, and more.   Really, we’re unmasking the chaos that we’ve been able to cover with observed patterns, and explain away the excepti0ns. Well, now the patterns are changing fast enough that we can’t expect to be able to plan, prepare and execute to succeed. We have to be more nimble, more agile.   In short, we have to move away from depending on formal learning to be able to cope, and we need a new solution.

The solution is to empower individuals so that they’re pulling together.   No longer can a few do the thinking for everyone, as we see in a hierarchical organization. Instead, we need to make sure everyone understands what the overall goal is, and have them work together to achieve it.   We need to tap into the collective intelligence of the entire organization. This is a redefinition of learning as performance, incorporating problem-solving, innovation, creativity, design, research, and more.

That means a number of things: we need to be explicit about goals, transparent about processes, supportive about collaborative skills, and proactive in creating a culture that fosters and nurtures the necessary approaches.   This doesn’t come for free.   Who is responsible for ensuring this works?

In some organizations it’s the information services group, or the knowledge management group.   And they certainly should be on board; ideally you don’t want a hodgepodge of different systems to do the same thing, you want a coordinated environment that supports lessons learned in one area to be easily shareable elsewhere in the organization.   At core, however, I believe that folks who understand learning have to be part of the picture.   They may not own it, but they need to be actively facilitating across the organization.

And this, to me, defines the future of   the training department.   It can no longer be just about courses.   It’s got to include performance support, and informal learning. It’s got to be about culture, and learning together skills, and facilitating productive information interchange and productive interactions. We have technologies now to empower user-generated content, collaboration and more, but the associated skills are being assumed, which is a mistake.   The ability to use these tools will continually need updating and support.

This should not be threatening or anxiety-inducing!   Training used to be important, as skilled workers were critical.   As we’ve automated more work and started developing training for more knowledge work without adapting our methods (and, consequently, making generally dreadful learning experiences), the training role is less and less seen as worthwhile. The opportunity to reestablish a strategic role in the organization should be viewed with excitement, and taken up as the gift it is!

So, I see the future of the training department being as learning facilitators, and the path there to be to take on more and more of that role.   In the future, I reckon, learning facilitators will be partners with the technology infrastructure units in providing an innovation infrastructure, a performance ecosystem.   These facilitators will be (virtually) distributed across the enterprise just as the technology infrastructure is.   Yes, there’s likely some re-skilling involved, but it beats irrelevancy, or worse.   Here’s to redefinition!

Ignoring Informal

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I received in the mail an offer for a 3 book set titled Improving Performance in the Workplace.   It’s associated with ISPI, and greatly reflects their Human Performance Technology approach, which I generally laud as going beyond instructional design.   It’s also by Pfeiffer, who is my own publisher, and they’re pretty good as publishers go.   However, I noticed something that really struck me, based upon the work I’ve been doing with my colleagues in the Internet Time Alliance (formerly TogetherLearn).

The first volume is really about assessing needs, and design, and it includes behavioral task analysis and cognitive task analysis, and even talkes about engagement strategies in simulation and gaming, video gaming.   The second volume includes performance interventions, and includes elaerning, coaching, knowledge management, and more (as well as things like incentives, culture, EPSS, feedback, etc.   The third volume’s on measurement and evaluation.

All this is good: these are important topics, and having a definitive handbook about them is a valuable contribution (and priced equivalently, the whole set is bargain-priced at $400).   However, while I don’t have the book to hand to truly evaluate it, it appears that there are some gaps.

In my experience, some issues are not behavioral or cognitive but attitudinal.   Consequently, I’d have thought there might be some coverage.   There was a chapter in Jonassen’s old Handbook on Research in Ed Tech on the topic, and I’ve derived my own approach from that and some other readings. When they get into tools, they seem to miss virtual worlds, and they seem to have a repeat of the straw-man case against discovery environments (many years ago it was recognized that pure discovery wasn’t the go, and guided discovery was developed).   It bugs me that I can’t find the individual authors, but I do recognize the names of one of the editors.     But these aren’t the biggest misses, to me.

Overall, there seems to be no awareness of the whole thrust of social and informal learning.   Ok, so Jay’s book on Informal Learning is relatively new, and the concrete steps may still be being sorted out, but there’s a lot there.   Or perhaps it’s covered in Knowledge Management (after all, Marc Rosenberg’s been deeply involved in ISPI and wrote the Beyond e-Learning book).   Yet it seems a bit buried and muddled, and here’s why:

I’m working with a client now, and one of my tasks is surveying how they’re using social media.   A group responsible for technical training (and they’re an engineering organization) recognized that they weren’t able to keep up with the increasing quantity and quality of changes that were coming.   Rather than do a performance improvement intervention, they realized that another opportunity would be to start putting up information and inviting others to contribute.   They put up a wiki, and first maintained it internally, and then gradually devolved some of the responsibility out to their ‘customers’.

The point is, how does that fit into the traditional paradigm?   And yet, increasingly, we’re seeing and recommending approaches that go beyond the categories that fit here.   I wonder if their metrics include the outputs of enabling innovation.   I wonder if their interventions include expertise finders and collaboration tools. I wonder if their analyses include the benefits of ‘presence’.

Times are changing, faster and faster.   I think these books would’ve been the ideal thing, maybe 5 years ago.   Now, I think they’re emblematic of a training mindset when a larger perspective is needed.   These come into play after you’ve identified that a formal approach is needed.   They use a phrase of a ‘performance landscape’, but their picture doesn’t seem to include the concepts that Jay includes in his ‘learnscape’ and I as the ‘performance ecosystem’.

Seed, feed, & weed

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In my presentation yesterday, I was talking about how to get informal learning going.   As many have noted, it’s about moving from a notion of being a builder, handcrafting (or mass-producing) solutions, to being a facilitator, nurturing the community to develop it’s own capabilities.   Jay Cross talks about the learnscape, while I term it the performance ecosystem. The point, however, is from the point of the view of the learner, all the resources needed are ‘to hand’   through every stage of knowledge work. Courses, information resources, people, representational tools, the ability to tap into the 4 C’s (create, contextualize, connect, co-create).

Overall, it taps into our natural learning, where we experiment, reflect, converse, mimic, collaborate, and more.   Our approach to formal learning needs to more naturally mimic this approach, having us attempting to do something, and resourcing around it with information and facilitation.   Our approach to informal learning similarly needs to reflect our natural learning.

Networks grow from separate nodes, to a hierarchical organization where one node manages the connections, but the true power of a network is unleashed when every node knows what the goal is and the nodes coordinate to achieve it.   It is this unleashing of the power of the network that we want to facilitate.   But if you build it, they may not come.

Networks take nurturing.   Using the gardener or landscaper metaphor,   yesterday I said that networks need seeding, feeding, and weeding.   What do I mean?   If you want to grow a network, you will have to:

Seed: you need to put in place the network tool, where individuals can register, and then create the types of connections they need.   They may self-organize around roles, or tasks, or projects, or all of the above.   They may need discussion forums, blogs, wikis, and IM.   They may need to load, tag, and search on resources.   You likely will need to preload it with resources, to ensure there’s value to be found.   And you’ll have to ensure that there are rewards for participating and contributing.   The environment needs to be there, and they have to be aware.

Feed: you can’t just put in place, you have to nurture the network.   People have to know what the goals are and their role.   Don’t tell them what to do, tell them what needs done.   You may need to quietly ‘encourage’ the opinion makers to participate.   And the top of the food chain needs to not only anoint the process, but model the behavior as well.   The top level of the group (ie not the CEO, but the leader of whatever group you’ve chosen to facilitate) needs to be active in the network.   You may need to highlight what other people have said, elicit questions and answers, and take a role both within and outside the network to get it going.     You may have to go in and reorganize the resources, take what’s heard and make it concrete and usable. You’ll undoubtedly have to facilitate the skills to take advantage of the environment.   And you have to ensure there’s value there for them.

Weed: you may have to help people learn how to participate.   You may well find some inappropriate behavior, and help those learn what’s acceptable. You’ll likely have to develop, and modify, policies and procedures.   You may have to take out some submitted resources and revise them for better usability.   You may well have to address cultural issues that arise, when you find that participation is stunted by a lack of tolerance of diversity, no openness to new ideas, no safety for putting ideas out, and other factors that facilitate a learning organization.

However, if you recognize that it will take time and tuning, and diligently work to nurture the network, you should be able to reap the benefits of an aligned group of empowered people.   And those benefits are real: innovation, problem-solving, and more, and those are the key to organizational competitiveness going forward. Ready to get grubby?

Guff: a conversation in 3 parts. Part 3

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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.”

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.”

A: “Well, the cost is good news.   But I‘ve got to have payoff numbers.   Intangibles are a hard sell.”

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.”

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.”

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.”

A: “Sounds hard to quantify.”

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.”

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.”

A: “I‘ll say.”

B: “So why do you keep doing it”

A: “Because it‘s supposed to be important!”

B: “And it is, but if it‘s important, isn‘t it worth doing well”

A: “I suppose.”

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.”

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.”

A: “It‘s when they get beyond that novice stage that they‘re useful.”

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.”

A: “And social media will hep with those latter two, supporting practitioners and experts.”

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.”

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!”

A: “Darn right. But trainers aren‘t going to be able to do it either.”

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.”

A: “I‘ll say, it‘s changes for managers too.”

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.

Mining Social Media

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One of the proposed benefits of social media is the capture of knowledge that’s shared, taking the tacit and making it explicit.   But really, how do we do this?   I think we need to separate out the real from the ideal.

The underlying premise is that we have an enlightened organization that’s empowering collaboration, communication, problem-solving, innovation, etc (what I’m beginning to term ‘inspiration’ in all senses of the word) by providing a social media infrastructure, learning scaffolding, and a supportive culture.   Now, all these people are sharing, but are we, and can we be, leveraging that knowledge?

The obvious first answer is that by sharing it with others, it’s being leveraged.   If information is shared with the relevant people, it’s been captured for organizational use by being spread appropriately.   That’s great, and far too few organizations are facilitating this in a systematic way.   However, I’m always looking for the optimal outcome: not just the best that is seen, but the best that can be. So how can we go further?

The typical response is using data mining that focuses on semantic content: systematically parsing the discussions, and using powerful semantic tools to attempt to capture, characterize, and leverage information systemically. (Hmm, you could map out the knowledge propositions, and link them into coherent chains and then track those over time to see significant changes, even regularly re-sort to see if different perspectives are changing…oh, sorry, got carried away, enough adaptive system designing :).

In terms of social media systems, while there are analytics available, semantics are not part of it, as far as I can see.   Further, I searched on social media mining, and found out that the first international workshop will be happening in November, but it’s not happened yet. There’s an interesting PhD thesis on the topic from UMaryland, but it’s focused on blogs and recommendations. In other words, it’s not ready for prime time.

The point is, that machine learning and knowledge mining mechanisms are in our future, but not our present.   Don’t get me wrong, there are huge possibilities and opportunities here, but they’re a ways off.   So, are we back to the best that can be?   I want to suggest one other possibility.   The systemic mechanisms are nice because, set up properly, they run regardless, but there’s another approach, and that’s human processing.   For all the advances in technology, our brains are still pretty much the most practical semantic pattern matching engines going.   So how would that work?

Well, let’s go back to the role that learning professionals play. We’ve already looked at how they could change as learning units take over responsibility for the broader picture of learning in the organization.   Learning professionals need to be nurturing social learning, and that means being in there, monitoring discussions for opportunities to draw out other members, spark useful feedback, develop skills, and more.

Well, they also can and should be looking for outcomes that could be redesigned/redeveloped/reproduced for broader dissemination.   They should be monitoring what’s happening and looking for information that’s worth culling out and distilling into something that’ll really bring out the impact of that information. Turning information into knowledge and even wisdom!

Yes, that’s a greater responsibility (though it’s also fun; you shouldn’t be in the learning space if you don’t love learning!).   It’s a new skill set, but I’ve already argued that.   The world’s changing, and the status quo won’t last long anyway.   So, while you can just allow and hope that individuals will perceive the value of the information created, and even facilitate by encouraging people to participate in all the relevant communities (which will likely cross role, product/service, and more), there’s a step further that’s to the benefit of the organization and the learners.

We’ll steadily build support for that process, but it will be facilitated, and advanced, by individual practice to complement, supplement, and inform the mechanistic approaches.   Don’t ignore this role; plan for it, prepare for it, and skill for it.   Responsibility for recognizing should be shared, so that the individuals in the network are also doing it (for example, retweeting valuable information), and that’s a learning skill that should be developed.

Here’s hoping you find this valuable!