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ABC: anything but courses
Month: January 2010
From training to learning
I came across the article From Training to Learning by Brigitte Jordan via two sources yesterday. It was written c. 1997 based on ” … a common discourse, carried on for the last several years at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (Xerox PARC) and the Institute for Research on Learning (IRL).”
“In a fundamental way, all work is about learning: it is about learning to fit in and to collaborate, about learning to take initiative when appropriate, it is about really understanding customers, about acquiring intimate knowledge of the products and services the company sells and how they can fit into customers’ lives. Acknowledged as such or not, learning has to be an integral part of work. But, somehow, integrated [work+learning] activities have become split into the separate spheres of [work] and [training] which have come to be dominated by quite different interests.”
This article synthesizes my own work practice and is a hot internal topic at the Internet Time Alliance. It covers:
- Why Conventional Training Doesn’t Work Anymore
- Shifting the Paradigm from Training to Learning
- Learning is fundamentally social
- Informal learning is crucial in the workplace
This makes the argument for change a bit easier, in that informal and social learning in the workplace is not that new of an idea and actually we’re a bit behind the times.
From Training to Learning is a highly recommended read.
Building common ground
The focus of this blog is on learning and working on the web and how work and learning are becoming one in a digitally interconnected world. I believe there is a critical need for new organizational frameworks, such as wirearchy, and a shift from learning as training & schooling to a more agile approach. Evidence that the old management models are no longer effective abound – see The Future of Management or The Future of Work.
Lilia Efimova is looking into Agile software programming teams, where work is geographically distributed and has observed the challenges of communicating without “common ground:
From what we have seen, the communication in distributed teams often shrinks to purely functional and, compared to face-to-face settings, there is much less unstructured informal interactions – this works for getting the work done (at some level), but seriously limits the opportunities to build awareness of the bigger picture and relationships. Most of the solutions in respect to building the common ground in distributed Agile teams still rely on making sure that there are opportunities to visit each other, while there is a lot of space for a technology-mediated ways to do so next to the f2f.
Building common ground at work takes time and many informal interactions, such as those afforded in a shared physical space. For distributed teams to work well, they need to develop common ground through social grooming. My experience in working with distributed groups is that the more effective teams are those who know each other. I will be more forgiving with someone I know through several years of blogging than some new business acquaintance who has just joined the team. After several thousand tweets I have some understanding of people’s sense of humour, and perhaps they understand mine as well.These casual interactions make the leap to collaborative work much easier, as I am experiencing with my Internet Time Alliance colleagues.
For distributed teams, informal social learning has to take place with digitally mediated communications. Allowing, and indeed promoting, casual social media use may actually be good for work and business. Blocking these channels may inhibit the development of common ground. This is something to consider as more work becomes distributed – break down those firewalls and let workers be people.
Teaching and Controlling
Some of the interesting things I found on Twitter this past week.
How we teach:
“Any teacher who can be replaced by a computer …. should be!” — Arthur C. Clarke. via @charlesjennings
@moehlert: “My son, the not-so-excited about math, won’t quit playing carrotsticks.com”
Video: “Most schooling is training for stupidity & conformity” ~ Noam Chomsky. via @courosa
What we can teach:
Educators beware: The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement #ACTA. via @josiefraser
The treaty would provide legal protection for digital locks and security protection on material, provisions that draw upon the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DCMA), but extend far beyond existing international law. As some American teachers and researchers have learned the hard way, these so-called “anti-circumvention” measures have had the unintended consequence of stifling scientific research. Since the DCMA has been in force, a number of computer scientists researching software and network security have faced lawsuits and criminal prosecution as a result of their legitimate research activities into anti-circumvention technologies.
Wherever Crown Copyright would be used, Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) would be used instead. Copyright Consultation via @mgifford
RIP Howard Zinn:
Howard Zinn passed away this week:
A People’s History: what the classroom didn’t teach me about the American empire, by Howard Zinn
The Social Network Business Plan – Review
The Social Network Business Plan: 18 strategies that will create great Wealth by David Silver
The central premise of this book is how to build “recommender networks“.
“The next great wave of online communities will focus on specific interests such as health, travel, improvement of government services, wealth, beauty, neighbourhood watches, hobbies, protecting one’s estate, and rating the abilities and prices of lawyers, realtors, electricians, hospitals, physicians, judges, school teachers, and vendors of a host of products and services for the home.”
David Silver is a venture capitalist and explains the type of online communities that he would invest in. He then goes on to explain several (18) models. You might think that Facebook already has the social network market cornered, but Silver thinks differently:
“Although the earliest social networks get their launch value by attracting massive memberships, the ones with highest revenues per member, are, at the end of the day, the social networks that have found the empty chairs in the musical chairs game of recommender social networks. It is the best execution of the cleverest business models that will decide the winners.”
This reminds me of the MD community of Sermo that charges sponsors about $100,000 each because it is a gated community for US registered physicians only.
Silver even thinks that recommender communities will one day usurp MySpace, Facebook, and other general communities. There are lots of specific tactics in this book so it’s quite appropriate for entrepreneurs. There is not much theory on groups or networks, but lots of anecdotes. For the theory behind social networks, read Connected: the surprising power of our social networks and how they shape our lives. For me, this is the kind of book to keep handy and refer to with the various communities that I’m engaged in. Who knows, maybe it’s time to start one myself.
PKM in 2010
Personal Knowledge Management
Updated 5 Feb 2010: changed “Filter” to “Understand”
[This post is a continuation of Sense-making with PKM (March, 2009)]
Personal = according to one’s abilities, interests and motivation (not directed by external forces)
Knowledge = the capacity for effective action (know how)
Management = how to get things done
What is PKM?
PKM is an individual, disciplined process by which we make sense of information, observations and ideas. In the past it may have been keeping a journal, writing letters or having conversations. These are still valid, but with digital media we can add context by categorizing, commenting or even remixing it. We can also store digital media for easy retrieval.
The Web has given us more ways to connect with others in our learning but many people only see the information overload aspect of our digital society. Engaging others can actually make it easier to learn and not become overwhelmed. Effective learning is the difference between surfing the waves or being drowned by them.
PKM can be looked at as three types of activities [note: I’ve reduced this from seven activities in my previous articles on PKM as I believe that a simpler process is easier to teach and to begin with].
Aggregate |
FilterUnderstand |
Connect |
| Observations & Notes Information Knowledge Sources of Info & Knowledge |
Annotate, Tag,
List, File, Classify, Clarify, Expand, Question |
People – People
|
Why PKM?
Human knowledge currently doubles about every year and personal knowledge management is one way of addressing the issue of TMI (too much information).
PKM is of little value unless the results are shared by connecting to others and contributing to meaningful conversations. Informal, social learning is the primary way that knowledge is created in the workplace. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts as we build on the knowledge of others. As knowledge workers or citizens, PKM is our part of the social learning contract. Without effective PKM at the individual level, social learning has less value.
A Model
There is more than one PKM process but here is a basic structure that works for me and makes sense to many others I show it to. This post is meant to be descriptive, not prescriptive. Take what you need, as there are no best practices for complex and personal learning processes.
PKM in the context of work:
Individuals have their unique methods of sense-making and by sharing cooperatively or working collaboratively they contribute to the social learning mosaic that creates organizational knowledge.
Aggregate – looking for good sources of information (people) – noting or tagging pieces of information while working collaboratively.
Filter Understand – saving information for later – considering how it may be useful in various contexts – making sense of it – finding the right information, at the right time, in the right format, from the information repositories of our subject matter networks.
Connect – ongoing conversations while learning and working including connecting ideas and people.
Enhanced Serendipity – PKM increases the chances of serendipitous learning. and as Louis Pasteur said, “Chance favours the prepared mind”. According to Ross Dawson: “You cannot control serendipity. However you can certainly enhance it, act to increase the likelihood of happy and unexpected discoveries and connections. That’s is what many of us do day by day, contributing to others like us by sharing what we find interesting.”
Getting to work
One of the difficult aspects of PKM is triage, or sorting. It’s the ability to separate the important from the useless. Unfortunately, what we view as useless today could be quite important tomorrow. Developing good triage techniques takes time and practice. It depends on the depth and breath of our sources (aggregation), as well as the effectiveness of our filters.
When we find something of interest or value, we need to do something with it. Either file it, save it, add to it, send it on or discard it. Discarding or missing something is becoming less of a problem online because we have powerful search tools and if we participate in cooperative networks, more than one person will notice items of significance. This process also gives us time to make sense of things, to understand.
All of this aggregation and filtering isn’t of much use if we can’t find things later. Putting our knowledge online, in databases that enable tagging, filtering and searching makes it much easier to retrieve it when we need it. For example, I use this blog as a knowledge repository. It is searchable and I’ve added tags and categories. With over 1,500 posts and +4,000 comments, I have a an excellent tool for managing what I’ve learned. Add to this almost 2,000 online social bookmarks and weekly summaries of what I learn on Twitter and I’ve created an outboard brain.
The most important aspect of PKM is making our knowledge not only explicit but public. This is part of connecting. Going public means looking both inward and outward. However, let me add one caveat. Sometimes, just publishing online for our own learning and perhaps later retrieval, is enough. It doesn’t matter if nobody links to it. If we get too focused on what others think, we won’t become good critical thinkers.
Net Work Learning article
The New Security Learning Foundation held its conference just prior to Online Educa last year in Berlin. I wrote an article, called Net Work Learning, for the journal that is distributed to members and conference attendees. Parts of it have appeared on this site but here is the complete unabridged version as a PDF:
I just received a few copies of the print version in the mail this week. Believe it or not, what I really like about print publishing is that an editor makes changes and also decides what to highlight or what works best as a call-out. It’s very good feedback on my writing.
Here are the call-outs from the journal article:
Individuals can act both locally and globally without the aid of formal organizations. That means that the traditional command and control organizational pyramid is getting much more porous.
Change begins when ideas meet new technology.
Command and control matters less and less on the business fringes. Look to business models that understand the importance of community as we become a global village.
If training departments want to remain relevant in this kind of environment, they will need to reconsider their role. In order to help organizations evolve in a networked environment they have to move away from training delivery and focus on connecting and communicating.
No single, sure-fire, cookie-cutter approach can be implemented in a top-down or consultant-driven manner to create a networked workplace performance model that works. No single method will work.
With hyper-linked information and access to expertise, not only are internal departments of less value, they can subvert the organization’s future by not responding quickly and appropriately.
A linchpin culture
Here is Seth Godin being interviewed by Hugh Macleod:
In a stable environment, we worship the efficient factory. Henry Ford or even David Geffen… feed the machine, keep it running smoothly, pay as little as you can, make as much as you can. In our post-industrial world, though, factory worship is a non starter. Cheap cogs are worth what they cost, which is not much. In a changing environment, you want people who can steer, innovate, provoke, lead, connect and make things happen. That’s my thesis. This is a new revolution, and just as Marx and Smith wrote about the industrial revolution, I’m writing about ours.
Godin’s new book is called Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? and he hits the nail on the head that the industrial model for work design is no longer of much use. The work that we will be paid for is the difficult, innovative, one of a kind, creative stuff.
The cynefin model (below) shows that emergent practices are needed in order to manage in complex environments and novel practices are necessary for chaotic ones. We will be facing more complexity and chaos in our work. There are fewer easy answers, easy jobs with good pay, or simple ways to keep a job for life.
I don’t believe that it’s any longer a question of whether standardized work will be outsourced or automated, but when. How much time do we have to prepare people for the new revolution? Any scenario that I consider – peak oil, global warming; globalization; Asian dominance – still requires that the developed world’s workforce deals with more complexity and even chaos. We need to skill-up for emergent and novel practices and that means a completely different mindset toward work.
It’s not enough that I am ready or that you are prepared. We have to be able to deal with change as a society. How can we help get our communities out of their comfort zones or overcome their fears and get their innate creativity flowing? Becoming a linchpin is the first challenge, but enabling a linchpin culture is the greater one.
PKM: aggregate, filter, connect
Knowledge Squared equals Power Squared, says Craig Thomler:
However the knowledge hoarding model begins to fail when it becomes cheap and easy to share and when the knowledge required to complete a task exceeds an individual’s capability to learn in the time available.
This has been reflected in a longitudinal study of knowledge workers that Robert Kelley of Carnegie-Mellon University conducted over more than twenty years. He asked professionals “What percentage of the knowledge you need to do your job is stored in your own mind?”
In 1986 the answer was typically about 75%. By 1997 workers estimated that they had only about 15% to 20% of the knowledge needed in their own mind. Kelley estimated that by 2006 the answer was only 8% to 10%.
Given that professionals now need to draw 90% or more of the knowledge they need to do their jobs from others, in my view ‘Knowledge equals Power’ is no longer true.
I believe it is now more accurate to state Knowledge Shared equals Power Squared.
I see the basis for sharing knowledge in the connected workplace is personal knowledge management or what I’ve called our part of the social learning contract. You need to have something to share in the first place and that happens when you make your work transparent. This means showing your sources (aggregation) and then what you find important (filtering) and sharing that with others (connecting).
In my case I use Google Reader as a feed aggregator, with shared items public. I also share articles with my Internet Time Alliance colleagues using Posterous. I filter more with this blog by writing about and commenting on much of what I have read and learned. I also filter information with Twitter and my weekly Friday’s Finds. I connect through this blog and the comments left by others, by leaving comments, via Twitter and in the increasing number of web conferences and discussions becoming available. Essential in all of this are the tracks I’ve left for others and for myself to retrieve as necessary, as I do during my frequent searches of this blog, Twitter favourites and my social bookmarks.
None of this is new, but I think that the three-step process of Aggregate/Filter/Connect is much simpler than my previous model of four internal actions and three external ones.
A simpler model, inspired by Ross Dawson’s post on enhanced serendipity, may be easier to communicate (and remember).
You cannot control serendipity. However you can certainly enhance it, act to increase the likelihood of happy and unexpected discoveries and connections. That’s what many of us do day by day, contributing to others like us by sharing what we find interesting.
I’ve found that this diagram works better in explaining my PKM process and how it relates to other people, all engaged in similar, but not identical, sense-making endeavours [Updated here: PKM in 2010].
Learning socially and being social
Some of the interesting things I found on Twitter this past week.
Diffusion By Learning. Innovation by Social Learning. via @charlesjennings
3. Social learning. People adopt once they see enough empirical evidence to convince them that the innovation is worth adopting, where the evidence is generated by the outcomes among prior adopters. Individuals may adopt at different times due to differences in their prior beliefs, amount of information gathered, and idiosyncratic costs.
@oscarberg “Organizations can own communities, but nobody can own social networks. They gather on purpose, and interact on the edge of chaos.”
@BFchirpy “The killer learning management system is the Web – silly” [in case anyone is still wondering]
Pondering complexity. Good MIT Sloan article on managing complexity. via @rossdawson
What can we do, the executives asked us, to manage complexity more effectively?
Our advice: Focus on the issues that are making it hard for your employees to get things done, and on building the ability of your work force to cope with the complexity in their roles. For most workers, complications arising from increased M&A activity and regulation matter less than having a simplified organization with clear roles and accountabilities.
Are we too professional: has professionalism gone too far? An excellent read via @AmirKassaei
Over-professionalism is everywhere. Teachers in England are trained to plan lessons in segments of three minutes, a theory which leaves little room for spontaneity in the classroom. They are also often exhausted before term even starts because of the endemic pressure to plan every lesson weeks in advance. It is all too tempting for teachers to sacrifice freshness–which is impossible to measure or record on paper–in favour of form-filling. But can education ever be mapped out in such prescriptive terms? Anthony Seldon, Master of Wellington College, thinks not: “The erosion of trust in education is sucking the life out of classrooms, teachers and students. You can tick all the boxes under the sun and still be a lousy teacher. You cannot encapsulate the human experience of learning in some mechanistic pedantry.”
Great slide presentation by @sachac on how to be a shy connector – Shows that it’s not necessary to behave like arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks:
The Shy Connector
View more documents from Sacha Chua.