February 2010 – Harold Jarche

Filtering is about trust

2010-02-26 by Harold Jarche

Some things I learned on Twitter this past week (the first article describes what I’m trying to do here with Friday’s Finds):

@cdn – Filtering is the new search. The next frontier in information management. Search is about Where. Filtering is about Who. It’s about Trust.

Excellent checklist for remote workers & managers. via @dria

@JaneBozarth [ Jane was looking for some case studies on Twitter in the workplace]: microblogging at Qualcomm & Qualitative Study on Micro-blogging at Work

@timkastelle – Great post by Irving Wladowsky-Berger – focus on idea flow, not idea stocks: The Business Value of Social Networks.

Value creation has thus been shifting from protecting proprietary knowledge, to fostering collaboration, both within the company and beyond its boundaries, in order to help the firm participate in as broad and diverse a range of knowledge flows and thus improve its competitive position. It is within this context that one has to consider the business value of social networks, and their impact in helping people better connect with each other, and build sustaining relationships that enhance knowledge flows and innovation.

More complexity, more crises: we need new management models. via @tdebaillon

Our environments are more complex than they were ten or fifteen years ago, or maybe even three years ago. Complex situations become more common and more normal every year. It would not be a good response to panic or blame others. It’ll probably be better to accept the fact that the world is quite complex, and that there is not a standard solution for everything. As crises become normal, deal with it normal.

@valdiskrebs – Is the sun about to set on the corporate machine?

For one, the existence of a burgeoning alternative landscape in which corporations have no real part will push the Western corporate model further towards redundancy. Trends in such boom fields as fair trade, farmers’ markets, organic produce, self-made and/or recycled products, the barter economy, the black or alternative economy, micro-brands, Islamic banking, micro-credit, social networking and, ethical investment all carry, in different ways, the germs of the corporation-as-we-know-it’s demise.

@gsiemens Lack of Sympathy

Comment #13 by Howard – Before universities existed, most people learned by apprenticeship. As Harold points out, before WWII universities apprenticed elites; priests, doctor, scholars, teachers, etc. . .. The mode of learning was still an apprenticeship model and most elite education ended with a very specific apprenticeship practice like a dissertation or medical residency, or for the wealthy, an initiation into “the club”. But educational theory ignored the way things worked and stressed knowledge over doing, knowledge that was represented by a degree. Many people are now finding out that a degree correlated with higher incomes, but did not necessarily cause them. Knowledge alone proves to be no covering, the emperor has no clothes. We may not be blacksmiths or leather tanners, but evolution has not changed us that much and we still learn in much the same way as we always have, by watching other people do things. I think education would be better off if it focused on doing instead of knowing.

A framework for social learning in the enterprise

2019-02-282010-02-24 by Harold Jarche

A framework for social learning in the enterprise

The social learning revolution has only just begun. Corporations that understand the value of knowledge sharing, teamwork, informal learning and joint problem solving are investing heavily in collaboration technology and are reaping the early rewards.

—Jay Cross

Social learning

Why is social learning important for today’s enterprise?

George Siemens has succinctly explained the importance of social learning in the context of today’s workplace:

There is a growing demand for the ability to connect to others. It is with each other that we can make sense, and this is social. Organizations, in order to function, need to encourage social exchanges and social learning due to faster rates of business and technological changes. Social experience is adaptive by nature and a social learning mindset enables better feedback on environmental changes back to the organization.

The Internet has fundamentally changed how we communicate on a scale as large as the printing press or the advent of written language. Charles Jennings explains why we need to move away from a focus on knowledge transfer and acquisition, an approach rooted in Plato’s academy:

“We are moving to the world of the sons of Socrates, where dialogue and guidance are key competencies. It is a world where the capability to find information and turn it into knowledge at the point-of-need provides the key competitive advantage, where knowing the right people to ask the right questions of is more likely to lead to success than any amount of internally-held knowledge and skill.”

Our relationship with knowledge is changing as our work becomes more intangible and complex. Notice how most value in today’s marketplace is intangible, with Google’s multi-billion dollar valuation an example of value in non-tangible processes that could be deflated with the development of a better search algorithm. Non-physical assets comprise about 80 percent of the value of Standard & Poor’s 500 US companies in leading industries.

From replaceable human resources to dynamic social groups

The manner in which we prepare people for work is based on the Taylorist perspective that there is only one way to do a job and that the person doing the work needs to conform to job requirements [F.W. Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management, 1911]. Individual training, the core of corporate learning and development, is based on the premise that jobs are constant and those who fill them are interchangeable.

However, when you look at the modern organization, it is moving to a model of constant change, whether through mergers and acquisitions or as quick-start web-enabled networks. For the human resources department, the question becomes one of preparing people for jobs that don’t even exist. For example, the role of online community manager, a fast-growing field today, barely existed five years ago. Individual training for job preparation requires a stable work environment, a luxury no one has any more.

A collective, social learning approach, on the other hand, takes the perspective that learning and work happen as groups and how the group is connected (the network) is more important than any individual node within it.

MIT’s Peter Senge has made some important clarifications on terms we often use in looking at work, job classifications and training to support them.

Knowledge: the capacity for effective action. “Know how” is the only aspect of knowledge that really matters in life.

Practitioner: someone who is accountable for producing results.

Learning may be an individual activity but if it remains within the individual it is of no value whatsoever to the organization. Acting on knowledge, as a practitioner (work performance) is all that matters. So why are organizations in the individual learning (training) business anyway? Individuals should be directing their own learning. Organizations should focus on results.

Individual learning in organizations is basically irrelevant because work is almost never done by one person. All organizational value is created by teams and networks. Furthermore, learning may be generated in teams but even this type of knowledge comes and goes. Learning really spreads through social networks. Social networks are the primary conduit for effective organizational performance. Blocking, or circumventing, social networks slows learning, reduces effectiveness and may in the end kill the organization.

Social learning is how groups work and share knowledge to become better practitioners. Organizations should focus on enabling practitioners to produce results by supporting learning through social networks. The rest is just window dressing. Over a century ago, Charles Darwin helped us understand the importance of adaptation and the concept that those who survive are the ones who most accurately perceive their environment and successfully adapt to it. Cooperating in networks can increase our ability to perceive what is happening.

Making social learning work

Jon Husband’s working definition of “Wirearchy” is “a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority, based on knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results, enabled by interconnected people and technology”. We are seeing increasing examples of this on the edges of the modern enterprise. World Blu’s annual listing of our most democratic workplaces continues to grow and gain attention. Google’s dedicated time-off for private projects, given to its engineers, promotes non-directed learning and collaboration. Zappos directly engages with its customers on Twitter, fostering higher levels of two-way trust. As customers, suppliers and competitors become more networked, being more wirearchical will be a business imperative.

Wirearchies inherently require trust, and trusted relationships are powerful allies in getting things done in organizations. Trust is also an essential component of social learning. Just because we have the technical networks does not mean that learning will automatically happen. Communications without trust are just noise, not accepted and never internalized by the recipients.

Here are some ways to make social learning work in the enterprise:

Think and act at a macro level (what to do) and leave the micro (how to do it) to each worker or team. The little stuff is changing too fast.

Engage with Web media and understand how they work. The Web is too important to be left to the information technology department, communications staff or outside vendors.

Use social media to make work easier or more effective. Use them to solve problems for work teams and groups.

Make traditional management obsolete. Teach people how to fish and move on to the next challenge. If the organization is maintaining a steady state then it has failed to evolve with the environment.

Analyzing social learning

Most 20th century workplaces had two types of learning: formal learning through training and informal learning (about 80% according to research) which just happened by accident or the result of observation, conversation and time in the job. This focus on formal training, for skills and knowledge, missed out on our social nature. Business has always been social, especially at the higher levels of management and with ubiquitous access to networks, this is once again part of everyone’s work. In the global village, we are all interconnected.

Jane Hart has shown how social media can be used for workplace learning and that instead of just training, there are five types of learning that should be supported by the organization:

IOL – Intra-Organizational Learning – keeping the organization up to date and up to speed on strategic and other internal initiatives and activities

GDL – Group Directed Learning – groups of individuals working in teams, projects, study groups, etc Even two people working together in a coaching and mentoring capacity

PDL – Personal Directed Learning – individuals organizing and managing their own personal or professional learning

ASL – Accidental & Serendipitous Learning – individuals learning without consciously realizing it (aka incidental or random learning)

FSL – Formal Structured Learning – formal education and training like classes, courses, workshops, etc (both synchronous and asynchronous)

Notice that traditional training (FSL) is only one of the five types. Three of these (IOL, GDL, PDF) require self-direction, and that is the essence of social learning: becoming self-directed learners and workers, all within a two-way flow of power and authority. Social and informal learning are not just feel-good notions, but have a real impact on an increasingly intangible business environment.

Jay Cross has looked at the ways that social learning is becoming real and developed this table to highlight some of the workplace changes he is observing:

Implementing social learning

The changes in becoming a networked workplace can be further analyzed using Jane Hart’s five ways of using social media for learning in the organization.

ASL – Accidental & Serendipitous Learning: from Stocks to Flow

Learning is conversation and online conversations are an essential component of online learning. Online communication can be divided into Stocks (information that is archived and organized for reference and retrieval) and Flows (timely and engaging conversations between people, including voice or written communications). Blogs allow flow and micro-blogs, like Twitter, enable great flow due to the constraint of 140 characters

The web enables connections, or constant flow, as well as instant access to information, or infinite stock. Stock on the Internet is everywhere and the challenge is to make sense of it through flows of conversation. It is no longer enough to have the book, manual or information, but one must be able to use it in changing contexts. Because of this connectivity, the Web is an environment more suited to just-in-time learning than the outdated course model. ASL is shifting from looking at knowledge as the collection of bits and engaging in the learning flows around us, without any conscious plan. We are working and learning in networks and the only thing a network can do is share.

PDL – Personal Directed Learning: from Clockwork & Predictable to Complexity & Surprising

Complexity, or maybe our appreciation of it, has rendered the world unpredictable, so the orientation of learning is shifting from past (efficiency, best practice) to future (creative response, innovation). Organizing our own learning is necessary for creative work. Workplace learning is morphing from blocks of training followed by working to a merger of work and learning: they are becoming the same thing. Change is continuous, so learning must be continuous. Developing emergent practices, a necessity when there are no best practices in our changing work environments, requires constant personal directed learning.

In complex environments it no longer works to sit back and see what will happen. By the time we realize what’s happening, it will be too late to take action. Accepting surprise is similar to the delight an artist may have on completion of a work and only then see an emergent quality not consciously understood during the process of its creation.

GDL – Group Directed Learning: from Worker Centric to Team Centric

As mentioned earlier, the real work in organizations is done by groups. This means that sending individuals on a training course and then re-integrating to their work group is relatively useless. With work and learning merging in the network, groups need to find ways that support each member’s learning, while engaged in tasks and projects. Tools that can capture activities and keep group members focused should be used to reinforce group learning.

Social learning requires a certain amount of effort to maintain regular contact and association with our colleagues. Developing social learning practices, like keeping a work journal, may be an effort at first but later it’s just part of the work process. Bloggers have learned how powerful a learning medium they have only after blogging for an extended period. With the increased use of distributed work groups, it is even more important to foster social learning and web media are the current tools at hand.

IOL – Intra-Organizational Learning: from Subject Matter Experts to Subject Matter Networks

Mark Oehlert recently coined the term Subject Matter Networks as a new way of finding organizational knowledge. Instead of looking for subject matter experts from which to design training, we should extend knowledge gathering to the entire network of subject-matter expertise. Once again, the emphasis is no longer on the individual node but on the network. Good networks make for effective organizations.

Networked communities are better structures in dealing with complexity, when emerging practices need to be continuously developed and loose ties can help facilitate fast feedback loops without hierarchical intervention. Collaborative groups are better at making decisions and getting things done. The constraints of the group help to achieve defined goals.

Building capabilities from serendipitous to personally-directed and then group-directed learning help to create strong networks for intra-organizational learning. This is exceptionally important because the emerging knowledge-intensive and creative workplace has these attributes:

• Simple work will be automated.
• Complicated work will go to the lowest bidder, as processes & procedures become more defined and job aids more powerful (e.g. mortgage applications).
• Complex work requires creativity and is where the value of the post-industrial organization lies.
• Dealing with Chaos sometimes has be confronted and this requires creativity as well as a sense of adventure to try novel approaches.

FSL – Formal Structured Learning: from Curriculum to Competency

There remains a need for training in the networked workplace but it must move away from a content delivery approach. The content will be out of date before the training is “delivered” (another outdated term). Work competencies will still need to be developed through practice and appropriate feedback (what training does well) but that practice will have to be directly relevant to the individual or group (group training is an area of immense potential growth). Jointly defining work competence with input from individuals, groups and subject matter networks should become the new analysis process, enabled by social media. Think of it as social ADDIE (analysis, design, development, implementation, evaluation) for the complex workplace.

Summary

Our workplaces are becoming interconnected because technology has enabled communication networks on a worldwide scale. This means that systemic changes are sensed almost immediately. Reaction times and feedback loops have to get faster and more effective. We need to know who to ask for advice right now but that requires a level of trust and trusted relationships take time to nurture. Our default action is to turn to our friends and trusted colleagues; those people with whom we’ve shared experiences. Therefore, we need to share more of our work experiences in order to grow those trusted networks. This is social learning and it is critical for networked organizational effectiveness.

Our current models for managing people, training and knowledge-sharing are insufficient for a workplace that demands emergent practices just to keep up. Formal training has only ever addressed 20% of workplace learning and this was acceptable when the work environment was merely complicated. Knowledge workers today need to connect with others to co-solve problems. Sharing tacit knowledge through conversations is an essential component of knowledge work. Social media enable adaptation, and the development of emergent practices, through conversations.

About Internet Time Alliance

Internet Time Alliance helps organizations solve performance problems.

Our toolkit contains collaborative intelligence, network optimization, performance support, informal learning, and a hundred years of practical experience.

Together, we can help you make your workers and partners more proficient, in less time, and often for lower cost.

See what we’re thinking, visit us at the Internet Time Alliance

Jay Cross | Jane Hart | Harold Jarche | Charles Jennings | Clark Quinn

External References

George Siemens http://elearnspace.org/

Social Learning White Paper http://www.entreprisecollaborative.com/

Charles Jennings http://charles-jennings.blogspot.com/

F.W. Taylor: Principles of Scientific Management Wikipedia

Jon Husband: Wirearchy http://www.wirearchy.com/

WorldBlu: Most Democratic Workplaces http://www.worldblu.com/

Jay Cross: Where did the 80% Come From? http://www.informl.com/where-did-the-80-come-from/

Jane Hart: Social Learning Handbook http://www.c4lpt.co.uk/handbook/state.html

Jay Cross: Social Learning Gets Real http://www.internettime.com/2009/11/social-learning-gets-real/

Mark Oehlert: Subject Matter Networks eclippings (learning as art)

Training alone is not enough

2010-02-23 by Harold Jarche

In our second eCollab blog carnival, I asked if we could formalize the informal:

Are there ways of “formalizing” some or all of this without losing out on the personal relationships we have with our friends and colleagues, those who we turn to help us solve a problem. Can we formalize the informal?

Jay Cross, in my subsequent interview on the subject, said:

… it’s the wrong question. It would be like asking if we should “informalize” formal training. A key understanding that Jay wants to get across to everyone in the workplace learning arena is that it’s not an either/or proposition, but rather how much informal and how much formal learning should we support and who is determining what’s to be done. All learning is a bit of both. His promotion of informal learning is not to replace formal training but to open up the possibilities of supporting the other 80% of learning that has been ignored for far too long.

My own perspective is that supporting informal learning is mission critical for knowledge-intensive organizations:

A key difference between formal training and informal learning is that the former is designed (push) while the latter is enabled (pull). As far as formal training goes, we have several models and many examples of good practices. But training alone is not enough. The best training programs can only address a maximum of 20% of the work performance issues in an organization. Training can only help to develop skills and knowledge if we know in advance what these are. In many cases, we don’t know what our future performance needs will be.

Dennis Callahan provided several examples of “creating conditions to help informal learning thrive”:

Providing tools (e.g., wiki, blog, microblog) for people to share knowledge

Provide learning for how to use these tools for sharing

Creating an OJT [on job training] guide that describes events that someone must experience as part of their learning (e.g., going on a sales call with a sales representative)

Developing a mentoring program

Facilitating a working session on helping customers solve a real business problem

Tom Haskins submitted a very thoughtful response and showed that “…formal learning poses the opposite requirements from those of formalized informal learning”:

Instead of encouraging useful mistakes, formal learning penalizes mistakes …

Instead of scattering what needs to be learned, formal learning delivers required content in centralized locations like classrooms and books …

Instead of assisting students in unlearning their misconceptions, formal learning assumes errors will get obliterated by providing more content …

Dave Ferguson looked at the importance of aligning goals and balancing organizational and individual learning goals:

Those phrases got me thinking about how, if you work within a large organization, you need to find ways to align your personal goals with the organization’s in a way that’s authentic for you and helpful to the organization. In part, it’s the old concept of the king’s shilling: if you’re accepting the paycheck, you’re granting the organization’s right to set and pursue its goals and to ask you to help achieve them.

When you can’t ethically do that, it’s time to get out.

Donald Clark (USA) takes a slightly contrarian view :

I think this 80/20 informal/formal thingy is kind of going in the wrong way. We should be spending the majority of our time on 20% of the learning taking place within our organization — remember the Pareto principle? Thus you should be asking:

What processes are critical for delivering our product/service and do we need to ensure that our workers learn them correctly?
What tasks are so vital to a processes that we have to ensure we educate someone to be a backup?
How can we best develop our workers so that we continue to grow as a company? What we think of as the “informal” will most often fall into this category.

Thanks to all the contributors to this blog carnival. Please feel free to weigh in, as there’s no time limit here (it’s the web & it’s informal):

Trust Agents – review

2023-01-142010-02-22 by Harold Jarche

Trust Agents by Chris Brogan & Julien Smith could also be called the Miss Manners Guide to Social Media. For long-time bloggers and heavy social media users there is not a lot that’s new here but it’s still an interesting read. What I really like about the book are the various recommendations on how to behave online. Not only do they cover what you CAN do with social media but they always say what you SHOULD do.

“That Guy” can be a man or a woman, but we all know a version of That Guy. He’s annoying. He handed you his business card immediately but barely looks at yours. His attitude is “hand them all out”, which is the business equivalent of carpet bombing … In your business, you shouldn’t ask for anything almost ever. Asking for favors, getting people to blog things for you, these are things that make people go out of their way and make them feel uncomfortable.

I have met new friends, business partners and clients with social media, and like the authors, I would say that a “no sales” approach works best in the long run. The chapter called the Human Artist covers online etiquette in detail and should be read by any self-described social media guru. Also, three of the book’s chapters reflect The Law of the Few – how small groups of people enable social change or the transmission of new ideas.

Connectors: They talk about the idea of being Agent Zero, or the person who connects groups where no previous connection exists.

Mavens: They also discuss creating value, or doing things that people need, one small bit at a time. In Make Your Own Game, the premise is to find a niche and become an expert in it.

Salespeople: In Build an Army, the authors show the promise and pitfalls of crowd-sourcing and social networks for business.

Creative constraints

2010-02-21 by Harold Jarche

I’ve been using Jing for a while to make slidecasts (audio and slides) that I post as short explanatory videos. The medium works for me because I can make a reasonably decent slide presentation with Apple’s Keynote and then I can practice the voice-over until I’m satisfied with the work. I don’t have video production or editing skills so Jing lets me combine voice and pictures without a steep learning curve. I use the Jing Pro version, which costs only $15, so I can save the output as MP4. The free version limits the output to Flash (.swf) which of course doesn’t work on the iPhone.

Both options limit you to 5 minutes, and this is, in my opinion, the best aspect of Jing. I’m a firm believer that constraints are good for creativity. Like Haiku or Twitter, you have to use your words wisely. Sometime it’s best to look not only at the features of a tool but also what is not there to distract you. You want to stay focused on the real task at hand. Tools like Jing and Twitter can be more powerful than complicated, feature-rich, platforms because you can focus on getting the work done and not waste time on extraneous details.

Wired Work was my latest slidecast.

Information is free; Experience is expensive

2010-02-19 by Harold Jarche

Interesting finds on twitter this past week:

Tom Haskins: When we get confident in our own informal evaluation schema- we can take others’ evaluation of us with a grain of salt.

Enterprise 2.0: Start broad with many conversations – then find champions to take a narrow & harder-driving approach. FastForward

@juneholley: Emergence and management

Yes, it is certainly true that the role of managers is probably exaggerated (with their pay). But the project of changing management is unnecessary. Over-managed firms will self-destruct, possibly at great cost to themselves and others, simply because managers have to be paid for and management that is not necessary simply makes a firm unwieldy, inefficient and unprofitable.

@David_A_Eaves: The world is not flat, it’s walled & non-integrated

@CharlesHGreen: “It’s not plagiarism, it’s mixing.” Our changing mores on how to think about who owns content. NYTimes – “There’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity,” said Ms. Hegemann in a statement released by her publisher after the scandal broke.

@gsiemens: “I have not found a SINGLE school that shows ANY evidence of using technology to transform teaching and learning”. The Good Morrow

Teacher roles in networks = Amplifying; Curating; Wayfinding; Aggregating; Filtering; Modelling; Persistent Presence. [A similar perspective would be that the Teacher/Instructor role in networks is supporting personal knowledge management PKM] – Connectivism

@itsthomas RT @avinashkaushik “You don’t blog to be known. You blog to be knowable.” – @hughmcguire

@JPBarlow Information is free. Experience is expensive.

Born in a storm

2010-02-19 by Harold Jarche

Six years ago, on 19 February 2004, states of emergency were declared in Nova Scotia and PEI after a prolonged blizzard, later named White Juan, dumped as much as 95 centimetres of snow. Many roads were impassable, blocked with snow drifts of up to 4 metres.

Another event in the local area received significantly less press – I started this blog on 19 February 2004:

This is where I post my thoughts and comments on ideas, events or other writings that are of a professional interest to me. Current areas of interest include social networking applications, like blogs, wikis and the use of RSS feeds, which is one reason why I have this blog; to practise what I preach. I’m also interested in the use of open source software platforms for learning. The development and nurturing of communities of practice online is another area of applied research that interests me.
My previous blog is still available as an archive.

I’d like to thank, once again, all of the people who have helped me on the sense-making journey enabled by the medium of blogging. The ability to publish anything at anytime has been not only empowering but enlightening. I have learned so much from so many people, especially other bloggers, and I truly appreciate all the comments added to my own, often half-baked, thoughts.

Informal Learning: “mission critique”

2010-02-17 by Harold Jarche

My latest article, Informal Learning: mission critical (en français Apprentissage Informel: Mission critique ) has just been published on the Collaborative Enterprise (#eCollab) site.

My interest in informal learning has grown with my experiences online. We now have a wide array of cheap and plentiful platforms for informal learning – blogs, wikis, social bookmarks, podcasts, social networks, micro-blogs. Digital networks mean that we are no longer limited to reading what has been formally published or talking only to our limited social circle. We can now engage in much larger conversations, as an individual, a member of a group, or within an organization. Ignoring, or blocking, ways to learn informally online would be like handicapping every employee’s cognitive abilities.

I have several articles posted on eCollab now, some new and some re-posted. This has been a great opportunity to review and update my articles as well as get them translated. My colleague, Thierry deBaillon is doing an amazing job with the translations. Drop by the eCollab site (in perpetual Beta of course) and please join us in a cross-cultural idea laboratory to exchange perspectives with experts and practitioners. You will also find my latest interview with Jay Cross.

Sensing and Thinking

2010-02-16 by Harold Jarche

Tim Kastelle (a great source of knowledge on innovation) discusses how it’s better to have a good idea than a large network to fire off any old idea. Good ideas have better acceleration.

This is an important innovation lesson as well. We don’t need more ideas, we need better ideas. In many ways this is a stock and flow problem – if we only focus on stocks of ideas, we’re less able to get them connected to people. We need to think about our idea flow. As the story of these two posts illustrates, the quality of an idea has a lot to do with how well it flows through our networks. It is yet another example of the greater importance of quality, not quantity.

The notion of aggregating/filtering/connecting for innovation is one that I have looked at for personal knowledge management. I have revised this to Seek/Sense/Share in my quest to find a good metaphor/model to introduce PKM.

We can seek out (aggregate) all the sources of information on any subject and share them with the world, but if we don’t make sense of them, they’re worthless.

The narrow point of the hourglass is where less gets through, it’s under greater pressure and it’s what makes the act of sharing valuable – our special context.

PKM isn’t just collecting and filing bits and pieces of information for later retrieval. There is an ongoing sense-making process that, through practice, develops cognitive skills. It’s knowledge management, not information or document management.

Learning Flow: unfrozen

2010-02-15 by Harold Jarche

Not only is e-mail where knowledge goes to die (according to Luis Suarez) but PDF’s are where entire articles go to die. This is a re-publication of an article I wrote that was originally published in April 2006 for ADETA, but is no longer available on their website. Considering the subject matter, and my comment that was published with the article, it’s a bit ironic.

—

Author’s Note: In developing this article, I have realized how limited the print medium is, especially when transferring what was originally a series of blog posts to create the basis of what is written here. Added hyperlinks are now more natural to me than using the APA format, which I have used for many years, but I now view as a relic of a bygone era. What originally flowed is now just a piece of stock. As a blog post [https://jarche.com/2006/01/old675/] this article built on previous posts and was open to comments and additions. With this article, it seems as if the conversation, and my learning process, have been frozen in time.

—

Learning Flow

The ubiquitous digital content found on the Web today is the raw material that younger generations especially are using to create unique perspectives on popular culture. One of the new evolutions in the digital content area is the mashup. “A mashup is a website or web application that seamlessly combines content from more than one source into an integrated experience … via a public interface or API” (Mashup, 2006). The Creative Commons, an organization promoting flexibility in copyright laws, even has a special license for these types of media., called Sampling (http://creativecommons.org/license/sampling/). New Web 2.0 technologies like blogs, wikis, podcasts and video blogs, combined with the availability of digital content, have changed those who were previously consumers of information into co-creators. Apple Computer’s famous marketing tag line of “Rip, Mix, Burn” can become “Construct, Deconstruct, Reconstruct” when put into a web-based learning context. The learner is able to interact with the learning media in a way never possible with the print medium.

Let’s take a look at how digital media may be changing the field of instructional design, a technology with its roots in the Second World War and the need to quickly train thousands of personnel.

Digital Media Types According to Lefever

Business blog consultant Lee Lefever has defined two distinct types of digital media – stock and flow (Lefever, 2005).

Stocks = Archived, Organized for Reference (e.g. web site, database, book, voice mail)

Flows = Timely & Engaging (e.g. radio, speeches, e-mail, blogs)

Interacting with Digital Media

Lefever specifically comments on the changes that are happening within television. TiVo (TV on demand) is changing the television medium from one of flow (and therefore engaging) to one of stock (and therefore of less value). He also says the reason blogs are so popular at this time, with over 30 million on the Internet, is because they allow flow.

Consider the whole notion of digital content in education. Stock is like product – it has a shelf life and over time its value is reduced. In education you need flow to provide value (context), enabled through social interaction. For instance, MIT’s open courseware initiative (http://ocw.mit.edu ) makes the stock, in the form of course content, available for free, but, you have to pay to participate in the flow (class membership and a degree from MIT). Flow keeps the learning conversations current for the changing needs of learners.

Will Richardson, an educational blogger, has discussed the changing needs of learners in a networked world (Richardson, 2005)

For instance, now that we have access to people and knowledge, learning is ‘network creation’ and that we can learn through ‘collaborative meaning making’. And the idea that we no longer need to learn everything in ‘advance of need’ resonates strongly with Brown and Hagel’s idea of push vs. pull learning [where learners become networked creators of knowledge], that we can pull information from a source when we need it, not have it pushed upon us in case we need it.

Impact on Instructional Design

Because the Web allows anyone to connect with everyone, as well as provide immediate access to information, it is an environment more suited to just-in-time learning (e.g. performance support tools) than for linear academic or training courses. Courses are stock, and learning on the Web is moving from stock to flow. I think that there will be a rapid decline in online course development as better models of web-based collaboration and just-in-time knowledge are developed. As online information and knowledge in all fields continues to expand, it will be more and more difficult to design a traditional course following instructional design methodologies that stands the test of time.

Another issue is finding, controlling, and updating the ever increasing amount of digital resources. Relatively in-depth studies do not give us answers on how to control all of the learning stock that is being created. The UK’s JISC Pedagogical Vocabularies Project recently released two reports and a series of recommendations on structuring learning content for the web but was only able to recommend more study of the field (JISC, 2005). The reality is that the field is expanding too quickly for us to capture and re-use the objects that we create.

In this environment of increasing digital information, more control will not address our information management needs. After perusing the 121 pages of the two JISC reports, I came away with the feeling that trying to control chaos is a losing game. My suggestions for dealing with learning stock are:

use the simplest of basic structures, such as the Resource Description Framework (RDF) [Standards built on RDF describe logical inferences between facts and how to search for facts in a large database of RDF knowledge – http://www.rdfabout.net/quickintro.xpd ],
build better search into online learning applications (try to be like Google),
only build taxonomies, ontologies and controlled vocabularies based on a specific user need, not “just-in-case”,
give learners and facilitators more tools to manage their information (tags, tagclouds, smart search, etc), and
focus on tools to surf the chaos, not control it.

In learning, you could say that much of the flow is really communication. It is through communication, often conversation, that we attempt to make meaning. Dave Pollard has developed a table that compares several communications methods – written, audio, video, live – as to their cost, impact, value and cost/benefit (Pollard, 2006). This is a good decision support tool for learning environment designers to consider before creating educational media, and as Pollard says, it’s open to revision.

Pollard also lists his principles of human learning preferences

People like information conveyed through conversations and stories because the interactivity and detail gives them context, not just content, and does so economically.
People hate talking heads, and are increasingly intolerant of them.
People no longer have the opportunity for serendipitous learning and discovery — everything they read and learn is narrow, focused, bounded, and the tools they are given in their reading and research reinforce this blinkered approach to learning. The consequence is the intellectual equivalent of not eating a balanced diet — a malnourished mind.
People do not know how to do research, or even search, effectively. They think these two things are the same, which they are not, and they have never been trained to do either properly. It’s a good thing the search engines are so smart, because our use of them is mostly dumb.
People search as a last resort. They prefer to ask a real person for what they want to learn or discover, because it’s faster and the answer is more context specific. And if there is a single good browsable resource on their subject of interest, readily at hand, and they have the time, they will usually prefer to browse that resource rather than looking at a bunch of disconnected, often irrelevant, search engine matches. (Pollard, 2006)

Stories are an excellent example of learning flow. For millennia, humans have learned through stories. Pollard’s listed preferences also indicate that learners need better tools, such as tag clouds [a visual depiction of content descriptors used on a website with more frequently used words depicted in a larger font], to enable serendipitous learning (Point #3) and that better built-in search is critical for finding good learning resources (Points #4 & #5).

These principles support the idea that we should put more effort into contextualizing online learning and less on cataloguing information and learning objects (Point #1). Instead of building more stock, learning professionals should concentrate on enabling flow. Having a lot of meticulously catalogued and tagged Stock (learning objects) is of little value without the contextual Flow (conversations & stories). There is lots of stock to choose from, and with Creative Commons licensing, more being created that is simple and easy to use for learning design. So, let the learning flow.

References

JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) Pedagogical Vocabularies Project, Retrieved 24 March 2006 from http://www.jisc.ac.uk/elp_vocabularies.html

Lefever, L. (2005). Re-introduction to stocks and flows in online communication. Retrieved March 23, 2006 from Common Craft web site http://www.commoncraft.com/archives/000985.html

Mash-up (web application hybrid). (2006). Retrieved March 23, 2006 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mashup_%28web_application_hybrid%29

Pollard, D. ( 2006). The economics of communication and effective learning. Retrieved March 23, 2006 from http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2006/01/17.html#a1409