Work is learning. Learning is the work.
I’ve been blogging at AcademicInfo for the past month writing posts more focused on higher education or the issues that I think may be of interest to this audience. Karyn Romeis is also writing a series of book reviews. Drop by if you’re interested and feel free to suggest topics of interest. I intend to address some subjects that I may not have done on this blog. Subjects so far have been about business models for universities, social networks, blogging and literacy.
Sessions start tomorrow (Monday):
Come to Corporate Learning Trends and Innovations 2008 if you want to:
- participate in a stridently unaffiliated event (no Platinum sponsors here)
- discuss things you don’t find at commercial conferences (we’re indie)
- take part in an event that’s 100% free (because the web scales)
- join sessions anywhere with net access (this is entirely online)
- track emerging opportunities in learning (if it’s not at the forefront, it’s not allowed in)
- socialize online with peers and other participants (schmoozing encouraged!)
Don’t forget to join the community on the LearnTrends social networking site.
With the election over and Bill C-61 dying with the last Parliament, the government is once again looking at making changes to copyright law. In A Copyright Call to Arms published in the Globe and Mail this week, the authors call for consultation from all sides of this complex issue:
Ministers Clement and Moore have a singular opportunity to consult with Canadians to develop reforms that will be fair for both consumers and rightsholders and position Canada for success in the 21st century.
I’ve just finished reading Remix: Making art and commerce thrive in the hybrid economy by Lawrence Lessig and it should be required reading for all politicians involved in re-making copyright policy.
Lessig shows the differences between Read-Only (RO) and Read-Write (RW) cultures and how RO came to dominate in the 20th Century, while RW has been around for as long as humans have communicated with each other. An RW culture emphasizes learning. Lessig’s view is balanced and he does not call for the abolition of copyright but mostly for the removal of copyright protection from non-commercial uses. He uses US law to make his points, but much of what he says is applicable to other Common Law jurisdictions.
Perhaps the most damning indictment of current copyright laws is that they are making criminals out of an entire generation:
But the real failure of this war [on copyright violation] is the effect that this massive regulation has had on the basic integrity of our kids. Our kids are “pirates”. We tell them this. They come to believe it. Like any human, they adjust the way they think in response to this charge. They come to like life as a “pirate”. That way of thinking then bleeds. Like the black marketers in Soviet Russia, our kids increasingly adjust their behavior to answer a simple question: How can I escape the law?
It’s time to stop this madness and help our children become better citizens, not line the pockets of a few multinational corporations. Non-commercial copyright infringement should not exist and our educators should be leading on this issue. We don’t need special rights just for educational institutions, we need to encourage RW creativity for lifelong learning.
For further reading, see my bookmarks on copyright.
The Work Literacy online learning event is over and many of the participants are now at DevLearn08 and I might surmise that they’re connecting with some folks they met during the course.
Our learning community event spanned six weeks and had 766 registered users at the end. When Michele, Tony and I initially discussed the program, we expected perhaps sixty participants. However, the large size did not detract from the learning and was not a burden for the facilitators. First of all, we developed all activities for three levels of participation: Spectator, Joiner, and Creator. The majority fell into the first category and the Creators took on the role of facilitating where necessary. For me, a highlight was Paul Lowe’s live web presentation on his use of blogs for a Photo Journalism Master’s programme. It was good to see some early initiatives taken by the members, such as French language forum started by Stéphane Wattier. The Creators made it easier for all of us.
We decided to use Ning as the main course site because it gave us several tools in one application and it’s free, which fit in with our non-existent budget. The only missing application was a wiki, but we were able to add in a link on one of the main Tabs and connect with PBWiki. Interestingly, the wiki, which was supposed to be used to synthesize the previous weeks, was taken up by only a few people.
Participation ebbed and flowed, with 198 discussions on the Introduction forum. The first three weeks (Social Networks; Social Bookmarks; Blogs) also saw more activity on the Forums. A drop in participation may have been due to the length of the course. In my own case, I was much busier with work demands in the later weeks of the course.
So what did I learn or what was reinforced?
To find out what others thought about the course, read the comments on, Was this course successful. How do we know? [Dead link, as we didn’t take up Ning on their paid service option. See more post course notes here: Tools – Social Networking – Social Media & Learning]
The Centre for Learning Technologies was a hybrid organisation that was university-based, externally-focused and did both research and business consulting. In my three years at the CLT I was involved in about 40 projects and worked with a great team, especially in my first year with Tom Gram, the Director.
Tom moved on in 1999 and we’ve kept in touch, but much of his professional life has been behind the firewall. Well, he’s out on the WWW now and Gram Consulting has a blog. The focus is on “performance design”, and that is an area where there are fewer bloggers than in e-learning or Web 2.0.
So this blog is also for people who are in one way or another involved in the design of work processes and human systems that are at the heart of improving business performance in the modern workplace. That will include Organization Development Specialists, Human Performance Consultants, Business Mangers, Quality and productivity specialists and performance oriented learning specialists. Here’s my Word Map on topics that you will likely see in future posts on performance design.
Welcome to the blogosphere, Tom.
As Enterprise 2.0 initiatives continue to proliferate, I cannot see how the latent dissonance I perceive and have tried to articulate will be avoided. I think it will have to be addressed by using new design principles for knowledge work.
This is one of the conclusions that Jon Husband makes in Work Design – From Industrial to Networked Age Part 1, Part 2A, Part 2B. Jon talks about “vertical knowledge disrupted”:
Performance objectives, job assignments, compensation arrangements and bonus schemes are generally almost always predicated on causality derived from the vertical arrangements of knowledge and its use in planned and structured initiatives. As more and more knowledge work is carried out by people communicating and exchanging information using hyperlinks in social networks, where the places knowledge lives and that facilitate its routing to where it is needed, at a point in time, the vertical arrangements for guiding the flows of knowledge are disrupted, if not subverted. Weinberger’s most recent work, Everything Is Miscellaneous, is a beginning treatise on this subject.
I sat in a presentation of a talent management system last week and after being shown how skills could be categorized and people identified for progression, I had one question. How can you prepare for a job that does not even exist yet? Many of us are doing work that we would never have imagined one or two decades ago. How about professional blogger or podcaster? Imagine a talent management system in 1999 that was preparing junior journalists to become a newspaper’s full-time representative in Second Life. You cannot use an accountant’s rear view perspective to prepare for an unknown future. It is better to nurture a mix of people with a variety of skills, experiences and attitudes, much as nature does with ecosystems. A biological model trumps a mechanistic one in adaptation to change.
Picture: Knowledge work framework by Lilia Efimova
New design principles, from instructional development to job descriptions, are needed for our inter-networked society. I’ve started looking at a new design for the training department but redesign is needed everywhere. I think that more people are looking for new designs and are willing to try them out, if they can. The economic crisis may actually help bring about some needed change. So here’s a new job description to insert into all those talent management systems: work redesigner.
Derek Hatchard is organising a regional Blogger/Podcaster Dinner:
What: Casual get-together for bloggers and podcasters
When: Friday November 21, 6:45pm
Where: Joey’s Pizza and Pasta, 16 York St., Sackville, NB
Who: Anyone who produces content for a blog or podcast (audio or video)
Why: Just cuz
No presentations, no sponsors, just good food and conversation.
RSVP on Derek’s blog post or e-mail/DM him. He is also coordinating car pooling from Moncton.
If you get into town early, stop at the Bridge Street Café with free wi-fi. You may also want to check out the Craft Gallery at the visitor information centre (off the Main Street Exit) where local artisans have unique gifts for sale. The Owens Art Gallery and Fog Forest Gallery are also worth a visit. If you’re in town for a while, give me a call.
My keynote at SkillSoft’s Canadian Perspectives conference yesterday gave some advice to the training department and how it may need to change to meet the demands of a complex environment. Several people said that they found the talk interesting and I will take the notes and feedback to write a paper on the topic which I should publish in a couple of weeks. All references to this presentation are on my Delicious bookmarks.
During the day I attended some breakout sessions, mostly focused on advancements in SkillSoft’s product and service lines as well as a few customer case studies. The first presentation of the day covered three market shifts that the company sees as having an impact on its business: mobile devices; ubiquity of content; and talent shortages.
I also noticed a theme that learning content has to move outside the LMS. The LMS is perceived as an appropriate tool for tracking objects but learning activities are being pushed outside the LMS box. SkillSoft’s strategy is to use an open (not open source) architecture to plug into other systems with “portlets”, which are similar to the web widgits that you see on most blogs today. It all reminded me of a discussion I had with Mark Dowds at the Brandon-Hall conference last year. Mark knows information technology but was new to e-learning. After a few days of presentations, Mark told me he had finally figured out what an LMS is, “It’s just another widgit”. It looks like that’s the way this technology is going.
Last week I wrote about The Training Department in the 21st Century, part of a presentation I will be giving in Toronto on Thursday. This new model that I propose, which has its roots in knowledge management and wirearchy, is an attempt to take the theory and make some practical recommendations for those who have to do the day to day work.
The model is centered on Connecting and Communicating to enable knowledge flow in the organisation and is based on three processes:
Here are some specific recommendations that I’m putting forward for the “new” training department:
None of these require Web tools or techniques but they can all be enhanced by the Internet.
I was recently asked by a consultant to help develop an asset map for the local learning industry:
NRC-IIT [National research Council, Institute for Information Technology] and the Province of New Brunswick, via Business New Brunswick, are partnering to conduct two asset mapping projects. These asset maps will identify strengths, resources, and opportunities that exist within two key sectors in New Brunswick: Health/Life Sciences and Advanced Learning Technologies.
The goal is to develop a sound base of information to support the development of new strategic plans for both sectors. Additionally, the asset mapping projects will help to further forge connections between individuals, organizations, and institutions within these sectors and to provide a catalyst for investment and the formation of new collaborations.
I declined, stating that I had been involved in two such reports (1999, 2004) and that I didn’t feel like going through the process a third time. I had also put forth some recommendation on this blog in Rx for NB Learning in 2006.
The major recommendation made in 1999, while I was at the CLT, was that the Industry should move away from off-the-shelf content development and increase services such as performance improvement consulting and performance support solutions. This was ignored. In April 2002 the provincial government even purchased shares in Content Alive Inc. This company later became Vitesse Learning which closed in bankruptcy in 2007.
In 2004, I recommended to focus more on European markets and less on US ones. Instead, the government sponsored more US trade missions. I specifically recommended starting a new focus on a selected field such as open source for learning; performance technology or simulation & gaming. Open source would have been a good niche. Imagine if the province was now a centre of excellence for Moodle.
I have always seen the key to innovation being about people, especially educated, motivated and creative knowledge workers, who come from a wide variety of cultures and experiences. A diverse industry could capitalize on opportunities and markets throughout the world. Our province has home-grown, entry level skills in abundance but a major gap is business leadership. Generally speaking, the higher level business, technical and learning skills are in short supply, and these skills are necessary to create and grow companies. By focusing on making the province attractive for experienced individuals, the industry would be able to grow.
Finally, I think that a non-profit chaordic organisation (PDF), as recommended by Rob Paterson on the Fast Forward Blog, might be a better structure than the some of the models tried already. I hope that the asset map that is being developed will be published and that it will be made freely available for open discussion and even for remix.