Work is learning. Learning is the work.
My next Personal Knowledge Management online workshop is scheduled for 11-22 June 2012. PKM is also one of the topics for our social learning Summer Camp during July/August 2012. Here is a 10 minute video that covers PKM and gives an introduction to the workshop. It should help in deciding if this workshop is for you. Feel free to ask any questions. The last two workshops fostered some good conversations and I look forward to this next one.
Here are some of the observations and insights that were shared via Twitter this past week.
@gapingvoid – “Marketing is not mathematics. There are no solutions, only experiments.”
@gapingvoid – “I think Twitter alone is now a bigger cultural force than Hollywood; a fact the old cultural elite isn’t quite ready for.”
@RalphMercer – “the 4 horsemen of technology adoption: trust, curiosity, leadership and culture”
The Automattic (WordPress) company creed starts with “I will never stop learning“- by @photomatt
I will never stop learning. I won’t just work on things that are assigned to me. I know there’s no such thing as a status quo. I will build our business sustainably through passionate and loyal customers. I will never pass up an opportunity to help out a colleague, and I’ll remember the days before I knew everything. I am more motivated by impact than money, and I know that Open Source is one of the most powerful ideas of our generation. I will communicate as much as possible, because it’s the oxygen of a distributed company. I am in a marathon, not a sprint, and no matter how far away the goal is, the only way to get there is by putting one foot in front of another every day. Given time, there is no problem that’s insurmountable.
@johnstepper – “Every single bank I know recognizes that their collaboration solutions are inadequate”
When it comes to sharing information, banks are conflicted. They aim to enforce “need to know” policies and “only use bank devices for work” policies. Yet they also want to break down the silos and discover more cross-selling opportunities.
Which is it? Well, it’s all of the above. Yet, the combination of old tools combined with restrictive policies leads to a set of incoherent, inconsistent, and ineffective controls.
@MarionChapsal – Anyone Can Cook, says Chef Gusto. Can Anyone Present?
I believe, like Professor Max Atkinson and like Chef Gusto, that anyone can learn to make delicious and yummy presentations!
Organizational Hierarchy: Adapting Old Structures to New Challenges – by @orgnet
The U.S. government is currently facing a dual problem in the intelligence community:
improve accuracy — WMD in Iraq?
improve agility — stop terror attacks
One of the solutions being discussed is adding a new formal position to the intelligence community. This new box would be an ‘intelligence czar’ to which all other intelligence leaders and their agencies would report. The thinking behind this proposed solution is for there to be one aggregation point for all intelligence. Node 017 in Figure 2 represents this new position.
@tomspiglanin – On using Twitter & URL shorteners
The best practice then seems simple. Paste a link directly into a native Twitter application to share it. If a blog site has a Tweet button that goes directly to Twitter with no additional link shortening/tracking (like the one immediately below), that’s essentially the same. At a minimum, post only a full link using your app or link shortener of choice.
Larry Lessig on Facebook, Apple, and the Future of Code – via @RossDawson
Much worse (and more frustrating) are the easy problems which the government also can’t solve, not because the answer isn’t clear (again, these are the easy problems) but because the incumbents are so effective at blocking the answer that makes more sense so as to preserve the answer that makes them more dollars. Think about the “copyright wars” — practically every sane soul is now focused on a resolution of that war that is almost precisely what the disinterested souls were arguing a dozen years ago (editor’s note: abolishing DRM). Yet the short-termism of the industry wouldn’t allow those answers a dozen years ago, so we have had an completely useless war which has benefited no one (save the lawyers-as-soldiers in that war). We’ve lost a decade of competitive innovation in ways to spur and spread content in ways that would ultimately benefit creators, because the dinosaurs owned the lobbyists.
Stephen Hart has a good series of quotes on informal and social learning on his website. Sometimes the right quote gets the message across faster than a long explanatory paragraph.
For several years, there has been a rule-of-thumb, called “90-9-1”, that 90% of online participation in groups/communities consists of “lurkers” or more politely, “passive participants”, and only 1% are active creators. Jacob Nielsen’s 2006 post on Participation Inequality provides a good overview of this phenomenon.
All large-scale, multi-user communities and online social networks that rely on users to contribute content or build services share one property: most users don’t participate very much. Often, they simply lurk in the background.
In contrast, a tiny minority of users usually accounts for a disproportionately large amount of the content and other system activity.
A recent BBC survey of 7,500 people shows significantly different results.
Here we see that passive lurkers make up only 23% of participants; active (intense) participants have increased to 17%; and there is now an “Easy” group in the middle who, “ … respond largely to the activity of others. This includes replying, ‘liking’ and rating, all activities where there’s little effort, exposure or risk.”
Perhaps the most interesting finding is that many early adopters, those who used to be active online, are dropping out and are classified as “passive”. I’m not sure if they are actually dropping out or have just moved on to other media and communities.
One conclusion I would make is that in 2012 it is now easier to get people engaged in online participation, whether for work or pleasure. This is the Facebook effect, which I have noticed since the service became mainstream. With a concrete model of what a social network looks like, people can more easily understand online communities. Of course, there comes a saturation point which many of us have faced as we add social networks to our lives. The YASNS effect [“Yet Another Social Networking Service” ~ Clay Shirky] is also becoming ubiquitous.
If nothing else, this report indicates that social media are making people more social online. The medium is the message, or so it seems.
The five informal learning methods described in yesterday’s post on Learning in the Workplace have one thing in common. They are all relatively simple.
Most of today’s larger companies have a complicated structure. Over time, to enable growth and efficiencies, more processes have been put in place. New layers of control and supervision continue to appear, silos are created, and knowledge acquisition is formalized in an attempt to gain efficiency through specialization. As companies get bigger, internal growth and innovation reach a tipping point, and companies rely on mergers and acquisitions to maintain the illusion of growth.
But knowledge, and the acquisition of new knowledge, are still key factors for innovation and effectiveness. To compensate for its complicated processes, the enterprise attempts to shift to another paradigm, and tries to become a learning organization, putting significant effort into training. Unfortunately, training is often not the right solution.
Today’s large, complicated organizations are now facing increasingly complex business environments that require agility in simultaneously learning and working. Typical strategies of optimizing existing business processes or cost reductions only marginally influence the organization’s effectiveness. Faster evolving markets challenge the organization’s ability to react to customer demand. Decision-making becomes paralyzed by process-based operations and chains of command and control; thereby decreasing agility. Training, as “the” solution to workplace learning needs, fails to deliver and then gets marginalized, often being the first department to have its budget cut.
Organizations (and training departments) need to understand complexity, instead of simply increasing complication. This lack of understanding is a major barrier to adopting social business concepts and practices. We should always take into consideration that people can handle complexity much better than our constructed systems can.
We need to think of organizations as parts of Value Networks.
We need to move away from shareholder value and become client-focused
We need to base growth on cultivating ecosystems, not the illusion of mergers and acquisitions.
We need to think of knowledge acquisition and sharing as social.
We need to constantly develop emergent practices.
All of these changes can be started by doing a few simple things. As with Lego bricks, using a single unifier (the pin size) we can create an infinite variety of solutions. The examples of how to support informal learning do not require expensive technology or detailed needs analyses. They can be implemented quickly and modified over time. For too long our organizations have suffered from the disease of complication. It’s time to simplify.
Jane Hart asked readers “how regularly are you “learning” in the workplace?” Here are the top five ways that people learn, with my comments below on how this can be facilitated in the organization, either by management or the learning support group. Notice that these are all informal. The more formal methods, like courses, ranked much lower on the survey results.
Since email is the number one method of keeping up to date, find ways to make it easier or replace it with a world without email. Using internal blogs for any multi-recipient email is a start. That way it’s visible, in one permanent place, with all the comments attached.
Create space for people to talk. Regular company coffee breaks can be supplemented with white boards or flip charts to encourage knowledge sharing. Take pictures of what’s going on and post them. Photos can encourage conversation. Small nooks with comfortable seating invite conversations. Changing office layout can change behaviours and even encourage inter-departmental conversations.
“At Pixar, east of San Francisco, [Steve] Jobs oversaw the design of the new building. Because the software jockeys worked in one area and the marketing folks worked in another and so forth, he decided to put the bathrooms in a central atrium. That way, employees had to run into each other each day.”
Point out good reading resources. Aggregate learning resources and get input on the best sources, as we have done with Working Smarter Daily. Use social bookmarks to share what you’re reading.
Put together resources on how to search. You may be surprised how few people know how to search effectively. For example: Compfight for images; GoogleGuide; Tools for Search; Four Ways to Search the Social Web.
Participate in and recommend social learning communities that meet the needs of your organization. If you don’t have any private social networks, try some out, like Yammer or Socialcast.
These are all relatively simple and fairly inexpensive things that can be done to support workplace learning. It’s amazing how many Learning & Development departments do not get involved in these types of activities. Not supporting active, informal workplace learning will just make the formal training function even less relevant.
“The central change with Enterprise 2.0 and ideas of managing knowledge [is] not managing knowledge anymore — get out of the way, let people do what they want to do, and harvest the stuff that emerges from it because good stuff will emerge. So, it’s been a fairly deep shift in thinking about how to capture and organize and manage knowledge in an organization.” — Andy McAfee
One of my earlier blog posts is still online, which I stumbled upon this week, much to my surprise.
Note: Nine years ago I was warning how production jobs were leaving Canada and getting outsourced. Deep conversations about R&D in this Province never materialized though. The industry was much too focused on “jobs”, which were subsidized by the government. One of the few large eLearning R&D projects in the province just finished last year. The private sector partner is an Ontario company and no further R&D is happening in New Brunswick.
I later shifted to using Blogger (WordPress had just been created in 2003) with a link off my website. It was easier than trying to manage a blog by myself.
Note: It’s interesting that the whole learning objects discussion seems to have disappeared from the mainstream. MOOC’s are the current educational hot topic. I have also moved on, doing much less work in the educational sector and now more focused on integrating learning into the enterprise workflow.
My self-hosted blog started in 2004 using the Drupal CMS and I later switched to WordPress, which made it much easier to manage. Drupal was too much for a mere blog.
Hosting my own blog was one of the best decisions I ever made. Using WordPress was fortuitous, as Automattic is probably the best internet company there is. Best in the sense of supporting its greater community. Best in “not being evil”. The company is doing a very good job of making the Web a better place.
Blogging has provided me with a medium for self-expression and self-publication and a unique medium to reflect on almost a decade of work. Thanks to all those people who believed enough in blogging to write code that works! Many of us really appreciate it.
Many people like to share things online. Twitter is full of links to other websites. For a long time you needed to use URL shorteners to ensure you stayed within Twitter’s 140 character limit. There are now many to choose from, including open source and full-service analytics. Now Twitter has its own URL shortener – t.co – that converts every link that is shared. This is so Twitter can analyze all of this sharing and then sell the aggregated information.
One problem with using a third-party URL shortener with Twitter is that you are adding another potential point of failure in the link. I now copy & paste the full URL into Twitter, and it auto-shortens the link. There is only one potential point of failure and people can see the original URL as ALT text. This is user-friendly and respectful to readers.
Many people like to analyse what happens with their online activity and use tracking tools. For example, if your site exports its RSS feed using something like Google’s Feedburner, then the link people click on in their aggregators has extra information attached; so you can be tracked. I think it’s very rude to pass on these kinds of links and I always clean these URL’s before sharing them. All you need to do is delete everything after the question mark (in bold):
… tryingtotrackyou.com/?utm_source=feedburner …
I use Google Analytics on this site and understand why people want to see their social media traffic. However, it is easy for users to block these services, just like using pop-up blockers. My RSS feeds are clean and I provide a full-feed so I don’t force people to come to my site to read an article, just so I can increase my traffic. I think it’s important to share as openly as possible. I appreciate full feeds and clean URL’s as a reader.
Recently I have noticed another layer of complication being imposed by those who share links. Not only are tracking URL’s used, but these links go to another third-party site, like paper.li or tumblr.com which usually add no additional context for the reader. Often they are just clippings of the original website so the reader has to find the link to the original to read the complete article. All of these services are adding additional points of failure. If these services go down, as many do, then the chain is broken.
My intention with this post is to explain why it’s important to understand some of the technical aspects of how the web is working so we can do what people do best – be social. Please don’t be unintentionally anti-social. I would also be interested if there are any other common anti-social online practices that should be stopped.
Etiquette at the Ball for the Victorians of London Society
Here are some of the observations and insights that were shared via Twitter this past week.
@birgittaj – “Fascism should rightly be called Corporatism, as it is the merger of corporate and government power. ~ Benito Mussolini”
HCI : “more than 50% of line managers believe that shutting down the L&D function would have no impact on employee performance!”
Too many training departments have become mere “order takers,” responding to requests for training by harried but ill-informed managers who believe that training is the solution to every kind of performance problem. (Managers probably don’t really believe that, but ordering training is easier than tackling the real issues.) I call this the “McDonald’s Clerk” approach to training; take the order and, at most, see if they want fries with it.
Governance in a Networked World : SNA is an 80+ year old science but has been largely ignored by the social analytics community.
Now there may be good reasons for this. Some of the language is frankly impenetrable for the newcomer. The SNA measures can be quite complex and as with traditional statistics, need to be applied with care. That said there is clearly an opportunity here to build a bridge between the current social analytics practice to the more sophisticated but far more powerful world of SNA. It will require some careful translation of the language and some very selective use of the measures, but the potential I believe is worthy of a genuine 2.0 label.
Humans were not born to read – The brain has to be rewired in order to perform this newfangled skill – via @anniemurphypaul
“Reading is a cultural invention,” [Dr. Guinevere] Eden said. “There’s nothing designed in the brain to make us readers. Reading has only been around for 4,000 years, maybe a little longer. There are no systems in place from an evolutionary perspective designed for reading.”
@dpontefract – Analysis: Coursera, EdX & Udacity
There is the possibility that edX and Coursera in particular are using these non-credentialed courses as loss leaders. (see the FAQ of edX – no Harvard or MIT recognition comes with a completed course nor are any credits issued) If the courses are free, and they lead to nothing more than a certificate of completion (affiliated by no university whatsoever) students may want an actual official degree or designation from one of the Academic institutions at some point for their efforts. Do you really think Harvard is simply going to give away their crest for free? MIT? Princeton? Highly unlikely. I see these projects as opportunities to upsell fee-based programs and degrees that otherwise might not have occurred due to the lack of a sales channel.
@sjgill – Do you need a CLO?
The unintended consequence has been to reinforce the notion that work and learning are separate and that one has higher value than the other when, in fact, the success of the organization depends on continuous learning. To break out of this mental model, companies should stop doing things that appear to centralize responsibility for learning. Don’t put all the emphasis on a course catalogue and don’t hire a CLO.
Note the XKCD cartoon’s Alt Text – “Saying ‘what kind of an idiot doesn’t know about the Yellowstone supervolcano’ is so much more boring than telling someone about the Yellowstone supervolcano for the first time.“