Knowledge Transfer

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After seven years, my business has taken another turn, as one would expect from a life in perpetual Beta. Starting tomorrow I will be spending a good part of my time supporting research at Mount Allison University. I have accepted a term contract as Knowledge Transfer and Partnerships Officer in Research Services. It’s a very interesting role and I’m looking forward to branching out of information and learning technologies and working with life sciences, among other fields. The work is full-time (though not by freelancer standards) and then turns to half-time. It’s like a working sabbatical for me. There’s even paid vacation time – I have not taken a vacation in ten years.

Jarche Consulting will continue as a business and I will still blog, but probably less frequently. There are over 1,700 existing posts here for anyone to peruse. I also intend to discuss issues around technology and knowledge transfer in the context of higher education. You can expect more knowledge management type discussions. This will definitely be a learning experience and I look forward to expanding my network and my knowledge.

With less time to concentrate on my own consulting, and business development, I will focus on working with my colleagues at the Internet Time Alliance.

Let me now officially add the disclaimer that the views expressed here are my own and do not reflect the views of any past or current employers or clients.

One interesting point: my e-mail address will be the same one I had a decade ago while at the Centre for Learning Technologies.

What tools should we learn?

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The LCB question this month is, What Tools Should we Learn, or:

The question is really about the specific tools that would make sense to learn today in order to be a valuable eLearning professional in 2015?

I’m going to start with a broad definition of tools, in the spirit of  The Educated Mind: How cognitive tools shape our understanding, an excellent read and highly recommended. I believe it is important for everyone, especially those in teaching or training roles, to develop critical thinking skills. My post on critical thinking in the organization, explains this in more detail.

As this image shows (click to expand), there are many web tools that can help develop critical thinking.

I would suggest that a cognitive web toolbox should be comprised of at least one tool from each category. There are many tools not listed, so explore and ask others for recommendations. Find and master tools that allow you to observe and study your field, participate in conversations that  push your understanding, challenge your assumptions, evaluate others’ arguments, and make tentative opinions that in turn will be challenged. The key is to be engaged in your learning and in your profession and web tools are all about connecting.

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Tony also asked that suggested resources be provided, so here are some, copied from our Work Literacy Ning site (2008), that is in danger of getting bumped off the Net due to Ning’s new pricing policy. Thanks to Michele Martin for writing a significant portion of this.

Social Bookmarks

Perhaps the simplest way to start sharing organisational knowledge is with social bookmarks. Many people still have their list of Bookmarks/Favourites in their web browser, but when they’re not at their computer these links aren’t accessible. Enter the social bookmark.

Social bookmarks are web sites that let you create an account in order to save web pages. They differ from those on your browser in that 1) they’re accessible from anywhere; 2) you can clip a piece of the page for reference; 3) you can add categories (a.k.a. tags); 4) you can search your bookmarks; and 5) you can share your bookmarks with others.

The most widely used social bookmarking service is Delicious, which we will focus on this week.

One advantage of social bookmarks is that they don’t require the IT department’s permission to use. You can start sharing what you find interesting/important with your team or section without any new technology other than a web browser and access to the Internet. You’ll also find that you will be sending a lot fewer e-mails saying, “hey, check this out”. By creating your own “tag” you can have everyone finding information about competitors or new trends. A tag such as “ABC123? can be used by everyone to identify something for a specific project, and then you can search for that tag and the system will show you what everyone has found.

As you continue to use social bookmarks you will also see others who have bookmarked similar items and then follow their links to show even more interesting stuff in your field of interest. The more you share, the more you learn.

Harold uses social bookmarks for everything except some password-protected sites, like his bank. He also will set up a new category for a client if it can help communicate better.

If you want to keep your bookmarks away from prying eyes, you’ll have to mark all your posts as private. Another option, if you want to share within your organisation, would be to use an open source social bookmarking system and bring it inside your company’s firewall, but that would take some cooperation from the IT department. An example of an OS social bookmarking application is Ma.gnolia.

Tags, Tagging and Folksonomies

Dave Weinberger says that in a digital world, “everything is miscellaneous” in the book of the same name . A key difference between physical and digital objects is that digital objects can be in more than one place. For example, in a digital catalogue, you can find a sink in the hardware section or the kitchen section. The real object can only be in one location but the digital object can be linked in many areas at once.

Many computers still use file folders for classifying and storing digital files. The object can only be in one folder, and probably not the one you think it is in. However, that isn’t really necessary, and anyone who uses GMail knows that you can add as many tags as you want to an e-mail. All you e-mail are stored in one big “miscellaneous” bin, but you sort your correspondence by adding descriptive tags like – work, client A, jan08 or whatever you want.

Tags are labels that are used to describe things. Sometimes we use tags that are controlled by someone else, like the “wlning” tag that we’ve decided to use here. If all tags are controlled then we’re probably using a taxonomy. If each person uses their own self-defined tag, then the aggregated results that emerge are called folksonomies. Delicious is one big folksonomy. There’s more information about taxonomies, ontologies, folksonomies and thesauri at SmartLogic. Incidentally, Harold found this page in August and had bookmarked it on Delicious. To find it again, he just searched for the word “taxonomy” in his bookmarks and found this page, which was tagged – Library2.0; Learning; and student_resources. You may also want to check out this article, Tags and Folksonomies, Why Should You Care?.  An excellent screencast to watch on this topic is Knowledge Sharing with Tags, which describes some of the benefits of social bookmarking and tagging.

Blogs

Jay Cross, CEO of Internet Time Group and author of Informal Learning, likens a blog to a camera. It puts the world in a new perspective. Everything that the user encounters becomes a potential picture, or in the case of a blog, a potential post.

Bloggers continually search for interesting information they can post. When they post information, they must synthesize that information, formulate additional questions, contrast and make sense of differing viewpoints, and identify patterns and trends. Karyn Romeis, a learning solutions designer at Capita, a British professional services company, has been blogging for two years and finds that she gets tremendous value from it. “I’ve learned more from blogging in the past year than I learned in several years using other approaches,” she says.

Tracy Hamilton, an education assistant of organizational development at Southlake Regional Center in Newmarket, Canada, started blogging as the result of a conference a few months ago. She has a similar perspective. “Blogging is my main source of learning,” she says.

Part of the impact comes from the fact that a blog is public.  It raises the stakes much like having to do a presentation at a meeting or teaching in a classroom.  In fact, many of the same attributes of preparing and giving a classroom presentation apply to blogging.  Mark Oehlert, a well-known blogger who recently became the emerging technologies lead for Defense Acquisition University, “There is something that happens to a person when they hit that ‘publish’ button – you cross a threshold – you move from consumer to producer – you put your intellectual neck on the line and I really think that you aren’t the same person after that.”

Blogging is Networking

Blogs also act as a type of social networking tool.  Most people are familiar with social networking tools such as MySpace, Facebook or LinkedIn.  These tools aim to help people to connect and interact in a variety of ways, often based on a profile and personal communication.

Blogging also causes interaction and connection, but in a different and possibly more natural way.  Each time a blogger leaves a comment or links to another blogger’s post, they are having a conversation.  Over time, as the conversations continue, this leads to recognition and deeper relationships between the bloggers.  This is similar to content-based social networking that occurs in del.icio.us and Flickr, but blogging is based on a more open, fluid type of content and conversations.  Generally blogs also provide a more robust picture of the blogger through their continuous posts and conversation.  Using emerging tools such as MyBlogLog, bloggers can get to know who is visiting their blogs and who is in their community.

Once bloggers become connected, they often reach out to get help on a particular topic.  Karyn Romeis tells us, “It is amazing how unselfish bloggers are with what they know.  I am so convinced of the value of social networking that I am writing a dissertation on how it has transformed my professional practice.  Social networking has blurred the boundaries between work, play and learning, between corporate and academic, between formal and informal.”

This kind of help from a social network is invaluable.  Many workplace learning professionals find that building this network and having this sustained discussion allows them to discuss significant issues they face at their work in a way that’s not easy to duplicate through other avenues including face-to-face interaction.  Wendy Wickham, a medical applications trainer at George Washington University and a blogger since September 2006, started her blog because of several important projects, including an LMS implementation and some application upgrades.  Wendy says, “The folks in the learning blog space, including highly respected eLearning specialists and educators, have been incredibly supportive and provide valuable feedback.  When you are in the thick of the day-to-day – tight deadlines, resource constraints, and unsupportive environments – you can feel very isolated from what is happening with others.  Being involved with folks grappling with the same issues you are helps ease that isolation.”  Because of her blogging, Wendy was recently been invited to speak at a major conference.

It takes time to build up a social network using a blog, but it occurs naturally as part of the conversation.  Tracy Hamilton tells us, “You have to work at communicating with other people, asking questions, and responding to questions, but it is very much worth the effort.  The one thing I have really noticed and experienced about the blogging community is that everyone is extremely friendly, open and willing to share ideas and be mentors to one another.”  The process of connecting can be sped up by posting interesting questions, linking to other blogger’s posts, participating in activities such as the Learning Circuit Blog’s Big Question.  Of course, it’s also a good idea to get together with other bloggers at industry events.  There are rumors that bloggers like beer.

More Reading

I have my personal favorites on this topic such as (October 2006 Big Question – Should All Learning Professionals Be Blogging – (summary post) Top Ten Reasons to Blog and Not to Blog), but a great source is going to what people in this course have collected via social bookmarking:

How to become part of a blogging ecosystem (Lilia Efimova)

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Twitter

Learning & micro-blogging (Twitter)

Leading through turbulent times with PKM

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In what BP’s oil spill says about management today [dead link] the author talks about the need to deal with increasing complexity, concluding:

Navigating a business successfully through turbulent times requires the ability to deal with ambiguity, be resilient in the face of adversity, be authentic and have the innovative capacity to anticipate and respond to the unpredictable environment. Consequently, leading through permanent whitewater requires an ability to sense, make sense, decide and act quickly. It requires a sharp mind, humility and an openness to new experiences.

It’s what I call life in perpetual Beta and one way to deal with it is by developing a personal knowledge management process. Seek, Sense & Share in order to handle the complexity of the networked age. This isn’t a “nice-to-have”, optional approach to organizational learning. It’s a necessity. BP sure could use PKM at all levels.

Learning and forgetting

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Some things I learned via Twitter this past week.

Learning through Practice

@charlesjennings – ID – Instructional Design or Interactivity Design in an interconnected world?

We need designers who understand that learning comes from experience, practice, conversations and reflection, and are prepared to move away from massaging content into what they see as good instructional design. Designers need to get off the content bus and start thinking about, using, designing and exploiting learning environments full of experiences and interactivity.

@donaldclark – 10 techniques to massively increase retention

This is the classic ‘forgetting curve’ by Ebbinghaus, a fundamental truth in memory theory, totally ignored by most educators and trainers. Most fixed ’courses’ or ‘lectures’ take no notice of the phenomenon, condemning much of their effort to the world of lost memories. Most educational and training pedagogies are hopelessly inefficient because they fail to recognise this basic truth. Smart learners get it. They revise over a period, with regular doses to consolidate their memories.

Quotes of the Week

Abraham Lincoln: The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise — with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country. (Annual Message to Congress: 1862)

“Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.”-Howard Aiken; via @RudolfChristian

Lots about Facebook

@betchaboy “Freakin AWESOME post about the whole Facebook privacy debacle by Andrew Birch, A must read IMO”

@JaneBozarth “DH sat next to young family at ball game. He heard kid’s full name, school, and family secret password. They’re worried about Facebook privacy.”

WikiHow: How to Permanently Delete a Facebook Account via @lpgauthier

@zephoria “The privacy Machiavellis are masters of the bait and switch” by Chris Hoofnagle:

Privacy “messaging” is masking the actions and goals of companies such as Google and Facebook. These for-profit companies have business models that depend upon increasing the collection of personal information, yet they tell us that “privacy is important.” The real question is: How important?

and more

Trojan Mice: small, well focused changes, which are introduced on an ongoing basis in an inconspicuous way; via @charlesjennings

@vineetnayar “Structure of a family has transitioned from command and control. Why can’t that structure work in an organisation?” Star Organisation

“GRADUATE education is the Detroit of higher learning.” NYT op-ed piece. via @elatedca

Once more, across that chasm

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Geoffrey Moore’s analogy of “crossing the chasm” is that any new technology is quickly adopted by innovators and early adopters, but there is a chasm to cross in order to get the more pragmatic majority to adopt the new technology. For marketing, this is the real challenge – can the new product get widespread acceptance? In many cases the development costs can only be recovered if the majority purchase the goods or services.

I have referred to this model before and even tied it to Gladwell’s “tipping point” theory. My consulting work is mostly bridging the chasm:

  1. I am an early adopter myself, and use this experience to work with the early pragmatic majority. I also use a broader definition of technology; being the application of organized and scientific knowledge to solve practical problems. I spend much of my time watching the innovators, and
  2. I then determine which of their ideas and new technologies would make sense for my clients. To do this, I have to keep trying out new tools and processes in my own work.
  3. It’s a balancing act, being on the leading edge but not the bleeding edge.

In 2005 I wrote that these technologies were ready to cross the chasm:

  • Blogs (with some difficulties) & RSS
  • Workflow Learning (including wider acceptance of performance support instead of training)
  • Open Source

… and that these probably wouldn’t get across, yet:

A year later the use of blogs had exploded, while workflow learning had stalled and I noted that an understanding of the value of informal learning was catching on. Wikis were becoming more popular, especially those that replicated word processesors, like Writely, which was later purchased to become Google Docs, used ubiquitously today. There appeared to be a growing interest in natural enterprises and something to replace corporatism as a guiding model, and this continues, though too slowly for me.

In 2010 we’ve seen Twitter and micro-sharing cross the chasm, while virtual worlds, like Second Life seem to be floundering. Informal learning is being discussed throughout the profession, but in many cases it’s just lipstick on a pig. Mobile tools are poised for a major breakthrough, though more as performance support and knowledge management than courses online. In the next few years, the use of collaborative work technologies, such as Google Docs or Sharepoint, will grow, while stand-alone learning applications will see a decline.

I think the next big shift in training/elearning will be the integration of learning into work. As staff costs continue to increase and the economy sputters for several more years, companies will look for reductions that also improve effectiveness. Once companies pass on the word that their staff are learning without a training department the shift will happen quickly. Learning professionals won’t even be involved in these conversations. Come back in five years and see if I’m right.

Heads you win, tails you lose

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The Long Tail is one of the most commonly quoted models for business on the Internet:

The Long Tail or long tail refers to the statistical property that a larger share of population rests within the tail of a probability distribution than observed under a ‘normal’ or Gaussian distribution. This has gained popularity in recent times as a retailing concept describing the niche strategy of selling a large number of unique items in relatively small quantities – usually in addition to selling fewer popular items in large quantities. The concept was popularised by Chris Anderson in an October 2004 Wired magazine article, in which he mentioned Amazon.com and Netflix as examples of businesses applying this strategy. Anderson elaborated the Long Tail concept in his book The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More.

More money is made by creators at the head than at the tail, according to Kevin Kelly, via Chris Anderson:

In pocket #1 of the curve, Seth talks in terms of a creator of a work. In pocket #2 of the curve, he also talks in terms of the creator. But then when he gets to the long tail, he switches away from a creator, to talk in terms of an aggregator of other creators’ work. Why is that? What happens to the creator? The creator is dropped when we get to the long tail “pocket of profit” because the long tail is not profitable for the creator. It’s profitable only for the audience and aggregators.

According to Seth Godin, pocket #2 has some real potential:

The reason you can make money in the niche pocket is that it costs far less to compete here. First, because there’s less competition and the competition is less fierce, and second because it’s cheaper and easier to reach your target market because they’re choosing to pay attention.

After seven years as an independent working online and participating in online content creation, I am starting to wonder how much room there really is in pocket #2 and if it’s just a (very) short extension of pocket #1. Jaron Lanier in You Are Not a Gadget, says:

The people who are perhaps the most screwed by open culture are the middle classes of intellectual and cultural creation.  The freelance studio musician, the stringer selling reports to newspapers from warzones are both crucial contributors to culture. Each pays dues and devotes years to honing a craft. They used to live off the trickle down effects of the old system, and like the middle class at large, they are precious. They get nothing from the new system.

If you’re not one of the recognized leaders in your field, can you make a living online or are you just part of the long tail, valuable only to aggregators and their advertising revenues? As a content creator are you providing the fodder that lets Google, Facebook and YouTube earn huge market valuations? Will there be a middle class in the networked economy, or only heads & tails?

Amateurs, ideas and learning

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Here are some of the things I learned on Twitter this past week.

@nickcharney : “In a field that changes rapidly, there are no experts, only degrees of amateurs.”

[Which will make it even more difficult to formalize instruction]

The learning opportunity imbalance by Gary Wise

Jane Hart: The State of Learning in the Workplace Today (May Update) via @c4lpt

Implementing social media tools in formal courses will certainly help to improve workplace learning and adding in to the mix some “informal learning” will also help to supplement learning.

However to reinvent formal learning requires a re-think of the existing provision of formal learning, in particular providing more opportunities for collaborative learning, recognising the importance of user-generated content, and more relevant design of learning “solutions” for today’s learners.

But to go further and to transform learning requires a complete new understanding of the role of “learning” in an organisation. Adopting an integrated enterprise-wide approach to organisational learning such as this is not just about the technology, but will require a new mindset and new skillset – both for L&D and learners.

Upstreaming Conversations: Don’t seek thought leadership; figure out how to learn faster. via @stuarthenshall

In a world of rapid change, instant real-time updates and network effects, managing or marketing ‘thought leadership’ seldom puts runs on the board. It is only when the organization becomes more collaborative, more effective at asking better questions and more agile at interpretation and at finding direction that organizational performance begins to improve.

Empires of Ideas: 1. Generate ideas 2. Select & test ideas 3. Get ideas to spread. via @timkastelle

Consequently, if we’re going to build our own empires of ideas, we need great ideas, but more importantly, we need a method for processing and executing ideas. And we need to be able to get the ideas to spread.

Let’s talk about work

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Work today (and tomorrow) requires more creativity and less formulaic intelligence and it also requires less of “us”. That’s less of our dedicated, full-time attention, with contract work becoming the new normal:

Littler Mendelson, one of the largest employment law firms in the country, predicted in a report last year titled “The Emerging New Workforce” that 50 percent of new jobs that emerge after the recession will be contingent positions, and as a result “as high as 35 percent of the work force will be made up of temporary workers, contractors or other project-based labor.”

Full-time work has not been the ticket to the good life for several decades:

The prolonged period of economic prosperity that Canada has enjoyed resulted in a 72-per-cent increase in economic output between 1975 and 2005, growth that has continued since, it [the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives] noted.

The benefits of the growth, however, have not been reflected in workers’ paycheques, it added. “Canadians’ average real wages, which are wages adjusted for inflation, have not increased in more than 30 years.”

In a networked, knowledge-based economy where initiative, creativity and passion trump intellect, diligence and obedience; being “at” work 8 hours a day makes little sense. The Internet makes “time at work”, an antiquated notion. It also makes many of our traditional management and personnel policies irrelevant. The recession has only amplified this trend.

What can we do?

Most intelligent people know that there is no such thing as a job for life. Corporations have shown that loyalty to the enterprise does not work both ways. Organization should look at how they can structure to take advantage of these workplace changes. The first part is to stop thinking like a hierarchy, with titles and reporting relationships, and start framing the enterprise in terms of networks. Mapping value networks is a start, as is talking about social networks and supporting them through the use of social media. If you look at work differently and talk about it differently, then new conversations and attitudes will result.

Here are some ideas, for starters:

Abolish the organization chart and replace it with a network diagram.

Move away from counting hours, to a results oriented work environment

Encourage outside work that doesn’t directly interfere with paid work, as it will strengthen the network

Provide options for workers to come and go and give them ways to stay connected when they’re not employed. Build an ecosystem, not a monolith.

Plus ça change

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Tony Bates made these recommendations to the University of New Brunswick, “to foster further development of knowledge-based industries in the province”:

1. Greater incorporation of ICT and other 21st century skills (e.g. independent learning, problem solving) in a wider range of programs and subject disciplines.

2. A gradual move from almost entirely face-to-face courses in first year programs to hybrid or fully distance programs in the fourth year undergraduate and graduate programs, as well as develop more online non-credit certificate or diploma programs focused on the lifelong learning market.

3. Start gradually to redesign courses in this way on a program by program basis. Make sure the new programs are properly resourced (time for development + learning technology support).

4. Stop treating distance education courses as extra load, but integrate them into regular credit programming as part of a normal teaching load for instructors, perhaps supplemented with revenues from full cost recovery courses aimed at lifelong learners.

5. Look to partnership and consortia to leverage the development of online programs on an international basis.

6. Provide systematic and comprehensive training in pedagogy and educational technology for instructors scheduled to work on online programs.

7. Provide instructional and web designers to work in teams with instructors for the redesign of courses.

After reading this and seeing what advice they got from the west coast, I just had to dust off a (not successful) online learning strategy proposal that Rob Paterson and I submitted to UNB in 2008. Here are some highlights:

We see the objective of building a community of learners as the critical aspect of any future endeavour in online learning.
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In two years time, 2010, the web will be the principal place where most business, entertainment, and socializing will take place – learning will follow shortly – so by 2012 you will be a player or dead.
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The university can still grant a degree and the degree has a certain amount of societal value. The university can also offer a social space, but most kids don’t need 4 years of this.
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UNB wants to be a leader in online learning but there must be several reasons why the university is not a leader already. There is no competition in New Brunswick and little competition in the Atlantic provinces. One of the reasons for declining enrolment is demographics, as cited in the UNB Online Partnership document, and another is the lack of students outside the traditional age range. This age range is what business ventures call “low hanging fruit” and the model worked well when a university education was accessible, affordable and provided a decent return on investment. Given the rising cost of a university education and the declining perception of a bachelor’s degree, the traditional university business model has peaked.

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I respect Tony very much, but I do not believe that an incremental approach will work. However, it’s probably what the client wants to hear.

Work Shift

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Dan Erwin responded to my last post on the new reality of Automated and Outsourced work. Dan wrote: “There’s a thorough and masterful report that supports all your conclusions.  It’s the result of a study by the research group at the Dallas Fed in 2003, entitled, The Evolution of Work.”

The table in the report clearly shows how we are moving to an economy that values emotional intelligence, imagination and creativity. These data are almost a decade old, so just imagine how much further we are into the new economy.

This should have been a wake-up call to our training and education institutions in 2003. Notice that even the requirement for analytic reasoning is declining in the workplace. As the authors note:

In today’s world, companies and workers face the challenge of ascending the hierarchy of human talents. Workers are increasingly using those traits that make us truly human. Some jobs require imagination and creativity, including the ability to design, innovate and entertain. Other jobs rely on such social skills as conflict resolution, cooperation and even humor. Work is more likely to put a premium on the ability to inspire and motivate, a capacity social scientists call emotional intelligence.

Update: via the Creative Class Blog: Creativity ranks as the number one most important leadership quality for business success, according to a new study by IBM.