CSTD Trading Post

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These are my notes and links for the Trading Post session I will be doing this afternoon at the CSTD Conference in Toronto.

Are training departments still necessary? Leveraging social networking, informal learning and e-learning are just a few ways to manage learning and training in the 21st century. Are traditional courses the best way to link learning with the business or to engage learners?

I’ll be giving the same talk three times as participants move from table to table to take in three of a possible 15 presentations. The discussion is based on what I posted on Increased Complexity Needs Simplified Design.  This is a shortened, and more focused, version of an online presentation I did for CSTD in March 2009.

Dealing with complexity is something that we all face and I’m currently reading Simplexity: Why Simple Things Become Complex (and How Complex Things Can Be Made Simple), which I’ll review as soon as I finish it. From the prologue:

There is a taxonomy of things that fool us every day and, in so doing, help the complex masquerade as the simple, and the simple parade as the complex.

Distinguishing between the two is never easy, and complexity science doesn’t pretend to have all – or even most – of the answers.

LearnTrends 2009

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The agenda has been set for LearnTrends 2009 (17-19 Nov 2009) and it looks extremely interesting. I will be giving a session on personal knowledge management and participating in a discussion with my colleagues at the re-branded Internet Time Alliance.

The main theme is convergence and topics include:

  • Reinventing organizational learning
  • Building a social learning environment
  • Microlearning
  • elearning outside the training box

Don’t forget that this 3 day global conference is absolutely FREE, with no vendor hype, so please join us.

Friday’s Finds #22

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This week’s finds on Twitter are all dedicated to education:

Testing:

Mark Federman: standardized curriculum and testing contribute to the deterioration of public education.

How grades replaced the teacher’s name: William Farish: The Worlds Most Famous Lazy Teacher. via @nwinton [the story by the student at the end of this article is worth a read]

Listening to the mainstream media and educators discuss the New Brunswick public education standardized test results was disheartening. I liken it to two obsolete institutions trying to prepare our society for life in the early 20th century. Here is CBC perpetuating the industrial myth

Literacy:

New Zealand Education Minister: “Digital literacy is no longer a novelty.” via @josiefraser

Food for Thought:

Good food is the wedge that has caused a revolution in a Wisconsin School. In 1997, a private group called Natural Ovens began installing a healthy lunch program. via @robpatrob

Universities:

John Polanyi on TVO’s Big Idea: “the role of the university is to provide context and connect”

Sleep is for those with job security [life without tenure as a post-doc] via @lemire

Fields medalist Terry Tao has seen the future of academic work, and it is networked and collaborative: via @sebpaquet

PKM: our part of the social learning contract

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Why is social learning important?

It is becoming more difficult to make sense of the world by ourselves. Understanding issues that affect our lives takes significant time and effort, whether it be public education, universal health care or climate change. Even the selection of a mobile phone plan requires more than mere numeracy and literacy.  We need context to understand complex issues and this can be provided by those we are connected to. The reach and depth of our connections become critical in helping us make sense of our environment and to solve problems. Problem-solving is what most people actually do for a living, so doing it better can have widespread effects. With social learning, everyone contributes to collective knowledge and this in turn can make  organizations and society more effective in dealing with problems.

How does personal knowledge mastery relate to social learning?

PKM is an individual, disciplined process by which we make sense of information, observations and ideas. In the past it may have been keeping a journal, writing letters or having conversations. These are still valid, but with digital media we can add context by categorizing, commenting or even remixing it. We can also store digital media for easy retrieval. However, PKM is of little value unless the results are shared by connecting to others and contributing to meaningful conversations. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts as we build on the knowledge of others. As knowledge workers or citizens, PKM is our part of the social learning contract. Without effective PKM at the individual level, social learning has less value.

knowledge-management

Image Source: iKnowlej Personal Knowledge Management

Justifying that LMS

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I noted on Twitter that I was having writer’s block, so @Quinnovator and @Busynessgirl chimed in with some suggestions. Now, several minutes later, I present a David Letterman style top ten list.

Top 10 things an administrator would say to justify the purchase of a learning management system (LMS):

10. It comes with a blog!
9. Vendor has cool conferences
8. We had money left in the budget
7. Everybody else has one
6. Learned about LMS at our last professional development day
5. Had to make up for the staff we laid off
4. Have to keep track of the remaining teaching staff
3. You can’t manage what you don’t measure (psst: what ARE we measuring?)
2. Kickback from the vendor (via @Quinnovator)
1. How else would students learn online?

This is excellent preparation for the CSTD Conference panel on which I will be participating next week. The opening topic: “Is a Learning Management System necessary within your organization?”

Feel free to make this list more than ten items.

Friday’s Finds #21

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Some things I learned on Twitter this past week.

Several articles and posts on Knowledge Management

KM: Safe-fail probes & diffusion of innovations | how to support emergent work practices via @mathemagenic

@rickladd “I recently finished a 2 year Masters program in Knowledge Management & I’m certain I could have learned far more on my own through research & social media”

“… all knowledge is either tacit or rooted in tacit knowledge …” Cognitive Edge

Best practice alternative: look for emergent principles & infer what would on principle be best learnlets.com via @quinnovator

Social Media & Learning

@mpetersell: Just wrote a summary of my first #lrnchat experience: Many Ways to Learn: I Have Learned…Socially!!!

great collection of nonprofit social media slide presentation We Are Media: Social Media Starter Kit for Nonprofits via @kanter

Insidious pedagogy: How course management systems impact teaching by Lisa M. Lane: via @moehlert

General Interest

The Decline of Empire by Chalmers Johnson – best hour I have spent – via @robpatrob

evidence of last common ancestor of humans & living apes found, Disproves “Missing Link” via @northernchick

80% of Cuba’s agriculture is organic YouTube video series

PKM – start small

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Tony Karrer responded to my question yesterday on what aspects of PKM I should consider for the LearnTrends conference:

Harold – my question is what organizations should be doing around this? What skill building?

The challenge is that it’s personal and quite different based on roles. Going around and coaching seems too expensive.

How do you begin to move an organization forward?

I still think that the easiest way to share knowledge is to make visible some of what we already do, without adding extra work or effort. Pretty well anyone with a personal computer saves web sites to their Favorites/Bookmarks. Changing that simple annotation process to something that can be shared is relatively easy. I’ve explained it before in Free Your Bookmarks.

If an organization or department decided to put everyone’s bookmarks into a social application it would make for a large repository of links. There may be some effort in going through these bookmarks and adding more descriptive tags but it could be spaced over a period of time. The department responsible could then look at all of these bookmarks, which might be on a variety of systems (e.g. delicious, diigo) and bring them together with RSS and publish them to a central web page. The page could include a visual tag cloud for easier searching. This is an example of the role of connecting & communicating that I advocate for the training department of the 21st century. [Note to self: Diigo looks to be much more collaborative than Delicious, and I have to test it out some more].

It’s doubtful that everyone will be good at sharing bookmarks that are relevant, annotated and appropriately tagged. I think that in a large enough group some people will shine at this and, once again, the leaders of the initiative should support them. The examples provided by peers will have more chance of influencing workplace behaviour than rules and regulations from above, so allow methods to develop over time. The early adopters of social bookmarking may become facilitators for some of the other knowledge sharing activities I’ve previously  suggested (and I haven’t even mentioned twitter):

Aggregate

Converse

Reflect

However, in organizations where there is little history of online collaboration, I would wait a while before initiating these. For a lot of workers and organizations, the leap to online social bookmarks will be big enough.

PKM for LearnTrends

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Another free, LearnTrends professional development event is gathering steam for November.

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Like past LearnTrends events, there will be a great variety of presentations and conversations over the three days. I’ll be presenting on Personal Knowledge Management. The entire schedule should be out on October 15th.  I’d appreciate any input or suggestions on what to focus on for the half hour or so I’ll have to present.

Here are some of my existing resources on PKM:

The most recent overview: Sense-making with PKM

One example: Creating your PKM Processes

More examples: Other PKM Processes

Also, Patti Anklam just concluded a three-part series on knowledge management, with The 3rd KM: Personal Knowledge Management.

Increased complexity needs simplified design

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In the book Informal Learning: rediscovering the natural pathways that inspire innovation and performance, Jay Cross draws a parallel between the development of:

1) Bands, 2) Kingdoms, and 3) Democracies

with

1) Small, local businesses, 2) Large, central corporations, and 3) Loosely coupled networks.

bands to democracy

The learning analogy Jay provides is

1) One on One, 2) Classes & Workshops, and 3) Informal learning. I’d like to expand on this.

Most learning of skills was based on an apprenticeship model until quite recently and this model still exists in some fields. One of the limitations of apprenticeship is that it does not scale. Each master is limited in how many personal relationships can be managed.

apprenticeship

With better communications, the course model enabled expertise to be collected, first with books and later with other storage media such as video and audio. However, the limiting factors were lack of access to the resources and the shortage of connections between expertise and need.

training pyramid

The course model is an artifact of a time when information was scarce and connections were few. Now that many of us live in messy democracies and work in loose networks, learning has become complex with more connections to influence us. According to the authors of Getting to Maybe, in complex environments:

  • Rigid protocols are counter-productive
  • There is an uncertainty of outcomes in much of our work
  • We cannot separate parts from the whole
  • Success is not a fixed address

As Jay has said, informal learning is a better approach for more complex environments. Given the above, here are some guidelines for what informal learning development could look like:

  1. Spend less time on design and more on ongoing evaluation to allow emergent practices to be developed.
  2. Build learning resources so that they can be easily changed or modified by anyone (allow for a hacker mentality)
  3. Allow everything to be connected, so that the work environment is the learning environment (but look for safe places to fail)
  4. There is no clearly defined start or finish so enable connections from multiple access points.

Information is no longer scarce and our connections are now many. If an organizational informal learning effort lets people connect more easily and communicate more effectively, then it will have a chance of success. Connecting & Communicating are central roles for organizational leaders whose workplaces are becoming more complex, either in terms of evolving practices, changing markets or advances in technology. Enabling the integration of collaborative learning with work is a more flexible model than designing courses that are outdated as soon as they’re published.

emergent learning

Related posts:

Informal Learning & Performance Technology

Analysis for Informal Learning

Note: this will be the theme of my Trading Post session on 20 October at the CSTD Conference.

Friday’s Finds #20

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Weekly review of what I’ve found and learned on Twitter:

Jane Hart’s Social Learning Models: wrap-around, integrated, collaboration. Jane Hart’s social Learning slideshare presentations. Interesting. via @charlesjennings

mobileYouth: Content is Dead … Long live Context – youth marketing mobile culture research via @northernchick @KellyOlexa (five years ago I suggested Context & Community)

I Finally Get It – Why Social Networking is So Important via @kevindjones

The key to a successful online community: Listening via @aponcier

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Two Knowledge Management definitions @snowded Cognitive Edge and @elsua ELSUA (with several others) via @jackvinson

Safe-fail probes & diffusion of innovations via @mathemagenic (supporting emergent work practices)

Mapping Government 2.0 against the Hype Curve (there are a variety of potential service models along the curve)

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Replacing desktops with laptop, netbook or thin client could reduce energy consumption by 86%

Public Speaking Tips: research ideas, audience engagement, chart techniques, and more via @ldguymn RT @6minutes

Jury nullification: the Canadian criminal justice system’s dirty little secret (I followed a series of tweets and blog posts that led to this)