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)

Visual Aids for Search

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Just when you think you know what you’re doing on the Web, along comes another tool. In Borrowing from the Library to Support Workplace Learning, Michele Martin gives some great advice and links to several tools. She mentions the Google Wonder Wheel, which I hadn’t heard about, though it’s been right in front of my nose. It’s a quick way to get an understanding of what makes up a field of practice or a subject area and here are two examples:

Screen shot 2009-10-01 at 8.46.36 AM

Screen shot 2009-10-01 at 8.47.50 AM

Resilient Communities

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Jon Steinman presented “Deconstructing Dinner” last night at Mount Allison University:

John Steinman

He’s touring the Maritimes with his theme of food purchases as investments, not expenditures. Jon showed that 90% of beef slaughtering occurs in only 5 plants across the country, just one example of corporate concentration in the industrial food system.

Corporate Concentration results in:

  1. price control
  2. fewer options for consumers
  3. corporate influence over policy & regulations
  4. food safety concerns
  5. loss of local culture
  6. lack of diversity and subsequently resilience

He quoted Canada’s Minister of Public Safety on the recent closure of prison farms, saying that  “labour-intensive farming is no longer relevant”. The current government obviously sees no future in smaller scale or family farming.

Jon then went on to show what is happening in his town of Nelson, BC.

Jon also emphasized how all of the initiatives were grassroots and started with little, if any, funding. Furthermore, using the Net to share information is one of the greatest assets we have in creating resilient communities: aka ridiculously easy group-forming.

Some resources in our area:

Sackville CSA

Renaissance Sackville

Fundy Biosphere

ACORN

Here’s a book to examine some of the more radical options available: The Revolution will not be Microwaved

Freelancers unite

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I’m following up on my post earlier this month on “free-agentry“:

My own observations include the notion that Work 2.0 has resulted in more fluid and ongoing job searches, that learning is becoming part of work routine and that we now take our social networks wherever we move and need the workplace less for socialization. I’ve also observed a rise in self-employment and made my recommendations on how free-agents can market themselves online.

The Creative Class blog just raised some more points on free-agency:

  • More Canadians than Americans are moving into freelancing
  • Companies are hiring more contract and temporary workers, who have all the downsides of freelancing without any of the benefits. Contract workers are told where, when and sometimes how to work.
  • Lack of medical coverage (US) or a drug plan (Canada) can be barriers to freelancing, as mentioned in one of the comments.

Fewer jobs in manufacturing, a recession and a shift to networked business makes for an increasingly itinerant workforce. Contract work is what companies may want but it is in the worker’s best interest to approach non-salaried work from a consultant’s perspective. You are there to solve the client’s problem, not just do as you are told. Also, if you have to be in a workplace where the employer provides you with office space and tells you when to show up for work, the tax man may not regard you as self-employed, so you lose what few deductions you have.

If contract work seems like the only option, then start networking with co-workers and competitors. Band together as a guild or association and help each other out. Think of it as a freelancers union and look into group health care, joint marketing and shared administration. You can’t do this working 40 hours a week for The Man. The deck is stacked with laws supporting either employers and employees but the future of knowledge work is free-agency. The powers that be, corporations and unions, won’t change to help out freelancers, we have to help ourselves.

Check out: Freelance Switch

Photos you can use

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A friend asked about online repositories of photos that can be used for academic presentations and I mentioned several sources. I realized after sending the list that many others may not know about the wealth of resources available, especially for  teaching and learning.

Online photo repositories (check usage rights for each):

Free images for your inspiration, reference and use in your creative work, be it commercial or not! http://morguefile.com/

Creative Commons search, but check license of each photo: http://search.creativecommons.org/

Commons project from various institutions, including The Library of Congress: http://www.flickr.com/commons/

Wikimedia Commons, with many public domain images: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

Updated:

Most of the media in these collections are attached to generous copyright licensing. http://copyrightfriendly.wikispaces.com/