Social or Community?

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Fred Cavazza raises an interesting point on the difference between social and community platforms. “Community” platforms allow members to fully engage in conversations, while “Social” platforms, like Facebook, Twitter and Flickr, are more passive. In the comments, Fred says that blogs are definitely social, as they allow authors to block and filter comments.

Graphic by Fred Cavazza: Community (left) – Social (right)

Using social media is not the same as fostering a community, is what I infer from Fred’s comments. My experience is that communities are much harder to control, can have short lifespans (e.g. most Ning communities) but can be much more dynamic. For instance, there are some interesting conversations and new forums created on LearnTrends that would not have happened on any individual blog. One recommendation for successful online communities is that the founder needs to give up control to get one going and then must stay actively involved, but with a gentle hand, to keep it going. Just like a real community.

On the Edge

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Yesterday we presented our session at Corporate Learning Trends and everything that could go wrong, did. Plan A failed so we switched to Plan B which didn’t work so we made up Plan C that limped along for the hour. Jane was stuck in traffic, the technology did not work the way it did the day before and the three of us were multi-tasking so much that we were not as focused as we should have been. So much for life in perpetual Beta. But that’s the whole point — we went out on the edge, practising what we advocate, and failed in so doing. We learned a lot.

www.gapingvoid.com

Sometimes it’s cool to live on the edges but for the most part it’s hard work. Things keep breaking. The business model isn’t proven. The procedures aren’t fixed. The models and metaphors are not understood by everyone. Our new business venture, TogetherLearn, is an edge model, and it will have its challenges, as does my own work based in rural Canada.

When we ran our informl unlearning workshops a couple of years ago we had constant failures with our technology. Some participants did not appreciate this. We could have gone with a bomb-proof solution yesterday but decided to push the technology, and ourselves, to the limit. You only find out if it really works when you do that. Yesterday’s experience reinforced that to be a good teacher you need to be a good learner, so it’s back to the drawing board for me.

Learning Together

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Today, at 8:00 PM GMT we’ll be introducing our new venture, TogetherLearn. Details are on the LearnTrends collaborative site.

This venture is a natural progression of my work over the past decade, after retiring as a military training development officer in 1998, with a freshly minted MEd in hand. At that time, I was reading Jay’s blog and making comments. Jay and I finally met in Moncton about the same time that I ventured out on my own as free agent (and started my own blog) and since then we’ve collaborated on several projects. Much of our work has been around informal learning and performance improvement in the workplace. Through Jay I met Clark and Jane. My work with Drupal, as an early adopter, introduced me to Bill who is now providing our platform of choice for TogetherLearn. The Drupal community is large and dynamic and as an open source advocate, I could not be happier than to support its development.

I see myself as a bridge between theory and practice, or between early adopters and the early majority,  as this picture shows. For me, technology is the application of organised and scientific knowledge to solve practical problems. Some of the methods I’ve developed are in my performance  Toolbox, so that I can share and also learn from others.

Our group is much like what I picture wirearchy to be, which is the clearest view of what I would like all workplaces to become:

a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on information, knowledge, trust and credibility, enabled by interconnected people and technology

AcademicInfo

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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.

Corporate Learning Trends & Innovations

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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.

Toward a Read-Write Society

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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.

Post Work Literacy

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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?

  • A loose-knit online learning community can scale to many participants and remain effective.
  • Only a small percentage ~10% of members will be active.
  • Wikis need to be extremely focused on real tasks/projects in order to be adopted.
  • If facilitators can seed good questions and provide feedback, then conversations can flourish.
  • Use a very gentle hand in controlling the learners and some will become highly participative.
  • Design for after the course, using tools like social bookmarks, so that artifacts can be used for reference or performance support.
  • Create the role of “synthesizer”. I found it quite helpful when Tony and Michele summarized the previous week’s activities.
  • Keep the structure loose enough so that it can grow or change according to the needs of the community.

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]

Performance Design Blog

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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.

The Age of Dissonance

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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.

Blogger/Podcaster Dinner in Sackville

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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.