Informal Learning

Informal learning

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.

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

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.

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:

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Work Smarter – informal learning in the cloud

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Just picked up my copy of Jay Cross’ latest book, Work Smarter, which sells through Lulu for a reasonable $19.99. As Jay says, this is not a traditional book. It’s an unbook and not meant to be read linearly, though you can if you want. It covers a wide variety of topics, as you can see in the preview, and features all of our colleagues at InternetTime Alliance as well as other friends of Jay.

Work SmarterThe book is also updated from time to time, so it’s always current.

This is the kind of book to keep at your desk and peruse as you need, refreshing something you know or a quick read on a new concept. The sub-title tells it all, “informal learning in the cloud”. This is a great book to hand out to clients and others who want to get up to speed on working and learning in networks.

Thanks for all the hard work in putting this together, Jay.

If learning was free

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Writing If TV Ads were Free, Seth Godin looks at the business and says that the reason there was so much talk about advertising instead of just doing it was because TV ads are expensive. Not all ideas could make it to the broadcast medium. However, with web social media, the cost is minimal with few barriers to entry:

You guessed it: new media is largely free. So why teach it in school as if it were a scary theory? Why encourage people to be afraid? Just do it. Build your own platform. Appear in the places that seem productive or interesting or challenging or fun. Experiment quietly, figure out what works, do it more. No need to be a dilettante, and certainly you shouldn’t spread yourself too thin or quit at the first sign of failure… but… quit waiting for the right answer.

Anybody see a parallel here with instructional systems design or curriculum development? These processes take time and money and once the investment is made, nobody wants to do it again. Web media can be created quickly and, if designed in an open manner, can change according to the needs of learners and facilitators. For instance, we developed the Work Literacy site in about a week and at no cost. It was added to and modified by the participants. Everyone was an unpaid volunteer. Total cost: zero.

Design is a craft and takes practice and so does instructional media design. Now you can practice these for free. With the web, learning is free; “quit waiting for the right answer”.

Mind Map: The Networked Society

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Over the years of writing this blog I’ve reorganized, added tags, categories and the Key Posts & Toolbox pages in order to help make sense of over 1,500 posts. A major theme in my writing has been our shift to a networked society and what that means in how we work and learn. I’m especially interested in the fact that working and learning are merging in many contexts. Learning (often viewed from the limited perspective of training or education) is not a separate activity, removed from work.

This mind map links several concepts and related articles around the theme of the networked society:

Networked Society

Working

Structures

Living

Learning

Relevance in the Network

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In Become a meta L&D Manager (requires free registration), my colleagues Jay Cross & Clark Quinn advise that it’s time to take a broader look at learning in the organization:

“Your charter as head of L&D [learning & development] is to optimise learning throughout the organisation, not just in the pockets that once belonged to HR. This takes a broader perspective than what you deal with day-to-day. You’ve got to rise above the noise to see the underlying patterns and then optimise them.”

In the comments, Martine Parry adds to this topical article, saying that the ” … training role will become responsible for large deployments and for legal and governance issues – only.” This is the root of the change that we are facing in organizations today: relevance in the network. There are many silos of support functions in any large organization, each with their own culture and perspectives on business performance – HR; L&D; IT; KM; Marketing; Communications; et al. And of course there are also the individual business units as well as the key driver of revenue in many companies – Sales. If roles have to merge, who will win out, a business unit or a support function? It’s quite possible that the traditional training function will become marginalized.

History shows that significant changes in how we communicate result in significant changes in how we work. Many silos of support functions will not work in a network-centric organization as there’s too much redundancy, duplication of effort and slowness to react. It’s becoming obvious that only highly networked organizations are going to be successful. As another colleague, Jon Husband, puts it:

“The performance management schemes, grade levels in the organizations and compensation practices have yet to recognize how work gets done in networked environments and increasingly, in a networked world.”

Does it really matter that training or L&D will be marginalized? In the long run, I think not. We are seeing the merging of roles and functions as networks bypass command & control. That means that each departmental silo will lose some of its traditional power. What will emerge will have to be more effective for the networked organization. As a learning or workplace performance professional your choice is clear:

  1. Fight to ensure that your department wins the short-term internal political game of leading organizational learning; or
  2. Park your ego (and that of your tribe) to work with everyone in the organization to make it more effective in the long-term.

It’s obvious which choice I would recommend but #2 will be fraught with problems, such as being ostracized by your departmental colleagues and maybe even working yourself out of a job. However, if your organization doesn’t succeed in the long run, neither will your job.

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Photo by ZoomZoom