Informal Learning

Informal learning

ATMC – Providing Excellent Training in a Tough Economy

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The Automotive Training Managers Council (ATMC) annual conference is online and open to members and guests this year. ATMC is focused on the “exchange of training ideas and strategies helpful to both technical and sales/marketing training professionals”. The theme for the conference, to be held on Thursday, 28 May 2009, is Providing Excellent Training in a Tough Economy.

Here’s the schedule (Eastern Time Zone GMT -4):

12:30 PM: Welcome and Brief ATMC Update
12:45 PM: “Training and the Networked Workplace” by Harold Jarche – Workplace Learning Strategist, jarche.com
1:45 PM: “Service Training at Daimler Trucks North America” by Brian Stowe – Manager, Training Development, Daimler Trucks North America
2:45 PM: A topic related to delivering video on the Web by Paul Louwers – President & CEO, AVI (Automotive Video, Inc.).
3:15 PM: A topic related to finding grant funding for training by Jeff Miller – Partner, Incentis Group
3:45 PM: Rapid Networking.

Free conference registration is now available.

Learning as a Network

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Mohamed Amine Chatti extends the framework on personal knowledge networks with his post on Learning as a Network (follow link for graphic):

The Learning as a Network (LaaN) perspective draws together some of the concepts behind double-loop learning and connectivism. It starts from the learner and views learning as the continuous creation of a personal knowledge network (PKN). For each learner, a PKN is a unique adaptive repertoire of:
– One’s theories-in-use. This includes norms for individual performance, strategies for achieving values, and assumptions that bind strategies and values together (conceptual/internal level) Tacit and explicit knowledge nodes (i.e. people and information) (external level

Here is Chris Argyris’ double-loop learning theory in a nutshell:

“There are four basic steps in the action theory learning process: (1) discovery of espoused and theory-in-use, (2) invention of new meanings, (3) production of new actions, and (4) generalization of results. Double loop learning involves applying each of these steps to itself. In double loop learning, assumptions underlying current views are questioned and hypotheses about behavior tested publically. The end result of double loop learning should be increased effectiveness in decision-making and better acceptance of failures and mistakes.”
double-loop

And here is George Siemens’ Connectivism theory:

Connectivism is the integration of principles explored by chaos, network, and complexity and self-organization theories. Learning is a process that occurs within nebulous environments of shifting core elements – not entirely under the control of the individual. Learning (defined as actionable knowledge) can reside outside of ourselves (within an organization or a database), is focused on connecting specialized information sets, and the connections that enable us to learn more are more important than our current state of knowing.

Finally, you can get a quick overview of the Cynefin model and complexity with this video from Anecdote.

So that’s: double-loop learning – connectivism – complexity; three concepts, each requiring some depth of understanding . No wonder this is a hard sell in the boardroom. Many people think of learning as school, training as something that is delivered, and complexity as problems that can be solved with effort and resources.

Like Mohamed, I am interested in these theories but my true passion is in implementing frameworks for the workplace.  I too think that merging learning and knowledge management into our work is a good way to help organizations deal with complexity.

Here’s a possible elevator pitch for learning as a network, or PKM:

Is your work becoming more complex? How much complexity is there in the markets or the environment? Can anyone predict what’s going to happen next? Obviously many of the world’s economists have been wrong about most things. Looking backwards hasn’t helped us much.

In a complex world we cannot predict outcomes but we can engage our environment and learn by doing. That makes constant learning a critical business skill. But how do we help people develop that skill?

Giving tools and teaching by example is a good way to start. People need to make connections and see patterns and then reflect, criticize and detect errors. Only in a trusting, collaborative workplace can this happen.

Want to know more? Well let me you tell a story …

Twitter potpourri

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I’m still figuring out how best to integrate Twitter to my personal knowledge management processes. I post some things I find directly to Delicious and others I mark as favourites. Here are some of my recent favourites, a follow-on from a related post last month [I’ve added some letters and words to make it more coherent]:

@davecormier RT @arvind: @davecormier Hard core social network research: danah boyd

@c4lptnews Leveraging Human Networks to accelerate learning | CLO magazine

How to opt out of cookie sniffing and trading – painless – via Seth Godin

Shai Agassi: A bold plan for mass adoption of electric cars (TED) Inspiring, Hopeful, Fantastic!

The movement from a public service that is opaque by 21st Century standards to one that is transparent is going to be gut-wrenching – David Eaves

RCMP and Vatican: The downfall of the hierarchical and opaque organization – David Eaves

Via @neternity Try 2-3 low-cost approaches instead of one big (expensive) project – that way you can afford to fail #learntrends

Via @neternity The biggest cultural change was breaking down organizational walls. This is an emerging “wirearchy” says @jonhusband #learntrends

@KathySierra Cut a few prime-time ads, use the money to hire fabulous usability & instructional design team to craft/implement a spectacular user learning “strategy”.

Composing Twitter messages using only brainwaves #learntrends – The Future?

On calculating ROI for human activities (economics, learning, marketing, etc.)  from a Nobel laureate

@nickcharney 17 Things we Used to Do (before Twitter): Andrew McAfee

Learning products

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Heike Philp recently made this comment in response to Media & Messages:

What I am sorely missing right now are ‘learning products’. To me a product has product specifications (specs) just as much as a computer has a list of specs or software has a list of features.

The fascination of Pecha Kucha for me is, that this simple idea could be patented and that it is a ‘product’, it has specs, the specs are ‘20 slides auto advancing 20 sec’.

In the light of lots of IM software out there, a Tweet is a ‘product’ because it has 140 characters.

So, where right now in the vast ocean of fuzzy connectivism and informal learning experiences are the products?

We are always talking about tools. Is this because these seem to be “the products” out there right now?

I use my personal knowledge mastery (PKM) process for some of my own sense-making, involving several internally (sort, categorize, make explicit, retrieve) and externally (connect, exchange, contribute) focused activities:

Here’s a first look at some of the learning “products” that can be created:

Sort & Categorize: lists; taxonomies; topic maps; mind maps

Make Explicit: constrained note-taking; written observations; graphical representations; audio recordings; video recordings

Retrieve: problem-solving; pattern-sensing

Each of these can be made more explicit; such as creating specific lists for a project. The resulting products can all be aggregated as part of a personal learning environment.

Individuals can also Connect – Exchange – Contribute with others through their learning “products”. For example:

  • Bookmarks (and any comments or tags) become a way of connecting to other lists & topics when they are put on the Web and made social.
  • Moving from reading and viewing content to making comments is a way of exchanging information, instead of just consuming it.
  • Developing new ideas and posting these on the Web as blog posts, slide shows, or recordings contributes to the ongoing conversation that may become part of a field of interest or even a discipline.

Looking at this from the perspective of a learning professional, I would suggest combining the use of tools with an understanding of the higher processes shown in the diagram above. That means that you don’t really have to decide upon particular tools and can leave that to individual preferences. For instance, if you want to use blogs for teaching, you can specify the “learning products” you are looking for, but it does not matter what blog platforms are used. I can see a large number and wide variety of learning products that can be developed around these PKM processes.

Media and Messages

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To paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, every message has its medium and every medium has its message. That sums up my impression of our LearnTrends web conference which finished yesterday. Selecting the appropriate messages and media is becoming an essential part of facilitating learning. The other component is building or connecting to networks, social or otherwise. The major trend in workplace learning that I see is the merging of Learning & Working. The main driver is our ubiquitous access to networks. Our global 24 hour conversation was in fact a global village, still composed mostly of innovators and early adopters, but the tip of a connected iceberg.

Personally, I enjoyed the sessions but of course this medium is only good for a certain type of interaction. It could not be all things to all people. For instance, there were several media involved:

Synchronous Sessions (Elluminate) – good to get acquainted, hear some new ideas and feel like part of a larger movement. The text chat enables more people to have input without interrupting the current speaker, but it can get off topic. The session by Heike Philp on Pecha Kucha showed another way to make this medium more interesting, and fun, by adding constraints for the presenters.

Twitter – gets the word out about upcoming sessions and allows wider publishing of impressions. Using Twitterfall, or search, one can see the collected observations from many people and from this see some patterns. These are some of my observations I passed on via Twitter:

“I knew I was in a community of practice when my practice had changed,” heard in a discussion.

“If you shut down the training department, would it be missed?” a general question

“Try 2-3 low-cost approaches instead of one big (expensive) project- that way you can afford to fail,” from a presenter.

“Twitter is for surfing an ocean of information, not trying to understand fluid dynamics,” my own observation.

Blogs – like this post, blogs provide a more permanent record of what happened and more thought-out individual impressions, plus the option to connect or comment.

Social Networks – the LearnTrends community site provides a place to add a profile which is a handy way to put a face to a name. The main limitation of using Ning is the lack of wiki, and obvious weakness when  creating a schedule on the fly with people in multiple time zones.

I’ve been attending, presenting and coordinating web conferences for over a decade now and each time I learn, or re-learn something. Whenever I go live on the Web I also realize that this active learning is necessary to really understand the medium. Looking back and observing is not enough to understand how networked learning can be facilitated. We learn through our practice.

Conversations about learning in organizations

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We’re nine hours into our global (free) 24-hour online conversation about learning in the workplace. Ross Button is currently giving a great presentation on CGI: Bringing the internet inside for informal learning & transformation. He’s discussing all the details of bringing social software into a large multinational organization covering the social, data and technology dimensions. Ross suggests that when initiating these kinds of initiatives, it’s better to try 2 to 3 low-cost approaches instead of one big and expensive project. In this way you can afford to fail a few times. He also says that the biggest cultural change was breaking down departmental and organizational walls because social software ignores the chain of command. Jon Husband commented that this is an emerging wirearchy. Finally, Ross says that these kinds of projects take time, support and patience.

We started this morning (Pacific Time) with a good mix of people, though mostly from North America, and we have been averaging about 100 participants at any time.

There have been a lot of great conversations so far and more scheduled for the next +12 hours.

ASTD: Blowing Up the Training Department

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Join most of the togetherLearn gang on ASTD’s Pulse of the Profession Webcast:

Blowing Up the Training Department: Make Learning a Management Priority

Are training departments REALLY necessary? Leveraging social networking, informal learning and e-learning are just a few ways to manage learning/training in the 21st Century. The real message–traditional courses are not the best way to link learning with the business or to engage learners.  When will we GET it?

Panelists: Clark Quinn, Jay Cross, and Harold Jarche Moderator: Kevin Wheeler

April 22, 2009, 2:00 P.M.-3:15 P.M. ET

Register here. Member/Non-Member $39.95 (all proceeds support ASTD)

Global 24-hour Workplace Learning Conversation

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For 24 hours starting April 21 at 9:00 am Pacific time, LearnTrends will host a series of online conversations on boosting the performance of organizations through learning. We expect hundreds of people to attend the free, live, online sessions. Conversations will be recorded and made available on the web to foster reflection and continuing discussion. Our Twitter back channel will probably be hopping. The LearnTrends community now numbers more than a thousand members around the globe. Sign up if you are not a member to keep track of what’s going on.

Lots of people have signed on for this event and I’m sure that a good part of the +1,000 members of the LearnTrends community will drop in for some part of this 24 hour online conversation that is available to anyone interested in workplace learning.

Please note that the content is also what you bring to the party. We have some set topics to start and finish. In the interim, if you have some discovery you’d like to spotlight, bring it up in conversation. You can pick a spot on the agenda, click “suggest a topic,” and tell us what and when; we’ll put it on the schedule. Alternatively, you can simply check in during the event and request the microphone.

Effective knowledge sharing

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The mainstream application of knowledge management, and I would include learning management, over the past few decades has got it all wrong. We have over-managed information because it’s easy and we’re still enamoured with information technology. However, the ubiquitous information surround may put a stop to this. As enterprises become more closely tied to the Web, the principle of “small pieces loosely joined” is permeating our industrial walls. More and more workers have their own sources of information and knowledge.

Following on from yesterday’s post, connecting and communicating through effective conversations, I’d like to quote again from Dave Pollard’s experience with knowledge management:

So my conclusion this time around was that the centralized stuff we spent so much time and money maintaining was simply not very useful to most practitioners. The practitioners I talked to about PPI [Personal Productivity Improvement] said they would love to participate in PPI coaching, provided it was focused on the content on their own desktops and hard drives, and not the stuff in the central repositories.

We can add to Dave’s anecdotal evidence the research from  Wharton’s Haas & Hansen in Does Knowledge Sharing Deliver?, via Tony Karrer. The researchers found that the two types of organizational knowledge – codified in a knowledge base and interpersonal sharing – are appropriate to different tasks. Generally speaking, codified knowledge does not help teams to produce any better unless the team is rather inexperienced. Interpersonal sharing can be more effective for some teams but it is time-consuming. According to Haas:

“We find that using codified knowledge in the form of electronic documents saved time during the task, but did not improve work quality or signal competence to clients, whereas in contrast, sharing personal advice improved work quality and signaled competence, but did not save time,” Haas says. “This is interesting because managers often believe that capturing and sharing knowledge via document databases can substitute for getting personal advice, and that sharing advice through personal networks can save time. But our findings dispute the claim that different types of knowledge are substitutes for each other. Instead, we show that appropriately matching the type of knowledge used to the requirements of the task at hand — quality, signaling or speed — is critical if a firm’s knowledge capabilities are to translate into improved performance of its projects.”

The inability of expensive enterprise knowledge management systems to deliver broad results is similar to the 80-20 funding ratio between formal and informal learning. We’ve been putting too much money in the wrong place.

A way forward for KM and Informal Learning 2.0

We should move away from central digital information repositories (KM, Doc Mgt, LCMS, etc.). I’m not advocating tearing down any existing IT infrastructure; just enabling a parallel system, which may exist already, to grow. Some suggestions:

  • Develop measures that can help experienced knowledge workers capture and make sense of their knowledge.
  • Support the sharing of information and expertise between knowledge workers, on their terms, using personalized knowledge management methods & tools.
  • Keep only essential information, and what is necessary for inexperienced workers, in the organizational knowledge base – keep it simple.

Connecting and Communicating through Effective Conversations

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What if a company creates an IT infrastructure but nobody uses it? This is one of the questions posed by Dave Pollard in What’s Next after Knowledge Management? Dave’s work has helped me develop practical  processes for knowledge workers, such as sense-making with PKM and his observation that most workers want the company knowledge-base to be very personal informs this work.

So what have our efforts in enterprise knowledge management (KM) since 1975 yielded so far? According to Dave, only three information technologies were adopted wholesale by enterprises (fax, e-mail, intranets) with minimal results in the management of information or knowledge.

In other words, in adding to the volume and complexity of information systems, we have added relatively little value, and in some cases actually reduced value. The reason for this is simple:

  1. We have not done anything to substantively improve the ability of senior management to manage the business (i.e. to manage cash flow, share price, risks or opportunities).
  2. We have not done anything to substantively improve the effectiveness of any of the information flows … that matter in organizations, or the quality of the information.

We have, in short, implemented a solution that addressed no problem. We introduced new KM tools because we could.

Dave predicts the future organization may look more like this:

The IT department is still responsible for maintaining security around the organization’s proprietary information, but very little content is left in this category.

The KM department still manages the purchase of external information, though almost all information in 2025 is free; information producers have realized that their business model is to apply that information to specific customers’ business environment, in consulting assignments, rather than trying to sell publications.

Most of what the KM department does now is trying to facilitate more effective conversations among people within the organization and with people outside the organization, including customers.

And, when the organization holds sessions and conferences on strategy, risk, innovation or customer relationships, the KM department is on hand to do advance and just-in-time research.

The issue of the relevance of KM is not that different from the future of the training function. Both are support functions that have to be integrated with 1) the organization and 2) the individual. As workers become more nomadic (more jobs & contracts over a lifetime) they will be taking their networks and productivity tools with them. Connecting the organization’s networks to the individual’s, and vice versa, is the new organizational management challenge. In the diagram below, I show that Connecting & Communicating should be the focus of the training function, which is pretty well what Dave says is the role of the new KM department.

One of the approaches we’ve suggested at togetherLearn is Informal Learning 2.0 – supporting collaborative and self-directed work – very much like the new KM which is about facilitating more effective conversations. We’re all in this together and support functions (KM, IT, HR, T&D, OD) had better start working together. Now that’s a conversation worth having.