Informal Learning

Informal learning

A Learning Reformation

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In — No more “learners” — Jay Cross uses the preacher-congregation metaphor to show the dysfunction in our educational and training systems. Much as the Reformation, sped by the new technology of the printing press, ushered in an era of believing and thinking for ourselves, we have the makings of our own Learning Reformation.

The removal of overt rules (Jay uses traffic signs as an example) can empower people, while thinking of them as just “learners” is condescending and plays to the power game of teacher-students. Let’s face it, especially in light of how our institutions have screwed up the world, we all have to be learning together.

In The future of the training department, Jay and I put forth the idea that in order to help organizations evolve in a complex environment we have to move away from training delivery and focus on Connecting & Communicating. Workers, provided the right tools and resources, can figure out what they need to learn. Tony Karrer has picked up on this, as has David Wilkins.

Here are some suggestions for people in training organizations as they shift to supporting the networked workplace:

  1. Be an active & continuous learner yourself (e.g. personally manage your knowledge).
  2. Be a lurker (passive participant) & LISTEN
  3. Communicate what you observe.
  4. Continuously collect feedback, not just after formal training (yes there’s still a place for some of this).
  5. Make it easy to share information by Simplifying & Synthesizing.
  6. Use Networks as research tools.
  7. Identify learning skills and develop them in yourself and others [thanks, Clark]

All of these skills are dependent on #1. You can read about being a good learner and then put the book back on the shelf, but learning is a process and leadership by example is needed. Be an example.

Q: What’s the best way to use social media in your organization?

A: Start by using them yourself.

Steve Simons recently wrote:

I read with interest your article “The future of the training department”, particularly the last paragraph. As an IT trainer in the UK (I train on a contract basis for large organisations), I’ve often wondered what uses people will get from their learning. Sometimes my general feeling is “none”. Your phrase “shift the focus to creativity, innovation, and helping people perform better, faster, cheaper” really hit the spot with me.

I recommended the book From Training to Performance Improvement to Steve, as it helps get training departments out of the “solution looking for a problem” approach. As much as books like this are a good start, a shift to performance improvement is not enough. There is no single best approach and we need to bring in other frameworks such as connectivism, wirearchy and social network theory. The era of silos is over.

Here’s some advice for anyone in charge of a training department:

No single, sure-fire, cookie-cutter approach can be implemented in a top-down or consultant-driven manner to create a networked workplace performance model that works for “your” organization. Don’t believe the hype that one technology or one method will save you, because no single method in the past has done that. You have the best knowledge about your organization. You may need some direction, support, data, advice or a sounding board, but you have to create your own inter-dependent network.

The future of the training department

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Jay Cross and I have written and posted The future of the training department [link updated] on our togetherLearn blog:

Prior to the 20th Century, training per se did not exist outside the special needs of the church and the military. Now the training department may be at the end of its life cycle. Join us for a brief look back at the pre-training world and some thoughts about what may lay ahead.

I’ve also developed an accompanying slideshow, which will be the basis of my CSTD online presentation on March 4th.

Training 21 C V2

5th Anniversary

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On 19 February 2004, I went down the rabbit hole and started this blog:

This is where I post my thoughts and comments on ideas, events or other writings that are of a professional interest to me. Current areas of interest include social networking applications, like blogs, wikis and the use of RSS feeds, which is one reason why I have this blog; to practise what I preach. I’m also interested in the use of open source software platforms for learning. The development and nurturing of communities of practice online is another area of applied research that interests me.

And so I began blogging in earnest, having set up a few others previously, but this time with my own domain and a bit of a plan. My personal knowledge base is now over 1,400 blog posts with +3,000 comments. Mostly, I write for myself, though I know that others read what I’ve posted and a smaller fraction make comments. Many of these people have become friends and even business colleagues. That’s been the best part, meeting people who share some of my passions.

I’m writing fewer posts than when I started out, with a peak of 58 in May 2004. I can’t imagine doing that many now. I have settled on an average of 15 per month which seems to be enough for personal knowledge management (implicit => explicit) and I don’t feel under pressure to publish. I’ve found a daily commitment a bit much, such as when I helped fill in for Stephen on OLDaily.

I’ve also taken up micro-blogging on Twitter this past year and that is enabling different kinds of conversations. What might have been a few comments here are now many 140-character tweets. This blog is still central to my Web presence but I have other windows on the world now.

Thank you for coming by here during the past five years and helping me make sense of my place in the world.

Cappuccino U 2.0

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Jerome Martin has updated Cappuccino U, a good read for anyone not versed in all the informal learning activities available on the Web:

The traditional education system cannot be expected to provide learning for everyone, everywhere, all of the time. Knowledge is growing so quickly in so many fields that educators cannot always remain current in their fields. Furthermore, there are new fields of study developing. Many of us are working in areas and fields which were not developed when we went to university.

Originally published in 2006, the ideas are more relevant today, as Jerome says, “education is not acquired through vaccination or some sort of anointment”. This is a short read and the kind of e-book to pass around (CC-licensed) to folks who say that they could never read or learn via a computer.

The Practice of Training in the 21st Century

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The Practice of Training in the 21st Century is an online presentation I will be doing for CSTD on 4 March 2009 at 1:00 PM EST. There is a fee for the event which supports CSTD’s work in fostering the profession of training, workplace learning and human resources development in Canada [my services are pro bono].

The presentation is an update of the ideas from the Training Department in the 21st Century. There is also a version on SlideShare. The March presentation will give more detail than what is on my related blog posts and enable some feedback, as well as open up the concept to a broader audience. As I re-do the presentation, any suggestions or criticism would be appreciated.

The leaking pyramid

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Two years ago I wrote about the the forces of change and how workers, who one could call the “Cluetrained’, were dropping out of the bottom of the industrial organisation’s pyramid and doing it on their own. “It” meaning working, learning, creating and collaborating.

Today, these outlets are bigger and more obvious:

  • Informal learning is increasingly available from formal venues, such as Stanford’s series on Darwin’s Legacy that I’m following on YouTube.
  • Social networking is getting more pervasive (Facebook, Twitter or DIY with Ning) and accepted in the mainstream, such as Linked-In for recruiting.
  • Distributed work and tele-work are becoming more acceptable. It is almost normal to work from home from time to time.
  • User generated content is getting people noticed. Job offers are posted (or reverse job postings) and made through blogs while videos on YouTube can catapult people to fame.
  • Creative Commons is becoming the normal license for digital media, enabling easier sharing, and even the White House is using it.

I would say that the bottom of the Command & Control pyramid is getting much more porous.

Innovation and Learning

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In Innovating in the Great Disruption, Scott Anthony suggests three disciplines necessary to foster innovation in difficult economic times – placing a premium on progress; mastering paradox; and learning to love the low end. He also discusses the importance of learning;

Innovators will need to continue to find creative, cheap ways to bring their ideas forward. Fortunately, they can tap into a plethora of powerful tools to facilitate rapid learning.

Rapid learning is not PowerPoint slides turned into online courses but rather increasing the ways to connect ideas and people. This is the future of training and e-learning, or what I call ABC (anything but courses). Anthony’s third point, love the low end, also speaks to the use of inexpensive tools such as web services or open source software. If learning professionals can be seen as catalysts for innovation, then even in difficult times will their future look bright.

On-job support is critical

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I don’t usually get information about training and performance improvement in the Wall Street Journal but this article clearly spells out the benefits of linking training directly to the workplace. In Lessons Learned, Harry Martin describes two cases and provides several links for further reading. Basically, formal training is more effective if followed up with specific objectives for change in the workplace. I think most of us know this, but many organisations don’t practice it. What I found most interesting was the effectiveness of engaging peer support in the workplace, as shown in this figure:

This reinforces the influence of peers, which parents of teenagers already know, and shows the potential for informal structures that encourage peer interaction at work. If you’re looking for better ROI for your training initiatives, the best place to put your effort may be AFTER the training.

Need for collaboration continues to grow

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We’re starting to see some interest in our TogetherLearn initiative and one of the main drivers seems to be cost-reduction. I came across this future-looking ZDNet article via Bertrand Duperrin and it sums up the situation nicely:

However, for business-driven internal enterprise Web 2.0 collaboration projects, I see growth. Why?  Because the business will find their collaboration needs to grow in 2009, while they see IT providing them with fewer services. Collaboration needs grow as a result of layoffs, mergers, and deepening external partnerships (requiring new infrastructure to collaborate outside the firewall with trusted, external partners).  And this happens while IT’s services shrink as a result of layoffs, a focus on streamlining operational costs, while not taking on new projects.

The need for online collaboration is growing as organisations make cost-cutting decisions in travel and training. The recession is just the catalyst that shows the redundancies of industrial, command and control systems in the hyperlinked economy. The need for online collaboration and the integration of work and learning will continue as long as we have the Internet.

Our value proposition for TogetherLearn is fairly simple. We set up a collaborative space outside the firewall and work with clients in their particular business context. We provide support, coaching and access to a network of resources. Clients pay for what they need and no more. The aim is to help online community managers learn and practice their role. We use open source technologies so clients can decide how and where they grow their communities, with no strings attached. Everything is transparent and senior consultants are involved in every step of the process.

Last year at this time I noticed that Big Consulting Firms are Jumping on Bandwagon 2.0. “As I’ve said before, Free-agents and natural enterprises are better. The upstart independents and small consultancies have Clayton Christensen’s disruptive Sword & Shield which the incumbents (large consultants) don’t have. With early motivation to enter this emerging field (Shield) and now with with years of experience and skills (Sword), we the “upstarts” should be able to hold our own.”

The current economic situation has just made the business case for a nimble, low overhead, web-enabled consultancy that much easier.

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.