Informal Learning

Informal learning

Lessons from an early MOOC

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In September 2008, Michele Martin, Tony Karrer and I hosted a 6-week open professional development program on social media. We did this for the eLearning Guild as a run-up to the annual DevLearn conference. It was an asynchronous (no time-scheduled activities) program. We developed all activities for three levels of participation: Spectator; Joiner; and Creator, with different requirements for each. The majority fell into the first category, but the Creators were able to take on the role of facilitating, which became important as we grew.

Here was the program we created:

  1. Introduction to Social Networks
  2. Social Bookmarks
  3. Blogs
  4. Aggregators
  5. Wikis
  6. Implications / Summary

We had to be flexible because we originally expected about 50 participants. We actually had over 900 people in what today could be viewed as a professional development MOOC, where the C did not stand for course, but rather content. Developing the content was a major effort shared between Michele and myself. I learned a lot, including the insight not to do another one of these for free. It took a lot of work to develop the program and even more to facilitate and keep as many people as possible engaged for six weeks. There was a lot of reading, reflection, and writing.

One experience of the program still stands out for me. Paul Lowe, course leader of the MA in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography at the London College of Communication, spontaneously gave a live web presentation on his use of blogs with his master’s students and shared what he had learned so far.

  • blogs act as the glue between synchronous events
  • blogs are ways of mapping the learning journey
  • every blog is unique and gives a whole-person view, which you don’t get with assignments
  • blogs encourage dialogue and show how to relate to an audience, which is good for photographers in training
  • there is peer group feedback
  • blogs allow for rich media – images, video, sound, links to other resources; all of which can be mashed up, tagged, recomposed, mixed – by all participants
  • blogs can also be emotional and playful

I also noted that Paul’s student blogs were not used as assessment vehicles. To ensure that blogs and comments were read, the course assigned small groups of  “blog buddies” to read and comment on each others’ blogs. Graduates could also keep their blogs, as they were not hosted by the university and this helped to give a sense of ownership to the students. This course was an excellent example of some pragmatic uses of social media and is still pertinent today.

Here are some other things I learned during those six weeks.

  • A loose-knit online learning community can scale to many participants and remain effective.
  • Only a small percentage ~10% of members will be active.
  • 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 (insight shared by Paul Lowe)
  • Create the role of “synthesizer”. I found it quite helpful when Tony and Michele summarized (curated) the previous week’s activities.
  • Keep the structure loose enough so that it can grow or change according to the needs of the community.

Michele Martin also shared her thoughts in Deconstructing the Work Literacy Learning Event.

What I do think we managed to do was create and foster a community of practice that, for a period of time, brought together a large group of people who wanted to work together on learning about using Web 2.0 tools for learning. Through this network of connections and discussion, we also created an excellent resource that will be available to other people who may want to explore these tools on their own, at their leisure. [note that the platform we used, Ning, began charging for service in 2010, so the resource is no longer available]

As Ning was shutting down its free service, I tried to capture some of the resources we had created, like the Introduction to Social Networking. In 2013 the technology available has changed and MOOC’s are now all the rage (or is that already over?). The Internet has made social and cooperative learning much easier. It still takes focus, guidance and flexibility to make it work though. I am glad we did this five years ago and learned these lessons for ourselves.

Let me close with a reflective note by one of the participants. Catherine Lombardozzi said that we need to really think about learning.

One of my favorite quotes is from Kent Seibert: ‘Reject the myth that we learn from experience and accept the reality that we learn by reflecting on experience.’ My experiences in this experiment underscored for me how important it is to reflect “out loud” – if not by engaging online, by taking some of what you’re thinking about and talking about it with others. These kinds of tools make it possible to compose and share your thoughts on what you are learning, to ask questions, to get feedback from others (many of whom you have never met). Tools also make it possible to learn from others… following their bookmarks, for example, or using the tools to make contacts, simplify your own research, and more. They expand our learning support system in fabulous ways.

we are the internet

Experience, Exposure, Education

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70-20-1070%: Experience

20%: Exposure

10%: Education

The 70:20:10 Framework Explained is a holistic framework, a “reference model”, and not a recipe. “A reference model is an abstract framework consisting of an interlinking set of clearly defined concepts produced by an expert or body of experts in order to encourage clear communication.” —p.17. Charles Jennings explains the framework in detail so that organizations can use it to improve how people work and learn at work. Each organization will have to add its unique context in order to implement the framework, but this book provides an excellent start. The 70:20:10 institute can provide more contextual feedback.

The book gives clear guidance on dealing with the changing nature of work and organizations, such as:

  • Flattening organizations
  • Softening structures
  • Increasing complexity
  • Globalization pressures
  • Decrease in the half-life of knowledge
  • Rapid changes in business conditions
  • Increasingly dynamic market for expertise
  • Shifting and diminishing role of managers

The 70:20:10 Framework is based on learning at work, not in a classroom and not in a lab. Charles describes workplace learning as based on four key activities:

  1. Exposure to new and rich experiences.
  2. The opportunity to practice.
  3. Engaging in conversation and exchanges with each other.
  4. Making time to reflect on new observations, information, experiences, etc.

In today’s workplace, work is learning and learning is the work. This book helps you get there. Not only do I recommend this book, I think most organizations should buy several and keep them around so that everyone can read them. Why? Because experience with the framework, “tells us that reductions of 50% of spend on formal development are not unreasonable to expect.” That’s one good reason, and there are many more.

Building institutional memory, one story at a time

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Institutional memory, which I wrote about recently, is a mixture of explicit and implicit knowledge sharing. It can be as explicit as Harvard Business School’s Institutional Memory site, or as implicit as the feeling one gets from a well-known local legend. A lot depends on what the organization wants to preserve. Is it how-to knowledge, like a trade secret formula, or is it certain practices and norms that define the culture? Or is it both? Each institution has to define this for itself.

Implicit knowledge is difficult to share and is usually complex. We know that this type of knowledge cannot easily be codified. However, it’s often what gives institutions sustainability and even competitive advantage. Finding ways to collect and share both types of knowledge is important for institutional memory. Stories can be an effective medium for these exchanges. The Ritz-Carlton provides an excellent example with Stories that Stay with You. Stories do not have to be exceptional to be effective, and simple anecdotes may be better on a large scale, rather than sweeping epics, or one can wind up in the uncanny valley of business storytelling.

stories.001

Institutional memory is a close cousin of knowledge management. Both can be strengthened with a firm foundation of personal knowledge management (Seek-Sense-Share). While seeking and sense-making are mostly individual activities and people should be allowed to use what’s best for them, the organization can overtly support knowledge sharing. One suggestion is to create more opportunities for “people to have coffee together”. Though it’s not the coffee that’s important, the act of gathering, combined with an environment that encourages capturing and sharing knowledge artifacts, serves to build institutional memory.

IM_coffee.001

We need more sandboxes

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Earlier this week I wrote that practices like personal knowledge mastery (PKM), and its potential for enhanced serendipity can give us the underlying structure to become better hackers and be more creative. Behaviour change comes through small, but consistent, changes in practice. So how do you move from responsibility, to creativity, and potentially to innovation? Play, explore and converse. But first you need to build a space to practice. PKM can be your cognitive sandbox.

But what can be done at the organizational level to promote playing, exploring and conversing?

Informal learning environments tolerate failure better than schools. Perhaps many teachers have too little time to allow students to form and pursue their own questions and too much ground to cover in the curriculum and for standardized tests. But people must acquire this skill somewhere. Our society depends on them being able to make critical decisions, about their own medical treatment, say, or what we must do about global energy needs and demands. For that, we have a robust informal learning system that eschews grades, takes all comers, and is available even on holidays and weekends. – Scientific American

Organizations should think about building sandboxes as well. These could be shared resources, like the museums used by schools in the article, or even virtual spaces. The greatest challenge, if organizations did create learning sandboxes, would be resisting the urge to control them. Perhaps the best way to develop a “robust informal learning system” that eschews control would be through joint efforts, public and private. We have museums for the public, mostly aimed at basic levels of learning and often focused on children. Is there a new role for museums to develop spaces aimed at working adults? Can these be aligned with market needs? Instead of boring courses for the unemployed, how about access to a maker space instead? Again, it would mean giving up control.

Last year I witnessed a company close operations. A very good benefits package was provided as well as access to “re-training”. This was provided by an HR services company. Courses were available on how to write a resume or how to search for a job. I heard from attendees that these courses were interesting but not that useful. I suggested that something like PKM might be useful. However, the company would not provide anything beyond what the HR service provider offered. The company had met its legal commitments and it was time to turn the page.

sand playInstead, some employees set up their own sandbox. It was just a blog, connected to LinkedIn and other social media. People shared stories and passed on opportunities to others. Now this filled a gap, but it was temporary and the network was not that strong. Imagine if this sandbox had been in existence prior to the closure and was already a learning community of practice? What if community managers were already plugged in to other networks? Would this not be better for employees, the company, and especially society? Let’s build some sandboxes.

The post-job economy

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Learning may be the work in the network age, but that does not mean that learning will get you the work. Inge De Waard discusses this in MOOCs change education, but jobs decline in a knowledge era:

The simple truth is that not all of us get jobs even when graduating from universities, and if MOOCs add to that particular degree market (universities), we are stuck, for indeed if even the ones that graduate now are not always finding jobs, with the declining job market in mind, most of the new wave of graduates will get stuck as well. A knowledge era is a fine thing, it sounds great … for a minority of people. So how do we (re)find a balance between jobs and people having them?

I’ve highlighted Inge’s question because other people are asking similar ones. Much of my professional focus is about learning at work, and improving how people collaborate, cooperate and innovate in internet time. I call it sense-making for the connected workplace. Helping people adapt to this type of workplace is a big challenge. An even bigger challenge, for which I do not have any simple answers, is: How do people adapt to a post-job society?

Many MOOC’s are based on an educational model that has a curriculum from a body of knowledge that, so the logic goes, when mastered will prepare someone for meaningful work. Improving one’s education to get a job is often a primary motivator for participation. It’s the way the system has worked for decades. The “job” was the way we redistributed wealth, making capitalists pay for the means of production and in return creating a middle class that could pay for mass produced goods. That period is almost over. America has hit peak jobs TechCrunch informs us. The New York Times calls it  the rise of the permanent temp economy. The recession, combined with technology, is killing middle class jobs, reports the Associated Press.

We will not find a rebalance between jobs and people having them.

We have connected the world so that data and information can flow in the  blink of an eye. There are fewer information asymmetries, as companies like Amazon bust down one industry after another. One recent example is a local startup that is reducing information asymmetry in the used car business. This interconnectedness and increasing computational power will continue to automate work and outsource any job that can be standardized. New businesses are employing fewer employees, while manufacturing is moving to an increased use of robots.

One of my clients is an educational institution and I was heartened to learn that they are moving away from job preparation to a focus on entrepreneurship. They see the numbers. Their graduates are not getting jobs. Creating our own work will be the only option for many of us.

Ross Dawson provides some good advice on what we can do to prepare for a post-job economy.

As I often say, in a connected world, unless your skills are world-class, you are a commodity.

However there are three domains in which individuals and organizations can transcend commoditization and push their value creation to the other end of the spectrum, where they can command their price and choose their work.
The three domains are:

    • EXPERTISE …
    • RELATIONSHIPS …
    • INNOVATION …

The future is stark. There will be a large and increasing divide between those who have one or more of these core strengths, and those who do not and whose livelihoods are on an ongoing path of commoditization.

labour and talent

 

Image Source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Motor_Manufacturing.jpg

Scaffolding and capability building

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Jane Hart’s recent post on changing the role of L&D (learning & development) explains how training departments need to move beyond packaging content and toward scaffolding and capability building.

What I like about this matrix is that it makes it easier to describe my professional services in the organizational learning area. I have highlighted my areas of focus in red. The rest is not really my business, as there are plenty of companies that do that. I used to say I did ABC Learning [Anything But Courses]. Jane’s graphic makes it  much more clear, and it’s what our new Connected Worker site is all about.
scaffolding

Work environment design for learning

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Catherine Lombardozzi writes, in Time for an Evolution:

To those of you who feel like you just stepped into the middle of a conversation, a learning environment (to my mind) is a collect of resources and activities for learning. The resources may be inanimate or human; the activities may be formal or informal. A well designed learning environment is curated with a specific need in mind. It may be curated by an individual (as in a personal learning environment), by a group (such as a community of practice), or by a designer who is supporting a specific complex need that can’t be met by training or other formal programs alone.

I’ve been promoting learning environment design as a way of thinking about what we used to call blended learning, and as a way of capitalizing on informal learning resources by curating the best materials (in your judgment) and making them easily accessible by your learners.

I have taken her image and added a 70:20:10 overlay. This could serve as a decision support tool for allocating time and resources for organizational learning and development.

70 20 10

Some thoughts from 2012

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Here is a review of the five most popular posts here this past year, with a short synopsis of each. One year, distilled into a few paragraphs.

Informal Learning: The 95% Solution

Informal learning is not better than formal training; there is just a whole lot more of it. It’s 95% of workplace learning, according to the research reviewed by Gary Wise.

To create real learning organizations, there is a choice. We can keep bolting on bits of informal learning to the formal training structure, or we can take a systemic approach and figure out how learning can be integrated into the workflow – 95% of the time.

You simply cannot train people to be social

Effective organizational collaboration comes about when workers regularly narrate their work within a structure that encourages transparency and shares power & decision-making.

Creating a supportive social environment is management’s responsibility.

My experience is that changing to more collaborative, networked ways of work requires coordinated change activities from both the top and the bottom. It has to be a two-pronged approach and it will take some time and effort.

Three Principles for Net Work

Narration of Work – Transparency – Shared Power

The high-value work today is in facing complexity, not in addressing problems that have already been solved and for which a formulaic or standardized response has been developed. One challenge for organizations is getting people to realize that what they already know has increasingly diminishing value. How to learn and solve problems together is becoming the real business advantage.

The Learning Organization

  1. Learning is not something to “get”.
  2. The only knowledge that can be managed is our own.
  3. Learning in the workplace is much more than formal training.
  4. When we remove artificial barriers, we enable innovation.
  5. Learning and working are interconnected.

Cooperation trumps Collaboration

In networks, cooperation trumps collaboration. Collaboration happens around some kind of plan or structure, while cooperation presumes the freedom of individuals to join and participate. Cooperation is a driver of creativity.

Shifting our emphasis from collaboration, which still is required to get some work done, to cooperation, in order to thrive in a networked enterprise, means reassessing some of our assumptions and work practices.

Collaboration is only part of working in networks. Cooperation is also necessary, but it’s much less controllable than our institutions, hierarchies and HR practices would like to admit.

enhancing innovation

EEA Learning Day

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I will travelling and speaking for most of this week but will share what I have learned when I get back. This will be my first time addressing the European Environment Agency in Copenhagen and I look forward to meeting many new people. Here is what I will be talking about:

Keynote: Working Smarter in the Learning Organisation

As complexity increases in the networked economy, we need to integrate learning into the workflow. Communities of practice bridge the gap between getting work done and serendipitously connecting to looser social networks. Learning and development in the networked workplace must move from content delivery to community enablement. Harold Jarche will present a new framework for working smarter which includes the narration of work, transparency and knowledge-sharing to increase innovation.

I will also be running a workshop for managers:

Workshop: Coaching in the Learning Organisation

Harold Jarche will discuss some new approaches to support informal and social learning in the workplace. If problems and environments are becoming more complex, and are changing so quickly that our level of information will always be inadequate, there are some new qualities that learning coaches will need: 

1.       Openness to learning, not only from our peers, but from our employees and their contacts.

2.       Flexibility in our learning approaches; helping people understand how they learn best.

3.       The ability to be a generalist, moving in and out of learning situations as required.

4.       The skill to develop large-scale social networks in order to access help in solving  employee problems.

5.       An understanding of how networks operate in the exchange and development of knowledge.

What is learning’s role?

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My colleague, Clark Quinn, in Building a Performance Ecosystem states that the benefits of maximum information for people to get work done, combined with minimum barriers to achieve their work goals, are good for the entire organization. “When they [workers] can get the resources they need and the right people to assist when necessary, the performance benefits are obvious.” Alignment is necessary.

Some of that alignment is missing between departmental silos though. While Clark says that “learning leaders” should step up to the challenge, there is also a strong need to get aligned with IT, marketing, and operations, to name a few. As Clark concludes:

“By aligning the use of technology with business needs in this way, learning leaders are demonstrating the strategic contribution to the organization that the executive suite wants to see. Failing to grasp the opportunity at this inflection point in business operations has a grim prospect. Folks know they can learn on their own and together. If learning leaders don’t get in and facilitate the full learning spectrum, it will happen without them. Then, just what is learning’s role?”

What is learning’s role? First of all, in the network era, a coherent organization is one in which learning is no longer a specialty. Much as writing was no longer a specialty when the majority of workers became literate, learning today is more than putting an X in a checkbox. Work is learning and learning is the work. I may have said this many times before but it is the essential change in how we must view knowledge-intensive and creative work in a networked environment.

Learning is not something done to us, it is what we do together. Learning delivery in a constantly changing work environment is an outdated notion. For example, training courses are artifacts of a time when information was scarce and connections were few. It is glaringly obvious in this time of ubiquitous connectivity and pervasive proximity that we can get pretty well any information we need whenever we want it. To make sense of this, we need network era literacies, and with these new literacies we no longer need the equivalent of learning scribes. Pulling informal learning, instead of having formal instruction pushed to workers, has to become the workplace norm. By norm, I do not mean something bolted on to a course or some function of an LMS. I mean integrated into the daily work flow.

Learning together is part of collaborating to get things done while also cooperating in order to participate in knowledge networks. “Strictly business” is less frequently the case in our lives, as our work/life boundaries get fuzzier. Meanwhile the work/learning boundaries also get fuzzier. We no longer limit our learning to classrooms, training centres, workstations, or our official company mobile devices. In this environment, we cannot leave the direction of our learning to a “learning professional”. If today’s learning professionals want to remain relevant in the coherent organization, then they need to participate in collaborative and cooperative work/learning flows. This will be a sea change for the training & development profession, but I am certain it will happen with our without their participation.

CoherentOrgExpanded