Informal Learning

Informal learning

Learning Assessment

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For March the LCBQ is:

How do you assess whether your informal learning, social learning, continuous learning, performance support initiatives have the desired impact or achieve the desired results?


Jay Cross responds:

You need to wait a while before taking the assessment. Smile-sheets and test scores prove nothing because they are administered before the forgetting curve sets in. The reason only 10%-15% of what is learned shows up on the job is that most of what you learn disappears rapidly unless it’s reinforced by reflection and practice. That’s why it’s a good idea to wait three to six months — to see what sticks.

In the Canadian military, it is called Validation, as opposed to Evaluation. The latter is to make sure your training program is using appropriate methods and resources. The former is to ensure that you’re meeting operational needs.

We used rolling validations in the Air Force. First, they were based on training that had clear Performance Objectives (PO’s). We would follow up with a quick survey to course graduates, their immediate supervisors and perhaps other senior operational staff. Six months after each course we sent out a survey. It listed all the PO’s on the course. Graduates were asked if 1) they had learned the skill on the course; 2) if they had to use that skill in the past six months and 3) if they felt competent with that skill [yes, it’s subjective]. Supervisors were asked if that graduate had performed the skill in the past six months and if so, whether the graduate was competent.

This was a very quick pulse-taking that could then be followed up with more in-depth interviews.

Could you do this with informal or social learning? Of course you could. You just need to describe the capability you wish to measure.

For example, after 6 months on the job, with access to micro-sharing, company blogs and the development of a personal knowledge management framework, you could ask similar questions.

Do you have to regularly access information and knowledge to do your job?

Have you learned to access information and knowledge faster than when you started 6 months ago?

Supervisors can be asked if people are effective at getting access to information in a timely fashion.

The Big Question is, what do you expect to achieve? In a complex environment, there is no linear relationship between cause and effect, so we know these measurements are only indicators. Used correctly, and administered as lightly as possible, they can help make informed decisions on priorities, support or resource allocations.

 

 

Seven years and still independent

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I’ve been putting my thoughts on this blog for seven years now. When I started (19 Feb 2004), the term blog was not exactly mainstream and one media “guru” said blogs were on their way out. Today, my blog is still the main part of my “outboard brain” and I can’t see how I could manage my sense-making processes without a blog as home-base.

I have tried to keep this blog true to my principles and beliefs but still professional and courteous. I cannot say the posts here have a neutral point of view. I was an advocate of open source software before it was popular with the mainstream. I have  commented on oligopolistic practice, suggested that the LMS is not the centre of the universe and have advocated for de-schooling. While not radical, this blog has not been corporate mainstream either. Of course, there is always a price to pay for that, as I continue to learn. However, I cannot see how I could remove myself from my online life. For instance, I never comment online under a pseudonym. My writing reflects me and nobody else, though I try to be restrained and provide balance. I allow negative comments and only delete spam.

If you want to know what I think, read my blog. If you’re surprised by my behaviour, you may not have read enough.

Blog post #1,865

Image: Seven Beggars

Training Evaluation: a mug’s game

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“Efficiency is doing things right. Effectiveness is doing the right things.” —Peter Drucker

Dan Pontefract is quite clear in Dear Kirkpatrick’s: You still don’t get it:

Let me be clear – training is not an event; learning is a connected, collaborative and continuous process. It can and does occur in formal, informal and social ways every day in and out of your job. In your email, with the statement “what happens after the training event”, you have cemented (again) the root cause of the Kirkpatrick model. The ‘event’ is not solely how learning occurs. Whether in the original model, or the weakly updated model, the single largest flaw with the Kirkpatrick Four Levels model is the fact its basic premise is that learning starts with an event. Once you ultimately get past this stumbling block, the Kirkpatrick Four Levels model will potentially become relevant again, should it be suitably updated again.

Dan is not the first person to show the limitations of the Kirkpatrick model. Eric Davidove and Craig Mindrun wrote in Verifying Virtual Value:

The key to determining the business value of networked learning, however, is a more expansive view of the kinds of outcomes delivered. Traditional training analyses, such as Kirkpatrick’s four levels of evaluation, were designed to assess solutions that are delivered in a linear manner. Since networked or collaborative learning solutions are informal, integrated with the workflow and driven by the learners, these traditional assessments will not work.

Event-based instructional interventions, or the course as learning vehicle, is an outdated and useless way to look at workplace learning. Courses are an artifact of a time when information was scarce and connections were few. The internet is an environment optimized for ABC learning [Anything But Courses].

In “Not Your Father’s ROI”, Jay Cross suggests:

Make a hypothesis of cause and effect. Interview a statistically significant sample of the workforce to see if the hypothesis holds up. Often, results obtained from social science research methods will produce more meaningful feedback than solid counts of the wrong thing.

Changing our training evaluation models shouldn’t be a management focus anyway. That’s looking at the wrong thing. Even if we get 100% efficiency, and some level of effectiveness, we’re missing 90% of the  picture, as shown in this graphic by Charles Jennings.

Training more efficiently is a mug’s game. Managers and workplace performance professionals should focus on Working Smarter, by helping people learn and develop socially.

Notes from 2005

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2005

This is a continuation of my notes from 2004 … I see that 2005 was the year I started digging deeper into PKM/Networked Learning.

David Williamson Shaffer’s paper on Pedagogical Praxis: The professions as models for post-industrial education provides a theoretical model, with three case studies (biomedical negotiators, online journalists and architects using complex mathematics), on how educational institutions can better bridge the gap between learning in formal education and learning in the workplace.

Perhaps the power of new technologies to bring professional practices closer to the purview of middle and high school students provides an opportunity to move beyond disciplines derived from medieval scholarship constituted within schools developed in the industrial revolution. Learning environments such as those described here, based on professional learning practices and deliberately constituted outside the traditional structure of schooling, suggest a way to move beyond current curricula based on the ways of knowing of mathematics, science, history, and language arts.
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From the The Walrus magazine on an uninspiring 2005 McLuhan International Festival of the Future, until the very end:
As the last few intellectual thrusts of “Probing McLuhan” wound down, a figure rose from the crowd and said a few words. The voice was eerily reminiscent of the Master, as was the rhetoric. It was Eric McLuhan. “The new media won’t fit into the classroom”, he told the audience. “It already surrounds it. Perhaps that is the challenge of the counterculture. The problem is to know what questions to ask.”
For the first time that afternoon there was silence, and it spoke volumes.

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One challenge in this business of designing systems is to constantly question our models and assumptions – a very McLuhanesque perspective: “The specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving toward the grand fallacy.”

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Social media & the McLuhans’ Laws of Media:

In looking at the newer social networking technologies [for learning] we could say that they:

  1. extend the learner’s voice;
  2. obsolesce the course as the unit of education
  3. retrieve the Oxford-Cambridge collegial education model
  4. could reverse into a meaningless “echo-chamber” (Wikepedia definition of “echo chamber: Metaphorically, the term echo chamber can refer to any situation in which information or ideas are amplified by transmission inside an enclosed space.)

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On running a virtual team:

Stick to small groups, and
if you’re the leader, give up control, because
there is no leader, so
have complete trust, and
allow for total transparency, but
provide clear & achievable goals, while also having
an open ended final goal.

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Adam Kahane; “If we want to help resolve complex situations, we have to get out of the way of situations that are resolving themselves”.

Gloria Gery: “Training will either be strategic or it will be marginalized.”



Notes from 2004

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I was listening to an interview with Steven Johnson on CBC Spark and he suggested that it’s a good practice to take regular notes (like my blog) but also important to review them regularly. I’ve gone through my 2004 posts, which was my first year of full-time blogging on this site, and here is what still remains interesting. Note that in 2004, blogging was not mainstream yet.

In 2004, I posted for the first time — Learning is business, and business is learning — finally.

I was keen on The Cluetrain Manifesto, only five years old at the time, and noted a few lines I really liked:

“Fact is, we don’t care about business — per se, per diem, au gratin. Given half a chance, we’d burn the whole constellation of obsolete business concepts to the waterline. Cost of sales and bottom lines and profit margins — if you’re a company, that’s your problem. But if you think of yourself as a company, you’ve got much bigger worries. We strongly suggest you repeat the following mantra as often as possible until you feel better: “I am not a company. I am a human being.”

I also wrote —

Social networks, communities of practice, expertise locators, etc. have more potential and utility in this medium [the web] than centralized systems such as LCMS (learning content management systems)” [The year before I had been working for a company selling an LCMS].

as well as:

I find that there is still a lot of snake oil being sold as e-learning. If you can help people find what they need, when they need it, in the right context to be useful, then you will have effective content management and/or performance support. The rest is what a friend of mine calls ‘shovel ware’.

More thoughts & comments from 2004

Many companies are trying to find ways to motivate their knowledge workers. This makes me wonder about Peter Drucker’s comment that the corporation as we know it won’t be around in the next 25 years (Managing in the Next Society, 2002). Perhaps the actual structure of work, especially the Corporation itself, is an obstacle to knowledge work. Instead of tweaking the mechanisms of the corporation, through job redesign or cultural initiatives, we should be re-examining the basic structure of the corporation. It is an industrial age creation, designed to maximize physical capital and may not be optimal for maximizing “knowledge capital”.

The network, with its dynamic conversations, is where a lot of knowledge work gets done, and we should be looking at new laws to recognise networks in a similar way that we recognise corporations as legal entities. Is anything like this happening?

—

Business models that allow leadership to prosper will be essential. These potential leaders, from an “aggressively intelligent citizenry”, need to be free from corporate non-disclosures or government gag orders, and the most effective business model could be the free agent working within a peer network. As tenure was essential for academic freedom, so an unfettered business model may be necessary for future leaders. If all individuals had the rights of today’s corporations, what kind of societal benefits would ensue?

—

My conclusion for a while has been that knowledge cannot be managed, and neither can knowledge workers. It will take a new social contract between workers and organisations in order to create an optimally functioning enterprise. Adding management and technology won’t help either. This is the crux of everything in the new “right-sized, lean, innovative, creative” economy – getting the right balance between the organisational structure and the knowledge workers.

—

This piece of advice is worth a revisit:

Each of us is given five balls. One is rubber and four are glass. The rubber ball is work. If you drop it, it will always bounce back. The other four glass balls are family, friends, health and integrity. If you drop them, they are shattered. They won’t bounce back.

Quotes from 2010

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I found many quotes this past year, especially via Twitter. Here are most of them, all together (this way I’ll be able to find them all when I want to use them). #NetworkLearning

Life

via @VasilyKomarov RT @nickthinker: Those who can lead an inexpensive (low cost) life and appreciate the simple and free things are actually the “new rich”!

@KareAnderson “Life is like a game of cards. The hand that is dealt you represents determinism; the way you play it is free will ~ Jawaharlal Nehru

@bduperrin “The more social you are you [the] more opportunities you get, the more busy you are, the less social you become.”

via @CharlesHGreen “When you dig yourself into a hole, first, stop digging.” up by your bootstraps

@EskoKilpi “The everyday live interactions we experience do not exist in a meaningful way in any documents.”

@EskoKilpi “Control means being able to predict (if A then B); if we can’t predict, we can’t control.”

via @4KM Complexity is necessary … confusion & unnecessary complication should be eliminated. (Don Norman)

@GeorgeKao “There’s no such thing as ‘keeping up.’ There’s only checking in at high leverage times.”

@JohnDCook “He who marries the spirit of the age will soon be a widow.”

“Silence is golden but duct tape is silver!” @JaneBozarth

“Uncertainty is the certainty that the parameters will change.” @downes

“No matter how many pairs of reading glasses I buy & strategically place around the house they are never nearby when I need them.” @skap5

History

Abraham Lincoln: The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise — with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country. (Annual Message to Congress: 1862)

Organizations & Management

“Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.”- Howard Aiken; via @RudolfChristian

via @minutrition RT @umairh: in the age of strategy, what counted was knowing the terrain. in the age of wisdom, what counts is knowing the soil.

@jonhusband “Unfortunately, HR is the home base for the management practices based on old mental models about work & motivation .. not synched with networked work”

@tdebaillon “Most companies aren’t designed for collaboration.” My Little Enterprise 2.0 Diffusion Framework

@umairh “The problem isn’t that we need new jobs. It’s that we need a better economy, composed of new kinds of companies, built for a higher purpose.”

Henry Mintzberg: “In a word, corporate America is sick.” – “A viable economy needs to be led by explorers, not exploiters.” – “The Problem Is Enterprise, Not Economics” via @jonhusband

@faboolous “Knowledge work thus requires that each party offer something with no guarantee that they will get anything specific in return”.

via @planetrussell- “Globalization creates interlocking fragility, while giving the appearance of stability.” —Nassim Nicholas Taleb, PhD.

“when hiring, we don’t care about formal education” says @JasonFried of37Signals – the new workplace, the new normal

“Walmart exec (I’m not making this up) told me email was so time-consuming cause she had to approve everyone’s email in advance.” @jaycross

“I think “human capital” is an oxymoron. “Social capital” too. Test question: would you consider your spouse, children or friends “capital?” @dsearls

“If I am an effective leader then I have set up a system that is not dependent on me.” @gcouros

“The fact is that organisation and management sciences are not sciences at all but scientific emperors with no clothing.” Complexity & Management Centre

“Organizations not engaged in real-time sensemaking are going to find themselves getting Dumb and Dumber” by Jeff Jonas (& others). via @jonhusband

“Don’t pity the blind man, for he has never seen PowerPoint.” @MeetingBoy

Networks

@reactorcontrol “Tim Berners-Lee describes social networks as “vertical silos”, because they are not interoperable. #dzf4?

@charlesjennings “ROI on social learning? ‘social networks are necessarily loose-edged and impossible to make fully explicit’ (David Weinberger)”

@VMaryAbraham “These guys are some of the smartest in the microsharing room, but I haven’t yet heard the 140-nugget that makes the case.”

Education & Training

Catherine Lombardozzi – “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.’

“Most of what we know we learn from other people. We pay tuition to a few of these teachers … but most of it we get for free, and often in ways that are mutual – without a distinction between student and teacher … We know this kind of external effect is common to all the arts and sciences – the ‘creative professions.’ All of intellectual history is the history of such effects.” Does Milwaukee have enough college graduates to thrive?

“Anything you think is either unoriginal, wrong or both”

@courosa Look at a single Twitter page. Think about prior knowledge / literacies needed to decode that page. RTs. links. voice. events. #MediaLiteracy

@Dave_Ferguson My comment to @rnantel : fixing most performance problems with training is like fixing a leaky faucet by painting the kitchen.

“You can not have a superior democracy with an inferior system of education.” @ginab

My Favourites

Steven Johnson – Chance favours the connected mind. via @timkastelle

@ralphmercer – “committees are places to lure great ideas to be killed while absolving everyone of the blame”

“Hierarchy is a prosthesis for trust” … Warren Bennis” via @jonhusband

via @HealthCareerPro “I am always ready to learn although I do not always like being taught.” ~ Winston Churchill.

What is working smarter?

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I’m in the business of helping organizations work smarter. What does that mean?

Our industrial and information age is nearing an end as we transition into an era where creativity becomes the most important element in our economy. We are also living in a more complex time as traditional disciplines blur and as information explodes. For the developed world, that means the future does not lie in doing manual or simple work because much of it will be automated. Merely complicated work, which is most of the work done in traditional industrial or office jobs, is being outsourced to the cheapest source of labour. That leaves complex work, requiring initiative, creativity and passion.

How does this affect our daily lives?

First of all, look at the restructuring that is happening in our economy. Jobs are being shed that will never be replaced. Can your work be done remotely by someone who doesn’t cost as much? Then at some point in the near future, it will. Companies are finally realizing that they need to work smarter. That means automating and outsourcing where necessary (if they don’t, their competition will) and then figuring out how to get things done in complexity.

The core of working smarter in complexity is the integration of learning and working. It sounds easy, but it’s not. There are two major parts to this. At the individual level it requires people to think critically and embed sense-making processes into their work and their lives. This takes skill and practice. It also takes a work environment that supports and encourages individual learning, sharing, and collaboration.

Hierarchy is the enemy of creativity but we still need some structure to get things done. As Vera John-Steiner writes in Creative Collaboration; “…the achievement of productive collaboration requires sustained time and effort. It requires the shaping of a shared language, the pleasures and risks of honest dialogue, and the search for a common ground.” The risks of honest dialogue will be a major barrier for many organizations to transition to more creative work.

Successful organizations will need to:

1. support creative collaboration (not merely team work)

2. support each person in developing critical thinking skills

3. put this together in order to get things done

There is no specific recipe to do this. Every organization and business will have to find its own path. However, that path will not include:

– standard job competencies; job descriptions & JOBS;

– one-size-fits-all instruction;

– equating time to value;

– and many other vestiges of the industrial era.

Corporate Learning’s focus

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Inspired by Jay Cross, Amanda Fenton asks how her Corporate Learning department could better meet the needs of employees. I think these are excellent questions and the answers form the basis of addressing how to integrate work and learning in the enterprise.

Q1) Close to 80% of learning happens informally and 20% formally, yet we spend most of our time and money on the 20%. How could we better support this and shift our time and money?

There are a few ways to address this imbalance.

The organization can adopt a performance improvement perspective and ensure that all formal training meets a need. HPT (human performance technology) is a broader design approach and should be seen as an enabler to get to instructional systems design (ISD). Without the proper analysis of the organizational needs, constraints and performance factors, a “learning” project may be doomed from the onset, because too often, training is a solution looking for a problem. By doing a performance analysis, it becomes obvious that many performance problems do not require training. I have developed a performance analysis job aid which is available for non-commercial use.

Another approach would be to divert or expand training funds to support informal learning. This could start small but would show that informal learning is important to the organization.  Starting small makes sense because the essence of implementing informal learning is giving up control. This can be scary for managers used to tight command and control. Start with the message that training  addresses less than ten percent of workplace performance. That might get somebody’s attention. Then look at ways to help with the other 90% of work.
One final note, don’t try to formalize informal learning.

Q2) Novices and experts have very different needs (curve from formal to informal). What needs to be in place to better support those differences? How can we support these differences across diverse business units (sales, service and specialized functions)?

Jay Cross and Clark Quinn have used this to explain the formal/informal mix by level of experience:
The above graphic is a good rule of thumb but should not be adhered to slavishly, as there are cases where informal learning works for new hires. I would look at ways to support do-it-yourself learning at all levels.

Q3) How can we shift from teaching content to developing search & find skills, critical thinking skills, creative thinking skills, analytical skills, networking skills, people skills, and reasoning and argument skills?

Organizations should start with Dan Pink’s advice – create an environment where workers have autonomy, mastery and a sense of purpose. A key factor in innovation is to allow people to do meaningful work, in their own way.  The skills listed in this question directly relate to critical thinking. Teaching critical thinking skills may take some time for people used to getting content served on a platter and then being tested on short-term mastery of that content. I don’t see these changes happening overnight.

There are web tools that can be used for critical thinking skills, but tools are not enough. Good informal learning skills are directly linked to critical theory – to question authority, seek the truth and question our own perceptions of reality. All workers need to be good learners but learning cannot be controlled externally, only supported. I like this quote from an unlikely source, Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood: “I was going to Martha Graham [College] partly to get away from Lucerne, but also I had to do something so I might as well get an education. That’s how they talked about it, as if an education was a thing you got, like a dress.”
Start by giving up total control of the training process and focus instead on connecting & communicating.

Q4) What training programs do we need to provide, at minimum,  for legal compliance purposes?

Compliance training is a symptom of the current disconnect between learning and working. Meeting compliance training objectives is usually not a worthwhile goal for the organization, though it may keep executives out of jail. Ray Jimenez summed up the issues with this type of training when he commented on my post, compliance of an industry:

“This is bold, cut and dry and thanks for the exposition.

I see debilitating effects across the training industry when many of our training colleagues accept “compliance” as the norm for training. a good example is the blind loyalty to testing for retention with little concern for applications in real-job situations.

Why not fight this culture? I might be wrong, but our industry might be too “onion-skinned” to accept self-reflections and self-criticisms that we rather continue to hide the dirty linens than confront them.

How do we lift ourselves out of this mindset?”

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In subsequent posts, I look at Amanda’s other questions on:

Network Learning: Working Smarter with PKM

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“In the period ahead of us, more important than advances in computer design will be the advances we can make in our understanding of human information processing – of thinking, problem solving, and decision making …” – Herbert Simon, Economics Nobel-prize winner (1968)

The World Wide Web is changing how many of us do our work as we become more connected to information and each other. In California, Ray Prock, Jr. (2010) uses a Web-based note system to store messages, manage his financial risk and stay on top of the multiple factors necessary to run a successful dairy farm. He is constantly learning as he works and has found a method to keep up, thanks to the Internet.

For many, however, keeping up isn’t easy. The amount of information flowing through the Internet today is measured in exabytes, or billions of gigabytes. We now create as much data in days as it took us centuries to create in the past.

This information overload has a direct impact on workplace learning. Workers have access to more information than ever before, but often don’t know if it’s the right information or if it’s current. In the industrial workplace, our training programs could prepare us for years of work, but much of what we learn today will be outdated in months or even weeks.

We need to re-think workplace learning for a networked society. Our organizational structures are becoming more decentralized, with individual access to almost unlimited information, distributed work teams, and digital media that can be copied and manipulated infinitely. In the interconnected workplace, who we know and how we find information are becoming more important than what we know.

As the Internet Time Alliance’s Jay Cross says, formal learning can be somewhat effective when things don’t change much and are predictable, but today’s world is the opposite in every way imaginable. Things are changing amazingly fast, and there’s so much to learn. Today’s work is all about dealing with novel situations (Cross 2010a).

Jane Hart, another colleague at the Internet Time Alliance, has examined social media and learning in the context of the workplace and has noted that much of it is informal (Hart 2010). Formal, structured learning plays only a small role in getting things done in the networked workplace. Research shows that about 80 percent of workplace learning is informal (Cross 2010b) and that less than 10 percent of what knowledge workers need to know for their jobs is in their heads (Kelley 1999).

Informal learning is nothing new, but it is of growing importance in the modern, digitally connected workplace. Making sense of information, both personally and in networks, is becoming a key part of work. Teams and organizations that can share information faster and make better sense of it are more productive. Social learning is about getting things done in networks. More attention must be paid to how we can support and encourage informal learning in the workplace. A “workscape” focus is  broader than the traditional training and development approach.

Personal Knowledge Mastery

Personal knowledge mastery (PKM) is an individual, disciplined process by which we make sense of information, observations and ideas. In the past, self-directed learning may have involved keeping a journal, writing letters or having conversations. These are still valid, but with digital media we can add context by categorizing, commenting on, or even remixing information. We can also store information for easy retrieval as we need it.

PKM, at the individual level, includes:

Personal directed learning – how individuals can use social media for their own (self-directed) personal or professional learning; and

Accidental and serendipitous learning – how individuals, by using social media, can learn without consciously realizing it (e.g., incidental or random learning).

At its core, PKM is a way to deal with an ever-increasing amount of digital information. It requires an open attitude toward learning and finding new things. Each worker needs to develop individualized processes of filing, classifying and annotating information for later retrieval.

Standard document management methods have been shown to fail over the years, as most workers do not personally adopt them. Developing good network learning skills, on the other hand, can aid in observing, thinking and using information and knowledge. Learning in networks also prepares the mind to be open to new ideas and can result in “enhanced serendipity.” As Louis Pasteur said, chance favors the prepared mind.

One way to look at network learning is as a continuous process of seeking, sensing and sharing.

Seeking is finding things out and keeping up to date. Building a network of colleagues is helpful in this regard—it not only allows us to “pull” information, but also have it “pushed” to us by trusted sources.

Sensing is how we personalize information and use it. Sensing includes reflection and putting into practice what we have learned. Often it requires experimentation, as we learn best by doing.

Sharing includes exchanging resources, ideas and experiences with our networks and collaborating with our colleagues.

Seeking: Using Filters

In seeking, we need to develop effective filters so we are not overwhelmed by too much information. A high signal-to-noise ratio is desirable.

We can use human filters, such as asking a close colleague for a good source of information on a subject. This often happens in open work environments, where someone asks the group, “Hey, does anybody know how to … ?” This is a naïve filter, in that the recommendations provided are not necessarily reliable. The closest people are not always the best sources of knowledge.

Another option is to find a known expert in a field and ask him or her for advice. It’s a better approach, but dependent on the expert.

The best option is to connect with a network of expertise and corroborate advice from a variety of experts. Twitter is an example of a platform that enables this. We can follow many people in a discipline and fine-tune the network by adding or subtracting from it until we have an optimal signal-to-noise ratio.

There are also tools that use mechanical filters, such as search engines or analytical engines that show trending topics. Using both human and mechanical filters can ensure a good flow of information without being overwhelmed. Keyword alerts can be set up with a variety of online systems, or regular searches can be conducted on social media platforms. With practice, we can find what we need when we need it (and sometimes before we need it).

Sensing: Validating, Synthesizing, Presenting, and Customizing

We make sense of data by using our existing knowledge to create more information. This is what writers do—they take various data and write a coherent narrative that becomes information for someone else. While this is an efficient way of transmitting information from one to many, it does not transfer knowledge, as a recipe book does not a chef make. Each person makes sense and builds expertise on his or her own terms.

As mentioned, filtering information is an easy way to start to make sense of digital information flows. Social bookmarking services, such as Delicious, enable us to categorize and annotate Web pages. Social bookmarks are searchable and can be shared within a group or made public. They are a good initial step toward moving information to the cloud. Making information public helps to validate it, as we can check references, analyze logic and compare sources.

Another level of value can be added by synthesizing information. This synthesized information can then be presented in various digital formats to facilitate understanding. For example, a good graphic may make more sense than several pages of text. A slide show with voice-over can help convey complex ideas. Information presentations can be further customized for specific contexts, such as an analysis of global trends and how they may affect a specific business.

These are examples of taking information and adding value to it for the individual, the group, the organization and the network. By treating information as grist for our cognitive mills, we can build knowledge bases that will help us get work done. Thus, a blog can become a place for small, coherent thoughts that, when aggregated, become a discussion document or a policy paper.

Without the ongoing process of sense making, we can fall into the trap of grabbing the easiest information that is available at the time.

Some Web tools for sense making include:

Note taking (e.g., EverNote)
Social bookmarks (e.g., Delicious)
Micro-sharing (e.g., Twitter)
Blogs (e.g., WordPress)
Presentations (e.g., Slideshare)
Videos (e.g., Vimeo)

Not everyone will use all of these tools, and there are many others, but it is important to develop methods of sense making that work on a day-to-day basis.

Sharing: Joining a Community

PKM practices are part of a social learning contract for better organizational learning. Sharing is an essential part of network learning. Without it, we become islands of knowledge that cannot take collective action.

The use of online media enables sharing and can result in exponential network effects. Because knowledge has no known limits, the potential return on investment in knowledge co-creation can be many orders of magnitude greater than traditional process improvement methods.

The most wonderful aspect of Web-based social media is that they are designed for sharing. We can start our sense-making journey in a completely selfish way, but by using Web tools we can easily share whenever we wish. This is network learning. For example, blogs can start as private journals, but after a while we may want to share our posts. As the blog is already online, it can be made public, and all of the information it contains is available for distribution. No extra programming is necessary.

By sharing information and engaging in online conversations, we become part of a community. We will discover that we are truly in a community of practice when it changes our practice.

By seeking, sensing and sharing on an individual basis, we create the building blocks for a dynamic community of knowledge workers, continuously pushing at the edges of our disciplines. Network learning lays the foundation for the ongoing process of idea management, a necessity in complex work environments that require continuous adaptation. This sharing and using of ideas is at the core of business innovation.

REFERENCES

Cross, Jay. 2010a. How to Support Informal Learning Informal Learning Blog.

Cross, Jay. 2010b. Where Did the 80% Come From? Informal Learning Blog

Hart, Jane. 2010. The State of Learning in the Workplace Today. Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies.

Kelley, Robert E. 1999. How to be a Star at Work. New York: Crown Publishing Group.

Prock, Ray, Jr. 2010. Ray-Lin Dairy: A Progressive California Dairy Farm Blog.

Note:

This article was published, with minor changes, as PKM: Working and Learning Smarter, in Information Outlook, The Magazine of the Special Libraries Association, Sept 2010.

Exploring and free ranging

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Whatever happened to “free range learning”? Jay Cross  used the term free range learning for a while in reference to informal learning and Tom Haskins picked up on the free range chicken metaphor. I even suggested a logo, but I don’t hear much talk about it any more. I think it’s still a great descriptor for learning and working on the Web, especially for events like #lrnchat on Twitter.

Free range learning may help deal with the disorientation that is more and more common in our complex lives and workplaces. Marilyn Taylor developed a model of learning, based on classroom experience, that has workplace implications as well, I believe. Her work has not been widely published but there is a reference in this PDF from NALD [dead link] (see page 53). You can also read about the model in Making Sense of Adult Learning.

Taylor observed university students in classrooms, and saw a pattern of continuous Disorientation, Exploration, Reorientation & Equilibrium. Each stage took different periods of time with each student and not all students completing a cycle during a formal course. The successful students were the ones who could work through the entire process and continue into another cycle. When students are shown the cycle, many get an “ah ha ” moment and realize that their confusion (disorientation) is quite normal.

According to Taylor, disorientation is a natural state in formal education:

Stage 1 – Disorientation: The learner is presented with an unfamiliar experience or idea which involves new ideas that challenge the student to think critically about his/her beliefs and values. The learner reacts by becoming confused and anxious. Support from the educator at this point is crucial to the learner’s motivation, participation and self-esteem.

Working and learning in our information-rich environments with constantly changing tools and business rules presents us with frequent and longer periods of disorientation.

Leaders and managers today should be helping fellow workers with their disorientation and exploration . A first step would be to show that disorientation is quite normal. It’s OK to be confused, but the strategy is not to close up but to be open to free range learning. Instead of looking for a simple solution, sometimes it’s necessary to poke around and explore to reorient our thinking. Consider what implications this has for training and workplace norms. Maybe I’ll go for a walk or perhaps I’ll check out Twitter or Facebook. How many workplaces encourage that? In the long run, it may be best to allow for a fair degree of exploration. Aren’t workers constantly encouraged to think outside of the box?  That’s where the free range chickens are.