Learning

Learning

Technologies for collaboration and cooperation

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Whether we’re working or learning, how we communicate is a key part of everything we do. Some web tools hinder communication while others may enable it. Last year, in communication and working together, I looked at a communities & networks model by Lilia Efimova:

One of the things I came up when playing with different ideas was to position teams, communities and networks in respect to the most prevalent forms of communication in each case (in all cases the other forms of communication are there as well, but are not at the core of it).

I find the model useful to look at what kinds of social tools are most suitable for the type of collaboration or cooperation we’re trying to foster. For instance, there is a big difference between Sharepoint and Facebook, though both enable some kind of collaboration. Structured, goal-oriented collaboration is typical of what happens inside the firewall in a controlled access environment. Informal, opportunity-drive (serendipitous) collaboration is more like the free-for-all of an event like #lrnchat. Communities of practice are a mix of both.

My experience is that there is no platform that covers the entire spectrum. Open networking environments lack the tools needed for project work while enterprise collaboration systems lack openness and flexibility. There is an opportunity for platforms like Yammer & Socialcast or Brainpark to bridge the structured with the informal. Three smaller pieces loosely joined seems to be a better approach for collaborative work/learning at this time rather than a unified platform. That may change as collaboration technologies mature but for now any large organization should be looking at all three.

Organizational architecture

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Why do people do bad things? Is it because they have to? Here is Gary Stager discussing a re-enactment of the famous Milgram Experiment:

One of the subjects in the television program was a 7th grade teacher who explained that she didn’t stop shocking the learner because as a teacher she had learned when a student’s complaints were phony. I thought to myself, “Has she electrocuted many students?”

The teacher asked the researcher, “There isn’t going to be any lawsuit from this medical facility, right?” When told that the teacher was not liable, she replied, “That’s what I needed to know.” It is however worth noting that this was after she induced the maximum shock and the learner demanded that the experiment be terminated.

In this interview with Guy Kawasaki, Dr. Philip Zimardo discusses the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, where students played their roles as guards or prisoners and abuses started within 24 hours:

But on the second morning, the prisoners rebelled; the guards crushed the rebellion and then instituted stern measures against these now “dangerous prisoners”. From then on, abuse, aggression, and eventually sadistic pleasure in degrading the prisoners became the daily norm. Within thirty-six hours the first prisoner had an emotional breakdown and had to be released, followed in kind by similar prisoner breakdowns on each of the next four days.

German researchers have recently released horrendous stories of what went on with regular soldiers during the Second World War. As der Spiegel notes: “Newly published conversations between German prisoners of war, secretly recorded by the Allies, reveal horrifying details of violence against civilians, rape and genocide”.

In this report from Science News we learn that moral talk is cheap:

When faced with a thorny moral dilemma, what people say they would do and what people actually do are two very different things, a new study finds. In a hypothetical scenario, most people said they would never subject another person to a painful electric shock, just to make a little bit of money. But for people given a real-world choice, the sparks flew.

…

But when there was cold, hard money involved, the data changed. A lot. A whopping 96 percent of people in the scanner chose to administer shocks for cash.

It seems it’s not just authority, but money (from which we can derive a form of authority) that may drive us to do immoral things.

Part of the answer lies in the concluding paragraph of the der Spiegel article:

The morality that shapes the actions of people is not rooted in the people themselves, but in the structures that surround them. If they change, everything is basically possible — even absolute evil.

I have often quoted Winston Churchill, and it’s most appropriate here – “First we shape our structures and then our structures shape us”.

Adding new programs, such as diversity training, will not address structural issues. Organizational architecture, which should be a blend of the best from our management disciplines and neuro-sciences, is what’s really needed. My observations over several decades show that most people work within structures without really thinking about them. For our future, and our humanity, we need to change this. What kind of foundation is your organization built upon?

Are we awake?

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Social business offers businesses a major opportunity for redefining the nature of work and the structure of companies, freeing knowledge workers from organizational-only pressure and defining a new social contract between customers, workers, firms and their ecosystem. On a dark side, it also gives companies novel ways to enforce business-as-usual and to further exploit the outdated legacy of our industrial era. People-centric or IT-centric, the use of social technologies for enterprise is at a crossroad, and it might be time to face it without self-indulgence.

This is how my colleague, Thierry deBaillon, concludes his article on the two faces of social business. It’s not just social business, but the entire model of the Net that we need to critically examine. As Jaron Lanier wrote in You Are Not a Gadget:

The people who are perhaps the most screwed by open culture are the middle classes of intellectual and cultural creation.  The freelance studio musician, the stringer selling reports to newspapers from warzones are both crucial contributors to culture. Each pays dues and devotes years to honing a craft. They used to live off the trickle down effects of the old system, and like the middle class at large, they are precious. They get nothing from the new system.

If you’re not one of the recognized leaders in your field, can you make a living online or are you just part of the long tail, valuable only to aggregators and their advertising revenues? As a content creator are you providing the fodder that lets Google, Facebook and YouTube earn huge market valuations?

Will there be a middle class in the networked economy? Is there a middle class in the social business?

Doc Searls says that the social web is nothing more than the commercial web:

I want liberation from the commercial Web’s two-decade old design flaws. I don’t care how much a company uses first person possessive pronouns on my behalf. They are not me, they do now know me, and I do not want them pretending to be me, or shoving their tentacles into my pockets, or what their robots think is my brain. Enough, already.

We’re definitely reaching a crossroad with net neutrality, open data, and personal social networks on one side and usage-based billing, controlled access, and gated communities on the other. As I’ve written elsewhere, democracy is our best structure for political governance and I believe it should be the basis of our workplaces as well. As work and learning become integrated in a networked society, I see great opportunities to create better employment models. I know that we can do better than cubicle farms, cookie-cutter job descriptions, generic work competencies and boring, dead-end jobs.

However, I see the darkness creeping in, ever so quietly. It was only one hundred years ago that we had widespread child labour in North America.

Child labour and other inhuman practices haven’t been eradicated but we have made huge strides. Are we letting society and our workplaces slip backwards? Any technology cuts both ways. The Net has the potential for much good.  There is still an opportunity for a workplace reformation, but we have to seize it.

Learning and working effectively

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An effective networked workplace can be viewed as a three-sided framework, with a leadership/management strategy (radical & wirearchical) that supports collaborative work enabled by social learning.

All three are necessary. If there is any degree of complexity in the work, collaboration needs to be supported by a flexible management framework that encourages social learning. This is especially true for creativity and innovation. These cannot be forced, yet many of our organizational practices still reflect cultures that do not trust individuals.

Just read any HR or IT policy of a large firm. Most do not start with, “we trust you to do the right thing …”

Jay Cross and I have been tossing some ideas at each over the past week [as he wines & dines his way through Europe] and this graphic is a result of that collaboration.

The intent of this image is to show that both directed (by the organization to get work done or to meet compliance needs) and undirected (by individuals and self-forming groups) activities make up our work and learning how to do work. We work collaboratively to get things done. We learn socially because we want to. Both are necessary but not everything can be managed. The parts in red should be self-managed (though they need organizational support).

It’s when we try to create (learning) management systems for the red parts that we get into trouble, because we’re using complicated approaches for complex areas. Read more on Cynefin:

Complicated, in which the relationship between cause and effect requires analysis or some other form of investigation and/or the application of expert knowledge, the approach is to Sense – Analyze – Respond and we can apply good practice.

Complex, in which the relationship between cause and effect can only be perceived in retrospect, but not in advance, the approach is to Probe – Sense – Respond and we can sense emergent practice.

My advice is to manage above the line and support below it. However, learning is a jagged, messy process, as the line shows, so don’t expect linear results. Stay flexible; it’s life in perpetual Beta.

Working Smarter, one day at a time

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ITA 2011Yesterday we hosted a conversation on social learning and working smarter, facilitated by the folks at Citrix and the eLearning Guild. We all enjoyed the hour long session and participants will be sent the link to the recording by Citrix. In Jane’s social learning community a few comments arose about the lack of interaction. I responded that with 500 people in the audience and only one hour, we were limited in what we could do. Citrix provided the platform and support staff for one hour (plus several hours of rehearsal). We had already crowd-sourced the questions and also answered dozens of text questions that came in (however, it seems not all were posted back to the audience). It was great the community participated for 30 days before the event and hopefully will continue for many days after.

Yesterday’s event was only one part of many conversations that started several years ago on our blogs and continues on Twitter and other platforms.

I’ve highlighted some of the questions on performance improvement asked yesterday  and expanded on the responses, including links:

Q: Where does performance support as a process integrate into social tools and learning at the time and place of need? Where do you best recommend that HPT/ISD individuals gain the social/collaboration skills? What tools are you using to create the performance/support and learning communities?

Performance support starts as a complement to social learning, but then we move to having the community co-develop the performance support tools. The best way to develop any skill is to practice & get feedback – I suggest you  jump in and start using these tools in order to understand them and then see how they can be used in the workplace. Check Jane’s tool of the day site, but lots of potential solutions: open source, commercial, already out there (e.g. Yammer & Status.net)

Links:

Whither ISD, ADDIE & HPT? (includes definitions of these acronyms)

HPT and ISD

Getting to Working Smarter

Q: What do you opine regarding HPI/HPT practitioners (ASTD/ISPI) and the need for this type of specialized practitioner as a member of organizations’ HR or as a community resource?

I think HPT skills are a good addition to training development skills but we also need to add business skills and social/collaboration skills. I find that HPT doesn’t get “social” very well. Basically, HPT is only one toolset;  good for some things, but not all.

HPT, like many other workplace disciplines, creates silos. Networks require the integration of organizational support. We’re realizing that compartmentalized approaches to supporting work do not work in a highly networked world. Why should HR, IT, Finance, Training, KM, OD, Marketing etc. be separate functions? It’s time to rid our organizations of Taylor’s ghost and use radically different management. Clark Quinn calls it a unified performer-facing environment and I have said for a while that we need to break down the intra-organizational walls. I hear the same discussions in HR, OD, KM, Training and IT. They see their traditional roles and control eroding. Each field is trying to remain relevant but it’s only by working together that they will.

It’s not just about HPT, or L&D, or HR. Systems thinking is necessary.

Q: Did I miss it, or have you not defined the term “social learning”?

No cookie-cutter answers here ;)

Bandura’s Social Learning Theory

Bandura and Social Cognitive Theory

Working Smarter through Social Learning

Learning Socially

Social Learning Handbook

More to follow …

 

Life in Perpetual Beta – Director's Cut

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You read this blog, why not see the movie by the same name? [I have no affiliation with the film, though I like the title and enjoyed it]

Life in perpetual Beta – Director’s Cut is now available for purchase. Produced by Melissa Pierce @melissapierce and released this month, the documentary covers the effects of social media and the always-on Web on many facets of our lives. It includes interviews with Seth Godin, Biz Stone, Gary Vaynerchuk, Jason Fried, Liz Strauss and many others.

Life in Perpetual Beta is a documentary film about the ways in which technology has/is/will change the ways in which we think about ourselves as individuals and a society. It is exploring the cultural shift that technology creates as it enables people to live more passionate, less planned lives. Life in Perpetual Beta was made by the same principles it explores, all aspects of the film were crowdsourced on social networks, from who to interview, what to ask, camera crews and how to pay for production. Life in Perpetual Beta will inspire you to believe that with a little faith in humanity and help from the internet, anything is possible.

Check out the movie’s website.

There are a lot of interesting stories and perspectives in this video. No answers, but many lenses to see our mixed-up world and how perpetual Beta is becoming the norm.

“There’s no map” – “You have to be open” – “Authenticity is obvious” – “Everybody is in the design business” – “You can change your mind” – “You have to know where you are now and plan forward from that”

Note: The video is only available for purchase in the USA, though you can watch it in the screening room.

Don’t worry, we’re counting the apples

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The other day I was at the university dining hall, waiting at the cashier’s counter. Several students came through and swiped their cards. One student was carrying her hand bag and was told that she couldn’t come in with it. [I later found out that hand bags and back packs must be left in a non-secure area at the entrance. This seems to be the norm at many institutions of higher learnin’. ]

The young lady explained that she was carrying the necessary equipment to deal with her diabetes, such as insulin and juice packs . The cashier did not know what to do and the supervisor was called. The young lady was grilled again on the need for the offending bag in the dining hall and after a minute or two the supervisor allowed her to enter with it, with a clear warning not to take any food from the dining hall.

And so the student went for her mid-day meal. A student who pays about $7,000 in tuition, plus the cost of text books and other fees and then an additional $3,700 for the privilege of dining in an establishment where you are treated like a criminal. If I was a student with a $2,000 computer in my pack, I would not leave it unattended. But it seems they have little choice. Take it or leave it. The thing is, some day they may leave it, especially in an age of instant communications and ubiquitous online university rankings.

This highlights the small-mindedness of institutional culture. We become obsessed with the possibility that a student may sneak an apple out of the dining hall while oblivious to the enormous demographic and economic changes that universities are only beginning to face. No students, no dining hall, no apples to sneak out in hand bags. But don’t worry, the apples are safe.

 

 

 

Networked Knowledge: out of the ivory tower

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Many of the important issues that face our society are complex and require a good knowledge of science. Yesterday, I explained some of what I’ve been trying to learn about nuclear fission and power generation. Understanding how people learn and how we can integrate learning into work is a prime professional interest of mine.

More and more political and personal decisions have to made on some understanding of science. Of interest to me are: nuclear power; hydro-fracking; climate change and uranium mining. Each requires significant knowledge to understand the issues.

Obviously, the public media are not designed to deal with these kinds of issues. They are in the business of selling advertising and getting readership. Some journalists inform but most, including the good ones, can only shine a lens and let us make up our minds. My post yesterday was intended to show that mainstream media were not very good at informing us on complex subjects. I wanted to explain how I was able to get information and put some things together. The self-correcting nature of a blog would ensure that somebody might set me straight or point me to better sources of information. Comments on Twitter indicated that I might be seriously misinformed. I am still learning and will continue to do so. Learning is work and work is learning; that’s life in perpetual Beta.

Image: Ivory Towers by Colin Smith

I’d like to highlight one aspect of how we treat knowledge in our society. Complex scientific fields are the realm of research institutions, like universities.  It takes a long time to get expertise and competence is conferred through peer review. But peer review has its problems and much of the research is published in the language of specialists that only the select few can decipher. There is also little incentive in the highly competitive (for research funding) fields of scientific research to publish widely or to synthesize research so that it is understandable by the average adult. These same adults who vote for politicians who set research funding policies.

The media aren’t informing and the informed aren’t using media.

Part of my responsibility in using networked knowledge is to give back to the community. I believe it’s our part of the social learning contract. The scientific community has the same responsibility. I was asked, “Please, don’t spread this wrong thinking around.” So in return, I ask the scientific community to step up and spread their knowledge. The whole world is trying to understand these issues.

Update: I’m noticing The Guardian and the CS Monitor are providing good in-depth analysis of the nuclear situation in Japan now. Very good to see. Now we just need this on a regular basis for many other complex scientific issues, especially when there’s no urgent crisis.

Fuelled by Informal learning

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Caveat: It seems I have to put a warning sign on this post. I am not a nuclear physicist and the opinions on this post are personal and are not professional, scientific advice on radiation or its effects.

I’ve had a crash course in nuclear physics this week. I took basic Physics in university, but my major was History, so I never really got into it. This interconnected world sure makes it easy to learn informally though.

From Twitter, I was led to an excellent overview of how the Fukushima Daiichi reactor works at Why I am not worried … which is now being hosted by MIT’s Nuclear Information Hub:

The solid fuel pellet (a ceramic oxide matrix) is the first barrier that retains many of the radioactive fission products produced by the fission process.  The Zircaloy casing is the second barrier to release that separates the radioactive fuel from the rest of the reactor.

The core is then placed in the pressure vessel. The pressure vessel is a thick steel vessel that operates at a pressure of about 7 MPa (~1000 psi), and is designed to withstand the high pressures that may occur during an accident. The pressure vessel is the third barrier to radioactive material release.

The entire primary loop of the nuclear reactor – the pressure vessel, pipes, and pumps that contain the coolant (water) – are housed in the containment structure.  This structure is the fourth barrier to radioactive material release. The containment structure is a hermetically (air tight) sealed, very thick structure made of steel and concrete. This structure is designed, built and tested for one single purpose: To contain, indefinitely, a complete core meltdown. To aid in this purpose, a large, thick concrete structure is poured around the containment structure and is referred to as the secondary containment.

Both the main containment structure and the secondary containment structure are housed in the reactor building. The reactor building is an outer shell that is supposed to keep the weather out, but nothing in. (this is the part that was damaged in the explosions, but more to that later).

Then I read today on the MIT site that, “Radiation levels on the edge of the plant compound briefly spiked at 8217 microsieverts per hour but later fell to about a third that.” What’s a microsievert, I asked myself, and how dangerous are 8217 of them? I was able to find out via Wikipedia that:

1 Sv = 1000 mSv (millisieverts) = 1,000,000 µSv (microsieverts) = 100 rem = 100,000 mrem (millirem)

And I further read that at 250,000 µSv “Some people feel nausea” and at 1,000,000 µSv there is “Mild to severe nausea”. Makes 8,217 µSv look pretty small to me.

The mainstream media reports tell a different story. Here’s one from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation:

Most of the attention in the past three days has been focused on Daiichi units 1 and 3. A complete meltdown — the melting of the radioactive core — could release radioactive contaminants into the environment and pose major, widespread health risks.

There is no mention of radiation levels, or what would happen in the event of a core meltdown [containment], in this story and in many others by the CBC and other mainstream media/entertainment sources.

Update: A more detailed explanation of the factors at play, via Twitter:

There are some characteristics of a nuclear fission reactor that will be common to every nuclear fission reactor. They will always have to contend with decay heat. They will always have to produce heat at high temperatures to generate electricity. But they do not have to use coolant fluids like water that must operate at high pressures in order to achieve high temperatures. Other fluids like fluoride salts can operate at high temperatures yet at the same pressures as the outside. Fluoride salts are impervious to radiation damage, unlike water, and don’t evolve hydrogen gas which can lead to an explosion. Solid nuclear fuel like that used at Fukushima-Daiichi can melt and release radioactive materials if not cooled consistently during shutdown. Fluoride salts can carry fuel in chemically-stable forms that can be passively cooled without pumps driven by emergency power generation. There are solutions to the extreme situation that was encountered at Fukushima-Daiichi, and it may be in our best interest to pursue them.

This is why it’s so important to be a self-directed learner. Who stands to benefit by the stuff that’s being Pushed to you? Advertisers? Whether it’s news or education, we have the networks that can help us figure things out. It just takes a little effort.

It’s not just the media, either. This weekend I came across an article in The Atlantic, Lies, Damn Lies and Medical Science that showed that “as much as 90 percent of the published medical information that doctors rely on is flawed”. We need to think for ourselves.

Update 16 March: The CSMonitor (almost mainstream media!) is providing some good in-depth reporting:

Meltdown 101: What are spent fuels and why are they a threat?

Opinion: Japan’s Nuclear Crisis: 6 reasons why we should – and shouldn’t – worry

Good coverage by The Guardian – Japan Nuclear Crisis Live Updates

I must say that the mainstream press are stepping up on this.

18 March: From a science journalist: Nuclear power won’t kill you

Frictionless learning

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Gary Wise, in Close to the Edge: The Radicalization of Training,  suggests that workers need an environment with:

seamless, frictionless and ubiquitous access to/from the right learning assets – at their moment(s) of learning need – in work context-friendly amounts – in compelling, readily-consumable formats – to/from the right devices.

This is definitely part of the solution and goes a long way in addressing the training department’s predominantly event-based, fire & forget, mindset. However, it’s also content-centric and appears to assume that if you have the right content, learning will happen.

But more of our work is in exception-handling or is increasingly complex and requires the sharing of highly contextual tacit knowledge. That means we also need to be connected to the right people at the right time. Professional social networks enable these connections. I would add to Gary’s description, “seamless, frictionless and ubiquitous access to/from the right learning assets as well as a dynamic network of colleagues/co-workers …”. Once again, this sounds like wirearchy:

a dynamic [multi-way]  flow of power and authority based on information, knowledge, trust and credibility, enabled by interconnected people and technology