Learning

Learning

Social media & workplace performance matrix

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c4lpt_corporateJane Hart has an excellent resource on Case Studies for Social Media & Learning in the Workplace that she keeps up to date. I’ve looked at it many times and thought that it might be easier to see the big picture as a matrix, which I’ve created as a Google Document.

Feel free to use and improve this spreadsheet. If you do re-post it, please let me know so I can add the link here. Much of the information comes from third-party reports so I cannot attest to its accuracy. Let me know of any errors or omissions and I will address them.

If you would like to edit the Google Doc, or get it as a spreadsheet, please contact me.

Favourite Workplace Learning Blogs

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This list is a result of a series of tweets, initiated by Janet Clarey who referred to a Top 50 list of educational technology blogs. Shortly after that, Maria Anderson suggested that I create a list for workplace learning. I don’t like creating “Top 50” lists so here are my current favourite sources of information and knowledge about learning, especially for the networked business environment. These are not all the blogs I read and I have another set of blogs that are more academic and purely learning related.

First of all, I follow my colleagues because that’s how I met most of them, by reading what they had to say [and I liked it].

Informl.com by Jay Cross (US)

Learnlets by Clark Quinn (US)

Social Media in Learning by Jane Hart (UK)

Performance, Learning, Productivity by Charles Jennings (UK/AU)

Wirearchy by Jon Husband (CA)

InternetTime.com another one by Jay Cross (US)

Blogs about Workplace Learning, in the broadest sense of the term

(in alphabetical order)

Anecdote AU: A blog focused on “putting stories to work”.

Bunchberry & Fern UK/JP: Simon Bostock’s blog on information engineering, learning, and organizational development.

Cognitive Edge UK: Dave Snowden focuses on rejuvenating management practices especially when addressing intractable problems.

Corporate eLearning Strategies & Development US: (the title says it all) by Brent Schlenker (includes a very long blog roll).

Dave’s Whiteboard US: Dave Ferguson (also a Canadian citizen) is an experienced workplace learning practitioner.

Donald Clark Plan B UK: Donald always gives us something to think about and question our assumptions.

ELSUA ES: Luis Suarez talks about knowledge management, community building, social computing and living in a world without e-mail [a very good thing].

e-Clippings: Learning as Art US: Mark Oehlert has particular expertise in gaming and learning.

eLearning Technology US: Tony Karrer has a deep and wide-ranging blog on all things learning and technology.

elearnspace CA: George Siemens is well-known in academic circles but also discusses business and workplace issues.

Green Chameleon SG: Blog of knowledge management consulting firm Straits Knowledge.

Growing Changing Learning Creating US: Tom Haskins’ insightful blog ranges from learning strategies to business models.

Janet Clarey US: Janet discusses emerging technologies in workplace learning with a strong research focus.

Karyn’s erratic learning journey UK: Karyn Romeis is an independent learning & development consultant who shares her passion for workplace learning.

Knowledge Jolt with Jack US: Jack Vinson blogs about knowledge management, personal effectiveness, theory of constraints, and more.

Mark Sylvester US: Mark writes about social networks, working together, learning together and being together.

Mathemagenic NL: Long-time blogger Lilia Efimova writes about personal productivity in knowledge-intensive environments,  PKM and more.

Networks, Complexity and Relatedness US: Patti Anklam specalizes in organizational network analysis and knowledge management.

The Obvious UK: Euan Semple is a deep thinker focused on helping people understand the web.

The Smart Work Company UK: Anne Marie McEwan writes about workplace trends and new ways of working, or working smarter.

Interdependent Thoughts NL: Ton Zylstra writes about knowledge work and management and the tools and strategies that help us navigate the networked world.

Trends in the Living Networks AU: Ross Dawson talks about opportunities for business and society in a hyper-connected world.

Will at Work Learning US: Will Thalheimer is focused on the research behind workplace learning practices.

Workplace Learning Today US/CA: Brandon Hall’s multi-author site that always has something of value.

This is not a complete list but all of these bloggers post regularly and I have followed each one for more than a year and some for many years.

PKM: a node in the learning network

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Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy, or, in other words, digital networks enable multiple connections, so organizational communications are no longer just vertical. Somebody else, outside the hierarchy, is only one click away, and perhaps easier to deal with and a better source of information and knowledge. This is becoming obvious in the business world and frameworks such as Social CRM (customer relationship management) are one attempt to address it.

Too often we think of learning as school, training as something that is delivered, and complex problems as solvable with enough effort and resources. We are wrong on all three counts.

Social learning is about getting things done in networks. It is a constant flow of listening, observing, doing, and sharing. Effective working in networks requires cooperation, meaning there is no plan, structure or direct feedback. This can scare managers and organizational leaders because no one is in change of social learning and there is no end-state or final learning objective. But social learning in networks can help us deal with complexity by providing a platform to test out ideas and learn from and with each other.

Jane Hart has described five types of learning using social media, the lubricant of learning in digital networks. Then she looked at how they relate to formal/informal learning as well as the spectrum of dependent/independent/interdependent learning.

social pkm

I have circled those activities at the bottom of this grid to show what personal knowledge management (PKM) enables. I have described PKM as our part of the social learning contract and the more I look at implementing social learning, social CRM or social business models, the more convinced I am that PKM is a foundational skill-set.

knowledge-management

Keeping knowledge in our heads is not of much use in getting things done, though that is what most of our training and development efforts have focused on for the past century. Individual training, stemming from the military systems approach to training, addressed skills and knowledge acquisition, as directed by those in change. The organization wanted to drive stuff into our heads.

networks-n-nodes


In networks, though, one of our main jobs now is getting stuff out of our heads and sharing with others.

PKM is focused on accidental, serendipitous, personal-directed, informal, independent learning.

PKM enables group-directed, intra-organizational, interdependent learning.

PKM enriches formal, structured learning and helps learners be less dependent.

PKM is taking control of our learning, as well as making much of it transparent. It makes us a valuable node in our various networks. We share our learning riches without diminishing them. If more people start seeking, sensing & sharing then we’re on the social learning path. Notice how I did not mention that you need some special “social learning” technology platform to do this?

Diffusion of social learning

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Paul makes an excellent comment to my article on social learning in the enterprise that Jon Husband kindly posted for me on the FASTForward Blog:

I see the critical aspect to social learning to be ‘diffusion’. Knowledge ‘flows’ at specific speeds, and complex, technical details have high viscosity. Some nodes are efficient at in-flow (fast learners), some at out (teachers). Excessive turnover removes nodes before their knowledge has spread to the rest of the group. Isolated groups fail to transmit their knowledge. Again, if I were debugging a company I’d want to measure this. How long before a new product feature is well understood by sales? by management? Does R&D know about current marketing efforts? How much does a idea change as it’s communicated through the company? Are there particular points where ideas get stuck, or particularly garbled?

There is a lot to unpack from this paragraph and it highlights many of issues around learning in the enterprise. It’s not just about having access to knowledge or people but getting ideas flowing throughout the organization. Redundancy comes to mind as a principal for supporting social learning diffusion. There has to be more than one way to communicate or find something.

Just because something was blogged, tweeted or posted does not mean it will be understood and eventually internalized as actionable knowledge. The more complex or novel the idea, the more time it will take to be understood. Often I have revisited articles and only understood them when I have read related views or had a chance to find examples of some new concept. Understanding networks, for instance, is easier when you live and work with them and can see examples of network effects.

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Diffusion – Viscosity – Flows – Redundancy

Interdependent Learning

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The value of social networks for learning is that they help create trust paths to share ideas, advice and feelings between people who care. Jane Hart has developed five categories for social learning:

IOL – Intra-Organizational Learning – keeping the organization up to date and up to speed on strategic and other internal initiatives and activities

GDL – Group Directed Learning – groups of individuals working in teams, projects, study groups, etc Even two people working together in a coaching and mentoring capacity

PDL – Personal Directed Learning – individuals organizing and managing their own personal or professional learning

ASL – Accidental & Serendipitous Learning – individuals learning without consciously realizing it (aka incidental or random learning)

FSL – Formal Structured Learning – formal education and training like classes, courses, workshops, etc (both synchronous and asynchronous)

I previously looked at these categories as being either Undirected, Self-Directed or Directed (from the outside):

social media for learning

My colleagues at ITA have been discussing the use of words like informal; formal; social; directed; and autonomous and how much they add to enabling better learning in organizations. My moment in the shower this morning sparked this idea as a way to describe and categorize activities related to learning for work:

Dependent Learning (FSL) – direction is required in terms of objectives, curriculum, expertise and facilitation. The learner is dependent on others.

Independent Learning (ASL & PDL) – self-motivated people can get what they need in the manner they want

Interdependent Learning (GDL & IOL) – learning that requires connecting to others and cannot be done alone.

For workplace learning, especially in complex environments, I would want to support interdependent learning as much as possible, as this would create a more resilient learning community, not dependent on any individual nor any formal training program. I would also encourage independent learners to share what they know so that the best learners could set an example. I would minimize dependent learning because it is obviously a cost centre and too much dependent learning may adversely influence mastery of independent and interdependent learning.

Now we can ask the CEO – do you want us to focus our energies on encouraging dependent, independent or interdependent workers?

social snake oil

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Knowledge management (KM) was a most promising field until it was hijacked by software vendors who were selling IT systems for six figures. A lot of money went into information technology systems and there was little left to help the individual make sense of it. Dave Pollard noted this several years ago:

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

Personal Knowledge Mastery is one counter movement to centralized document repositories. As Mary Abraham wrote, during a recent discussion on PKM: “Perhaps PKM is growing in importance because so few organizational KM methods work for individuals.” As soon as the software vendors and marketers get hold of a good idea, they pretty well destroy it. Maybe that’s why there’s a constant flow of new business books — the authors are trying to keep ahead of the snake oil salesmen.

snake oil 2
Image: gapingvoid.com

I saw this happen with e-learning. In the late 1990’s e-learning was an all encompassing term for learning online. However, the IT systems vendors and the course providers (AKA: shovelware) turned e-learning into online courses. Building simplistic document management systems coupled with generic information presentation was an easy way to keep profits high.

Now if you say you’re in the e-learning business, everyone thinks you do online courses. That’s why I coined the term, ABC Learning [Anything But Courses]. Yes, I know there are some good e-learning programs, but these are more than information presentation. The better ones resemble simulations.

Is the same thing happening with social learning? Jane Hart recently changed her title to Social Learning Consultant so people will not think she creates online courses. Now social learning is being picked up by software vendors and marketers as the next solution-in-a-box, when it’s more of an approach and a cultural mind-set. In A framework for social learning in the enterprise, there is no suggestion whatsoever that an organization can implement some software system and suddenly social learning will just happen. Perhaps PT Barnum was right and there is an innate desire to buy some magic potion to solve all our problems.

Why are businesses buying their productivity tools from traveling circuses?

A framework for social learning in the enterprise

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A framework for social learning in the enterprise

The social learning revolution has only just begun. Corporations that understand the value of knowledge sharing, teamwork, informal learning and joint problem solving are investing heavily in collaboration technology and are reaping the early rewards.

—Jay Cross

Social learning

Why is social learning important for today’s enterprise?

George Siemens has succinctly explained the importance of social learning in the context of today’s workplace:

There is a growing demand for the ability to connect to others. It is with each other that we can make sense, and this is social. Organizations, in order to function, need to encourage social exchanges and social learning due to faster rates of business and technological changes. Social experience is adaptive by nature and a social learning mindset enables better feedback on environmental changes back to the organization.

The Internet has fundamentally changed how we communicate on a scale as large as the printing press or the advent of written language. Charles Jennings explains why we need to move away from a focus on knowledge transfer and acquisition, an approach rooted in Plato’s academy:

“We are moving to the world of the sons of Socrates, where dialogue and guidance are key competencies. It is a world where the capability to find information and turn it into knowledge at the point-of-need provides the key competitive advantage, where knowing the right people to ask the right questions of is more likely to lead to success than any amount of internally-held knowledge and skill.”

Our relationship with knowledge is changing as our work becomes more intangible and complex. Notice how most value in today’s marketplace is intangible, with Google’s multi-billion dollar valuation an example of value in non-tangible processes that could be deflated with the development of a better search algorithm. Non-physical assets comprise about 80 percent of the value of Standard & Poor’s 500 US companies in leading industries.

From replaceable human resources to dynamic social groups

The manner in which we prepare people for work is based on the Taylorist perspective that there is only one way to do a job and that the person doing the work needs to conform to job requirements [F.W. Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management, 1911]. Individual training, the core of corporate learning and development, is based on the premise that jobs are constant and those who fill them are interchangeable.

However, when you look at the modern organization, it is moving to a model of constant change, whether through mergers and acquisitions or as quick-start web-enabled networks. For the human resources department, the question becomes one of preparing people for jobs that don’t even exist. For example, the role of online community manager, a fast-growing field today, barely existed five years ago. Individual training for job preparation requires a stable work environment, a luxury no one has any more.

evolution of work

A collective, social learning approach, on the other hand, takes the perspective that learning and work happen as groups and how the group is connected (the network) is more important than any individual node within it.

MIT’s Peter Senge has made some important clarifications on terms we often use in looking at work, job classifications and training to support them.

Knowledge: the capacity for effective action. “Know how” is the only aspect of knowledge that really matters in life.

Practitioner: someone who is accountable for producing results.

Learning may be an individual activity but if it remains within the individual it is of no value whatsoever to the organization. Acting on knowledge, as a practitioner (work performance) is all that matters. So why are organizations in the individual learning (training) business anyway? Individuals should be directing their own learning. Organizations should focus on results.

Individual learning in organizations is basically irrelevant because work is almost never done by one person. All organizational value is created by teams and networks. Furthermore, learning may be generated in teams but even this type of knowledge comes and goes. Learning really spreads through social networks. Social networks are the primary conduit for effective organizational performance. Blocking, or circumventing, social networks slows learning, reduces effectiveness and may in the end kill the organization.

Social learning is how groups work and share knowledge to become better practitioners. Organizations should focus on enabling practitioners to produce results by supporting learning through social networks. The rest is just window dressing. Over a century ago, Charles Darwin helped us understand the importance of adaptation and the concept that those who survive are the ones who most accurately perceive their environment and successfully adapt to it. Cooperating in networks can increase our ability to perceive what is happening.

Making social learning work

Jon Husband’s working definition of “Wirearchy” is “a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority, based on knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results, enabled by interconnected people and technology”. We are seeing increasing examples of this on the edges of the modern enterprise. World Blu’s annual listing of our most democratic workplaces continues to grow and gain attention. Google’s dedicated time-off for private projects, given to its engineers, promotes non-directed learning and collaboration. Zappos directly engages with its customers on Twitter, fostering higher levels of two-way trust. As customers, suppliers and competitors become more networked, being more wirearchical will be a business imperative.

Wirearchies inherently require trust, and trusted relationships are powerful allies in getting things done in organizations. Trust is also an essential component of social learning. Just because we have the technical networks does not mean that learning will automatically happen. Communications without trust are just noise, not accepted and never internalized by the recipients.

wirearchy

Here are some ways to make social learning work in the enterprise:

Think and act at a macro level (what to do) and leave the micro (how to do it) to each worker or team. The little stuff is changing too fast.

Engage with Web media and understand how they work. The Web is too important to be left to the information technology department, communications staff or outside vendors.

Use social media to make work easier or more effective. Use them to solve problems for work teams and groups.

Make traditional management obsolete. Teach people how to fish and move on to the next challenge. If the organization is maintaining a steady state then it has failed to evolve with the environment.

Analyzing social learning

Most 20th century workplaces had two types of learning: formal learning through training and informal learning (about 80% according to research) which just happened by accident or the result of observation, conversation and time in the job. This focus on formal training, for skills and knowledge, missed out on our social nature. Business has always been social, especially at the higher levels of management and with ubiquitous access to networks, this is once again part of everyone’s work. In the global village, we are all interconnected.

Jane Hart has shown how social media can be used for workplace learning and that instead of just training, there are five types of learning that should be supported by the organization:

IOL – Intra-Organizational Learning – keeping the organization up to date and up to speed on strategic and other internal initiatives and activities

GDL – Group Directed Learning – groups of individuals working in teams, projects, study groups, etc Even two people working together in a coaching and mentoring capacity

PDL – Personal Directed Learning – individuals organizing and managing their own personal or professional learning

ASL – Accidental & Serendipitous Learning – individuals learning without consciously realizing it (aka incidental or random learning)

FSL – Formal Structured Learning – formal education and training like classes, courses, workshops, etc (both synchronous and asynchronous)

Notice that traditional training (FSL) is only one of the five types. Three of these (IOL, GDL, PDF) require self-direction, and that is the essence of social learning: becoming self-directed learners and workers, all within a two-way flow of power and authority. Social and informal learning are not just feel-good notions, but have a real impact on an increasingly intangible business environment.

Jay Cross has looked at the ways that social learning is becoming real and developed this table to highlight some of the workplace changes he is observing:

get real jaycross

Implementing social learning

social media for learning

The changes in becoming a networked workplace can be further analyzed using Jane Hart’s five ways of using social media for learning in the organization.

ASL – Accidental & Serendipitous Learning: from Stocks to Flow

Learning is conversation and online conversations are an essential component of online learning. Online communication can be divided into Stocks (information that is archived and organized for reference and retrieval) and Flows (timely and engaging conversations between people, including voice or written communications). Blogs allow flow and micro-blogs, like Twitter, enable great flow due to the constraint of 140 characters

The web enables connections, or constant flow, as well as instant access to information, or infinite stock. Stock on the Internet is everywhere and the challenge is to make sense of it through flows of conversation. It is no longer enough to have the book, manual or information, but one must be able to use it in changing contexts. Because of this connectivity, the Web is an environment more suited to just-in-time learning than the outdated course model. ASL is shifting from looking at knowledge as the collection of bits and engaging in the learning flows around us, without any conscious plan. We are working and learning in networks and the only thing a network can do is share.

PDL – Personal Directed Learning: from Clockwork & Predictable to Complexity & Surprising

Complexity, or maybe our appreciation of it, has rendered the world unpredictable, so the orientation of learning is shifting from past (efficiency, best practice) to future (creative response, innovation). Organizing our own learning is necessary for creative work. Workplace learning is morphing from blocks of training followed by working to a merger of work and learning: they are becoming the same thing. Change is continuous, so learning must be continuous. Developing emergent practices, a necessity when there are no best practices in our changing work environments, requires constant personal directed learning.

In complex environments it no longer works to sit back and see what will happen. By the time we realize what’s happening, it will be too late to take action. Accepting surprise is similar to the delight an artist may have on completion of a work and only then see an emergent quality not consciously understood during the process of its creation.

GDL – Group Directed Learning: from Worker Centric to Team Centric

As mentioned earlier, the real work in organizations is done by groups. This means that sending individuals on a training course and then re-integrating to their work group is relatively useless. With work and learning merging in the network, groups need to find ways that support each member’s learning, while engaged in tasks and projects. Tools that can capture activities and keep group members focused should be used to reinforce group learning.

Social learning requires a certain amount of effort to maintain regular contact and association with our colleagues. Developing social learning practices, like keeping a work journal, may be an effort at first but later it’s just part of the work process. Bloggers have learned how powerful a learning medium they have only after blogging for an extended period. With the increased use of distributed work groups, it is even more important to foster social learning and web media are the current tools at hand.

IOL – Intra-Organizational Learning: from Subject Matter Experts to Subject Matter Networks

Mark Oehlert recently coined the term Subject Matter Networks as a new way of finding organizational knowledge. Instead of looking for subject matter experts from which to design training, we should extend knowledge gathering to the entire network of subject-matter expertise. Once again, the emphasis is no longer on the individual node but on the network. Good networks make for effective organizations.

Networked communities are better structures in dealing with complexity, when emerging practices need to be continuously developed and loose ties can help facilitate fast feedback loops without hierarchical intervention. Collaborative groups are better at making decisions and getting things done. The constraints of the group help to achieve defined goals.

Building capabilities from serendipitous to personally-directed and then group-directed learning help to create strong networks for intra-organizational learning. This is exceptionally important because the emerging knowledge-intensive and creative workplace has these attributes:

• Simple work will be automated.
• Complicated work will go to the lowest bidder, as processes & procedures become more defined and job aids more powerful (e.g. mortgage applications).
• Complex work requires creativity and is where the value of the post-industrial organization lies.
• Dealing with Chaos sometimes has be confronted and this requires creativity as well as a sense of adventure to try novel approaches.

FSL – Formal Structured Learning: from Curriculum to Competency

There remains a need for training in the networked workplace but it must move away from a content delivery approach. The content will be out of date before the training is “delivered” (another outdated term). Work competencies will still need to be developed through practice and appropriate feedback (what training does well) but that practice will have to be directly relevant to the individual or group (group training is an area of immense potential growth). Jointly defining work competence with input from individuals, groups and subject matter networks should become the new analysis process, enabled by social media. Think of it as social ADDIE (analysis, design, development, implementation, evaluation) for the complex workplace.

Summary

Our workplaces are becoming interconnected because technology has enabled communication networks on a worldwide scale. This means that systemic changes are sensed almost immediately. Reaction times and feedback loops have to get faster and more effective. We need to know who to ask for advice right now but that requires a level of trust and trusted relationships take time to nurture. Our default action is to turn to our friends and trusted colleagues; those people with whom we’ve shared experiences. Therefore, we need to share more of our work experiences in order to grow those trusted networks. This is social learning and it is critical for networked organizational effectiveness.

Our current models for managing people, training and knowledge-sharing are insufficient for a workplace that demands emergent practices just to keep up. Formal training has only ever addressed 20% of workplace learning and this was acceptable when the work environment was merely complicated. Knowledge workers today need to connect with others to co-solve problems. Sharing tacit knowledge through conversations is an essential component of knowledge work. Social media enable adaptation, and the development of emergent practices, through conversations.

emergent practices

About Internet Time Alliance

Internet Time Alliance helps organizations solve performance problems.

Our toolkit contains collaborative intelligence, network optimization, performance support, informal learning, and a hundred years of practical experience.

Together, we can help you make your workers and partners more proficient, in less time, and often for lower cost.

See what we’re thinking, visit us at the Internet Time Alliance

Jay Cross | Jane Hart | Harold Jarche | Charles Jennings | Clark Quinn

External References

George Siemens http://elearnspace.org/

Social Learning White Paper http://www.entreprisecollaborative.com/

Charles Jennings http://charles-jennings.blogspot.com/

F.W. Taylor: Principles of Scientific Management Wikipedia

Jon Husband: Wirearchy http://www.wirearchy.com/

WorldBlu: Most Democratic Workplaces http://www.worldblu.com/

Jay Cross: Where did the 80% Come From? http://www.informl.com/where-did-the-80-come-from/

Jane Hart: Social Learning Handbook http://www.c4lpt.co.uk/handbook/state.html

Jay Cross: Social Learning Gets Real http://www.internettime.com/2009/11/social-learning-gets-real/

Mark Oehlert: Subject Matter Networks eclippings (learning as art)

Training alone is not enough

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In our second eCollab blog carnival, I asked if we could formalize the informal:

Are there ways of “formalizing” some or all of this without losing out on the personal relationships we have with our friends and colleagues, those who we turn to help us solve a problem. Can we formalize the informal?

Jay Cross, in my subsequent interview on the subject, said:

… it’s the wrong question. It would be like asking if we should “informalize” formal training. A key understanding that Jay wants to get across to everyone in the workplace learning arena is that it’s not an either/or proposition, but rather how much informal and how much formal learning should we support and who is determining what’s to be done. All learning is a bit of both. His promotion of informal learning is not to replace formal training but to open up the possibilities of supporting the other 80% of learning that has been ignored for far too long.

My own perspective is that supporting informal learning is mission critical for knowledge-intensive organizations:

A key difference between formal training and informal learning is that the former is designed (push) while the latter is enabled (pull). As far as formal training goes, we have several models and many examples of good practices. But training alone is not enough. The best training programs can only address a maximum of 20% of the work performance issues in an organization. Training can only help to develop skills and knowledge if we know in advance what these are. In many cases, we don’t know what our future performance needs will be.

Dennis Callahan provided several examples of “creating conditions to help informal learning thrive”:

  • Providing tools (e.g., wiki, blog, microblog) for people to share knowledge
  • Provide learning for how to use these tools for sharing
  • Creating an OJT [on job training] guide that describes events that someone must experience as part of their learning (e.g., going on a sales call with a sales representative)
  • Developing a mentoring program
  • Facilitating a working session on helping customers solve a real business problem

Tom Haskins submitted a very thoughtful response and showed that “…formal learning poses the opposite requirements from those of formalized informal learning”:

  • Instead of encouraging useful mistakes, formal learning penalizes mistakes …
  • Instead of scattering what needs to be learned, formal learning delivers required content in centralized locations like classrooms and books …
  • Instead of assisting students in unlearning their misconceptions, formal learning assumes errors will get obliterated by providing more content …

Dave Ferguson looked at the importance of aligning goals and balancing organizational and individual learning goals:

Those phrases got me thinking about how, if you work within a large organization, you need to find ways to align your personal goals with the organization’s in a way that’s authentic for you and helpful to the organization.  In part, it’s the old concept of the king’s shilling: if you’re accepting the paycheck, you’re granting the organization’s right to set and pursue its goals and to ask you to help achieve them.

When you can’t ethically do that, it’s time to get out.

Donald Clark (USA) takes a slightly contrarian view :

I think this 80/20 informal/formal thingy is kind of going in the wrong way. We should be spending the majority of our time on 20% of the learning taking place within our organization — remember the Pareto principle? Thus you should be asking:

What processes are critical for delivering our product/service and do we need to ensure that our workers learn them correctly?
What tasks are so vital to a processes that we have to ensure we educate someone to be a backup?
How can we best develop our workers so that we continue to grow as a company? What we think of as the “informal” will most often fall into this category.

Thanks to all the contributors to this blog carnival. Please feel free to weigh in, as there’s no time limit here (it’s the web & it’s informal):

Jay Cross

Dave Ferguson

Tom Haskins

Dennis Callahan

Donald Clark

Informal Learning: “mission critique”

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My latest article, Informal Learning: mission critical (en français Apprentissage Informel: Mission critique ) has just been published on the Collaborative Enterprise (#eCollab) site.

My interest in informal learning has grown with my experiences online. We now have a wide array of cheap and plentiful platforms for informal learning – blogs, wikis, social bookmarks, podcasts, social networks, micro-blogs. Digital networks mean that we are no longer limited to reading what has been formally published or talking only to our limited social circle. We can now engage in much larger conversations, as an individual, a member of a group, or within an organization. Ignoring, or blocking, ways to learn informally online would be like handicapping every employee’s cognitive abilities.

I have several articles posted on eCollab now, some new and some re-posted. This has been a great opportunity to review and update my articles as well as get them translated. My colleague, Thierry deBaillon is doing an amazing job with the translations. Drop by the eCollab site (in perpetual Beta of course) and please join us in a cross-cultural idea laboratory to exchange perspectives with experts and practitioners. You will also find my latest interview with Jay Cross.

Sensing and Thinking

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Tim Kastelle (a great source of knowledge on innovation) discusses how it’s better to have a good idea than a large network to fire off any old idea. Good ideas have better acceleration.

This is an important innovation lesson as well. We don’t need more ideas, we need better ideas. In many ways this is a stock and flow problem – if we only focus on stocks of ideas, we’re less able to get them connected to people. We need to think about our idea flow. As the story of these two posts illustrates, the quality of an idea has a lot to do with how well it flows through our networks. It is yet another example of the greater importance of quality, not quantity.

The notion of aggregating/filtering/connecting for innovation is one that I have looked at for personal knowledge management. I have revised this to Seek/Sense/Share in my quest to find a good metaphor/model to introduce PKM.

seek-sense-share

We can seek out (aggregate) all the sources of information on any subject and share them with the world, but if we don’t make sense of them, they’re worthless.

The narrow point of the hourglass is where less gets through, it’s under greater pressure and it’s what makes the act of sharing valuable – our special context.

PKM isn’t just collecting and filing  bits and pieces of information for later retrieval. There is an ongoing sense-making process that, through practice, develops cognitive skills. It’s knowledge management, not information or document management.