Learning

Learning

nature favours large social groups that network their information

by

Knowing how to get the answers you need is more important than storing those answers in your head, especially with the shorter lifespan of knowledge these days. What you find when you look something up is probably current. What you already know is more and more likely to be out of date.

A vital meta-learning skill: how to find the answer you need, online or off.

—Jay Cross (2006)

Knowledge is evolving faster than can be codified in formal systems and is depreciating in value over time. One of the ways to deal with this knowledge explosion is to use what we have — our humanity. We have developed as social animals and our brains are wired to deal with social relationships. By combining technology with our brainpower, we can figure things out. We are naturally creative and curious.

Read more

subject matter networks

by

We live in a networked world. Is it even possible for one person to have sufficient expertise to understand a complex situation such as this pandemic? So do we rely on one subject matter expert or rather a subject matter network?

I have noted many discrepancies between advice from our Chief Medical Officer of Health as opposed to a network of experts who I follow on Twitter. Our CMOH has been responsible for producing some of the most complicated public health guidelines and even our local CBC radio station staff could not come to an understanding of the concept of a ‘steady ten’ — Do these circles overlap? How long can they last? What about children going to school in contact with others? Talking with other people I have noticed that everyone interprets it differently. This is a failure to communicate.

Read more

a decade of digital transformation

by

With a focus on improving collaboration, sensemaking, and knowledge sharing in teams, communities and networks, I have had the privilege of working with a wide variety of clients.

Ten years ago I tried to convince senior federal public servants of the importance of social media and how they would have to change their relationship with citizens. This presentation fell on deaf years. I had much more success working with Dominos in incorporating personal knowledge mastery into their leadership training.

Other companies like Cigna, AstraZeneca, and ING Bank were open to changing their approach to supporting learning in the workflow and enabling cross-departmental cooperation. Carlsberg added PKM and social learning to their year-long global leadership program. More recently I worked with Citi to develop a global social learning program based on PKM.

Read more

connect, challenge, create

by

Education won’t counter populism — changing education might

Slovakia’s president, Zuzana Caputova, was elected in March 2019, and surprisingly showed a way out of the populist quagmire that many countries find themselves in. The tribal affiliations retrieved by the previous corrupt government, particularly via social media, were what Caputova had to counter in order to get elected.

She addressed these tribes not by creating a new tribe, but by discounting the tribal perspective and focusing on the population’s common humanity instead. In this case, it worked. Understanding The Laws of Media, especially the retrieval quadrant gives us a tool to counter the negative effects — or potential reversal — of new technologies like social media. This is real media literacy.

Read more

overcome by events

by

I wrote the following in 2009 —

Workplace learning in 2019

  • Much of the workforce will be distributed in time & space as well as in engagement (part-time, full-time, contract mix).
  • More learning will be do-it-yourself and gathered from online digital resources available for free and fee. More workers will be used to getting what they need as they change jobs/contracts more frequently but remain connected to their online networks (online/offline won’t matter anymore).
  • Work and learning will continue to blend while stand-up training will be challenged by the ever-present back channel. Successful training programs will involve the learners much more – before, during and after.
  • Conferences, workshops and on-site training will become more niche and fragmented (smaller,  focused & connected online) as travel costs increase and workers become more demanding of their time.
  • The notion of PKM will have permeated much of the workplace
  • These changes will not be evenly distributed.

Read more

moving beyond training

by

Working smarter means that everyone in an organization learns from experience and shares with their colleagues as part of their work. Training is not enough — see the missing half of training. We cannot know in advance and prepare formal instruction for everything that people need to learn on the job today.

The 70:20:10 framework shows that learning at work is based, generally, on these ratios:

  • 70% from Experience
  • 20%: from Exposure
  • 10% from formal Education

Read more

schooling unbound

by

“I know not what answer to give you, but this, that Power always Sincerely, conscientiously, de très bon Foi, believes itself Right. Power always thinks it has a great Soul, and vast Views, beyond the Comprehension of the Weak; and that it is doing God Service, when it is violating all his Laws.” —John Adams to Thomas Jefferson

In a 2007 presentation — covered by ICTology — Graham Attwell discussed the future of schooling in view of online personal learning environments, concluding that, “The role for teachers will be mediating, engaging, monitoring, helping, motivating …” He further commented, “Not that assessment is a thing to avoid, but it should be taken outside the learning process. On the other hand, self-assessment is reflection and thus becomes part of the learning process”. Given that many students are learning online these days, these are good ideas to be reconsidered for education, and for training.

Read more

debunking handbook 2020

by

The Debunking Handbook 2020 has just been published and is an excellent free guide to address the mass amounts of misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda that flow through our digital communications everyday and then influence real life behaviours. I have discussed some of these phenomena previously, in confronting the post-truth machines and pre-bunking the conspiracy theorists.

The 19-page Handbook provides these handy definitions.

  • Misinformation: False information that is disseminated, regardless of intent to mislead.
  • Disinformation: Misinformation that is deliberately disseminated to mislead.
  • Fake news: False information, often of a sensational nature, that mimics news media content.
  • Continued influence effect: The continued reliance on inaccurate information in people’s memory and reasoning after a credible correction has been presented.
  • Illusory truth effect: Repeated information is more likely to be judged true than novel information because it has become more familiar.

Read more

supporting workplace performance

by

Many workplace performance issues cannot be solved through training, such as:

  • Poor communications
  • Unclear expectations (such as policies & guidelines)
  • Inadequate resources
  • Unclear performance measures
  • Rewards and consequences are not directly linked to the desired performance

The barriers above can be addressed without training. Only when there is a genuine lack of skills and knowledge is training required. Even a trained worker, without the right resources and with unclear expectations, may still not perform up to the desired standard. Allison Rossett states that “… performance support is a repository for information, processes, and perspectives that inform and guide planning and action.” There are many cases where performance support is needed to help workers, even if they are trained.

Read more

when training is the wrong solution

by

Training is too often the proverbial hammer in search of nails. It’s an easy check mark to show that action has been taken, assuming that improving individual skills is the core issue that needs to be addressed. But training does not improve diversity.

Firms have long relied on diversity training to reduce bias on the job, hiring tests and performance ratings to limit it in recruitment and promotions, and grievance systems to give employees a way to challenge managers … The positive effects of diversity training rarely last beyond a day or two, and a number of studies suggest that it can activate bias or spark a backlash. … That’s why interventions such as targeted college recruitment, mentoring programs, self-managed teams, and task forces have boosted diversity in businesses. Some of the most effective solutions aren’t even designed with diversity in mind. —HBR 2016-07

In another experiment with 10,000 employees of large global corporations, diversity training had little impact where it mattered.

We found very little evidence that diversity training affected the behavior of men or white employees overall—the two groups who typically hold the most power in organizations and are often the primary targets of these interventions. —HBR 2019-07-09

Read more