Learning

Learning

Source?

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There are some ideas that capture our imagination and provide us with a way forward or a framework for further action or study. For me personal knowledge management (PKM) and wirearchy are two such ideas. These are not my ideas and even though I may not cite the original sources in all cases that I discuss them, I give credit where it is due. I learned this many years ago as an undergraduate. I remember my History professors demanding, “Source?” whenever we made a bold  statement of fact or brought in some new line of thought. I have a link to wirearchy on my header and I ensure that I add references when I publish or distribute any work that mentions PKM. I will mention work by Lilia Efimova, Denham Grey and Dave Pollard on PKM or Jon Husband on wirearchy.

*** Update: There are some “self-corrections” in the comments pertaining to this next section [how’s that for speed?] ***

On a related note, George Siemens posts that The Rhyzome Project fails to even mention the published work of Dave Cormier on Rhyzomatic Education. With the simplicity of adding hyperlinks to web pages, citing your main sources should not be a problem, and this is something that the project could rectify quickly. I wonder how long it will take to give the appropriate citations? This could be an interesting case study of the self-corrective nature of the Web and blogs.

Academic Upstarts

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The latest book from Clay Christensen and his team, authors of The Innovator’s Dilemma and others, is Disrupting Class, where they examine education. Tom Haskins reviews the book and provides his own perspectives in Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and finally his own assessment on the value of college diplomas.

Tom thinks that the value of a diploma will decrease because knowledge in one field will not be enough for a generation facing multiple job changes and that the economies of scale offered by physical institutions will no longer be as obvious as they were in an industrial, fossil-fuel driven economy. I agree with Tom, and have discussed the challenges faced by universities, most recently in Moving the Ivory Tower to the Web: Part 1 and Part 2:

This is the same problem facing established academic institutions. Current revenues rest with the old way of doing business – students in classes. Going to the new Web model threatens those who make their living with the old model. Therefore leaders in the old hesitate because they are tied to their existing revenue streams. They cannot put the new inside the old. The answer is to locate the new outside of the old infrastructure and let the new unit go after customers who are not served by the current model. This way institutions can hold onto the value of their existing business for as long as possible while building up new capabilities with a different business model.

Furthermore, I would venture that many online universities are not real upstarts in this business, they are just variations on the same theme. Take local Meritus University for instance. An online BBA costs $36,000 for tuition and electronic documentation fees, compared to the average tuition at a Canadian university of $20,000 for four years. Customers pay a premium for the convenience of space and time. This model is not a great threat to traditional universities as it only targets those willing to pay more for flexibility. It may be a threat to more expensive US colleges though and that may be their target market. Still, it isn’t disruptive.

An example of the changing landscape is that participation rates in free learning programs are increasing, witnessed by over 700 members in Work Literacy and over 2,000 in Connectivism & Connected Knowledge. No one is making any money on these, except for the few students registered through the university for CCK08. This is a disruptive model of semi-academic courses being provided to mostly non-consumers (people who would not have paid for it anyway). At this time, these offerings are no real challenge to the existing structure, but acceptance of these programs may prepare the way for an upstart.

The challenge for academia will be in finding where the potential revenue is moving in the new value chain. For example, I give away all of my content on this website, because I know that my revenue is generated through consulting. This has been clear to me ever since I started. The blog helps me learn and connect and raises my profile on the Web. Charging for my content wouldn’t make any sense. Free generates the fees. How will universities be able to meet the challenge of more free content? Would they be able to compete with free tuition, even if it’s not as good? How about free accreditation?

I have some ideas about some new business models, which I’ve discussed with people such as Rob Paterson, and I’m sure that there are other people looking at this challenge as well.

Learnscape Sandbox

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Need a sandbox to test out Web 2.0 tools and techniques and see what they mean for your organisation? You may want to check out our Plug-in Learning 2.0 to go:

Advice on implementation comes from learning professionals, not software geeks. Jane knows social networking tools as well as anyone in the industry; Harold has his finger on the pulse of bottom-up learning and open source approaches; Clark is a passionate advocate of cognitive design, applying what we know about how people think to the design of systems. Jay is the thought leader in informal learning and the convergence of work and learning online.

This service is for organisations who want to be early adopters of social media for work and learning but haven’t figured out a way to do it internally. Our international team has a lot of experience and we work well together. Drop one of us a note and we’ll have a chat. We believe that there is a need for this kind of service and we’ve put together a package that we think makes sense. Comments are always appreciated.

Quantifying relationships, or perhaps not

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Jay Cross has often discussed the return on investment (ROI) on learning and knows that you can’t properly measure much learning anyway, at least not to a direct cause-effect relationship and then to some monetary calculation:

“You can’t manage what you don’t measure” is nonsense. The vast majority of what senior executives manage is immeasurable. They make judgment calls; they play hunches. How else do you select the right people for key jobs? How else do you choose your partners? How else do you divine the future? Organizations pay senior executives handsomely to buy their ability to make wise choices in the absence of simple measurements.

I liken learning ROI to military morale. The military puts a lot of stock (and money) into the maintenance of good morale but there is no morale indicator scale in real life. Good commanders know when morale is high or low and they how far they can push their troops. They don’t waste time trying to put an ROI calculation on every effort to build a cohesive team.

Charles Green says that we should stop measuing ROI on soft skills training and gives several reasons why. Here is one to add to your notebook, so that you have a good response when someone asks about your ROI calculation:

the perversion of individual measurement. Most soft skills deal with our relationships to others. The drive to individually behavioralize, then metricize, has the effect of killing relationships—an ironic outcome for relationship-targeting training.

As much of our work moves online and becomes more collaborative and via multiple social networks, we should remember that quantifying these relationships may be detrimental to the very same relationships that help our organisations prosper.

Reflective practice using blogs

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Paul Lowe is the course leader of the Masters programme in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography at the London College of Communication, and shared his experience using blogs with our Work Literacy group today. Here are some of the points I picked up:

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

The MA course lets the students choose their own blog platform so that blogging can continue after the course; a nice step beyond the LMS-centric approach to academic courses. I also noted that student blogs are not used an assessment vehicle which should encourage more open reflection. To ensure that blogs and comments are read, the course assigns small groups of  “blog buddies” to read and comment on each others’ blogs. This course is an excellent example of some pragmatic uses of online social media.

The recorded session is available online, just enter any participant name and leave the password blank.

Greedy Instructional Design

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Last year I wrote that Instructional Design Needs More Agility, saying that it’s time that the training industry develop its own agile approach or risk becoming redundant. Continuing on the theme of faster and more flexible development, Daniel Lemire thinks that programming could use the greedy algorithm as a basis to manage projects. I mentioned on Twitter that I thought that a “greedy approach” was similar to agile programming and Daniel replied:

@hjarche greedy here means: don’t think globally, make the best choice locally, and the end result will be ok. So, yes, it is agile.

My experience in larger projects is that we spend too much time in planning and then freeze that process once we start development, even if the plan is no longer relevant. In smaller projects planning can be almost non-existent, with a quick decision on what model/approach to use and then it’s off to meet whatever was stated in the contract. Building in agility or the greedy algorithm at the onset seems to give more options to the development team, who now have the responsibilty of confirming that they are on course as they continue to refine the product.

The second week of Work Literacy

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This past week on Work Literacy has focused on social bookmarks, perhaps the easiest and simplest of social media. Most people are already using bookmarks/favourites with their preferred browser so the leap to social bookmarks is not huge. I’ve learned a few more things about social bookmarking for learning and have discovered that Diigo is used by a lot of educators.

Once again this week, several of the +600 members jumped-in and became guides and coaches, making the work of the facilitators much easier (thank you). This kind of sharing shows that online activities can actually scale well beyond the size of a traditional course, as long as the instructors/facilitators don’t try to control everything.

I also like what Michele Martin has done with her Delicious Portfolio and think I will create one for myself. The portfolio is a good snapshot for those of us who do much of our work online and is easy to keep up to date. I can see this usage becoming common.

Next week (#3) we move on to blogging. The real benefits of blogs, which I noted over three years ago remain today:

  • Using a feed reader (via RSS), saves a lot of time and bookmarking.
  • The information I get from bloggers is usually weeks ahead of the mainstream press. Call this competitive intelligence.
  • By blogging, I have raised my profile on the web and increased visits to my site by a factor of 1000 in less than one year. This is cheap marketing.
  • I use my database of posts when preparing reports, proposals and presentations. It helps to have a searchable system like Drupal. [now WordPress]
  • Blogging forces me to think and reflect in order to write, so that what was just an idea in my mind becomes more concrete.
  • The underlying technology of easy posting and RSS to keep track of things, makes a lot of sense for collaborative learning and collaborative work – two areas of interest for my business.
  • Through blogging, I have met a number of business partners.
  • Blogging keeps me in touch with a lot of interesting people and expands my view of the world, providing new ideas for my business.
  • When I have a problem, especially a technical one, I post it on my site or someone else’s and usually get an informed answer within 24 hours. It’s like a large performance support system.
  • It allows people to get to know my opinions before they engage me as a consultant; saving time and potential frustrations.

Opportunities in difficult times

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It’s hard to get management’s attention when things are going well. They’re running off to meetings, golf games, conferences and the like. However, as cash and clients become scarcer, management has to focus on the business at hand and figure out how to do things better. They might even question the role of the training department.

I’ve been in the business of virtual learning and online collaborative work pretty well since the Web entered the business world. It’s been a hard sell over the years, especially since many people would prefer a trip to Florida in the Winter to attend a training course. Everyone deserves some time away from the office, but as travel and training budgets get slashed, more companies are examining learning and working on the Web.

WWW's "historical" logo, created by Robert Cailliau.
Image via Wikipedia

Recently I’ve been seeing more search phrases like – “open source social networking” and “cheap web conferencing tools” – coming to this site. Necessity is the mother of invention and people are looking for options. Luckily, many organisations have led the way in online collaboration over the past decade and there is a fair bit of expertise around, as witnessed by the range of knowledge on our Work Literacy online learning event. There are also a lot of tools to select from – some would even say too many.

I have a feeling that there will be a growing demand for innovative ways to help people in organisations work and learn together using the Web. For instance, I’m talking with a potential client who does not want me to travel on-site. Since I’m advising on how to move from a classroom teaching model to e-learning, he reasons, we should set the example and do all of our work online. I’m quite comfortable working that way, but it’s taken several years of practice.

I also see a rising interest in online performance support and just-in-time help, as opposed to just-in-case online courses. For professionals with skills in analysing business problems and finding methods and cost-effective technologies to address them, this is a time of opportunity. If people in the learning & development field complain that they can’t get management’s attention at this time, then perhaps they never will.

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Facebook Learning

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An example of a social network diagram.
Image via Wikipedia

Last week on Work Literacy the topic was about social networks for learning. Tony Karrer wrote a good summary of things that were noted, shared and learned. A number of people wrote that Linked-In was for professional connections while Facebook was more for social chatting. Others picked up on this and showed how Linked-In could be used for learning, but there were not a lot of instances of Facebook being used for learning.

A recent article by Marcia Conner in Fast Company is one of the best articles I’ve read on how Facebook can be used for learning, Face to Facebook Learning. She cites the work of one of my local colleagues, Hal:

Or how about the work of Hal Richman, who started the Convergence of Social and Business Networking group on Facebook to explore the learning he was seeing all around him. Early on he conducted a survey and 81% of group members said they like to merge their social and business worlds and 93% said they expected or aspired to meet people they will network and collaborate in the future. One qualitative response captured the essence of many others with, “It is important that business contacts get to see the real you. In that way you present a more rounded and credible personality who is more likely to engage others.” Discussion topics were thoughtful and revealing, helping me as a group member to learn about how others were grappling with important emergent themes.

There are lots of concrete examples and links to explore how Facebook can be used for learning and Marcia has created a group, What are you learning on Facebook?

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The social aspect of bookmarks

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This coming week (#2) at Work Literacy we will be discussing social bookmarks. I wrote about the basics of social bookmarks last year in Step 1: Free Your Bookmarks, which discussed how to get your data onto the Web cloud.

I think that social bookmarks and RSS aggregators are the two basic tools for using the Web for personal knowledge management. For those with limited social media experience, I usually suggest these two tools to get the hang of information flows on the web, which can feel like a tidal wave.

Dave Pollard, who is participating in the Connectivism and Connected Knowledge course notes how social media can have a connectivist aspect:

Refocusing Social Tools: Just as Knowledge Management is now shifting focus and attention from collection to connection, social media need to turn their attention to enabling more, more effective, more informed, more valuable conversations. They need to help us identify ‘the right people’ (to live with, make a living with, love, and talk to) and then connect with them in real time in simple yet powerful ways that mimic, as much as possible, face-to-face conversations. They also need to help us make these conversations and meetings and social interactions more effective — bring more clarity and context, reach consensus, enable stories to be told and remembered, capture non-verbal communication, and pick up from where we left off at the end of the last conversation — keeping us connected, all the time, everywhere.

Social bookmarks are but one aspect and one way to keep connected online, and in my experience one of the easiest ways to get started with web social media.

Getting your bookmarks out on the Web where you can easily access and search them definitely can help with personal productivity. It’s just easier to find things. However, it is only after some time when you have a number of pages marked with your tags and comments and when you have connected with other people that you realize that social bookmarks are more than just a heap of personal links. Other people start connecting to your network and they can annotate a link for members of their network. Suddenly, who you know becomes as important as what you know. If someone in your network knows that you’re interested in an area, perhaps they’ll find and mark a reference that you would never have found. Serendipity can happen, but only once you’ve engaged in the social space.

Here is an example of some recommendations from my network: