SocialLearning

Social learning

PKM as pre-curation

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The most important part of personal knowledge mastery (PKM), in my opinion, is the need for active sense-making. Merely seeking and sharing information does little other than create more noise online. Sense-making takes time, discipline, and effort.

One strength of PKM is the “manual” nature of sense-making activities. The act of writing a blog post, a tweet, or an annotation on a social bookmark all force you to think a bit more than clicking once and filing it to an automated system. Other sense-making routines, like my weekly review of Twitter favourites and creating Friday’s Finds, can encourage reflection and reinforce learning.

Sense-making, or placing information into context, is where the real personal value of PKM lies. The knowledge gained from PKM is an emergent property of all its activities. Merely tagging an article does not create knowledge. The process of seeking out information sources, making sense of them through some actions, and then sharing with others to confirm or accelerate our knowledge are interlinked activities from which  knowledge (often slowly) emerges.

Robin Good has a similar perspective on curation, as shown on this mindmap on curation for training & education.

Content curation is NOT the same as social sharing, reposting/retweeting, liking or favoring a specific content item.

Robin says that, “Curation is about making sense of a topic/issue/event /person/product etc. for a specific audience.”

The difference between PKM and Curation is that the former is personal, while the latter is for an intended audience. I practice PKM for myself and my blog’s primary audience is me. Sharing online  makes it social so that I can learn with and from others. Sense-making (as described by Ross Dawson)  is the most important aspect in both cases:

Filtering (separating signal from noise, based on some criteria)

Validation (ensuring that information is reliable, current or supported by research)

Synthesis (describing patterns, trends or flows in large amounts of information)

Presentation (making information understandable through visualization or logical presentation)

Customization (describing information in context)

The connection, in practice, between PKM and curation seems quite obvious to me. I can practice PKM and over time develop a wide variety of knowledge artifacts. For example, I have 2,182 blog posts and 2,858 social bookmarks. These have all been curated by me and for me. However, if I want to curate these artifacts for an intended audience, I can quickly search these artifacts and find suitable resources. I frequently do this for my clients, where I may compile a list of a few blog posts related to some aspect of our project.

I think that people who have a professional PKM framework have some of the skills and knowledge needed to be good curators. Their sense-making processes are already developed. I would consider PKM as a form of pre-curation.

Training, Performance, Social Workshop Notes

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We launched a new online workshop today called, From Training, to Performance, to Social. It’s a Beta version, at a reduced price, but we have had a good number of participants sign up. I came up with the idea while conducting one of the PKM workshops and noticed that many people either mixed up training with performance improvement, or thought of social learning as merely a bolt-on to a formal course.

The first assignment has started with a bang this week, with many long and thoughtful posts about training and instruction. We will move to performance improvement tomorrow and then focus on social learning all of next week. There is one assignment for Training, two for Performance Improvement, and three for Social; reflecting, in my opinion, their relative importance in any organization. It roughly aligns with the 70:20:10 framework.

We have participants from AUS, NZ, UK & Europe, and North America, from many types of organizations and backgrounds. The workshops are designed to give just enough structure, without constraining personal and social learning. We curate what we think are the essential resources on a topic and also provide additional links and resources for those who are interested. We encourage all discussions to be done in the group area, so that people can learn from each other. Also, participants get my attention for two weeks. I try to find ways to help each person as I see what issues arise in the conversations. Without these conversations, I would not be able to help in an informed way. For those attending the workshops, the more they give, the more they get.

This is my fourth online workshop this year and it seems to be a model that works for me as well as participants. Feedback has been almost universally positive and I find the workload manageable. We will be offering more topics, and suggestions are always welcome. Custom workshops for organizations can also be developed.

courses artifacts

What's working in social business

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What’s working in social business in 2012? This is the question that CMSWire asked me to write about. In my opinion, technology sales, marketing campaigns and the speakers circuits are doing well. Implementation and organizational change are lagging far behind.

Like the knowledge management and e-learning hype phases of the 90’s and ’00’s respectively, social business is being led by software vendors. Some are even the same vendors that MIT’s Peter Senge said co-opted the field of knowledge management. I watched as e-learning moved from hope for ubiquitous learning, to the overproduction of self-paced online courses, also known as “shovelware.”

My focus on social business stems from a background in training, knowledge management, performance improvement and social learning. I have learned that the hard work comes after the software has been installed and the initial training sessions are over. Then comes the question, what do we do now?

Transparency

People may say that it’s not about the technology, but that is where a large share of the budget goes in any major change initiative. The bigger change to manage however, is getting people to work transparently. One of the major benefits of using social media is increasing speed of access to knowledge. But if information is not shared, it will never be found, and knowledge will remain hidden. Transparency is a necessity for social business.

While social media enable transparency, they also lay bare a company’s culture. A dysfunctional company culture does not improve with transparency, it just gets exposed. In the transparent social business, there is no place left to hide. This change alone can be enough to cause massive organizational upheaval. Transparency can be scary for anyone who owes their position to the old system.

Social business is not just about using social media but changing routines and procedures. With greater transparency, information now flows horizontally as well as vertically. New patterns and dynamics emerge from interconnected people and interlinked information flows, and these will bypass established structures and services. Work gets more democratic as it becomes visible to all.

With the democratization of information, user-generated content increases. Today, search engines give each worker more information and knowledge than any CEO had even 10 years ago. Pervasive connectivity changes organizational power structures, though the full effects of this take time to become visible. From a transparent environment new leaders and experts may emerge, as it takes different leadership and an understanding of networks to support a social business.

Narration

Agile social businesses need people who can work in concert on solving problems, not waiting for direction from above. Management must ask: how can we help you work in this transparent environment? In social networks we often learn from each other; modelling behaviours, telling stories and sharing what we know.

While not highly efficient, this is very effective for learning. There is a need to model the new behaviours of being transparent and narrating one’s work. Social business also requires power-sharing; for how long will workers collaborate and share if they cannot take action with their new knowledge and connectivity? Changing to more social behaviours takes time, but most of all, it takes trust.

Once social technologies have been installed, modelling new work behaviours becomes the main organizational challenge.

The organization can support this by fostering and supporting communities of practice. These are potential bridges between work teams and the open social networks on the Internet. Narration of work, or learning out loud, is a prime enabler of knowledge-sharing. One indicator that a social business is working is when people at all levels are narrating their work in a transparent environment.

If the daily routine supports social learning, and time is made available for reflection and sharing stories, then an organization is on the right track. One determinant of effective professional communities is whether they actually change practices. Only then will we know if the social business initiative has been successful.

Enterprises adopting social business need to find and support people who can model knowledge-sharing behaviours, not just talk about them. Managers should identify people who already narrate their work, create user-generated content and share transparently. Companies should get advice from people who share power and do most of their work in networks already. Just think, if there is nobody to model social business behaviours in the organization, how will people learn? From their friends on Facebook?

In a social business, work is learning and learning is the work. Social learning needs to be integrated into the daily workflow. Workers need more than technology; they need ongoing, real-time, constantly-changing, collaborative support. Management’s primary responsibility in a social business is supporting organizational learning.

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Originally posted on CMS Wire

Engage, out loud

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Why Google Isn’t Making Us Stupid … or Smart, by Chad Wellmon is a very good look at our relationships with knowledge, how we codify it, and how we connect to it.

Only at this macro-level of analysis can we make sense of the fact that Google’s search algorithms do not operate in absolute mechanical purity, free of outside interference. Only if we understand the Web and our search and filter technologies as elements in a digital ecology can we make sense of the emergent properties of the complex interactions of humans and technology: gaming the Google system through search optimization strategies, the decision by Google employees (not algorithms) to ban certain webpages and privilege others (ever notice the relatively recent dominance of Wikipedia pages in Google searches?). The Web is not just a technology but an ecology of human-technology interaction. It is a dynamic culture with its own norms and practices.

A key idea here is that our actions are much more important than any technology. One group that has developed new norms for knowledge-sharing is the software development community. Dave Weinberger talks about public learning, what I call learning out loud (LOL), in this video where he describes how developers are “learning in a way that simultaneously makes the environment smarter”.

Dave’s video is his contribution to the Adidas blog carnival on a new way of working and learning.

John Stepper describes working out loud as the most practical way to start online collaboration.

Confused about what to write? Simply post about what you’re working on every day. Who you’re meeting with. The research you’re doing. Articles you find relevant. Lessons you learned. Mistakes you made.

The form factor of short posts that are easy-to-skim make this kind of narration practical – for both the author and the audience.

This reinforces my three key principles for net work: narration, transparency, shared power. By changing our norms and practices, we can use the Internet in ways that are best for people, workplaces and society. But first, we have to be engaged.

Leadership is an emergent property of a balanced network

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This is my second recent quote from Mark Fidelman, who writes in Forbes. He has a good perspective on the integration of work and learning, and how technology is only a very small part of social business.

Investment in social business platforms and mobile solutions are great – we’re finally on the right path. But ignoring the workplace infrastructure to accommodate them will be a missed opportunity. We have to move away from the Mad Men era office, to digital workplaces that take advantage of the entire social, mobile and content being produced by an organization’s greatest asset.

Its employees.

Fidelman discusses the new role of management in the future workplace.

The new role of management is to facilitate the finding of solutions; not to dictate them. The new role of management is to facilitate “connections”, to match people with the right skills and abilities to projects where those skills are most needed. The new role of management is to remove hurdles to engagement by building approvals mechanisms into workflows. Management won’t do this alone. They will leverage new technologies that automatically introduce employees to employees, partners and suppliers in order to build relationships that help you and the organization become more effective.

Culture is an emergent property of people working together. For example, trust only emerges if knowledge is shared and diverse points of view are accepted. As networked, distributed workplaces become the norm, trust will emerge from environments that are open, transparent and diverse. As a result of improved trust, leadership will be seen for what it is; an emergent property of a balanced network [“in-balance” may be a better term for this changing state] and not some special property available to only the select few.

Network Culture

Building on my previous post – that in complex environments, loose hierarchies and strong networks are the best organizing principle – here is my view of how a transparent, diverse & open workplace should function.

Networked contributors (full-time, part-time, contractors) need to work together in a networked environment that facilitates cooperation and collaboration. This is why the narration of work  and PKM will become critical skills, as work teams ebb and flow according to need, but the network must remain connected and resilient. A key function of leaders (think servant leadership) will be to listen to and analyze what is happening. From this bird’s-eye view, those in a leadership role can help set the work context according to the changing environment and then work on building consensus.

I’ve noted before that the power of social networks, like electricity, will inevitably change almost every business model. Leaders need to understand the importance of organizational architecture. Working smarter in the future workplace starts by organizing to embrace networks, manage complexity, and build trust.

Learning is everywhere

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There are lots of “learning specialists” in organizations and they work for variously named departments. As learning specialists, I assume they are supporting workplace learning, so let me ask:

  • If I’m sitting at my desk with a work-related problem, can I call the Training Department to quickly get me up to speed?
  • If I want to learn about a new market sector, will the Learning & Development specialist help me?
  • If I need some coaching to prepare me for a meeting with a new client, can I call Human Resources to connect me with the right person who is available?
  • If I’m stuck on trouble-shooting an unfamiliar piece of software, can I get someone from Training to walk me through it?
  • If I’m looking for great examples of collaboration and social learning, do the folks in Training & Development model them?
  • If I want to become a better networked learner, can I call a Training specialist to get me started and coach me?

Learning & working are interconnected in the network era. If learning support is not connected to work, it’s rather useless. Learning is the new black — it’s everywhere, and that’s exactly where learning specialists should be. Net workers need more than advice (training), they need ongoing, real-time, constantly-changing, collaborative, support.

PKM Workshop Introduction

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My next Personal Knowledge Management online workshop is scheduled for 11-22 June 2012. PKM is also one of the topics for our social learning Summer Camp during July/August 2012. Here is a 10 minute video that covers PKM and gives an introduction to the workshop. It should help in deciding if this workshop is for you. Feel free to ask any questions. The last two workshops fostered some good conversations and I look forward to this next one.

 

Learning in the workplace

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Jane Hart asked readers “how regularly are you “learning” in the workplace?” Here are the top five ways that people learn, with my comments below on how this can be facilitated in the organization, either by management or the learning support group. Notice that these are all informal. The more formal methods, like courses, ranked much lower on the survey results.

Email (keeping up to date inside the organization)

Since email is the number one method of keeping up to date, find ways to make it easier or replace it with a world without email.  Using internal blogs for any multi-recipient email is a start. That way it’s visible, in one permanent place, with all the comments attached.

In-person conversations (keeping up to date inside the organization)

Create space for people to talk. Regular company coffee breaks can be supplemented with white boards or flip charts to encourage knowledge sharing. Take pictures of what’s going on and post them. Photos can encourage conversation. Small nooks with comfortable seating invite conversations. Changing office layout can change behaviours and even encourage inter-departmental conversations.

“At Pixar, east of San Francisco, [Steve] Jobs oversaw the design of the new building. Because the software jockeys worked in one area and the marketing folks worked in another and so forth, he decided to put the bathrooms in a central atrium. That way, employees had to run into each other each day.”

Read blog posts/online articles (keeping up to date outside the organization)

Point out good reading resources. Aggregate learning resources and get input on the best sources, as we have done with Working Smarter Daily. Use social bookmarks to share what you’re reading.

Search the Social Web using search engines (solve problems)

Put together resources on how to search. You may be surprised how few people know how to search effectively. For example: Compfight for images; GoogleGuide; Tools for Search; Four Ways to Search the Social Web.

Connect with others in public social networks or in private groups or communities (keeping up to date outside the organization)

Participate in and recommend social learning communities that meet the needs of your organization. If you don’t have any private social networks, try some out, like Yammer or Socialcast.

These are all relatively simple and fairly inexpensive things that can be done to support workplace learning. It’s amazing how many Learning & Development departments do not get involved in these types of activities. Not supporting active, informal workplace learning will just make the formal training function even less relevant.

Boundaries are for learning

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Opportunity lies at the edge of systems. Real value creation happens at the edge of organizations. That’s also where we find learning opportunities. Understanding the role of boundaries in human systems can also give us ways to take advantage of them for learning, as Kathia Laszlo writes in Reflecting on Boundaries: Who is teaching and who is learning?

“The boundaries of a system are part of its structure. There are structures that are enabling and others that are limiting. There is a delicate balance between openness and safe space. Diversity is healthy, but with certain limits. As systems thinkers, observing and reflecting on the role of the boundaries is an important practice. We need to remember that social systems are human creations. We must recover our power as social systems designers in order to reconfigure those boundaries and enable new and more life-affirming interactions.”

For example communities of practice can be bridges between our work teams and our loose social networks. Perhaps the boundaries between each of these systems — teams, communities, networks —  can be used for learning opportunities as well.

Think of opportunities to open doors between the work space and the looser dialogue in communities of practice. Bringing in specific examples from the work space to the community is another opportunity for learning. Finding new metaphors and models in our social networks and discussing these within the context of our community of practice can foster innovation. Perhaps there are roles in communities of practice that can be used in your work teams. Maybe looser social network protocols will revitalize a community of practice. Think about where the boundaries are and their influence on learning.

None of this is profound, but I think it’s helpful for community managers and facilitators: guide people to the boundaries to get new ideas to flow in and out. As Kathia writes:

“How can I facilitate the evolution of this organization or community?” is a question I frequently ask myself. And often I find that the answer to this question relies on my ability to expand the boundaries of the system so that we can move from either/or to both/and. If in the old system there where those who teach and those who learn, how can we create a culture in which everybody teaches and everybody learns? How can we move beyond acquiring knowledge to creating meaning? How can we collaborate rather than work against each other?