SocialLearning

Social learning

Getting Social Learning

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We were discussing social learning yesterday and I think it boils down to this:

We are all inter-connected because

technology has enabled communication networks on a worldwide scale,

so that systemic changes are sensed almost immediately,

which means that reaction times and feedback loops have to be better, therefore

we need to know who to ask for advice right now,

which requires a level of trust, but

that takes time to nurture.

Therefore we turn to our friends and trusted colleagues,

who are those with whom we’ve shared experiences,

which means that we need to share experiences in order to trust each other [get it?].

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It’s called social learning.

Social learning is real

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Once again, I’m learning from my colleagues, as yesterday I realized how important self-direction is in enabling social learning. Now I’m picking up on Jay’s post on Social Learning Gets Real and see how it connects to Jane’s observations. Jay has described several aspects of the future of social learning (below) and they map to the matrix (farther down) I created based on Jane’s five types of social learning.

get real jaycross

As Jay says:

In the past, we’ve focused on individuals but work is performed by groups. Hence, I expect us to start helping groups learn to perform instead of individuals.

Why is this important? We have structures and systems in place that promote and validate individual training but we leave almost all of the social learning to chance.

For example:

Would it be better to 1) take a generic classroom workshop on information management or 2) spend a few hours serendipitously learning on Twitter.

Is it more effective to a) read prepared case studies or to b) co-create your group’s case study that can be shared with the entire organization?

social learning is real

Jane Hart’s social  learning definitions:

  1. IOL – Intra-Organisational Learning – how social media tools can be used to keep employees up to date and up to speed on strategic and other internal initiatives
  2. FSL – Formal Structured Learning – how educators (teachers, trainers, learning designers) as well as students can use social media within education and training – for courses, classes, workshops etc
  3. GDL – Group Directed Learning – how groups of individuals – teams, projects, study groups etc – can use social media to work and learn together (a “group” could just be two people, so coaching and mentoring falls into this category)
  4. PDL – Personal Directed Learning – how individuals can use social media for their own (self-directed) personal or professional learning
  5. ASL – Accidental & Serendipitous Learning – how individuals, by using social media, can learn without consciously realising it (aka incidental or random learning)

Social Learning – Highlights

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We released our first white paper, on Social Learning, at the Collaborative Enterprise last week.

For me, the essence of social learning is that as our work becomes more complex, we need faster feedback loops to stay on top of it. Courses, with their long development cycle, are inadequate to meet the learning and performance needs of those dealing with complexity. The course is an artifact of a time when information was scarce and connections were few. Social learning can give us more and better feedback if we engage  our networks in order to develop emergent work practices. This requires not only a re-thinking of training but also our organizational structures.

Highlights from the white paper:

Frédéric Cavazza: Social Learning may be defined as follows: “Practices and tools to take advantage of collaborative knowledge sharing and growth”.

Julien Pouget: Social learning can be considered a way of learning that is based on collaborative practices and internet technologies associated with them (wikis, bookmarking, blogs, etc.). Constantly evolving with technology, this way of learning is naturally “nimble”. It enables both individuals and organizations to learn more efficiently in quickly changing contexts.

George Siemens: 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.

Bertrand Duperrin: Since much knowledge work focuses on narrow and contextualized issues, the only way to get the appropriate answer is through an unmediated and contextualized from the source. Peer to peer learning is efficient because it comes when needed, and only then, and because it involves someone who has already found a solution and used it.

Clark Quinn: When you learn with others, you co-create your understanding, and this has implications for formal and informal learning, as well as organizational and societal effectiveness. The effect of the internet, the flattened world, is that we can learn socially in new ways with new people, creating new understandings, new „inspirations?.

Cédric Deniaud: Knowing how to collaborate, share one’s knowledge and promote it, are part of the true skills that are required today.

Charles Jennings: We are living in a world where access trumps knowledge every time. Those who know how to search, find and make the connections will succeed. Those who rely on static knowledge and skills alone will fail.

Florence Meichel: To be efficient, learning processes must integrate two complementary dimensions. We learn by doing and talking to others and at the same time, we learn how to learn. From these two approaches, we have double-loop learning processes, (individual and collective), which enable organizations to develop permanent and relevant adaptive skills.

Anthony Poncier: All this informal knowledge can be capitalized for and by the community of learners and enriched by all who participate. Indeed, each person generally organizes his or her own learning. We must give the means and the desire to share or “socialize” this personal work, to all learners (that is the role of the trainer).

Jay Cross: People have always learned to do their jobs socially. Workers talk with one another, mimic the behavior of successful performers, ask questions, converse, gossip, and collaborate. The fact that it’s fun encourages us to continue with the practice.

Christophe Deschamps: Less formalistic than knowledge bases, these tools [blogs, wikis, company social networks] which convey conversation within organizations enable us to understand formal knowledge and also the informal context that drives them, and give them all their meaning.

Lilian Mahoukou: The word “social” means more people-generated content, less control and less hierarchy; which is fundamentally different from current training modalities.
It’s a huge challenge for trainers who need to first understand the stakes and start listening to the conversations around social learning.

PKM: our part of the social learning contract

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Why is social learning important?

It is becoming more difficult to make sense of the world by ourselves. Understanding issues that affect our lives takes significant time and effort, whether it be public education, universal health care or climate change. Even the selection of a mobile phone plan requires more than mere numeracy and literacy.  We need context to understand complex issues and this can be provided by those we are connected to. The reach and depth of our connections become critical in helping us make sense of our environment and to solve problems. Problem-solving is what most people actually do for a living, so doing it better can have widespread effects. With social learning, everyone contributes to collective knowledge and this in turn can make  organizations and society more effective in dealing with problems.

How does personal knowledge mastery relate to social learning?

PKM is an individual, disciplined process by which we make sense of information, observations and ideas. In the past it may have been keeping a journal, writing letters or having conversations. These are still valid, but with digital media we can add context by categorizing, commenting or even remixing it. We can also store digital media for easy retrieval. However, PKM is of little value unless the results are shared by connecting to others and contributing to meaningful conversations. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts as we build on the knowledge of others. As knowledge workers or citizens, PKM is our part of the social learning contract. Without effective PKM at the individual level, social learning has less value.

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Image Source: iKnowlej Personal Knowledge Management

Social tools for networks

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Effective knowledge sharing is what many organizations do not do well, or as Lew Platt past-CEO of Hewlett-Packard said, “if only HP knew what HP knows, we would be three times more productive”. But HP will never know what the employees of HP know, so wouldn’t it be better to let the workers share what they know in the best way possible? That’s the key benefit of personal knowledge management, in my opinion. If each person can better manage knowledge creation and capture, then it becomes easier to share it.

For example:

Social bookmarks let me tag and search a wide array of bookmarks and by making them public they are shared with others, but through no extra effort on my part.

Writing this blog gives me a knowledge-base of my thoughts which become articles and presentations but in being public I find others who can add to my knowledge. I also make available information and perhaps knowledge that is useful to others.

By posting on Twitter I answer questions, share links and opinions and get to know others with similar interests, with the same effort as chatting in the office but with a much broader reach. On the Net, chance favours the prepared mind.

Just providing access to knowledge creation and capture tools is a relatively easy first step in moving the organization to Enterprise 2.0; an essential step in working in complex networks versus complicated markets. During the initial implementation of these tools, there is no need to talk about collaboration. Many Web 2.0 tools can be sold on their value to the individual. Let collaboration emerge from the individual practices of workers, most of whom want to do a better job anyway.

The powerful aspect of most Web 2.0 tools is that they are designed for knowledge-sharing as well. However, collaboration is difficult with the imposed barriers to communication created by Enterprise 1.0 IT policies. The major obstacle to social learning (and working) today is the IT department and it’s time that management takes back control of information sharing. This post was inspired by Dave Pollard’s practical guide to implementing Web 2.0 which gives more information on how to accomplish this.

SocialLearn

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Yesterday, I attended Martin Weller’s presentation on SocialLearn, hosted by George Siemens, with the recording now available online. SocialLearn is a project of The Open University and takes Weinberger’s concept of small pieces loosely joined and applies it to higher education. I wrote about Small (learning) pieces loosely joined three ago and have long been a proponent of getting outside the LMS box set of constraints. In the case of SocialLearn, I think that they have the right concept for social learning on the Web and now have to clarify their own business model (yes, even universities must have business models).

The basic model is to provide the interface (API) that enables learners to connect with other systems and platforms. This strategy allows the “connector agency”, in this case the university, to quickly adopt new applications as they are used by students and teachers. Check out the diagrams on the SocialLearn blog for examples.

I see this approach as enabling critical thinking tools for each learner, as the situation warrants, and I strongly support this model.

Changing the role of The Open University from main content and application provider to a more facilitative role, with constantly changing technologies, will require a new business model and that is what Martin and his peers are looking at. The real money in higher education has almost always been around certification. That’s why Harvard can charge more, because Harvard certification is worth more on the market. Universities charge more than community colleges and for the most part, on-line degrees aren’t valued as much in-place ones. Certification, or how many degrees are granted, also drives the funding model for many state-subsidized institutions. Control the valued certification and you control the money flow. Just remember that the market may change its mind on what is valued.

Here is an excerpt from a proposal that Rob Paterson and I wrote this year:

Organizations that are decisively moving to the web are doing well. For example, iTunes is the second largest music store in the world, and the BBC have so much action online now, that some ISP’s in the UK are having bandwidth problems. NPR in the US is decisively moving to the Web and has a number of pilots out in the market and tools in development. Organisations that only partially moved to the open Web are doing less well – Barnes & Noble is really a bookstore with a web presence that fears that if its web presence was successful it would damage its store business.  The New York Times has the same issue. It has more web subscribers than paper subscribers but all its costs are tied into the paper. The music business tried to stop downloading and to hold onto bundling where its main revenues were derived. But in working to protect its current model it killed its future.

This is the problem. In this revolution, the old model is where the current revenues are located. Going to the new has to threaten this model. So leaders in the old hesitate or act half heartedly. They cannot put the new inside the old.

The answer to this paradox is to locate the new in a separate unit and to go after customers who are not served by the current model. This way you can hold onto the value of your existing franchise for as long as possible while building up the new in parallel.

Perhaps the best way for SocialLearn to go forward is to create a completely new playing field for the millions of non-consumers of higher education and become the de facto leader in a new space, much as the OU did in the 1960’s. It will be interesting to see if there is room for several players in this space and who else is moving into it.

New work, new attitude

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Nine Shift has a series of posts on the changing nature of work and how the idea of responsibility usurped morals during the industrial age (See Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3).

“In the Industrial Age of the 20th century, you didn’t have to be of good moral character to work in the factory. But you did have to be responsible.  And so teachers in the 20th century schoolhouse and college taught (still teach) responsibility.   And by that  teachers mean specific behaviors.

Those behaviors are now obsolete. They made sense in the factory …  But not in the virtual office.”

This post had me thinking about our approach to work literacy, and its foundation on skills, such as how to deal with information flows or personal knowledge mastery. What if the real challenge to be productive in the new workplace will be an attitude shift? Organisations may not be concerned if you work a full shift or are spending time at your work space. Compensation may become focused not just on results but creative solutions to the organisation’s issues. The required attitude may be creativity, as in “what have you done that’s different?”.

As we moved from morality to responsibility one hundred years ago, are we now shifting from responsibility to creativity? If we do, then most of our organisational tools and measurements about productivity may have to get thrown out.

Informal Collaborative Social Learning & Work

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Some recent threads seem to be interweaving and creating patterns in what is becoming my de facto field of practice – “informal collaborative social learning & work”.

One thread is what Jay Cross has referred to with Hole-in-the-Wall Learning (HiW), which I first came across in the book Design Like You Give a Damn, and this conversation has been picked up by Peter Isackson:

It seems to me that the fundamental key to the success of HiW is the notion of “self-organized groups” who learn on their own. If education is to become truly non-invasive, as Jay suggests, it must refrain from defining both the goals and the means to reach them, entrusting the groups with this task. If educational gurus (authorities) notice that a group is neglecting what is considered “essential” in the curriculum (for whatever reason, whether it’s basic security, survival or inculcating an existing set of values), the group could be challenged to account for why they may be neglecting a certain topic or reminded of the interest in pursuing it. Respecting the self-organizing group and its decision-making capacity is the sine qua non of success. It also happens to be the absolute opposite of the organizational principles of traditional education and training.

The idea of self-organised groups is a key theme in informal workplace learning, which Jay and I experimented with last year in the “unworkshops“. The HiW data is corroboration that we may be on the right path, though these studies involve young children only.

The other thread came via Michele Martin when she described some “new” roles that may be jobs of the future. The roles of Personal Learning Environment Assistant; Social Media Specialist; Online Coach; Social Network Catalyst and Social Network Analyst are ones that I’ve taken on at some time over the past few years. These descriptors are, for me, a clarification of the work that I’m doing.

One on my constant challenges has been in describing my work to others, and these roles can help with that. A current project with the Advanced Leadership Program of the Canada School of Public Service has me in the roles of Social Network Analyst & Catalyst and perhaps later as PLE Assistant. As we develop the online aspect of the wildlife emergency response network with AWI next year, I will assume similar roles and perhaps even that of Online Coach. If we use these terms in our proposals and work descriptions, they will become mainstream and should make it easier to get away from industrial-style roles such as workshop trainer, when not applicable.

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The two threads of self-organised learning and some commonly used terms in online collaboration have come together for me and should make it easier to ‘splain just what the heck I do.

Is education over the Internet already the killer app?

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In 1999, everyone in the nascent e-learning industry was citing this quote by John Chambers, CEO of Cisco Systems:

The next big killer application for the Internet is going to be education. Education over the Internet is going to be so big it is going to make e-mail usage look like a rounding error in terms of the Internet capacity it will consume.

Yah, right, say the skeptics who lived through the Dot Com bust and have watched as e-learning (education and training) continues to play a junior role at the boardroom table. Even the largest e-learning companies are mostly unknown outside the industry.

Well, I think that Chambers was right. We’re just measuring the wrong things. Education over the Internet is huge. Consider – Wikipedia, Wiki-How, Google search, personalised information pulled through RSS, social learning networks, learning with blogs and collaboration with wikis. Add all of these together and e-mail is starting to look like a rounding error.

Step outside the box of academic courses or training departments and online learning is growing and not looking like it will stop. As learning becomes essential for our knowledge society, we will become like fish in water, not realizing what it is we’re swimming in. One challenge for learning professionals will be to remain relevant as all of the action moves beyond their traditional turf.

From e-Learning to s-Learning

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James Farmer has started an excellent conversation on learning management systems and how new systems can be developed on a looser configuration of individual controlled nodes by using blogging software. The general theme is that less management is better, and that individual learners could write all of their posts, assignments and papers from their own site, and these could be directed to each class as web feeds. The classes would aggregate the feeds from all the students and instructors. The beauty of this kind of system is that each student keeps all of his/her content, and it does not get locked away in an inaccessible archive of a centrally controlled LMS.

Boris Mann and Will Pate add their comments, especially from the Drupal perspective, with Will pushing for a move away from electronic learning to social learning. I think that a shift of focus (and development effort) away from the management aspects of learning and more on the social aspects of learning can only be positive for the learner.

We have the technology to do this, and Drupal only needs a few more functions in order to be a “learning community in a box”. It’s exciting to know that we are getting to the point of having a real alternative to the LMS. I have tried in the past year to convince some organisations to move away from the LMS model, but the alternatives have been a bit messy, especially for the IT department. Rob Paterson’s course at UPEI showed that an online course could work without an LMS. The development of an “off-the-shelf” social software tool, designed for formal learning interventions, could really kick-start a new direction for learning technologies.

Update — and the Drupal development community has begun to discuss the creation of a module for educational sites, starting with quizzes, but ending who knows where.