SocialLearning

Social learning

Learning socially and being social

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Some of the interesting things I found on Twitter this past week.

Diffusion By Learning. Innovation by Social Learning. via @charlesjennings

3. Social learning. People adopt once they see enough empirical evidence to convince them that the innovation is worth adopting, where the evidence is generated by the outcomes among prior adopters. Individuals may adopt at different times due to differences in their prior beliefs, amount of information gathered, and idiosyncratic costs.

@oscarberg “Organizations can own communities, but nobody can own social networks. They gather on purpose, and interact on the edge of chaos.”

@BFchirpy “The killer learning management system is the Web – silly” [in case anyone is still wondering]

Pondering complexity. Good MIT Sloan article on managing complexity. via @rossdawson

What can we do, the executives asked us, to manage complexity more effectively?

Our advice: Focus on the issues that are making it hard for your employees to get things done, and on building the ability of your work force to cope with the complexity in their roles. For most workers, complications arising from increased M&A activity and regulation matter less than having a simplified organization with clear roles and accountabilities.

Are we too professional: has professionalism gone too far? An excellent read via @AmirKassaei

Over-professionalism is everywhere. Teachers in England are trained to plan lessons in segments of three minutes, a theory which leaves little room for spontaneity in the classroom. They are also often exhausted before term even starts because of the endemic pressure to plan every lesson weeks in advance. It is all too tempting for teachers to sacrifice freshness–which is impossible to measure or record on paper–in favour of form-filling. But can education ever be mapped out in such prescriptive terms? Anthony Seldon, Master of Wellington College, thinks not: “The erosion of trust in education is sucking the life out of classrooms, teachers and students. You can tick all the boxes under the sun and still be a lousy teacher. You cannot encapsulate the human experience of learning in some mechanistic pedantry.”

Great slide presentation by @sachac on how to be a shy connector – Shows that it’s not necessary to behave like arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks:

The Shy Connector

View more documents from Sacha Chua.

Social learning in the enterprise

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This past year, my Internet Time Alliance colleague Jane Hart changed her title to Social Learning Consultant. Why?

Whereas early e-learning was all about delivering content, primarily in the form of online courses, produced by experts and managed via learning management systems, Social Learning is about creating and sharing information and knowledge with other people using (often free) social media tools that support a collaborative approach to learning.

Social Learning is fast becoming recognised as a valuable way of supporting formal learning and enabling informal learning within an organisation (something that has been overlooked for far too long). The use of online communities and networks, where employees are encouraged to co-create content, collaborate, share knowledge and fully participate in their own learning, is helping to create far more enduring learning experiences.

As Jon Husband says, “everyone in almost all enterprises is using the Internet all day long, participating in exchanges and flows of information”. This is networked business reality. If the learning/training department remains focused on content delivery it will miss the greatest opportunity for organizational performance – social learning.

I’ve put together a short slide presentation that covers some of the factors driving us towards social learning in the enterprise.

1. This is inspired by a year of discussions and conversations, especially with my Internet Time Alliance colleagues, with whom I’m grateful to collaborate and learn.

2. I start with McLuhan’s Laws of Media because this lens has proved useful over the years. For more information, read McLuhan for Managers.

3. We are only starting to see the enormous impact of the Internet on how we work. It is changing everything. I have yet to be swayed from this opinion.

4. We are seeing a shift in how we view knowledge, as Charles Jennings wrote on Social Learning:

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.

5. Jay Cross has riffed on the changing nature of work, based on Thomas Malone’s The Future of Work.

6. Our current work structures are based on last century’s models of scientific management, sparked by F.W. Taylor.

7. Networks are draining the organizational pyramid, as the Cluetrain highlighted a decade ago.

8. We need to look at work differently and the nature of the job has fundamentally changed as passion & initiative replace diligence & obedience in the creative economy.  Wirearchy is a new framework for work in this economy.

9. None of this is new, it is part of our continuing need to adapt to change.

10. We need to look at learning as a core part of our work, and Jane Hart describes how workplace learning is more than just formal training.

11. When we need help at work, we turn to our friends and trusted colleagues with whom we’ve shared experiences. However, our closest friends may not be our best source of knowledge. We need to grow our trusted networks by sharing our work experiences so that we have more people to learn from when the need arises.

12. Social learning is critical for networked organizational effectiveness.

Enterprise Social Learning

View more documents from Harold Jarche.

Informal, Social, Wirearchical Business

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Our motto is that “six heads are better than one” at the Internet Time Alliance, and I have the pleasure of working with and learning from a great collaborative team, spread across eight time zones.

1. 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”.

I believe the shift in power and authority is showing up in clear ways all around us, for better and for worse.  The shift can be seen in daily events and in the ways peoples’ working lives and behaviours are changing, in the ways they are becoming more or less well-informed, and in consumption patterns for much of what they are buying and using.

This is a good description of where our work is focused: enabling organizations to become more “wirearchical”.

2. Wirearchy requires trust, and Charles Jennings explains how trust relationships are powerful allies in getting things done (focus on results) in organizations.

If we’re working in L&D [learning & development] strong trust relationships with senior leaders and middle managers are vital. Without a high level of trust any L&D manager will find it almost impossible to embed a culture of learning in their organisation.

3. The way we think of work and learning has to change in consideration of the dominance of networks (technical & human) in business. I have called this Work 2.0 and here are some suggestions on how to get there:

  • 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 IT, communications or outside vendors.
  • Use social media to make work easier or more effective. Use them to solve problems for you.
  • Make yourself and your function  redundant. Teach people how to fish and move on to the next challenge. If you’re maintaining a steady state then you’ve failed to evolve with the organization and the environment.

4. Business has always been social, especially at the higher levels of management and this is now part of everyone’s work. We are all inter-connected. Jane Hart explains how social media can be used for workplace learning. Instead of just training, there are five types of learning that should be supported by the organization:

1. IOL – Intra-Organisational Learning – keeping the organisation up to date and up to speed on strategic and other internal initiatives and activities
2. FSL – Formal Structured Learning – formal education and training like classes, courses, workshops, etc (both synchronous and asynchronous)
3. 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
4. PDL – Personal Directed Learning – individuals organising and managing their own personal or professional learning
5. ASL – Accidental & Serendipitous Learning – individuals learning without consciously realising it (aka incidental or random learning)

5. Social and informal learning are not just feel-good notions, but have a real impact on an increasingly intangible business environment, as Jon Husband & Jay Cross wrote:

In the network era, things you can’t see are more valuable than things you can.

Twenty-five years ago, intangibles accounted for less than a third of the value of the S&P 500. Today, intangibles can make up more than 80 percent of that value.

“Intangible assets — a skilled workforce, patents and know-how, software, strong customer relationships, brands, unique organizational designs and processes, and the like — generate most of corporate growth and shareholder value,” wrote NYU Professor Baruch Lev in Harvard Business Review in June 2004.

Corporate decision makers say their goal is to increase shareholder value. In a networked, information-based environment, shareholders value brand, reputation, ideas, relationships and know-how. These assets don’t appear on the balance sheet [yet], but more and more often they provide a corporation’s competitive edge.

Jay Cross: 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.

6. Clark Quinn & Jay Cross have described the new role of Chief Meta Learning Officer required for a wirearchical organization that supports informal, social learning in order to get things done.

Corporate culture is becoming more participatory. Authenticity, transparency, sharing, experimentation, peer power and togetherness are what it takes to succeed in a networked environment. As the tendrils of communications networks slither through silos and corporate boundaries, network values become the default organizational values. Cisco, which lives and breathes networks, is an example of baking network values into a corporate culture.

In Summary

My colleagues and I have thought a lot about workplace learning and we have been involved internally and as consultants with a wide range of organizations. Our thinking comes from experience, critical observation and forward-thinking assumptions based on patterns and trends. We are certain that organizational change is a business imperative and that social and informal learning are important paths to remaining innovative, and staying in business.

Getting Social Learning

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chat_icon_01.png

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?].

—

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.

knowledge-management

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.