Work is learning. Learning is the work.
information & communication technology
I am presenting on enterprise social technologies, learning and performance at the Learning Technologies conference in London today. Most large organizations have something like Microsoft Sharepoint, an intranet, or perhaps a social tool such as Socialcast. But how can you tell if these tools are right for the job? How can these tools support a coherent social strategy across the enterprise?
At the end of the nineteenth century, mechanization changed the economy, the workforce, and society. Many countries, especially the United States and Great Britain, shifted from an agricultural to an industrial economy. Human muscle was replaced by machines. Farm workers left their fields and migrated to the factories.
Today we are a witnessing a similar shift, as human information processing is being drastically surpassed by integrated technology systems. This has been called the second economy. I frequently discuss the implications of work automation on what is becoming a post-job economy. Consider that about 35% of existing jobs have a 85% or greater chance of being automated. The challenge we face is how to distribute wealth when capital accrues to the few and there is no need to hire as much labour to run that capital. Industrial powerhouse General Motors still employs over 200,000 people, but who knows how long that will last. In comparison, computer hardware maker, and iTunes master, Apple has about 80,000 employees, while the search/advertising giant Google has 46,000. It seems that the more intangible the goods and services, the fewer people are required.
I mentioned the creative economy in a recent post and given the growth of this second economy, and fewer jobs produced in the current economy, we need to seriously reconsider how value, wealth, and economic independence can be achieved. The key is creativity. “Identifying the new” will be a critical skill. The creative economy will be led by people testing the limits of all fields of endeavour. This will be fueled by big (and distributed) data, in conjunction with networked people. Innovation will be so essential that it may no longer be discussed. Innovation and creativity will be the new literacies.
This is scary because most of our schools and other institutions do not foster innovation and creativity. I think many people will be left on the sidelines of the creative economy until we develop support systems that can help people tap their innate abilities that were ignored for much of the past century. Machines have already replaced most physical labour. Networked computer systems will continue to rapidly replace human thinking for logical and analytical processes.What is left is creativity. The demand for innovative ideas (like new business models) and creative ideas (like games and movies) is probably infinite. However, at this time, the supply is still limited. Platforms that can leverage collective creativity may be a way to get people into the new economy. Some existing organizations, like corporations or universities, could help, but they must significantly restructure.
Céline Schillinger, says that companies must cultivate their rebels in order to remain relevant to their workers, while staying competitive in their arenas. These rebels can let them see beyond the organization’s walls. Rebellious people are essential for a new economy that no longer requires the diligence and obedience now provided by networked computers. The rebel spirit is the competitive advantage for innovation and creativity. Most organizations do everything possible to extinguish it, but rebels can help cycle more quickly through increasingly shorter stages of competitive advantage. The new economy’s equivalent of the industrial assembly line will likely be some system that celebrates rebels. This will be an epochal shift in management thinking.
Rawn Shah once told me that knowledge is evolving faster than can be codified in formal systems and is depreciating in value over time. This pretty well sums up the situation. Humans have the ability to deal with some very complex things, yet too often our societal and organizational barriers block us from using our abilities. In the new economy, it’s not what you know, but what you do with what you can learn, that will be valued. It will take rebels on the edges to do this.
“I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over; on the edge you find things you can’t see from the center.” – Kurt Vonnegut.
Image: GapingVoid.com
Jane Hart compiles a list every year of what people find to be their best web tools for learning. Voting closes on 27 September. Here are my top tools this year, with last year’s position shown in brackets.
9 (new): Wikimedia Commons is a great source for copyright free images to use in presentations.
8 (new): Feedly is my new feed reader, now that Google Reader has been shut down.
7 (8): Flickr: Still a great way to share photos online. I like the feature that automatically creates images in multiple sizes. Though the deletion of Pro accounts, for which I paid two years in advance, shows that Yahoo! (the owner) does not really care about its customers, only advertisers.
6 (10): Google Plus: I find G+ is very good for deep conversations and the live Hangouts feature is still a killer app, even though the features and interface keep changing, showing that the platform is built by engineers, for engineers.
5 (5): Keynote: Apple’s presentation application has enabled me to improve my slide presentations, through its simplicity and lack of clip art.
4 (9): Slideshare: A handy way to share presentations so that people can view them before or instead of downloading them.
3 (3): Diigo: Social bookmarks are a quick way for me to save a web page and find it easily (Diigo allows me to do an auto backup to Delicious).
2 (4): Twitter: Next to my blog, Twitter is my best learning tool and allows me to stay connected to a diverse network.
1 (1): WordPress: It powers my blog, which is the core of my self-directed learning and online reflection. It’s easy to use, has a huge community, and there are many plug-ins and additions available.
The future of workplace learning is social, cooperative and especially mobile. One approach for this type of workforce is to support their mobility with something like a ‘genius bar’, instead of having to request a support ticket from IT or get an appointment with HR. There is a growing array of enterprise software tools to support the emerging workforce, but it takes more than technology, as Dion Hinchcliffe warns.
We forget at our peril that collaboration is a fundamentally human activity. This implies that any use of enabling technology without taking into account how people actually conduct their work, their inclinations to share information and interact with each other, and in particular how the proposed technology will empower them and alter their collaborative behavior for the better/worse, is bound to disappoint.
Providing mobile access for work and learning just makes sense today. Clark Quinn says that mobile technology makes a lot of sense, as “it decouples that complementary capability from the desktop, and untethers our outboard brain“. Sense-making is a critical skill for most knowledge workers today, and frameworks like PKM can help. When I refer to personal knowledge management, especially my blog, I often call it my outboard brain. Supporting mobile technologies can leverage every worker’s outboard brain and free up cognitive load for pattern recognition, the stuff that machines are not as good at.
While sales of tablets are increasing, and mobile business is an expanding sector, there is still a lot of work to be done on how people actually conduct their work. Legislating mobile collaboration is probably not the best solution, but it does underline the huge cost-savings of abandoning the industrial age concept of being paid for merely putting in time. As Nancy Dixon writes, “The only reason to come together face-to-face is for people to be in conversation with each other!” Too often though, the workplace is not designed to enable conversations. While mobile technologies may be part of the solution to a more agile workforce, another component is improving the workplace environment so that people can do what they do best face-to-face — converse.
If you replace the word “learner” with “worker’ in this article on the SPATIAL model, you can see that there is a lot that can be done to make work environments more open. More open environments can encourage conversations [AKA, participation in complex work].
Participation is a critical variable in nonmandated education; thus, the physical environment’s impact on participation rates can be especially important in educational and training efforts outside of school settings.
Mobile work and learning proponents should also be looking at changing the physical workplace to further support a more nomadic workforce that is empowered with mobile technologies. Let me finish with another example from Nancy Dixon, a case study called The Hallways of Learning, where a change in the physical layout of a hallway significantly increased in-depth professional interactions.
The learning that occurred in Researcher’s Square did not come from presentations, rather the knowledge gained was through conversation. When we think about learning from others our first thought is to have someone make a presentation. But as ubiquitous as presentations are, they are a poor way to learn from peers. Typically, a presenter offers what happened in his or her own situation, but that is not what learners need to hear. Learners are interested in knowing how to adapt the lessons to their situation and for that they need to have a conversation so that the other person can understand their context, and they also can understand the context of the other.
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This post is brought to you by Mobile Enterprise 360 Community and Citrix
Note: I retained editorial control and take full responsibility for what is posted. Contract writing is one of the ways I make my living.
It was reported that only 2% of social sharing happens on Google Plus (G+). I too, do not share much on G+. I recently posted on G+ that it did not fit in with my professional use of social media, even though discussions are often fun, interesting, and informative. That G+ post I made now has 52 comments, more than any post on this blog has had.
In that post, Jeff Roach described G+ as “a network that looks like Facebook (media rich) but functions more like twitter (streams etc) but is more friendly to conversations and sharing than both of them.” Joachim Stroh suggested that I create a community on G+ but I countered that I preferred to cooperate in the open, not in another social media walled garden:
I think one of the problems today is that many online social networks are trying to be communities of practice. But to be a community of practice, there has to be something to practice. One social network, mine, is enough for me. How I manage the connections is also up to me. In some cases I will follow a blogger, in others I will connect via Google Plus or Twitter, but from my perspective it is one network, with varying types of connections. Jumping into someone else’s bounded social network/community only makes sense if I have an objective. If not, I’ll keep cooperating out in the open.
Nollind Whachel then weighed-in with several thoughtful comments and Joachim Stroh continued to engage. I stood on the sidelines, and a few others added comments, including one commentator unknown to me who felt I was being unprofessional because I did not understand G+. By the way, all of my G+ posts have been public, so anyone can jump in.
Nollind provided a good way to describe the sense-making process in these online social networks:
Connect = producing content
Empower = making sense of content patterns
Inspire = leap of logic, the patterns form a story, you see the bigger picture
Joachim made an interesting subsequent comment:
So, I’m still looking for the connection to go from unstructured to structured content, without doing a lot of curation. It’s not easy if you are doing this on your own (as you describe), it’s almost impossible to do this collectively (without a CM role).
Nollind added an emergent thought, that I think is important, and is partially what this blog post is all about:
Hmm, just had an interesting thought. It actually may be easier to do the writing and sense making within one community and then do the outlining and structuring in another community.
My interest in all of this comes down to PKM, and so far, G+ is a mere extension of my PKM processes. Perhaps it could be more, but I strongly believe in the centrality of my blog, which I own and control. I am not ready to give that to Google or any other third party. Nollind also made an excellent comparison of my PKM framework with his own methodology,
Seek = Connect = Play
Sense = Empower = Learn
Share = Inspire = Work
At this time, G+ provides a nice place for deep discussions with people who probably would not post as much on my blog and would be throttled by Twitter’s 140 character limit. I know that others use it much more, adding tags to make search and retrieval easier, and engaging with communities. G+ does add to my weak & diverse ties and even enables the sharing of complex knowledge. Perhaps G+ is trying to be all things to all people, and for those of us with existing PKM processes, that’s just too much.
Image: Social Ties for Cooperation & Collaboration
Today, it’s all about networks, something you were most likely not taught about in school. This means that most of our education is useless in understanding the world as it currently exists. Yes, useless.
If you were raised during the past several decades you probably understand tribes and institutions. You likely heard a lot about market forces, especially in 2008. But that is a triform society. What happens as we become a quadriform society (Tribes +Institutions +Markets +Networks)?
There are some interesting things that happen when hyperlinks subvert hierarchy, as the writers of the Cluetrain Manifesto said in 1999 (that long ago). For example, United Breaks Guitars, a video that gave a whack on the side of the head to United Airlines, adversely affected United’s stock price. Wikileaks published some documents and enormous state resources were put against one person, now holed up in an embassy, at significance expense to those who pay the guards. Arab Spring became a force overnight, confusing intelligence agencies (the same ones who never saw the collapse of the Soviet bloc in advance). The Occupy movement came and some say has gone, but it’s likely a field test for more movements to come.
In education, the current subversion is called a MOOC, which has already been subverted by corporate interests, but will likely rise again in another name or form. In the labour movement we are seeing things like alt-labour as well as a growing shareable economy. CSA’s are becoming the norm. Networked, distributed businesses, like AirBNB, are disrupting existing models, with the inevitable push-back as they become successful.
Big data is also networked data. Data is the new oil, according to Gerd Leonhard. While my personal data may not be that important in the great scheme of things, networked data drive advertising, brands, and security systems. To negotiate the network era we need to understand networks – social networks, business networks, government networks, and information networks. We need network fluency.
Tony Reeves wrote a recent post about the 21st century skill set, showing that global fluency could be developed through certain skills like critical thinking, in addition to some key literacies, like information literacy. I have taken these ideas but describe them slightly differently, as shown in the image below.
Network era fluency could be described as individuals and communities understanding and being part of global networks that influence various aspects of our lives. For individuals, the core skill is critical thinking, or questioning all assumptions, including one’s own. People can learn though their various communities and develop social literacy. Information literacy is improved by connecting to a diversity of networks. But control of networks by any single source destroys the ability for people and communities to develop real network era fluency, which is not good for society in the long run and may kill innovation and our collective ability to adapt.
Mass network era fluency can ensure that networks remain social, diverse, and reflect many communities. This kind of fluency, by the majority of people, is necessary to deal with the many complex issues facing humanity. We cannot deal with complex issues and networked forces unless we can knowledgeably talk about them. This requires fluency.
Related: The Network is the Solution
Ten years ago I started out on my own. I took a bit of a gamble – no job, two school-age children, no clients. I was an optimist.
I live in the middle of nowhere as far as the business world is concerned, and without the internet I would not be able to do my work, or even have a living. For the moment, the following statement is basically true:
“The elite have power over just about everything. The internet is a rare, untamed exception” – Truthout
Maybe I was wrong to be optimistic – but I’m still hopeful, in spite of some evidence to the contrary that the next middle class will be quite different. The latest news about state surveillance operations, here and elsewhere concerns me as well, but I think current events may help open the internet again. This just might be the beginning of the end of techno-utopia for educators, as well as the impetus for a more open internet, particularly coming from outside North America.
The internet was essential in building my business. It’s my net. Now it looks like it could become nothing more than a fishing net for any state security organization. But I’m still optimistic that things can change for the good. Connecting +2 billion people for the first time in history is going to have some emergent effects that nobody can predict or control. It’s life in perpetual Beta, for people and for institutions, no matter how powerful they may be. In the network era, I don’t take anything for granted, and neither should the elites.
ENCLOSURE: In English social and economic history, enclosure or inclosure is the process which ends traditional rights such as mowing meadows for hay, or grazing livestock on common land formerly held in the open field system. Once enclosed, these uses of the land become restricted to the owner, and it ceases to be land for commons. – Wikipedia
Do we no longer own common culture?
People everywhere are seeing and feeling the loss of parts of their lives to the ‘enclosure’ of privatization and the diminishment of the commons (the public spaces where certain types of common services and goods are made available to the public). – Jon Husband
Even the newest ventures are quickly getting enclosed.
What was a promise for free-range, connected, open-ended learning online, MOOCs are becoming something else altogether. Locked-down. DRM’d. Publisher and profit friendly. Offered via a closed portal, not via the open Web. – Audrey Watters
Government is also culpable.
In the absence of that [a culture of open government], though, we could paradoxically find ourselves living in a world where technology makes it easier to share information — via the government’s open data portal or its online access to information request system — while our government’s culture makes it harder to talk to the people who can give that information meaning and context. – David Eaves (Toronto Star)
But what is the price of enclosure? We will lose our ability to innovate. For a society, a country, or an organization, this is the end of evolution and the beginning of stagnation.
Andy McAfee reports in HBR that United Technologies is laying off workers, even though its stock is at an all time high and sales have increased by 35%.
I simply want to point out that if this example is part of any larger trend, then we cannot rely on economic growth to fix our current problems of unemployment or underemployment. Because even for individual companies, economic growth has become so decoupled from employment growth that the former goes up while the latter goes down.
I have been observing for quite some time that most work is getting automated and outsourced, while only complex and creative work remain valued, and therefore wealth-generating for those who do it. The construct of the JOB highlights this problem, because jobs are designed around work that can be copied and workers who can be replaced, but anything that can be reduced to a flowchart will be automated. Relying on the job as society’s main wealth-sharing mechanism is a major mistake in the network era, but one that politicians and many others continue to make. We are entering a post-job economy.
Part of the solution is taking control of our own professional development. Another is developing new systems of wealth exchange, such as the many new models examined at Shareable. But most importantly, we need to change our language as we discuss work, wealth, and economics. We need to stop focusing on job creation and figure out better systems of wealth redistribution for a networked society.
Once again, it’s time to put my money where my mouth is. I have been a proponent of the open web and open source software for the past decade and more. This site was Creative Commons licensed when CC was in its infancy. I have talked several times about the importance of owning your data. I deleted my Facebook account over a year ago, having no more time for this enormous walled garden, and I deleted my LinkedIn account and started to rebuild it last year. The latter was an interesting experience, as I saw how much more controlling and channeling LinkedIn was with new users than when I first joined.
This week Google announced that it will close down Google Reader, an RSS aggregator that I have found useful, after Bloglines went offline and then changed its operating model. Reader is a very important part of my PKM process, especially the “Seek” part. I have just switched to Feedly and will see how it works. At this stage I am more inclined to find paid services than free ones. As they say on the web, if you’re not paying for it, you are the product. For more commentary on Google Reader see Stephen Downes’ posts.
I would not be surprised if Feedburner, another Google service, gets shut down soon as well. Many subscribers here get their email notifications via FeedBurner. As I move away from the Google web domination machine, I will be removing FeedBurner as an option, though existing subscribers will continue to receive notifications until Google inevitably pulls the plug.
In the meantime, I will try to set an example and remove myself from as many walled gardens as possible. Google Plus is probably next, as is Google Analytics. I still get value from Twitter and LinkedIn and will continue to use them, though I am under no illusions that they are serving my interests.
I will also look for good platforms that are either open source, like wordpress.org, which powers this site, or services that charge a fee and cater to their customers. For instance, I gladly pay for my Flickr service.
We are going through another transition of the web and I have no intention of leaving the whole thing to a few corporate interests. This site will remain ad free and open access, not residing on some commercial third-party hosted platform. It’s a very small thing I can do.
