What is April Learntrends? Learntrends is a series of online conversations among people with an interest in improving the process of learning in corporations and government. It’s the April installment of Corporate Learning Trends and Innovation.
Who may attend? Learntrends welcomes anyone interested in organizational learning. We are expecting a diverse mix of newbies, old hands, managers, practitioners, specialists and generalists. We hope to have storytellers and provocative thinkers joining in.
When does Learntrends take place? The conversations begin at 9:00 Pacific time on Tuesday, April 21, and conclude 24 hours later at 9:00 Pacific on Wednesday, April 22. At any given time, some participants will be in their pajamas, others will be huddled around conference room tables, while others will be enjoying a cigar on their yachts after sumptuous dinners. Please see the main event page.
What does Learntrends cost? Learntrends is free. You don’t need to register. Just come.
How do I listen in? Click here to enter our conferencing system (Elluminate). Check your connection before signing in the first time.
How do I speak? Plug in a microphone and check your audio settings in Elluminate. Put on a headset (to avoid echoes.) Tell the moderator you want to talk in the chat. We encourage all participants to speak.
What topics will be covered? We’ve invited people to talk about the payback of social and informal learning, learning in an age of networked intelligence, new roles for learning professionals, making informal learning concrete, Twitter and enterprise learning in real time, changing corporate culture, selling the important of learning to clients, measuring learning across borders, future learning technologies, and more. However, we want you to hear about other topics that interest you.
Why should I say anything? We all learn more when we’re participants, rather than just observers. Do yourself a favor. Take advantage of this learning opportunity. Introduce the topics you want to know about, talk about, or share experiences about. Get the feel of what social media is all about. If you’re shy, stay up until there are only a few people on line, but do ask a questions or share something with us.
How do I suggest a topic? Got a large issue? Pick an open time-slot, invite some people to talk with, and give us the details here. Or bring it up live. We have left many hours open for discussion of whatever you want to talk about.
Do I have to be a member? No. Members get occasional alerts and surveys, but we’re open to all people with good hearts and an interest in learing in organizations. Members can send one another private emails and post inquiries.
Why are you doing this? We are members of an immense community of corporate learning & development professionals. Some of us see sharing information and inspiring innovation as our obligation to the community. People helped us learn; this is where we pay back. Everyone, us included, benefits from the new connections that get-togethers like this forge.
PS
We are looking for moderators for 15:00-18:00 Pacific and 4:00-10:00 Greenwich Mean Time (14:00 – 20:00 in Sydney). Experience with Elluminate is a plus but not mandatory.
An unworkshop is composed of small pieces, loosely joined. I always reserve the right to hop around based on my reading of the participants. (Every unworkshop is unique unto itself.) Sometimes I get so worked up that I feel that I am channeling the material rather than presenting it. Unlike traditional workshops, nothing in one of these sessions is for sure. That’s the “un” part. And it’s there because uncertainty engages the mind.
Earlier this month, at Online Educa in Berlin, I conducted my final unworkshop of 2008. Here was the schedule:
And here’s a more detailed agenda from the Berlin session. The supporting presentation slides are all available on SlideShare. Asked if I weren’t afraid of being ripped off, since I do charge for these events, I replied “Not in the slightest.” It’s not the jokes so much as how you tell them. My goal is to rattle people’s cages, to make things memorable, and to invite bold change. Copycats don’t have the energy.
Solo presentations are deadly dull, so I’ve taken to inviting friends to take a role in my unworkshops. Nigel Paine came to my mid-year session in Melbourne to share some stories from BBC, and Ross Dawson visited the unworkshop in Sydney to describe his compelling Web 2.0 overview. In Berlin, we continued this theme with half a dozen “mountain guides” who chimed in with examples and wisdom, and made themselves available for networking throughout the event. Here’s one guide’s take on the Berlin unworkshop.
I love doing these events. It lets my inner performer loose. However, what with the advance planning, travel, prep, and follow-up, a one-day event can consume a week. I think I’ll shoot for a dozen unworkshops in 2009. Given the economy, I expect some of these will be working sessions where we identify how to slash costs while boosting performance.
To get over the here-today-gone-tomorrow phenomenon, I often precede an unworkshop with preparatory readings or a video. (Here’s an example from 2007.) Afterward, I’ll leave a structure for follow-up or an artifact of the session, such as this video.
Curriculum-free, interactive, self-service learning is the way of the future, but it’s a future most training departments are not quite ready to adopt.
Most of us agree on where we’re headed: to ecologies where work and learning are one and the same, where people help one another build competency and master new crafts, where members of self-sustaining communities of professionals participate because they take pride in maintaining their standards and doing a great job, and where everyone strives to be all she can be. Open, participative, bottom-up, networked, flexible, responsive: that’s what we’re after.
If only it were that simple. Learning professionals are already over-burdened. Budgets are tight. The economy is a shambles. Management demands cost-effective, rapid-impact solutions. And they want them up and running tomorrow.
Pulling this off requires choosing among a myriad of new technologies, coordinating with IT, cobbling together social networking tools, CYA with legal, monitoring social network performance, and answering demands for new approaches, all the while doing the old job with fewer resources and more demands.
Jane Hart, Harold Jarche, Clark Quinn, and I have been helping CLOs and learning managers deal with these issues, but talk alone doesn’t solve anything. This is like blogging, where you’ve got to try it in order to understand it. We thought about how to accelerate prototyping and experimentation.
Over the last month, we have assembled an online environment to support a team a dozen to 150 people working and learning together. Our suite of low-cost, proven web software provides online space for conversation and collaboration, personal and professional profiles, following group activities in real time (online and/or by mobile phone), sharing insights and developments, building and retaining collective intelligence, scheduling and conducting meetings, monitoring subscriptions to industry and community news, tracking competitive information, collaborative writing, and more. It operates “in the cloud” and is ready to activate the day after you contact us. Don’t ask IT; just do it.
Advice on implementation comes from learning professionals, not software geeks. Jane knows social networking tools as well as anyone in the industry; Harold has his finger on the pulse of bottom-up learning and open source approaches; Clark is a passionate advocate of cognitive design, applying what we know about how people think to the design of systems. Jay is the thought leader in informal learning and the convergence of work and learning online.
We can get you started for as little as $2,500, although you’ll probably opt for additional services.
We are looking for a few organizations to torture-test our informal learning sandbox. If you’re an early adopter, please get in touch. Give us a call or complete this form. One of us will be in touch.
Learnscape Sandbox Set-up
Learnscape Sandbox Set-up
Please provide this information to kick off our conversation about setting up your Learnscape Sandbox. You have to start somewhere; this is it. This is not a contract. You are under no obligation to go forward.
In preparation for today’s conversation, I’ve posted my thinking on three questions that keep popping up in companies I talk with about implementing enterprise learning ecologies:
Yesterday I attended the Future of Media Summit at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. Host Ross Dawson walked us through his Future of Media Report: check out the Future of Media Lifecycle and the Seven Driving Forces Shaping Media.
Many of the panel sessions involved people in both Sydney and Mountain View. Several times, this led to existentialist moments: trying to get the people on the other side of the Pacific to get back on schedule.
Panelists discussing television were fighting a rear-guard action, claiming content is king, and never once mentioning interactivity. Personalization boiled down to letting people use their Tivos.
Robert Scoble turned up for the Future of Journalism panel, mixing it up with Phil Bronstein, Tom Abate, JD Lasica, and Brian Lott, a partner from Burson-Marsteller. Bronstein: The answer to every question is “I don’t know who is going to pay for this.” JD: Ten years ago, reporters for the Sacramento Bee were not allowed to mention the name of a website without management approval. Brian: Journalists have been taught they own the story. Tom Abate, quoting Mark Twain on the advent of the telegraph: A lie goes halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on. Scoble: Old-style journalists are not keeping up; they dont’ know what’s going on. Great debate on reporter neutrality. Old reporters were not to reveal their political preferences; Scoble says right up front that he backs Obama. Which is more frank?
Scoble told me about the wonders of modern tech he’s experiencing. He was interviewing the head of Tesla, the controversial maker of the pricey all-electric sports car. They’re driving around, Scoble shooting live video with his iPhone. A viewer asked Scoble a question about the car’s brakes. Scoble relayed it on, and the driver answered it on the spot.
I pulled out my Flip videocam and asked Scoble about technology-assisted learning:
The Computer History Museum is a trip for computer buffs. Here’s an original Apple 1:
This is Deep Blue, the IBM machine that beat Kasparov:
And this is a five-ton Charles Babbage Differential Engine for computing (and printing tables of) polynomials to 31-place accuracy. One of two made from the 1840s plans.
Many a knowledge worker will tell you, “I love to learn but I hate to be trained.” Learning is in keeping with the democratization of the workplace spawned by the network revolution. Decision-making is passing from the manager to the worker, and part of the deal is learning crowding out training.
Emergence is the key characteristic of complex systems. It is the process by which simple entities self-organize to form something more complex. As training converges with bottom-up self-organizing systems, network effects, and the empowerment of individuals, it morphs into emergent learning.
People who already know the lay of the land don’t want a curriculum. That’s someone else’s opinion of what they need to know. It undoubtedly contains lots of things they either already know or have no interest in finding out. They prefer to cherry-pick what they need in the easiest way available to them.
Courses are dead. Who’s got the time? Courses are almost always separate from work. That goes against the trend of integrating learning and work. Hence, learning from performance support fits better with today’s workplace.
Training program? This is the same as courses, except often more time robbed from work. Since most learning is social, wouldn’t it be more effective to put workers in touch with others, so they can learn from one another?
A busy person detests being told to make time for something to convenience someone else. Self-service learning is more convenient and more economical. I don’t go to the bank during banking hours much any more. It’s more convenient to bank in the evening. The ATM doesn’t mind what I’m wearing or whether I say hello.
Learning things in advance, “just in case,” is a losing game. Until the case arrives, the worker suspects the subject matter won’t be relevant. And when the case does come along, the knowledge acquired in advance is probably long gone. Knowledge, like muscle tissue, deteriorates when it’s not used. Learning something at the moment of need, however, couples learning and application and that has more lasting effects.
When you cannot predict the future, and emergence is unpredictable, you can’t build training programs in advance because you don’t know what you’ll need. Formal learning takes place in classrooms; informal learning happens in learnscapes.
A learnscape is a learning ecology. As the environment of learning, a learnscape includes the workplace. In fact, a learnscape has no boundaries. No two learnscapes are alike. Your landscape may include being coached on giving effective presentations, calling the help desk for an explanation, and researching an industry on the net. My learnscape could include participating in a community of field technicians, looking things up on Google, and living in France for three months.
How would you build a learnscape for emergent learning?
IBM, Oracle, Yahoo!, and Microsoft (ominously close to Yahoo!) had big booths. I It’s ironic to see traditional bloatware providers claim to be loose, flexible, and fleet of foot. Uh huh. Remember Steve Martin in the early days of Saturday Night Live? “Let’s get small.” Scores of tiny companies, most of them with odd-ball names, were doing the booth thing. It’s hard to tell some of them apart. By the end of the year, half of these guys will no longer exist.
In the “Long Tail Pavillion” for small companies I found a some technologies that fit well with the concept of impromtu learning. OpenaCircle is a lightweight collaboration platform which has just what our Cafe group has been looking for: simultaneous video conferencing. CamWii is a very slick screen-sharing app. No client software required. Blazingly fast. Apps like this can support over-the-shoulder learning: live screenshow. I hope I get into CamWii’s beta program before leading workshops on natural learning to Australia in June.
WOT is short for Web of Trust. WOT offers an internet reputation scorecard that pops up when you’re visiting sites. “wOT is a free browser security tool that warns the user about risky websites that try to scam visitors, deliver malware, or send spam. The company, Against Intuition, was founded by a couple of Finnish grad student a couple of years ago. I’m going to test drive this one.
I picked up a couple of interesting O’Reilly books that didn’t feature the usual menagerie on the cover: Adaptive Path’s Subject to Change and Amy Shuen’s Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide. I love most O’Reilly pubs but wonder how long they can continue proliferating new series without watering down the brand. Knowing Your Ass from a Hole in the Ground: The Missing Manual. Some of the O’Reilly digital photography books are spectacular.
As the day was coming to an end, Chris Heuer motioned for me to join him in front of the cameras for a live videochat on UstreamTV. His questions punched my mental hot spots, and we had a rollicking good time. (Check back tomorrow for the full rant. How are people going to cope with mind-blowing change? Unlearning. Visualization. Mindful flexibility. What did I think of this conference? This is not a conference; it’s a ten-ring circus. Normal people (i.e., not us) would have a hard time figuring out whether the activities in the Blogtropolus room were real or science fiction.
Not a week goes by that I don’t hear from a college student asking about informal learning. I am generous in answering thoughtful inquiries, but I do not intend to rob students of learning experiences by doing their thinking for them.
Teachers give assignments to help students learn. Cutting and pasting the results of Google searches until they resemble a paper you might have written saves you time and effort at the expense of your learning. Learning requires reflection. This takes more effort the first few times you try it but saves time in the long run. When you learn, from there on you’ll be building on what you already know instead of continually reinventing the wheel. Unless you’re preparing for a career doing simplistic searches on the net, don’t game the system.
If you are a student, study. Getting answers is easy. Asking the right questions is hard. Read How to Ask Questions the Smart Way by Eric Raymond and Rich Moen. It taught me enough social engineering to get better answers quicker and with less waste.
This arrived in my morning email:
Hi my name is ___, i am a 3rd year student at ____ University studying educational studies i graduate this summer, my final assignment module is informal learning and i have to write a report on the evaluation of an effective informal learning context for learning, included observations and research methods. I was researching and came across your website and you seem extremely knowledgeable in this area, i would be extremely grafeful if you could suggest any interesting ideas, or previously research simliar to this because i am struggling to come up with a creative idea.
This email is more cordial than most but I don’t know what she’s really asking for. A creative idea? How about “What have I learned outside of class and what did it get me?”
Over the weekend, I had visited the wiki for a course on informal learning that the instructor had invited me to review. Here’s the first entry on informal learning:
If Cross suggests that informal learning should be learned through doing then what is the purpose in publishing a book on the subject? Wouldn’t a more effective way of disseminating the information be through a web site or similar sort of collaborative learning tool that everyone could add to? Maybe that’s what the website Informl was supposed to be. When I visisted the site, however, I was unable to efficiently find any information about informal learning and some parts of the web site returned an error message. I think wikis are a pretty good tool for informal learning – they allow collaboration and also are easily searchable. Maybe this should have been the format of the informl website instead.
Having once been a wise-ass college student myself, I don’t mind the snarky attitude. I do find it troubling when a student makes specious observations that end up inhibiting learning. Hence, I responded:
Permit me to offer a few suggestions for navigating the informl website. Look in the righthand column for the link to my wiki. From there, click informal learning, and you’ll find a YouTube explanation, a summary of informal learning, a poster about informal learning, the introduction to the book, lists of references, the first three chapters in their entirety, links to eight articles, descriptions of informal learning tools, and a list of books that influenced my thinking. Most of my major web pages contain a search engine for ten years of my blog posts, a link to articles, and a link to a discussion community. When you’re surfing one of the oldest sites about learning on the web, expect a few 404s; link rot happens.
Frankly, I am amazed you could visit the site and not find informal learning. Where were you looking?
Being a champion of informal learning doesn’t make me think that formal study should be lackadaisical.
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