Addictive Learning That Sticks

In a hurry? Enroll in the course here.

There’s still plenty of room in our virtual classroom. Please join us.

Today I joined more than a hundred people at the Presidio Officers Club for a day-long Social Media Camp. Another 650 attended remotely by via Justin.tv.

Many participants were novices. The majority were interested in social media as a marketing tool. We saw some cool technology, e.g. 12 Sprints (knowledge workflow from SAP). Kevin Marks gave an interesting keynote on Tummlers (moderator – geisha – steward role).

Who do you suppose is in charge of social media within companies? In the group, 10% lodge it under PR. The remaining 90% consider social media a marketing function. Mind you, many in the audience were one- or two-person businesses, so their answers may not account for much. I’m going to take a poll asking who owns social media in large corporations.

Surprisingly, wi-fi was not available, so our online socializing was confined to Twitter.

San Francisco

LIVE

Addictive Learning That Sticks

In a hurry? Enroll in the course here.

SpacedEd is a platform designed to allow learners and teachers to harness the educational benefits of spaced education. It is based upon two core psychology research findings: the spacing effect and the testing effect. In more than 10 randomized trials completed to date, spaced education has been found to:

• Improve knowledge acquisition,
• Increase long-term knowledge retention (out to 2 years),
• Change behavior,
• Boost learners’ abilities to accurately self-assess their knowledge.

In addition, spaced education is extremely well-accepted by learners.

The SpacedEd approach is predicated on a set of core principles:

• • Short Repeated Bursts: Because it uses a regular schedule and an adaptive algorithm, learning can be delivered in small amounts that can take as little as 3 minutes a day.
  • Push Learning: The learning comes to you on a regular schedule. You don’t have to remember to do it or set aside large chunks of time.
  • Adaptive: The daily content adapts based on past performance automatically to drive long-term retention while requiring less time.
  • Immediate Feedback: Once a question is answered, detailed educational feedback is provided. Users are also given performance data (their course progress and performance relative to peers) which feeds their addiction to the courses.

Topics covered:

• Formal & informal learning
• Learning celebrities
• History quiz
• Jeopardy questions

When you complete the course, please leave a review at SpacedEd or a comment below.

Charles Jennings has written that we need to learn less in order to know more. In an age of ubiquitous computing, I don’t need to know all the details if I know where to find them.

SpacedEd could be a great way to learn the core learning content, the small orange dot above.

Top Informal Learning links for the first month of 2010.

Yesterday’s #lrnchat was on crowdsourcing. This is an example. The crowd picks this list, not I.

1. Protecting Reputations Online in Plain English- Common Craft – Explanations In Plain English -, January 6, 2010
2. A Few Thoughts on the Nexus One- OReilly Radar, January 5, 2010
3. Networking Reconsidered- HarvardBusiness.org, January 4, 2010
4. Tonight On CrunchGear: Live At CES- TechCrunch, January 7, 2010
5. The opposite of “open” is “theirs”- Joho the Blog, January 14, 2010
6. Tools for Finding Creative Commons Images- Full Circle, January 2, 2010
7. What’s going on with OAuth?- OReilly Radar, January 8, 2010
8. Three Questions Executives Should Ask for the New Year- HarvardBusiness.org, January 4, 2010
9. The Neural Advantage of Speaking 2 Languages- Scientific American, January 21, 2010
10. Questioning Pedagogy- Half an Hour, January 4, 2010
11. Blog – The Case of the Collider and the Great Black Hole- Technology Review Feed – Tech Review Top Stories, January 4, 2010
12. Skinner Box? There’s an App for That- OReilly Radar, January 4, 2010
13. A Better Way to Manage Knowledge- HarvardBusiness.org, January 19, 2010
14. 2010: My Fifth Annual List Of The Tech Products I Love And Use Every Day- TechCrunch, January 1, 2010
15. Facebook’s Zuckerberg Says The Age of Privacy is Over- ReadWriteWeb, January 9, 2010
16. Electric Icarus: NASA Designs a One-Man Stealth Plane- Scientific American, January 19, 2010
17. Google and China: What’s the real story, and where does it go from here?- OReilly Radar, January 14, 2010
18. The Future of Decision Making: Less Intuition, More Evidence- HarvardBusiness.org, January 7, 2010
19. Ten Technologies That Will Rock 2010- TechCrunch, January 1, 2010
20. Top 10 YouTube Videos of All Time- ReadWriteWeb, January 10, 2010
21. Challenging Mindsets: From Reverse Innovation to Innovation Blowback- Edge Perspectives with John Hagel, January 6, 2010
22. Top 10 eLearning Predictions for 2010- eLearning Technology, January 18, 2010
23. How Ford Got Social Marketing Right- HarvardBusiness.org, January 7, 2010
24. The Father of All Business Models- Doc Searls Weblog, January 6, 2010
25. Idle Minds and What They May Say about Intelligence- Scientific American, January 6, 2010
26. Top Tools For Tracking Topics on the Web- ReadWriteWeb, January 21, 2010
27. Congratulations Crunchies Winners! Facebook Takes Best Overall For The Hat Trick- TechCrunch, January 8, 2010
28. The Decade in Management Ideas- HarvardBusiness.org, January 1, 2010
29. Knowledge sharing across silos: Part II- Cognitive Edge, January 12, 2010
30. Flattery Will Get You Far- Scientific American, January 11, 2010
31. Everyday RFID- Purse Lip Square Jaw, January 4, 2010
32. We go with the flow- Mind Hacks, January 28, 2010
33. Four pointers to the chasm between elearning and video game designers- edublogs, January 4, 2010
34. 20 Best Marketing And Social Media Blogs By Women- Forbes.com: News , January 14, 2010
35. The Best Times to Buy Anything, All Year Round [Buying Guide] - Lifehacker, January 5, 2010
36. Massive increase in words consumed- Donald Clark Plan B, January 6, 2010
37. China rising- The Long Now Blog, January 18, 2010
38. Are You Ready For The 21st Century ?- Wirearchy, January 9, 2010
39. Open course-wars, redux… the real nastiness is elsewhere- Abject Learning, January 5, 2010
40. Bright Green: Collapsible Shipping Containers- Fast Company, January 11, 2010
41. Do I Need to Know It, or Just How to Find It?- Workplace Learning Today, January 20, 2010
42. The K-factor Lesson: How Social Ecosystems Grow (Or Not)- Dion Hinchcliffe’s Web 2.0 Blog, January 5, 2010
43. Michael Allen describes the future of authoring systems- Internet Time, January 5, 2010
44. The End of the Industrial Training Era- Informal Learning, January 2, 2010
45. Facebook usage statistics by country – Dec 31st 2009- Robert Paterson’s Weblog, January 11, 2010
46. Disabled Girl’s $10k Laptop Computer Stolen – Turns Up On Craigslist- Lockergnome Blog Network, January 11, 2010
47. Blogging as an Exercise of the Brain- Irving Wladawsky-Berger, January 2, 2010
48. Community as Curriculum – vol 2. The Guild/Distributed Continuum- Dave’s Educational Blog, January 27, 2010
49. Blog Post: If traditional incentives can have a negative impact, what’s the workaround?- Gurteen Knowledge-Log, January 11, 2010
50. Adaptive Path in 2010: A Look Forward- Adaptive Path, January 6, 2010

I find lists like this great for serendipitous learning. There’s always something I haven’t tripped over before. Informal learning is like that.

Prediction #1: The iPad will make eLearning sexy again.
Prediction #2: The excitement will fade within six months.

Multi-tasking component of corporate Learnscapes

Three years ago I talked with a former KPPG consultant, Harm Wegstra, at Online Educa Berlin. Harm told me about his team’s experience with informal learning in an engagement with Sara Lee. Here’s an extract of an email Harm sent me.

Hi Jay,

As promised, I send you some details about the research I’ve done at Sara Lee, being then a senior manager at KPMG Consulting.

Sara Lee wanted to invest in technology in the domain of learning.

At the beginning of this century, learning management systems were quite dominant, and therefore dominant on the radar screen of Sara Lee. But I had doubts if a LMS would be the proper solution for Sara Lee.

That’s why we suggested to set up a meeting, in which we would explore where the learning takes place within the organisation, more specific, within the sales and marketing department, for which the technology was meant.

About 20 employees attended the meeting: sales and marketing representatives, and representatives of the management and the HR department. We asked them to write down (individually) all their work-related learning experiences. When finished this individual brainstorm, we plenary discussed the results, what resulted in the following list of learning activities:

- Experiences on the job
- Refer to manuals and instructions
- Training programs
- Networking
- Mentoring & coaching
- Special assignments (e.g. temporary job rotations)
- Workshops

After we agreed that this was the correct list, I asked them to individually estimate how much time they spend on an average a week on each of these activities. After plenary discussing and negotiating the outcomes, we concluded the following relative importance of each of the learning activities:

- Experiences on the job 45%
- Manuals and instructions 2%
- Training programs 8%
- Networking 30%
- Mentoring & coaching 3%
- Special assignments 2%
- Workshops 10%

Having a closer look, I concluded that the list of activities could be divided into more formal and more informal learning activities.

Formal:
- Training programs
- Special assignments
- Workshops
- Mentoring & coaching

Informal:
- Experiences on the job
- Manuals and instructions
- Networking

Given their relative importance, this means that 77% of the activities can be labelled as highly informal and 23% as highly formal.

We summarized the findings in this pie chart:

Sara Lee was quite surprised. More precisely: the majority in the meeting thought that they made a mistake and suggested to reconsider the time they initially thought they spend on an average on each of the activities. I suggested to first benchmark these findings to research at other companies. After a desk research we found an astonishing amount of evidence that these employees at Sara Lee probably collectively made a quite adequate estimation of the time spent on the distinct learning activities. This knowledge since then is at Sara Lee leading in the decisions about investing in learning within the organization.

I hope you like the story and can use the results.

Using the pie chart is no problem.

Please refer to the research I’ve done at Sara Lee, with my team at KPMG Consulting. The research was conducted in 2002.

Again, it was a pleasure meeting.

Hope to meet you an other time.

Kind regards,

Harm Weistra
WeistraConsult

The Informal Learning Page is now home to articles, graphics, free chapters from my Informal Learning book, video, and a link to some sources of the oft-quoted 20% figure.

Here’s an overview of informal learning. It’s several years old, but with the recent interest in informal learning and squabbling about how best to define it, I figured it’s worth a re-run.

Informal Learning in a Nutshell

WORKERS LEARN MORE in the coffee room than in the classroom. They discover how to do their jobs through informal learning: talking, observing others, trial-and-error, and simply working with people in the know. Formal learning—classes and workshops—is the source of only 10 to 20 percent of what people learn at work. Corporations overinvest in formal training programs while neglecting natural, simpler informal processes.

OUT OF TIME

More happens in a minute today than in one of your great grandmother’s minutes. Not only is more and more activity packed into every minute, the rate of change itself is increasing. Measured by the atomic clock, the twenty-first century will contain a hundred years. Measured by how much will happen in the twenty-first century, we will experience twenty thousand current years (Kurzweil, The singularity is near: When humans transcend biology.). Change itself is accelerating. People are anxious. The future is unpredictable. Companies are run by sound bites. People plan; God laughs. The traditional mode of training employees is obsolete.

INFORMAL LEARNING

Learning is that which enables you to participate successfully in life, at work, and in the groups that matter to you. Informal learning is the unofficial, unscheduled, impromptu way people learn to do their jobs. Formal learning is like riding a bus: the driver decides where the bus is going; the passengers are along for the ride. Informal learning is like riding a bike: the rider chooses the destination, the speed, and the route. The rider can take a detour at a moment’s notice to admire the scenery or go to the bathroom. Learning is adaptation. Taking advantage of the double meaning of the word network, to learn is to optimize the quality of one’s networks.

SHOW ME THE MONEY

Executives don’t want learning; they want execution. They want the job done. They want performance. Informal learning is a profit strategy. Companies are applying it to:

• Increase sales by making product knowledge instantly searchable

• Improve knowledge worker productivity

• Transform an organization from near-bankruptcy to record profits

• Generate fresh ideas and increase innovation

• Reduce stress, absenteeism, and health care costs

• Invest development resources where they will have the most impact

• Increase professionalism and professional growth

• Cut costs and improve responsiveness with self-service learning

Knowledge workers demand respect and expect to be treated fairly. They thrive when given the freedom to decide how they will do what they’re asked to do. They rise or fall to meet expectations.

Training managers have complained for years that senior managers don’t understand the value of training. Lots of formal learning programs do not work. Maybe the executives do understand the value of formal training. They’ve determined that in its present form, it’s not worth much.

Tragically, many firms have mistaken measuring activity for measuring results. Training directors measure participant satisfaction, the ability to pass tests, and demonstrations. They don’t measure business results because they don’t own the yardstick by which business results are measured.

EMERGENCE

Training is something that’s pushed on you; someone else is in charge. Learning is something you choose to do, whether you’re being trained or not. You’re in charge. Many knowledge workers will tell you, “I love to learn but I hate to be trained.”

Formal learning takes place in classrooms; informal learning happens in learnscapes, that is, a learning ecology. It’s learning without borders.

Critics say that it’s impossible to formalize informal learning and therefore informal learning is unmanageable. In fact, I don’t want an executive managing learning; that’s the worker’s responsibility. What I want to do is optimize learning outcomes. Optimization means removing obstacles, seeding communities, increasing bandwidth, encouraging conversation, and so forth.

CONNECTING

Reinventing the wheel, looking for information in the wrong places, and answering questions from peers consume two-thirds of the average knowledge worker’s day. Slashing this waste provides a lot more time to devote to improving the business, reducing payroll, or, more likely, a bit of both.

Knowledge management is no longer the intellectual high ground it once was, by and large because it didn’t work. Knowledge lives in people’s heads, not in mere words. You can no more capture true knowledge in a repository than you can trap lightning in a box.

The informal organization is how most business gets done, yet executives miss it because they can’t see it. Mapping social networks make the pattern clear.

It’s not who you know that’s important; it’s who those others know.

META-LEARNING

Learning is a skill, like playing golf. The more you practice, the better your performance is, but if golfers followed the pattern of businesspeople learning, they would arrive for a match without ever having thought about the game or touched a club.

Many traditional training departments concentrate almost all of their energy on providing training to novices. That’s like providing kindergarten classes to high school students to save money. In truth, the more mature learners, typically the top performers, are simply going to skip it entirely or become disgruntled.

Intuition is often more effective than logic because it calls on whole-body intelligence. It is born of relationships and patterns. It draws on the power of the unconscious mind to sort through meaningful experience as well as the immediate situation.

LEARNERS

If something improves the overall value of the ecosystem and the welfare of the individual worker, I’m in favor of it. This includes helping workers build personal strengths and overcome personal obstacles.

If your basic mental systems are out of whack, you may be working extra hard just to cope.

It should come as no surprise that workers don’t like training. Most training is built atop the pessimistic assumption that trainees are deficient, and training is the cure for what’s broken. Everybody wins if the starting point is, “Be all that you can be.”

You may have the best thoughts in the world, but if you don’t communicate them effectively, they won’t help you or anyone else. I’m thinking about how you converse, tell stories, speak in public, and write.

If you’re not happy, you should do something about it.

ENVISIONING

We humans are sight mammals. We learn almost twice as well from images and words as from words alone. Visual language engages both hemispheres of the brain. Pictures translate across cultures, education levels, and age groups. Yet the majority of the content of corporate learning is text. Schools spend years on verbal literacy but only hours on visual literacy. It’s high time for us to open our eyes to the possibilities.

Graphics are not fluff. Consider how they can improve informal learning throughout your organization. Graphics work wonders when you need to:

• Bring deeper understanding to complex subject matter.

• Share results of dynamic meetings with others.

• Help the team see the big picture and focus attention.

• Improve the decision-making process.

CONVERSATION

Conversations both create and transmit knowledge. Frequent and open conversation increases innovation and learning. Schooling planted a false notion in our heads that real learning is something you do on your own. In fact, we learn things from other people. People love to talk. Bringing them together brings excitement.

People spend most of their time at work or at home. Work is a demanding, pressure-packed, rats-in-the-maze race with the clock to get the job done. Home is a comfortable, private space for sharing time with family and individual interests. Neither work nor home, a World Café is a neutral spot where people come together to offer hospitality, enjoy comradeship, welcome diverse perspectives, and have meaningful conversations.

Business conversations at Pfizer no longer consist of knee-jerk emotional responses, because people have a means of critiquing the quality of their conversations. They ask, “Is the information valid? Are we making an informed choice? Are we exercising mutual control over the conversation?”

COMMUNITIES

Unless you are a hermit, you are a member of several communities of practice, although you may not have thought of it that way.

For a long time, I maintained that communities were organic. Like truffles, they sort of sprouted up on their own, where they wanted, and the most you could do was to nurture them by providing time and space for them to meet. Times have changed. A quarter of the world’s truffles are cultivated on a plantation in Spain.

As fast and easy as it is to search Google, Cisco sales engineers can pinpoint just the knowledge they’re looking for. They query the in-house repository of VoDs, and the system takes them down to the exact sentences or slides of interest.

LEGO hobbyists are a community of practice. Subgroups create building standards that enable them to create large displays quickly.

UNBLENDED

It has become trite to point out that the e of eLearning doesn’t matter and that it’s the learning that counts. I don’t think the learning counts for much either. What’s important is the doing that results from learning. Executives don’t care about learning; they care about execution.

In 2001, training directors turned their attention to return on investment. Unfortunately, instead of learning cost-benefit analysis, people who wanted to speak the language of business studied accounting. Created long before knowledge work was invented, accounting values intangibles such as human capital at zero and counts training as an expense instead of an investment.

Consider how we managed to end up with a VCR in every classroom. Was it because teachers wanted to show nature documentaries? Hardly. Massive demand by America’s seemingly endless thirst for pornography drove the unit price to $100. Smart phones, voice recognition, and virtual reality are learning tools, but learning won’t drive their development. Courses are dead.

THE WEB

The Internet changed everything. In 1996, there were 16 million Internet users; in 2006 they number more than 1 billion. Google is the largest learning provider, answering thousands of inquiries every second.

Recently, I hosted a series of unworkshops on learning with blogs, wikis, and Web 2.0 tools. Why the un? To crush the old paradigm of workshop leader spoon-feeding participants.

Imagine having an in-house learning and information environment as rich as the Internet. You’d have blogs, search, syndication, podcasts, mash-ups, and more. You’d also have a platform just about everyone already knows how to use. CGI, a large Canadian services company is doing precisely that.

GROKKING

To grok is to understand profoundly through intuition or empathy. Learning without training is alive and well. BP employees in vital positions grok their roles in an extremely complex organization digesting several mega-mergers.

UNCONFERENCES

Business meetings used to come in one flavor: dull. New approaches are creating meetings that people enjoy, often organized in scant time, and at minimal cost. These meetings are not events; there’s typically activity before and after. If something is working well, why not share it with everyone? And why not keep it alive as long as you can? Successful gatherings are those where everyone participates.

There were no presentations at BAR Camp, no PowerPoints, no better-than-thou, no podium, and no positions carved in stone. Instead of presentations, campers had conversations. We were equals, co-discovering new ways to look at things. We sat in circles. No one was in charge because we were all in charge.

JUST DO IT

Management must assign enterprise-level accountability for learning. Unless you are blessed with a rare, sensitive executive management team, you must address governance or scrap plans of getting the benefits you’ve been reading about.

Natural learning requires an attitude of surrender and acceptance. Informal learning is unbounded. It enables us to find a voice to take its place alongside other parts of who we are as humans. We need all of who we are to be fully engaged, outside and with inner realms to meld with larger wisdom in the world.

As work and learning become one, good learning and good work become synonymous.

Don’t start with problems. Beginning with problems starts you off on the wrong path. You may solve the problem but miss a fantastic opportunity that was yours for the taking

Informal Learning Page