There’s no “I” in “We”

Ooooo, some juicy questions at the Learning Circuits Blog this month. Let’s go…..

• Should workplace learning professionals be leading the charge around these new work literacies?

Yes and no. I think we should be hardcore advocates for 2.0 tools and join other thought leaders in the org who might rally around the cause. But I think we should primarily limit our leadership to the realm of influencing the further evolution of a learning organization. 2.0 has implications beyond the learning function, and we need to let other groups discover and figure out for themselves how they want to use them. 

• Shouldn’t they be starting with themselves and helping to develop it throughout the organizations?

I would have to say “Yes” on this one. A big mistake made by way too many folks is to preach the good word without having gone through the transformation themselves. Web 2.0 represents a whole mind shift, not just a set of tools. It is the power of “we” not “I”. It is about people creating content together, not the lone, brave hero leading the pack. The only way to “get it” is to try it. To get the power of finding or creating your own community of practice with others who you may never have even met, you have to try it out. You have to discover a community and contribute to it. Without experiencing it for yourself, you become another old-world “leader” using all the right buzzwords and pretending to know.

• And then shouldn’t the learning organization become a driver for the organization? 

This seems similar to question #1. I think we should be thought leaders to the extent that we influence the establishment of a learning organization (including in the continuous improvement sense, not just creating a bunch of courses). An advocate or influencer, yes. Driver? Not so sure. I reckon that as organizations (and especially our own learning colleagues) get the importance of informal learning, our position as “driver” here might become especially important.

• And like in the world of libraries don’t we need to market ourselves in this capacity? 

Absolutely we need to be marketing ourselves. I see my role, and my team’s role, as having a unique set of skills that the organization needs to leverage. If I don’t market myself and/or my team, the rest of the org has no clue what they are missing. Marketing is absolutely crucial. And, unfortunately, it is a skill-set too lacking among too many learning professionals.

Designing for conversation, not content

Is content king? Apparently most instructional designers think so. Maybe that mindset is why we end up with so much boring training- both classroom and online. No doubt content is important. But too often IDs spend too much time word-smithing and tweaking content at the expense of engaging design that gets people talking. Talking? Yeah, you know, conversation.

The best courses I have taken (and designed) included strategic use of conversation-based interactions that helped participants learn the content at a deeper level and make it personally relevant. Really well-done learning events, much like well-done messages of any kind,  also tend get talked about outside of the course enviornment.

Because people talk about what is relevant and important to them, we should design with that in mind.  We should design conversation into our courses (live in the classroom, or via blogs, wiki, social networking, etc). And instead of focusing on perfect content, we should figure out how to deliver it in a way that gets the learner talking about it outside the course. That’s where the real applied learning happens.

One way to do that would be to design post-course activities where participants work on projects in the field, and share their results with one another via blogs, for example. A conversation/collaboration strategy doesn’t have to be 2.0 tools only, of course. As Janet Clarey recently said, the challenge is to blend the best aspects of our current learning environments with the social learning technologies that support learning.

Back in 2006, Corey Doctorow pointed out that “Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about.” While he is referring to media business (specifically Disney), we should be looking at training design, too.

Is content king? Maybe, but I say the ace of spades is conversation.

What do you think?

 

Pushing the envelope: Requiring blogging for learning

Tony Karrer asked an interesting question earlier this week: Should blogging be mandatory (in contexts such as attending conferences, formal learning setting, and sustained learning activities). The post generated a great discussion and a lot of points were raised. Not surprisingly, most of us in the conversation seem to object to anything “mandatory.” But now I am wondering if maybe some form of mandatory blogging isn’t a bad idea. After all, there are a lot of mandatory things in the learning world. Examples from my own career:

• Taking training courses, I have had to complete certain assignments, often involving some sort of report
• In various projects, I often have had to report out to colleagues on problem-solving results, project status, lessons learned, etc.
• For personal development goals (such as reading educational books, attending lectures or conferences) I have had to write a report and email it to the team, or give a presentation.

All of these were “mandatory,” although that word may not have been used. They were required because there is some understanding of the importance of sharing knowledge. We all benefit from sharing lessons learned and knowledge newly acquired.

So, isn’t blogging the same thing? It is just another tool for doing what people have always done: connect and share. But blogging has some new benefits for learning organizations: Being on-line and storable, they potentially become a powerful way of storing tribal knowledge and having it searchable and retrievable by others now and in the future. And unlike Word reports sent via email, blogs are much better for creating conversation and further learning from one another….and those conversations, too, becomes storable and searchable.

How cool is that?

So maybe we should require blogging in certain contexts. It’s a powerful tool for learning. And as learning professionals, we really should be pushing the envelope with new technologies and helping our organizations become flexible, strong, learning organizations. We need to push the power of “We learning.”