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.

Who Has Time for a Second Life?

This month’s Big Question at Learning Circuits is really three different questions around virtual world sensation Second Life. 

I really couldn’t get past the first question: “In what situations, do you believe it makes sense to develop a learning experience that will be delivered within Second Life?”

My own knee jerk response to this is: “Second Life?  Hell, I barely have time and money for first life learning!” Sure, there are some interesting possibilities for SL, especially along the lines of the Plymouth example Tony Karrer describes. While SL has some awesome potential and applications, it is too time-consuming to figure how to design for it, and even more challenging for technically unsavvy audiences like the one I design for.  

When I evaluate the right tool for e-learning, I think about where it fits in with a model similar to the one Clive Shepard recently posted about. He describes a model for delivering e-learning in three tiers, develped by Nick Shackleton-Jones.

 

At the top is high-end content that, due to it’s complexity, is expensive and often sponsored by top management (due to its expense and development time). At the bottom is user-generated content, social learning stuff. In the middle is the typical e-learning projects like tutorial, software sims, e-presentations, and the like.

So, in this model, it seems that SL kinda fits in at all three levels, depending on the design. But it’s complexity and steep learning curve (i.e., expensive!) puts it at smack at the top (I think). I don’t see how to reconcile this. I work for a huge company with a small learning group, and an even smaller e-learning team: ME!!!! I have to think hard about finding a big bang for my limited buck.

Right now, I am spending most of my time creating middle-tier e-learning. I’d like to move toward more user generated content. I can vision a much greater return on selling the power of blogs and wikis than I can virtual world tools like Second Life. Someday, maybe. Not today.

For now, I’m putting Second LIfe on hold and getting back to Real Life: A cold brew has my name on it at my favorite Seattle brew pub, where I will plan my next real life NW hike here:

 

1-2-3-4 we don’t want your….LMS?

I was away on vaction last week, a million mental miles away from the blogosphere. And now: EduPunks everywhere. Whaaaaat happened? Never heard of the word before, and now it is the buzzword of the week in my Google reader. 

So what’s with all the bruhaha and elephant talk? A wikipedia entry is already posted and summarizes it pretty well. Seems that there are two basic points of rage behind the edupunk idea: 

A.      EduPunkers don’t like idea that the Man might take control away from the learners and teachers and

B.      Big companies taking 2.0 and other do it yourself (DIY) technologies, bundling them up, and profiting off of them.  

I’m not sure I really care about point B. Sure, it is annoying to see corporate machines taking cool ideas that others came up with, packaging them up, adding their spin, and re-selling it to consumers as if it was their idea to begin with. But I am fine with that. As I David Warlick says, we all have to make a living. And besides, if we were really serious about not allowing profit with DIY capabilities, we’d all be baking our own bread and roasting our own coffee.

Point A is a more valid protest. Educational/learning control should stay in the hands of professional educators and learners not 3rd party sales directors, IT departments, and so on. My fear is that empire-builders and internal control freaks will succeed in telling trainers, teachers, designers, and learners how and when tools should be used. That defeats the whole point….and it ain’t cool at all.

As learning professionals, we should be focused on establishing an infrastructure that enables learners to discover their own learning path, create their own content, and have conversations in ways that work for them. We need to give them the tools…and get out of their way.  Does that make me an edupunk? I dunno……

I do know that having a “screw you” attitude doesn’t help. We in the workplace learning world need to work together to empower our learning communities as best we can. I don’t care who is making a profit off of whatever. I do care that I now have tools at my disposal that let me strategically design conversations, discovery, and construction right into my courses. And that is REALLY cool.

And when politics gets in our way of that, that is where we work diplomatically to make change. Not extend fingers.

 

 

 

 

 

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.”