Social learning

(Taken from my internal blog at work.)

This is a blog post 'on demand'. There is this new thing out from IBM Research, called the 'blog muse' that lets people request others to blog about a certain topic. The tool will find the 'experts' on the topic and ask them to dedicate an article on is. As I like the approach of 'blogging on demand' a lot, here is my view on 'social learning':

Social learning is not new at all. Some call it informal learning. I think learning is the oldest profession in the world (yes, not the other on), and it has mostly been a social activity until the mass education system of the industrial age changed that somewhat to a sender/receiver happening. What is the most natural thing you do when you are stuck at whatever you are doing at work? You ask the ones next to you. Conversation is social learning (and as Jay Cross called it a lost art.) The thing is that the person next to you is probably not the best person to ask, just the most availabe one. Enter technology. We have a lot of technology now that enables us to make social leaning work better. Social learning has always existed, social networking technology makes it work more and better.

• We have always been able to ask someone for guidance. But now we have technology to ask people far away (IM), asynchrounously (forums, email), to search for experts, etc
  
• We have always been able to coach people. Now we can do it remote, virtual, faster and further.
  
• We have alway been able to write down our experience in journals.Now with blogs people can follow our journey and learn from that anywhere and all time.
  
• We have always been able to work together on documents. Now we can do that remote in real time via whiteboards, wikis, etc
  
• We have always been able to search for expertise. Now a system can link us in real time with available experts via social networking and profiles.
  
• We have always been able to bookmark interesting information and learning. Now social bookmarking makes that availabe to the crowd, and the crowd tells us what is worthwhile.
  

The hugh potential of social learning or informal learning is not to make it formal (and kill it), but to unlock the potential of 70 to 80% of learning on the workplace. Do that by supporting it instead of forbidding it (install your own social software instead of blocking access to facebook), by making it visible, and by making it count.

Reflection

This quote deserves its own post:

All too often, we support content, not learners.
(Patti Shank)

It's true, we all too often do. Protecting learners from the vast amount of unnecessary content would be one good place to start. It's not because the content exists, or someone thinks it wouldn't hurt to know that everyone needs it. Is there an 80/20 rule here that enables us to cut 80% of the content and allow people still to do the actions we wanted them to do by giving the training?

I3 change implementation model

The May edition of 'E-learn magazine' mentions the I3 Change Implementation model in its article 'e-learning means change'. In the 6c learning model, I refer to 4C as context, and adapting to your company's context. Change management is one of the ways to do that. I3 simplifies change implementation to inform, involve, integrate.

• Phase 1: Inform, generate awareness = answering the what, why, how, who, when and whatsinitforme questions, via posters, emails, presentations, speeches, etc
• Phase 2: Involve, generate involvement = change attitudes and behaviors and start with key influencers. You can use meetings, road shows, lunches, etc
  
• Phase 3: Integrate, generate commitment = make sure the change is accepted as the norm, for example linking it in with the current performance evaluation, key initiatives, processes, etc
  

Weird. Left brain or right brain test.

I'm not a firm believer that artistic and mathematical skills are neatly split among right and left brain. The different halves don't do exactly the same, but the simplistic picture that is sometimes put up of it is an urban legend of learning if you ask me (and read 'brain rules' book by John Medina).

But that's not the point, have a look at this site, and tell if the lady spins clockwise or counterclockwise. That says if you are right (rechts) or left (links) brained. The weird thing is that if you do some other activity she might suddenly change rotation. Is this really a proof that we use right/left brain for different activities? Or some other weird experiment? It does freak me out...

http://content.jobat.be/nl/artikels/ben-jij-een-linker-of-rechterdenker/?utm_source=jobat&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_term=2009-05-13&utm_campaign=jobat-tipvandeweek

Learning can make an argument

This graph comes from Datanews, a local weekly IT magazine. It lists the education budget per employee for the major Belgian IT companies.

So, why would you select, say, IBM to outsource your IT to instead of EDS? IBM employees get more than double of the education every year. That is strong evidence they are more competent and knowledgeable on the latest developments.

Learning can make a sales argument too. We don't use that enough.

Talent On Demand - book review

For profit corporations have one goal for talent management (including learning): to make supply meet demand.

Read my review on this enlightening book on my homo competens blog.

10 steps for integrating e-learning into a business

Kevin Kruse (2004) suggests ten steps for integrating e-learning into a business, I've put in brackets how that links to the 6C dimensions of the 6C learning model:

1. identify the business need (1C)
   
2. gain leadership support (6C)
   
3. assess your culture (4C)
   
4. choose the technology (2C)
   
5. Gather your resources (6C)
   
6. identify the appropriate learning model (1C)
   
7. define your content strategy (3C)
   
8. ensure you've got support (5C)
   
9. manage the transition (4C)
   
10. measure it (6C)
    

Impact of learning

The video by Kirkpatrick on MBAvid.com features in my last post deserves some extra attention. Around 39 min into the video, two slides are discussed on what impacts the effectiveness of a learning program.

Activities contributing to learning effectiveness:

• pre-work contributes for 26%,
• the learning event itself for 24%,
• the follow up for 50%;

What do we see in the spending behavior of the learning function?

• 10% goes to the preparation,
• 85% to the learning event and
• 5% to the follow.

The speaker concludes that we are spending the money were we ware the most comfortable: the learning event itself.

In the next slide the causes of training failure are displayed: lack of preparation or readiness 20%, bad learning intervention 10%, application environment 70%.

It builds a strong case to have more of our attention and money spent on the afterlife of a course. Actually, the whole idea of learning being an event is not the right approach. People learn through a period over time in which they soak in knowledge and skills, learn to apply them optimally and adapt to their working environment and job.

MBAVID.com : business video education portal

MBAvid.com is a collection of educational videos for general business use. The library covers the usual topics found in an MBA course.

Take for example this video tagged with learning. It's a son-of-a-Kirkpatrick talking about measuring the impact of learning.

More new learning on the cheap: yAuthor.com, GoView,

http://yauthor.com
As they say themselves: yAuthor.com is an on-line service with authoring tools allowing authors to create professionally looking interactive content easily. There. It's a beta project of Young Digital Planet (I believe they are in Poland.) As other emerging authoring tools (udutu, unison, ...) this one is completely online and will create you the things you wanted to create a few years ago: courses with tests and multimedia, downloadable in SCORM format ready for the LMS. Don't get me wrong, I see A LOT of potential for these tools, especially combined with collaboration features for the extended e-learning development team. And these tools WILL lower the bar for e-learning creation with cheaper tools. BUT it is still optimizing the kind of learning we were wild about three years ago. This is still the wiseguy(s) making a course of all things that you need to go to after you find it first.
I have not made a course with yauthor, but it looks well designed and easy to use. Might be a winner.

http://goview.com
Another classic in e-learning is screen recordings for application training. I've posted earlier about new, online tools to let you capture your screen and upload that to a site for sharing. GoView is another one that is in beta. This one is backed by a big one: Citrix.

Great instructional design with action mapping and the e-learning blueprint

Cathy Moore is a freelance instructional designer that coined the action mapping approach. She has now a great online tool for instructional designers that is easy, to the point and valuable: the e-learning blueprint. You can see the first pages for free, the rest works via a subscription model. Take the tour here.

Design Lively Elearning with Action Mapping

View more presentations from Cathy Moore.

Visual thinking: the way of the whiteboard

Very inspiring talk by Dan Roam on 'the way of the whiteboard'. For example he has a 6x6 rule to picture anything in 6 aspects based on how the brain processes vision.

http://videos.visitmix.com/MIX09/C16F

Experiencepoint sims

A strong form of learning is 'immersive' learing. It's where you submerge into the context of the topic at hand and learn by playing or acting in that environment.

I like the way experiencepoint for example makes its business simulations to get a student into a simulated business context to learn from.

Learning on the cheap: sliderocket and WiZiQ

Just a few more tools in the 'learning on the cheap' series:

- Sliderocket.com : this must be by far the nicest online presentation authoring tool I've seen. I'm just wowed by it. (But I must admit I use Google Docs presentations for now because they are integrated and I don't need to make really fancy looking ones - yet.) Lately, I found a renewed interest in slide-based learning. Like many I turned away from it years ago because of the 'death by bullet point' syndrome. But when you use the presentation tools right, you get fantastic results as this site and samples on slideshare.net prove.

- WiZiQ.com : aimed at the education world, but interesting for corporations too. This tool lets people teach and learn via online classes, tests and content sharing. It's like a market place where people with an urge to know will find people with the desire to share/teach. Supply meets demand. X marks the spot. The economist in me likes it.

Flowgram 'web 2.0'

If you are still thinking in terms of 2.0 or other numbers, here is a flowgram that makes sense of what web 2.0 means for education.





Link: http://www.flowgram.com/p/66p65shxd9uwy6/

I'm including it not because of the content per se, but to show you what a flowgram is. It combines web pages, slides, photos and other information and someone talks you through it all. As always, you can share and embed flowgrams in other pages.

What will the post-crisis area be like? Back to old or go for new?

While visiting the NATO here in Brussels, secretary of state Clinton said to 'never waste a good crisis.' She might be on to something.

I wonder what the post-crisis learning will look like. If the crisis would be done tomorrow, we'd just go back a few months in time and pick up where we left. But as time passes, some innovation might get a chance to prove it's value and some historically established burdens might have gone bankrupt. The blended balance might shift a few percentage towards virtual or e-learning. We'll see it when it happens.

Anyway here are a few innovative sites I keep an eye on:

- There is a new set of e-learning authoring tools emerging. There are all online, usually based on flash templates. One of the productivity benefits is that they offer true collaborative authoring in the form of integrated media libraries or LCMS, online review cycles during development and less need for programmation or technically advanced actions. Right now they are owned by smaller firms, but they might become big fast. Here is a list to watch: unison, coursebuilder, composica, atlantic link, rapidel-i, udutu, smartbuilder. I've played around with most of them, and they allow you all to create the type of e-learning that is 'established' now, in fast templates: courses with next buttons, images and text and flash and video, glossary, menu and FAQ.

- Screentoaster: I've tried this screencast program when it was just out of beta a few months ago and liked it. Now Jane tells they just added features. It is a simple, completely web-based way to make application 'how to' screencasts. Tools like screentoaster and jing give end-users and non-technical coaches the tools to make short tutorials, and gives peers the tools to instruct eachother. As I said before, let's hope our expensive corporate learning factories won't have to deal themselves with making this absurd 'click on the save button to save' training beyond what you need to get started.

- Thinking Worlds : This is a software by UK based Caspian Learning to create educational games. I've browsed for many game engines the past week. They all seem horribly expensive and focus on the graphics rendering rather than learning. Caspian Learning is the only one I found that has thought about how learning might work in games, and proposes some types for that. Furthermore, you can (could?) freely go to thinkingworlds.com and make new games based on existing assets for non-commercial use. I made one last week. Cool tool. Today that site seems to be closed and they announce the commercial version of it in a few days. If they sell the commercial one for affordable price, they deserve to take the market by storm.

- And open source is busy with good things too. Moodle's rise is unstoppable. And Toby from work pointed me to eTok, an extension to OpenOffice to make e-learning. I haven't had time to test it myself yet.

All these and more make me hopeful that when the crisis is over in months or years, the learning field will have raised its bar. We're the first to get budget cuts when times are bad, but we should also be the first to act and rise again! (trumpets!)

Stealing from children, and educating in return

The learning field is a broad one. So broad you have to focus. So I chose my focus on corporate learning. Not that I don't care about lifelong learning, school education and giving people equal opportunities through education. It's just that I can't follow it all. This article will be an exception, but I need to get it off my chest.

We are stealing from our children. This economic crisis cuts deep in government budgets, and guess who will repay that one day? We are borrowing that money from our children who will pay taxes to finance our current mess. Actually, we are borrowing without their consent, so the proper term for that is stealing.

What value are we giving them in return? I will not exaggerate and say we leave them a screwed up planet, but the least you can say is we used up more of it than was our fair share, and triggered the planet's climate system to find a new balance. We leave them a financial burden.
Maybe the most valuable and lasting thing we will leave them, is education. If we do the utmost we can today in our schools, universities and employment programs so they can look back and say they got great value from their education that set them of and lasted for life, we might have made up for the stealing.

It's why I get so upset when I read about education that just isn't living up to expectations. It might be the one lasting value we give them in return. How do you recognize those institutions and countries that don't live up? They are the ones not asking the question on what they leave the children with, but got stuck in their own system, beliefs and comforts.

As I said in the beginning, I'm not anyone to talk about education. It's not my field. My friend works as a secondary school teacher, and I see the despair and frustration in his eyes anytime we go to a reception and meet up with a random bunch of people all so knowledgeable on how schools are bad and how they need to change. I'm not going to do that. But I am going to plea for all people that are in the education field to please please please do everything it takes to give our children the biggest value possible.

e-books might get a whole new meaning (semblio)

Microsoft is working on Semblio. Currently it's a SDK (software development kit) that makes educational content on it's .NET plaform and sliverlight frameworks. But in 2010 it should get included in the new version of Office and become accessible for teachers to assemble new content and quizzes in lessons.

The demo looks good, it is very engaging content with a lot of potential. That is, if Microsoft can convince book publishers to go to new waters and make decent e-books that are not PDF versions of their paper cousins. But than again, a lot of publishers are firmly entering the e-learning arena. (Bertelsman with scoyo.com, television stations as discovery channel that set up educational sites, etc) It's a late entry compared to schools and corporations, but a significant one that can redirect our current thinking on e-learning and established content formats.

the smart cut: Bersin tips

In an article of the January edition of Chief Learning Officer magazine, Bersin gives 3 tips for the 'downturn dilemma':

"He identified trends that are emerging from his work with learning organizations:

1) Increased centralization: Learning organizations are moving to federated, central learning models.
2) Emphasis on talent management: CLOs are partnering with talent management partners and programs.
3) Business alignment: Learning organizations are focusing on initiatives critical to the business."

I would have put them exactly in the reverse order. How do they say that: strategy before structure...

Learning on the cheap : open source web conferencing

One to add to the list of open source software that can be used for learning: dimdim. It's an open source online meeting platform. I haven't tried it out, but it looks good and has some unique features like synchronised browsing. It works completely in a browser, no downloads required.

There was a time online conferences and online classes were two separate things, and two separate products. Those times are gone, you can discuss, teach, learn in any online conversation.