eel-learning

Catechism of cliché (3) - the L&D pep talk

What is your job this morning?

• To share ideas around our vision

I appreciate your generosity.  What act of manual dexterity will you also be performing?

• Positioning the change programme

With what aim, of an aeronautical relief-bringing variety?

• So that it lands well

From whence are we beginning?

• A good foundation

In what provocatory surroundings will we find ourselves in the next year?

• A challenging environment

What will we do to this challenging environment?

• Respond to it

To what must our learning be closely aligned?

• Business needs

What should the method of propulsion  of our learning strategy be?

• It should be driven by the needs of the business

What propulsive activity should our learning, in turn, carry out?

• It should drive business results

Where will this ‘business’ be found?

• At the customer interface

What unitary outlet, of an arresting nature, will our new website become?

• A one-stop shop

What will this shop offer, provide, promote, make possible?

• Access

Access to what?

• All your learning and development needs

What will we be serving up to meet these needs?

• Media rich content

In what easily masticated form will these needs be met?

• Bite size chunks

What basic physics work will be executed by our social learning strategy?

• It will leverage the collective knowledge of the workforce

In what tubular repositories does this collective knowledge currently reside, out of which we will pry it?

• Silos

That will require a lot of thought. Where will I do this thinking?

• Outside the box

That, sir, is nothing but a cliché.  Go away.

 

(With apologies to the spirit of Flann O'Brien)

Bullshit bingo

The other day I sat through several  consecutive presentations by learning service providers. A grim experience made bearable only by a lot of doodling, deep breathing exercises to keep the brain oxygenated, and an imagined game of bullshit bingo, from the relatively innocuous "One of the major challenges we had was around change management." (Courtesy of the Department of Stating the Bleeding Obvious), through "leveraging best-of-breed systems" (finger down throat) to " to see how you're trending up against your peers " (Don't try that in a lift in my building.)

But the one that intrigued me most, trotted out by at least two of them  was " company X came to us and said We need you to help us with ... ".

I was amused by the way this sounds almost like a social networking call, or like Jeannie asking how to put something in Word into italics - 'Hey, got a minute?'

What they really meant to say was " Company X allowed us to tender at two days notice for a mega project so our account  manager was living on coffee for two days and nights on the understanding that if we didn't get this contract she'd never work in this town again, after which we hastily tried to approximate Company X's branding and stuck a mugshot of its ugly CEO on the rough mockup system home page we'd used with Company Y the previous week, then pored over Company X's request spawning paragraphs of buzzwords to match each of its sentences, then flew in Tom, Dick and Harriet from head office, parked their jetlagged butts in the presentation room and got them to shake hands with everyone and promise the earth then three weeks later Company X put us on their shortlist and their procurement people made us cut the price in half and promise twice as much functionality then we got the contract and realised it could never be delivered on their IT infrastructure but it didn't matter as the manager who asked for it had moved on and we were able to pass off what we could scrape together as being what he had asked for as nobody who made up the contract still had a job so we were at least able to put company X's logo on the second slide of our presentation, you know, the one with all the logos the other people tendering on the day have got on theirs, strange that, but anyway don't you think it looks empty without yours? "

Any resemblance to any companies living or dead is ... well ... in your imagination.

Digital distraction

OK, I've lampooned the 'passing on wrong information' objection to the use of social media at work. I've readily agreed - and still do - that our informal channels provide much more helpful and useful information at work than the formals.  I''ve nodded my head at the statement 'if people are going to be distracted they'll be distracted whether you provide social media or not'.

Yet I notice that when I come across a link saying 'Digital Distractions Are Expanding at the Workplace http://bit.ly/k5vbVD'  in the midst of a collection of links promoting social media for learning and information-sharing, I leap to click it. When I got to the article I felt a wave of recognition. It's not that distraction was invented by Twitter or anything, it's just that as we have become more digitally connected the space for focus and concentration has diminished and the more we add, the harder it gets.

When I was at the Learning and Skills Group, Don gave out the Twitter hashtag for the conference with the fire instructions. I remember thinking ' the last thing I want to do if I'm enjoying a presentation or intrigued by the argument, or better still, challenged by it - is to sit scrolling through my phone reading what other people are saying about it in real time. I want to focus.  The time I'd see myself wanting to dip into the Twittersphere would be if I were bored. I felt at times that to express such a view would mark me down as somewhere between a Luddite and a dinosaur. I have the same feeling on LSG or eLearning Network webinars where I've taken to shutting down the chat room (except when I need to ask, painfully regularly 'Has the audio gone off or is it just me?').  Because I cannot concentrate on two things at once and I cannot concentrate well on one thing if I'm drawn to dip in and out of another.

So when I read in the article I've linked to:

• 68% of respondents reported that their employers have implemented policies or technologies to minimize distractions, while 73% of end users have adopted self-imposed techniques to help maintain focus.
• The #1 corporate strategy used to discourage digital diversion is blocking access to public social networks such as Facebook and/or other non-business websites (48%).

... I feel recognition and validation from the first and bitter disappointment about the second. Because this is precisely the sort of restriction I normally argue against.But I can see that it's not just humbug, it's a real issue.

For myself it boils down to the fact that  I revel in the use of "pull" resources and I make a lot of effort to protect myself from "push" .   So like many others I switch off email notifications, and I keep other stuff like Twitter and Facebook at arm's length. I go into Facebook frequently but Twitter I only look at every few days. And it overwhelms me when I do.

In conclusion I'd say that social learning - or rather the kind of self-directed learning that SoMe enables so wonderfully - is now seen to demand not only new skills but new levels of self-discipline.  With them, we can make the most of what it offers, but without them, and without even recognising that there's a problem, we'll suffer.

 

Gurteen Knowledge Cafes

The other day I attended a day’s session led by David Gurteen on his ‘Gurteen Knowledge Cafes’ concept. David is an international speaker in the Knowledge Management area, and I first met him with Jay Cross and Charles Jennings on a meeting about social learning.

 

So what’s a Knowledge Café? First of all the ‘café’ bit is incidental, other than to emphasise informality and its birth as an adaptation of the ‘World Café’ concept to the business world. In fact David said the model is that of a chat in a pub after a meeting, when the real conversation happens, but ‘knowledge pub’ might not go down too well in many parts of the world!

 

It’s a structure to enable a group of 20-30 people to examine a single topic or question in a way that allows participants to meet and exchange views in shifting groups, but removes the barriers to conversation inherent in the way such meetings are typically held. For example, the normal requirement of  ‘syndicate groups’ to elect a scribe and report back to the wider group is removed (to everyone’s relief). Flipcharts are banned! A typical session is structured for 90m to 2 hours and discussion takes place in various small groups and in the large group of everyone.

 

I’ve seen other attempts to structure meetings to provide more focus than the default free-for-all or ‘chair plus agenda’ ways, from de Bono’s famous ‘thinking hats’ concept to a faintly embarrassing one based on native American traditions. While they seek to remove waffling and domination by individuals by setting up a form of role-play, the Knowledge Café takes the opposite approach of aiming to remove obstacles rather than putting in a structure which can take on as much importance (and debate) as the topic.

 

It’s actually nothing very dramatic at all, and therein lies its appeal. You come away thinking  ‘ yes, this makes sense and I could easily run this. ‘.  Gurteen recognises that some aspects of his approach will be controversial in business: for example the insistence on no formal ‘outputs’ – the benefits are tacit and therefore not available for objective measurement. He has arguments to support this position and it led our group to a wider discussion of the largely spurious nature of attempts at forecasting and measuring ROI in the fields of learning, development and knowledge management. Some managers will not be convinced by this very liberal approach but as in so many areas, it just takes one conspicuous good result to mark an approach as a Good Idea.

 More about David Gurteen and his approach

Working Smarter webinar

I attended a free transatlantic webinar featuring members of the Internet Time Alliance - Clark Quinn,  Charles Jennings, Jay Cross Harold Jarche and Jane Hart. They had invited questions beforehand, and this is a short summary of the points that came up in the discussion.  I think the presentation benefitted from the pressure to address each of these questions. The leaders 'rotated', addressing each question in pairs, with the others chipping in occasionally. That made the overall presentation brisk and to the point. The theme was that social learning is less about learning and more about working in a 'smarter' way.

What's 'Working Smarter' and why is it important?

• it's about conversation, not packaged information
• it's to enable us to cope with the avalance of information
• because our current company practices are from the pre-information age
• as routine work gets automated and outsourced, we're left with exception handling, complex work  and creative work. Trad TNA and training aren't geared for these non-repeatable operations
• it's about augmenting our brains with technology

Examples of using social learning to support formal learning

• Jane Hart - managers' learning community in a South African power station company
• returning the focus of training to apprenticeships, away from the classroom

How do you motivate busy people to do social learning when their schedule's full already?

• demonstrate that it's easier, cheaper and more flexible than the alternatives
• show that it saves time and effort. Google demonstrates that people take the line of least resistance to find what they need
• show that it's more fun

How do you sell the idea of social learning to a sceptical manager?

• show the benefits to his/her own practice, or at least to yours
• don't call it 'learning' or 'social' or 'networking' - call it effective collaboration

What's the role of an L&D specialist in Working Smarter?

• 'network weaver'
• removing barriers
• NOT checking technical correctness - examples of Wikipedia and Dare2Share show self correction works
• facilitator of communities - some will need input and help
• a minor part will still be developing content and courses but this can be outsourced if in conflict

What part will mobile learning play in this?

• four functions of mobile device - get content, compute (make us smarter), capture (photo, mic, video, sensor), communicate
• not just a delivery platform for more elearning
• connecting with your network. If networks inhibited by corporate restrictions people will use their mobiles
• slow learning - a continuing relationship with the learner, not event-based
• performance support should be training's top priority
• predicted that in 2-3 years, majority of internet access will be from mobile devices
• Google now design primarily for mobile before desktop

What are the ingredients of a successful community of practice?

• you need a shared purpose and eagerness to learn from each other
• so you can't mandate a C of P
• it's about nurturing, more like gardening
• start to embed a collaborative culture (this term appeals to senior managers)
• 'You know you're in one when it changes your practice'

How do you create a groundswell for informal learning without alienating management?

• it has to be 'seeded, fed and watered'
• it has to be both bottom up and top down - senior champions. BBC and Reuters had support of top people willing to blog

How do you measure the impact of social learning?

• get out of the learning mindset into a business mindset
• business outcomes, changes in behaviour, business metrics
• push-button reporting (like LMS) won't work. LMS doesn't measure business performance
• talk to people - even a sample of 24 people is enough
• see McKinsey report on speed of access to knowledge. 'Knowledge workers spend 50% of their time doing things they don't want to do - dealiing with email, searching for information, making appointments'

What's the most important thing you can do to move the Working Smarter agenda on?

• demonstrate the value to yourself first - social learning is something you do
• immerse yourself in it
• don't assume people have the skills or motivation to share - they need nurtured and 'safety' has to be created if it isn't there
• find seniors who 'get it' and bind them in closely as examplars not just endorsers
• measure business results in thes same way you'd measure engagement or sales
• don't focus on learning, focus on work.

The Internet Time Alliance

Working Smarter Daily

Starting a Community of Practice

I've been working on a Community of Practice for all those involved in any way with online learning across my organisation. Last week saw the startup event, which was very encouraging.

Why a CoP?

We've just been through one of the biggest mergers in UK corporate history. During this we found that there were lots of people with an interest in online learning who didn't know each other.  Some were creators, others regular purchasers from external suppliers. Some relied on 'e' for their formal learning programmes, others were L&D people who wanted - and needed - to understand better the range of media encompassed by 'e'.  I was particularly keen to get talking with the people who regularly buy from outside suppliers as I had a suspicion they could only visualise what they'd seen before - page turning tutorials - and the suppliers would be only too happy to provide the staple diet. Not only were there no standards across the organisation about 'e' but there was no common language even about what online learning was.

My managers and I also realised that we'd only understand social learning by doing, and that this was a golden opportunity to learn about how to set up a CoP by actually doing it.

What form does it take?

There's an online element and a face to face element. The online element consists of a forum, a resources page (with links to top bloggers like Tom Kuhlmann, Charles Jennings and Clive Shepherd) and an internal blog platform. The forum and blog are hosted on our server, external to the firewall. That way we're not forced to use the over-controlled corporate  Sharepoint.  Even then we still have quite strict limitations on the kinds of software we can use, and the ones we've chosen are just enough to get us using these facilities. If the idea catches light, then we'll be in a better position later to discuss better, more dedicated platforms like Yammer. We launched the forum first, with a 'Who Are You?' topic, as part of the build up to last Thursday's launch event, where we attracted over 50 to our conference centre.

There we had a keynote talk from the Director of Learning, who is an iconoclast and a great enthusiast for this sort of thing, from Charles Jennings, opening our minds to the end of the separation of work and learning, and an after-lunch rant from me about the things that set my teeth on edge in elearning. The most important part of the day was a 'knowledge cafe' style discussion, first in small groups then in the larger group on the theme of 'what are we going to do about it, then?'.  To kick this off we had very short introductory statements from three of us (along the lines of 'scrap formal and compliance training', ' don't throw the baby out with the bathwater', ' conversations are more powerful than training ').

I'd been very particular about calling this C of P 'online learning' rather than 'elearning' and the day certainly spent a lot of time talking about knowledge sharing, user generated content and performance support as well as 'traditional' elearning.

The large group conversation brought up a lot of the expected barriers - Group IT and Group Brand being the main ones - but also the encouragement of the Director of Learning to try new ideas, to be willing to experiment and learn from failure, and to enlist his support in the bigger internal battles that we'll meet when we try to extend our role beyond order-taking to consultancy.

I was delighted by the response - both in terms of the numbers that came and the enthusiasm with which they threw themselves into the discussions. And the main objective - that they should simply get to know each other - seemed to have been met. We're now in the crucial phase of not letting it all get beaten by the Return to the Inbox. I'll report back after some time on how it's gone.

 

 

 

Media in Learning (Trainer1)

A couple of colleagues and I attended this one-day course last week, given by Neil Lasher.  Although we've been experimenting a little with audio and video at work (and I've been doing a little video editing at home) we had little concrete knowledge to go on, living as we have been in a world of text and (small) images. Not that anyone's actually told us our intranet is opening up to allow more media, it's just that other people have started to do it and not been slapped down. Not yet anyway.

Neil is an engaging man but one with strong opinions, and there were lots of interesting digressions into the history of elearning since the early 90s (he believes we're coming full circle into a re-appreciation of the simple page turner) and the questionable delights of SCORM.  Neil's company Trainer1 has invested a lot in research into the views of users of elearning in the public and private sector. Some of it will be published, some not. But we went fully into the different file types and formats of video, and their advantages and disadvantages, and various useful bits of hardware and software were demonstrated. It was a good use of the face to face training session to breathe a bit of debate and controversy into what might have been a dry topic on a blog or information site. 

One topic he emphasised repeatedly, preaching to the  converted in my case, was brevity. Videos and elearning modules don't have to be 5 or 10 minutes, but the environments in which they're deployed do not lend themselves to anything longer, even 'immersive' training that really is engaging. If you're going to do the practice and 'rehearsal' that will make new information stick, then among other things you need freedom from distraction, and in most places I know that simply isn't available. Learning Centres and cybercafes seem so last decade and they probably are, but the 45 minute elearning module belongs there, not in a busy office or - worse - the customer-facing desktop. So the move towards using these media for motivation, overviews and short practice scenarios is appropriate. 

Course over, I came home and today responded to an email telling me of some Mandatory Training that had to be completed by today. It had sat in my to-do list for three weeks. ('Mandatory Training for Q1' is such a motivator, isn't it?)  I found myself entering a module estimated as taking 30 minutes, followed by a test. After 10 pages I hadn't found anything relevant to my role, except in terms of ' you work in a bank so you should know all this ', so I ducked out and took the test, achieving 19 out of 20 with ease by following the giveaway cues. A world away from the kinds of things we'd been talking about with Neil, and a long way to go. At least they hadn't given us a 30m video.

Cognitivemedia and visual thinking

As a fan of Dan Roam and ‘visual thinking’ I was pleased to come across this site. I’ve dabbled in cartoons before and used a comic strip approach in a very small way here and there in elearning, but this is on a different scale, using very talented cartoonists to represent a conversation or the argument of a book. But isn’t this so much better than the average ‘interactive’ module?

http://www.cognitivemedia.co.uk/

Informal learning and performance support

Last week I tuned into a webinar from the Elearning Guild by Con Gottfredson. It was a summary of his book with Bob Mosher Innovative Performance Support (http://performersupport.com).  Here's a brief outline:

Formal learning tends to follow the sequence learn > practice > apply > review

Con's Performance Support model attempts to address some of the weaknesses of this model e.g.

• the forgetting curve
• the disconnect between the learning environment and the workplace
• memory overload

It looks at five 'moments' when learning is necessary:

1. new (what's this?)
2. more (I thought I knew enough about this but I don't)
3. change (oops - that's different!)
4. solve ( what's going on here? )
5. apply ( how do I do this)

The central idea is that you design for the 'moment of apply' and everything else follows from there.  The moment of apply has three phases, for which you can provide support:

Before - (reference material, elearning, wiki, community of practice)

During - (sidekicks, job aids, context-sensitive help, FAQs, coaching, Twitter equivalents)

After - (checklists, self-assessment tools, the feedback loop - 'lessons learned')

A good selection of these is the focus of design, with any formal training being around how you use them.

But you don't create everything for every operation: to target the design you use a critical skills analysis / risk analysis approach that says 'this task is high frequency, low risk and that task is low frequency, high risk', so one would merit a simple job aid and the other some reinforcement in formal learning.

He also posits the idea of a digital performance support broker, a kind of context sensitive intervention that links you to relevant Twitter feeds, blogs, formal learning and books.

Echoing many of the talks from Learning Technologies, this argues that 'Just in case' learning is pretty much wasted time, and in the words of Harold S. Geneen,CEO of ITT (International Telephone and Telegraph: Performance is your reality - forget everything else!

More at (http://performersupport.com). 

Reader, my life was changed!

Reading the blog of person using a new bit of software and discovering belatedly that it doesn't autosave as you go along, and feeling her pain, as they say in pain-filled California, I remembered the lesson I was given by someone (sorry I can't remember the name) who taught me Desk Top Publishing way back in the 80s.

    'Small success? Ctrl + S'

In other words as soon as something goes right - Save It!  Probably the best habit I've learned in 20 years of computer-bashing.