Several large LMS companies added “informal learning” to their sales shticks this week. One says “All documents accessed can be tracked as informal learning events.” (Documents are events?) Another firm claims to have added a “social learning platform layer that enables customers to securely empower their employees to find, create and share knowledge assets and expertise with their colleagues as they leverage an extensive” online book collection.
Tony Karrer picked up some of the disconnects in a post entitled Social Learning Tools Should Not Be Separate from Enterprise 2.0. Read the comments to get the full flavor of the argument.
Xyleme‘s Dawn Poulos points out:
If we look beyond our training silos for just a bit, we’ll see that that big social implementations are actually taking place outside of the training department. These implementations span multiple business units, functions, geographies, etc., have huge user communities and encompass social learning activities such as employee on-boarding, internal collaboration and expertise location. Rarely are these initiatives driven by the training organization. So, it’s perplexing to see why training yet again wants to separate itself from the enterprise and use their own set of social tools. This only serves to marginalize the training department even further.
Dan Pontefract, over at TELUS, puts it succinctly:
This is why we need to federate the LMS into the ‘collaboration’ platform, be it Jive, SharePoint, Connections, Confluence, whatever. Once we do this, we can link in the formal content/registrations with the social connection side of the E2.0 platform. I don’t want the LMS as the place whereby social interaction takes place – that’s just ‘lipstick on a pig’.
One naive ID blogger praised informal learning and wrote “Here is one awesome presentation about this very type of learning and steps organizations can take to organize their informal learning.” Unfortunately, she points to Articulate’s witty April Fool’s Day spoof.
(It’s a joke.)
I’m delivering a presentation on The Cluetrain Manifesto at the Swiss eLearning Conference next week. I suggest LMS vendors catch the Cluetrain in time. Here’s how The Cluetrain Manifesto begins:
people of earth… |
A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter—and getting smarter faster than most companies.
These markets are conversations. Their members communicate in language that is natural, open, honest, direct, funny and often shocking. Whether explaining or complaining, joking or serious, the human voice is unmistakably genuine. It can’t be faked.
Most corporations, on the other hand, only know how to talk in the soothing, humorless monotone of the mission statement, marketing brochure, and your-call-is-important-to-us busy signal. Same old tone, same old lies. No wonder networked markets have no respect for companies unable or unwilling to speak as they do.
But learning to speak in a human voice is not some trick, nor will corporations convince us they are human with lip service about “listening to customers.” They will only sound human when they empower real human beings to speak on their behalf.
While many such people already work for companies today, most companies ignore their ability to deliver genuine knowledge, opting instead to crank out sterile happytalk that insults the intelligence of markets literally too smart to buy it.
Related:
Informal Snake Oil
What really is informal learning?
No related posts.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
I consider Amazon’s (or any such site’s) ratings and comments feature, particularly if users also have user profiles linked, to be an instance of using Web 2.0 / social media tools. And people can learn from such reviews / ratings all the time — I know I certainly have! And this is not formal learning — structured, created to match objectives, event-driven, etc. I would argue it is a type of informal learning, and it is generated from the masses, derived from interactions between people, so it is social learning.
That said, a problem with the marketing line you quoted, about this being a “social learning layer”, is that it is a rather thin layer. It is one that connects and feeds off of one of the vendor’s traditional product lines, so it is a good way for them to dip their toes into the Web 2.0 / social learning waters. If you think they are suggesting it to be more than that, then fine.
I think informal/social learning in organizations, in the long run, will obviously include things like ratings/comments around traditional formal learning assets, but it will also be (more?) about robust discussion forums, blogs, wikis, sharing videos, micro-messaging like Yammer, and so on. User-generated ratings and comments on traditional book content (or traditional e-learning courses) is a nice first step — but is just a small first step in this arena. That doesn’t make it *not* informal learning or social learning, but it is a very small example of what informal learning and social learning in organziations can be. In fact, I’d argue that in a very short period of time — 1 or 2 years? — having comments and user ratings around traditional content will be *very* common, perhaps even conspicuous by its absence. As a feature, it will be so trivial and obvious that it won’t be worth discussing.
I agree with Dawn’s comment in so far as I agree it is a fact that much organizational Web 2.0 / social / informal learning is going on without L&D leadership or even involvement. But it is also true that in many organizations it is not going on much at all, or only in very small ways. In those cases, I think it is very important for L&D leaders to step up, seize the day, take the reins, and find the right platform(s) to enable informal / social learning. I preach this constantly in my numerous presentations on this topic at industry events. (Even in those orgs where it is happening robustly, I’d argue L&D leaders need to join the party — whether that means getting an LMS with a wide range of social/informal tools or not depends on the orgs’ needs.)
I disagree with Don’s comment, in the sense that I don’t think adding Web 2.0 / social / informal features to an LMS is just “lipstick on a pig”. What is important is the end result — a strong platform tool that integrates formal (with its tracking needs) with informal/social (with its powerful features too) all in one smooth, seamless platform. Whether you get there by adding LMS features into Jive/SocialText/SharePointetc. or you integrate a tool like Jive with an LMS — as we have done with Element K’s KnowledgeHub LMS — the end result is what matters. Why be against LMS’s adding Web 2.0 / social / informal functionality, as long as they do it well? Don seems to be assuming the “pig” — LMS — can’t change to become the kind of informal/social learning enabling platform he wants. I say LMSes can make that change — whether many will or not remains to be seen.
I should correct one thing I said that could easily be misconstrued. I didn’t mean to imply that in some organizations informal learning is not going very much — I agree with the common view that the majority of workplace learning is informal (and I agree with your oft-made point Jay that while most of workplace learning is informal, most of L&D budgets go towards developint or procuring or tracking formal learning). What I meant was *technology-enabled* informal learning — what we generally mean by Web 2.0-enabled learning or also called “social learning.”
Jay, did a podcast last week with Ben Kiker, CMO of Jive Software. http://bit.ly/ayK5D0 He gave some pretty great examples of enterprise-wide social learning initiatives taking place in large organizations. Unfortunately, as I referred to in my comment on Tony’s blog post, majority aren’t driven or even have involvement from training organization
Good stuff, Jay.
I only quibble with the word, informal. I prefer workplace or life space based. What we must do is move messages, conversations, support and information closer to where they are used. Simultaneously, let’s invite users to contribute their ideas and struggles.
What bugs me about informal? Just that it gives the impression that we can create a blog or add Twitter to onboarding or ethics class and voila, magical betterment of the development enterprise. Change and success just aren’t that funky– as I know you know.
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