When I first attended TechKnowledge six or seven years ago, the content was all stuff I’d heard before. I grumbled. Lance Dublin set me straight. This conference wasn’t for me; it was for newbies. They hadn’t heard the Bob Pikes and Bill Byhams (and the Lances) give their stump speeches before, and they were enthralled to hear them. The first time you heard these guys, they knocked your socks off. (The fifth time, you admired their stamina.)

This taught me to segment conferences by the audiences they appealed to. Some event are bleeding edge confabs for learning professionals at the top of their game; others are designed for newcomers. While it bored me to tears, my first TechKnowledge was a great experience for most of those in attendance.

Conferences aren’t good or bad; it’s whether they are designed for you or for a different group of people.

ASTD held TechKnowledge in San Jose this year. Committee chairperson Ellen Wagner demanded they pick a spot with wi-fi. (TechKnowledge’s habitual hangout was the Riviera Hotel in Vegas. Casinos don’t have decent wifi for the same reason they don’t have clocks on the wall; it might divert gamblers from throwing their money away.) Needless to say, the “capital of Silicon Valley” has a different take on providing wifi. The event has morphed. It’s not just for newbs any more, although the event is conflicted about ditching training for learning: for taking taking the game into the 21st century where pull replaces push.

Over the course of three days, I attended all of two sessions. One was precisely what I was looking for. It was, as the Michelin Guide would say, “worth the journey.” Dan Pontefract and David Mallon’s presentation on creating a culture of collaboration at TELUS was one of the most useful things I’ve ever heard at an ASTD event, and I was making presentations at ASTD events thirty years ago.

I also attended the keynote by a couple of Googlers. Google provides a lot of the infrastructure social learning rides on; they own Blogger, YouTube, GoogleDocs, GoogleAnalytics, and so forth. I mentioned to Tony Bingham, sitting next to me, that Google lacked the problem most corporations face: cultural drag. You want to do something with social learning in most corporations, you better have a switchblade in your pocket, for you’ll find enemies in every corner. Entrenched managers and staff will have nightmares about what might go wrong and give you a thumbs down. What if somebody spills company secrets? Or leaks private information? Or posts something that’s not accurate? How can we trust these people? (We’re paid to control them, aren’t we?)

Google doesn’t have those problems. It’s open. It’s transparent. They worship innovation above all. They like crazies. They trust their employees to do what’s best — with minimal oversight. So the presentation was very interesting but couldn’t describe the greatest challenge for most L&D professionals, bringing the corporate culture into the 21st century. Turns out one to the Googlers lives right down the hill for me; we’re going to continue the conversation at a tapas bar tomorrow night.

But only two sessions over the course of three days? Did I recoup my investment of time, not to mention the price of a fancy suite atop the Fairmont? Yes, yes, yes.

It fit where I’m at in the lifecycle of conference attendance.

When I was a newcomer, I attended conferences to build my foundation knowledge. I attended ASTD, eLearning, Online Learning, Elliott Masie’s TechLearn, Training, ISPI (then NSPI), and many others. I went to as many sessions as I could pack into the day, taking voluminous notes (even before computers went personal. Remember ballpoint pens?) This is where structured learning shines: give me your framework. I’ll use it until I develop my own.

As time passed, I became choosy. I sought out speakers who had new ideas to offer, perspectives I was not familiar with, or great delivery and entertainment value. Instead of trying to cover it all, I was a man with a mission. I became a “pull” learner, pursuing what I wanted aggressively and bypassing the rest. I checked the backgrounds of the speakers and decided in advance who I’d like to hob-not with. (Were I doing it again, I’d try to contact those I wanted to meet before the event.)

In the early 2000s, Elliott Masie’s TechLearn (he came up with the name; ASTD’s TechKnowledge shamelessly ripped it off) was a fertile field for networking and sampling new concepts. Everyone who has known Elliott for a while has mixed feelings. Elliott brought together exciting ideas, great people, and a prophetic vision. His annual get-togethers at DisneyWorld were great for networking and meeting up with others. Maybe they still are. Elliott’s ego may suck all of the air out of the room, but when people needed someone to lead them out of the woods, he has illuminated the path.

My relationship with Elliott is like my relationship with Tom Cruise. I never hear from him and don’t expect to. We live on different planets. But it was at TechLearn that I learned how to learn outside of the main tent, and I’m grateful.

Back to San Jose. I spent half the time working my tail off from my room at the Fairmont. First things first. Client priorities trump attending conferences.

While I attended only two sessions, meetings with friends old and new more than made up for it. These reunions and check-ins were fantastic. Quick reconnections refresh forgotten but important memories from times past. Sometimes our rapid-fire 140-character conversions conveyed what was important and conveyed the right links for making progress.

(Click the image for the photos)

Chats with Allison, Lance, David, Pat, Tony, Nancy, Ellen, Jos, Vivian, Alicia, Aaron, Martyn, Dan, Reuben, Chris, another David, Koreen, Karie, Charles, Michelle, Karl, a third David, Bob, Scott, Sam, Jennifer, Ryann, Michael, and oodles of other kindred spirits — that list is off the top — lit up my panels, flooded my consciousness with fresh ideas, and taught me more than anything I could have learned in a workshop. Thanks, gang.

If you know the analogy, I’m entirely off the bus, having more fun and learning more because of it. People have called me a “guru.” Right. Un-huh. As if. I only have few clues. Now I’m involuntarily becoming a wise elder instead of a smartalec. I’m wryly enjoying a growing appreciation of the flow of time. The deeper you go, the better it gets.

Participants at Educa are enthusiastic:

You can watch a longer version of the party video here. When did you last see this enthusiastic a group of learning professionals?

Six of the Business Educa track sessions in Berlin were streamed and recorded:

The Opening Conversation

Social Media & Mobile Learning

Learning from Experience

Games: Should you be doing this at work?

Working Smarter with Learning Networks

Preparing for Business Educa 2011

Overall Business Educa Video Archive

Tony O’Driscoll was up at 5:00 am to present his thoughts on learning in 3D from North Carolina. The Tech Staff do not recognize that Macs exist and did not have the right cable to bring in the Skype session. Here is my implementation hack. We could hear Tony clearly; seeing his face on the screen was a bit tough.

Show’s over.

Ivan Illich

Forty years ago, Illich wrote about the need for learning networks, peer-to-peer webs, and learning objects. We have yet to catch up with his vision.

In preparing a presentation I’ll be delivering with Paul Pangaro in Brazil next month, I’ve just re-read Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society.

Deschooling Society (1971) is a book that brought Ivan Illich to public attention. It is a critical discourse on education as practised in “modern” economies. Full of detail on programs and concerns, the book’s assertions remain as radical today as they were at the time. Giving examples of the ineffectual nature of institutionalized education, Illich posited self-directed education, supported by intentional social relations in fluid informal arrangements:

Universal education through schooling is not feasible. It would be no more feasible if it were attempted by means of alternative institutions built on the style of present schools. Neither new attitudes of teachers toward their pupils nor the proliferation of educational hardware or software (in classroom or bedroom), nor finally the attempt to expand the pedagogue’s responsibility until it engulfs his pupils’ lifetimes will deliver universal education. The current search for new educational funnels must be reversed into the search for their institutional inverse: educationalwebs which heighten the opportunity for each one to transform each moment of his living into one of learning, sharing, and caring. We hope to contribute concepts needed by those who conduct such counterfoil research on education–and also to those who seek alternatives to other established service industries.^[1]

^[Wikipedia]

In other words, Illich is saying what Bill Gates means when he says that even if high schools were working perfectly, they’d still be missing the boat, for they are fundamentally trying to do the wrong thing. (Note to self: call Bill.)

These words from Deschooling Society could have come from Informal Learning:

“Such criticism leads many people to ask whether it is possible to conceive of a different style of learning. The same people, paradoxically, when pressed to specify how they acquired what they know and value, will readily admit that they learned it more often outside than inside school. Their knowledge of facts, their understanding of life and work came to them from friendship or love, while viewing TV, or while reading, from examples of peers or the challenge of a street encounter. Or they may have learned what they know through the apprenticeship ritual for admission to a street gang or the initiation to a hospital, newspaper city room, plumber’s shop, or insurance office. The alternative to dependence on schools is not the use of public resources for some new device which “makes” people learn; rather it is the creation of a new style of educational relationship between man and his environment. To foster this style, attitudes toward growing up, the tools available for learning, and the quality and structure of daily life will have to change concurrently.”

The following passage got me thinking about how institutionalized learning has gotten in the way of my own learning. I’m sad things turned out this way.

Simple educational objects have been expensively packaged by the knowledge industry. They have become specialized tools for professional educators, and their cost has been inflated by forcing them to stimulate either environments or teachers.Simple educational objects have been expensively packaged by the knowledge industry. They have become specialized tools for professional educators, and their cost has been inflated by forcing them to stimulate either environments or teachers.The teacher is jealous of the textbook he defines as his professional implement. The student may come to hate the lab because he associates it with schoolwork. The administrator rationalizes his protective attitude toward the library as a defense of costly public equipment against those who would play with it rather than learn. In this atmosphere the student too often uses the map, the lab, the encyclopedia, or the microscope only at the rare moments when the curriculum tells him to do so.

I had the good fortune to attend some fantastic schools but I squandered many of the opportunities they offered me. I thought I was there to meet academic requirements, get good grades, and get the sheepskin. Learning was not part of the deal. Curiosity? Not much of that either.

One’s memories are always fuzzy. In time, they distance themselves from what was really going on. However, one example haunts me. I’m sure this one happened. Or, more precisely, didn’t happen.

Princeton has a fine art museum. I walked right by the entrance every day for two years on my way to the classrooms where I studied sociology and public opinion polling.

Mind you, I have since discovered that I really enjoy art. I’ve paid many a visit to the Louvre, Orsay, Prado, Uffizi, MOMA, the Met, the National Gallery, BFA, etc., etc., etc. But art was not one of my courses at college. In four years on campus, I never once set foot in the university art museum.

I missed innumerable opportunities on campus because they weren’t on the official, academic agenda and I was too sheepish to have an agenda of my own. I’m about to weep as I write this.

Here are some quotes that spoke to me as I re-read the book this week.

Cue Paul Simon…

When I think back
On all the crap I learned in high school
It’s a wonder
I can think at all
And though my lack of education
Hasn’t hurt me none
I can read the writing on the wall

People learn socially and informally.

Research usually finds that around 80% of workplace learning is informal. This is of course an average; the value depends on the context and the individual learner.

Note that the studies that came up with the 80% were conducted before we had social networks or Google or YouTube or Facebook or ubiquitous email or blogs or smart phones.

What proportion would you think Informal Learning accounts for in today’s connected world?

People tell me this is worth watching. You tell me. It’s 104 minutes long. Please skip around.

Let’s talk about how we see the world on these issues. Leave a comment below.

Professional Development

Long-term professional development often involves working and growing with peers.

The book Kitchen Confidential (Harper, 2001) by Anthony Bourdain describes how he become a professional chef and how he continues to support the community of professional chefs. No one issues membership cards to professional chefs but they are not difficult to recognize. They wear funny looking hats and white tunics. They carry a set of knives that no one else is allowed to touch. Their fingers bear scars from calling it too close with those knives

When chefs travel, they meet with other chefs. They eat together. They share techniques. Were it not for this Sharing, we would not enjoy the broad, international array of foods on our tables (because chefs turned one another on to sources of exotic ingredients). When a top chef wants to move to a new job in a particular location, he tells a few chefs, the grapevine spreads the word, and within a week he has several job offers.

In the book, Bourdain describes starting out as a dishwasher in a restaurant on Cape Cod. Then he lands a job as a fry cook. From that point on, the chef running the kitchen he’s working in is looking out for his career. When will the kitchen worker be prepared to advance from washing lettuce to making salads? What does she need to know to advance to pastry chef? How can the chef help the dessert chef advance to sous chef? Good chefs take developing their staff very seriously. They see that their apprentices learn to create satisfying yet economical food.

Anthony Bourdain decided he needed to accelerate his development so he attended the Culinary Institute of America for formal training. This enabled him to understand the interrelationships of ingredients and cooking and customers. The curriculum at CIA taught him frameworks for various cuisines; he learned practices that would have taken years to learn on the job. And indeed, when Bourdain went back to cooking, he rapidly advanced up the ladder to become a chef.

Chefs are a community of like-minded individuals who identify with one another, advance the practice of their profession, and help new entrants join the profession.

Ten years ago, the common wisdom was that you could not establish a community of practice. If you found one that was working, the best you could do was to nurture it. It was like truffles. They grow wild. You want truffles, you put a pig or well-trained dog on a leash and encourage it to dig around the roots of oak trees in southern France or northern Italy.

The authorities were wrong on both counts. Half the world’s truffles are cultivated on truffle plantations in Spain. Thousands of corporations have established thriving communities of practice that advance both their members and their shared body of knowledge.

Knowing the tricks of a trade does not make you a professional.

Beyond acquiring know-how, a professional hangs out with other professionals, builds relationships with others in the profession, and contributes to the collective wisdom of the profession. Most importantly, the professional knows deep inside that she has joined the profession.

A cook becomes a chef when she feels she’s a chef. Professional firefighters, insurance salespeople, plumbers, accountants, and architects don’t just master subject matter; they become members of their profession.

Experience is the best teacher. You can’t become a chef without working and learning in a kitchen.

Many professionals accelerate the rate at which they gain experience by enrolling in formal courses. Formal learning, where an outside authority chooses the subject matter, is a great way to see the big picture of a new field, master its concepts, get to know the ropes, and learn to talk the talk. Mind you, formal learning doesn’t teach everything. No chef has every recipe in her head; that’s why she has cookbooks.

Motivation

People are motivated to do things because they want to make progress. As Dan Pink* says, “It’s about satisfying workers’ desire for autonomy, which stimulates their ‘innate capacity for self direction’**.” Some want to increase the scope of their repertoire to gain personal power. The best motivation is intrinsic. People do things for their own satisfaction, not external rewards.

The carrot-and-stick method no longer works. In fact, external reward initiatives often backfire. Withdraw the reward and the desired behavior may stop. Also, rewards tied to performance have the potential to change play into work.

If you set high expectations of people, they usually live up to them. if you have low expectations of people, they live down to them. A person not trusted with the authority to do something can’t take responsibility for doing it. “It’s not my department.” A person authorized and trusted to take responsibility cannot help but do so.

As Will Herzberg***, ”the father of motivation theory,” pointed out years ago, workers are motivated by achievement, recognition, the work itself, responsibility, promotion, and growth. This innate desire to do well can be hindered by obstacles that reduce motivation: lack of respect, poor working conditions, perceived unfairness, low pay, lack of job security, and poor relationship with supervisor.

Instructional design pioneer Robert Mager**** proposed a manner of determining whether a roadblock was lack of knowledge or of motivation. Hold a gun to her head. If she does what you ask, you’re grappling with a motivation problem.

___________

* Pink, D. 2010. Drive, the Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

^** O’Connel, A. 2010. Daniel Pink’s Drive. Harvard Business Review

^*** Herzberg, W. 1968. One More Time, How Do You Motivate Employees? Harvard Business Review

^**** Mager, R. 1970. Analyzing Performance Problems. Or You Real/yOughta Wanna. Fearon Publishers

___________

Related:
Workscaping, part 1

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:

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?

One of the things I like best about Twitter is the collegial, friendly fire-ish banter among L & D professionals. One of the most active of these professionals is the prolific Jay Cross. Jay, with his colleagues in the Internet Time Alliance, has recently produced the 2010 version of his “unbook,” Working Smarter: Informal Learning in the Cloud.

Convention and controversy

Among the topics often up for grabs lately are ideas around informal learning and the networked learning landscape of the 21^st century. Those in the quantitative data/metrics/benchmarking camp argue against the legitimacy of the notion of “informal” learning. As often as not, they claim workplace learning is too important to be left up to happenstance, and requires planning and careful, thorough, design. Cross is clear, though, that he is drawing the “kill the courses, shut down the training department” line with a dramatically heavy hand, admitting that he uses it as much for shock value as anything else, while trying to put forth the idea of workplace learning as different from the traditional view of training course. He also asserts that “informal” does not, as it so often seems to be interpreted, mean “haphazard” or “random.”. Cross acknowledges the time and place of traditional training approaches, particularly for novices (although he questions the decision to put so many resources there rather than with supporting better producers). But seasoned workers, he rightly notes, will not flock to workshops and traditional classes, as they have work to do. Making it easier for them to get to information, to find one another, to learn through collaboration and by accessing meaningful self-service performance support, will strengthen the organization and “help sharp people become sharper.”

From the abstract to the specific

As I said on Twitter one night, “I am 93.2% suspicious of statistics about concepts of abstractions like ‘learning’.” While the data we have all seen – along the lines of “80% of workplace learning occurs outside the classroom” – may be appealing, and so quotable, we know we can’t actually measure anything like “learning” in these terms. But we do know that people learn at work all the time, every day, more from one another (even if that “other” is a person who has uploaded a video tutorial, or updated a Wikipedia page) than from anything that happens in a classroom. We know that peer groups and communities exist to share knowledge and support performance, even if they’re bootlegged and kept under management’s radar. We’ve all experienced a need-to-know moment, made better or worse by how quickly we could put our hands on the right information or find the right person to ask. Doubt me? For the rest of the week, as you go about enacting your work, ask how much of what you are doing came from anything resembling a traditional classroom or e-Learning course. Cross leads the reader on a tour of informal, networked learning and performance support, and helps move the conversation from 50,000 feet to 50. This “unbook” is a compilation of his own ideas as well as interjections from his colleagues in the Internet Time Alliance (Harold Jarche, Jane Hart, Charles Jennings, Clark Quinn, and Jon Husband), with chime-ins from many others. There are checklists, tools, and images, charts and provocative questions. And there are honest remarks about the state of learners, many of whom need to stop waiting for directions and start becoming self-directed. For me, the most value in the text comes not from the parsing out of the finer points of informal and formal approaches, but the articulation of the difference between training and learning. Food for thought, from Cross: “If you were to create the organization’s learning and development function from scratch, what would it look like? Are you still doing huge, expensive training-based software rollouts, or shifting the effort into on-point performance support? Have you taken charge of your organization’s learning function, or just training?”

The unbook

A word about the book itself – it claims it is not one. It’s an unbook, updated every year or so, and published by “Jay Cross and friends,” his colleagues in the Internet Time Alliance Group. Updates appear on Jay’s Internet Time blog http://www.internettime.com so, if they strike your fancy, purchase a bound or e-copy update from Jay’s site, from Lulu, or from Amazon. Where traditional books exist as editions updated every few years, often out of date before they even make it to bookshelves, this unbook is always in Beta. Be aware: While Working Smarter is organized into chapters, it is not the formal, tightly edited, unified work that some readers will expect from a traditional book. I found the organization refreshing, and the get-to-the-point-already style very effective. You can also find Jay on Twitter @jaycross, where he’s a frequent participant in the weekly Thursday night #lrnchat sessions that I help moderate. Join us! 8:30 to 10 PM ET. Jay Cross and Friends. (2010) Working Smarter: Informal Learning in the Cloud. Internet Time Alliance: LULU. $20 paper; $16 e-version, available from Lulu http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/working-smarter-|-january-2010/8259651 or from Internet Time at http://internettime.pbworks.com/FrontPage.

On YouTube, Peter Casebow and I continue our conversation, talking about learning and performance, and how informal learning works.

Learning and Performance 5:06

Informal Learning and Performance 5:39

How Managers Learn – In Their Own Words

Jay Cross & Peter Casebow video 1 -Intro
Jay and Peter introduce themselves, the internet time alliance and GoodPractice