Sloan Management Review has a great interview with Andy McAfee on What Sells CEOs on Social Networking. CEOs excitedly agree with Lew Platt’s old observation about Hewlett-Packard: “If only HP knew what HP knows, we’d be three times more productive.” They understand the power of weak ties in enterprise social networks. They appreciate the incoming generation’s new approach to working without limits. Sure, there are fears of losing control, the fact that hierarchy and social networks are not comfortable bedfellows, and the inevitable paradigm drag. But in the long run, people are eager to express themselves and enterprise collegiality is the path to “knowing what HP knows.”

Yesterday IBM presented a compelling case for social business excellence at the Enterprise 2.0 Summit in Paris. Social networks are so patently good for business that managers are routing around IT to put them in place. The social business captures value through capturing tacit information, fostering collaboration & discovery, filtering information flow & finding patterns, and transforming exception processing & making processes resilient.

David Weinberger’s Too Big To Know convinced me that networks have radically changed the notion of what constitutes knowledge. Lots of our previous concepts about knowledge were due to the limitations of paper, not that there’s some absolute truth out there. On the net, facts don’t stay on the page. There are no isolated ideas; there never were; there are only webs of ideas. We can improve those webs through open access, good filters, metadata, linking everything, and opening up institutions.

David describes leadership as an emergent property of an organizational network. Leadership resides more with the group being led than the purported leader. Strong leadership is simply a means for a group to accomplish its objectives.

Yesterday on Dan Pink’s Office Hours, Gary Hamel described the irrelevance of 100 year old models of management and the growing impatience of disgruntled workers, customers, and shareholders. Hamel has said that the future model of management looks a lot like web 2.0.

So networks underpin leadership, business performance, knowledge, and management.

It’s undeniable that the internet is an unprecedented game changer. People and ideas and knowledge and happenings are connected as never before, and there’s no end in sight. The omnipresent network makes us look at processes instead of events: everything has a precedent and an antecedent. Murphy’s Second Law kicks in: You can never do just one thing. Institutions that block connections, be they schools or close-lipped corporations, are increasingly out of step with the times.

But I have a question about this: Why isn’t anyone talking about learning networks?

Neither McAfee nor IBM nor Weinberger nor Hamel talks about networks for learning. This parallels the situation with informal learning and eLearning. Even after people accepted that informal learning is the primary way people learn to do their jobs, few corporate training organizations lifted a finger to do anything about it. eLearning — the boring, one-way, content slapped on pages for self study variety — was a total flop because learning involves more than exposure to information. Two major opportunities to boost performance were squandered. I don’t intend to stand idly by as business thought leaders repeat the same mistake with learning networks.

Networks were made for learning. And in a ever-changing world, learning is a survival skill.

This is hardly a new idea. I wrote about it in Informal Learning in 2005:

ENGINEERING THE INDIVIDUAL’S LEARNING NETWORK
Learning originally meant finding the right path. Paths are connectors; people are nodes. The world is constructed of networks. We’re back where we started.

In networks, connections are the only thing that matters. We network with people; we use networks to gather information and to learn things; we have neural networks in our heads.

Learning is optimizing our connections to the networks that matter to us.

This satisfies both the community concept of learning (social networking) and the knowledge aspect (gaining access to information and fitting it into the patterns in one’s head).

To learn is to adapt to fit with one’s ecosystems. We can look at learning as making and maintaining good connections in a network. Cultivators of learning environments can borrow from network engineers, focusing on such things as:

• Improving signal-to-noise ratio

• Installing fat pipes for backbone connections

• Pruning worthless, unproductive branches

• Promoting standards for interoperability

• Balancing the load

• Seeking continuous improvement

This echoes a white paper, Informal Learning – the other 80%, I wrote nine years ago.

We need to think of learning as optimizing our networks. Learning consists of making good connections.

Taking advantage of the double meaning of the word network, “to learn” is to optimize the quality of one’s networks.

Learning is optimizing our connections to the networks that matter to us.

A sustainable social business provides the means and motivation for workers to learn what they need: the know-how, know-who, and know-what to get things done and get better at doing them. This takes more than access to social networks, blogs, and wikis. Organizations must provide the scaffolding that focuses on discovery, practice, sharing, and reinforcement. Organizations that lack a clear understanding of their learning architectures are doomed to descend into an aimless world of social noise and meaningless chit-chat. Facebook-itus.

Next week I’ll release a white paper on the Internet Time Alliance site on how to develop an enterprise learning network.

In the early 90s, before the web entered our consciousness, I envisioned plugging into a virtual world of shared imagination. A sci-fi fan told me I had to read Neuromancer. Science fiction is not my thing, so I listened to tapes of William Gibson drawling his way through Neuromancer while commuting from Berkeley to Sausalito. The image of the crazed main character Case jacking into cyberspace with his deck found a permanent home in my neural circuitry. Now it feels as if the fiction is becoming reality.

Touch-typing was far and away the most useful course I took in high school.  I gained the autonomic muscle-memory that lets me riff at the keyboard without thinking about keys. Ideas come; text appears. It’s marvelous. Occasionally I flash on Gibson’s damaged anti-hero Case, connecting to cyberspace for salvation and a fix. (Gibson invented the term cyberspace to describe the virtual world of Neuromancer.) He’d grab his deck (my deck is usually the keyboard on one of my Macs or my iPad) and jack in.

At this moment, I’m tapping keys on a Mac in Berkeley. Characters are pouring into the Cloud. I’m jacked in. I am not really concerned whether I’m entering text into one of my blogs or a shared blog or a comment on someone else’s blog or a wiki or whatever. It’s going into the cloud. If the message warrants repeating, someone will Tweet it or Digg it or Diigo it or share it in a public space. It’s all in the Cloud somewhere. You can find it with a search if it’s worth finding. I don’t have to choose a pigeonhole for it. You or I or anybody else will be able to retrieve it from cyberspace when the time is right.

From here on out, I don’t intend to waste brain cycles speculating where to put things. My business blog, my informal learning blog, one of my wikis and so on. Who cares about where I’m standing when I pitch a new concept into cyberspace?

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.

I find silent PowerPoint presentations (except for those that only use words) about as useful as a Rorschach ink blot. Heaven only knows how many silent PowerPoints decks have screwed things up because people read their own meaning into them to fill the void.

For example, that’s a real psych-test blog above. See any weird stuff? It’s all in your head. The blot’s neutral.

Some people think mute PowerPoints constitute training. Ha, ha, ha, ha. Hence, this deck includes sound.

This is practice for a presentation I’ll be delivering in Sao Paolo next month. I’m sick as a dog, sicker, actually, so don’t listen if sniffling and heavy breathing offend you. A healthy version will come out later.

How to embed sound in a SlideShare deck: Record your words as you run through your deck. I used Garage Band and saved the spiel as an mp3. Upload your presentation to SlideShare. Click Edit. Syncing sound to slides is intuitive.

Any feedback? My audience includes business training managers and teachers; they don’t understand how people can be expected to learn without a teacher.

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

The ‘Learning Knights’ of Bell Telephone in the Op/Ed section of today’s New York Time is a case study of Push learning vs Pull learning.

In 1955, Bell Telephone was concerned about leadership development:

“A well-trained man knows how to answer questions, they reasoned; an educated man knows what questions are worth asking.” Bell, then one of the largest industrial concerns in the country, needed more employees capable of guiding the company rather than simply following instructions or responding to obvious crises.

Bell set up a program called the Institute of Humanistic Studies for Executives. More than simply training its young executives to do a particular job, the institute would give them, in a 10-month immersion program on the Penn campus, what amounted to a complete liberal arts education.

Drawing by Dave Gray

The Institute was deemed a success overall but Bell was disappointed its graduates tipped the scale of work/life balance more to the “life” side:

One man [said] that before the program he had been “like a straw floating with the current down the stream” and added: “The stream was the Bell Telephone Company. I don’t think I will ever be that straw again.”

Over the following five years, Bell phased out the Institute of Humanistic Studies. Old ways die hard and once again, control preempted autonomy.

Today’s companies are grappling with the same issues Bell faced a half century ago. Are we confident our organization is preparing leaders who will be able to deal effectively with the challenges of the future?

• Do we have the right balance of generalists and specialists?
• Are we focused on the short-term or the long?
• Should we teach what we know or inspire people to discover what we don’t know?
• Isn’t the “soft stuff” as important or more so than the “hard stuff”?
• Are our programs developing people we can trust to make the right decisions down the road?

I fear the training community is on the wrong side of these questions. The world is open-ended; it’s not assembled from black and white answers. Real life is painted in shades of gray.

You can’t measure discovery learning with an LMS but that doesn’t mean it’s unimportant. This does it mean you shouldn’t use an LMS to monitor compliance and formal learning either. In a healthy learning ecosystem, “Pull learning” and “Push learning” are symbiotic; you need a bit of both.

We need fewer drifting straws on the stream of American business, and more discontented thinkers who listen thoughtfully to both sides of our national debates.

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.

Teach a man to fish…

PKM: Figuring out what’s important to you, how to find it, how to keep up with it, how to make sense of it, how to recall it when you need it anew, and how to share it with others — this is ground zero for mining the riches of the web. Bookstore shelves overflow with books on blogging, but I’ve yet to see one on PKM.

Harold Jarche has written some great posts about PKM. But for those of you have a tough time seeing the trees for the forest, I decided to clean up my PKM framework and show you what I do rather than talk about it.

My links page is my launch pad. I’ve maintained a page like this for a dozen years. It may be my ADD; I need some semblance of structure. The launch page begins with frequent destinations. The little lobster signals my restaurant page; the plane, my travel numbers and suppliers. (These are screen shots; go to the links page if you want to play with the real thing. You’ll find some pages that are private.)

To the right of the clocks are a Google search of all my sites and an Amazon search box; I use these incessantly.

Mind you, I”m forever tweaking the launch page as my interests (and the web) change. Below the frequent destinations, I keep URLs of online services I tap into. To the right, blogs… although the list is a little flaky. I read a dozen blogs in the mail and many more in Google Reader.

To the right of that section are feeds I like and local organizations & events.

I use the bottom of the page to store frequently used graphics. No more searching all over for a common icon.

That’s the top layer of my Personal Knowledge Management set-up.

If you visit the links page, you’ll see subsidiary pages such as the Research page and my  Delicious tags.

I stash the social connections on my home page:

The home page is also the entry into my articles, groups, books, and so on:

One page I recommend visiting is this page of other people’s work. I plan to expand it soon.

Seminal Documents

How do you organize your PKM?

I set the foundations of my approach before we had tags, billions of choices, and responsive search engines. There’s bound to be an easier way.

This post continues the discussion among the members of the Internet Time Alliance about appropriate terminology for learning in the network era. This is an exploration, not an ultimatum.

The main point is getting the job done. That pays the bills. Everything flows from working smarter.

All learning is social, so that’s not really a useful distinction unless we’re stressing social networked learning.

Learning has replaced training as the term of choice. (For more on that issue, see transcript of tonight’s #lrnchat.)

There’s a continuum from top-down, mandated learning (“formal”) to self-directed, intrinsically-motivated learning (“informal”). Unfortunately, “formal” and “informal” are tainted words that invite misinterpretation. Formal can mean stodgy or accepted. Informal can mean casual or flippant.

I prefer calling the bookends of the spectrum of corporate learning….

• Traditional learning — institutional control, paternalism
• Independent learning – demand-driven choice by the learner

Traditional learning is not better than independent learning or vice-versa; context determines utility.

What are your thoughts about this?

Related posts

Understanding learning (Jane Hart)

Social media and self-directed learning (Harold Jarche)

Formalizing informal learning (Clark Quinn)

Interdependent Learning (Harold Jarche)

Informal Snake Oil (moi)

*If you are not reflecting, you are not learning. Here are some things I learned from in the past six months.

I bought a Flip HD

The Flip UltraHD camcorder is a breakthrough learning device. Two hours of high-quality video from a cam that slides into your pocket. All for less than $200. Here’s a sample:

I continued to experiment with learning video. I prepared these videos to show at Online Educa.

• Verna Allee describes Value Networks
• Mark Oehlert discusses Identity and Authority
• Ellen Wagner summarizes the Future of Learning Technology
• John Foster talks about People Policy at IDEO
• Kevin Wheeler and Murray Christensen laugh at Talent Management
• Eileen Clegg explains Visual Learning
• Michael Allen tells about a futuristic, object-oriented authoring system
• Workshop participants practice project elevator pitches
• Dart Lindsley explains Business Architecture

Design Thinking

Had my design consciousness raised at Overlap ’09 in Monterey. The press thought our meeting nefarious.

Business Week tells you “what went on at the clandestine affair.”

This year’s motley bunch included an assorted portfolio of designers; businesspeople, investors and MBA graduates; a tech systems architect who was also a former Navy Seal; and a tai chi master. The mean age was in the high 30s, with several people over 60 and a few in their mid-20s. “Despite coming from different backgrounds, we’re all risk takers We don’t fit in normal places so we make positions for ourselves,” says Dila, 45, who also has a PhD in philosophy.

Internet Time Alliance

Jane Hart, Jon Husband, Harold Jarche, Charles Jennings, Clark Quinn, and I formed the Internet Time Alliance to help organizations innovate in learning. We are outspoken advocates of curriculum-free, interactive, self-service learning. Organizations call on us to grow ecologies where work and learning are one and the same, where people help one another build competency and master new crafts, and where all strive to be all they can be. Open, participative, bottom-up, networked, flexible, responsive: that’s learning with business impact.

Last month we selected Charles Jennings to be our CEO; I will serve as Chair. I am really looking forward to working with my esteemed colleagues, who are also great friends.

Chair and CEO of Internet Time Alliance

Provided marketing and distribution advice to half a dozen web 2.0 companies, all of whom wish to remain anonymous.

Learning is Not Enough

Began to embrace idea that Learning is not enough. “Learning is a necessary but insufficient condition for working smarter. Dictionaries define learning as acquiring knowledge and skills. But we all know skilled, knowledgeable people who don’t get things done, don’t we? Learning that doesn’t lead to doing is no better than not learning at all.”

Articles

Informal Learning 2.0

In the world of business, the era of networks is crowding out the Industrial Age. Network connections are replacing rigidity with flexibility, penetrating internal boundaries and silos and obliterating the walls that have separated businesses from their customers.

Networks reduce transfer costs to zero, enabling companies to focus on what they do best while outsourcing what others can do better. Networks also speed things up, often at a terrifying rate, making the corporate world unpredictable. In sum, networks are ushering in new ways of doing business. Corporate approaches to learning have to change, as well.

Productivity in a Networked Era: Not Your Father’s ROI

Today’s networked era requires a new way to make investment decisions that incorporates intangible assets and more accurately depicts how value is created.

The industrial age has run out of steam. Look at General Motors. Look at Chrysler. We are witnessing the death throes of management models that have outlived their usefulness.

The network era now replacing the industrial age holds great promise. Networked organizations are reaping rewards for connecting people, know-how and ideas at an ever-faster pace. Value creation has migrated from what we can see (physical assets) to intangibles (ideas). Look at Google and Cisco.

More Human that Human

My last column called for the abolition of corporate training departments. Now some instructors and traditional instructional designers see me as a job threat. They needn’t worry. Enlightened e-learning requires more people, not fewer.

Ten years ago, venture capital firms issued lengthy reports explaining why e-learning would take the world by storm. Their underlying economic argument was cost-cutting: less travel, fewer facilities and no more salary expense for instructors. It was a classic industrial age proposition: Replace humans with machines. That first round of e-learning largely failed for precisely this reason. You can’t remove the humans from learning.

Whose Learning Are You Responsible For?

Last month I conducted several workshops to inject informal and social learning practices into hidebound organizations that were anxious to ramp up to the future. I encouraged them to address the needs of people who had traditionally been left out of the corporate training agenda.

Come Together

Organizations have woken up to the power of people working together. Collaboration gets things done and is the most powerful learning tool in the CLO’s playbook.

Workshops

I conducted several onsite workshops to inject informal/social learning practices into hidebound organizations that are anxious to ramp up to the future. My intent is to challenge a couple of dozen managers to each come up with a major change project and shape up a pitch to sell the idea to their organization. I intend to coax them to plant dozens of seeds. If one or two take root, it may ignite the process of organizational transformation. This has me thinking about where companies should be placing their bets.

By the way, I can do this with your organization for a nominal fee. Virtual or face-to-face.

Clark Quinn and I gave a one-day workshop on implementing networked learning architecture the day before DevLearn. Here’s a podcast prequel.

Lenora Routon Cross 1920-2009

Mom, my brother, and me (in plaid) in the early fifties.

Largest magnolia tree in the South, on our family’s homestead in Washington, Arkansas

Sitting in Bill’s cabinet room chair at the Clinton Library in Little Rock

Endless rows of FEMA trailers parked in Hope forevermore

Un-books

Released several editions of Work Smarter at $19.95. Changed tag line to better reflect the content: Informal Learning in the Cloud.

North to Alaska

Until you’ve been to Alaska, it’s tough to imagine how large it is. In July, Uta and I joined our son Austin for vacation in Denali and Wrangell National Parks.

Gave a talk on Meta-Learning: Process of Learning in the Network Era and the VI International Seminar on Open Social Learning in Barcelona.

Barcelona

Stephen and George in Barcelona

Amazing meal at Tossa del Mar on the Costa Brava

DevLearn marked a significant shift in the field of corporate learning. Content and planning have become secondary to getting the job done. In today’s world, that means trusting workers to learn for themselves. The natives are taking control. Learning is mobile. Curriculum is toast.

Charles Jennings, introducing Internet Time Alliance.

Heike Philp, putting Online Educa online with simulcasting

Chaired a well-attended session at Educa on neuroscience and learning. I feel we’ve left some of the obvious findings of brain science out of our designs for learning environments. The scientists at the session warned us not to draw too many conclusions from the wiggles on fMRI charts.

Speaking

Here’s my shot at Pecha Kucha at Educa:

I was determined to improve my ability to excite an audience this year. A few months earlier I’d performed an Ignite session on the stage of Gnomedex. I’m practicing now and plan to have people on the edge of their seats a few months hence.

See also the Pecha Kuchas of Daniel Stern, Robin Good, and Heike. More to come.

Talent Management overtook Learning & Development in corporations this year. I led sessions on the future circa 2015 at the Future of Talent Institute Retreat. (I’m on the faculty; hard to believe this was my fifth retreat.) It was my second time at Asilomar in six weeks.