Done! Internet Time Blog » Web 2.0 http://www.internettime.com from Jay Cross and Internet Time Group Wed, 17 Mar 2010 05:15:43 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 en hourly 1 Price of Working Smarter Goes Up March 16th http://www.internettime.com/2010/03/price-of-working-smarter-goes-up-march-16th/ http://www.internettime.com/2010/03/price-of-working-smarter-goes-up-march-16th/#comments Tue, 09 Mar 2010 06:58:50 +0000 Jay Cross http://www.internettime.com/?p=3670

Working Smarter, the 2010 Edition, is priced like lobster in an upscale restaurant. The price is whatever we feel like.

Current price of hardcopy = $16   After March 16, $20

Current price of download = $10  After March 16, $16

Enlargement

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Jay’s latest book focuses on social & informal learning in the cloud http://www.internettime.com/2010/01/jays-latest-book-focuses-on-social-informal-learning-in-the-cloud/ http://www.internettime.com/2010/01/jays-latest-book-focuses-on-social-informal-learning-in-the-cloud/#comments Mon, 01 Feb 2010 05:47:57 +0000 Jay Cross http://www.internettime.com/?p=3577

The January 2010 Edition of Working Smarter was released today. Subtitled Informal Learning in the Cloud, this edition focuses on social learning and implementing web 2.0 technology.

The hardcopy version of Working Smarter costs $19.98. Believe me, I’m not trying to fool you with trick pricing. My publisher’s algorithm won’t let me charge $20 even. I figured $19.98 was better than $20.01. Buy the 240-page hard copy.

The download version of Working Smarter costs $12.00. I prefer the hard copy myself but your mileage may vary. And of course you can get the soft copy right away. Buy the download.

Here’s a map of the book:
Working Smarter Topic Map
(Click the map)

Contents

Introduction … 3
What can you achieve with this book?…3
Who should read this book?…4
How the book is organized …4
An unbook6
New in 2010 …7
Preface .. 10
Cataclysm …10
Internet Time Alliance…12
Working Smarter … 14
Network Effects …14
Business Results…21
What can we do to improve this informal learning?…23
Techniques and Patterns…24
Rethinking Learning in Organizations…30
Getting Started…35
Informal Learning …36
Genesis of the Informal Learning Poster …37
Cheat-sheet.
Become a Chief Meta-Learning Officer…93
Social media for collaboration…110
Resources on line ….119
The Research Page…119
The Home Page …120
Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies .121
People and their Brains….128
Network Effects…139
Business Results….153
Speak the Language of Business …156
ROI is in the mind of the beholder …162
Perspective ….172
Techniques and Patterns …174
Rethinking learning in organizations …201
Learning is not enough…224
Back Matter….225
Bibliography …225
People…228
About the author..228
Where I’m coming from …229
Maps of Book Content …235
Acknowledgments …238
Index ….238

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The book stops here… http://www.internettime.com/2010/01/the-book-stops-here/ http://www.internettime.com/2010/01/the-book-stops-here/#comments Thu, 21 Jan 2010 23:42:43 +0000 Jay Cross http://www.internettime.com/?p=3521

book tour logo

Here: February 15-19, 2010

Tony O’Driscoll and Karl Kapp have a book coming out next month – Learning in 3D: Adding a New Dimension to Collaboration and Learning. Amazon’s blurb:

Understanding the impact that 3D environments, virtual worlds, and immersive learning spaces will have on society, business, and learning is a challenge. Corporations, academic institutions, and government agencies must develop a clear understanding of how virtual immersive environments will impact global interactions, knowledge transfer, work transactions, and existing learning paradigms.

Learning in 3D empowers forward-thinking executives, managers, faculty members, and training professionals to design, develop, and collaborate in the rapidly emerging field of 3D immersive environments.

I haven’t read the book yet (maybe this weekend), but I’m intrigued by the way Tony and Karl are publicizing it. Among other things, there’s a virtual book tour that floats from one popular blog to another. Tony’s tweeting daily at #lrn3d. Each week, they’ll give a copy of the book to a random tweeter. The book’s site has four video examples. There’s a Facebook Fan Page.

Learning in 3D: Adding a New Dimension to Enterprise Learning and Collabora

Promote Your Page Too

It’s really smart to publicize a book like this on the web.

Drop by Internet Time Blog the week of February 15-19 when the book stops here.

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Virtual sessions at Online Educa http://www.internettime.com/2009/12/virtual-sessions-at-online-educa/ http://www.internettime.com/2009/12/virtual-sessions-at-online-educa/#comments Thu, 03 Dec 2009 00:12:32 +0000 Jay Cross http://www.internettime.com/?p=3283

Guten Tag!

You are invited to attend several virtual sessions of Online Educa Berlin.

Thursday, December 3

Tools of the Trade, Jane Hart

16:30-17:30 Berlin
10:30 New York
15:30 London

Friday, December 4
Pecha Kucha
11:30 – 12:15 Berlin
5:30 New York
10:30 London
Future of Leadership Training

13:30 – 14:15 Berlin
7:30 New York
12:30 London
World Time: http://tinyurl.com/Berlin-130pm-Dec4

Future of Technical Training

14:15 – 15:00 Berlin
8:15 New York
13:15 London
Video Festival
15:00 – 16:00 Berlin
9:00 New York
14:00 London

Virtual venue: Adobe ConnectPro http://proj.emea.acrobat.com/simulcast Log in as “Guest.”

Link to descriptions of sessions.

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LearnTrends Live: Harold Jarche on PKM http://www.internettime.com/2009/11/learntrends-live-harold-jarche-on-pkm/ http://www.internettime.com/2009/11/learntrends-live-harold-jarche-on-pkm/#comments Tue, 17 Nov 2009 21:46:03 +0000 Jay Cross http://www.internettime.com/?p=3214

Personal Knowledge Management

hJarche1BIG KM (corporate) |  Little KM | Personal KM

Lots going on. Books, blogs, bookmarks, tags, etc.

Harold asked himself, “What is it I actually do?”

“Sorting” means filtering one’s sources.

Weekly overview of interesting stuff found on Twitter: tagged as Friday Favorites and posted weekly.

“Categories” are your personal folksonomy.

“Making explicit” is tagging and pigeon-holing.

“Retrieving” is recall.

“Connecting” is following people.

“Exchanging” is conversation, swaps, etc.

“Contributing” is writing articles, sharing tips.

pkm_method

Tools? They switch over time. Microblogging is new.

pkmtoolsYour blog is homebase.

Delicious is delicious.

Magnolia disappeared – catastrophically. Harold downloads his Delicious files monthly.

Harold has tags for clients, for projects, and for subjects.

After a while, you realize the power of other people, sharing their bookmarks and tags.

Lilia Effemova’s model

lilliaDave Pollard’s notion of critical thinking overlaps Harold’s PKM model:

critthnk

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Learning = getting the job done http://www.internettime.com/2009/11/learning-getting-the-job-done/ http://www.internettime.com/2009/11/learning-getting-the-job-done/#comments Sun, 15 Nov 2009 00:23:22 +0000 Jay Cross http://www.internettime.com/?p=3161


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.

rogersSkim through the following ideas from several dozen DevLearn speakers. None of these topics were being presented two years ago. Social/informal learning is crossing the chasm to mainstream acceptance. I’ll expand on that thought in later posts and video.

Without a doubt, Web 2.0 is having a tremendous impact on every aspect of our lives, including how we consume, play, work, learn, communicate, relate, participate, and more. At the same time, organizations are under pressure to remain competitive in today’s economic environment, while being prepared to take advantage of new opportunities when they come and also meeting the needs of a multi-generational workforce. By leveraging the thinking and approaches, as well as the tools and technologies, of the Web 2.0 world for learning, organizations are meeting these challenges.  Lance Dublin

With the advent of “Web 2.0,” we can begin to move beyond the next generation of e-Learning to the next generation of learning itself: Learning 2.0. Learning 2.0 is transformative, and its successful implementation requires support at all levels. Marc Rosenberg

Google has tapped the power of online collaboration to solve business problems and engage learners. It is easier than you might think to leverage scalable and free technologies to address your organization’s needs. Julia Bulkowski & Erika Grouell

Corporate learning organizations are realizing that they just can’t create programs fast enough to meet the learning needs of their audiences. So they turn to social learning environments as the solution. These environments empower people to find any formal or informal learning resource from a single place. Today’s corporate learning environments look more like YouTube than a corporate course catalog. David Mallon

Emerging technologies are changing our expectations of what a high-value e-Learning experience can be. By aligning these emerging tech priorities with the practices and methods that e-Learning professionals value in their work, and with consumer expectations of rich, engaging online experience, e-Learning professionals can better respond with designs that engage learners, while simultaneously anticipating what all their stakeholders expect. Ellen Wagner

Amazon.com blends the data they collect about their visitors and social networking to dynamically generate a customized user experience. Arguably, we have significantly more data about our learners than Amazon.com has about their customers, and yet we do practically nothing to leverage that data to customize the learning experience. Richard Culatta

The buzz surrounding Augmented Reality has grown considerably, now that the technology has become more versatile (available over Web applications) and more affordable (easier to develop). The question is, how can we apply AR for education?  Cahlan Sharp

So, what do Twitter, You Tube, Facebook, WordPress, American Idol, and movie documentaries like Super Size Me have in common with e-Learning 2.0? They all allow us to simultaneously become interactive, stranger-than-fiction reality-based storytellers, audience participants, and online learners. They provide us new ways to tell our very own stories, where we are globally involved and connected as both teachers and students. Laura Kratochvil

Mobile gaming takes on many forms, ranging from mini-games to simulations to alternate reality games. Recent programs embody a Web 2.0 hybrid of these models that embrace technology and promote learning. Come explore the latest examples of mobile gaming, like Google’s Foundations of Leadership Training game, and others. David Metcalfe and Julie Chow

Seventy to ninety percent of what we learn is learned informally. But how do we facilitate informal learning in the workplace? This case-study session will focus on Intel’s experiences in using social media to facilitate informal learning. Participants will learn the methods that have worked, those that have not worked, the tools used, the hurdles they overcame, and those they are still overcoming. David Wade

Twelve national Toyota training entities were trying to offer relevant and timely product information to roughly 17,000 sales professionals and managers. By adopting social knowledge sharing, and encouraging connections between subject matter experts and peers who have the knowledge and experience, there have been significant successes. These include seeing expert roles shift from headquarters associates to regional personnel, blogging by SMEs, shared training documentation, and robust discussions on best-practices. Rodolfo Rosales

In this economy, even a mid-size corporation outside of the tech sector must sustain itself from service disruptions, critical skill gaps, and wasteful exercises caused by duplicative and competitive internal efforts while, at the same time, become a more nimble and aggressive organization geared for growth. Arron Silvers, Stephanie Daul

WordPress, an open-source blogging platform, is quickly evolving into a leading solution for organizations to consider, because of its minimal cost, ease-of-use, and open architecture. WordPress allows nearly anyone to author and share information with minimal effort and minimal technical expertise.  B.J. Schone, John Polaschek

Web 2.0, the participative and social Web, has sparked an explosion in spontaneous, digital content creation and distribution. A recent Guild report on this surge in user-generated content (UGC) explores the implications and opportunities presented for digital content creation, sharing, use, and modality.  Beth Davis & Colleen Carmean

Providing learners with the ability to practice in a virtual environment ensures a better experience for our guests, and reduces product waste and trainer labor hence positively impacting P & L. Dave Ragan

Tens of thousands of university students have earned undergraduate and graduate degrees without routinely setting foot in bricks-and-mortar classrooms. Today, a population is emerging that is not only comfortable with the virtual classroom experience, but expects to be educated in this manner – using collaboration tools, content generation tools, and online interactivity to augment the traditional hierarchical education model where information flows top-down from an expert or instructor. But many corporate training and learning services organizations do not have a way to address these market segments (particulary generation Y). Chris Gosk

Session participants will learn about ways to integrate content displayed in the iPhone browser with Web-based applications and knowledge bases on a desktop or laptop computer. You’ll learn if animated screen shots work better than live video, and how much text to use within the minimal available screen real estate. You’ll also be exposed to the iPhone user interface elements, and the development environment. Joe Welinske

What if you had to develop and deliver personalized training to 900,000 employees, located in 34,000 different locations globally, with a complex set of variables that changes the training on a location-by-location basis? The key is single-source learning. Bryan Chapman

This session will demonstrate how one organization has overcome this challenge while improving their bottom-line, productivity, and customer satisfaction ratings. Participants in this session will learn how this organization reduced their overall training time by 60%, and improved individual sales volumes by 26%, simply by integrating learning into the workplace. Kim Zipric

MIT’s Learning Library is an aggregator of media from the Web, such as a video, image, or audio file, but also a publishable tool that allows participants, whether students or educators, to integrate personal-life experiences with a learning concept. Like sites such as Flickr or YouTube, the Library encourages students and educators to produce and circulate their own materials, creating an open-content, open-knowledge network, which appraises and critiques the materials as part of the learning process. Erin Reilly

In this session, we’ll take a simple mobile learning application, and show you how you can build it yourself. You’ll learn what features can be used on what platforms, cover the testing issues that arise when developing on multiple platforms, and strategies for efficient testing. You’ll take home pointers to resources, and a copy of the finished application (with source code) to jump-start your own development efforts. Clark Quinn and Richard Clark

It’s not news that our learning models are dated. Designed for industrial efficiency, not learning effectiveness, they’re unengaging and ineffective – yet they persist. On the other hand, technology has advanced to the stage that Arthur C. Clarke’s line that, “any truly advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” is now true of our ability to deliver e-Learning. We have magic, what should we do? We know that learning works better spaced over time, not massed in an event; that our minds don’t work in a vacuum, but we’re a product of our environment and our experience; and that where and when we are can be as important as what we know. Does this give us any leverage? Clark Quinn

Every so often technology dramatically changes the way we do things. In today’s world of constant need for just-in-time knowledge, it is urgent to equip learners with creative delivery methods to the information they need, when they need it. Leslie Kirshaw

In this session, you will get a cutting-edge overview of several of the most important development processes in software user assistance, and learn their application to e-Learning. User assistance is much more than “Help.” It employs a number of devices, including, but not limited to, Help, wizards, tutorials, printed manuals (and their PDF equivalents), and user interface text. In many cases, training departments are asked to employ these user assistance devices in the e-Learning world. Joe Welinske, Alan Houser, Davi Knopf, Kevin Siegel

Participants in this session will learn the 5-Step Micro-Learning Design Process to break down complex, huge, and bulky content into micro-content items that allow learners to instantly do micro-learning and micro-applications while on the job. You will learn to be more effective in designing rapid e-Learning, writing blogs and wikis, using PDAs and mobile tools to train and collaborate with others, and using e-Learning tools and LMS/LCMSs to deliver micro-learning and performance. You will also learn how to save time, cut the costs, and increase the speed of learning. Ray Jimenez

Session participants will go through a case study of how the organization leveraged its online community, the Cisco Learning Network, and its underlying wiki-based platform to create a collaborative and secure authoring environment for external SMEs. You’ll gain insights and strategies to help you decide if developing a program to enable user-generated content is right for your organization. Merilee Ford

”Over one billion people in emerging markets will never access the Internet using a PC,” said Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen in September 2008. With advances in Web technology, mobile devices, and wireless networks, mobile connection is not just a trend anymore and instead has become a standard ubiquitous platform. People demand anytime, anywhere access to communication, information, learning, and performance support. Mark Chrisman and Jeff Tillett

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Andy McAfee at DevLearn http://www.internettime.com/2009/11/andy-mcafee-at-devlearn/ http://www.internettime.com/2009/11/andy-mcafee-at-devlearn/#comments Sat, 14 Nov 2009 08:53:06 +0000 Jay Cross http://www.internettime.com/?p=3143

dl09       
andymcafee

Harvard’s MIT’s Andy McAfee’s opening keynote was the perfect set-up for 2 1/2 days of exploring social learning at DevLearn.

Appropriately, he addressed how business is changing; he didn’t have to tell the 1,500 learning developers that they better get with the program. You could feel the rumble of the cluetrain leaving the station.

My notes:

Full-size map of presentation on MindMeister

Andy’s blog

I’m sure I’ll have more to report when I’ve finished reading his new book.

You’re not letting anything hold you back from hopping aboard the social/informal learning bandwagon, are you?


Related post from February 2009
Harvard B-School Professor Andy McAfee is a web 2.0 Paul Revere, warning sleepy companies that the web is a game-changing technology that can improve their innovation, collaboration, knowledge sharing, and collective intelligence. Yesterday he presented his thinking to a couple of hundred of us in the auditorium at PARC.

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Is Enterprise 2.0 a crock? http://www.internettime.com/2009/11/is-enterprise-2-0-a-crock/ http://www.internettime.com/2009/11/is-enterprise-2-0-a-crock/#comments Fri, 06 Nov 2009 00:59:23 +0000 Jay Cross http://www.internettime.com/?p=3120

ent20

Yesterday I attended the Enterprise 2.0 conference, “the event that will make your company more agile.”

First up was a Google presentation about Wave. Bare-bones Wave is a snooze; I haven’t been able to see many benefits. But customized Wave looks like a winner and that’s how I think Wave will be deployed. SAP demo’d a business process management application with collaborative charting; prototyping with their “analysis gadget” looked slick. ThoughtWorks showed project task assignments; the individual tracking and comments reminded me of what I’d seen in Brainpark last month. Novell Pulse combined messaging and project management. All of these bolt onto Wave’s API. Wave enables collaboration. Some in the audience were skeptical.

Google said it plans to open-source most of the code. This happens through the Google Federation Protocol. From the Federation website:

Principles

  • Decisions are made in public: all protocol specification discussions are recorded in a public archive
  • The Google Wave Federation Protocol is evolving as an open source project, and as the community and technology grows, here are the guiding principles:

    • Wave is an open network: anyone should be able to become a wave provider and interoperate with the public network
    • Wave is a distributed network model: traffic is routed peer-to-peer, not through a central server
    • Make rapid progress, together: a shared commitment to contribute to the evolution and timely deployment of protocol improvements
    • Community contributions are fundamental: everyone is invited to participate in the public development process


    Next up was a panel session entitled “Is Enterprise 2.0 a Crock?,” hosted by Information Week’s David Berlind. The panel included representatives of MetLife, Alcatel-Lucent, Eli Lilly, EMC, Booz Allen Hamilton, Medtronic, and CSC. None of them thought Enterprise 2.0 was a crock. In fact, they were raving fans.

    The panel addressed Enterprise 2.0’s crockiness along these dimensions:

    crockiness

    Most of the discussion focused on workforce transformation. “We are shifting from waterfall design to agile development.” “We’re providing tools and technology to support change agents.” “This makes it easier for people to share and learn things.” It’s best when embedded in workstreams.

    Booz is employing enterprise 2.0 to make business processes better, faster, and cheaper through bottom-up change. Others report cutting time-to-completion and speed-to-resolution. CSC has an Enterprise Social Collaboration Officer (who also runs KM.)

    tvpanel

    The Intellectual Property issue is the old trade-off of governance and democratization. The answer is to trust your employees. Workers have been able to betray secrets with email and phone; enterprise 2.0 is no worse threat.

    The Religious Wars issue is recognizing that Enterprise 2.0 is a people endeavor, not an IT project.

    Big benefits come from useful apps (like Excel Tips and Tricks), timeliness (realtime competitive information), and innovation (through crowd sourcing).


    siemens

    I mistakenly wandered into the keynote for VoiceCon, the co-located conference, where this character from Siemens was explaining their integration of social software and phone service. Translation: phone tries to make sense of Twitter messages. I tweet “Just arrived SFO,” and my phone resets itself to Pacific time. (Funny, I don’t have to do anything for my iPhone to switch time zones.)

    More advanced: I tweet that I’m headed to lunch and my phone is automatically put in vibrate mode for the next hour.

    Imagine the parody Doonebury could create around this one.

    The expo was listless. People were gathering data sheets on SharePoint, Notes, and lots of undifferentiated collaboration tools.


    Clark Quinn and I ended the day with the San Francisco Overlap Group at Adaptive Path, engaged in an impromptu, zany exercise that seemed a fitting end to a somewhat confusing day.

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    Dion Hinchcliffe’s Pragmatic Enterprise 2.0 http://www.internettime.com/2009/10/dion-hinchcliffes-pragmatic-enterprise-2-0/ http://www.internettime.com/2009/10/dion-hinchcliffes-pragmatic-enterprise-2-0/#comments Thu, 22 Oct 2009 19:35:06 +0000 Jay Cross http://www.internettime.com/?p=2838

    dionhA thriving social network is the backbone of social learning in the enterprise. I hope Dion Hinchcliffe’s approach is successful, but it’s too early to tell.

    Hinchcliffe, a respected interpreter of all things enterprise 2.0, today announced an alliance with Socialtext and Asuret called Pragmatic Enterprise 2.0.

    Pragmatic Enterprise 2.0 OverviewView more documents from Dion Hinchcliffe.

    The new service promises the moon:

    Pragmatic Enterprise 2.0 is an integrated combination of strategy, implementation, and full-lifecycle rollout that reflects the practical realities of the enterprise world including concerns around ROI, value generation, risk, control, and trust. Pragmatic Enterprise 2.0 is not, however, a rigid, one-size-fits-all template. The service is based on adaptive, lean methods that identify and meet the unique requirements of each organization to create the highest value outcomes possible with social media.

    Adaptive Methods + Risk Navigation + Best-of-Breed Platform = Success

    Implementing social media at the enterprise level can be a political, bureaucratic, and technical struggle. But it doesn’t have to be. Though the tools themselves are usually easy to acquire, creating the right environment for demonstrable success is much more challenging. Hinchcliffe & Company, a global thought leader in social collaboration and Web 2.0, has created a simple, easy-to-use service that provides access to the full range of benefits of social computing while proactively reducing the downside. By integrating our process with two industry leading partners, we have succeeded in creating an advanced yet lightweight method known as Pragmatic Enterprise 2.0. It is suitable for social computing efforts large and small.

    Isn’t it cheeky to call something that’s never been tested pragmatic? Other parts of the announcement smack of hype:

    Don’t reinvent the wheel, use the lessons learned from an entire industry.

    Sleep well at night knowing that your enterprise social media effort is under control and heading in the right direction.

    Already have tools? We can work with those too.

    “Faster than a speeding bullet! More powerful than a locomotive! Able to leap tall buildings at a single bound!” Hinchcliffe says the key ideas in his presentation are:

    Consumer social media must have enterprise context added to it to fully function in the business world. (Don’t take a knife to a gunfight.)

    Most organizations are just climbing the social computing competency ladder and need access to expertise. (If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.)

    Understanding the actual state of a social computing effort must be easier. (Don’t eat anything larger than your head.)

    There is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to Enterprise 2.0. (Flexibility is a worthy value.)

    Social computing is a journey, not a deliverable, and any approach must reflect this. (Expect to pay continuing fees.)

    Whether Pragmatic Enterprise 2.0 goes anywhere or not, I highly recommend Hinchcliffe’s blog and his writings on ZDNet. No one has thought more deeply about Enterprise 2.0, and his graphics are great:

    state_of_enterprise2_for_2009_large
    Click image to enlarge it.

    social_economies


    community_manager_large

    Click image to enlarge it.


    social_computing_process_anatomy

    Click image to enlarge it.

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    The future is people, not technology http://www.internettime.com/2009/05/the-future-is-people-not-technology/ http://www.internettime.com/2009/05/the-future-is-people-not-technology/#comments Sun, 31 May 2009 05:21:04 +0000 Jay Cross http://www.internettime.com/?p=2479

    clologo

    More Human Than Human

    CLO magazine, June 2009
    Column on Effectiveness, by Jay Cross

    The future is people, not technology

    My last column in CLO 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.

    Companies should embrace network-supported informal learning because it works better, not because it reduces labor costs. People learn more efficiently at the time of need, in the context of work, from people in the know and through virtual conversation.

    When my colleagues and I advocate cutting back on workshops and classes in favor of building “learnscapes,” we aren’t suggesting firing the instructors. Rather, we recommend redeploying them in new capacities, serving as connectors, wiki gardeners, internal publicists, news anchors and performance consultants.

    There’s no cookie-cutter formula for assigning these new roles and responsibilities. An active community of practice is a different animal from a bottom-up knowledge management network or a corporate news channel. New communities have different requirements than old.

    In their book Digital Habitats: Stewarding Technology for Communities, Etienne Wenger, Nancy White and John Smith describe different community orientations in terms of meetings, open-ended conversation, projects, content, access to expertise, relationships, individual participation, community cultivation and service context.

    Digital Habitats posits the role of the community technology steward. Technology stewards are people with enough experience of the workings of a community to understand its technology needs and enough experience with technology to take leadership in addressing those needs.

    A steward’s initial task is to shape a vision consistent with the community’s orientations. The steward then selects the simplest technology to advance the community as both the technology and the organization progress.

    Digital Habitats also assigns these duties to the technology steward:

    • Bringing new members up to speed with the community’s technology.
    • Identifying and spreading good technology practices.
    • Supporting community experimentation.
    • Assuring continuity across technology disruptions.
    • “Keeping the lights on” (including backups, permissions, vendor payments and domain registrations).

    Internet Alliance’ss Clark Quinn sees the need for a learnscape architect who nurtures the health of the learning network for collaboration, communication and learning opportunities. More a leader than a technician, the learnscape architect is the network champion who carries the vision, monitors metrics, promotes network participation and encourages continuous experimentation.

    Mzinga’s Dave Wilkins describes several production roles. Producers manage the contributions of others, drawing out the best in them while also opting not to include contributions that aren’t as good. Moderators help ensure an environment of high trust by ensuring that people play by the rules. Expert moderators may vet the accuracy and clarity of information in their domains. Yet other moderators seed discussions to channel conversations in ways that might provide insight to the organization. Reporters and bloggers unearth what is newsworthy and document it for the community.

    These tasks won’t happen by themselves. Furthermore, people throughout the organization will need to share the burden of helping everyone learn. Distributing learning throughout the social fabric of an organization requires storytellers, mentors, bloggers, community elders, schedulers and editors. We’re all in this together.

    Some instructors will continue to instruct, but they will increasingly do so with network support and in smaller bursts. It’s a better use of their time. Face-to-face instruction packs a punch but is difficult to scale. Economics dictate that traditional instruction will play a diminishing role in corporate learning.

    Traditional instructors and instructional designers are ideally suited to excel in these roles. They understand how adults learn and how to transform information into learning. It’s important for corporations to benefit from their learning people, not give them pink slips

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