I did not want to like paper.il, the new, personal Twitter aggregater. Just more clutter, I thought to myself.

Nonetheless, it is so easy to set up, I filled in the blank with my Twitter list of Internet Time Alliance colleagues. Voila. Our Daily Tweet-news.

This morning I visited my Daily site and learned a number of things I might otherwise have missed. Three-quarters of this was generated one way or another by my prolific pal Harold Jarche, but still, it amazed me how a change of format brought things to my attention. No doubt I’ll habituate but for now, I’m happy to learn things like:

Chuck House speculates that HP’s board was looking for a reason to force Hurd out:

The Voice of the Workplace, HP’s thirty-five year historic ‘measure’ of employee feelings (done every five years) showed in April an astonishing finding — more than two-thirds of HP’s employees would quit tomorrow if they had an equivalent job offer. Not a raise, not a promotion, simply an alternative. That number never used to be in double digits.

Hurd was, apparently, very unpopular with the HP rank-and-file.

Ironically, when I went back to look at this, I was in the midst of cleaning up my already-too-many social connections:

Flickr/jaycross
Facebook/Jay Cross
Linkedin/internettime
Twitter/jaycross
YouTube/jakeross1
Del.icio.us/jaycross
Friendfeed/jaycross
Tumblr/jaycross
Learnstream/jaycross

…and now

Community (Grou.ps)
Daily Tweets

May 3-5. San Francisco. Internet Time Alliance will be there. For the free part. Exhibits, unconference, and keynotes. Register here.

Since this is half an O’Reilly gig, I wonder why it still has the Web 2.0 monitor. Didn’t Tim O’Reilly tell us it was morphing into Web Squared?

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.

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

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:

(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

Here: February 15-19, 2010

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.

Guten Tag!

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

Thursday, December 3

Tools of the Trade, Jane Hart

Personal Knowledge Management

BIG 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.

Tools? They switch over time. Microblogging is new.

Your 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

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

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.

Skim 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

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?