A Google+ Hangout with Craig Wiggings, Charles Jennings, Enzo Silva, Pascal le Rudulier, Clark Quinn, and Jay Cross.

Rough Agenda

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The Twenty-First Century Corporation

Businesses around the world are transforming into extended enterprise networks but their training departments are stuck in the previous century. In the pursuit of trying to fix what’s broken, let’s imagine what ideal corporate learning would look like if we could start over from scratch.

In the 1800s and 1900s, successful companies ran like well-oiled machines. Workers were mere cogs in those machines. The people were interchangeable parts. Companies paid them to follow instructions and do the same thing over and over again.

Workers have since replaced machines as the primary means of creating value. Companies rely on them to solve problems, delight customers, and stay ahead of the game. They are what make a business go and grow. A company’s market value echoes the ingenuity, know-how and reputation of its people.

Twenty-first century employees have to do complex, unpredictable work. They have to keep up with a torrent of new products and services, not just their own but also their competitors’. They have to stay sharp in a
world that’s going ever faster. They have to grapple with a barrage of new information and demands on their time. Continuous learning is the only way they can keep up. Their work has become learning, and learning is the bulk of their work.

And, on top of this, technology has connected the world, making it possible to connect with just about anyone, anytime, anywhere. The ease of sharing of information has lead to a cultural phenomenon, which relates to our topic at hand; people are used to being able to get the answers to their questions – to learn – of their own accord through
research and conversation. But this way of learning – autonomous searching and social collaboration – has not yet been reflected in corporate learning, demonstrating that corporate learning has fallen behind.

To keep things simple in our following exploration of how corporate learning needs to change, let’s call the industrial-age (old school) companies Hierarchical and the network-era (2012) companies Collaborative. Control in Hierarchical companies resides at the top. Orders and instructions are pushed down through the organization. Control in Collaborative companies is distributed throughout the organizations. Workers and supervisors have a large say in what they do and they pull in the resources they need for themselves.

So, imagine the training department just disappeared because our organization has shifted from Hierarchical to Collaborative, and learning has become everyone’s business.

Where should we focus to improve learning? It’s a matter of people and infrastructure. Those will be the topics of my next posts on this subject.

White paper | Slideshare

Curation enriches conferences

At the turn of the century, blogging was brand spanking new, Twitter had yet to be born, and backchannels referred to espionage by double agents. Back then I tried to capture and share what was going on in lengthy blog posts. For example, here’s my report on Elliott’s TechLearn 2001. And here’s my review of Online Learning 2001.

Dave Kelly has made curating conference exhaust — the Tweetstream, presentations, photos, recordings, and related links — into an art form. For people who can’t attend an event in person, the backchannel provides the next best thing to being there. For those who do attend, the backchannel keeps the content alive. If I want to revisit what Aaron or Clark or Gary or Brent said about something, I can find it on the persistent backchannel. As a result, I no longer compulsively take notes at events.

Here’s a Dave Kelly’s backchannel for mLearnCon and a synopsis of mLearnCon. Don’t miss Kasper Spiro’s mindmap of the closing session.

Resources like these convert conferences from one-time events into on-going processes.

From now on rather than write an exhaustive blow-by-blow account, I’m going to post only a few thoughts I draw from events I attend. Here goes…

Mobile is mandatory

Mobile learning has crossed the chasm. Smart phones and tablets are crowding out laptops (see The Last Laptop). Five billion people have mobile phones, one billion have smart phones, and the U.S. has more mobile phones than citizens. Savvy developers are writing software for mobile first instead of as an afterthought from the PC version.

Neil Lasher getting high on sugar before moderating our panel session.

A member of the audience at the panel session asked how to build a learning strategy. Her manager had asked her to create a training course for the iPads they were buying. I replied that she should explain that figuring out what you’re trying to do comes before deciding how you’re going to do it. I also recommended checking the free parts of the book Lance Dublin and I wrote ten years ago on implementing eLearning.

Mobile learning is inevitable because mobile business is inevitable. As the pace of business is ever faster, working and learning become one and the same thing. There’s no time to learn in advance. Besides, learning at the time of need is more effective.

Business is becoming SoLoMo (social-local-mobile, a coinage of venture capital icon John Doerr). SoLoMo business requires SoLoMo learning.

A participant at our panel session asked how one could make sense of the diverse mobile technologies, user populations, toolsets, standards, apps, and devices. I suggested the starting point is not the technology, but what can improve the business.

Tin Can

mLearncon was the coming out party for Project Tin Can, AKA next-generation SCORM.

Image by Liz Burow

Tin Can will be important because it’s a Rosetta Stone for creating an interoperable record of all sorts of learning experiences, not just individual courses (which was a major limitation of the original SCORM.) Several vendors demonstrated mobile apps that utilize the beta Tin Can API.

Clark Quinn opening the Wednesday session.

How to Think Mobile

Okay, I’m biased. (Aren’t we all?) Clark Quinn is a close friend and a colleague in the Internet Time Alliance. I like Clark. And Clark’s presentation was the best advice I’ve heard on mLearning.

Consider these five things when augmenting our limited brains wherever we are:

1. How does your mobile device make you smarter? (Content, communicate, computer, capture)
2. Anything but a course. (Courses are for optimal execution. Innovation takes “Big L” Learning.)
3. Where’s the business need? (Location, location, location.)
4. What’s the least I can do for you? (Do the 20% that yields 80% of the results.)
5. Do you have a mobile solution? (If not, you’re toast.)

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

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

The Opening Conversation

Social Media & Mobile Learning

Learning from Experience

Games: Should you be doing this at work?

Working Smarter with Learning Networks

Preparing for Business Educa 2011

Overall Business Educa Video Archive

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

Show’s over.

One of the joys of publishing an unbook instead of going the traditional route is putting together your own marketing campaign. We released The Working Smarter Fieldbook at the Irish Learning Showcase in Dublin.

This being Ireland, Guinness played a major role.

Several people who had read the 2009 and earlier 2010 editions of Work Smarter asked if they should read the new version. I told them yes. The Fieldbook is more than half new material. It’s 50% longer. It has many more ideas from Jane, Charles, Harold, Clark, and Jon. Readers tell me it’s a more practical book.

Co-author Jane Hart and I introduced the book at the formal Irish Learning Showcase. Interactive Services purchased books for everyone in attendance.

Co-author Charles Jennings joined me the next day for celebrations at the Guinness Storehouse.

Sharon Kaliouby hosted the third part of the release at Dublin’s oldest pub, The Brazen Head. (Click link for cool Celtic music.)

The young woman to my left added to the festivities.

Ireland is wonderful. The Internet Time Alliance will be back.

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

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

My class at Harvard Business School has the distinction of being the last not allowed to bring portable calculators to exams. (A Bomar 4-function calculator cost $99, a sum that kept many of us from acquiring one.) I got through by doing discounted cash now with a slide rule.

Everyone has several calculators today. They are giveaways. There’s probably one in your phone. All of which makes it irrelevant to learn long division, how to take cube roots, or logarithms. Why bother? That’s yesterday’s knowledge.

Robert Kelley at Carnegie Mellon discovered that whereas in 1986 we carried 75% of what we need to know to do our jobs in our heads, by 2006 our brains contained only about 8-10% of what we needed to know.

The rest is stored in our “outboard brains” — our laptops or, increasingly, our smart phones.

Once I had to learn most of the things required to do my job; now I need to know where to retrieve them. I search or ask people when I need to know. If I have a good network of savvy colleagues, I can ask them for advice (“social search”). “I store knowledge in my friends.” (6)

Instructional designers once only designed instruction. Now they must assess the tradeoff of putting knowledge in the worker’s head (learning) or putting it in an outboard brain (performance support). Among the options available to them: