Join Jane Hart and me for an online conversation on Wednesday 23 May 18.30-19.30 pm GMT, 13.30-14.30 pm ET, 10.30-11.30 am PT.

We will talk about whatever you want to talk about. Leave your questions below. Better still, become a member of the Social Learning Centre (free) and leave your questions in the In Conversation with Jay Cross group there.

Six years ago few people believed that informal learning made much of a difference. Today’s common wisdom is that most workplace learning is experiential, unplanned, social, and informal.

Informal learning tops many training department agendas. Companies are attracted by the low price tag. However, few of them are doing much systematically. They’ve converted a few programs but they’ve failed to improve their learning ecosystems.

We’ve shifted how we think about learning since the Informal Learning book came out. It’s a new ball game and we need to play by new rules. Consider what’s changed:

• We used to think that communities of practice could only sprout up organically. Now we know we create them via artificial insemination.
• The information explosion has hit. We create as much new information in a day as we once created in a millennium, and it’s growing exponentially. People trying to figure everything out all out by themselves are whizzing their way to overload and breakdown; collective wisdom and social filters are the only way to keep up.
• Companies are connecting people with social network technology. Some have so embraced in-house social networking, microblogging, and discussion forums that they define themselves as “social businesses.” The merged workflow/learning that flow through these networks makes or breaks the enterprise’s sustainability.
• Time continues to go faster. New businesses are created in a week and are acquired in less than a year. Competitors are faster on their feet.
• Complexity theory used to be a riddle for scientists to tinker with. Today we all grapple with complexity’s outpouring of unpredictability, volatility, emergence, and uncertainty.
• The tools for building and sustaining networks are at hand and are dirt cheap.
• We used to think that knowledge resided in people heads. Today most of us believe the knowledge resides in networks.
• Web 2.0 has become mainstream. People communicate with texts, Tweets, iPhones, email, and blogs in their personal lives, and expect to be able to do so at work.
• People have become savvy web consumers. Young people who grew up with Facebook, MySpace, Wikipedia, and Google are entering the workforce. New hires ask “Where’s the network? Where do I post my profile?”
• Internet Culture is proliferating. Openness and sharing are default behaviors.
• The web gives unprecedented free access to college courses, how-to videos, advice columns, and experts.
• Network access has gone mobile. Desktop PCs have given way to laptops and laptops are losing ground to smartphones and tablets.
• Connectivity has undoubtedly shifted the 80%/20% ratio of informal to formal learning; it’s probably closer to 95%/5% these days.

I’m convinced that working smarter by boosting informal performance is a key to survival in today’s topsy-turvy business climate. I’ve resolved to show organizations how to increase the effectiveness and depth of informal learning — in the larger context of working smarter in the digital enterprise. Working Smarter is not education for intellectual enrichment; it is how people get better at doing their jobs over time.

When the book on informal learning came out, nay-sayers attacked me as some kind of loony. Some still do. I’ve got a thick skin.

QUESTION: How do you know that informal learning works?
ANSWER: How did you learn to walk and talk? How did you learn to kiss?

QUESTION: How can you measure what people learn?
ANSWER: By judging what they do. Has their performance improved?

QUESTION: How can we assess the ROI of informal learning?
ANSWER: Cost-benefit analysis. But hold it, how to you assess the ROI of formal learning?

QUESTION: How do you know learning on the job is 80% informal?
ANSWER: Study after study arrives at that figure but it’s a generality. It depends on the context: what’s to be learned, who’s learning it, and where’s the learner starting from. The important thing is that informal learning is too important to overlook.

QUESTION: Do you want a doctor or pilot who learned informally?
ANSWER: Informal learning is only part of the solution.  I want my doctors and pilots to have learned both formally and through experience. Yes, I want them to engage in frequent conversation with their peers.

QUESTION: How do you know if people really learn this way?
ANSWER: You ask them how they learned to do what they’re doing. Studies find that only 15% of what’s learning in formal workshops shows up as changed behavior on the job. Can informal learning do any worse?

Despite the criticism, many readers were very supportive. I expected managers and executives to flock to informal learning. Corporations leave money on the table — lots of it — by not investing in the combination of working and learning that really works.

What happened? Not much. Companies continued to put almost all of the training budget into schooling novices. They acted as if the natural way of informal learning didn’t exist. Or was someone else’s responsibility. They largely squandered the opportunity to increase their effectiveness by becoming networked learning organizations. I think I’ve figured out why.

Schooling

Business people confuse learning with schooling.

For the better part of twenty years, school indoctrinated us that formal learning was the legitimate way to learn, that teachers and books provided the knowledge one needed to master, and that grades were the measure of accomplishment.

It’s easy to poke fun at the foibles of schooling. Learning is active and most schooling is passive. What’s taught in school is often superficial, boring, and irrelevant. Since school learning isn’t reinforced in real life, most of what’s learned is forgotten before it can be put to use. Could you pass your college’s final exams? Grades that once seemed so important turn out to be meaningless outside of school systems.

Nonetheless, most corporate training departments are modeled on schools. They deal with learners who are enrolled. They provide top-down classes and rigid content. They take attendance, administer tests, and certify participation. They let non-training learning fall between the cracks.

The Road Not Taken

Nick Shackleton-Jones commented on a post on Jane Hart’s blog about this topic:

I replied:

David Price followed up:

Trust is at the heart of this. If you don’t trust people to do what’s right, you can’t support informal learning. We’ll return to this subject.

In the next couple of posts, I’m going to point out how the world has changed since the book came out and things I’d do differently were I writing the book today.

This is the second in a series of posts about how business can profit from informal learning. We’re recapping the book before getting into the current scene.

What makes informal learning effective
Informal learning is effective because it’s personal. The individual calls the shots. The learner is responsible. It’s real. We learn in context, with others, as we live and work. Recognizing this fact is the first step to crafting an effective learning strategy.

People with experience like to learn but hate to be taught. People who already know the lay of the land don’t want a curriculum. That’s someone else’s opinion of what they need to know. They prefer to cherry-pick what they need in the most convenient way available. They expect the freedom to connect the dots for themselves. Intrinsic motivation trumps following orders.

This is business
If a learning project–make that any project–does not make business sense, don’t do it. If the return on investment is not so obvious that you can sketch it out on the back of a napkin, do something with a higher return.

The appropriate measure of learning is how good a job one is doing. Training metrics should be business metrics.

Getting down to cases
The book describes how organizations have taken advantage of informal learning.

• Communities of practice rely on practitioners to discover, document, and bring their members up to speed organically.
• Workers become better learners when they understand how learning works, set expectations, know themselves, reflect, take notes, and cement what they learn by revisiting it.
• Conversations are the stem cells of learning. Encourage meaningful conversation by recognizing its value, making room for it, supporting a culture of sharing, demanding candor and understanding, and relying on storytelling to communicate.
• Organizations have relied on graphics to develop corporate strategy and bring it to life. After all, humans are sight mammals.
• eLearning failed coming out of the starting blocks because learning involves a lot more than exposure to content, and you can’t take people out of the equation. A smart organization blends context, reinforcement, interaction, and more into the learning mix.
• A few have invested in building learning ecologies, shared spaces where people learn. They pay attention to social networks to optimize organizational performance.
• Replacing stodgy, over-planned meetings and conferences with spontaneous “unconferences” makes events more relevant and at the same time cut costs.

Previous post on this topic

Six years ago I wrote Informal Learning, Rediscovering the Natural Pathways that Inspire Innovation and Performance. The book came out before iPhones and iPads. Facebook was only available to students. Twitter had not been born. eLearning was still haled as a panacea. Andy McAfee had just coined the term Enterprise 2.0, and nobody was talking about Social Business. It’s time for an upgrade.

This is the first in a series of posts about what informal learning is and how to put it into practice.

Synopsis of Informal Learning
The book made the case that most learning about how to do a job is informal. An organization that fails to address informal learning leaves a tremendous amount of learning to chance.

Most corporations spend most of their training budget on formal learning, despite the fact that most of the learning that goes on is informal.

What is learning?
Learning is how people adapt to changing conditions, and things are changing faster than ever before.

Learning is that which enables you to participate successfully in life, at work, and in the groups that matter to you. Informal learning is the unofficial, unscheduled, impromptu way people learn to do their jobs.

Corporations would bypass learning altogether were it not politically incorrect to do so. Executives don’t want learning; they want execution. They want the job done. They want performance.

Formal and informal learning
Learning is neither formal nor informal; it’s always a bit of both.

Learning that is more formal has a curriculum: content and objectives that are set by someone other than the learner. Often people learn formally in groups at set times. It’s like riding a bus. The bus follows the official route regardless of the requests of individual passengers. Formal learning frequently concludes with some sort of recognition, be it a certificate or grade or checkmark in a learning management system. People participate in formal learning because they are told to.

Informal learning is more personalized. The learner chooses the subject matter and often decides how and when to learn it. Learning may be solo or with others. It’s like riding a bicycle. The bike rider selects the route, often changing in mid-course. The rider may stop short of the original destination. People generally learn informally to get something done, and it’s the ability to do something that demonstrates that learning took place.

Listening to a lecture or attending a workshop are primarily formal learning. Asking questions of co-workers or trial-and-error are informal.

This is the first post of many. You can find more information about informal learning here.

Flipping learning is big in education. It will be big in corporate learning. Let’s not blow it.

How do you flip learning?

Khan Academy is the poster child for flipped learning. Sal Khan has produced more than 3,000 short videos on a variety of topics. Students watch the videos before coming to class. In the classroom, they sort out what they’ve learned and do what used to be called homework. Millions of students are learning this way. Recently, Stanford professors offered a couple of courses in this fashion and were surprised when a third of a million people enrolled.

Flipping makes a ton a sense. The learner can watch the mini-lectures when it’s convenient to do so. The learner controls the pace by pausing, replaying, or fast-forwarding. In all likelihood, the presentation by the enthusiastic Salmaan Khan or a popular Stanford prof is going to be more engaging than your local school teacher or grad student teaching assistant. The video can provide content in small, digestible pieces. Once it’s in the can, the video can be replayed again and again. And of course, video delivered online scales without an increase in cost.

More important for learning outcomes, the time spent in class can be put to more productive use. Learners convene to get answers to questions, discuss examples, put what they’ve learned in context, debate, explore, and extend their knowledge. Instead of passively listening to an instructor, they actively engage the material. Instructors, freed of the need to mouth the words of lessons, focus on helping learners understand things and coaching individuals. These activities can take place online, and people can learn from one another in virtual communities and support groups.

Flipping Stanford

In a Science Times essay, “Death Knell for the Lecture: Technology as a Passport to Personalized Education,” Daphne Koller described how Stanford University has flipped traditional courses:

At Stanford, we recently placed three computer science courses online, using a similar format. Remarkably, in the first four weeks, 300,000 students registered for these courses, with millions of video views and hundreds of thousands of submitted assignments.

What can we learn from these successes? First, we see that video content is engaging to students — many of whom grew up on YouTube — and easy for instructors to produce.

Second, presenting content in short, bite-size chunks, rather than monolithic hourlong lectures, is better suited to students’ attention spans, and provides the flexibility to tailor instruction to individual students. Those with less preparation can dwell longer on background material without feeling uncomfortable about how they might be perceived by classmates or the instructor.

Conversely, students with an aptitude for the topic can move ahead rapidly, avoiding boredom and disengagement. In short, everyone has access to a personalized experience that resembles individual tutoring.

Watching passively is not enough. Engagement through exercises and assessments is a critical component of learning. These exercises are designed not just to evaluate the student’s learning, but also, more important, to enhance understanding by prompting recall and placing ideas in context.

Moreover, testing allows students to move ahead when they master a concept, rather than when they have spent a stipulated amount of time staring at the teacher who is explaining it.

An article in Wired, The Stanford Educational Experiment Could Change Higher Learning Forever, describes the wildly popular course on artificial intelligence taught by Stanford professors Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig:

Does it make any sense that school is generally a place where people come together to sit and listen to the person at the front of the room?  It generally doesn’t make the most sense to get a group of people together to sit and stare.  What if instead, educators spent class time doing and homework time for the watching of lessons/lectures.  The other benefit of this is that these can be viewed and reviewed anytime/anywhere.  The result is a lively bustling classroom where students can spend their time learning, talking, doing.

I fear that flipping learning in corporations may meet the same nasty fate as eLearning.

In the early days, 1999-2000, many of us believed that eLearning was the forefront of a renaissance in learning. Not only could people learn at their own pace, whenever they wanted, they’d also be able to ask questions, learn with peers, join communities, access job aids, contact mentors, and create personal learning paths. Workers could attend virtual classes without leaving the workplace. Software would create personalized learning experiences by assembling custom configurations of learning objects.

The eLearning dream didn’t last long. Companies proved more interested in reducing instructor head-count and facilities costs than in improving learning outcomes.  Training departments put PowerPoint presentations on their intranets and acted as if people could learn from them. Vendors put deadly-dull page-turner courses online and called it eLearning.

When times were tough, training departments slashed budgets by replacing face-to-face instruction with online reading. They failed to follow through with the discussions, practice, social processing, and reinforcement that makes lessons stick. It didn’t work. Most eLearning is ineffective drudgery.

That’s my nightmare about flipping learning in the corporation, that organizations will once again confuse exposure to content with learning. It’s great to replace lectures with video clips — IF you retain the opportunity for people to ask questions, interact with the material, practice what they’ve learned, collaborate with others, and periodically refresh their memories. This takes a sound learning ecosystem, a workscape.

Dan Pink thinks we should flip not only schooling but also publishing, the movie business, human resources, and office space. I agree. Business has changed. There’s hardly any business model left that couldn’t benefit from a flip. Break the processes into pieces and see if there’s not a better way to put them back together.

Donald Clark is blogging about 50 learning theorists in 50 days. It’s a rollicking good read.

Of the thirteen he’s covered thus far, Donald has pointed out that:

For Rousseau, “It’s hard to see a man who handed all five of his children up to an orphanage at birth, as an expert on the development and education of children. Prickly and paranoid, he managed to fall out with almost everyone, including those who tried to help him.”

Socrates “loved to pick intellectual fights and the method was not so much a gentle teasing out of ideas, more the brutal exposure of falsehoods. He was described by one of his victims as a ‘predator which numbs its victims with an electric charge before darting in for the kill’, even describing himself as a ‘gadfly, stinging the sluggish horse of Athens to life’.”

William James, elder brother of Henry James the novelist, asked his younger brother to stay close for six weeks after he died, as he wanted to try to contact him from the next world. No messages were ever received but it showed how seriously he took real inquiry and experimentation.

Despite the sad end to his life – he strangled his wife and spent his last years in an asylum, Althuser, born in Algiers, attempted to reconcile Marxism with structuralism.

In about a month, it will be my turn. I’m sandwiched between Csikszentmihalyi and Zuckerburg. I’m honored to rate a place on Donald’s list.

I’m also wondering what dark aspect of my past Donald will dig up to introduce his take on my theories.

March 1, 2012 to March 30, 2012

Working Smarter draws upon ideas from design thinking, network optimization, brain science, user experience design, learning theory, organizational development, social business, technology, collaboration, web 2.0 patterns, social psychology, value network analysis, anthropology, complexity theory, and more.

Working smarter embraces the spirit of agile software, action learning, social networks, and parallel developments in many disciplines. Every day, Working Smarter Daily uses social signals to select the top articles from blogs in these fields. Here’s how. And here are the top articles from this month:

1. Habermas (1929- ): ideology, action but lost on new media- Donald Clark Plan B, March 30, 2012
2. A workscape perspective- Harold Jarche, March 25, 2012
3. Beyond Execution- Clark Quinn, March 27, 2012
4. What you see animates into what you get- David Weinberger, March 25, 2012
5. Learning Without Training- Jay Cross, March 5, 2012
6. My top 10 favourite resources from February- Jane Hart, March 1, 2012
7. Checklist: transforming corporate learning- Jay Cross, March 6, 2012
8. Blog marathon: 50 blogs on learning theorists over next 50 days- Donald Clark Plan B, March 17, 2012
9. What a MOOC Does – #Change11- Stephen Downes: Half an Hour, March 1, 2012
10. Is 70:20:10 valid?- Jay Cross, March 5, 2012
11. MOOCs for the win!- George Siemens, March 5, 2012
12. 70:20:10 Tech- Clark Quinn, March 6, 2012
13. Kew Gardens adopts Web principles for real-world wayfinding- David Weinberger, March 26, 2012
14. “Go With The Flow”. CIO Magazine (NZ & Aus.) Interview- Jon Husband, March 1, 2012
15. Schooling, as opposed to learning- Jay Cross, March 1, 2012
16. Education as Platform: The MOOC Experience and what we can do to make it better- Stephen Downes: Half an Hour, March 23, 2012
17. Social business drives workforce development- Harold Jarche, March 26, 2012
18. Why Social Business Keeps Failing to Deliver- Luis Suarez, March 21, 2012
19. Time for the Patent Office to move off of TIFF?- David Weinberger, March 12, 2012
20. Yammer and why activity streams are a key foundation for integrated applications and organizations- Ross Dawson, March 26, 2012
21. [2b2k] Information overload? Not so much. (Part 2)- David Weinberger, March 9, 2012
22. What About the Future?- Jay Cross, March 21, 2012
23. Clothing is a privacy system- Doc Searls , March 15, 2012
24. [2b2k] 13 reasons why the Britannica failed on paper- David Weinberger, March 20, 2012
25. John Maeda #LSCon Mindmap- Clark Quinn, March 21, 2012
26. Building an alliance- Harold Jarche, March 17, 2012
27. 10 things to remember about social learning (and the use of social media for learning)- Jane Hart, March 23, 2012
28. Why The Bay Area Needs The Bay Lights- Steven Berlin Johnson, March 16, 2012
29. Greg Cole- David Weinberger, March 1, 2012
30. Shifting control- Harold Jarche, March 27, 2012
31. Thriving in the Net-Work Era- Jay Cross, March 19, 2012
32. Love thy neighbor by disrespecting his faith- David Weinberger, March 18, 2012
33. Berkman Buzz- David Weinberger, March 16, 2012
34. Scaling- Clark Quinn, March 26, 2012
35. A Data Scientist You’ve Never Heard of Is Now the Master of Your Domain- Andy McAfee, March 2, 2012
36. The death rattles of AM, then FM- Doc Searls , March 7, 2012
37. [misc] Thesaurus of metaphors- David Weinberger, March 28, 2012
38. Making collaborative work work- Harold Jarche, March 7, 2012
39. Dave Cormier #EDGEX2012 Mindmap- Clark Quinn, March 14, 2012
40. Using network perspectives to visualize changing culture and meaning- Ross Dawson, March 11, 2012
41. Shared thoughts- Harold Jarche, March 10, 2012
42. Birthday Girl: The Story- David Weinberger, March 24, 2012
43. Innovation is about making connections- Harold Jarche, March 14, 2012
44. Least likely Theory of Cheney ever- David Weinberger, March 14, 2012
45. [berkman] Berkman Buzz- David Weinberger, March 3, 2012
46. Earth to Cable: You don’t control us.- Doc Searls , March 5, 2012
47. Distributed research needs collaborative researchers- Harold Jarche, March 3, 2012
48. Infographic: Timeline of the acceleration of crowdsourcing- Ross Dawson, March 15, 2012
49. February’s Top 50 Posts on Working Smarter- Jay Cross, March 3, 2012
50. [2b2k] Moi- David Weinberger, March 1, 2012
51. Local libraries are the 99%- David Weinberger, March 18, 2012
52. Organizations Don’t Tweet – Review- Harold Jarche, March 1, 2012
53. George Siemens #EDGEX2012 Mindmap- Clark Quinn, March 12, 2012
54. Working Smarter in Social Business- Jay Cross, March 2, 2012

eLearning for Kids

Khan Academy is popping up everywhere! Sal Khan’s videos have helped millions of students learn algebra, biology, finance, and more. Singlehandedly, Sal Khan has done more to shake up the traditional notion of schooling than anyone since Horace Mann. Everybody’s thinking about how to flip the equation. Provide the content before class — and use class time to figure out what it means. Brilliant.

But what happens when you’re a kid, before you’re ready to tackle algebra and finance? That’s when you turn to eLearning for Kids.

Established eight years ago by my friend Nick Van Dam, eLearning for Kids serves up free lessons to millions of kids aged five to twelve. Take a look at the courses.

eLearning for Kids is run by volunteers and funded with contributions. If you want to donate to a good cause, assured that your money’s going to do some good without being scalped by (ahem) “management fees,” make a contribution to eLearning for Kids.