@oscarberg “Most enterprise social software platforms actually separate internal communication from external communication while email & phone doesn’t.”

via @timkastelle Good #km post – Informal Information Management and Knowledge Management Are Not the Same Thing by @johnt

My thinking is that just the sharing aspect of informal stuff is “know-what”, this is what KM has been about, but we need to go further to the “know-how” ie. to learn and to be able to have the skills to come up with your own “know-what”. We can do this via conversations. We can now converse with people who shared their informal information, and not only know “what” but also “how”…the ultimate example is apprenticeship and mentoring.

via @VenessaMiemis  A fairly good source on Social Capital

In general, there is no one model for social capital formation or the creation or strengthening of local groups. Albee & Boyd (1997) argue that there is no single answer or model to promoting participation … there are only frameworks and guiding principles. Pantoja (1999) argues that instead of one particular model of local organisation, a wide variety of community organisations should be promoted. There needs to be an individual, participatory approach to each intervention.

@downes Social OS and Collective Construction of Knowledge

The development of a technological literacy, though, is uneven. In the divide between a world where we control technology and a world where we are controlled by technology lies what Henry Jenkins calls the “participation gap.” It is the divide between those who can create and have created using digital technologies and those who have not. This is not simply a digital divide, not simply a division between those who can access technology and those who cannot, but rather, a divide between those who have been empowered by technology and those who have not. And it is a gap we see not only at the base level of simple web constructs such as web pages or Twitter profiles, but even more so at the higher reaches of social engagement, in professional discourse and communities of practice. To begin to learn is to begin to participate at the periphery of a community of practice; to become learned is to reduce the participation gap between oneself and fully engaged members of that community.

Learning is what most adults will do for a living in the 21st century via @crazyquote

Innovation via @timkastelle

Innovation = learning x diverse connections
I disagree with the argument that innovation is the child of desperation. I wish it was so, because if it was, we would be on a planet devoid of incredible amounts of preventable child deaths, failed economies, and the rest of what would otherwise be tragedies that could be prevented by innovations of all kinds. The pragmatic reality is that innovation happens at the intersection of learning and cultivating diverse connections. When you have diverse connections in a network, learning almost cannot not happen. Networks literally become learning disabled if the connections become too homophilous and without learning, no innovation is possible.

whistle – but don’t tweet – while you work 54% of companies prohibit access to social networking sites for any reason via @charlesjennings

The No. 1 benefit of Enterprise 2.0 is Personal Knowledge Management (PKM)

… most E2.0 vendors are doing it wrong. If the #1 benefit is personal knowledge management, why are all the big players selling to the CEO, CIO, and IT departments? Where are the tools targeting individual knowledge workers?

How to Decentralize Traditional Employee Structures via @WorldBlu

Touchstone uses a democratic “Bubble” structure, which means that any person at any level of the organization can lead a group of staff – not just managers or senior-level people. The leader of the team can ask for and receive whatever level of talent they need to achieve the mission of the project. One result is that senior staff sometimes ends up working under a less-senior staff person who is managing a given project. The reasoning is that the leader is in charge of the deliverable, and has the freedom to develop and implement the project as they fit with the team they need to get the job done well.

@cdn – Filtering is the new search. The next frontier in information management. Search is about Where. Filtering is about Who. It’s about Trust.

Excellent checklist for remote workers & managers. via @dria

@JaneBozarth [ Jane was looking for some case studies on Twitter in the workplace]: microblogging at Qualcomm & Qualitative Study on Micro-blogging at Work

@timkastelle – Great post by Irving Wladowsky-Berger – focus on idea flow, not idea stocks: The Business Value of Social Networks.

Value creation has thus been shifting from protecting proprietary knowledge, to fostering collaboration, both within the company and beyond its boundaries, in order to help the firm participate in as broad and diverse a range of knowledge flows and thus improve its competitive position. It is within this context that one has to consider the business value of social networks, and their impact in helping people better connect with each other, and build sustaining relationships that enhance knowledge flows and innovation.

More complexity, more crises: we need new management models. via @tdebaillon

Our environments are more complex than they were ten or fifteen years ago, or maybe even three years ago. Complex situations become more common and more normal every year. It would not be a good response to panic or blame others. It’ll probably be better to accept the fact that the world is quite complex, and that there is not a standard solution for everything. As crises become normal, deal with it normal.

@valdiskrebs – Is the sun about to set on the corporate machine?

For one, the existence of a burgeoning alternative landscape in which corporations have no real part will push the Western corporate model further towards redundancy. Trends in such boom fields as fair trade, farmers’ markets, organic produce, self-made and/or recycled products, the barter economy, the black or alternative economy, micro-brands, Islamic banking, micro-credit, social networking and, ethical investment all carry, in different ways, the germs of the corporation-as-we-know-it’s demise.

@gsiemens Lack of Sympathy

Comment #13 by Howard – Before universities existed, most people learned by apprenticeship. As Harold points out, before WWII universities apprenticed elites; priests, doctor, scholars, teachers, etc. . .. The mode of learning was still an apprenticeship model and most elite education ended with a very specific apprenticeship practice like a dissertation or medical residency, or for the wealthy, an initiation into “the club”. But educational theory ignored the way things worked and stressed knowledge over doing, knowledge that was represented by a degree. Many people are now finding out that a degree correlated with higher incomes, but did not necessarily cause them. Knowledge alone proves to be no covering, the emperor has no clothes. We may not be blacksmiths or leather tanners, but evolution has not changed us that much and we still learn in much the same way as we always have, by watching other people do things. I think education would be better off if it focused on doing instead of knowing.

Tom Haskins: When we get confident in our own informal evaluation schema- we can take others’ evaluation of us with a grain of salt.

Enterprise 2.0: Start broad with many conversations – then find champions to take a narrow & harder-driving approach. FastForward

@juneholley: Emergence and management

Yes, it is certainly true that the role of managers is probably exaggerated (with their pay).  But the project of changing management is unnecessary.  Over-managed firms will self-destruct, possibly at great cost to themselves and others, simply because managers have to be paid for and management that is not necessary simply makes a firm unwieldy, inefficient and unprofitable.

@David_A_Eaves: The world is not flat, it’s walled & non-integrated

@CharlesHGreen: “It’s not plagiarism, it’s mixing.” Our changing mores on how to think about who owns content. NYTimes – “There’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity,” said Ms. Hegemann in a statement released by her publisher after the scandal broke.

@gsiemens: “I have not found a SINGLE school that shows ANY evidence of using technology to transform teaching and learning”. The Good Morrow

Teacher roles in networks = Amplifying; Curating; Wayfinding; Aggregating; Filtering; Modelling; Persistent Presence. [A similar perspective would be that the Teacher/Instructor role in networks is supporting personal knowledge management PKM] – Connectivism

@itsthomas RT @avinashkaushik “You don’t blog to be known. You blog to be knowable.” – @hughmcguire

@JPBarlow Information is free. Experience is expensive.

Knowledge

@snowded: Narrative as Mediator:

Without the mediation of narrative there can be no knowledge transfer or learning.
Without the symbolic, learning will not diffuse to broad populations & there will be no advance.
Without embodied knowledge there will be no wisdom.

@ken_homer “The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.” ~ Hans Hofmann

@exectweets “Knowledge has to be improved, challenged, and increased constantly, or it vanishes.” – Peter Drucker

Learning

@mfrancone A single conversation across the table with a wise man is worth a month’s study of books ~ Chinese proverb

@valdiskrebs: Social learning -> You are as smart as the network you are embedded in!

@eduinnovation: “You weren’t born to be a cog in the giant industrial machine. You were TRAINED to become a cog.” ~ Seth Godin | via kdwashburn

@mglazer: Myth: the “training dept” is responsible for the learning that goes on at the company.

@zecool Nous sommes comme dans un mega-buffet mais chacun a 1 assiette seulement; il ne faut prendre que ce qu’on aime, pas tous les plats!

@jarche [result of a conversation with @janebozart & @denniscallahan] “When you learn with and from your customers, learning and marketing are the same.”

@BFchirpy Next step in Informal/Social Learning? If you want to cut out the middle man, go direct to your customers.

Working

More Trust Yields More Innovation via @CharlesHGreen

HBR: To be effective in this new world, you will need to master the skills of empathy & teamwork.

@jackvinson: PKM [personal knowledge management] in the enterprise? It’s all about the enterprise recognizing the importance of individuals getting work done.

@sebpaquet Thought-provoking quote … “The more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the government.” – Cornelius Tacitus (56-117 A.D.)

—

I remarked earlier in the week that “crowds don’t need wise contributors, but diverse & independent ones; it’s like evolution: simple mechanisms create complexity.”

—

We learn through idle chatter, so it seems (via @shareski):

@charlesjennings

“if it’s social & engaged there is no us & them, only we”

“It’s not the channel that empowers or dis-empowers the learner. It’s the presence or absence of the ‘course and curriculum’ chains”

“True knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing” – Socrates

@c4lpt (Jane Hart)

The Changing Face of Learning & Development

Leapfrog to the Future

@jaycross

“I think of crowd sourcing as tapping the wisdom of the crowd, not getting one idea by asking a large group.”

Go straight to the finish line

Jay’s book on working/learning smarter in the cloud

@Quinnovator (Clark Quinn)

Innovation’s Long Gestation

“lesson from Twitter (for web, mobile design), you don’t *need* full sentences, you DO need to communicate”

“as my colleague @hjarche says, “increasingly, work is learning and learning is work” [yes, I already knew that]

@jonhusband

The HR Problem: the traditional organization is a machine and we are human

The Problem with the Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom Hierarchy

The temporary and flexible hierarchies of Fishnet Organizations

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and I also learned that “eMail Is Where Knowledge Goes to Die” via @elsua

How we teach:

“Any teacher who can be replaced by a computer …. should be!” — Arthur C. Clarke. via @charlesjennings

@moehlert: “My son, the not-so-excited about math, won’t quit playing carrotsticks.com”

Video: “Most schooling is training for stupidity & conformity” ~ Noam Chomsky. via @courosa

What we can teach:

Educators beware: The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement #ACTA. via @josiefraser

The treaty would provide legal protection for digital locks and security protection on material, provisions that draw upon the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DCMA), but extend far beyond existing international law. As some American teachers and researchers have learned the hard way, these so-called “anti-circumvention” measures have had the unintended consequence of stifling scientific research. Since the DCMA has been in force, a number of computer scientists researching software and network security have faced lawsuits and criminal prosecution as a result of their legitimate research activities into anti-circumvention technologies.

Wherever Crown Copyright would be used, Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) would be used instead. Copyright Consultation via @mgifford

RIP Howard Zinn:

Howard Zinn passed away this week:

A People’s History: what the classroom didn’t teach me about the American empire, by Howard Zinn

Diffusion By Learning. Innovation by Social Learning. via @charlesjennings

3. Social learning. People adopt once they see enough empirical evidence to convince them that the innovation is worth adopting, where the evidence is generated by the outcomes among prior adopters. Individuals may adopt at different times due to differences in their prior beliefs, amount of information gathered, and idiosyncratic costs.

@oscarberg “Organizations can own communities, but nobody can own social networks. They gather on purpose, and interact on the edge of chaos.”

@BFchirpy “The killer learning management system is the Web – silly” [in case anyone is still wondering]

Pondering complexity. Good MIT Sloan article on managing complexity. via @rossdawson

What can we do, the executives asked us, to manage complexity more effectively?

Our advice: Focus on the issues that are making it hard for your employees to get things done, and on building the ability of your work force to cope with the complexity in their roles. For most workers, complications arising from increased M&A activity and regulation matter less than having a simplified organization with clear roles and accountabilities.

Are we too professional: has professionalism gone too far? An excellent read via @AmirKassaei

Over-professionalism is everywhere. Teachers in England are trained to plan lessons in segments of three minutes, a theory which leaves little room for spontaneity in the classroom. They are also often exhausted before term even starts because of the endemic pressure to plan every lesson weeks in advance. It is all too tempting for teachers to sacrifice freshness–which is impossible to measure or record on paper–in favour of form-filling. But can education ever be mapped out in such prescriptive terms? Anthony Seldon, Master of Wellington College, thinks not: “The erosion of trust in education is sucking the life out of classrooms, teachers and students. You can tick all the boxes under the sun and still be a lousy teacher. You cannot encapsulate the human experience of learning in some mechanistic pedantry.”

Great slide presentation by @sachac on how to be a shy connector – Shows that it’s not necessary to behave like arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks:

Here are some of the interesting things I found on Twitter this past week.

Learning & Development is still stuck in the course paradigm [multi-way discussion]. via @c4lpt

Are instructional designers like buggy whips? Courses are buggies; obsolete learning vehicles for the Internet. Back-to-front e-learning via @BFChirpy

The situation in the workplace is even worse than most critics of formalized training & schooling say [good references in this article by Gary Wise]:

Training (formal learning) takes place in controlled environs that can include classroom (face-to-face and virtual distance learning) and/or asynchronous on-line, self-paced events. Nothing wrong with any of these methods. Unfortunately, these formal events equate to a mere 5% (+/- depending on your industry) of a learner’s 1,080 hour work year – another Bersin research finding. That equates to about 54 hours per year spent in training.

Work context represents the other 95%. Are we spending 80% of our training dollars on only 5% of a learner’s work year? Work context, therefore, represents our greatest opportunity to leverage informal learning. In order to include the other 95%, it becomes important to include key attributes exclusive to the downstream work context where the learner actually performs their work.

Next time someone asks for the Return on Investment (ROI) of [social learning?] … I’ll kindly ask them to listen to @dmscott’s epic rant on ROI. via @jonhusband @elsua

One of the most effective mechanisms for knowledge transfer which has emerged in human history is the apprentice scheme. via @snowded

Highly ritualised in medieval times with the apprentice walking the boards once they had reached a certain level of competence to become Journeymen. Then, for some the execution of the master work to become one of the company masters. Dress changed at each stage as did obligation. The educational model was also community based. Journeymen also educated apprentices and were often better able to do so than the masters. While in the early stages of knowledge transfer there was a degree of rote learning, increasingly the apprentice learnt by practice and by tolerated failure. They did not copy the master, they adapted with variance and as such the body of knowledge progressed, it was not transferred as a static entity – something all too common in most KM [knowledge management] programmes – but as a living, breathing and changing practice.

@JaneBozarth “How did I miss this before? The fabulously articulate @quinnovator on bridging formal/informal learning.”

@BFchirpy to @JaneBozarth & @usablelearning “Re: Killer Learning Management System – it’s the web, silly.”

Complexity

The State of Social Learning Today & Some Thoughts for the Future of Learning & Development (L&D) in 2010 via @c4lpt

If it seems too complex for L&D to take on the “responsibility” for enabling learning across the organisation, then bear in mind that this role will probably be assumed by others, e.g. Bus Ops, IT or Internal Communications departments as their own interests widen. If this takes place, what is likely to happen to the L&D function? As the desire and need for formal training diminishes, L&D will probably become more and more marginalized. 2010 is therefore the year for L&D to take action! So who can help?

via @finiteattention “Seen on a colleague’s noticeboard: If everyone is doing it …” [Dilbert's point hits the core of the "best practices" problem]

The Cynefin Framework Mindmap via @johnt

Classroom instruction is complex but do we treat it as such? Is “sensing” a priority of teacher education? How would an instructor who waits for “patterns to emerge” be viewed by their supervisor? As laid back? Aloof? And does outcome-based education (unintentionally) result in educators treating complex situations as complicated, or worse yet, simple in nature?

Networking reconsidered via @jonhusband

In a rapidly changing world, the knowledge that matters the most is tacit knowledge — the knowledge that we have all accumulated from our experiences that we have a hard time expressing to ourselves, much less to each other. The challenge is that this type of knowledge — in contrast to the explicit knowledge that can be written down and broadcast to the world — does not flow very easily. Accessing this kind of knowledge requires long-term trust based relationships and a deep understanding of context. Large contact databases don’t particularly help in this quest and, in fact, can subvert our efforts to build the kinds of relationships that matter the most.

Changing Practice

Tom Gram: Instructional Design: Science, Art & Craft: in balanc:

Effective learning designs then,  happen most when that elusive combination of art, science and craft come together. Where the three approaches coexist, through a skillfully assembled learning team the result is usually effective, motivational learning grounded in the realities of the organization.

Evidence that change does not come from within, in this ASTD article via @JaneBozarth

Old favorites dominated in our study. E-learning today appears to be mostly about delivering assessments and designs, testing, personalization, scenarios, and tutorials. All these are familiar, and they all have deep roots in the training and development community. Should we lament that the habits identified in this study are not much different in 2009 than they were in 1989 (although, of course, enabled by technology)?

Group photo of some of the ASTD survey respondents: