Too often we think of learning as school, training as something that is delivered, and complex problems as solvable with enough effort and resources. We are wrong on all three counts.

Social learning is about getting things done in networks. It is a constant flow of listening, observing, doing, and sharing. Effective working in networks requires cooperation, meaning there is no plan, structure or direct feedback. This can scare managers and organizational leaders because no one is in change of social learning and there is no end-state or final learning objective. But social learning in networks can help us deal with complexity by providing a platform to test out ideas and learn from and with each other.

Jane Hart has described five types of learning using social media, the lubricant of learning in digital networks. Then she looked at how they relate to formal/informal learning as well as the spectrum of dependent/independent/interdependent learning.

I have circled those activities at the bottom of this grid to show what personal knowledge management (PKM) enables. I have described PKM as our part of the social learning contract and the more I look at implementing social learning, social CRM or social business models, the more convinced I am that PKM is a foundational skill-set.

Keeping knowledge in our heads is not of much use in getting things done, though that is what most of our training and development efforts have focused on for the past century. Individual training, stemming from the military systems approach to training, addressed skills and knowledge acquisition, as directed by those in change. The organization wanted to drive stuff into our heads.

In networks, though, one of our main jobs now is getting stuff out of our heads and sharing with others.

PKM is focused on accidental, serendipitous, personal-directed, informal, independent learning.

PKM enables group-directed, intra-organizational, interdependent learning.

PKM enriches formal, structured learning and helps learners be less dependent.

PKM is taking control of our learning, as well as making much of it transparent. It makes us a valuable node in our various networks. We share our learning riches without diminishing them. If more people start seeking, sensing & sharing then we’re on the social learning path. Notice how I did not mention that you need some special “social learning” technology platform to do this?

I see the critical aspect to social learning to be ‘diffusion’. Knowledge ‘flows’ at specific speeds, and complex, technical details have high viscosity. Some nodes are efficient at in-flow (fast learners), some at out (teachers). Excessive turnover removes nodes before their knowledge has spread to the rest of the group. Isolated groups fail to transmit their knowledge. Again, if I were debugging a company I’d want to measure this. How long before a new product feature is well understood by sales? by management? Does R&D know about current marketing efforts? How much does a idea change as it’s communicated through the company? Are there particular points where ideas get stuck, or particularly garbled?

There is a lot to unpack from this paragraph and it highlights many of issues around learning in the enterprise. It’s not just about having access to knowledge or people but getting ideas flowing throughout the organization. Redundancy comes to mind as a principal for supporting social learning diffusion. There has to be more than one way to communicate or find something.

Just because something was blogged, tweeted or posted does not mean it will be understood and eventually internalized as actionable knowledge. The more complex or novel the idea, the more time it will take to be understood. Often I have revisited articles and only understood them when I have read related views or had a chance to find examples of some new concept. Understanding networks, for instance, is easier when you live and work with them and can see examples of network effects.

—

Diffusion – Viscosity – Flows – Redundancy

IOL – Intra-Organizational Learning – keeping the organization up to date and up to speed on strategic and other internal initiatives and activities

GDL – Group Directed Learning – groups of individuals working in teams, projects, study groups, etc Even two people working together in a coaching and mentoring capacity

PDL – Personal Directed Learning – individuals organizing and managing their own personal or professional learning

ASL – Accidental & Serendipitous Learning – individuals learning without consciously realizing it (aka incidental or random learning)

FSL – Formal Structured Learning – formal education and training like classes, courses, workshops, etc (both synchronous and asynchronous)

I previously looked at these categories as being either Undirected, Self-Directed or Directed (from the outside):

My colleagues at ITA have been discussing the use of words like informal; formal; social; directed; and autonomous and how much they add to enabling better learning in organizations. My moment in the shower this morning sparked this idea as a way to describe and categorize activities related to learning for work:

Dependent Learning (FSL) – direction is required in terms of objectives, curriculum, expertise and facilitation. The learner is dependent on others.

Independent Learning (ASL & PDL) - self-motivated people can get what they need in the manner they want

Interdependent Learning (GDL & IOL) – learning that requires connecting to others and cannot be done alone.

For workplace learning, especially in complex environments, I would want to support interdependent learning as much as possible, as this would create a more resilient learning community, not dependent on any individual nor any formal training program. I would also encourage independent learners to share what they know so that the best learners could set an example. I would minimize dependent learning because it is obviously a cost centre and too much dependent learning may adversely influence mastery of independent and interdependent learning.

Now we can ask the CEO – do you want us to focus our energies on encouraging dependent, independent or interdependent workers?

]]> http://www.jarche.com/2010/03/interdependent-learning/feed/ 4 http://www.jarche.com/2010/02/training-alone-is-not-enough/ http://www.jarche.com/2010/02/training-alone-is-not-enough/#comments Tue, 23 Feb 2010 16:00:07 +0000 Harold Jarche http://www.jarche.com/?p=3585 In our second eCollab blog carnival, I asked if we could formalize the informal:

Are there ways of “formalizing” some or all of this without losing out on the personal relationships we have with our friends and colleagues, those who we turn to help us solve a problem. Can we formalize the informal?

Jay Cross, in my subsequent interview on the subject, said:

… it’s the wrong question. It would be like asking if we should “informalize” formal training. A key understanding that Jay wants to get across to everyone in the workplace learning arena is that it’s not an either/or proposition, but rather how much informal and how much formal learning should we support and who is determining what’s to be done. All learning is a bit of both. His promotion of informal learning is not to replace formal training but to open up the possibilities of supporting the other 80% of learning that has been ignored for far too long.

My own perspective is that supporting informal learning is mission critical for knowledge-intensive organizations:

A key difference between formal training and informal learning is that the former is designed (push) while the latter is enabled (pull). As far as formal training goes, we have several models and many examples of good practices. But training alone is not enough. The best training programs can only address a maximum of 20% of the work performance issues in an organization. Training can only help to develop skills and knowledge if we know in advance what these are. In many cases, we don’t know what our future performance needs will be.

Dennis Callahan provided several examples of “creating conditions to help informal learning thrive”:

Providing tools (e.g., wiki, blog, microblog) for people to share knowledge

Provide learning for how to use these tools for sharing

Creating an OJT [on job training] guide that describes events that someone must experience as part of their learning (e.g., going on a sales call with a sales representative)

Developing a mentoring program

Facilitating a working session on helping customers solve a real business problem

Tom Haskins submitted a very thoughtful response and showed that “…formal learning poses the opposite requirements from those of formalized informal learning”:

Instead of encouraging useful mistakes, formal learning penalizes mistakes …

Instead of scattering what needs to be learned, formal learning delivers required content in centralized locations like classrooms and books …

Instead of assisting students in unlearning their misconceptions, formal learning assumes errors will get obliterated by providing more content …

Dave Ferguson looked at the importance of aligning goals and balancing organizational and individual learning goals:

Those phrases got me thinking about how, if you work within a large organization, you need to find ways to align your personal goals with the organization’s in a way that’s authentic for you and helpful to the organization.  In part, it’s the old concept of the king’s shilling: if you’re accepting the paycheck, you’re granting the organization’s right to set and pursue its goals and to ask you to help achieve them.

When you can’t ethically do that, it’s time to get out.

Donald Clark (USA) takes a slightly contrarian view :

I think this 80/20 informal/formal thingy is kind of going in the wrong way. We should be spending the majority of our time on 20% of the learning taking place within our organization — remember the Pareto principle? Thus you should be asking:

What processes are critical for delivering our product/service and do we need to ensure that our workers learn them correctly?
What tasks are so vital to a processes that we have to ensure we educate someone to be a backup?
How can we best develop our workers so that we continue to grow as a company? What we think of as the “informal” will most often fall into this category.

Thanks to all the contributors to this blog carnival. Please feel free to weigh in, as there’s no time limit here (it’s the web & it’s informal):

Jay Cross

Dave Ferguson

Tom Haskins

Dennis Callahan

Donald Clark

My interest in informal learning has grown with my experiences online. We now have a wide array of cheap and plentiful platforms for informal learning – blogs, wikis, social bookmarks, podcasts, social networks, micro-blogs. Digital networks mean that we are no longer limited to reading what has been formally published or talking only to our limited social circle. We can now engage in much larger conversations, as an individual, a member of a group, or within an organization. Ignoring, or blocking, ways to learn informally online would be like handicapping every employee’s cognitive abilities.

I have several articles posted on eCollab now, some new and some re-posted. This has been a great opportunity to review and update my articles as well as get them translated. My colleague, Thierry deBaillon is doing an amazing job with the translations. Drop by the eCollab site (in perpetual Beta of course) and please join us in a cross-cultural idea laboratory to exchange perspectives with experts and practitioners. You will also find my latest interview with Jay Cross.

This is an important innovation lesson as well. We don’t need more ideas, we need better ideas. In many ways this is a stock and flow problem – if we only focus on stocks of ideas, we’re less able to get them connected to people. We need to think about our idea flow. As the story of these two posts illustrates, the quality of an idea has a lot to do with how well it flows through our networks. It is yet another example of the greater importance of quality, not quantity.

The notion of aggregating/filtering/connecting for innovation is one that I have looked at for personal knowledge management. I have revised this to Seek/Sense/Share in my quest to find a good metaphor/model to introduce PKM.

We can seek out (aggregate) all the sources of information on any subject and share them with the world, but if we don’t make sense of them, they’re worthless.

The narrow point of the hourglass is where less gets through, it’s under greater pressure and it’s what makes the act of sharing valuable – our special context.

PKM isn’t just collecting and filing  bits and pieces of information for later retrieval. There is an ongoing sense-making process that, through practice, develops cognitive skills. It’s knowledge management, not information or document management.

—

Author’s Note: In developing this article, I have realized how limited the print medium is, especially when transferring what was originally a series of blog posts to create the basis of what is written here. Added hyperlinks are now more natural to me than using the APA format, which I have used for many years, but I now view as a relic of a bygone era. What originally flowed is now just a piece of stock. As a blog post [http://www.jarche.com/2006/01/old675/] this article built on previous posts and was open to comments and additions. With this article, it seems as if the conversation, and my learning process, have been frozen in time.

—

Learning Flow

The ubiquitous digital content found on the Web today is the raw material that younger generations especially are using to create unique perspectives on popular culture. One of the new evolutions in the digital content area is the mashup. “A mashup is a website or web application that seamlessly combines content from more than one source into an integrated experience … via a public interface or API” (Mashup, 2006). The Creative Commons, an organization promoting flexibility in copyright laws, even has a special license for these types of media., called Sampling (http://creativecommons.org/license/sampling/). New Web 2.0 technologies like blogs, wikis, podcasts and video blogs, combined with the availability of digital content, have changed those who were previously consumers of information into co-creators. Apple Computer’s famous marketing tag line of “Rip, Mix, Burn” can become “Construct, Deconstruct, Reconstruct” when put into a web-based learning context. The learner is able to interact with the learning media in a way never possible with the print medium.

Let’s take a look at how digital media may be changing the field of instructional design, a technology with its roots in the Second World War and the need to quickly train thousands of personnel.

Digital Media Types According to Lefever

Business blog consultant Lee Lefever has defined two distinct types of digital media – stock and flow (Lefever, 2005).

Stocks = Archived, Organized for Reference (e.g. web site, database, book, voice mail)

Flows = Timely & Engaging (e.g. radio, speeches, e-mail, blogs)

Interacting with Digital Media

Lefever specifically comments on the changes that are happening within television. TiVo (TV on demand) is changing the television medium from one of flow (and therefore engaging) to one of stock (and therefore of less value). He also says the reason blogs are so popular at this time, with over 30 million on the Internet, is because they allow flow.

Consider the whole notion of digital content in education. Stock is like product – it has a shelf life and over time its value is reduced. In education you need flow to provide value (context), enabled through social interaction. For instance, MIT’s open courseware initiative (http://ocw.mit.edu ) makes the stock, in the form of course content, available for free, but, you have to pay to participate in the flow (class membership and a degree from MIT). Flow keeps the learning conversations current for the changing needs of learners.

Will Richardson, an educational blogger, has discussed the changing needs of learners in a networked world (Richardson, 2005)

For instance, now that we have access to people and knowledge, learning is ‘network creation’ and that we can learn through ‘collaborative meaning making’. And the idea that we no longer need to learn everything in ‘advance of need’ resonates strongly with Brown and Hagel’s idea of push vs. pull learning [where learners become networked creators of knowledge], that we can pull information from a source when we need it, not have it pushed upon us in case we need it.

Impact on Instructional Design

Because the Web allows anyone to connect with everyone, as well as provide immediate access to information, it is an environment more suited to just-in-time learning (e.g. performance support tools) than for linear academic or training courses. Courses are stock, and learning on the Web is moving from stock to flow. I think that there will be a rapid decline in online course development as better models of web-based collaboration and just-in-time knowledge are developed. As online information and knowledge in all fields continues to expand, it will be more and more difficult to design a traditional course following instructional design methodologies that stands the test of time.

Another issue is finding, controlling, and updating the ever increasing amount of digital resources. Relatively in-depth studies do not give us answers on how to control all of the learning stock that is being created. The UK’s JISC Pedagogical Vocabularies Project recently released two reports and a series of recommendations on structuring learning content for the web but was only able to recommend more study of the field (JISC, 2005). The reality is that the field is expanding too quickly for us to capture and re-use the objects that we create.

In this environment of increasing digital information, more control will not address our information management needs. After perusing the 121 pages of the two JISC reports, I came away with the feeling that trying to control chaos is a losing game. My suggestions for dealing with learning stock are:

• use the simplest of basic structures, such as the Resource Description Framework (RDF) [Standards built on RDF describe logical inferences between facts and how to search for facts in a large database of RDF knowledge - http://www.rdfabout.net/quickintro.xpd ],
• build better search into online learning applications (try to be like Google),
• only build taxonomies, ontologies and controlled vocabularies based on a specific user need, not “just-in-case”,
• give learners and facilitators more tools to manage their information (tags, tagclouds, smart search, etc), and
• focus on tools to surf the chaos, not control it.

In learning, you could say that much of the flow is really communication. It is through communication, often conversation, that we attempt to make meaning. Dave Pollard has developed a table that compares several communications methods – written, audio, video, live – as to their cost, impact, value and cost/benefit (Pollard, 2006). This is a good decision support tool for learning environment designers to consider before creating educational media, and as Pollard says, it’s open to revision.

Pollard also lists his principles of human learning preferences

1. People like information conveyed through conversations and stories because the interactivity and detail gives them context, not just content, and does so economically.
2. People hate talking heads, and are increasingly intolerant of them.
3. People no longer have the opportunity for serendipitous learning and discovery — everything they read and learn is narrow, focused, bounded, and the tools they are given in their reading and research reinforce this blinkered approach to learning. The consequence is the intellectual equivalent of not eating a balanced diet — a malnourished mind.
4. People do not know how to do research, or even search, effectively. They think these two things are the same, which they are not, and they have never been trained to do either properly. It’s a good thing the search engines are so smart, because our use of them is mostly dumb.
5. People search as a last resort. They prefer to ask a real person for what they want to learn or discover, because it’s faster and the answer is more context specific. And if there is a single good browsable resource on their subject of interest, readily at hand, and they have the time, they will usually prefer to browse that resource rather than looking at a bunch of disconnected, often irrelevant, search engine matches. (Pollard, 2006)

Stories are an excellent example of learning flow. For millennia, humans have learned through stories. Pollard’s listed preferences also indicate that learners need better tools, such as tag clouds [a visual depiction of content descriptors used on a website with more frequently used words depicted in a larger font], to enable serendipitous learning (Point #3) and that better built-in search is critical for finding good learning resources (Points #4 & #5).

These principles support the idea that we should put more effort into contextualizing online learning and less on cataloguing information and learning objects (Point #1). Instead of building more stock, learning professionals should concentrate on enabling flow. Having a lot of meticulously catalogued and tagged Stock (learning objects) is of little value without the contextual Flow (conversations & stories). There is lots of stock to choose from, and with Creative Commons licensing, more being created that is simple and easy to use for learning design. So, let the learning flow.

References

JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) Pedagogical Vocabularies Project, Retrieved 24 March 2006 from http://www.jisc.ac.uk/elp_vocabularies.html

Lefever, L. (2005). Re-introduction to stocks and flows in online communication. Retrieved March 23, 2006 from Common Craft web site http://www.commoncraft.com/archives/000985.html

Mash-up (web application hybrid). (2006). Retrieved March 23, 2006 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mashup_%28web_application_hybrid%29

Pollard, D. ( 2006). The economics of communication and effective learning. Retrieved March 23, 2006 from http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2006/01/17.html#a1409

Join in the discussion at the bilingual & multi-cultural eCollab blog carnival and weigh in with your experiences and perspectives on informal learning in the enterprise.

Note: my blog is where I hammer out ideas, so you may be finding some of these posts a bit repetitive. Sorry about that

My working definition of personal knowledge management:

PKM: a set of processes, individually constructed, to help each of us make sense of our world, work more effectively and contribute to society.

PKM is also an enabling process for wirearchy: ” a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results enabled by interconnected people and technology”

Some Observations:

PKM is part of the social learning contract.
PKM works best when knowledge is shared.
Organizational Knowledge Management (KM) is dependent on effective PKM processes.
Standardizing PKM destroys it.

Explaining PKM:

I have looked at the PKM process as:

Sort-Categorize-Make Explicit-Retrieve
Connect-Contribute-Exchange
Aggregate-Filter-Connect.

Currently, this makes the most sense to me:

Seek-Sense-Share