Ruminations of a Learning and Development Professional

I'm Back! and I think I have something to share....

2011-08-25T08:27:00.014+10:00

Well it has been a long time since I blogged. Why? I have been thinking, writing, presenting and ruminating..... most of all I have been questioning. I have also now been in my new role for 10 months and needed the time to reflect on what this meant for my writing and my experience.

So much of what I take for granted as assumed and valuable knowledge in my role as a corporate educator is being challenged as we move further into the new century. The pace of change in the world has accelerated and this was the main reason why I stopped blogging. I felt what I had to say was lacking the relevance and the timeliness required to add value to the communities I was part of. For me this is critical as I need to be part of a community that I trust and that trusts me.

There is a new book which I have read quickly and will read again to absorb, which is a great re-orienting point for all corporate educators. It is not profound but rather pragmatic and it goes to the heart of an individuals engagement and why this is critical for success in organisations. The book is called "The way we're working isn't working: The Four Forgotten Needs That Energize Great Performance".

Essentially the book advocates that a myth has taken hold that "human beings operate most productively in the same one-dimensional way computers do: continuously, at high speeds, for long periods of time, running multiple programs at the same time." Think about it. We are told that we can multitask and we are getting better at it. In fact we are also told that women can master this better than men etc etc. The issue is our brains a sequential processors. We only process things one at a time (for more learning on this visit John Medina's Brain Rules website). We still need to repeat things to remember. We have not evolved our capability enough to cope with the demands of the instantaneous world.

The defining movement in the modern workplace is more, bigger, faster. More information than ever is available to us, and the speed of every transaction has increased exponentially, prompting a sense of permanent urgency. However, the need for understanding and adopting the social frameworks that are driving this important reformation are also providing an endless supply of distraction... some good and some not so good. Left unchanged and unregulated, these same technologies have the potential to swallow us. The relentless urgency that characterises most corporate cultures drives a level of performance but at the same time, undermines creativity, quality, engagement, thoughtful deliberation, critical reflection, and, ultimately, performance. We cannot hope to drive performance to higher levels if all we do is expect that the capacity of individuals is an endless bucket and that they will stay enthusiastic purely because they have a job. Employee engagement will become the number one critical measurement for organisations in the future and without it they risk perishing.

My advice to all corporate educators, training areas, learning and development departments etc.... stop, take the time to hover above your organisation and understand what is happening. The organisation and executive cannot wait for you but you need to know that a traditional approach will not work anymore. Performance support, e-learning, enabling collaboration, peer based education and new interpretive and analytical skill sets are rising to the top as key areas of discussion with thought leadership requirements but as always it will keep changing.

So, here I am, back ready to start offering and recording some cathartic thoughts. Hopeful that learning and development has an important role to play into the future of organisational development and performance.

Stiil standing on that precipice - and why I have not been blogging

2011-03-09T07:56:00.003+11:00

Followers of this blog will note that I have not blogged for some time.

There are two main reasons for this.

The first is that I have been rather busy in my new role as a head of learning and development for a top tier financial services organisation and with that comes a decision to read and observe to form opinion, direction and strategy.

My key learning from my new role is that one can never truly appreciate the complexity of a system until you assume the role of someone who can shape and mould that system.

The second reason is that I feel there is a significant shift happening in all forms of education (primary, tertiary and corporate) and I am the first to say that I don't know what the shift is as of yet.

However, for me it is important that when I write and reflect and exercise my cathartic rights (if you have read my blog for a while you will understand that it is first and foremost a form of catharsis for me) I feel I am writing about issues and learning that impact me most in the present moment.

I am afforded an opportunity to speak with a very many learned people in the L&D, KM&IM industries and there is genuine movement of thinking, strategy and systems and some of it may be for the better and some may not.

So pardon my infrequency as I continue to read, observe and listen but there is genuinely (for me at least) something rather unique happening and I hope to write about these observations and learning soon.....

Standing on the precipice

2010-12-29T08:33:00.005+11:00

What a year it has been! With the launch of the iPad and the emergence of a competitive tablet PC market, we are now seeing the convergence of our text books and information rich media, delivered on a device that allows for consumption in a traditional manner. The convergence of the Internet with our traditional viewing devices (television) all of a sudden brings education closer than ever before. (think education channels on YouTube)

The emergence of developing economies on the worlds stage is no coincidence and their hunger for education through media rich devices at low cost starts to ask questions of where education will transform to. Notice I do not question whether it will transform. It will transform either through innovative and proactive practice or through being forced to both economically and educationally, through competitive practice.

I entitled this piece standing on the precipice because I am looking out from the precipice and asking a lot of questions which I think will be answered and in turn will transform education practice and in time corporate learning and development. But in the meantime they remain questions for me.

Questions like:

If we face a future where more and more people have (easy access to) a laptop or a networked mobile device, what will it mean for the design of learning and the access to expertise?

What will it mean for institutionally advocated, mediated, protected and activated education?

How will educators use the new regime of tools and this moment to demonstrate active learning as much as their students?

How will learners adapt to more and more self directed learning functionality, multiple platforms of access, and multiple productive learning possibilities?

Will what is learned and new methods of learning alter as a consequence, becoming quicker but shallower, more instrumental and less reflective or will we be inspired to develop curricula that focus on critical thinking as a result?

Will the juggernaut that is social networking present possibilities that prompt greater reflexivity, a more sustained sociality in learning and concerns of the collective are seen as the dominant consideration in published expertise?

How can we use all of the new tools available to inspire our most traditional institutions of learning to change?

The corporate world should be investing in answering these questions as much as our educational institutions. It is the alignment of both sides of the learning continuum that is an imperative for success. Business needs learners with a critical reflectiveness that is key for knowledge work in the 21st century. Educational institutions need to look long and hard at the transformative shifts taking place and recognise the ability of students to move and adapt quickly and therefore design learning and qualifications that move just as quickly.

Standing on the precipice is exciting as you look over the edge to contemplate what might be. It is also bloody scary to contemplate what might go wrong should we not take advantage of all that is laid out before us.

2011 looks like it will be a watershed year for many reasons and at the moment I can only ask questions. The answers I seek may be sometime coming......

Why Knowledge Management and Learning need collaborative environments

2010-11-28T16:56:00.006+11:00

When I think of Knowledge management, I see it occurring on three levels within an organisation:

Organisationally:
this is knowledge that is critical to all staff throughout the organisation.This need is typically met by standard corporate intranet content, such as policies and procedures.
In the team or business unit:
this is information that is shared within a team, and is not of general interest to others within the organisation.
Personally:
this is knowledge, skills and expertise needed by an individual staff person. In technical terms, this is often facilitated by the use of social media, while skills are often gained through training, coaching or mentoring.

It is at the middle (team) level that collaborative environments can be of greatest benefit
when capturing and sharing knowledge. Many organisations are considering their options when it comes to this software but many have also supported the creation of team-level collaborative spaces using a range of technologies. (e.g. sharepoint, yammer etc)

These have proven to be most effective within communities of practice, and formalised teams and project groups. With collaborative technology evolving to be more effective, these tools are slowly becoming a key part of work practices. The challenge, however, is to ensure that collaborative environments to not promote a culture of knowledge hoarding. The danger is that teams or individuals will collect and store all their information within their own boundaries, in a format that is of little or no value to other staff in their organisation.

Again, this highlights the complimentary key to collaboration.... sharing. If you study and look at the early adopters of collaborative tools, where lots of work spaces were created, there was a large proliferation of individual areas, and few overall knowledge gathering or indexing tools working in tandem which meant that the knowledge could not be found. Thankfully, organisations are becoming more cognisant of the value of conversation and collaboration and are letting natural folksonomies occur to ensure knowledge remains contextual and available but also remains as a sense making tool for all.

Today's Knowledge management approaches must still be used to identify and distil the
key information within an organisation but it is the collaborative spaces that are providing more benefit for organisations as a whole. The ongoing development of collaborative spaces then need to be supported by appropriate policies and guidelines for users of the collaborative spaces.

Beyond these information and knowledge gathering activities, the collaborative spaces themselves should be placed within the context of the intranet as a whole, and classified according to a "living" taxonomy. From a learning perspective, it is clear that collaborative tools will grow in use within organisations, and the challenge for the learning community is to ensure that they promote effective knowledge sharing within an organisation, not create a hundred ‘silos’ of walled-off learning "classes" that produce value only for those who are participating.

elearning - Its not about the technology it is about culture and effectiveness

2010-10-04T09:41:00.004+11:00

Over on Linked In there has been an ongoing discussion about why elearning has/has not been successful in the Learning, Education and Training Professionals Group . After 6 months of posting and a lot of merry go round responses it is clear to me that learning professionals embrace an enormous bias towards their role and the value they feel they provide. This more than anything has me thinking whether people really understand the value of elearning done well.

It would appear that there is still a lack of understanding of the value that particular pieces of courseware provide. Most organisations have realised that off-the-shelf courseware is only effective in providing training on ‘standard legislative requirement’ - type of subjects, and not for conducting core "competitive adavantage business training. For the same reason that you can’t buy your organisational strategy off-the-shelf, you can’t use off-the-shelf courseware to implement core development for the organisation.

But the more critical issue is, the first-learn-then-work paradigm is out. We just don’t have enough time. We learn mostly when we work, and we work while we are still learning. Honestly - what do you do when you are trying out a new software? Do you search for a manual? Call 24/7 Helpdesk support? Or would you press F1 for help? In adult learning, cognitive goals are always application oriented’ we don’t have any 3- hour exam to sit for. Real life is our examination room! We need both explicit and tacit knowledge when we need it - on demand.

It is about learning to be more effective in today’s complex knowledge economy - an ecosystem that is continuously changing and evolving. Learning is not a system, which can be installed and be done with. Much is said of the learning organisation and what this means for organisational performance. Learning organisations = nimble and productive organisations. If elearning is done well it should produce this agility in employees. Workflow learning comes to mind!?

The primary aims, for effective use of elearning, for todays learning organisations should be:

Making explicit knowledge visible and accessible - on demand.
The computer’s memory is much more efficient than ours. They, not us, should handle complicated explicit knowledge. Not convinced? Try this -13 x 21=? Reaching out for your calculator - aren’t you? Well that’s what I mean. Memorisation is what you do in primary school, not in business.

Capture the complex changes of the business context as soon as possible.
Tacit knowledge is hard to gather; there is no single magic trick, which can perform the task. My experience tells me that blended formal and informal tacit knowledge gathering works best. However, elearning provides the best mode for timely dissemination of this knowledge.

Disseminate the knowledge seamlessly.
It’s not to make every bit of information available to all. Please don’t throw the drowning man another wave of information. Make relevant knowledge readily accessible for knowledge workers, knowledge that directly or indirectly affects their functional priorities. But ensure your instructional design caters for learning and assessment. You need to know it is working or not working to improve.

Implementing a culture of knowledge sharing and an atmosphere of continuous learning is admittedly, the most important and daunting task of all. Now some people will argue semantics in terms of deinition etc but that is exactly why the debate is happening over at the Linked In group. The paradigm that is corporate learning and development is shifting. I do not pretend to know what it will look like in the future but do know that it requires the fundamentals or the basics in place to be successful and elearning is dependant on an organisational culture that embraces learning as part of work.

As Peter Senge suggested:

"At the heart of a learning organization is a shift of mind –from seeing ourselves as separate from the world to connected to the world, from seeing problems as caused by someone or something ‘out there’ to seeing how our own actions create the problems we experience. A learning organization is a place where people are continually discovering how they create their reality. And how they can change it."

elearning needs to provide this for individuals and thus for organisations.

Complexity, knowledge work and why learning becomes difficult.

2010-08-19T20:17:00.006+10:00

Most managers are knowledge workers. If you produce information of various
kinds—documents, analyses, reports, art etc - you’re almost certainly displaying the traits of a knowledge worker. If you use software to perform your work, then you acquire the label with little argument from most pundits.

If you use the Internet in your work for more than a couple minutes per workday, it’s highly likely that you’re classified as a knowledge worker. And you certainly are if you use your experience and education in financial services, human resources and hundreds of other service industries to get things done. However, defining knowledge work as information seeking and application of knowledge, solving problems and creating taxonomies of types of information - is probably wrong and simply wont take us to a deeper understanding of how we can make work better.

But first there is the question of just how complex our working world has become. If you believe that modern technology is complex and that we are using more of it in a knowledge economy which was already complex, then it could be that we are in an cycle of increasing complexity!
Modern technology can be complex, but complexity by itself is neither good nor bad: it is confusion that is bad. Forget the complaints against complexity; instead, complain about confusion. We should complain about anything that makes us feel helpless or powerless in the face of forces that take away control and understanding.

The stunning reality is that we, as knowledge workers, often spend more than half our time doing work that has no formal description, no standards for best practices and no appropriate metrics. What’s more, that work is not formally or explicitly connected to specific outcomes,
whether they are services or products. Complexity is part of the world, but it shouldn't be puzzling: we can accept it if we believe that this is the way things must be. Just as the owner of a cluttered desk sees order in its structure, we will see order and reason in complexity once
we come to understand the underlying principles. But when that complexity is random and arbitrary, then we have reason to be annoyed.

So what does it mean for learning?

Critical thinking skills will be our staple for most knowledge workers but knowledge workers will need to ask some basic questions of themselves:

Am I trying to cram or memorise everything without really thinking about it?
Am I understanding, using ideas, thinking about the relationships between new concepts and things I already know?
Can I think analytically?
Am I working regularly or in a haphazard way?
Can I organise my time effectively?
Am I motivated?
Do I work well with others?

We as educators and learning professionals need learning environments that let individuals answer these questions. Without them, we will continue to develop industrial age learning for information age knowledge workers and it can only end in a down right complex screw up! This will not be easy. At the heart of complex environments is industrial age hierarchies. But that is for another day.....

The Importance of Context

2010-08-06T09:07:00.003+10:00

This week I have been taking the time to reflect on the importance of context as I prepare to deliver a keynote on the art of conversation next week. It forced me to consider what research was being done in this space and what group based research looked like in terms of researching communities. This is where most context is derived from. A community or social setting. It certainly presents an opportunity to critically reflect on the nature of learning and information use in larger scale communities and also the resultant diffusion of information and whether the context eradicates meaning or enhances it. Again, this word; "context" takes it’s place. Context for me is starting to become the key to the consideration of validity and use of information and knowledge particularly for modern day knowledge workers.

SO WHAT? This is the question that comes to mind and my challenge is to acknowledge that context is rarely thought of in the process and procedural ecology that is work. Managers would claim that it is however, there are many "war" stories, with evidence, that would state otherwise and this presents an opportunity to reflect on the types of context that we come across in our working lives

Here are the context’s worth considering as an information or learning professional:

Context as context of use: - what? Or where?
Context relating to problem
Context relating to individual situation
Context relating to state of mind
Context relating to social identity

Usage studies dominated a lot of my learning here and I was surprised, but not delighted that it was usually conducted by practitioners and not academics. It immediately places a context of “non-rigor” around the research and forces me to over analyse the findings and methodology on the basis of trust! Why do I have this context? Because in my experience, the nature of workplace research conducted by non-academics includes the boundary of time in the majority of cases and this forces them to reach conclusions that still have a "further research may reveal differences" clause in them. It erodes my trust in using the findings as part of what I do. It also impacts how I see context in terms of communities.

Trust. It would appear that this aspect in the literature is key and critical. Of course context is playing it’s role, but the community requires a level of trust to ensure that the sharing and use of information and learning is consistent with the ideals of that community. It is clear to me that the distinction between a community of practice and community of interest is again poignant in understanding information usage and the way they share knowledge and learn together. Communities of practice focus on the usage as it relates to a problem or task, whereas communities of interest focus on the use of information and learning for networking and motivational reasons.

One overriding sense I had here was that there was a diverse range of perspectives that could be applied here. In other words seen through a lens of an expert this could look particularly different. Examples are:

Marketing - Client group/market segment = Similar Needs/Wants
Cognitivism – similar knowledge structures, similar ASK
Sense-Making – similar situationality, similar gaps
Social Constructivists – similar social context –shared beliefs, ideas & social practices

One thing is for sure, a critical reflection on context will always force you to consider the humility with which you approach the design of information and education. You cannot be perfect and someones context will always be different to your intended learning outcomes, so the importance of context cannot be underestimated as it should keep us grounded in our profession.

Here is a piece of reading I recommend and reference:

Olsson, Michael (2004) 'Understanding Users: Context, Communication and Construction'. ALIA 2004 Biennial Conference Gold Coast Convention & Exhibition Centre, Queensland, Australia, 21 -24 September 2004. Available at http://conferences.alia.org.au/ alia2004/ pdfs/ olsson.m.paper.pdf

Why scan and skip is killing capability

2010-07-21T21:02:00.004+10:00

For some time now I have been ruminating over why I feel managers, knowledge workers and senior leaders struggle with communicating the basics to each other and why it is taking, even myself, a number of tries to get things right for our task masters.

I feel that the Internet is somewhat to blame and it may or may not get worse but I need to elaborate.

Because there is more information there is a need to find trusted sources to cut down on the time it takes to sort and classify the worth of that information. As you come across more sources, you look to the patterns and commonalities in the information you receive. This in itself starts to drag out a need to improve that skill.

However, just because we have more information, doesn’t necessarily mean that the information is better. In fact, it could even be argued that information, sometimes from known experts, is being dumbed-down due to our ever-shrinking attention spans which are spurred on by the ever pervading growth of immediacy in our work cultures. This constant bombardment of information, according to some psychologists and researchers, could even end up interfering with our sleep, sabotage our concentration levels and undermine our immune systems. (See American Psychology Association)

But the blame cannot merely be put on the use of the technology itself. The person does of course play a big role in how they choose to use, in an enhanced manner or in a redundant manner, what is available to them. The Internet is not some ecological energy that is just happening to us; it develops and evolves from our usage and ultimately caters to our demands. With a so many people spending hours on information seeking via Google and other search engines (and sometimes these aren’t particularly mind enriching - hello Facebook?), the person is ultimately the one in control but also the one feeding the algorithms and creating the demand.

Information technology is still a relatively new concept for some people. We are still in beginning stages of developing our own unique methods of sifting through the trash and the gourmet dishes (so to speak). But like anything that is designed to gain our attention, we will either be able to tune out what is extraneous and does not meet our needs or we will become hooked on what presents itself as the best of this powerful tool.

The issue for workplace learning is that information seeking behaviour is conditioned by the success or non success of finding what people want. And the nature of deep diving into a task and presenting both the good and the bad for consideration with appropriate solutions needs to compliment this new scan and skip culture of justifying the gut feel of a solution.

Take for instance the two contrasting cases of learning how to change the wheel on a car. Would you be more comfortable being directed by a mechanic who was with you all the time and instructing you or would you like to search the Internet for a self paced learning module or a set of instructions and try it by yourself?

The nature of what classifies expertise in both cases is judgment but one feels, simply through experience, that having the mechanic there would enhance the learning experience. Having both the self paced learning/instructions and the mechanic would enhance the experience even further?

When faced with the boundary of time how many learners afford themselves the critical thinking time and the deep dive into their subject matter? My experience tells me not many and the constant "search and find quickly" mentality of the modern day knowledge worker needs balancing quickly to ensure skills and capabilities are not lost. In addition, how many organisations are providing the time for workers to prove skills and capabilities based on well constructed opportunities?

The Internet may well be taking knowledge workers down a path that celebrates mediocrity unless there is an accompanying skills set that sets critical thinking as a prerequisite skill.

More ruminating to do.......

Twitter Advice

2010-06-29T08:31:00.003+10:00

I have recently been told by some of my learning colleagues that there is little or no value in twitter and they do not see a need to participate. My response is always that social media only "works" when you put the time, effort and care into it. It does not matter whether it is twitter, yammer, facebook or any other social media platform. My personal opinion is that you need to be anthropological in nature and participate to really evaluate it success or failure. You never asked for email but could you live without it now?

However, for those who are considering Twitter as a tool for use in learning then here are some of my top tips for using it on day by day basis:

Be very selective about the people you follow. Don't be afraid to unfollow if someone turns out to be a chatterer, tweets only about themselves, and generally does not contribute value.
Use #hashtags to associate your tweets with a topic, and to filter the tweet stream. You can search on the hash tag later.
Use Lists to organize what you see in the tweet stream. This is when you have a list of influencers, respected tweeters where you want all of their tweets to appear together.
Use a software tool (e.g., Seesmic Desktop, TweetDeck) to precisely control what gets your attention. These also let you aggregate other social media platforms like linked in, facebook, foursquare etc, into the one place so you do not need to hive off into a zillion different browser windows.
POST LINKS!!!! a tool like tweetdeck will shorten long links. The reason for posting links is to get around some limitations of the 140 character format, and because they add value for the audience who is following you.
Don't worry about the number of followers you have as this will take care of itself over time as you settle into your areas of interest.
Use group discussions (e.g., #lrnchat, #edchat, #learning) to plug into professional conversations, make contacts who become valuable resources, and to manage your time on line to the optimum exchanges.

I get a lot of value from Twitter as a personal learning tool, just by being organized, and I believe we as learning professionals can easily build it into the framework of a course. Yes, you do have to help people understand how to use it (see 1-7 above). If you don't like Twitter, if you think it's dumb, if you are offended by the thought that your learners may be criticizing you or not paying attention, well, that's your privilege and you don't need to bother with it any further. But I have to say that I think you are limiting a useful channel for learning by not taking an anthropological approach to embedding yourself first and evaluating from the inside.

This requires a lot of rumination of self....

Is collaboration too complex?

2010-06-28T08:40:00.003+10:00

I think this question has been on my mind more and more as I consider how I aggregate information and how I make sense of all of the information I receive. I wondered whether it was the action of collaborating that allowed me to "make sense" irrespective of who I was talking to. However I think collaboration at times is complex until I establish a true connection.
Right now I am at the point where I can state that I need a sense of "connectedness" in order to ensure I making sense of information and collaboration. To clarify this further:
The connections we participate in form our identities. We – you, I – know what our networks know in some form or another.
To quote George Siemens (a guru in connectivism in education):
"Every expression and viewpoint is a point of connection, every moment of transparent learning is a moment of teaching others and when we make our learning transparent, we become educators."
To me a community or group is defined by its connections – how people are connected to each other and to the world outside it. Relationships are tight-knit. Social groups, whatever the setting (business, school, volunteer etc) are all part of our social networks, providing a shaping influence on possible connections we draw between concepts, information sources, world views, and even other people.
To me collaboration is complex, if there is no connection. Once there is connectedness, the collaboration loses its complexity despite the system it exists in.
I need to continue to ruminate on this but in the complex systems we work and live in I firmly believe collaboration is not enough. The forming of connections is vital if education and learning is to take place.

Forget social media, learning has always been social....

2010-06-04T09:05:00.004+10:00

Over on linked there is a number of discussion forums talking about whether elearning is not as good as classroom and yadiyaditada the debate rages on. However they have been talking about aspects of learning which I think are vital. Especially on motivation. The empirical evidence on intrinsic and extrinsic motivation is probably the best available research in our field and it would appear that people are finally realising the importance of it. But they have also touched on the design of learning which forces us to look at instructional design and so many people still operate in instructivist/behaviourist paradigms that they cannot see the wood from the trees. They still feel interactivity with a person is paramount. I think it is but not because of some burgeoning necessity.
Now, if learning created is constructivist in nature then interactivity might be the last thing you need. Also if you have researched your target audience and the level of knowledge and expertise is such that you can take a hugely constructivist perspective on things then the outcomes will be personal to the learner and that is OK as far as I am concerned. That is why you designed it that way. For the learner to take from it what they will. (a simplification but you get what I mean)
I think I have said it before in this thread but learning and enlightenment is contextual and unless we understand the learners context, we cannot succeed as educators or designers irrespective of the medium.
Now when it comes to the workplace I am agnostic but believe in social interaction. Learning is actuated knowledge. It has to be evidenced in actions and behaviour to qualify as learning IMHO. It is the combination of formal and informal, elearning and classroom, webinar and seminar etc that provide opportunities for learning. There is NO significant difference when done well. However human interaction appeals to our social natures and that is what I think people need to understand. Learning is social in its nature. You need to interact with someone to actuate your knowledge. Sometimes that interaction is fleeting and sometimes extensive but you need to interact to validate and actuate. This can be irrespective of the medium too!
Maybe one day there will be a critical thinking component to all roles that asks them how they learn and if they are unsure, the first thing people do when they join an organisation is learn how to learn? Something to ruminate over........

By the Way.....

2010-05-16T12:21:00.003+10:00

As in a number of pieces of correspondence of late, I am letting you know I have 25 days left of my Masters and will then be officially finished my formal education.... for now!

I will then be getting back to blogging on a regular basis but until then.... sporadic commentary at best!

With love,

Wilko

Enough Said!!

2010-05-16T12:11:00.004+10:00

Over at Thinking Shift, one of my past lecturers and now a social media/thought exchange colleague, Kim, is embarking on a move to NZ.

Before leaving this country she gave a perspective on her career thus far which sums up a lot of what I have been talking about for the last 2 years and so it is lovely to be able to just re-post verbatim her thoughts:

organisations are artificial structures that throw together people who quite possibly would never wish to know each other and certainly would not want to mingle socially.
inspirational, visionary leadership is missing in contemporary organisations (at least the ones I’ve worked in).
There’s a lot of talk about values or codes of conduct but the actions of management show that they really don’t give a toss. I use the word management because leadership is something entirely different. Most organisations are stuffed full of managers who focus on anything but helping employees to develop. Managers try to beat the weaknesses out of employees by sending us off to courses or providing new objectives. They don’t always play to strengths or encourage hope within employees. By hope I mean inspiring someone to look at a problem or situation differently, helping to reframe goals and objectives, or promoting a positive mental attitude.
The baby boomers have a lot to answer for. Mostly boomers (and of course some Gen X) are those filling the roles of CEOs, COOs, CFOs and senior managers. They cling desperately to the command and control paradigm. There’s a lot of talk about collaboration, sharing, mentoring and so on but whilst the command and control mentality is predominant, organisations will remain soulless places.
Generation Y is not Generation Why? In the last two years or so, Gen Y have been close co-workers and I’ve found them to be what boomers are not – they are collaborative, inquiring, respectful, prepared to challenge things and ask “why is it this way?”. One Gen Y colleague is responsible for triggering off my current obsession for fantasy fiction. I’ve been impressed with their professionalism and real concern over societal issues. They can see that management is acting in a way that is contrary to espoused values but they’ll be braver I think than boomers or Gen X – when it gets too much, they will leave the organisation and seek one that is more authentic. They will not stick it out in an organisation for 20 years out of loyalty (and be given a gold watch for retirement and totter off). They will simply leave.
And from a KM perspective: it remains hard for KM practitioners to carry out their work. In my consulting work, I’ve been lucky to work in organisations that do “get it” but we’re still in a situation that when the going gets tough (ie the GFC), budgets get screwed and KM people may come under the spotlight. I’ve seen some KM colleagues retrenched or seen a KM initiative be dispensed with because there aren’t the resources for KM work. Again, I’ve been lucky that this hasn’t happened to me but I can see that organisations have a way to travel before they truly understand the amazing benefits KM can deliver.

Problem Solving - When will we wake up?

2010-03-19T11:29:00.003+11:00

“Habits of Mind are the characteristics of what intelligent people do when they are confronted with problems, the resolutions of which are not immediately apparent,” (Costa & Kallick)

Speaking yesterday at the 3rd annual blended learning conference, I was challenged by someone that said they believed that application of learning and knowledge management did not gain traction because of cognitive habits. Hence my Costa and Kallick quote to begin with. It got me thinking and ruminating......

The definition of a problem is any stimulus, question, task, phenomenon, or discrepancy, the explanation for which is not immediately known. Thus, we are interested in focusing on employee performance under those challenging conditions that demand strategic reasoning, insight, perseverance, creativity, and craftsmanship to resolve a complex problem.

Not only are we interested in how much stuff employees don't know, but also in knowing how to behave when they don't know. Habits of Mind are performed in response to those questions and problems the answers to which are NOT immediately known. We are interested in observing how employees produce knowledge rather than how they merely reproduce knowledge. The critical attribute of intelligent human beings is not only having information, but also knowing how to act on it.

Are your employees stuck in a habit of mind? Do they rely on reproducing knowledge rather than building it? And if they reproduce is this an indicator that they lack the skills to create/produce new knowledge? or merely a habit of mind?

Well worth ruminating over........

Now we are talking!!!!

2010-01-20T08:10:00.003+11:00

Over on linked in the eLearning Guild group have a question which was posed by James Jones and I re-produce it here:

"Do we need to move from instructional design to experience design?
There are many valuable insights in the world of instructional design. However there is a whole design world outside eLearning. Are you familiar with the work of organizations such as IDEO and the broader world of UX and design thinking? As I explore these more, I think there are several major gaps in common approaches to eLearning Design:
- Insufficient research into the lifeworld of the learner. This includes an understanding of other learning resources beside the course that are available to the learner, the social context of the learner (which social software is beginning to make more visible) and the environment in which the course is used.
- A focus on delivering a product (e.g. an eLearning course) rather than managing a learning experience.
- An unwillingness to be judged on results that truly matter - i.e. improved organizational outcomes rather than units completed, test scores or subjective ratings. Are these judgments too harsh?"

This raises a number of factors which I have talked about for some time now and it is good to see some robust discussion happening on this.

I posited some time ago that instructional design was dying in its current form and I still believe that because of the influence of social media and greater forms/views of individual sense making were developing; that new interaction, micro-learning and self publishing have changed the way we need to design learning; and that the recognition of organisations, industries and belief systems as ecology's would lead to new insights for the considerations of what and how we deliver it.

For the record, the process of instructional design has not changed that much. If we use ADDIE as an example I still think we need to have analysis, we still need to design, we will always develop and implement (Try not having a learning function in an organisation and see how long you last) and of course we will still need to evaluate to understand the outcomes.

But what happens in each of these stages has changed. To truly understand we need to take all of the shifts and direct them along an experience focus that allows for self reflection and self publishing of the learning. We also need to integrate learning with work as part of the learner experience.

Overall accountability of learning design has moved from being activity based to performance improvement based and that has been recognised in many organisations, and partly addressed by the introduction of “performance consultants” but, although it is recognised that performance consulting is becoming a key ingredient for high impact learning organisations, my experience says that it has not been universally accepted.

Trainers/facilitators/designers still struggle with the role title as it does not “fit” within a learning function. I have also witnessed incumbents placed in a business unit, preserving their “training terminology/speak” including training needs analysis thinking rather than broader needs assessment thinking and/or activity (throughput) thinking and are not sufficiently versed and/or prepared to operate with or within the business environment where business metrics are marshalled and bottom line performance is the driver. In other words all learning design should happen from "within" not from the outside.

Learning or instructional designed has moved and it should turn ideas into action, be contribution to knowledge, creating solutions from a full range of performance/experience interventions, and all this with courage and the fortitude to take the profession to the next level.

Enough ruminating for now......

Merry Christmas

2009-12-23T14:54:00.003+11:00

Hello one and all,

Thank you for your emails asking when I will write again.

Hopefully, the new year will bring some wonderful opportunities to resume my blog writing. I also hope you have been picking up my micro blogging feeds from twitter and it has provided an opportunity for further research and rumination!

I will speaking at conferences in Melbourne and Sydney in both February and March respectively and hope to see you there. I will post details in the new year. Until then Have a wonderful Christmas and I hope the New Year brings everything that you have hoped for.

Until then...... Buon Natale, Felice Navidad and Beers and Cheers.

Ross Dawson Wisdom and a rumination...

2009-10-19T08:32:00.003+11:00

In this country we are blessed to have some very smart people who have a gift of being able to ensure they remain topical relevant and future sighted and Ross Dawson is one of these people.

Over on his blog Ross has looked at the on-line world of 2016 and the following are some of his insights:

Ross’s forecasts for 2016 include:

Many people will wear video glasses as they commute and walk around, experiencing new forms of television, news updates, and detailed information about the world around them and people they meet.
‘Lifestreaming’ will be commonplace, in which we capture, store and share on social networks almost continuous videos, photos, sounds and conversations from our everyday lives.
We will have natural telephone conversations with computers, with almost all call centre staff replaced by automated systems.
Public measures of individual reputation will guide who we hire, do business with, and go on dates with.
Over 40% of adults will work independently rather than as company employees, many providing services to organisations all over the world instead of commuting to an office every day.
A next generation of ‘thought interfaces’ will allow us to control our computers just by thinking. While the technology will still be relatively basic, we will have begun to merge machines and humans.

As a historical reflection, Ross’s second book, Living Networks, published in 2002, opened with a description of corporate blogging, and discussed the idea of social networks years before MySpace or Facebook existed, as well as the rise of “micro-messages,” anticipating the Twitter phenomenon.

Whilst I think Ross is again on the money there are two things that I think are being discounted in his assessment . One is an ever growing disharmony in the civil liberties area which is dead set against the use of published personal information for anything except the individual. This will be influential and with pressure on governments leading to inevitable on-line regulation. I am not advocating this but am also a realist and it is only a matter of time IMHO.

The second thing is automated response systems. Believe it or not I class this in the same field as automation of flight systems in aircraft. Currently the Airbus class of jets is under a huge cloud of doubt as experts seek to understand how to ensure pilots can take back full control of a jet when automated flight systems fail. This is thought to be a possibility in the Air France catastrophes.

Companies who have automated response systems in call centres would suffer major damage if the system were to fail and there were not sufficient people to answer calls for customer service requirements. With the anticipated patience of a consumer in 2016 almost next to zero, this is something I think is still something that needs to be taken into account.

Risk management will move into another dimension clearly linked to on-time, up-time 99.99% of the time to ensure consumer satisfaction.

Now what are the learning ramifications here? More informal learning and performance support will be the staple for this and me thinks it would be scenario based delivered through my video glasses whilst I "think" about adding it to my academic record in my publicly available LMS of choice linked to my preferred industries.

Lots of ruminating to be done.......

2009-10-18T09:22:00.002+11:00

How to Take Advantage of the Social Aspects of Online Learning

from wikiHow - The How to Manual That You Can Edit

Online learning is great, but can be isolating at times. However, there are ways to learn over the internet and enhance your social network. Here are some of the best methods to employ as an e-learner.

Steps

Look for courses that involve group learning. If you have to maintain contact with fellow students in order to complete assignments, you’re more likely to make the effort to do so frequently. Make sure you get the phone numbers of some of your classmates so that you’re not left relying on email or instant messaging to speak to someone. When it comes to connecting, you’d be surprised how important it is to hear an actual voice once in a while.
Take advantage of the diversity offered in an online environment. Find out where your fellow classmates are from. You might find some friends with a drastically different point of view if you take the time to get to know some of the other students. One of the great things about online learning is its accessibility – you might find people from different countries, who speak different languages, or simply live a different type of lifestyle.
Connect with your instructor if possible. Most online instructors are trained specifically in online learning techniques and will be able to help you not only succeed in your course, but in the online environment in general. As well, the more people you’re directly in contact with the less you’ll feel separated from the school experience.
Join an online learners’ community or forum. You’re not limited to fellow classmates, or even students involved in a similar course of study. Whether you’re working towards a degree, taking an interest course, or upgrading your career skills, you’ll be experiencing situations similar to others who are taking the time to learn online. Members of a forum may not be able to help you with homework questions, but they can certainly empathize with what you’re going through.
Get out! You’re incredibly busy right now, with studying, work, family and all the everyday things that crop up. Make sure that you don’t end up scheduling yourself to oblivion, and leave yourself some time to get out and socialize. Meet with some friends, join a gym, even go for a walk at your local dog park and chat with the regulars. Just make sure that you’re not spending every waking moment staring at a computer.

Tips

Online learning is great for those who prefer to study independently, or who are working full time or caring for children and don’t have the time or opportunity to attend a campus school.
The great thing about online learning is the flexibility: depending on the type of course you take, most e-learners will have the opportunity to personalize their program and work at the speed that suits them best

Warnings

Students can be left feeling unsupported and unconnected – despite their constant online access to school facilities.

Article provided by wikiHow, a wiki how-to manual. Please edit this article and find author credits at the original wikiHow article on How to Take Advantage of the Social Aspects of Online Learning. All content on wikiHow can be shared under a Creative Commons license.

Speaking Engagements

2009-10-15T09:34:00.002+11:00

Just a short post to let you know that I will be speaking at a number of conferences in the near future. Details below:

Integrated Learning Strategies Conference:
http://liquidlearning.com.au/llg08/October/
I will be speaking on Leveraging Communities of Practice and Social Media

The Knowledge Management & People Development Conference
http://tonkincorporation.com/?m=5&id=349&t=6
I will be speaking on Social media and knowledge management: a marriage made in heaven or hell?

Hope to see some of you there!

Rob

Why is video soooo popular? Because it now works....

2009-09-30T07:58:00.005+10:00

I have been reflecting on my long journey of late, through the world of elearning and the other day had a conversation about online video and how, when I was a young instructional designer, talking head video was a real no-no for CBT programs as the learners attention could not be maintained (for want of a number of other arguements)

But now video is a wonderful social element that brings alive a documented opinion that before was only available in text or audio.

Several years ago, video streaming was very limited due to the slow dial-up connections and the occasional cable most people were running. Nowadays, broadband Internet access is very common and many people have even incredibly fast connections to the Internet. Now, with these fast Internet connections, people can watch videos from services like YouTube, Hulu, Vimeo, and Metacafe with ease. If we were still running dial-upit would not be possible.

Aside from streaming TV shows, movies, and homemade social videos, people create videos for learning that either run in a channel or on their main page to get the point across of a prescribed learning situation or opinion they have. Again, this is only possible because Internet speeds have become so fast. Lets face it, we hardly even notice video ads anymore.

It would appear that blended learning environments can only prosper from the use of video.

For example, using videos is one of effective ways to introduce particular language points that need to be practised in classroom when teaching languages. A teacher can stress out on pronunciation. Using videos will facilitate better understanding and recognition of English sound, intonation, and stress pattern. A teacher can make students practice on using certain grammar rules, such as past tense, present continuous, and perfect.

In elearning I think there are a number of usages and considerations such as:

Vignettes of experts providing advice/tips as it relates to the course’s content. Most usually place the video in a box in the corner with a play button. Once the user reads the content they can then “hear from as expert.” FYI: I want the video to add to the content, not overshadow it.
Narration - a talking head can narrate each page. Personally, I am still not a big fan of this. It annoys me and I end up turning the sound off. Giving users the option of turning the sound off and moving forward without listening the entire narration is good practice. You can also show a narrator’s full body imposed over the page and have them walking about the screen and pointing out specific elements of the content using green screening. Effective but costly.
Demonstrations of psycho-motor activities. For example, assembling a widget. Tying a complex knot etc
Showing scenarios. For example, how customer service is executed properly or perhaps how it is not executed properly. Creating stopping points where the user makes decisions and the video branches dependent upon the user’s choices adds wonderful interactive choices. That is a lot of work on your end, but if done right it enhances the instructional design.
Simulations - adding a moving setting or background to your simulations, for example, the interior of a store, building or factory adds an element of realism, like customers coming and going, machines moving, etc.

But by far and away one of the most wonderful advents of our time is the amount of content that is now free and available through some of the most hallowed learning institutions of our times and the fact that it will peak peoples interest in learning is both commendable and sensible as the search for new skills and capabilities begins in earnest for the next century.

Why is video popular... it works!

Here are some of my favourite channels from universities in the USA:

University Channels
http://www.youtube.com/user/Harvard
http://www.youtube.com/user/stanforduniversity
http://www.youtube.com/user/uctelevision
http://www.youtube.com/user/ncstate
http://www.youtube.com/user/carnegiemellonu
http://www.youtube.com/user/georgiatech
http://www.youtube.com/user/UniversityofMinn
http://www.youtube.com/user/pennstate
http://www.youtube.com/user/wesleyan
http://www.hbs.edu/entrepreneurs/

2009-09-14T10:20:00.002+10:00

How to Be Happy

from wikiHow - The How to Manual That You Can Edit

So happiness - isn't that the thing that all of us strive to find and keep? Nobody is happy all of the time, but some people are definitely more fulfilled than others. Studies on what makes people happy reveal that it doesn't have much to do with material goods or high achievement; it seems to whittle down to your outlook on life, and the quality of your relationships with the people around you.

Steps

Be optimistic. In the 1970s, researchers followed people who'd won the lottery and found that a year after they'd hit the jackpot, they were no happier than the people who didn't. They called it hedonic adaptation, which suggests that we each have a baseline level of happiness. No matter what happens, good or bad, the effect on our happiness is only temporary and we tend to rebound to our baseline level. Some people have a higher baseline happiness level than others, and that can be attributed in part to genetics, but it's also largely influenced by how you think.[1] So while the remainder of this article will help boost your happiness, only improving your attitude towards life will increase your happiness permanently. Here are some excellent starting points for doing that:
Follow your gut. In one study, two groups of people were asked to pick out a poster to take home. One group was asked to analyze their decision carefully, weighing the pros and cons, and the other group was told to listen to their gut. Two weeks later, the group that followed their gut was happier with their posters than the group that analyzed their decisions.[2] Now, some of our decisions are more crucial than picking out posters, but by the time you're poring over your choice, the options you're weighing are probably very similar, and the difference will only temporarily affect your happiness. So next time you have a decision to make, and you're down to two or three options, just pick the one that feels right, and go with it.
- How to Follow Your Intuition
- How to Stop Hesitating
Make enough money to meet your basic needs: food, shelter, and clothing. In the US, that magic number is $40,000 a year. Any money you make beyond that will have negligible effects on your happiness. Remember the lottery winners mentioned earlier? Oodles of money didn't make them any happier, and it won't make you any happier. Once you make enough money to support your basic needs, your happiness is not significantly affected by how much money you make, but by your level of optimism.[3]
- Your comfort may increase with your salary, but comfort isn't what makes people happy. It makes people bored. That's why it's important to push beyond your comfort zone to fuel your growth as a person.
- Don't assume you're the exception, as in "Sure they didn't use their lottery money wisely, but if I won it, I'm spend it differently, and it'd definitely make me happier." Part of the reason many people are unhappy is because they don't think research-based advice about happiness applies to them, and they continue chasing more money and achievement and material goods in vain.[4]
Stay close to friends and family. Or move to where other members are- so you can see them more. We live in a mobile society, where people follow jobs around the country and sometimes around the world. We do this because we think increases in salary will make us happier, but the fact is that our relationships with our friends and family have a far greater impact on our happiness than our jobs do. So next time you think about relocating, consider that you'd need a salary increase of over $100,000 USD to compensate for the loss of happiness you'd have from moving away from your friends and family.[5] But if your relationships with your family and friends are unhealthy or nonexistent, and you are bent on moving, choose a location where you'll be making about the same amount of money as everyone else; according to research, people feel more financially secure (and happier) when they're on similar financial footing as the people around them, regardless of what that footing is.[6]
Stop expecting your job to make you happy. Many people expect the right job or the right career to dramatically change their level of happiness, but happiness research makes it clear that your level of optimism and the quality of your relationships eclipse the satisfaction you gain from your job.[7] If you have a positive outlook, you'll make the best of any job, and if you have good relationships with people, you won't depend on your job to give your life a greater sense of meaning. You'll find it in your interactions with the people you care about. Now that doesn't mean you shouldn't aspire towards a job that'll make you happier; it means you should understand that the capacity of your job to make you happy is quite small in comparison to your outlook on life and your relationships with people.
Smile. Science suggests that when you smile, whether you feel happy or not, your mood will be elevated.[8] Moreover, studies show that happiness is contagious.[9] With this in mind, consider the implications for happiness that the very act of smiling at another in passing has on not only our psyche, but that of the larger good. More importantly, when we smile at another, it shouldn't be with the expectation of having a smile in return. Sometimes the people we are smiling at who don't return the gesture may be the ones who need the smile the most. Just the act of doing something positive -- sharing a smile -- might be enough to send our neurochemicals in the right direction, regardless of the response.
Practice Acts of Kindness. Acts of kindness done onto others have great potential to create positive feelings and emotions in those involved. When we do a kind act to another, it provides us with a the pleasure of having accomplished an act for the greater good. Even the smallest acts of kindness have implications for the immediate outcome of greater happiness, and if practiced liberally, have the potential to create a more optimistic and fulfilling future.

Tips

Just because something seems to make other people happy doesn't mean that it really does. People are very good at pretending they're happy, especially when they've invested so much into the things that are supposed to make them happy; it's hard to admit that you've been placing all your eggs in the wrong basket.

Warnings

Happy people aren't happy all the time. Everyone has times when they feel sad, frustrated, guilty, angry and so on. Happy people are just better at bouncing back to a state of contentedness. We may all feel negative at some moment in our lives, but try to bounce back and live in the moment, and be content with everything you do.
Some people may question why you are always happy/complain about you always being happy.

Related wikiHows

Sources and Citations

↑ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-science-of-lasting-ha&page=1

↑ The Social Animal by Elliot Aronson

↑ http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2004/08/01/you-only-need-40000-to-be-happy/

↑ http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2008/01/23/test-yourself-to-find-what-you-need-to-be-happier/

↑ http://www.powdthavee.co.uk/resources/valuing_social_relationships_15.04.pdf

↑ http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2009/05/21/how-to-decide-where-to-live-2/

↑ http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2007/01/16/the-connection-between-a-good-job-and-happiness-is-overrated/

↑ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facial_feedback_hypothesis

↑ http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,462265,00.html

Article provided by wikiHow, a wiki how-to manual. Please edit this article and find author credits at the original wikiHow article on How to Be Happy. All content on wikiHow can be shared under a Creative Commons license.

Support your learning efforts

2009-08-04T13:09:00.004+10:00

Much has been made of how we follow up learning and development efforts and how we can facilitate knowledge transfer and improve the take up of skills and knowledge in the workplace. I have recently been using Communities of Practice (CoPs) to foster take up of these skills when individuals attend formal education. They provide a network of informed and enthusiastic individuals who truly believe in the subject matter and genuinely want to foster adoption of skills and capability improvement.

Taking this to the next level is my passion and these CoPs are perfectly positioned to support knowledge management efforts. They are continuously capturing and sharing relevant knowledge with each other. Often, though, the knowledge captured is not directed towards a business objective and isn’t codified or validated in any formal capacity. Nor is the knowledge stored in a format that enables easy retrieval.

Leveraging these CoPs to further KM objectives by stepping back and letting the community capture and share based on effective learning transfer seems to be providing a common platform of sharing! Because the sharing is captured around a learning event, the shared objects/knowledge directly maps to business goals and represents what individuals "need to know" to be more successful in their role. This in turn creates impacts at the marketplace and organizational level.

After the learning program has completed, CoPs should be approached to more formally capture and roll out subsequent organizational leaning's as encountered through the use of a wiki, social media or informal networks. If there aren’t any communities of practice naturally aligned to the learning outcomes and skill sets, then new ones could be organized. Some large organizations with a history of knowledge management successes structure their communities of practice to do this for them on a regular basis. However, these aren’t always successful initiatives because the CoPs have a hard time striking the right balance between knowledge explorations and being focused on the learning goals.

Maybe it is time that we not only concentrate on life long learning but also on community fostered learning that enables collaboration and support that enhances skills transfer. Worth ruminating over? Me thinks so...........

Why Instructional Design is dying.........

2009-07-03T09:06:00.007+10:00

Apologies for the long time between posts. Don't forget to follow me on twitter as I am constantly micro blogging but am using my blog now for lengthy thought provoking posts!

Let me qualify this by first pointing out that I am only referring to the corporate learning ecology here and not the academic ecology.

There are two major aspects to this that I am now focusing on as I see it being critical to the future of effective learning.

Firstly, it is important for L&D professionals to have had some business experience. There are 3 transient levels that impact learners and designers in particular need to take these into account. Firstly an understanding of the industry ecology that the company works in is imperative. The global forces and the industrial forces at work are constantly forcing companies to evaluate and re-evaluate their strategic and operational directions. A 5 year plan is aspirational at best in today's fast moving world. The next layer down is the business context and this is subject to the cultural motives of the organisation and the resilience of the various units that make up the business. As ecological forces move in and force change, so does the leadership and management of the various organisations that are impacted by the ecological forces and they start to create new or revised contexts for individuals to cope with. Lastly the inner core is people and their belief systems. I focus on belief systems because at the end of the day, most of what we produce as learning designers, is designed to impact that belief system. That's why behaviour changes. Because an individual recognises something as important to them and makes that decision for change. (I think most people can relate to this.)

So these forces that are constantly at work and bi-directional in their influence look something like this:

Secondly, the advent of social media and its capacity for mobile delivery forces the corporate learning function to recognise that the future design of learning materials will be informal and performance oriented. Performance support has always been talked about as the next big thing but we have consistently focused in the past on integrating this as task oriented learning at the point in time that the task needs to be achieved. The problem is that we buried it in systems to be called up by an F1 key or click on a help function. Now, I can tweet, link in, facebook, friend feed my vast array of contacts to find my answers. And lets face it, the answer will always be aligned to my beliefs and in a lot of cases will be contextual.

Instructional design of formal learning materials is dying because of the aforementioned and I am sure a host of other reasons. This is not to say that it is not needed. I still believe that good, robust, well researched ID produces enhanced learning outcomes. It is just that organisational contexts are now moving too fast to support this unless there is rapid design that is effective!

Re-usable learning objects I hear you say........... time to ruminate again.

Do yourself a favour..................

2009-06-14T16:16:00.002+10:00

You need to read this:

"Learning to learn is a diffuse and complex concept, with different aspects emphasised in different contexts. It is a global phenomenon with similar ideas about learning to learn articulated around the globe. The common features associated with the idea are those of lifelong learning to ensure economic competitiveness, as well as expressing some dissatisfaction with aspects of the current education system in terms of its appropriateness for contemporary society and culture."

It is an excerpt from a paper written by Professor Steven Higgins, Durham University (May 2009) and the papaer can be found here.

What resonates with me about this paper is that the acknowledgement of context looks to play a significant part in the understanding of motivation to learn. I have formed a view that ecology, context and belief systems need alignment for an individual to become cognisant of the need to invest time in their won learning and I will write more on this in the future.

In the meantime enjoy this article from Steven Higgins.....

Heroes of learning # 2

2009-06-10T21:03:00.002+10:00

David Merrill.

M. David Merrill was listed among the most productive Educational Psychologists (Gordon, et al, Educational Researcher , Aug/Sep1984), among the most frequently cited authors in the computer-based instruction literature (Wedman, Journal of Computer-Based Instruction, Summer 1987), ranked among the most influential people in the field of Instructional Technology (Moore & Braden, Performance & Instruction, March 1988.).

Although famous for his component display theory, I prefer to focus on the following which he collaborated on with Charles Regulith. I will cover CDT at a later date. In focus in this post is:

First principles of instruction:

Task-centered principle

Learning is promoted when instruction is in the context of whole real-world tasks.
Learning is promoted when learners are engaged in a task-centered instructional strategy involving a progression of whole real-world tasks.

Activation principle

Learning is promoted when learners activate relevant cognitive structures by being directed to recall, describe or demonstrate relevant prior knowledge or experience.
Activation is enhanced when learners recall or acquire a structure for organizing the new knowledge, when this structure is the basis for guidance during demonstration, is the basis for coaching during application, and is a basis for reflection during integration.

Demonstration principle

Learning is promoted when learners observe a demonstration of the skills to be learned that is consistent with the type of content being taught.
Demonstrations are enhanced when learners are guided to relate general information or an organizing structure to specific instances.
Demonstrations are enhanced when learners observe media that is relevant to the content and appropriately used.

Application principle

Learning is promoted when learners engage in application of their newly acquired knowledge or skill that is consistent with the type of content being taught.
Application is effective only when learners receive intrinsic or corrective feedback.
Application is enhanced when learners are coached and when this coaching is gradually withdrawn for each subsequent task.
Application is enhanced when learners observe media that is appropriately used.

Integration principle

Learning is promoted when learners integrate their new knowledge into their everyday life by being directed to reflect-on, discuss, or defend their new knowledge or skill.
Integration is enhanced when learners create, invent, or explore personal ways to use their new knowledge or skill.
Integration is enhanced when learners publicly demonstrate their new knowledge or skill.

Tell me this does not make sense and that instructional designers should not be using this and I will immediately counter with a resounding "you do not know what you are talking about!". Some of our back to basics approach should allow for deep dives into the skill and competence required and we have to take a big breath and rediscover the strength of sound instructional science.

Clive on learning.... as always

2009-06-10T21:01:00.003+10:00

I so agree with this from Clive Shepherd. The less said the better.

But a better question is how do we ensure we have both, compliance and competence!

Worth ruminating over me thinks.

Heroes of Learning # 1 - Robert Gagne

2009-05-18T10:58:00.004+10:00

Today, to accompany my back to basics series I am commencing something I have wanted to do for a while; my heroes of learning, i.e. those theorists who still have an impact on how I design learning that I know will have an impact on my final product. Today's hero is Robert >Gagne and his "Conditions of Learning" theory.

His theory posits several different types or levels of learning. The significance of these is that each different type requires different types of instruction.

>Gagne identifies five major categories of learning:

verbal information,
intellectual skills,
cognitive strategies,
motor skills and
attitudes.

In addition, the theory lists and describes nine instructional events and corresponding cognitive processes:

gaining attention (reception)
informing learners of the objective (expectancy)
stimulating recall of prior learning (retrieval)
presenting the stimulus (selective perception)
providing learning guidance (semantic encoding)
eliciting performance (responding)
providing feedback (reinforcement)
assessing performance (retrieval)
enhancing retention and transfer (generalization).

These events should satisfy or provide the necessary conditions for learning and serve as the basis for designing instruction and selecting appropriate media (>Gagne, Briggs & Wager, 1992).

The reason I have started with >Gagne is that over my 20 years in this field, his theory has served me time an again whether the work has been minor or major or whether there has been time constraints or not.

IMHO, "Conditions of Learning" returns, in the most part, positive outcomes for the learning that one has to design.

If you have not experienced Gagne's work please take the time to do so. You will be justly rewarded.

TED - Wonderful

2009-05-18T09:32:00.005+10:00

If you have not listened to a TED video you are missing out on something purely wonderful. These commandments have been produced as a guide when presenting at TED.

Lots to admire, learn from and adhere to for those in learning and development:

Thou Shalt Not Simply Trot Out thy Usual Shtick.
Thou Shalt Dream a Great Dream, or Show Forth a Wondrous New Thing, Or Share Something Thou Hast Never Shared Before.
Thou Shalt Reveal thy Curiosity and Thy Passion.
Thou Shalt Tell a Story.
Thou Shalt Freely Comment on the Utterances of Other Speakers for the Sake of Blessed Connection and Exquisite Controversy.
Thou Shalt Not Flaunt thine Ego. Be Thou Vulnerable. Speak of thy Failure as well as thy Success.
Thou Shalt Not Sell from the Stage: Neither thy Company, thy Goods, thy Writings, nor thy Desperate need for Funding; Lest Thou be Cast Aside into Outer Darkness.
Thou Shalt Remember all the while: Laughter is Good.
Thou Shalt Not Read thy Speech.
Thou Shalt Not Steal the Time of Them that Follow Thee

Credit to Tim Longhurst for his post

A learning resource for you + twitter Vs blogging

2009-05-18T09:02:00.003+10:00

Recently I have been very busy on twitter and have been comparing the opportunities that the medium presents compared to my blog postings and my RSS reader.

As a firmly ensconced Google advocate I have been trying to understand whether there are advantages or disadvantages to each or either! I am happy to say that again, (surprise surprise) that it is purely a horses for courses approach that is required.

Twitter provides instantaneous thoughts and re-direction to awesome commentary and learning that I definitely enjoy. Of course it is laced with what people have for breakfast or what they are doing socially but that in itself is a window into understanding the person you have chosen to follow.

Blogs on the other hand are a form of self publishing and right now are maturing to being just that, an alternative to mainstream media and an opportunity for self publishing your expertise and sharing with a winder community. The readership of blogs is similar to newspapers in that it is chosen, read for as long as it makes sense and is relevant and is then left behind for other resources.

Both a learning resources for you and surprisingly can also duplicate content very easily depending on what blogs you are subscribed to or what people you are following on Twitter.

This site http://tinyurl.com/ph5sjz came to me via both. (an excellent resource BTW and is available via my de.lic.ious site Wilko64.

Twitter Vs Blogging? Each to their own and each has a viable purpose.....

Back to Basics # 4 - Observation Methods

2009-04-28T15:06:00.003+10:00

A quick one in my back to basics series.

Someone asked me last week at a presentations evening what my top list of things to do would be if I had to create e-Learning on process driven tasks and efficiency.

I stated that it would depend on context but the one thing I was sure I would do, based on past experience, is observe good and bad examples of what I would be required to develop the learning on. And so, here is my list of observation methods that should be considered when developing learning on process/task efficiency:

Cognitive Task Analysis – Conversations with employees regarding the cognitive reasoning approach to their job tasks. Questions focus on problem solving and the mental structuring of tasks.
Competency Assessment – Identify examples of exemplary performance and use these as a basis for preparing instruction for employees. The focus is on ideal performance rather than considering individual departmental issues.
Direct Observation of Work – First hand observation of employee performance. Observers watch what is happening in the employee's environment and how employees move through their job process
Examine Existing Personnel Data – Gathering employee data from Human Resources files regarding employee education level, certifications, licenses, previous work experience, hobby, interests, awards, etc.
Force Field Analysis – Identifying the “pros” and “cons” of behaviors, skills and attitudes regarding a defined event or process. The name provokes a visual image of resistance. Where there is a force (or influence) exerted on an issue or behavior, there exists a counter- force (or equal influence).
Group Behavior Observation – The observation of group activity. Behaviors are measured regarding the frequency of desired behaviors within a group within a prescribed unit of time.
Indirect Examination of Performance or Productivity Measures – The examination of productivity records, quality control rejects, scrap, work samples, etc.
Task Analysis – The direct observation of employee tasks required to complete a specific job or assignment. The observation is focused on the steps or tasks involved in a process. These steps are often timed.

Of course all of these would need more research based on your context and circumstance but if it helps...... great!

Heterachy - Worth Ruminating Over.......

2009-04-28T13:22:00.009+10:00

Ross Dawson has made available a wonderful article from the Journal of People and Strategy. It is part of their perspective series where and invited author publishes a paper, thought or idea and then invited peers are comment, agree, reject or philosiphise over the authors perspective and writing.

The article deals with an arguement for Heterachy as essential for understanding organisations and the impacts that networks have had in these organisations. This is in line with my thinking on Ecologies, Context and Beliefs which I believe also impact the heterarchy of an organisation.

Stephenson maintains " Heterarchies are collaborative endeavors whereby organizations are networked together. Organizations are depicted as yellow, layered silos and the collective and combined activity of the network is the blue network shown in the middle." See diagram.

My take on this is to understand the complexities of our fuedal management system (heirachy) and then seek to understand why, social networking software and the resultant connection it inspires, continues to erode these heirachies based on exposure, overlaps, multiplicity, divergence, sense-making and funnily enough, shared outcomes!

I speak about the software or the tool because it has engendered/enhanced the connection of individuals and continues to make this world a smaller connected place and on this basis, the ruthlessness being applied by society to corporate openness and transparency, is bringing the once protectionist and fuedal systems undone (re: CEO salaries, financial accountability, re-regulation, pay for performance etc.

This not merely theory IMHO, but theory into practice. As some would know I am completing my masters in KM and Business Information studies and this has fascinated me from day one.

How does it impact us as L&D professionals? By understanding the Heterarchy that exists in your organisation, you open up an opportunity for a viral approach to learning. Of course the learning has to be well structured thought out and effective, but you create the viral demand on the basis that you understand the silos in each area of the busines but you also understand how the silos are connected. That the learning has common benefit for each of the learners in the heterarchy is a no brainer but certainly this concept of heterarchy is well worth considering as part of the Learning and Development professionals business assessment.

Well worth ruminating over.....

(Many thanks to my colleague Ryan Tracey for the posts and tweets on this subject)

Sorry for the absence - What global financial crisis?

2009-04-14T21:47:00.003+10:00

Apologies for having been off the air. I have been giving twitter one hell of a shake and it is paying some handsome dividends in terms of extending and fortifying the connectedness I crave! You can follow me at @wilko64.

Is it just me or does the global hissy fit sound more and more like a ruse for not making monolithic profits instead of reasonable ones? Check this out:

Of the fortune 500 companies that filled the top spots in 2008 only 54 of them made a loss. The lowest profit recorded by any of them (other than those making a loss) was $27m USD. The lowest revenue recorded by any company was $4.6b USD.

Yes, I know it is about share price and the investment dollar that they represent, but companies are still viable and profits are still being made and many are lamenting the hard road they face in re-building a capitalist market that allows the profits of yester year.

Somehow we all need to stop and take a big breath and talk to our fellow shareholders and say some is enough, not more is enough.

Worth ruminating over me thinks.......

Back to Basics #3 - Selecting Development Tools

2009-03-20T13:40:00.002+11:00

OK. Another in my back to basics series but one I think is needed. If we are to believe that more and more companies will jump into eLearning to reduce costs (another arguement I will try and deal with later) then having a rigorous process behind how we select development tools is very important. Do we use our own development tools nowadays? If so this will help.

This is a bit long but I find publishing on the blog will allow you to cut and paste as required. As always, feel free to do so.

Development Tools Selection Process

Outlined below is a process for evaluating eLearning authoring/development systems. This same process can be used for a variety of development tools, although the detailed criteria will vary depending on the type of development tool.

Stage 1: Determine Needs

Determine requirements that the development tool must meet:

What is the nature of the training/performance solution that the tool would be use to create?

Examples:

Information transfer
Tutorial
Simulation
Skill building
Conceptual
Cognitive

What are some of the characteristics being considered?

High level of interactivity
Engaging
Ease of use
Easily accessible
Available on demand
Accommodate large learning audience
Ability to modularize to meet diverse learning needs
Deliverable to geographically dispersed learning audience
Ease of interface - keyboard and mouse interaction
Embedded computer-managed instruction
Flexible time offered
Ability to connect to multiple database sources
Ability to deliver on firm standard hardware platform
Can be packaged for portable use (vs. requiring participants to take on a special computer in the office)

Stage 2: Conduct Industry Survey

Survey the marketplace to identify candidates. Don't be shy!

Stage 3: Collect Systems Information

Gather information on:

Delivery platform: What is the delivery platform? Is it multi-platform (in the event of sales)? What delivery media are supported (CD-ROM, networks, etc.) Which operating systems does it run under? Is the delivery platform compatible with our existing technology?
Development platform: What development platform is required? Is there any special equipment needed? What are the requirements vs. what is already installed in-house? Are there separate development and delivery environments and, if so, what does this entail (e.g., after development, does the program have to be ported over to a different delivery system?)
Development interfaces: What interface is desired/required? Systems (icons/menus) give the developer more friendly access to development functionality, reduces the learning curve and increases productivity, but at the cost of flexibility and advanced capabilities. A language-based system allows for more complex courseware, but requires substantial training time and has a steep learning curve. Hybrid systems offer an iconic or menu interface along with a language that underlies the system. This dual functionality allows new developers to start developing courses fairly quickly as well as allow for increasing instructional complexity.
LMS coniderations: What record keeping, tracking/reporting features of participants’ progress does the tool have that is compliant with the LMS?
Cost and licensing: What are the costs? Are there any runtime license fees? Royalty fees for external sales?
Training and support: What training and support are available and what is the cost (including any travel to the training)? What consulting services/freelance expertise is available?
Product stability: How long has the vendor been in this industry? How new is the product? How stable is the product (will it/the vendor be around next years? Three years from now?) How widely is it used in the industry? It would be a bad situation to implement something nationwide, then have the vendor go out of business.

Stage 4: Perform Initial Selection of Several (about 5) Systems for Further Analysis

Based on the criteria above, compare development tools and select several systems that best fit the majority of the requirements.

Stage 5: Down Select to 2-3 Systems for Detailed Analysis

Contact vendors directly to arrange demonstrations of their products and receive an evaluation copy of their software. Assess the systems ease of use, features, etc. Have the vendor demonstrate the system so that the system’s full capabilities can be assessed. Based on demonstrations, data collected, and initial experience, rank systems based on training requirements criteria.

Determine two or three final candidate systems. Selecting more than three increases the evaluation time and makes the final decision more difficult.

Stage 6: Perform Detailed Analysis/Benchmarking on each final candidate

Talk to typical users of the program: What do they like? Dislike? What are the limitations? What is the learning curve? Development cycle?
Conduct benchmark testing to determine each system’s capabilities. Develop a “storyboard” for a sample interaction/design of the system. Use the vendor/someone experienced in the tool, to develop this interaction vs. attempting to develop it yourself to eliminate training time and ease of learning (which should be considered separately outside of these tests).
Evaluate the following criteria in the benchmarking:- Development or revision time (including time set aside for planning)- Number of authoring screens used in development and revision- System response time between actions or screens for each phase (be sure to test executable on the same machine to eliminate computer configuration variables)- Quality of display in delivery
Evaluate systems using this criteria by developing sample interaction specification documents in the content of the program to be developed. These documents should contain screen displays and directions for response analysis, branching and feedback. Give these documents to each vendor to develop this interaction in a specific period of time (such as two days).
Monitor their process, measuring each of the criteria during the specified time frame and then judge the quality of the display during delivery.
Text abilities:
When developing a piece of elearning, the range of facilities available for text is important, since this is likely to be the primary means of communicating with the student. The range of options available for text is likely to give you a good indication of the overall flexibility of the system.
Graphics
Graphics used in programs can either be generated by the application itself, or imported from files.
Sound
Since future applications may utilise sound, the abilities of the authoring environment to control sound is important. With interactive-audio drawn from a CD, the ability of the system to interface with the necessary software required to control the CD player will be fundamental. Sound can also be supplied from the hard drive.
Software friendliness
Where the program is to be developed/updated partially in-house, the ease of use of the software development environment is important. This reduces the need to subcontract the development of elements of the program to others outside of your organisation. The more complex the software is to use, the more technical expertise will be needed to develop and maintain the program.
Design assistance
When developing the applications, the more tools there are to assist the author, the quicker it will be to develop systems and modify them.
Learner control
The software environment must be capable of allowing the development of systems which allow the inclusion of sophisticated learner control.
Question handling
The ease of programming interactions is also a pointer to the overall abilities of systems. The range and variety of these are important, as is the ability to modify, add or remove interactions from within a program.
Branching
Most applications developed require branching. The route taken by the application should be capable of being decided in a number of ways.
Other user resources
Ability and ease in adding other resources to an application, such as context-sensitive help screens, dictionaries or glossaries, a built-in calculator, student note-taking resources, etc.
Printing options
Printing is not only required for reporting the student progress, but also for documentation and retention purposes.
Documentation and tutorials
Consider how well put together the paper-based documentation and other support for the product is.
Hardware and software
The software should be capable of running on a range of PwC hardware.

Stage 7: Review Detailed Criteria & Recommend Authoring System

Detailed Criteria Program

Finally there are all the little detailed, but important things you need to consider:

Text abilities
Variety of fonts, sizes & colors
Variety of styles, bold, italic, underline, highlighted
Variety of formats, centered, justified, double spaced
Ability to import text from other sources
Automatic re-formatting of text on the screen
Search & replace ability
Graphics development capabilities
(circles, lines, boxes, etc)
Transition effects (wipes, fades, dissolves, etc)
Color graphics abilities/range of colors
Animation abilities
Generated by the application
Ability to import from other programs
Ability to import graphics in several formats
Sound
Use computer-generated sounds (tones, beeps, etc)
Use sound cards
Utilize sound stored on other media (digital files on hard-disk, CD-ROM)
Software friendliness
Ability to structure layout of learning sequence
Ease of modification of the structure of the program
Ability to change screen layouts quickly
Ease of programming
Availability of developers
Ability to link to other applications
Ability to call software written in another language
Interface
Design assistance
Range of pre-written structures available
Ability to reuse code within other programs
Integral flowcharting of the application
System checks for incomplete branches
Ability to track testing of the system to help debugging
Ability to run sections of program, to aid debugging
Learner control
Pacing & sequence control by learner or program
Able to provide gradual learner control
Learner can go forward or backwards within a lesson
Programmable learner control keys
Question handling
Ease of creating student interactions
Ability to modify, add or remove interactions
Variety of question types
Variety of answer matching, key word, exact, spelling errors
Able to use questions with several correct answers
Able to generate specific feedback for each student answer
Random generation of questions or feedback
Branching
Unlimited branching for menu choices
Able to branch based on correct/incorrect responses
Able to branch based on elapsed time
Able to branch based on number of tries
Other user resources
Easy access to built-in, context-sensitive help screens
Easy access to available dictionaries or glossaries
Access to built-in calculator
Access to student note-taking resources
LMS considerations
Student management/CMIManagement easily turned on or off for specific program
Able to record small or large amounts of data for each student
Able to store elapsed time or level of achievement for each student
Course restart options available to LMS
Able to generate reports for each student or each lessonOutput available as an CSV file
Printing options
Able to print: program text or graphics, branching information, program documentation,
all or part of program
Documentation & tutorials
Well-indexed reference manual included
Tutorial included
Telephone support available
External training available
Hardware & software
Memory (RAM) requirements for delivery
Memory requirements for authoring
Required disk space
Processor requirements
Ability to run on organisational supported hardware
Need for other software (such as Windows)
Need for other hardware (graphics card)
Vendor stability/Support available from software distributors & system developers for continued viability/support

I know this is a bit detailed. Maybe this is why it is called back to basics. How much of this do you take for granted?

The Naivety of our Profession

2009-03-12T09:06:00.003+11:00

Image courtesy of Proven Business Models

I am sometimes struck by the failure of learned professionals to encompass some discipline and routine when it comes to their elearning considerations for their organisations. There is a lot of discussion (see tweets from @SLQOTD on twitter) about how to introduce social learning into organisations but I am going to have a go at our profession and accuse us of not understanding the ecologies within which we work.

The model I have included above is a standard when it comes to examining a business ecology for the first time. What I am challenging us to do is to look and consider some of the following:

How many heirachies exist in this model?

What level of connectedness exists between each layer?

How do we assess the level of connectedness?

How can we analyse the networks that exist?

What established systems can actually inhibit connectedness and sharing? e.g. reward and remuneration, recognition and awards, compliance, regulatory etc.

What cultural models of management exist? i.e command and control verses open book

and the list could go on further.

If these systems are embedded and have existed for a long time and the rythm and function of the organisation is predicated on these systems, then careful analysis is required to understand what barriers one might face in trying to leverage social media technologies as part of their learning platform. The mere notion of sharing might be contrary to the culture of the moment. e.g. A performance culture based on ruthless one upmanship.

Social media and the subsequent learning that comes from it's usage, is a very personal thing. When we try and take something that is uniquely viral and then try to wrap systems around it or try to introduce into a heavily systemetised ecology, then failure is a highly expected outcome. In addition, the learning that comes from using social media is usually aligned to ones belief systems and this can very much determine the learning that is achieved purely because the intrinsic motivation is there to begin with.

What is the best approach to introduce social media? I am still ruminating.......

The Learning Circuits Blog: Workplace Learning in 10 Years

2009-03-02T15:27:00.000+11:00

The Learning Circuits Blog: Workplace Learning in 10 Years

OK. This is a link to the Big Question over at Learning Circuits and it is certainly one of those questions that us learning professionals like to have a stab at so here is my contribution:

In 10 years time......

Most elearning is delivered on cloud based platforms that enable choice of LMS/CMS and migration of learning data from one platform to another.
Personal learning environments dominate the landscape in terms of organising life long learning and ensuring consistent development.
Universities and tertiary institutions have begun to merge into large scale campuses that are immersed in education that has embraced simulation as its mainstay.
Most elearning is now problem or simulation based learning so as to ensure application level education, rather than examination based education.
Corporate learning and development functions are completely specialised and decentralised to focus on scale of expertise and not general skills bases.
LMS do not exist as we know them anymore, as all of the meta data required to report on an individuals academic transcript is housed in a content management system that enables a one repository focus.
Learning is now mobile, ubiquitous and community validated and academics have moved to a research basis of existence which has shown true value of their expertise.

What do you think?
Tough question but this is what we are faced with trying to envision and as this was possible in the industrial era, we still try and put a handle on what this is all about and what it will be like in the future.

In reality, I would not have a clue!

Belief or social? Chicken or egg?

2009-02-24T16:26:00.004+11:00

I had the privelage of attending the NSW KM Forum monthly gathering last evening and listening to some wonderful people speak about their successes, failures and learning's when interacting with online communities. One speaker in particular caught my attention.

Mark Pollard proposed some wonderful thinking with regard to contribution and community. In his presentation he had some great statements to make that, for me at least, were very thought provoking. Mark contends:

That not all interaction is created socially

Just because it happens using social media technology does not make it "social"

His sense of community was defined as: "a group of people with a common belief system that interact constructively and directly with each other"

The last point struck the greatest chord with me as it forced me to understand whether my belief system was integral in determining whether I chose to interact with a community or not?

I came to the conclusion that as a life long learner, my belief system is developed based on my openness to learning and therefore the more I learn the more I develop this belief system. This in turn will play a major role in whether I interact or seek to interact with communities both virtual and face to face.

I then found myself ruminating whether there is in fact huge merit in social network analysis before contemplating the use of social media within organisations? Should we know what these belief systems look like to understand the opportunities for success? Surely people interact because of the similarities in their belief systems? What comes first? Interaction or belief?

Hmmmmmm.......

Why do we sacrifice?

2009-02-10T20:59:00.002+11:00

I am still at a loss to understand why so many learning and development functions sacrifice the opportunity to ensure the LMS in their organisation becomes an integral (i.e. Mission Critical) system within their organisation.

I hear so much talk about integrating with Share point, Social Media, Content Management Systems and the like, that I think Learning functions have lost sight of how to demonstrate value to their organisation.

Sure you have the typical ROI measures that accompany successful systems usage but how often does management hear about the value of the blended program being completed and utilised or individual development plans being seen through to their end? How often does the evidence on the academic transcripts reflect the amount of development time people have engaged in to fulfill their development plan? How often has the direct reporting manager used the system to engage and identify with an individuals goals and aspirations?

This knowledge capture is vital for the learning function if they are going to demonstrate real value to the leadership of an organisation. It allows them to differentiate their services based on a (favourably) weighted argument that demonstrates the base benefits of the LMS and it's contribution to organisational systems and the learning function in turn.

There will be time for integration and using the benefits of emerging technologies but for now, and especially now, lets not sacrifice the opportunity to demonstrate real value......

The Impact of Conditioning

2009-01-16T07:59:00.008+11:00

Well I am back refreshed and ready to take on another year!

In personal news I have secured a new role here in Australia which combines Learning, Communication and Knowledge Management so I am extremely excited at the prospect of what this year will bring both professionally and personally.

I thought I would commence this years posts with something of an observation and something which is dear to most when producing learning for any organisation.

Just this week when consulting with a client about their learning needs I noticed that we seemed to be having the same old conversation which went something like:

"So you are sure this is a learning need and not something more deeply behavioural?"

"No, they just need assertiveness training and I am thinking it should be blended learning"

"What tells you this is a learning need?"

"They just let everyone walk over them and they need to stand up for what they believe is right"

"How does your senior manager feel about this training for the team?"

"He suggested it......."

What strikes me about this and many other situations that we find ourselves in, is that the perceived learning needs of most organisations seem to be, conditioned responses of their experiences over a lifetime of work. Now don't get me wrong, we are not talking classic Pavlov's dog, but more so that it is easier to conduct learning program's than it is to address the critical causes of performance problems.

Intuitively, I could say that 8 times out of 10 there is a learning need there. It is just not what the direct manager or other managers think is needed.

As a profession, corporate learning needs to look at the conditioned responses that happen in a wholesale way everyday. Lord knows the global hissy fit has caused a lot of traditional reactionary responses to various situations and the actual critical evaluation of situations has fallen by the wayside and the solutions have again become the stock standard responses.

My observation on this is that most of these responses are conditioned responses. In order for organisations to continue innovative cycles of advancement and at the same time respond to market pressures, they also need to ensure they exhaust the possibilities for learning and performance. This means they should embrace fields of practice such as Appreciative Inquiry. But that is another post and something else to ruminate on....

Robs big prediction for 2009 (or not)

2008-12-30T17:12:00.002+11:00

Sorry to all who have been asking where I am at the moment but I am on a well earned vacation.

I thought however that it was appropriate that I finish the year with a prediction of sorts as this seems to be th thing that people are looking to at the moment.

For me this has been an amazing year on the Corporate Learning and Development front, but one thing that is very apparent to me is that some of the things that promise sooo much will have to wait in 2009. Therefore my prediction for 2009 is that Social Media and it's expected benefits will be the biggest dissapointment of 2009!

Why? Because the Global Hissy Fit (thanks to Kim at Thinking Shift for coining this term)will take the cautionary alarm sensors to frightening heights and expenditure on such extravagance will be a big non-non!

As always, am happy to be proved otherwise!

Happy New year to one and all and may you prosper as best as possible in 2009!

Back to Basics #2 - Instructional Design is More Important than Ever

2008-12-15T08:10:00.010+11:00

Time for a rant!

I am tired of people claiming that instructional design is no longer valid. If something is crap you will not learn from it! Period!

Instructional Design is now more important than ever so learning is enhanced; not left to chance.

In the second of my back to basics approach I thought I would focus on our taxonomies as a profession. Not for any other reason except that they make sense, are still valid and enhance the value of what we produce. I have chosen my three favoured taxonomies and I round the conversation off with a contrast of objectivism verses constructivism.

One of the first taxonomies of learning was devised by Benjamin Bloom in the 1950’s. It specified three learning outcomes:

· cognitive
· affective
· psychomotor

This was the first time that a formal systematic distinction was made between such diverse goals as, learning how to ride a bike (psychomotor), solving a mathematical problem (cognitive) and changing attitudes, eg how to generate commitment to a political goal (affective).

Furthermore, a range of differing learning/teaching strategies could be employed depending on how the learning objective was classified.

In the 1960’s educational psychologist Robert Gagne further developed Bloom’s Taxonomy by classifying five learning outcomes:

· intellectual skills

This kind of learning enables the learner to do something that requires cognitive processing. Intellectual skills are divided into concepts, rules and procedures.

· verbal information

Instruction is often designed to convey systematically organised ideas in various discourse forms such as description, exposition and narrative. This kind of learner knowledge is known as verbal information. The acquisition of verbal information enables the learner to state information.

· cognitive strategies

Cognitive strategies are skills which allow learners to exercise control over their own processes of learning and thinking. Strategies can range from very general rules about self regulation (“break the problem down into parts”) to detailed strategies that relate to particular problem domains.

· motor skills

Motor skills are productive actions involving movement controlled by the muscles. These skills can be refined in timing and smoothness by the learning that occurs during practice.

· attitude

An attitude is an acquired internal (motivational state) that influences the learner’s choice of action.

Gagne also described how instruction could be designed to provide the conditions required by different types of learning outcomes.

Merrill’s taxonomy, the Content-Performance Matrix (Fig 1), is described by Ruth Clark as “... a very effective and succinct basis for designing effective instructional materials.”

According to this taxonomy, for every performance outcome or objective written at the Remember Level, there must be a corresponding objective written at the Apply Level.

For example:

· Recall (by listing) the steps to cash a cheque (Remember /Procedure)

· Demonstrate (by doing) the steps to cash a cheque (Apply/Procedure)

Four types of learning are categorised:

· facts - simple associations between names, objects, symbols etc

· concepts - categories or classifications defined by a common set of characteristics

· procedures - a sequence of specific steps or operations performed on a single type of object

· principles - explanations or predictions of why things happen based on cause effect relationships

The Content-Performance Matrix: An Educational
Taxonomy

A Tried and True Approach

Another aspect is Robert Gagne’s work which provides invaluable insight for instructional designers, by specifying those events he believes are fundamental to the learning process. These are known as Gagne’s Nine Events of Learning:

1. Gain and Control Attention
2. Inform of Expected Outcome
3. Assist with the recall of prior prerequisite skills or knowledge
4. Present the stimuli related to the content, skills to be learned
5. Offer guidance for learning
6. Provide feedback on performance
7. Appraise performance
8. Provide for transfer
9. Ensure retention

Gagne’s work and later that of Dick and Carey focused on a systematic approach to instructional design.

Constructivism and Objectivism

Instructional design theories have their roots in Behavioural and Cognitive Learning Theories. The underlying philosophy of such theories is that the purpose of instruction or education is to help learners understand the “real world”. This is referred to as instructivism. This approach assumes that there is one “objective” interpretation of the world (objectivism) and that certain “pieces” of this “world knowledge” are important enough for everyone to learn.

An alternative approach is based on a philosophy of human learning and cognition known as constructivism. Constructivists believe that each of us defines the world (and ourselves) by what we know and believe. A constructivist approach would consider the major goal of education to be the creation of a rich assortment of “cognitive tools” that are made available to learners to help them explore their environments.

Consider two instructional designs for teaching Newton’s first law (ie, an object at rest remains at rest and one in motion remains in motion unless acted upon by some outside force). First consider a physics class where a teacher lectures about the principle to a roomful of students, followed by a series of homework problems from a text book. Then consider a class where the teacher has each student build and test a series of ramps with a variety of objects (to test different levels of friction).

The first scenario has students interacting with information selected and interpreted by someone else. In the second scenario, students begin by interacting with the principle itself. The teacher’s job is to facilitate, manage or at times guide the students’ interactions. With the help of the teacher, the group may form some consensus about Newton’s first law, but the “truth” of the law rests within each individual.

Thus, instructional designers may intend to map a particular reality for learners, but, ultimately, learners interpret the message in the context of their own experiences and knowledge and construct meaning relative to their own needs, backgrounds and interests. Thus, rather than attempting to map an external reality onto learners, constructivists recommend that designers help learners to construct their own meaningful and conceptually functional representations of the external world.

Accepting constructivistic assumptions would result in the following changes in design practice:

instructional goals and objectives would be negotiated, not imposed
task and content analysis would focus less on identifying and prescribing a single, best sequence for learning
the goal of instructional design would be less concerned with designing instructional
strategies to lead learners to specific learning behaviours and more concerned
with setting up environments in which learners could discover or develop their
own theories or strategies in a particular domain
evaluation of learning would become less criterion referenced. <

Amazing, Informal and a Lesson unto itself

2008-12-05T14:23:00.003+11:00

Via my mentor.......

The following was sent to me and I have to admit I was blown away by the sheer simplicity and yet the power of this situation. It was both a powerful learning experience for me and has forced me to concentrate yet again on what I call "contextual, small world learning".

Doctor performs amputation via mobile phone: http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/12/04/2437289.htm

What a fantastic example of just-in-time; just-enough performance support! Talk about informal learning!

The thing that strikes me about this is that much I am sure was learned from this situation:

The context forced the doctor to make a decision that ensured that recall of prior learning was used but also that he needed the support to ensure the task was completed.
In the doctor's small world, the constraints of his learning environment were laid out before him, but they did not become a barrier.
Learning the procedure did not become critical. Learning and knowing how to use the support he had available became critical and so on.....

I could analyse all day but I think my rumination on this, is that so much of what we strive for in a corporate learning sense is available in personal learning environments we use outsie of our work context and just maybe organisations spend their time on education that might not be needed!

Time for me to think and ponder.....

Do we challenge our place?

2008-11-24T11:22:00.002+11:00

It's funny but there is a great debate on at the moment in terms of why organisations are again culling the L&D function in response to the recession/financial crisis/dumbass investment decisions etc.

This morning the CLC (Corporate Leadership Council) released the results of a survey that asked CEOs which areas were to suffer the most in response to the crisis. L&D came out on top at 38%. So this means, globally, that a third of organisations surveyed will stop investing in development of employees. Recruiting was second and IT infrastructure was third.

It would appear to me the way modern business is setup, it (modern business) becomes the greatest impediment to informal learning being adopted. The hierarchical post modern structures re-enforce organisational norms and protect those managers that feel they have "earned" the right to be there. This plays out in such a distributed "tentacle like fashion" that it is almost impossible without an, inspiring "risk taking" leader, to get things done. This is why formal learning still enjoys a "pride" of place more as a reward structure rather than anything beneficial to the career of the individual and the benefit of the organisation.

We need to shift the function of management and eliminate the organisational barrier! Here is my theory:

Currently: The managers primary focus and need is to make sure some work gets done. Whether that work is manufacturing widgets or crunching numbers or making sales—it’s the manager’s responsibility to mobilise the people and resources to get the assigned objectives accomplished.

Future: Can we shift the primary focus to: The manager needs to tend to the satisfaction and growth of every direct report, because employee satisfaction and growth have important bottom line benefits. Are they learning and growing and becoming more valuable to the organisation? If a manager isn’t adding value to the work of his/her people, or if the manager isn’t helping to increase the personal capability of his/her people, that manager is superfluous to the organisation.

My theory goes that if we can get this shift happening then informal learning and performance support gets the opportunity it deserves and we know that when the opportunity is afforded, then the recognition it needs to prove it's worth, is given.

It is about the value chain to begin with and we are too far down on it at the moment. We have ridden the LMS/ elearning/ Virtual Classroom wave but the trough, not the crest, is in place at the moment.

And lastly, organisational un-learning is poor to say the least so we continue to build on the learning and re-learning and do not eliminate from organisational memory, that which should be forgotten. We always evaluate that which is useful verses that which is not, and we always know what routines are no longer valid verses those that are being introduced. So why do we continue to allow these said routines and experiences to stay in place? This is where KM and Learning overlap and whilst we continue to focus on managing widgets instead of people we will always perpetuate that which is in motion and not that which should be forgotten.

Everything Old is New Again

2008-11-18T11:11:00.003+11:00

Well I am back yet again.

Have finished Uni for this year and I must admit I am enjoying the solace of writing for enjoyment and not for assessment!

Whilst I have been busy studying my little butt off I notice that my feed traffic is focussing on bells buzzers and whistles and I thought it was time to start bringing people back to the fundamentals!!!!!

It would seem that people are forgetting the fundamentals. So today I begin a series of what to concentrate on to improve the quality of your learning product.

Lets focus on Instructional Strategies and Tactics!

These are methods of instruction and are used essentially to enhance the learning process.

The difference between instructional strategies and tactics is that strategies have a broader scope than tactics because a variety of tactics can be utilised to present or implement a single strategy. Presenting an example is a tactic, whereas using an inductive approach by presenting examples followed by a generality which governs them, is a strategy.

It is generally accepted that the term instructional strategy is used to include:

· the choice of techniques and media for each instructional event; and

· the structure and timing of instructional events within a course.

Generally, there are three kinds of strategies:

Micro Strategy

Organising small chunks of content eg teaching a single concept or procedure.

Intermediate Strategy

Organising medium sized chunks of content such as whether to use a discovery approach or a hands on approach for several related ideas. eg media solution and utilisation.

Macro Strategy

Selection and sequencing large chunks of content and managing it by controlling the instructional process.

The five major components of an instructional strategy are:

1. Preinstructional activities

2. Information presentation

3. Student participation

4. Testing

5. Follow through activities

Preinstructional Activities

Entry Level Requirements

These represent a brief description of the knowledge and or experience a student must have before commencing the instruction.

Motivation

This is a broad and complex issue because what motivates one person may not motivate another. However, there are various ways to grab the student’s attention.
For example, background or history of the subject, illustration or story, dynamic or animated graphics with an appropriate association to the content or use of a metaphor.

Appropriate interface design is an important consideration. Overall the student must be involved or engaged by the information presented at the outset. It must have direct relevance to the expected outcomes. This can be assisted by the presentation of a rationale as to why the material should be learned.

Students should be informed of what they will be able to do at the completion of the lesson and there is no reason why this should not be a modified version of the objective.

Information Presentation

The hierarchy of the course and the way in which the subject matter is to be grouped into activities influences presentation strategies.

Information presentation strategies can include the following:

· Easy to hard - from simple to complex tasks.

· Structural logic - similar to easy to hard.

· Learning dictated by the logical structure of the subject - identified basics first then built
upon or manipulated later in the course.
· Parallel themes - topics which could be studied in any order within the course.

· Chronological - happenings, events or discoveries over a period of time in the order in which
they occur.

· Causal sequence - chain of cause and effect. This applies where you are teaching cause and
effect relationships, especially if your objective is that the learners should be able to work out
and explain such a relationship.

· Problem centred sequence - you may sometimes be able to structure a course around the
exploration of a problem eg case studies and scenario based situations/simulations.

Student Participation

This part of an instructional strategy details the type(s) of interaction and/or practice to be made available to the student in order to consolidate instruction. Student participation also includes determining how feedback regarding performance will be relayed to the student. The content matter and proposed methods of testing also determine the form of practice.

For example, practice could include syndicate work, individual assignments, or activities with a theme which build upon each other as the course progresses. Feedback could be one to one or through group discussion.

Testing

Issues for consideration include:

· Will pretests be administered?

· How will embedded testing take place?

· The types of mastery tests to be administered, ie if the mastery test is on system or an observed performance test on the job.

Adequate test design is closely related to the quality of the instructional objectives. If you have a well written instructional objective, it will tell you exactly what conditions need to be present in the test item and what criteria is to be used to determine the correctness of student answers.

Follow Through Activities

Follow through activities refer to the strategies to be employed once the student has completed the course.

Follow through activities can be divided into:

Remediation

Generally, this would only be required upon a “fail” at a “on-the-job performance test” type activity. Considerations are:

· The form of remediation that will be provided either at the course or activity level if mastery of the subject is not achieved.

· Whether or not remediation will be provided on the whole course/activity or solely on objectives not mastered.

· Whether or not remediation will be a modified version (perhaps lower reading level or more graphical presentation) of the original instruction.

The need for remediation in itself should raise an alarm bell! For example, is the on-job performance test realistic, is it really testing what it should?

Enrichment

Consider further activities for students who are successful throughout the course and how these activities will be structured and presented.

For example, possible provision of handouts or assigned readings or provision of references of further information relating to content matter.

Choosing the right Instructional Strategy

There is no “correct” instructional strategy for a particular situation. When choosing a strategy the content of the material to be taught and the target audience must be considered. The instructional designer’s personal preferences are also into taken account.

The following may be useful in regard to choosing instructional strategies “ . . . do so on the grounds of how you believe they will appeal to your learners and help them to learn.”

There is no real reason for necessarily following the traditional “logic of the subject” - what you should be looking for is not so much the best logical order as the most satisfying psychological order.

For another perspective on instructional strategies specifically in relation to teaching concepts, refer to David Merrill and his component display theory

Wisdom for Consulting

2008-11-11T21:32:00.007+11:00

I have been asked by an industry colleague "what are some of the "must do's" as a Learning Relationship Manager or Learning Consultant. I thought it was worth publishing the wisdom that I have learned:

Right of client self-determination.

Borrowed from the professional ethics of social workers; however intense my desire to "help" might be, I need to stay clear on who "owns the store."

Diagnostic Questioning.

Lots of open-ended questions intended to help me "get it" from the client's perspective - in any performance issue the root causes could be many and seldom can be wholly attributed to lack of individual skill or competency. What's the performance system?

Relationship Building.

Trust is a necessary foundation for effectiveness. Some of the most interesting (and value-adding) work has come because I developed no-agenda relationships with line managers. When they need help, they turn to you first, and because they have a developed sense of who you are and what you can do, the work runs smoothly. Balance tending to relationships with, tending to tasks. Trust gets you better information and understanding; it also provides a stable platform for providing clients with feedback they need to hear but may be unwilling to (i.e., "you're baby's ugly").

Situational Analysis & Systems Thinking.

See #2; this is a variation of the same theme. "We need customer service training!" is really a symptom flag. Find out why they think training is needed, and you're on your way to understanding the problem. Apply rigorous analysis of the systemic factors surrounding performance and you're on your way to uncovering root causes.

Customised solutions (mass customisation).

Performance can wear an individual face, even when the performance system affects all individuals. Improving performance is often a matter of finding the right individual path to improvement. One size may/may not fit all. Beware!

Client involvement/engagement.

Again, be clear on who owns the store. Approaches/things will only succeed to the extent that the solution is owned/developed by the client.

Respect for client's business.

We serve all type of organizations and people, but I would shrivel and die if I had to do some of their jobs. For instance, some people would get excited over a new complex piece of federal legislation and thrive on the challenge of implementing into the organisation. We should honor their commitment, capability, and enthusiasm.

Respect for client's understanding.

Flip side of the above - they would shrivel and die if they had to do what I do. A great rule of thumb: "Start where the client is, not where I think s/he should be." But nurture the client's understanding carefully, as it's essential for.........

Client self-sufficiency as goal (moving up the value chain).

Leave the client smarter with every encounter. This is not advocating developing clients to the point where "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing," but ensuring you pay attention to opportunities to reduce the client's dependency on "experts." The client owns the store, after all, including many of the key elements of the total performance system Engaging the client through each step along the way leaves residual understanding that the client can apply independently after you're gone.

Something for you to ponder........

Whatever Happened to Response and Objective data?

2008-11-08T20:23:00.002+11:00

I have been reviewing some elearning materials for a friend and his not-for-profit and was astounded at how little effort was put into the learning objectives and assessing for those objectives. Needless to say the product was not one that I was impressed by but it did take me back to some of the rigor that I use to employ in my Instructional design and authoring days.

Back in those days we would re-visit, as part of our evaluation period, the elearning we had built and we would purposefully build in data collection at both the response level and objective level of the product to help us with our assessment. It allowed us to see what assessment questions and what embedded questions were working well and also what questions may need to be re-visited based on the weight of the data. e.g. a stronger correlation always appeared to exist between a poorly constructed assessment item and people getting the question consistently wrong. Not earth shattering but it did let us cut through the crap consistently.

My rumination today is one that asks whether we still have this same rigor as elearning specialists or do we rely on the automation of authoring systems and templates too much? Do we feel that meta data and LMS's have this covered? Have we become lazy from a design sense?

Hmmmm....

A new USA

2008-11-06T07:42:00.003+11:00

Having relatives in the USA I have been following the American election very closely. And I must say that my family and I feel we have witnessed and partly lived history even here in Australia. Obama's election to office is a wonderful achievement for the USA and one they can take great pride in. I am reminded of a wonderful poem by Maya Angelou whom I acknowledge as the author of this wonderful prose:

I RISE

You may write me down in history With your bitter, twisted lies, You may trod me in the very dirt But still, like dust,

I'll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you? Why are you beset with gloom?' Cause I walk like I've got oil wells Pumping in my living room.
Just like moons and like suns, With the certainty of tides, Just like hopes springing high,

Still I'll rise.

Did you want to see me broken? Bowed head and lowered eyes? Shoulders falling down like teardrops. Weakened by my soulful cries.

Does my haughtiness offend you? Don't you take it awful hard, Cause I laugh like I've got gold mines Diggin' in my own back yard.

You may shoot me with your words, You may cut me with your eyes, You may kill me with your hatefulness, But still, like air,

I'll rise.

Does my sexiness upset you? Does it come as a surprise, That I dance like I've got diamonds At the meeting of my thighs?

Out of the huts of history's shame

I rise

Up from a past that's rooted in pain

I rise

I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide,Welling and swelling I bear in the tide. Leaving behind nights of terror and fear

I rise

Into a daybreak that's wondrously clear

I rise

Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave, I am the dream and the hope of the slave.

I rise

and now for an aboriginal prime minister........

Learning, Knowledge and Information - are the lines blurring?

2008-10-29T10:43:00.003+11:00

My post today has a bit of an academic bent but my ruminations have been in this space for some time. Please forgive me as i take the time to deal with this

Information Management as a term disappears when studying corporate organisations. It is rare to find internal digital or logical libraries of information unless the organisation relies on information for direct income. E.g. television and radio stations, law firms, retail book stores. More so, the term Knowledge management seems to be applied to both information and knowledge and it’s use within an organisation.

It has been stated that many of the processes of production, identification and transfer of knowledge that have become known as knowledge management are not actually new and have been in place at organizations for years (Jeffrey W Alstete, 2003) (Firestone and McElroy 2003) state Knowledge Management is a management discipline that seeks to enhance organizational knowledge processing. Knowledge Management is also human activity that is part of the interaction constituting the Knowledge Management Process (KMP) of an agent or collective.

This last definition reduces KM to the definition of a process. The process is an ongoing, persistent, purposeful interaction among human-based agents through which the participating agents manage (handle, direct, govern, control, coordinate, plan, organize, facilitate, enable, and empower) other agents, components, and activities participating in basic knowledge processing (knowledge production and knowledge integration), with the purpose of contributing to the creation and maintenance of a unified whole system, producing, maintaining, enhancing, acquiring, and transmitting the enterprise's knowledge base.

However, (Wilson 2000) states “In all of this, the term knowledge is avoided, on the grounds that knowledge is knowable only to the knower. It cannot be transmitted – only information about the knowledge I have can be recorded and accessed by another person, and that information can only ever be an incomplete surrogate for the knowledge. Hence, knowledge management systems are nothing of the kind – they are, at best, information systems, just as information systems in the past used to be nothing but data processing systems – and, in some cases, still are”

Ultimately the tremendous amount of information that is generated by organisations is only useful if it can be applied to create knowledge within the organisation. Building and managing knowledge is one of the greatest challenges that faces organisations in the twenty first century. We hear a lot about the knowledge economy and for many organisations it is their knowledge or ‘know how’ that defines their competitive advantage.

However we cannot ignore that in the corporate sphere knowledge is used as a form of management practice by which there is an intent that competitive advantage can be gained. A definition of Knowledge management could be KM is first and foremost a branch of management, which makes it a social science. Moreover, it is a branch of management that seeks to improve performance in business by enhancing an organization’s capacity to learn, innovate, and solve problems. (Firestone 2003)

However, Firestone and colleagues have posited that there is a new form of Knowledge Management hailing from ‘criticalist’ epistemology. The criticalist denies that knowledge is knowable with certainty and relies instead on a fallibilist perspective, largely influenced by the philosopher, Karl R. Popper. Popper’s Critical Rationalism lies deep at the heart of developed theories of the new forms of Knowledge management.The implications of this are being considered far-reaching and profound. Out of this criticalist epistemology has developed a new type of organisation in which knowledge is continually being developed and is always open to criticism: “The Open Enterprise.” Creating and maintaining such environments, even as command and control styles of management continue to prevail, is the overriding tenet and challenge of this so-called, New Knowledge Management.

An in all of this consideration there lies the enabling factor known as learning. Learning, in the conventional definition, is the process of acquiring knowledge, skills, attitudes, or values, through study, experience, or teaching. To be counted as learning, it has to lead to long-term changes in behavior potential; in other words, it has to generate new capacity for alternative behaviors of an individual in a given situation in order to achieve a goal. Learning may be viewed as a change in activity, in the structure of behavior, and in a person’s mode of engagement in social practices (Packer, 1993:264). It is change in mind—metanoia, as Senge (1990) calls it—but also change that is reflected in action.

Our challenge, is to begin, again, to unblur the lines and understand more, the relationship between learning, Information and Knowledge management.

"You must understand, young Hobbit, it takes a long time to say anything in Old Entish. And we never say anything unless it is worth taking a long time to say. "

Learning Organisations??? where?

2008-10-21T22:31:00.003+11:00

Well I have been asked to comment on the global financial crisis and whilst I think I could point to any number of reasons and point people to an amazing number of resources that explain why... I would rather confine my comments to a narrow but equally important view.

I have spoken about the importance of unlearning and whilst I think this will ultimately reveal a lot of reasons for organisational failure, I am still left to ruminate over the lack of organisations to embrace the concept of "The Learning Organisation".

Essential to this is to re-visit Senge's definition of a learning organisation:
"organisations where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning to see the whole together."

If we were to examine a number of the organisations that have failed in this crisis it would be worthwhile to audit them in terms of their commitment to being a learning organisation.

Despite the copious amount of examples that have attracted major criticism in corporate history, these organisations were never engaged in a continuous and productive learning environment that supported a diversity in knowledge and experience. It would appear on the surface that there was too many of the same "type" of individuals and the same "types" of strategy.

This brings me back to Senge. For Peter Senge, real learning gets to the heart of what it is to be human. We become able to re-create ourselves. This applies to both individuals and organisations. Thus, for a ‘learning organisation it is not enough to survive. ‘”Survival learning” or what is more often termed “adaptive learning” is important – indeed it is necessary. But for a learning organisation, “adaptive learning” must be joined by “generative learning”, learning that enhances our capacity to create’ (Senge 1990:14).

One wonders whether our corporate leaders will heed the warning that this crisis deals out and start to truly invest in creating truly "thriving" learning organisations that are adaptive, generative and "unlearning" all that is not needed.

Now there is something to ponder.......

Why unlearning is Worth the Effort

2008-10-14T14:25:00.003+11:00

Yesterday I wrote about how important unlearning was for an organisation and what it represents in terms of managing organisational memory.

I was confronted by a challenge this morning that asked the question of "why anything would need to be "unlearned"." Conceptually i think we struggle with the term "unlearning" as it suggests that we need to forget what we know and sacrifice it for whatever is new. I believe this to be far from the truth and in fact I think unlearning is more about ensuring that we alter our mental models to deal with what we know to be the truth.

We all have existing mental models that, at times, allow us to "auto pilot" through life. The problem with this is there is little or no cognisance of value and worth of information and knowledge and therefore we carry on letting existing mental models have their way with what we believe to be the best part of a situation or context. My issue with this is we find ourselves in awkward situations where it is hard to challenge what is an organisational or social norm because we have not critically reflected on it.

A deliberate commitment to unlearning is required to begin to alter existing mental models and ensure individuals think critically about certain situations and contexts. There is certainly some global and local, policy, procedure, process and models that need to be "unlearned" as a result of the impacts associated with the global financial crisis. But it will take a disposition towards critically thinking about this and it will require organisations to reflect on the learning that has occurred and what action should be taken in the future.

The most important thing is to identify that which should no longer be part of the organisational memory and ensure steps are taken to "unlearn" that which would detrimental in the future.

The Case for un-learning

2008-10-13T16:21:00.006+11:00

I was asked the question "What role can Social Network enablement and social software play in enhancing individual and organisational learning?" In order to answer this we need to understand the flow of learning at an organisational level. Figure 1 depicts this in a very basic form which could be debated but we will accept for the purposes of this post:

Typically, most organisations are well equipped with a learning function that provides this flow of learning at the organisational level. But it could be argued that the majority of time is spent on the two areas of learning and relearning. However, there is a growing body of evidence that suggests that it is in the unlearning, that KM and learning overlap and become dependant on each other. (Hedberg 1981) states “Knowledge grows, and simultaneously it becomes obsolete as reality changes. Understanding involves both learning new knowledge and discarding obsolete and misleading knowledge. The discarding activity – unlearning – is as important a part of understanding as is adding new knowledge.”

This presents an opportunity for the KM practitioner to play an important role of change agent and also utilise the social networking capability of an organisation to advantage. Understanding that most education within organisations is built around the routines and systems of the organisation is; essential. Resistance to change is usually related to the individual and communal dependencies that are built up over time with familiarity of task and outcome. Feldman and Pentland (2003) state that organizational routines are; “repetitive patterns of interdependent actions carried out by multiple organizational members involved in performing organizational tasks”. Unlearning these tasks is essential for learning the new tasks.

This then requires that the organisation show intent for unlearning. Martin de Holan and Phillips (2004: 1606) define organizational forgetting as ‘the loss, voluntary or otherwise, of organizational knowledge’. Whilst I am not sure I can agree with this entirely, I prefer to view forgetting as inadvertent loss of routines, tasks or patterns from organisational memory. In order to do this, there needs to be obvious action take place in conjunction with the relearning or new learning.

(Tsang and Zahra 2008) state; Unlearning at the organizational level requires unlearning at the individual level. Unlearning at the individual level refers to the case where a person becomes aware that certain items of knowledge he or she possesses are no longer valid or useful. If KM is to work with learning to understand whether unlearning is taking place then an effective social media repository would be of enormous benefit to understand the receptivity, reciprocity and usage of the new knowledge.

The opportunity is to ensure effective use of the organisational memory. What must be avoided is ending up with an organisational “memory” that is not used. (Tsang and Zahra, 2008) state that; organisations can end up with storage bins of organisational memory. By bin they mean a location where information is stored. Individuals in an organisation gather information through their own direct experiences and observations and retain it in their memories. Of course information is also stored in computer memory.

Social networking and the new types of supporting media present and opportunity to ensure that good organisational memory is accessible and at the same time, by eradicating that memory not required, foster unlearning to ensure that the organisational and individual memory is performing and providing up to date excellence in Knowledge Management and Learning.

Perhaps there is a case for the financial Services industry to unlearn a hell of a lot now? Hmmmm.......

Narratives and Discussion

2008-09-29T22:13:00.003+10:00

From discussing the advantages of a good narrative....

I had thoughts on this initially that were more my thoughts that had been hardened over the last two years after having read Steven Dennings Book; “The Leader’s guide to Storytelling”. My commentary was; “My personal take on the narrative is that it succeeds where facts and figures don't. Typically people resort to the tried and proven when sharing and seeking results, knowledge, information etc. When managers need to persuade an audience, most try to build a case with facts, statistics, and some quotes from authorities. Sometimes this is accompanied by a 30 slide power point deck. As human beings, we make sense of our experiences through stories. But becoming a good storyteller is hard. It requires imagination and an understanding of what makes a story worth telling. All great stories deal with the conflict between subjective expectations and an uncooperative objective reality. (See anecdote.com)

Is it a fad? Hell no. But more objectively is the thought that in order to understand the value in the narrative, one should be focused on an outcome, even if it is only ensuring the focus of a team or person. The teller of the narrative needs to know why they are telling and what they are targeting out of it.

Others had thoughts that ranged from Storytelling reaching out to Gen Y workers, to the narrative being part of the social and cultural framework of our lives and therefore it was a very natural thing. They also felt that the narrative constructed itself in ways, many other forms of communication or process could not. They genuinely felt that there was not only a time honored tradition to entertain the narrative, but it was something that without reflection and continuous use, might make the workplace a worse place.

I think there was a corum that genuinely felt that business narrative was not a fad and conversely, it was the view of the group that it took a long time to truly master the skill of the business narrative and therefore there was little chance of it becoming a fad as most fads can be developed overnight and have a very short time to run their course.

The difference between these was left inconclusive to me. It would appear that many perspectives focus on one being a derivative of the other and that they each serve common and different purposes. I think I am comfortable with this.

However having read other contributions these got me thinking as to whether there was a better way to describe what people wanted to say. For instance I thought the word “account” would be applicable. If I recalled an “account” of what someone had done to benefit an organisation then I was engaging in a narrative that conveyed the “account’ and usually where the narrative extends to; the outcome. It is hearing the outcome of the account that allows an individual to make sense of what that narrative or story meant to them.

I would think that after this, individuals will form or construct anecdotes on the basis of what makes sense to them and also in what form, or for what purpose, they will use them in the future.

Collaboration and Discussion

2008-09-29T22:06:00.001+10:00

Recently I had an assignment at university that I thought I would share with you. We had to reflect on a number of things but in particular on the use of the medium.

In this instance we found ourselves collaborating digitally. This was part of our task and one that ensured in order to participate we knew how to use the appropriate interface. Digital collaboration is the use of technology to enhance and extend the abilities of individuals and organizations to collaborate, independent of their vertical area. In our case we were not dependant on time, space, location or system.

I found that this form of discussion is very good for contemplation and critical thinking. It allows you to perceive the content in a manner that it is meant to do. This is because we all have some familiarity with each other and we trust, to some degree the responses and work that has been attended to by the individual sharing their thoughts and knowledge with us.

In this case I think it is critical to distinguish collaboration from communication. Digital collaboration is an interaction between two or more people, mediated by a computer. The number of participants is crucial to distinguish collaboration from communication. Communication is mostly one-to-one or one-to-many. The number of recipients of the communication is virtually unlimited. It is a one-way, unstructured distribution of information. Collaboration is usually many-to-many, but fewer than 10. It is goal oriented, and can be asynchronous or synchronous (real-time). In her book Common Knowledge: How Companies Thrive by Sharing What They Know, author Nancy Dixon writes, "If we want people in our organizations to share what they have learned, we would be wise to create the conditions in which sharing results is of personal benefit." Collaboration is closely intertwined with knowledge management and suffers from many of the same stumbling blocks.

In our case, we certainly stood to gain personal benefit and I found myself ruminating on this point. Is it because I will gain personal benefit at the expense of a fellow student? I could answer this question with a resounding no! Then this meant my purpose was to share knowledge so as to promote learning and ensure there was enough debate and submission in answering the questions as to make the experience reflective as well as shared. I believe this was achieved.

Scizo learning

2008-09-14T10:36:00.002+10:00

Well, as I have been reminded by some of my readers I have not been contributing to my blog of late but I do promise I have not abandoned by cathartic way of thinking.

My organisation is currently merging (code for being taken over) by another and I have found myself faced with an amazing situation.

The apparently (a mere formality) merger has sent our leadership and management into a state of personal and professional reflection that has produced behaviour that is fascinating to watch (and manage). From dark circles under eyes to grey skin to pale expressions to over-enthusiasm to sheer happiness, the range of emotions contributing to a behavioural onslaught that a lot of people have not witnessed before.

It raises the consciousness in terms of the learning requests we are now getting. Anything from Business acumen to personal effectiveness dominates the landscape.

It is as if individuals have looked at their skills base and decided that they are not skilled enough and therefore need a quick cure all to add to the CV in order to impress whatever the new regime may be.

Why do people do this?

Amazingly it would appear that performance is secondary. That demonstration of skill is primary. I hate to tell them this but the two are not mutually exclusive. Effective learning experiences enhance performance. They do not detract from them. (Unless the learning is not associated with the role then it could inspire someone to do something completely different!)

It then begs the age old question of communication or the lack of it. And I think you can tell where I am sitting on this. In fact the leadership has been great. Plenty of information and good solid information on what is happening.

It would appear that the natural human behaviour of mythology serves a personal and professional purpose when trying to ensure that people are kept in tow and trying to ensure performance.

Hence, my posts have been sparing but you now know what is taking on a lot of my time at the moment.

Time to ruminate......

Lots to learn from the past

2008-08-28T09:03:00.002+10:00

A comment on a recent post from Harold Jarche;

I tend to like what Harold is espousing but I have reservations and whilst i know I will ruffle some feathers, my perspective on this is that we too often assume a Utopian state for the future and also assume that an individual has the intrinsic "competence" to learn without formal intervention or direction.

Recently I had a major implementation of a "new way of thinking about your business" program to roll out to managers of our distribution network. When we went to them and said "this is your choice, how would you like to learn?" the overwhelming response was a blend of formal classroom education and the opportunity to network in a community of practice.

The problem we face is that the place of work becomes, for a lot of people, the last educational institution they will attend. This is why the 'Senge' version of the learning organisation is important. People bring with them their early and secondary educational models of learning and given they are "mostly" comfortable with them they tend to continue to want this in some form or another.

This is not to say that this form of learning is not effective but rather, is something that we need to recognise, will always be an "inherited" experience and therefore something we will need to work with until the fundamentals are changed in terms of our early education models.

Call a Spade a Shovel - but make sure you describe!

2008-08-23T13:34:00.003+10:00

A short post expressing my opinion on a subject that I was asked comment on.

Is the term Instructional Designer a dead description, title, category or classification?

In light of web or learning 2.0, there are theories that in fact a better name would be an information and instruction architect. I have to say I have mixed feelings on this and each time it comes up in conversation I find it hotly debated but still with no specific outcome achieved.

I like the analogy of the architect as it implies a design and build with intent in mind but no guarantee with how it will be used or what the results will be. Instructional designer seems to imply that an outcome, as a result of receiving the instruction, will be achieved. I know this is semantics to some but again, I find with the rapid growth of personal learning environments and the change in learner centered dynamics, there is an opportunity to recognise what is happening, what shifts are taking place and think about the intent of workplace learning and what it is meant to achieve.

As it is adult learning, there is a perspective that the responsibility lies with the learner and what we need to be able to do is design with enablement and access at the forefront. This is why architect seems to be a more apt term rather than designer to me!

I will ponder this some more but again welcome all your comments. Always happy receiving the email comments but feel free to post on-line. Don't be shy!

Brilliant!

2008-08-22T08:31:00.003+10:00

Via my instructional Technology Forum feeds:

http://ogma.shef.ac.uk/learning_light/index.html

One of the best visual interfaces for accessing literature that I have come across. A credit to The University of Sheffield Dept of Information Studies, Saber Professional Solutions Ltd & Learning Light.

Brilliant!

People, Information and Knowledge – Reflecting and Ruminating

2008-08-20T22:38:00.011+10:00

Well I started my philosophical subject in my masters and what an eye opener! As is my want, I chose this subject because it, in my honest opinion, challenges the notion that there are any absolutes when it comes to information and knowledge. I am charged with producing a reflective log of my lectures and whilst I have been writing these in a document, you might remember that I thought it would be worth sharing my reflections on my blog. Here I am!

Remember, I am doing my Masters of Arts in Knowledge management because I see the world of learning, work and knowledge colliding at the moment and I want to make more “sense” of this situation. My discourse will assume that interested readers of my blog will associate themselves with terms that may be unfamiliar to them. That way I will not fill up my entry with descriptors all the time.

And so we begin with Descarte “I think therefore I am”.

Now I am the first to admit that history is not my strong point but my skill for remembering quotes or useless trivia is rather good. However I found myself wanting to know more about Descarte and something that my lecturer Michael Olsson talked about which was the “enlightenment” period.

What did I find out about Rene Descarte? He wrote a book called Discourse on Method. It was and still is a defining piece of literature. In his book, Descartes outlined his very personal scepticism of things, his method for inquiring into the truth, and his arrival at his famous conclusion (called the cogito, after the first word in the Latin sentence. More on that later). However, these achievements do not do any amount of justice, IMHO, to the reported crucial role Descartes played in practically every other area of the Enlightenment period. Descartes established several patterns for modern Europe to follow (Hooker, 1998): he promulgated the idea that the thinking mind was somehow more real than the body in which it is housed (this is called the Cartesian mind-body split); he established that emotions were due to the character of the individual--called Cartesian affect (i.e., emotion) theory: this has supposedly become the basis of music education, which attempts to develop the character by producing certain emotions in students, a kind of classical music feel good, emotion work-out; he also established the notion that the observer had supremacy over all things that he/she observed.

René Descartes is referred to as perhaps the single most important thinker of the Enlightenment. He quietly and methodically went about tearing down all previous forms of knowledge and certainty and replaced them with a single truth: Cogito, ergo sum , "I think, therefore I am." From that point onwards, particularly in European culture, subjective truth would appear to hold a higher and more important epistemological place than objective truth, skepticism would be built into inquiry, method would hold a higher place than practice, and the mind would be separated from the body. (Hooker, 1998)

Now this struck me as the very foundation of modern academic research and for this workplace educator, made me ponder why workplaces do not embrace more rigour with regard to information and knowledge and the role it plays in educating the workforce.

It also forced me to think about my definitions of the following (as did an exercise from Michael!):

DATA

Numbers and Letters, pictures or visual objects, sounds or smells, committed to storage in a device or memory

INFORMATION

Data that has a context (This could be argued but again it is information because it has meaning. But can meaning exist without context?)

KNOWLEDGE

Information that is used or actioned in an existing or changed context.

POWER

Maximum advantage at a point in time. (But is knowledge power?)

INFORMATION NEED

A need, at a point in time, for information that fits a certain context.

INFORMATION USE

Information, at a point in time, in a certain context, that is displayed, said, read, heard, felt or smelt.

INFORMATION POVERTY

The non-experience or deprivation of information or data.

You may or may not agree with these definitions but if it makes you think about or grapple with, whether you understand or can define meaning, then there is value in that as a process!

Ask yourself this; When was the last time you felt enlightened? For those participating in an education, what a joy you must feel! The opportunity to establish the known or the knowing and construct sense and meaning… and on your own terms!

My final reflection is one that states, as a learning professional in a corporate workplace, why is it that we do not recognise that a place of work is an educational institution? It could be the last institution that people attend to learn. Yes they work and yes they are exposed to information and knowledge, but they also learn, formally and informally and would it not be a fantastic proposition to hear an employee walk through the door and say “I think therefore I am”.

Hmmmm……. Time to apply this thinking……..

Body or skeleton of evidence?

2008-08-08T08:59:00.002+10:00

Via my RSS feeds from e-Ako; Whilst it is good to see some research on this topic (generational influences et al) it prompted me to ponder over whether research is too quickly cited/referenced when a good practice would be to compare and contrast this research against other works of evidence. Don't get me wrong. The e-Ako blog does nothing to suggest that this is the truth and nothing but the truth. But it raises some thinking on my part.

This could be why the WWW comes under so much criticism from those who see self publishing as a form of bastardry against those "enlightened' works where peer review and consultation/comparison provide enough debate.

I am of two schools here. The connectedness of the web allows me to consider published opinion and published documents/objects on my lonesome ownsome and then connect with those people whom I think I have something in common. Stephen Downes for instance, publishes his OLDaily and from time to time over the years I have commented or asked questions. Whilst I do not expect Stephen to remember me or cite me, it is what he publishes that resonates with me and that is our connectedness. When connected, I believe an individual has transformed or changed in some way. Therefore I am happy that someone publishes, it has an effect and I have changed in some way.

My second thought is that it is increasingly becoming difficult to separate intent and desired outcome from context when wanting to do "more" than just comment on research. If I want to prove or disprove research or "apply" the findings of that research, then this is where rigour, comparison and contrast are needed so my "application" or "opinion" is well informed. I don't have a problem with this as the intent and the context should demand this from me to achieve my desired outcome.

I would love to see more commentary on this as I am sure I am not the only one who has thoughts on this subject. Probably not as articulate as I could be but I think you get the gist of my rumination.......

Returning with some coherence?

2008-08-07T17:00:00.002+10:00

I'm back!

Apologies to those who have rung me and been asking about my whereabouts.

In preparing for my return to university, I went offline a while to gather my thoughts and understand what my needs were going to be!

Part of my work for university is to write a reflective log on my "People, Information and Knowledge" subject and I have decided to incorporate this as part of my blog so I will be mixing it up a little but still ruminating over all things learning and knowledge.

I especially feel that this is a coherent return to the blog, as my lecturer (Michael Olsson) is the partner of an old colleague of mine from my early learning days and I am thoroughly enjoying his challenging style but more importantly, his concentration on us as an audience and establishing a form of "connectedness" that will facilitate the style of lecture and tutorial he feels will benefit us the most.

I shall post the first two reflections soon. Stay tuned.......

Building on PLEs - Corporate Application

2008-07-21T15:22:00.004+10:00

So the question is asked, "if I have a PLE that satisfies most of my needs how does this, or rather how can this, be extended to my work?"

When the user defines what is important to them to complete their job, the organisation will design the tools and knowledge sources around this creating quicker execution to market. We are already seeing this in organisations such BT and BP where the interfaces have become collaborative and very much user driven.

The model for me that organisations need to be thinking about looks something like this:

I will speak more on this in the coming days but as you can see the model relies on the recognition that learning is mostly informal, individuals define and make sense of the information they filter and the organisation supplies the tools for the individual to make this all happen!

Nirvana or practical? Something to ruminate over........

More on Personal Learning Environments (PLEs)

2008-07-15T18:01:00.003+10:00

This is something that I have meant to do for a little while. Give my perspective.

Now do not ask for a definition of a PLE. I do not believe there is one.

A PLE for me is ecology unto itself and it is unique to every individual. Personal learning environments, to me, are also evolutionary. They have evolved, and will continue to evolve, due to a number of key factors:

Individuals need to filter information. There is so much information nowadays that an individual needs efficient ways of “dealing with” and “making sense of”, this information.

In filtering this information they begin to prefer the collective wisdom of the individuals they choose to “include” as part of this filtering.

These individuals can include published experts, academics, peers, colleagues or strangers.

The learning that takes place is based on what “resonates” with the individual and not what someone tells them they should learn. This fosters true listening from the individual.

The PLE allows an individual to harness the natural motivations to learn that exist within the individual and as such, provides a continuing learning experience that few corporate or academic training environments can provide.

My PLE looks something like this:

In essence I describe my PLE as a learning environment that is functional and provides me with different activities, modes and experiences for learning. Central to this model is the “connectedness” that exists between each of the activities and the people I interact with. As you can see, the tools are in the background and as an individual I choose to use and discard tools based on the ease of use and it’s ability to maintain the connectedness I require as a learner. This means my environment is fluid and ever changing.

Now of course this is my perspective......

Personal taxonomies..... again

2008-07-10T20:57:00.004+10:00

I continue to be dumbfounded by the blatant disregard organisations seem to have for their employees skills and expertise. A colleague related the story of how their organisation was attempting to classify all knowledge within their organisation based on a standard set of classifications and these classifications were purely linked to business outcomes and benefits.

Whats the problem you ask????

Not all information within the organisation is going to be created for this purpose. It also does not allow the individual the opportunity to make sense of what the information means to THEM! I believe that the collaborative nature of learning and knowledge that could exist can only exist if an individual maintains the right and the access to make sense of the information in the way that has meaning and enables them to learn. This is wholeheartedly at the essence of learning 2.0 for me. Call it constructivist in nature or just call it learning for learning's sake. The nature of this fostered "connectedness" means that individuals are learning how to learn and that can only be good.

Personal taxonomies, folksonomies, who cares? Let people learn by creating meaning. Lets remember this, the truth is only the truth until it is no longer the truth!

I think I learn......

Moving on..... Blending!

2008-07-07T08:32:00.002+10:00

A great post in my feeds this morning from Clive Shepherd about method Vs medium but more importantly about defining what a blended learning experience looks like. I am happy to say that I like this definition which I re-produce here:

A blended learning solution mixes social contexts for learning (self-study, one-to-one, small group, larger community) with the aim of increasing learning effectiveness, and/or mixes learning media (face-to-face, online, print, etc.) to increase efficiency, in the context of a particular learning requirement, audience characteristics, and practical constraints and opportunities.

What I like about this definition is the suggestion that learning and expertise is not isolated to the learning event itself but that there is a series of "things" that happen to allow learning to take place. It also recognises that learning is still in the hands of the learner but that blended learning invites options that the learner can take advantage of!

Now if universities will just forget about this mandatory attendance thing and deliver lectures and tutorials in blended formats........

Social Media - Cathartic media?

2008-07-03T08:16:00.006+10:00

Tom Haskins again provokes me to consider my participation in the greater global learning community. This is a fantastic exposition of facets of participation in social media. As always there is excellent reference to context. And I must say I agree with everything Tom has to say.

My only addition to this is the consideration of the philisophical arguement as to whether participation is needed or the mere fact that someone can post or publish, plays a part in them being able to journal and purge their thoughts in an immediate fashion with the knowledge that someone might be reading and listening. This "catharsis" plays an important part in one's self development and might be a first step that leads to partcipation in a wider social media context?

Worth investigating me thinks.......

The end is always in sight?

2008-07-02T22:56:00.002+10:00

This is a really interesting post from Jeff Stibel at the Harvard Discussion Leaders Blog site.

I have often thought of the concept of web 2.0 being another serious bubble that we will find may not live up to the hype we give to it but then again, I and many others could be very wrong.

This post likens the growth of social networks to the networks of neurons that are developed in the brain and the analogy works for me and Jeff gives some credible examples of why networks will and do come to an end only to be replaced by the next network.

Now my next question, surely this is behavioural more than just a fitting end being realised? and if so what is driving this behaviour?

I do love this stuff!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Personal Taxonomies or Folksonomies?

2008-07-01T22:49:00.002+10:00

This is a very thought provoking post and one which creates a lot of reflection for myself.

Whilst I do not think that the contents of the post reflect the possibilities of harnessing peoples natural cognition and sense making, it does bring in to question again the whole question of the value or benefit of information. It also correctly states that first and foremost, information needs to have value and benefit for the organisation otherwise the information and associated tags will not stand the test of time.

However I think there is more benefit from an unedited intranet! Surely the context is to let people tag information the way they would like to, so that the information is made sense of and put into practice or tried out. Does it not then become purposeful knowledge?

Individual or personal taxonomies, are a key component of personal learning environments, as they allow an individual to gradually learn and build, or "make sense of" that which has become important to them and provides learning and benefit to them.

More to write on this one but not without reflection and discussion......

Who's the boss?

2008-07-01T22:31:00.002+10:00

By way of the Slow Leadership Blog;

Now maybe there is some real thought to be placed in the concept of managing upwards but I have always thought that the connectedness between two individuals is a better building block. Still, the concepts have merit.... as all learning does!

Mash served the right way

2008-07-01T22:09:00.002+10:00

For those of you who are Jay Cross advocates (informal learning, Internet time etc) here is a link to his blog post which features a Mash Up of himself, Nigel Paine and Donald Clark speaking at Learning Technologies 2008 in London.

Great Stuff and something to make you ponder......

Not Quite Done..... Yet

2008-06-26T22:33:00.005+10:00

Aha! Some great pondering and argument as to why sense making and reason might just be essential to understanding whether learning 2.0 is in fact part of existing learning theory.

This post by Mark Nichols argues, (quite successfully I might add) that whilst encouraging web2.0; or for that matter learning 2.0, we should not lose sight of the educational tenets that instructional designers and educators alike, have built their knowledge and careers on. These would be cognitive growth, conceptual maturity, the development of reasoning and the opportunity for exposure to alternatives.

Mark goes on to say that web 2.0 should be embraced but not at the expense of the educational objectives.

Now for me this raises the dichotomy of learning 2.0. I have for some time now maintained that individuals, by no more means than their own sense making, develop personal taxonomies for the learning and information that occurs in 'their" learning space. Whilst i think this has evolved over time, I do not think that the individuals "classification" of the information or it's importance, has evolved. This has been part of their formal education and as such all they have done is developed this ability to decide on why something resonates with them and then codify the information based on this understanding or "sense" making.

A study of del.ic.io.us pages will show you exactly how these "personal taxonomies" are recorded and for me this then says that individuals have some understanding and therefore have learned. But have they achieved an objective or outcome that the learning/information/knowledge was intended for?

Do we know how to deal with this as educators? Is this purely social construct and learning happens in spite of it?

Great stuff to ruminate over.......

Vale Jane McGrath

2008-06-24T22:31:00.004+10:00

Like many people here in Australia I was shocked and saddened to hear of Jane McGrath's death. I had the pleasure of listening to her and Glenn speak at a Pink Ribbon breakfast some years ago at the Westin Hotel. My mother is a breast cancer survivor.

My life was richer for hearing what she had to say about the plight of women who were suffering from breast cancer but also because she was genuinely a dedicated mum and wife who valued her existence and what it brought to the world at large.

Tomorrow, 10 cents from every Daily Telegraph sold will go to the McGrath Foundation. The McGrath Foundation is committed to continuing Jane’s legacy by not only ensuring that young women are encouraged to be breast aware but by also continuing to raise the very valuable funds to support the placement of breast care nurses throughout rural and regional Australia to help women diagnosed with breast cancer.

Sad but inspiring.........

Awakenings

2008-06-22T13:11:00.003+10:00

I had the wonderful pleasure of meeting someone for the first time on Friday and in our discussion we talked about the occurrence of meeting someone for a first time and experiencing something of an awakening or in my case a re-awakening.

It was the fact that we connected on a professional level and talked about what intrinsic motivation for learning really looked like for each of us. Whilst we could talk with the passion of seasoned learning professionals, we eventually got on to the topic of how we could actually visualise this for the benefit of others.

Motivation is a very tacit and unique experience and something that everyone has intrinsically in their make up but our learning, from our conversation, was that sometimes it takes "connectedness" to awaken an individual and tap into the experiences that contribute to the conversation. I would love to be able to "visualise" what this connectedness feels and produces but that would appear to be a bit beyond me at this point in time. Maybe capturing the feeling is not what is needed but rather to relate this as narrative and hope that the connectedness is felt.

Needless to say I will think this one through with the hope that I will one day make this visual to myself and others. Hmmmmm.........

Enough Said

2008-06-19T19:38:00.001+10:00

For all those who are in the Facilitation game.

Read this post by Tom Haskins and ruminate.......

Bravo Tom!

What? No Stories?

2008-06-19T16:33:00.003+10:00

In a post from Don Clark, aptly entitled, "Storytelling Sucks", he discusses the many forms of narrative and the view that a narrative can sometimes have a top down "fixed" view and this does appear to erk him.

I love narrative and must admit it is my favourite form to use in facilitated experiences at my organisation.

I think the more we embrace that fact that a good story expressed in many forms (written, spoken, poetry, prose, images, song, theater, or dance) opens up the interpretive juices that individuals intrinsically possess, then we can understand that a narrative creates feelings the impel people to convey thoughts and dialogue and connect with each other.

This is where I do agree with Don. He quite rightly points out that many mediums convey great narrative but I am not prepared to so quickly dismiss the learning of the elders, until I know that there is little learning to be achieved or little dialogue that can be engaged in.

Definitely food for thought......

Culture and the city

2008-06-17T22:26:00.002+10:00

Just a short post today about the "Sex in the city" hype and what seems to be a never ending cache of fans.

It got me thinking as to whether we truly understand culture and whether we dedicate enough time to "sensing" what the culture of an organisation is.

Many organisations have invested large sums of money in cultural diagnostics yet it still seems that I hear all the same stories when it comes to the adoption of web2.0 tools and using them to innovate and extend the organisation.

It begs the question; "Is it purely the lack of understanding of where the culture is and why it is; that prevents successful rollouts of web2.0 tools?"

Time to think.......

Internet Behaviour = Individual Behaviour?

2008-06-15T18:49:00.005+10:00

By way of new scientist magazine....

This post offers an attempt to study the behaviour of the connected at the university of Indiana at Bloomington. The article extract is picked up ...

Mark Meiss and colleagues at Indiana University in Bloomington collected statistical data on hundreds of millions of online connections involving people exchanging emails, sharing files or just browsing the web. They found extreme variations in user behaviour - for example, in the number of people a user tended to interact with. The spread of results was utterly unlike the normal bell curve of statistics, produced when most data points are clustered around a central value, with few points at the "tails" of the curve.

I recommend that you follow the links and download the full report. What I find fascinating is the variance in the statistical outputs and what ramifications this holds for those who want to define what the next big thing is for WEB 2.0 and the Internet at large.

For instance, can we draw from some of this data that people's connectedness is now not based on introduction so much, but by way of thinking and learning? Could it be that individuals have become more needing of connecting with people who desire to learn about the same things that they want to learn about? Is this really social networking or do we connect on an intellectual level first? I am beginning to think that "connecting" in the on-line world has social outcomes but other than dating web sites, the drivers of on-line behaviour are something more tangible.

I will watch this space with interest.....

'Teachable Moments'

2008-06-13T22:43:00.003+10:00

I came across this post on a concept called "Teachable Moments". The article quotes Robert Thurman, Buddhist scholar and friend of The Dalai Lama:
‘teachable moments’ — are times when you recognize your current ways of thinking and coping aren’t adequate for what’s in front of you; times when life serves up something you can’t handle, at least with the approaches you’ve used before.

It then goes on to point out ways that you can take advantage of such situations. I find myself thinking about the success that people have derived from being "mindful" of those teachable moments and what they have garnered for themselves.

This awareness of one's own innate abilities seems to be gathering as a force that compliments connective intelligence and promotes sharing of experience, narrative and knowledge.

I am excited about the concept of a teachable moment and it is something that might need some journaling to ensure I capture that which has been of benefit.

great thoughts and concepts! Hmmmm......

GenY? What tag?

2008-06-12T17:26:00.003+10:00

Sorry for not posting of late but we had a long weekend here in Australia and I had to facilitate a learning session for an intake of graduates in my organisation.

As is my want I asked them about the TAG of Gen Y and what they thought of it.

Whilst one of the twelve participants objected to the descriptors that comes with the tag (aka selfish, single minded, impatient etc) most accepted that it was a societal descriptor that depicted the influences that have shaped their generation and did not believe that it typically described the persona's or the behaviours of their generation.

It made me think as to whether, as a Human Resources and Learning professional, whether I have truly given time to the Generation X tag that has been attributed to myself and do I agree that the descriptions depict the influences that shaped my thoughts patterns and processes.

One thing all agreed on; there are generational differences and these differences demand critical thought for communication, love, friendship, business and spirituality.

I live and I learn........

Mindfulness and sense making

2008-06-09T17:03:00.002+10:00

From David Snowden's Cognitive Edge Blog:

Sensemaking is the ability or attempt to make sense of an ambiguous situation. More exactly, sensemaking is the process of creating situational awareness and understanding in situations of high complexity or uncertainty in order to make decisions. It is "a motivated, continuous effort to understand connections (which can be among people, places, and events) in order to anticipate their trajectories and act effectively - David Snowden

I again find myself wondering why a disposition for critical thought needs to be inherent for people to seriously understand their own desires and needs to learn and "make sense" of their decisions. What I like about David's definition is that he identifies the attempts to make sense and not just the ability.

In my own sense making realm, I need to bridge the gap between the attempt and the ability but I believe this to be inherent in me because of a practiced "mindfulness" or "awareness" on a day to day basis. For me it is the essence of why I can make "sense" and why I have, IMHO, a heightened level of situational awareness.

However, this is not something inherent and I often ponder why. However, today I think sense making and mindfulness need to go hand in hand on some level and this is something i will now have to think about......

Communities of Practice Article

2008-06-07T22:42:00.004+10:00

By way of Chief Learning Officer (CLO media) magazine, this article has some valuable lessons on setting up a community of practice, particularly in a 90 day period.

Of course there is also Etienne Wenger or one of my lecturers and a favourite resource of knowledge management, Kim Scarbacea who are infinitely better resources than I on this subject.

But back to the article, I started to ruminate as to whether the steps they outline need some form or state of " readiness" in order to be implemented. The five steps referenced are:

1. Organize communities of practice around strategic initiatives.

2. Define clear roles and responsibilities.

3. Communicate benefits.

4. Schedule promotional events.

5. Be holistic in your approach

I have no argument with these as such but I do have a lot of experience with senior management who ask the age old question of "show me the benefit". The problem with this is that if you are trying to innovate by way of a community of interest or practice, then there will be no "runs on the board" so to speak, only comparative data on other organisations.

So readiness, for me, is about the allies and business leaders you have lobbied to introduce a framework for experimentation without ramification. In other words a mistake-accepting environment.

Only then would we truly be able to implement with haste and learn from it as we go.

Hmmmmm ......

Learning Landscapes and Mindfulness?

2008-06-06T18:18:00.003+10:00

Is it a requirement of an individual to be able to think critically in order for them to define what their learning landscape looks like?

This is the question I was asked by a colleague in my organisation.

It got me thinking, again, about whether there is indeed a true competence required in order to be a self directed learner. It stands to reason that consciousness or mindfulness is something that sparks or assists an intrinsic motivation to learn but does this mean that the process that follows the "spark" is a defined competence that enables learning to take place?

I tend to think that as an individual is unique so is the process by which they recognise "how" they learn. When compared or discussed with others they may find that they are similar to other people but still the process by which they came to understand or be mindful or how they learn, should be unique. Of course, once we have compared and accept that we learn like each other, this is when connected collective learning starts to grow and thrive?

Now that is worth pondering .......

EduPunk??????

2008-06-05T09:31:00.003+10:00

This title/concept/definition seems to be getting a lot of air time at the moment and for the life of me I am still struggling to understand why it even needs to exist.

Recognition that open source and the ability of individuals to influence and change via the Internet, is the reason why LMS vendors and other software vendors are looking to integrate web2.0 technologies on their platform. These large scale vendors have something that individuals do not normally have. A collective understanding of the ecology's that exist within organisations. Be it a knowledge ecology, a learning ecology, systems or processes, it is the understanding of the beast which becomes important and this is why it is important that they have a place in the scheme of things.

Having said this, my personal ethos is "power to the blogger" and ensuring that expression of ideas and learning is as open as possible. It is just that I struggle with these "mantra" like ideologies that really hold little or no substance if they truly understand what organisations and ecology's are trying to achieve.

BTW

I attended a social justice evening at my Daughters college last night and found myself in a state of complete "mindfulness" listening to people of different religious, cultural and political viewpoints. I had an extremely high perception of "being in the moment" and thoroughly enjoyed all the evening had to offer.

I am present....... and ruminating as always.

Being Mindful

2008-06-04T08:55:00.003+10:00

I am struck sometimes by the ability of individuals to trust process and intellect and not listen to that which they have always known to serve them best. Their instinct. Instinct is not something that "occurs" but rather is something that , I would say, gifted individuals recognise and embrace.

It is the combination of intellect with instinct that creates that state of being mindful and alert to the possibilities of all situations.

Carl Rogers, the psychologist whose notoriety was derived by his now famous "Humanist" approach to psychology, once stated " I have learned that my total organismic sensing of a situation is more trustworthy than my intellect."

Sense making is a term that is gaining amazing credence in Knowledge Management circles and my reflection of this is centered around this combination of intellect and instinct or "being mindful".

My rumination is..... Is this a learned state or can it only be practiced by a gifted few (metaphorically speaking).

I ponder yet again!

PLE or PKM or Merged and Connected

2008-06-03T08:29:00.004+10:00

Kudos to Harold Jarche for a thought provoking post and one that inspired me to ponder the differences (if any) of a Personal Learning Environment (PLE) and a Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) system.

Harold states "There are also three externally focused activities that I believe complement our internal learning. These are to Connect, Exchange and Contribute."

I believe these to be required activities rather than complimentary because I also believe that the paradigms of learning are shifting and we have not understood how monumentally they shift. Allow me to expand.

I have often watched by 16 year old daughter and 13 year old son go about their social, school and communicative activities on the PC at home and marvelled at their innate ability to be able to "psuedo" touch type despite not having any formal tuition or having engaged in any self-paced, self-directed learning that was available. No typing tutor software, nobody showing them where to put their fingers on the qwerty keyboard etc. Their skill was born out of their desire to contribute to discussion on instant messenger with 15 people at the same time or from being in a gaming discussion room wanting to have their 10 cents worth. Their learning was adaptive and almost unconsciously constructed. I say almost because their desire to Connect, Exchange and Contribute were the drivers behind the learning taking place and the skill being developed.

If we believe that Personal Learning Environments are systems that enable learners to take control of and manage their own learning, then perhaps a PKM is a true enabler of a Personal Learning Environment?

More to ruminate over!

CLO Technology Competencies???

2008-06-02T09:23:00.000+10:00

Thought this would be a good check on ourselves as learning professionals, as to what we see are competencies that maybe all those in learning and development should have.

Last week, the Masie Ctr conducted a "flash survey" on the Technology Competencies for Learning Leaders (eg. CLO). This was part of Elliott's work as academic director at the Wharton/UPenn CLO Program. Over 930 leaders from organizations around the world responded. Here are results, including the % of respondents that selected them as their top 8 competencies:

1. Integrates learning, talent and IT strategies with business strategy (87%)
2. Leads key decisions about learning and technology for the enterprise (85%)
3. Assesses organizational readiness and need for talent/learning software (73%)4. Collaborates with the Chief Information Officer (CIO) effectively (68%)
5. Effectively scouts for new and emerging technology trends and discerns (61%)
6. Leverages collaborative technology to increase organizational capability (59%)
7. Displays fluency in techniques/models of technical process and change (46%)
8. Applies understanding of quality improvement and business process (41%)

This is a great reflection for me on whether operational learning models or learning strategies, reflect these competencies or whether they even have to! In addition, should these be competencies that all should aspire to as learning leaders. It reflects some of my thoughts as to what a broader competency field should or should not look like. Whilst IBSTPI certainly have done a lot of work in this space, it would appear that the evolutionary aspects of our field of endeavour, are re-defining what is needed on a day by day basis.

Something to ponder.......

Initial Post for Posterity

2008-05-30T15:50:00.000+10:00

Greetings to other learning professionals who are dedicated to ensuring a connected and networked world that allows individuals to create their own "world" of learning-unlearning-relearning.

As a first statement I sincerely hope this summarises where my feelings lie about adult learning. I intend to focus on the corporate sector and ensure that I provide connectedness and insight to a world I truly believe is losing touch with the phenomenon that is learning in this century.

Collaboration is required to ensure individuals can create trusted sources of learning and this can only be as an extension of what they experience and apply in the "real" world. That is to say, whatever their real world might be!

More on this a little later.

I will also be intending to concentrate on the merging of learning, knowledge and work and whether all three are the same or completely different.

I sight George Siemens when he says:

"Learning is doing. Learning has to be evidenced in actions/behaviour to qualify as learning"

This is a short quote but one that resonates with me and the fact that it resonates means I may have learned something!

I look forward to posting and discussing!