What shape might this take?

• Learning as search

  • I have an immediate learning need and I search for something that will help me.
  • Text search  is limited — there is too much noise that comes from searching. Search engines may improve their algorithms, but there’s too much data out there.
  • Company channels - I go to my company’s learning channel (most likely an app) I look up a word and see a set of linked concepts – something like this:
  • Rating systems – I have the option to add layers or re-sort the data so I can see popularity, rating, recommendations by the Learning Group; recommendations by the CEO; or how they link to being a part of a learning series (aka curriculum). It also recommends others who may want to be taking the course at the same time and suggests them as learning buddies.
  • Learning solo or in groups: I also have the option of learning on my own, learning with a group, or with my team where we learn parts of a complex set of information (distributed cognition), or just learning with others who are taking this or have taken this recently.
  • Choosing & Follow-up  – I choose the learning chunk I want. This is followed-up by an email that asks me to  rate it, whether I want it put towards my performance goals and also send me related links for more learning. Maybe I take advantage of this, maybe I don’t.
  • If I don’t find what I need, I tweet internally. Hopefully someone in the Learning Group responds and sends me a link to the relevant information. I smile, they’re just like ComcastCares.

• Learning as part of Business/Talent Management

  • My company has set strategic goals. This translates into competencies. This eventually turns into learning goals at the group and individual level. Or maybe it’s just that my manager has set learning goals for the group.
  • The business management/talent management system sends me reminders on expected courses.
  • I take courses online/in-person. Or maybe I test out of them. Only successfully completed courses go on the record.
  • For bonus points I create learning modules and advertise internally. This goes towards my learning points. I check my learning points against those as colleagues on the leaderboard. Learning as gaming.
  • My learning points come up as part of my review process.

In 2015 we will still be recovering from this economic downturn. Whether companies will be able to invest in an infrastructure that brings together all the pieces of their business so that there can be a coherent learning plan remains to be seen. Or whether the management of this infrastructure goes to the cloud and software as  service can step in to fulfill this role remains to be seen.

I imagine workplace learning technology that is not that much different from today — I imagine it better integrated and linked to my personal objectives and my company’s strategic business objectives.

Workplace learning technology in 2015 will help me customize my learning experience to my needs and my company’s strategic goals.

Whatever happens — people will still need help separating the signal from the noise.

Predication and plans for 2010

In response to the ASTD big question this month – I offer the following

Predictions:

• Design thinking will be the buzz word for 2010. To be honest, I’m still figuring out what it means for learning. I think this all started with Tom Kelly’s IDEO: Art of Innovation book back in 2005 (see my review of this book) and continues with Tim Brown’s Change by Design. On IDEO’s blog, design thinking is described by 3 ideas: Inspiration, Iteration and Change
• Analytics will rule. I think the learning profession, especially online learning folks, will have to collect more specific data on how people are using the learning, finding patterns in the data to describe different “types” of learners. Again, still figuring this one out. (See post on analytics book review.)

Challenges:

• Finding new metaphors for learning. The metaphors of the book, and of the the classroom/course still dominate learning. What are the new metaphors? How do we move beyond these old metaphors? I think the big tool sets out there (Captivate, Articulate) push us towards these metaphors. Will there be new tools that move us in a different direction?
• Aging workforce. We’ve heard much about Gen Y. However, I think we are also dealing with an aging workforce. I need to research more stats.

Plans:

• Get work, get paid. Let there be work! Looking forward to being more fully employed in 2010, whether that be employment or more contracts: 2009 was not the best year to graduate :-}
• Design more games. Been focussed so much on the employment thing, forgot to do the thing I really wanted to explore.
• Learn more about:
  • Design thinking
  • Analytics
    
  • Metaphors for learning
  • Workforce statistics
  • Tools that break the mold(s)

Hmmm… I see many blog posts coming out of this. Happy 2010 everyone – may it be filled with blue skies and new possibilities!

Three things on shifting your audience & leadership:

• Create the time to play with the media
  • I left my job. I had time to play. I really didn’t want to get engaged in social media but felt like I should. At my previous job, we had tried to play with social media within the organization but it was a limited closed circuit. What we should have done, is played with social media in the world wide web — where it’s more dynamic, where you can participate in existing communities.
  • Informal company communications - I wish Twitter was more popular before I had left my job. It’s the one way I can imagine people on different floors keeping up with each other (cross-floor communication became an issue). It would have closed the physical space that opened up after we moved to new offices and the informal chatter lessened. It would have decreased the space between offices in NY, Durham, London. Or people offsite communicating how a client program is going (For example, I could have really used Twitter the time when our a video got held at Canadian Customs and my boss got held at Immigration — I felt very alone.) Twitter would have improved informal communications within our organization. These are spaces where  Twitter can play and help people do their jobs.
  • It depends in part on the type of work and group dynamics of your organization.
• Provide constraints – let them ease into it
  • There is one thing that got my into social media through blogging: it was Karl Kapp’s line “every learning professional should blog, if only for a month”. Blogging for a month — that I could do. I was participating in Work Literacy in Fall of 2008. I started to blog and it changed my connection to my work and opened up a community of support. Every learning professional should blog — about something they care about — if only for a month.
  • Others should be asked to comment on your blog — only for a month.
  • Rotate the blog contributors — so they each do it for a month.
  • Maybe  monthly/weekly team reports should be done on a blog.
  • Tweet once a day to a community of practice such as #lrnchat, #astd, #dl09, #learntrends – and follow the conversations/hashtags for that community to see if one learns anything new.
• Get influencers within the resistant cohort and/or leadership
  • I remember trying to teach Second Life (SL)to senior executives. The one question I always got was “Why should we bother, it’s not real.” So I positioned the economy of SL and other virtual worlds as emerging economies. How large (in USD) are these economies? Is this a place where you want to have a presence? How do you regulate in this emerging economy? What are the opportunities? Risks? Are you clients here? (That one always got them.) Are your staff here?
  • Teaching social media to leadership or anyone in the company I would ask similar questions. Social media is in part a reputation/branding engine. What are people saying about your company? Your brand? Are your staff here? Are your clients or customers here? Don’t tell them all, let them discover most of the answers for themselves. Call it research, call it discovery learning.
  • Examine those places that we don’t usually think of as social media — Amazon, photo sharing sites, Yelp, Ning, Delicious. I thought because I didn’t participate in Blogs, Facebook, Twtitter, LinkedIn that I wasn’t on social media. Not true
  • The harder thing to do is find measurements of social media learning that matter to your organization. Is there a pain point you can link social media to (customer complaints, etc.)? Is there a way you can measure the impact of social media?

Social media is a way for the learning department to have an impact beyond just learning and link it to the organization as a whole. It’s informal.

Just some thoughts.

Initial thoughts:

• Wireless communications have untethered our social norms
  • Sherry Turkle observed how we have become tethered to our virtual identities via cellphones and other devices.
  • What used to be considered rude – answering the phone while talking face-to-face with someone – is now the norm (in most of North America)
  • I don’t know what the social norms are in other countries/cultures.
  • Establish a new norm in your learning environment – via ground rules or other means. Discuss and create the norm up front.
    • Discuss how the backchannel can be used. What appropriate to say and not.
    • Give a list of web sites related to your topic for those who will want to surf the web (if laptops are allowed.) Have people surf in areas related to your topic.

• Presenters need to change their expectations.
  • Don’t expect full attention - design with this in mind.
    • Tell the learners what to pay attention to – keywords
  • Expect the back-channel conversation – bring it to to the foreground occasionally during the presentation or have someone moderating it and bring it up. Give the audience the #hashtag so you can let them know that you  know and so that you can follow. Give them the venue for the backchannel.
  • Stop presenting – let the audience engage with each other, either face-to-face table talk or just via the backchannel.
  • Or if you want to be authoritative and have the power – ban latops and blackberries from the room. I’ve seen this done in corporate settings. But you know, people might resort to passing notes.
• Partial-attention learners
  • Initial research into attention and performance showed that even when people are performing other tasks, they would still hear a message when primed to listen for a target word. (Treisman, 1964 Attenuation Theory). Does this mean we should be keying our learners for target words?
  • Perhaps as learners we should learn how to better target our attention and learn when to switch
  • Perhaps presenters should provide break points, pauses that allow for the swtiching.
• Treat the presentation like a game
  • What if we were to treat the presentation like a game?
  • The presenter sets the rules – back-channel rules, front-channel rules
  • The presenter sets the goals – prize to indivdual or table group that can complete a task within a certain amount of time or that answers the quiz at the end.
  • Points for the best answer…
  • Have to think about this one more.

Just some initial thoughts on changing/setting expectations and skills we can learn and sharpen. The game has changed in intensity, lets change with it.

Addtional note (added later 10/14/09): there are two types of attention under current research: top-down attention (attending to a task such as looking for keys or listening to a presentation) & bottom-up attention (automatic attention to something salient or attention-grabbing, such as a fire-alarm or key words) . See full blog post from Scientific American: link.