In 2009 I had participated in a class in social media and branding at Stanford, and was invited to speak at the new class the following year. I was struggling to define myself in the post-crash world and in a new world called California (oh so different than New York or Durham, North Carolina). The thinking and exercises I did on social media and brand as a part of that class were incredibly helpful.

It was helpful to remind myself of what I said then as it is still relevant and possibly even more important today: think about your value-add, what you bring to the marketplace, understand your “feature-set”, as well as think about an aspirational future and what you bring to that future — do you have the skillsets to support that future?

Watch and enjoy — would love to hear your comments on is it still relevant? What makes sense or doesn’t?

Was I wrong to remain impartial? Should I have taken this opportunity to engage the participants in a dialogue to both question their assumptions and deepen their understanding instead of treating it as fact finding mission? Or would that have come across as too didatic?

I’m reflecting back to a previous engagement that  I had where the interviews I conducted resulted in a mass of confusion, and a failed design – what could I have done differently in that instance? I’m not sure the dialogue would have revealed anything different (or maybe it would have), but what would have shifted is my understanding of the dialogue. If no one could agree on outcomes, how could a better design have helped?  The design should have shifted towards facilitating a dialogue, which is what was really needed.

Coming back to the present — I encouraged the participants to speak their viewpoint, and at the end, added in mine — and offered them resources and other items they could learn from. The scope of my mandate did not allow for much else. But what if I approached the focus group as a learning intervention for both of us? The realm of hermeneutics, or participatory research, you bring the unconscious forward to the conscious and together create a shared meaning – you learn from your participants and allow them to reshape your interpretations or frameworks. One might ask oneself — well, isn’t that what you’re suppose to do, learn from participants? The difference in this approach is consciousness around the creation of a shared meaning.

Taking it one step further into the obvious, focus groups can be instruments of change within an organization – a group of people coming together to express their perspectives and experiences, and then shifting into a group of people committed to making a change.

The challenge is in finding a way to make that shift.

Note: an interesting paper on use of hermeneutics by a Canadian I might add

The New Social Learning: A Guide to Transforming Organizations Through Social Media by Tony Bingham and Marcia Conner is a good book. It does exactly what it purports to do — provide a comprehensive guide to social learning. It’s one of those books that is going to become a must-have for learning folks — for the next couple years anyways before it all changes again. But by then, perhaps they will have built it into a franchise, bringing out a new book every year.

This book covers: workplace trends, online communities, making the case for social learning, micro-sharing (aka twitter and Facebook), collective intelligence (wikis, blogging), immersive environments, and blended learning.

Good points: it’s easy to read, it has nice tidbits (“Microsharing is an serendipity engine”, p.98). I can easily imagine it as a reference when making a game-plan for social learning in your workplace. A great place to start if you’re learning about social learning.

Downside: It didn’t inspire me. Perhaps it’s just me — I’m familiar with most of the stuff in the book and I’m looking for something else. It talks about nuts and bolts, and it has quotes from people who implement, people who manage it, there are many interesting stories, but not compelling stories. I wanted to hear more about how that small group of guys changed the culture of the CIA, FBI and the rest of the intelligence community and got them to use social media.

If you’re working at the intersection of social media and learning, you need this book in your shelf. End of story. So I’ll make it easy: here is where you can buy it. And don’t worry, I don’t get a cut, not even through Google ads.

But if you’re looking for the in-depth story of how social media creates cultural change in organizations, you won’t find it here.

Check out the New Social Learning website for more info.

Maybe not the shortest book review ever, but close.

For those of you not yet in the know, an open space meeting is essentially a gathering, spanning one day or several, around a common topic, where there is no preset agenda. The participants create the agenda on the day by putting up topics for small group discussion. The facilitators provide a grid of time slots and meeting spaces, and people put up the ideas or problems they would like to discuss. At the appropriate times, people vote with their feet and go to the small group gathering that interests them most. They can stay at one group, or flit between groups. Meeting notes are captured, and then published in a wiki or some other format.

The quality of the conversations depends on the participants, the topics, and the energy of the space. It’s a different way of having a professional conference. You are responsible for creating your own experience. Ok, I buy into that. But still, I find myself wanting more. What’s missing for me?

For me it’s the difference between formal and informal learning, where structured conferences are the former, and unconferences are the latter. There is a place for both. One is about learning in a designed path, in a structured way, to a particular outcome. The other is about exploring a topic.  So it depends what I need at that time. Am I exploring or wanting to get somewhere?

What I love most about the open space meetings is going places where I never thought I’d go. What I don’t like is when I’m looking to plunge deeply into a topic, and be taken to place I didn’t know I could go, by someone who has explored and thought about it in depth — when I need a guide.

Now that I’ve written this it seems obvious, but it’s not so obvious in the moment when you’re having great conversations and still find yourself looking around for the sage. I want both. I want to dive deep with a guide, and then explore, with others, and find my own way. Like improvisational jazz — structure and unstructure within the same experience.

Can’t we design a middle way?

Walking into Hacker Dojo at the start of the Women in Mobile event there was a loud buzz in the air. Voices bouncing off the concrete floor and reverberating through the open space — a large gathering of women and several men mixed in. And…. (sniff, sniff)…the smell of pizza in the air! (thanks PayPal) Ah, the scent of a meetup. Smiles as I greet Seema and Grace at the registration desk.

After introductions to APWT by Shirley (surely you know Shirley Lin!), and Lilian Tham — they hand it over to the moderator, Ishita Majumdar (Executive In Residence, Plug-N-Play) to talk about how these women entrepreneurs in mobile got started, what they/their companies are doing, and their advice for creating your own products and startups. I walked in with no expectations, and walked out excited by possibilities — the Silicon Valley magic.

Here’s the 3 women presenting and what I found cool about what they do.

• Georgi Dagnall, CEO, GeoGad
• Bess Ho, ninja mobile developer with 10 apps in the app stores and speaker at Web 2.0
• Katie McMahon, Marketing Maven,  SoundHound

Geodad – Your personal mobile tour

My first thought — isn’t this just a mashup of maps + tours? It reminded me of running routes that I could do and share with others. Ok, it’s an app, and it also has a web interface for creating personal tours. You mean I could create a personal tour of my home town Port Kells? (Ok, not really a town…more of a corner) Upload commentary, pics, and other stuff that I find cool about it? Ok, I could get into that.I could create my own personal tours around my interests and share it with others? Like a chocolate tour of SF? Ice cream tours? Coffee houses in tour of the South? City of Durham could put its Black History tour on this thing. Very cool.

But hey, I could use it for more than just tourist tours — I could use it for onboarding new people, and giving them a tour around a campus, office or facility (it’s based on longitude and latitude).  Hotels could use it to orient their guests/corporate users (could have used this as an event coordinator when I was trying to figure out what was possible in a space.) I could also use it to create an oral history project, combining it with locations. Or have students create their own oral history project! Or the local homeowners associations could use it to create garden tours, walking tours and more and more.

All right I get it, now I just have to try it. It’s completely free too! (Both iPhone & Android versions I think.)

SoundHound – sample sound, find music

SoundHound is probably the best-funded group that was here tonight. And SoundHound has some serious IP behind it. SoundHound  samples your voice, or a tune that you hum, the music via the radio or speaker –  and finds the song, artist, etc, AND link to places where you can purchase it! How cool is that? (The real question is can it understand MY tone-deaf humming?)

Most sound-matching technology goes from sound > text-text > matching. SoundHound does sound > sound-sound > matching. Much harder, many more possibilities.

So I can imagine doing role plays based on this sound matching. Stay with me — instead of a branching structure, imagine an algorithm that responds to tonality, to specific words, and creates a response based on that. Possibilities of more general role plays. Many things to play with here.

Very cool app. Download – there’s a freeium version or premium version at low cost. Both iPhone & Android.

Bess Ho – app creator, promotion-hacker extraordinaire

Bess Ho is amazing. That’s all I can say. Comes up with app ideas, does quick market research to see what’s out there, then if a competitor exists, designs to its failings, and then starts coding. Her advice: (a) Keep it Simple (2) Do One Thing Really Well (3) Make it Fun.

And she practices guerilla marketing – like showing up at the Palo Alto Festival with her music app, and just talking her way into performing, then near the Apple store in Palo Alto and just stop people on the street to promote her app. This girl is hacker to the core. Great energy, makes anything seem possible. Bess Ho rocks. You can follow here on twitter @bess.

The main questions I’m trying to answer is “What is twitter?” and “Why should I bother?” My interest in this introduction is not to get into branding, or social media marketing, or any of that. It’s really a reflection on why I got interested in twitter, and why you might find it interesting too. It was also to dispel the myth that twitter is just about gossip — because it’s not (though that is a large part of what goes on I must say.)

This also gave me to the opportunity to add to my portfolio and was a warm up exercise to get me motivated to do that learning thing I want to do about wine, which, you know, I’m getting to.

For you viewing pleasure, a slidecast. No complex builds because Slideshare doesn’t allow for that.

How I motivated my spouse to clean the living room

Last week while trying to get my husband to clean his stuff out of the living room, I tried to influence him with the idea of a more organized house, with the idea of him as a more organized person, and also with idea of my help. But because it felt wrong — dishonest really — to attempt influence him without him knowing, I decided to be more direct and started my campaign with the words “I want to influence you.” That was about as far as I got. He so loved the idea that I was trying to influence him, that he came over and gave me a hug, and the rest was relatively easy.

I’d like to take the credit for this magic trick, but let’s be honest, there was another motivating factor: we had a new couch arriving. The email of the impending arrival came the same week I was trying to get the cleaning done. That was the real motivation. My influence just helped get it done in a more timely manner. The arrival of the couch meant the completion of the living room, one of the last rooms to be completed in our long renovation saga. It was also about the completion of his idea of home. This was the underlying motivation.

Drive: the book about motivation

Daniel Pink’s new book Drive: the surprising truth about what motivates us, is actually not that surprising for many of us who have worked in the field of education. The work of Deci & Ryan (intrinsic & extrinsic motivations); Carol Dweck (how our beliefs in intelligence affect our view of ourselves as learners); and of course, Mihaly Csikszenmihalyi (the idea of flow.) What Pink does it put it all together in a compelling package and relates it to the world of work. Because of this, I found his book useful in thinking about motivation — and summarize the key components below.

Beyond carrots and sticks – the 3 components of motivation

Here is the twitter version of the book that the author provides (in the Toolkit section – yes, did I mention it was well-packaged?):

Carrots & sticks are so last century. Drive says for 21st century work, we need to upgrade to autonomy, mastery & purpose.

That’s it. You don’t have to read the book – it’s about intrinsic motivation – or autonomy, mastery & purpose. Understanding these 3 components will help motivate people for most types of work, he argues, especially work in the “new economy” of the “21st century”. With some types of repetitive work, apparently sticks and carrots still are good motivators (the post office comes to mind.) But for “knowledge workers”, he argues, it’s different — assuming that you compensate people fairly.

• Autonomy – people need autonomy over what they do (task), when they do it (time), who they do it with (team), and how they do it (technique) – (derived from Deci/Ryan plus others)
• Mastery – begins with flow (Csikszenmihalyi) – optimal experiences when the task  is neither too easy or too hard, but just above our level, pushing us to get better. Mastery is a mindset where one sees abilities not as finite or set (Dweck), but as infinite – the anything is possible mindset. However, mastery is painful, requiring grit and deliberate practice (Schon plus others). Mastery is impossible to fully realize – one can always get better.
• Purpose – people need purpose – goals that use profit to reach purpose (social innovations); when we need more than self- interest (hello, non-profit world); the idea of purpose maximization, as opposed to profit maximization.

My questions – But do we always know what we want and need? Will it get us to where we want to go? Or take us to unexpected places? When I’ve been placed on teams that are with people that I don’t like and know is when I’ve learned the most about how to work with people different from myself. It is then when I’ve grown. And sometimes these teams create the most innovative ideas — when we step outside our usual ways of being.

And, let’s be honest: extrinsic motivation matters. I wanted to do my Masters — I choose it as my purpose/task. But if I didn’t have a deadline (i.e. spouse threatening insanity if I didn’t finish), then no, I would not have completed it and graduated. If I didn’t start a blog called the Unfinished Masters, and asked all my friends to read it and keep me on track — then no, I would not have finished.

Yes – autonomy, mastery, and purpose make sense — but do people always know what they want and need? Can everyone function on intrinsic motivation alone? This is where influence comes to play, in defining purpose, in setting deadlines or other forms of extrinsic motivation.

How to motivate

• Understand people’s purpose, or help them shape their purpose and goals.
  Many educators do this at the start of class (see Learning Cycle blog)
• Can you structure the interaction so they can achieve mastery? Achieve a level of performance above what they currently have? (Think how video games are constantly challenging players just above their level. Hard to do sometimes for a mixed group.)
• Give them autonomy on how they reach their goals.

So these ideas are very general, let me try to apply to a couple situations.

Motivating my spouse

• Purpose: My spouse wants an organized, functional and beautiful house. Therefore, position the work on tasks that will make the house more functional, and not just because I’m asking him to clean.
• Autonomy: Within the purpose of organizing/increasing functionality let him choose his task; let him do it his way (technique), on his time (with deadlines of course – the couch was the extrinsic motivation part). And does he get to choose his team? Well, he choose to marry me – so yes.
• Mastery: Will the task have flow? Maybe if it’s a challenge of how quickly we can get it done. Can he believe he can do it — yes; although it won’t require practice, it will require grit.

In writing this outline of motivating my husband, I think it’s more for me than for him.

Motivating my own learning — about wine

• Ever since moving to the Bay Area I’ve wanted to learn more about wine. The grape varieties, the vintners, the regions, etc. My purpose is simple – to become a better Californian and learn about wine.
• Autonomy:I choose to learn about wine by creating a learning module (task). I’d like to try out a new Instructional Design model that I’ve been reading about (technique). I’d like to put it online. My team is myself, and perhaps a couple friends I can cajole into advising as needed. My technique will also involve sampling said wines The time – that’s the hard part — that where I need extrinsic motivation. That’s why I’m writing about this – I’d like to get YOU to help motivate me to complete this by mid-April.
• Mastery: I believe that I am capable of learning about wine; I also believe that I am capable of mastering the domain of wine — and be able to choose wines to go with food, wines to drink at parties, wines as gifts — and maybe more. This will require grit, deliberate practice, and refining my palette for wine. It will also require a drinking buddy.

In the process of writing these points, it becomes clear to me that my challenge is always, will always be the deadline. I love to read and research, but without the extrinsic motivation of the deadline, I would accomplish very little. This essential point is what Pink only touches on — that we need that external structure of deadlines, office spaces where we do our work, the exercise classes — to motivate us to keep focused and keep us going. We often need others to create expectations that we then fulfill. We need that social connection, and sometimes social pressure, to motivate us.

This one is created by Marcus Buckingham, the Gallup genius who helped create and market First, Break All the Rules, and Now, Discover Your Strengths. These books respectively say – each one of us is an individual and different, and managers should realize that and treat us differently; and people who do best focus on their strengths. The Strong Life Test for Women is a take-off on the latter.

First I took the online assessment, then I went to the bookstore and read the related book in about 2.5 hours (after reading academic papers, most business books are an easy read.)

Is is useful?

Well, it depends. If you’re looking for work, or a new life path, no one test is going to provide you the answer. What it may give you, is some insights into yourself, not because the test reveals your true self, but because you reveal your true self  when you react/interact with the test.

So I took this test. It told me the following:

• Strongest Role: Advisor. I like to ask the question – What’s the best thing to do?
• Supporting Role: Creator. I like to ask the question – What do I understand?

To be honest, I didn’t like that Creator was a supporting role. I’m an artist damn it! Ok, know that we’ve got that straight, we can move on, eh? I read my complete role descriptions and noted my reactions to the descriptions — yes, I like figuring out the answers and the best way to do things — I like being the expert (Advisor). Yes, I like starting with my own insights and finding the pattern underneath life’s craziness (Creator). Yes, I like tests that reconfirm how I think about myself, and make me remember what’s important to me.

The interesting difference

What’s different about this test, is not so much the test itself, but the accompanying literature that asks one important question:

• What are your strongest moments? In your working life, family, marriage, etc.?
• At what points do you feel you are at your best?
• What is is about those particular moments?
• How can you deliberately create those moments?
• Investigate those moments – what is it about them that you like?
• Celebrate and acknowledge those moments?

It is this difference – focusing on strong moments in your life, and the specifics of those moments — that makes this interesting. The most important exercise you can do is find the words to describe those moments.

The test is just a starting point.

Just an FYI – a list of roles as outlined in the book:

1. Advisor
2. Caretaker
3. Creator
4. Equalizer
5. Influencer
6. Motivator
7. Pioneer
8. Teacher
9. Weaver

There are many older pieces still to add, and many new ones running around in my head. But hey, check it out and I welcome your feedback.

Personas - courtesy galiciaCAD.com

Having been on the job market for several months now, I’ve noticed that Captivate and Articulate are required for almost every e-learning or instructional design position that I see posted. Having used Captivate, and having seen Articulate being used – I now understand why so many consider e-learning boring. These two software tools are designed to rapidly convert PowerPoint presentations into e-Learning. They also make it easy to tack a quiz onto the end of the learning. The metaphor behind the software design is “book”, is “page-turner”. The result is boring e-Learning.

Now hold on, am I just blaming the tools — especially since I haven’t really used Articulate? Am I limited by my own vision of what these tools are capable of? Possibly. Am I asking too much of e-Learning designers? Maybe. It is hard to create engaging e-Learning. Just look at my own portfolio — can’t say the learning is *that* engaging.

Research, Think, Write, Design

So here I come to my tag-line: research, write, think, design. Will this make learning more engaging? Perhaps, perhaps not. But it might make it more relevant.

• Research the business outcome. Why are you creating this learning course/widget/thing? What business outcomes are you trying to effect? What behaviors are you trying to change? What do you want people to do?!? Not just “We want people to learn this new financial software” — but “We want people to increase their efficiency and accuracy in expense reporting (or budget planning or budget management)”. This leads the question: “Well, heck, what are they doing now? Who are THEY?”
• Research the learners. Are they novices? experts? do they have different roles/needs? can you create personas from these needs? Is it possible to actually collect data on them? How technically savvy are they? How do they get their information? How do they interact with their LMS? Do they interact with the LMS? Examples of defining personas and how to use personas can be found on the Cooper Journal website. One can think of personas as meaningful customer segmentation made real by colorful descriptions — see the description of how Best Buy uses personas in designing their stores and interacting with their customers in my review of The Deciding Factor.
• Think about the research – well, can we just call this analysis? Sure, analyze you data. Concept. Examine the correlations. What can we learn from these data patterns, without making correlation errors. Clearly this is one of the areas that I need to address, in addition to designing better research.
• Write about it – does it seem redundant to write about your research and analysis? I think not. The process of writing and having to explain your research analysis is key to communication and deepening the understanding. The writing process forces the assumptions to the surface. It exposes the flaws in your argument. Writing is also key to the design process.
• Design – for me this is where you begin to explore methodologies, tools, techniques. This is where you think about learning outcomes, the learning experience. I also strongly believe that the basis of good learning design is good writing — understanding the subject matter, finding good examples, writing good scripts. The quality of the discourse matters. The writing underlying the learning design is often where it all falls apart — maybe the writer can’t imagine the learner persona. Maybe they do not fully understand the subject matter or business outcome. Good research and analysis don’t always lead to good design, but directs the design, channels the creative energies.

Yes, then we have development, where we use whatever toolset (choosing of which is part of the design process) or perhaps organizational constraints dictate what tools to use. Then the implementation, then the evaluation. Well, the evaluation should actually be a part of the research phase — if we know the business outcome, how will we know when we got there? Define success at the beginning and figure out how to effectively measure it.

For example, “We want people to increase their efficiency and accuracy in expense reporting (or budget planning or budget management)” — well there may be measurements in time required to do X, or accuracy in X (how many times to redo), or how many people to do X, what is the cost of doing X — then see if these metrics change after/during the learning. Of course, this assumes these metrics were collected in the first place for you to measure change against.

A role that incorporates this level of thinking, research, design would be ideal. Writing this down helps.

My question – Are Training & Development departments  thinking this way? Are organizations thinking this way? Is it that people just “don’t have time!” to do this level of research? You know, I don’t think so. I think much of the information is there, easy to get, is we ask the right questions. User-experience designers are already doing this. Product Management is already doing this. Let’s do it internally and not just for clients/customers. This is low-hanging fruit – but a big mental adjustment.