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.

Have you ever experienced learning design failure? It’s pretty easy to spot — the primary “tell” being the utterly confused or disgusted looks on the faces of your learners. Or it’s when your stakeholders or learners actively start sabotaging the design and doing whatever they want. Or they just get up and leave. That is a failure of learning design.

Having recently gone through a design failure, here’s some tips for avoiding this gut-wrenching experience.

Tip #1 – Make sure there is ONE owner/sponsor

The hardest thing for an outside consultant (or an inside L&D employee for that matter), is to make sure there is ONE person who owns the design. One person who will give you the sign-off, the go-ahead, the buy-in, the responsibility. If you find yourself in a situation where the owner or sponsor isn’t really owning the project — RUN, don’t walk, in the other direction. Ease your way out, or find a way to address the situation. To be honest, by the time you realize this, it’s often too late.

Tip #2 – Get your stakeholders’ attention

We all lead busy lives and our working lives seem to never let up. Learning initiatives often take a backseat to making the end-of-quarter numbers. So when you have your stakeholders review the information, make sure you are getting them at a point where they can pay attention and really try to understand what’s going on. Otherwise, you’ll end up with a nasty surprise just as you’re ready to launch, and where they will claim to have never been consulted.

Tip #3 – Make sure they understand the what the learning experience will feel like

Remember Tip #2 above — first get people’s attention. In addition, if people don’t do learning stuff every day, they will not easily understand the learning experience. Once you have their attention, do whatever it takes to help them understand the what the learners will be doing in the module, what it will feel like, what they will be doing, how the learning sequence ties together. Help them enter into the experience in your head. Then they will be able to give you honest, and grounded feedback on whether or not your learning design will work.

Don’t design alone

The hardest thing to do is do design alone without feedback. Do whatever it takes to get that feedback from your owner/sponsor, your stakeholders, your learners. Consult other learning designers if available. Do whatever it takes to get involvement and avoid surprises.

But sometimes, you just make mistakes. You make errors and there is no one to catch them. Or your design doesn’t quite fit expectations. Admit your problems and if there’s time and money, fix them. Otherwise, take a deep breath, do some meditation, and move on — and don’t forget the lesson you’ve learned.

• Why the heck am in a meeting with a bunch of OD folks when I think of myself as an Instructional Designer?
• What’s is organizational development? How is it different from organizational learning?
• What the difference between development and learning?

Flash Mob Dance - Informal Group Learning?

I realized that  really liked the folks at this meeting — it was the first meeting I’ve been to in the Bay Area where I felt “Ah, I’ve found my people.” Since I want to keep going, I had to figure out a WHY I was there — what was the connection?

Development vs. Learning

Why not start with the basics?

• Development – stages that one goes through in one’s life or one’s life or one’s career, often thought of as change in roles (becoming a mother or becoming a manager). These stages in development can be biological (aging); psychological (maturing, identity); or sociocultural (change in roles, life or career events/problems/trajectory). In addition, there are variables such as race, gender, and sexual orientation and the impact and influence on that person’s development.
• Learning – knowledge, skills and attitudes required to master a subject, attain performance, or understand a domain, or innovate. Learning, like development, is about change and growth. Or sometimes just about “running to stand still” — keeping up with change to maintain one’s position. There is formal and informal learning; online, face-to-face, and blended; there is the technology of learning from CMS/LMS/Performance Management systems to Webinars to games and virtual worlds. Learning is a part of development. Learning integrated with development leads to “teachable moments” — learning appropriate to developmental stages. There’s much much more but I’ll stop here.

Organizational development vs. learning

Continuing from the explanation above, then organizational development is about the stages of an organization. It has an action orientation — it’s about evaluating and creating an intervention. Examples below:

• What an organization need when moving from start-up to mature organization
• Using diagnostic tools to understand what “life event” an organization is facing and creating an intervention, such as:
  • Using organizational 360 or SLCQ (Strategy Leadership Culture Questionnaire)
  • Using something like the Periodic Table of Strategy (Mercer-Delta) to determine the challenge and potential strategic moves for an organization
  • Gap  of where an organization is, where they want to go, and what it will take to get there.
  • SWOT analysis – Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats
• Based on Senge’s five disciplines to create the learning organization:
  • personal mastery
  • mental models
  • shared visions
  • team learning
  • systems thinking
• Using coaching, mentoring, other tools to improve organizational performance

Organizational Learning

Quite simply, organizational learning is the collection of stuff involved in individual and collective learning inside an organization. It is also about the analysis and support of learning processes, formal and informal.

• Courses and curriculum
• Informal learning – social media, water-cooler learning, blogs, wikis, enabling conversations, mentoring, etc.
• Technology that support the above
• Design that supports the above
• Understanding of the cognitive and social processes that support learning
• Understanding the organizational processes that support or impeded learning
• Design of learning that supports organizational strategy
• Senge’s five disciplines

It’s in the last four that we cross-over into the realm of organizational development. There is clearly a link between the two — when things aren’t working on an organizational level, often we often turn to learning and development. However, much less often, do we turn to learning and development when things ARE working – or when we want to make things better when they are already good.

Why an Instructional Designer meets with OD folks

Instructional design (ID) is too narrowly focused on creating learning — instead of being more broadly focused on creating learning specific to organizational strategy — specific enough to measure impact. Because of the narrow focus of ID, I’m am pulled to people and groups asking bigger questions, with an organizational focus.

I love thinking about how people learn, but I also need (for my sanity) to think about how organizations learn, and how individual learning is relevant in this bigger picture.

That’s why I joined BAodn.

References for this Learning vs. Development article:

• Learning in Adulthood: A comprehensive guide by Merriam, Caffarella, Baumgartner
• Infed website: http://www.infed.org/biblio/learning-organization.htm
• Organizational Learning vs. the Learning Organization by Carol Gorelick (Google Books)

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.

At it’s essence this article says a very simple thing — asking learners hard questions before engaging with the content, (i.e., by giving them a test) challenges learners to come up with an answer before they read the material or listen to a lecture, thereby improving recall of the material. That means not giving people the answer before they engage. That means expecting them to get it wrong, expecting them to fail.

Instructional designers often do the opposite. Give people the model or the answers, then test them. What if we were to test them first with hard questions? That would force people to think! To generate and hypothesize for themselves and begin to engage with the material. But that’s not what ID’s are suppose to do, right? It’s our material and instructional design that shows the way to enlightenment. How can learners be expected to know the answer before they see the material. They will probably get it wrong — and that’s ok. Getting it wrong helps people learn — people learn from their mistakes.

The author’s suggest the following study tactic:

Students might consider taking the questions in the back of the textbook chapter and try to answer them before reading the chapter. (If there are no questions, convert the section headings to questions. If the heading is Pavlovian Conditioning, ask yourself What is Pavlovian conditioning?). Then read the chapter and answer the questions while reading it. When the chapter is finished, go back to the questions and try answering them again. For any you miss, restudy that section of the chapter. Then wait a few days and try to answer the questions again (restudying when you need to). Keep this practice up on all the chapters you read before the exam and you will be have learned the material in a durable manner and be able to retrieve it long after you have left the course.

The technique they describe above is similar to the PQ4R (preview, question, read, reflect, recite, review) method for study materials – except they suggest: preview, question, test, then the 4R’s. The key difference being the test. It’s also similar to asking “why” questions to get people to engage with the material.

This research makes sense but elicits a bit of a “duh” response (“I needed research to tell me that?!?”).

What this research does not address is motivation and relevance  — people can go through the motions of taking a test, of asking “why” questions and still not really engage. Challenging test questions may get some students to engage, but is not panacea. It is a simply method that may work in certain circumstances — what would be really helpful to better understand those circumstances.

My takeaways:

• test before you teach to challenge learners
• use hard questions
• allow learners to get the wrong answers
• let them find the right answers
• test again

• Keep it simple
• Remove extraneous detail
• Pare the learning down to essential components
• Clearly explain how these components relate to one another
• Help learners focus on what’s important.

The capacity for the brain to hold new information is limited.

• By the capacity of working memory (sometimes called short-term memory)
• By the how complex the material is to the learner

So, when learning try to communicate new knowledge:

• no more then 2-4 elements at a given time (i.e. per slide)

Knitted Brain

Some background information and research in case you want to know:

• When introducing new knowledge, the constraints of working memory limit how much information can be processed in a given time frame. Miller, 1950′s discovered the rule of 7 — no more than 7 items could be kept active in short term memory.
• However, when you’re trying to understand something, relate components of an concept, compare and contrast, then you want no more than 2-4 elements in working memory. (Sweller’s cognitive load theory).
• Interference  can limit recall of information. Recall is worse the more facts you learn about a concept. Interference literally knocks the old information out of your brain when attaching new facts to a concept, if the facts have no intrinsic relationship to each other. It interferes when the memory one is trying to create. This is why extraneous information is often not advised. (Anderson, 2006).
• Fan effects – the more facts or links associated with a concept, the longer it will take to recall any one fact.
• Redundancy effects, as opposed to interference,  can help with recall. Especially when the pieces are linked appropriately.

• • Example of irrelevant facts that INTERFERE:
    • Locke was unhappy as a student at Westminster.
    • Locke felt fruits were unwholesome for children.
  • Example 2 of REDUNDANT facts that help in recall.
    • Mozart made a long journey from Munich to Paris.
    • Mozart was intrigued by musical developments coming out of Paris.
• People use redundant facts to infer the target concept.

For more information, read up on Sweller’s cognitive load theory, and Mayer’s theory of Multimedia Learning.

This is as close as it gets to who I am: a translator between worlds. An explainer – someone who learns and understands quickly and can communicate to others. A designer — someone who cares passionately about the quality of the writing , the image, the narrative, the experience, the learning.

I prefer to make things beautiful, functional, and understood. And I’m flexible and versatile. Time to change my tag line once again — make it simple, make it easily understood.

Rani H. Gill – speak, manage, and design in three languages — technology, education and business.

A note on education vs. learning:

• education – the act or process of imparting or acquiring general knowledge, developing the powers of reasoning and judgment, and generally of preparing oneself or others intellectually for mature life. (Dictionary.com)
• learning – the act or process of acquiring knowledge or skill. (Dictionary.com)

Education is wider in scope and possibility. I want to help learners perform better, but I also want them to understand what they are doing — to approach any situation with an educated perspective. Thus technology + education + business.

• educational technology
• instructional technology designer
• learning + cognition + technology + business
• corporate learning developer

Nothing wrong with these categories — I am all of those — but none of them really encapsulates my aspirations. Instructional technology designer is what I have been calling myself lately, but the profession of instructional design in general is under pressure of becoming irrelevant (see Harold Jarche – The Relevance of the Learning Profession .) Learning has proliferated into mutliple channels – the traditional instructor-led classroom training (increasingly rare) to web seminars, books, ebooks, Twitter, Google search, and blogs of course. All of these channels cannot be controlled by the training department. It is reminiscent of what happened to network channels once cable entered the picture.

What then is left for the learning professional?

So here we go — an attempt at a new definition for myself (“again!?!” says my mother, “Yes, mom, again”. )

• Support learning and lead by example – make things easier to find, become a knowledge center/clearing house. Thus this blog.
• Support performance tied to organizational outcomes rather than learning outcomes. Create learning that matters to the organization. Create learning that can be measured.
• Make learning fun and anticipatory. That doesn’t mean it’s all games (though games can be pretty serious as well). It doesn’t mean it isn’t hard. The learner is motivated and engaged.
• Enable people to learn on their own and become self-directed learners. What skills, knowledge and attitudes do they need? Research, melioration, critical thinking.

So here I come to my tag line – learning + tech + fidelity.

• learning – how do people learn; how do we help them learn; how do we help them create their own personal knowledge environments (aka Stephen Downes) or personal knowledge management (aka Harold Jarche, et. al).
• technology – what technology tools can help people learn and how
• fidelity – has several aspects. on one level – just how good is the technical aspect of the media (quality of video, crispness of photos, etc.); how good is the content (quality of writing, design, camera work); emotional fidelity – how does the creator of the content connect with the audience/learner. How human is it? This is an area I’m just beginning to explore.

As so I begin.