Transparency in Learning
Jul 27, 2007 Uncategorized
At home my wife has an internet radio station on all day with soft, lilting music to bring some sense of sanity to our home of eight people. Every now and then the station will have news. As I was at the desk for just a short time I heard a report of a web site that blew me away. Not that it was novel, not that it was technologically advanced (because it is not), but it hit home to me the importance of understanding transparency in learning.
This site, www.ratemyprofessors.com does just that. Pick a state. Pick a college. Pick a professor. Rate them. WOW! I think of all the professors I have been through and how some of them are only half as effective as they could be. Smart they certainly are (most of them) but many didn’t know how to teach. As students have come in, in the past, picked a class and then saw that, maybe two professors are teaching. Which one to choose? Close your eyes and guess. No longer!
In fact, I am taking Masters classes from Boise State University (the Instructional and Performance Technology Masters) and went to look at my new professor for this fall. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like BSU has updated their records and it just says “STAFF” right now. BUT, if there was one assigned that person might be on there. And if there were choices (as there often are) you bet I will take into consideration the comments!
Professors are rated on “Easiness”, “Helpfulness”, “Clarity” and “Rater Interest” and they can leave comments, like this:
“Online class. His powerpoints were written for lectures, they lose something online- they contain test questions, but no answers. Need to read the book (well)to pass his tests. The lab activities online are lame.”
Good information! So obviously this is useful to the students but is this useful for the professors? Depends on how you look at it. I am sure there are a number of professors that don’t really want to change their teaching style, even if it stinks. But let’s imagine the fate of such an educator. They teach a class poorly. They are rated poorly. Their class enrollment declines. A few months of that and the administrators notice a pattern. They find the cause. They need to fix the cause. It becomes hard to hide behind what you want to avoid.
Here is the kicker in the whole thing: Neither the school nor the professors had anything to do with or say in creating this wealth of information. They can’t control it. It is all student run.
So how does this help learning? Obviously in large organizations this same thing could happen with the trainers. But expand your thinking beyond that. Information that was previously not known, or at least not aggregated so as to be useful information, is not only gathered together but can be acted upon, creating change. And those in charge of gathering, formatting, and dispersing training had nothing to do with it. This can be good or ‘bad’. The ‘bad’ part is that it may be information that is embarrassing, like ratemyprofessors.com.
Either way, information, whether or we want to or not, is becoming more and more transparent and aggregated. And we won’t always be in control of it. The question is, how will you take advantage of it and use it to create a useful solution?
The Content Creation Burden
Jul 20, 2007 Implementation, Learning 2.0, Wiki, collaboration
I was talking with a company who wants to implementing a L2.0 solution to allow them to more fully communicate with their customers, among other goals. Not fully understanding the whole setup/reason/purpose or how this all worked, they were very concerned about two things:
- “Who will create the content? We can’t afford to have someone spend all their time on the content.”
- “What if our customers (or even employees, for heaven’s sake) add something on there that isn’t right. (Again…) We can’t have a full time person reviewing the information to make sure it is correct.”
Good concerns, but they are asking from a point of view which is set in a traditional thought that one person (or a defined group) will create the material. Those are the people you can trust. Others may not get it right, may be misinformed, may not adhere to corporate culture or may done got their English wrong. This is a point of view not even challenged because it has been standard for so long.
But this is the beauty of collaborative learning.
First of all, everyone will create the content. In the past, in effect, that meant that no one would actually do it if it was not specifically assigned to a person. I have seen companies say that everyone will add to it. But behaviors do not change and the system is wasted. But for this to work, the process of sharing information needs to be a part of what you do every day. It can be inherent in your work and, at least for the beginning, almost seamless with current, normal activities.
An example might help. Let’s say a customer or another employee emails you a question. You know the answer so you respond. Issue taken care of. If we add one small step in there it becomes information shared which will expand beyond the two main parties. When responding back the person can add an extra email address. This email is then automatically published to a wiki which is then searchable for everyone to view when they have the same question. Not only is the problem solved, but so is the same problem that you know will rear its ugly head again in the (often not so distant) future.
Previous to this, if someone else had the same question, they might email the same person again. Then, the email might go out to everyone informing them of the solution. So when it comes back in the third time, hopefully the person will remember where that email was - “or was it in a document - or… where did I see that?”
That is only one way to easily allow information to flow from the people who know to the people who want to know.
That begs the second question - what if they are wrong? The person who reads it can either comment that it is not correct (the whole or part) or they can change it to the correct information. Either way, no one is really hurt because of it. “But then it becomes junk information.” Not really. Someone will find it and correct it.
Well, who is that someone? Anyone! Let’s say, for example, I find information which I know is incorrect. I can flag it as such, alerting others to take it for what it is worth, or I can change it to the correct version. Do we need to do this for EVERY entry? Heavens no. It will happen naturally.
This is one of the difficult parts - giving up control. Let things happen naturally. Let others participate and help and guide each other. It will happen. People naturally and instinctively take on roles which will refine the information.
So these two questions are then no longer issues. I LIE. They are issues that still need to be looked at and dealt with, but they are not nearly the show stoppers they were. They are now resolved in a totally different way that was not possible before. The questions actually morph into new questions.
Any time you introduce a new tool, philosophy, paradigm, it breeds new questions and new answers to old questions. The game effectively changes.
The ‘Long Tail’ of Learning
Jul 2, 2007 Learning 2.0
I wrote about this a couple weeks back, but want to do a little more.
One definition of the Long Tail is that the items which are in low demand are the major part. In training, the company only has resources to hit the most obvious and important (at least immediately important) part - let’s say 20%. It is the 80%, however, that people are looking for but can’t find in an organization.
It is this 80% that I am going after. We recently had a meeting with some key customers. They said that our documentation and training is great, but after a while it is not of use to them because they already consumed and used it. They are at a point where they experienced the first 20% that we gave them, but now they want the other 80%.
That is the value of Learning 2.0: Delivering the untapped 80%.
