Checklist of Social Learning Strategies

Jan 12, 2010 Adoption, E2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Implementation, Learning 2.0, social media

Feb 1-3 I will be presenting at the Training 2010 conference with Dave Wilkins (@dwilkinsnh). In preparation, we came up with a bunch of things that one would need to know when creating a social learning strategy.  Each one could take a deep dive, but we wanted to make the list available.

We hope this will help to spark some imagination and help you see, as you plan and implement, some areas you may have missed. (Here is the list in document form.  This work is under the Creative Commons Share Alike license.)

Please feel free to add to the list in the comments below.

Checklist of Social Learning Strategies

Cultural Issues Related to Social Learning
What do you want it to be?  What is it today?

• Openness vs. planning?  Where is your balance point?
• Autonomy and self-direction vs. top-down mandates?  Where is your balance point?
• What do executives, key stakeholders and “rank-and-file” think about social media and sharing?
• What are your organizational attitudes about transparency?
• To what extent do learners take personal responsibility and accountability for their learning?

Social Learning Approaches and Methods
What “kind” of  Social Learning models are you pursuing?  How do they integrate?

• Codified?
• Collaborative?
• Emergent?
• What kinds of social learning interventions do you need?
• Do you need focused Communities of Practice or decentralized social learning that is part of all learning experiences?  Or both?

  Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: checklist, Dave Wilkins, social learning

Tags vs. Hierarchy

Mar 16, 2009 Enterprise 2.0

They were easy enough to do, why not do more?

Tags vs. Hierarchy

Tagging Advantages:

• Results are much more contextual*
• Community tags
• Fits into many ‘categories’
• Tags are user generated
• Not lost in a sub-sub-sub folder
• Findability increases
• Learning increases

*With hierarchies you are limited to one category in which to place information.  In reality, one piece of information may fit MANY different categories (sub-sub folders for example) and may fit in one for a particular context and not in the same for a different context.  Tags allow for more than one ‘category’ and this information is not pigeonholed into one.

Tags: tagging, vs.

Eliminating Email? Not Quite, but I am Going to Try

Sep 2, 2008 Enterprise 2.0, Social Learning SIG, blogging

Image via Wikipedia

Inspired by Luis Suarez and his “Giving up on email” quest, and the fact that I feel the need to more fully walk the talk, I am doing my part to eliminate the Outlook electrons.

Emails for this practise will only be counted from internal sources – I won’t be counting junk mail, vendor mail or outside non-work email that comes through my normal email (not that I would have any )  But if they come from another employee I will count them.  Those that I send will be counted as well.

Here is the break down (I always want to start beat boxing when I say “break down” for some reason).

I have never analyzed my emails before, but am happy to see that I receive less than I create.  You will notice that last week is not counted.  That is because I was experimenting to see if this would really work.  And I think it will!  Time will tell, but I am optimistic.

The first thing I did this morning was create a blog post and let everyone know what I am doing, and why.  One thing I have added in is that if someone want’s to get my attention with a particular discussion or wiki document, they should add my username to the tags.  My RSS feeds now pick up anything tagged with my username.

Below is a snippet of my post:

PROS:

• I don’t need to keep getting bombarded with emails every time someone replies. I can, if I want, see the culmination after a few people have chimed in. This cuts down on my viewing time and gives me back time I need.
• My days (and the tasks I do during the day) are not driven by my email. Rather, I spend longer times on one task and finish it, rather than being interrupted by many different tasks.
• I might be asking the wrong person a question and the right person (or someone who knows the answer) might see the information and give us the correct answer.
• I go to one place for all the information on the subject, not 10 different emails.
• Discussions / documents focus on one topic. Emails can branch out into other topics not related to the original. With all the emails, one can get lost and not quite find the information they are looking for later on.
• I can go back and actually find the conversation I had with someone else and remember why we decided what we did or the details of it rather than losing the email and guessing.
• If I ask a question, there is a good chance others have, or will have, the same question but now they will find the answer.
• If it is an announcement of some type, this elicits discussion – which is a big pro.
• Often what I do concerns projects. It is good to be able to go back and see what happened, when, what issues were worked through, what questions were asked, etc., for the next time.

CONS:

• I have never done this before. So it will be a change of how I do work. Assuming all goes well, this will turn into a pro.
• Those discussions will be out there. One may argue that it may ‘clog’ up GTSX (the name of our internal environment) with extra information that is not needed. But, again, if I have a question, someone, sometime will have the same question. So, again, it turns into a pro.

Now – why?  We can learn and share information more easily this way.  Natually, much of my offline communication has already gone this way.  In fact, I was commenting to my wife last night that I spend more time on my iPhone than I do our home computer.  A refreshing change!

Here is a SlideShare presentation on eliminating email.

Tags: Email, iPhone, Luis Suarez, Outlook, RSS, SlideShare

Quick Thoughts – TK08, Maturity and Transparency

Dec 19, 2007 Enterprise 2.0, Learning 2.0

Deadline is this Friday.  I need to have the handouts into ASTD by then for the TechKnowledge 2008 conference session I am leading.  I pretty much know what it will be like and have known for a while.   During the last month or so I have been working on my final project in my class.  It has taken quite a bit of time that I have not been able to devote to this.  Now that it is over, I have only one week for the handouts.  No problem – and yet…

Social Learning, Learning 2.0, whatever is the official name, has not been around for very long.  Web 2.0 has been around for only 4 years.  Web 2.0 in business (called Enterprise 2.0) has only been documented and identified less than two years ago.  Applying learning to that has been the same amount of time (I guess some could argue with these numbers, but I went to some of the Web2.0 experts for these).  Social Learning is emerging and it is killing me that I have to create handouts for a topic that is so new and that will be different (or more understood) two months from now.  I would love to put it altogether a week before, but that wouldn’t be fair. 

Alas, it will be done.  But I reserve the right to add to the handouts when I get there!

So I just sat down, flipped through notes I have collected over the last year and came up with 5 pages of nuggets of gold.  This is really exciting!  Whenever I dive deep into this I become more thrilled with the possibilities.  And with my own work it just gets better and better.

This morning I conducted another training on our new Social Learning platform we are launching.  One thing that makes me inwardly laugh every time is  to watch people realize how transparent this makes information (and thus us as individuals and thus the company) , and then watch them struggle with the urge to not want to be transparent because it is not a comfortable position.  To get the benefits of SL they need to be transparent, yet, if they do, there is risk.  But is that OK?  They go back and forth and you can just watch them struggle in their questions and heads.  It is the moment they let go and try it that is magical.  It finally clicks and they realize it isn’t as scary as they thought.  Actually, it can quickly become more comfortable than the old ways.

BTW – some good discussion is happening at SocialLearning.ning.com.  Come join us.

And So It Goes, And So It Goes – And Now 2 Billion Pictures Know

Nov 30, 2007 Enterprise 2.0, Social Learning SIG

I have been waiting to post this, even though it is old news, just so I can be sure that what I am saying is correct.

Flickr.com started in February of 2004.  On November 13th, the 2 billionth photo was posted on this site – only 3 years and 9 months later.  That is a TON of photos the world is sharing!  Very impressive.  Even more impressive, in my estimation, however, is that the 1 billionth photo happened on or very near August 4th (not a very impressive picture, however), only 3 months and 10 daysish earlier.

There is a momentum that is happening.  More of us are getting used to this type of sharing.  As we do, we want to LEARN!  We will EXPECT to learn when we want it and in the amount we want – and we will want to share our information.  Truth be told, we already do- well, some do and some don’t.  It is up to us to appease the appetites of those who do and help those who don’t to share appropriate information so we all can learn.

The ‘SOCIAL’ in Social Learning

Nov 8, 2007 Enterprise 2.0, Implementation, Learning 2.0, Social Learning SIG

A couple nights ago at the SAO’s IPSIG meeting, one person mentioned that the social part of Social Learning is getting out of hand and killing productivity. Afterwards, as we were talking, she shared an experience where she left the desk of one of her employees, waited a bit and then came back around. Quickly, the employee make one swift keystroke to cover up what was on the screen and then looked at her with that look of, “I am pretending nothing is wrong although I was surfing but I don’t want you to know that.”

She is concerned, and has seen evidence, that too many people get on the internet and blog or comment or …(?) about useless information not pertaining to their work; information that may be personal or just a self satisfying indulgence.

I agree – to an extent. I guarantee this WILL happen, as it has happened with the Internet when it was first introduced (and to some extent now); as it happened (and is happening) with teenagers and texting; as it happened when the hoola hoop was introduced. We tend to over indulge on the new, really taking it out of context and creating a fad until later it equalizes out and is used for its intended purposes. (There is a whole sub-discussion on how this ‘fad’ stage expands the usefulness of any thought/product for other uses, but that is another discussion.)

This attitude helped fuel the first internet bubble (some say we are in another now).

What we should not do it get so worked up that this is THE solution for learning. Years ago e-learning was the next BEST thing – then it was the LMS. Now, we are realizing that we have applied both of these to areas that should have been left alone. That will happen again with Social Learning, to be sure. We just need to keep this in mind and make sure we will have a level head on as we go through this learning bubble.

I am not trying to down play Social Learning’s effectiveness, but we just need to be realistic and moderate.

Survey says: JIVE

Oct 11, 2007 Enterprise 2.0, Learning 2.0, collaboration

After a period of time that rivals most modern eras and after a long search we have finally decided to purchase and use Jive Software’s ClearspaceX for our internal Social Learning, projects, collaboration, knowledge base, communication, etc…

We looked at a number of worthy options, all of which had strong points.  In the end we felt that ClearspaceX had the best all around feature set, function, flow, price and would best be able to deliver the kind of customer experience we were looking for.

Now, it is play time!  We have had it loaded for some time for the evaluation, but they only give you 5 licenses for free which was perfect to play with.  But now it is time to load it out and get it going.

This should be fun!

Light and Fluffy Mumbo Jumbo Learning

Oct 4, 2007 Enterprise 2.0, Learning 2.0, collaboration

This is sort of a follow up to yesterday’s post on ROI. I have heard it before many times “The ’social’ part of all of this new movement is really too much.” “Actually, what good is all this. Can it be proven?” “This is a fad that will pass or will burst like Internet 1.0.”

Could all of this be overvalued? Possibly I must admit. Life changing remenents from Internte 1.0, however, still exist and has been the framework for part of what modern society is like today. So shall this be, in the least (I personally believe it will be more rather than less).

One of my favorites to read, Andrew McAfee, recently posted information that really rung true for me. One question I had was “Do all these loose connections between people really add up to better information, more learning, better business execution?” From his thoughts I have to answer, “Yes.” It comes in the form of “The Strength of Weak Ties.”

The strong ties we have with each can produce powerful ideas, concepts, products, etc. But strong ties generally won’t help us much when we need to get out of what we all know into something that we don’t know. For example, let’s say we all know about E-Learning and we can talk a lot about it, becoming more and more proficient in this area. Think of a magazine focusing there, brining in experts. We all learn from each other and pat each other on the back. But what if we need new information that is outside of our knowledge or path of future knowledge? What do we do then? That is where our weak connections come in.

Those weak connections allow us to bridge the community gap. If I have a lot of weak connections I am able to step into another community, glean some information and be the better for it. These weak ties foster innovation and learning.

From Andrew’s Post:

A tidy summary of SWT’s conclusion is that strong ties are unlikely to be bridges between networks, while weak ties are good bridges. Bridges help solve problems, gather information, and import unfamiliar ideas. They help get work done quicker and better. The ideal network for a knowledge worker probably consists of a core of strong ties and a large periphery of weak ones. Because weak ties by definition don’t require a lot of effort to maintain, there’s no reason not to form a lot of them (as long as they don’t come at the expense of strong ties).

Subsequent research has explored whether Granovetter’s hypotheses and conclusions apply within companies, and they appear to be quite robust. My former HBS colleague Morton Hansen, for example, found that weak ties helped product development groups accomplish projects faster. Hansen, Marie Louise Mors and Bjorn Lovas further showed that weak ties helped by reducing information search costs. And Daniel Levin and Rob Cross found that the benefits of weak ties were amplified if knowledge seekers trusted that information sources were competent in their fields.

We develop a greater potential for learning when we create more weak ties.

How are you creating weak ties? What kinds of tools are you using to do this?

The ROI of Social Learning

Oct 3, 2007 Enterprise 2.0, Learning 2.0, Social Learning SIG

I write this as I am formulating my thoughts.

There is a debate about how to do ROI on Social Learning and technologies or even if there should be an ROI at all.  Can it even be done?  My answer is NO.  Not in the traditional sense of the definition of ROI.  There are efforts to measure using the traditional ROI.  I have not seen anything widely successful (although I have not looked really hard either).  But what I do know is that many people have tried and have come up with some great case studies instead.

ROI is “Return On Investment.”  But the return of what?  Value.  How do you measure value?  Using a philanthropic example, I could say that an employee of mine has a certain ROI and I could calculate that fairly easily.  So what is the ROI of a baby who is born with Down’s Syndrome?  Through this little person’s life, they will probably never produce more than they consume – in terms of money.  But they have a high ROI in other ways.  How is that measured?

An extreme example, I know.  But this shows that some things in which we invest resources can have an intrinsic value (having value by its very nature) and not a hard measurable number to define its value (there is a word there that I am not finding to describe this…).  Yet we know they are valuable.

How do we prove that?  How do we prove that Social Learning is valuable?  Maybe it is in a new type of ROI, one that shows a value measurement of some other type.

I don’t have the answer, but it is certainly worth looking into more.

How to “Liberate Your Control Freaks”

Aug 17, 2007 Enterprise 2.0, Implementation, Learning 2.0, SlideShare

One of the most challenging things to do when implementing Collaborative Learning is to help relax the people who have control. The control could be something as small as a report or as big as a corporation. Don’t get me wrong, there is moderation in all things and some things cannot be given up – like accountability. However, there are so many territories that are traditionally held on to. The old mentality was that “The more you control, the more powerful you are.” That is shifting to “The more your share, the more powerful you are.” (I might venture to say it has always been that.)