I loved listening to Andrew McAfee. Being a professor at the HBS, he gave grades to certain aspects of E2.0.
Awareness = A
He mentioned that a driving force of this socialization in business was from the kids of executives. These executives start learning about what their kids are doing and both start to wonder if there is any relevance in the workplace (you better bet your noodle!). Like David, he talked about freeform authoring. We should not impose structure – get out of the way and allow them to decide form. We don’t know (or have limited knowledge) of whey they do know, what they like and their skills. Let them learn what they need – this is the whole personalization piece.
Technologies = A-
But we need to watch for feature creep and stick to ease of use. Just because it is cool it is not successful. There is the ‘9X’ factor. We tend to overweight the usefulness of the incumbent technology by a factor of 3x. We also tend to underweight the new technology by a factor of 3x. This gives us a 9X gap. For example, e-learning courses is an incumbent technology. We can all look back now and see this exact scenario in WBTs and other e-learnings. Now, there are new ways to look at learning and we have a 9X gap here to overcome the heavyweight incumbent processes and modes of learning.
Communicating Results = C
Oh, so true. He pointed to the lack of case studies. They are there, but there are not a TON of them. He continues to refer back to the same ones he knows and loves. He also talked about the dangers of ROI. In know this is dangerous territory to tread. We, as learning professionals, have always been told that utopia would be an ROI on every project. But give me the ROI on sharing information or the ROI on finding information more quickly or on tagging information for easy retrieval. Some things have only an intrinsic value and not a commoditized value that can be measured by ROI.
