Quick Thoughts – TK08, Maturity and Transparency

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.