Over the course of a couple hours yesterday and one today, I sat through a deep dive into a web site redesign.  They wanted to refresh it, bring it up to speed (so that, for example, it does not show an old cell phone on the front page).  They had plans to update layout and navigation and organize the current information a bit better and bring in some new info.  After some prodding, I found out that the purpose of this redesign was to help people find information better and just to make it look more modern.

In the old version there was navigation and search to help users find information.  In the new, there was search and a redesigned navigation.  The improvement for find-ability was very incremental.  But if that is really the goal, we weren’t doing it.

We forget that there are more ways to find information.  Search.  Heirarchical navigation. Tagging. “Others who viewed this also viewed…” and other techniques.  Those are the technical ways.  But we can’t forget that one of the best ways to find information is through PEOPLE.  I know – weird concept, but it works.  Link people together and they will find the information that is not in a system.  Rather, it is in their heads, or their desk drawer on a piece of paper, or on a local hard drive, or in a book you didn’t know about, or it hasn’t been discovered until you and they put your heads together to discover it.

Right now more systems focus on information or documents.  What they should focus on is people since they are the ones who create the information. Focus on the people and the information will take care of itself.  As @dave said during #lrnchat tonight, “Biggest thing for lrng professionals in adopting soc learning is changing mindset – let learners share expertise #lrnchat.”  Enable that and you are golden.

Photo from Flickr by Thomas Hawk

WHY #1: Social Learning FOCUSES on People.

What this means could be different for everyone.  But I think that there are many similarities.  (ASIDE:For some reason, whenever I think about this, Barbara Streisand starts singing in my head.)

This is what it means to me.

First, social learning focuses on people rather than focusing on a presenter or instructor.  This may be a little scary to some, and  others see this as threatening to their job.  Instead of being a presenter we need to become a true facilitator of learning no matter what the mode.  It is a slight change of wording, but a large paradigm shift.  It is not a one way street – the instructor to the pupil.  Instead of the main contact being from teacher to student, it is student to student.  Because we focus on people, we want to help them exchange ideas and learn from each other.  We facilitate conversation, share resources, share information.

Second, it is not focused on content because we are not the ones creating it anymore.  It’s the learner who is creating the content.  For example, if you go out on a public drive at your company, you can learn a lot.  But how do you find it all?  And which folder do you look in?  Which version of the document that you found is the correct one.  And who ‘owns’ it?  This lesser approach focuses on the content itself and on the document instead of the person. This is why I am not a fan of Microsoft’s SharePoint – it centers on files and content.  I prefer systems that focus on the people, and there are plenty of them (a shortlist here).

Another thing it does not do is focus on the legal or corporate mandates.  For example, being forced to take sexual harassment training.  In our new of environment we are not focused on what one MUST do, but on what they CAN do according to their individual needs, not according to the needs of the organization.  And that is really the crux of it.  Focusing on what the learners want and need, not on what the organization wants or needs.  (Not that there shouldn’t be mandates from a company on training, but this is not the focus in this context.)

What it DOES do, is it gives the “power to the people” and allows them to take control of their learning. This may seem like craziness at first, but hold on to this thought: They already have control.  As much as we learning professionals like to think we have control, we don’t.  Influence, yes.  Control, no.  For example, how many of you have created (in your estimation) the best training and still had someone give you a bad Level 1 score or they fell asleep?  It has happened to us all.  Yes, they have control.

In my next series post I will give you a fabulous example of this and talk about the ramifications of focusing on people.

Until then…  What does “Focusing on the People” mean (or not mean) to you?

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