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.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

WHY #10: Finds Information

Social Learning FINDS what you are looking for.  Or at least helps you find how to find.

What are the most common ways to find information? Did you notice that I did not say “search for information?”  This is because searching is only one way to find information.

The four major ways to find info are:

• Search
• Hierarchy
• Tag (Machine is using us)
• Personalization

Search is the most use.  Probably because it is most common and we are used to that.  But it may not be the most effective. How many times have we searched on Google and found a whole bunch of results that have the term(s) we wanted but didn’t have anything to do with what we wanted?  All too many times.

Hierarchy is good, but it is limited. For example, I may be able to save a document in a folder on my hard drive.  Oh, but wait.  It could also live in another folder.  And another.  It realistically live in all three.  Which do I put it in?  And when I go to find it next time, will I remember where it lived?  Yet it is another effective way to organize information.  A director of IT mentioned to me that one time he searched his network folders – which were not really THAT huge – and found 15 separate versions of the same document all with different information. Now, which one was the correct version?  Which was most up to date?

Tagging gives subjects to a bit of information rather than trying to pigeon-hole it into on label (which is what a hierarchy does).  For the best video on this, see  Information R/evolution.

The Personalization was pioneered by Amazon.  It can ‘see’ what you are looking for and give you suggestions on similar pieces of information. The system does the work for you.  Also, it can help you find others who might know what you are looking for.  Many times what you want is not in a system but in someone’s head.  The system will connect you with that person.

When anyone throws up Objection #12 you know that they don’t quite ‘get it’ yet.  And that is OK.  Your job is to help them get it.  Some times we hear “Right now we know when people have learned.  We have them take tests.  They fill out evaluations.  We can see in the LMS that they have taken a course.  How will we measure this learning?”

Answer: It is true that you will not be able to see who has taken which courses or that they have passed a test or that they really liked a class (Level 1 evals – which is what most organizations do anyway).  We cannot measure something new using the old methods.  We can, however, measure using other methods not native to training or learning.  The methods used are web analytics.

• When millions of people search on Google, what are they trying to do?  They are trying to learn.  You can measure the number of times employees perform a search.  They want to learn something from every search.
• Then, look at what they are searching for.  That will give you a great insight.
• What information are they sharing?
• What are they commenting on?
• How many wiki pages were created?
• What were they created for?
• How many blog postings were created?
• When was the last time someone logged in? (if logging in is part of the process)
• How many forum questions were asked?
• How many answers were given?
• What are the most viewed pages?
• Define ‘active’ and measure how many people are active.
• How many people have become active in the last _______?
• You can analyze not only where people are going, but how they get there, how long they stay and what they do when they are there.

This may seem odd for some.  But we also need to remember that much of what they learn we cannot account for.  It happens, but we have no way to measure it.  Although this does not verify the transfer of knowledge or skills, it is a pretty good indication.  It is a new way of measuring learning.