I am in Tony Karrer’s session here at TK08 today entitled, eLearning 2.0 – Applications and Implications. It is a very large room and was intended to be more of a discussion, but oh well! This is going to be a 201 session – a follow up from this morning’s session (which I did not attend).
From the outset, it looks like his presentation will be similar to mine tomorrow morning, more along the lines of implementation.
He starts out by asking who is implementing this now. Only about six people raised their hands in about 250 people. I raised my hand and explained my situation very briefly.
Interestingly, he did a survey and the top way people want to use these technologies is “Alongside Formal Learning.” Yet EVERONE that mentioned that they are using it are NOT doing it alongside formal learning. This shows me that those who are using it doing think of it as an extension of training. It further proves to me that as people dive into this they divorce it from training. It is totally separate. Not that it cannot compliment or help, but it is not in the ‘learning plan.”
Things that get in the way?
· Firewalls
· IP
· Privacy
· Security
· Control of information by management
· Strict control over policies – Accuracy
· Liability / Discoverability / Compliance
· Change Management – Ready for it / Culture
· Management take it seriously – away from work
· Is it real work or not?
· Education of management
· Lack of resources – Mobile devices
· Pushback from workforce – adoption
What about the quality of the content? That is ALMOST a non-issue. Think about it – the information is getting out now, but it is over the phone, IM, email. But now it is recorded and easily accessible. But it is not really an issue once implemented.
Usually, at first, the moderation is more strict than a few months later. It relaxes. It just happens. Corporations like to limit authoring as well. WHY? There are some reasons and I can see, but for the reasons that I have heard it is a paranoia that goes away once they get comfortable. And limiting visibility? Again, there are reasons to do it, but at first more is locked down and then t opens up because people realize that it is OK for anyone to see it.
Tony cites the 90-9-1 rule where 90% of the community members are lurkers, 9% contribute a small amount and the 1% contribute the majority of the content.
(Honestly, this is almost frustrating being in the audience because I want to jump up and answer so many of these questions and help people realize that all the ‘issues’ they are bringing up seem like big issues, but they are, for a lot of them, non-issues. Oh well – I continue to listen and soak it all up. He is doing a great job of answering the questions. It is obvious he has good experience in it.)
Next, Tony talks about ways to get wiki adoptions, based off of www.wikipatterns.com. I have written before, but the writer of the Wiki Patterns book is doing some vodcasts. If you have questions about this, you should check these short videos out.
How do you measure the impact? He says the same way you do now, but with one caveat: You can’t correlate individual behaviors with individual results like you would an LMS. But you can in a more general way.
Convincing Management. He said that it is very difficult. It comes down to almost an ethnographic view – sharing stories of how it works integrated with cold hard numbers. Management is used to seeing numbers only. But one way to do it is to just do it yourself. Then get others to do it with you on projects or meetings or… (make sure it is all kosher within the org and that you are not going to get fired or prosecuted for doing it). Then others use it, start demanding it and then management sees that it is in use and see the benefit. But then their question is “OK, we see the need, how do we control it?” Kind of funny.
Great session. A lot of questions answered.
