Yesterday I attended the Future of Media Summit at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. Host Ross Dawson walked us through his Future of Media Report: check out the Future of Media Lifecycle and the Seven Driving Forces Shaping Media.
Many of the panel sessions involved people in both Sydney and Mountain View. Several times, this led to existentialist moments: trying to get the people on the other side of the Pacific to get back on schedule.
Panelists discussing television were fighting a rear-guard action, claiming content is king, and never once mentioning interactivity. Personalization boiled down to letting people use their Tivos.
Robert Scoble turned up for the Future of Journalism panel, mixing it up with Phil Bronstein, Tom Abate, JD Lasica, and Brian Lott, a partner from Burson-Marsteller. Bronstein: The answer to every question is “I don’t know who is going to pay for this.” JD: Ten years ago, reporters for the Sacramento Bee were not allowed to mention the name of a website without management approval. Brian: Journalists have been taught they own the story. Tom Abate, quoting Mark Twain on the advent of the telegraph: A lie goes halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on. Scoble: Old-style journalists are not keeping up; they dont’ know what’s going on. Great debate on reporter neutrality. Old reporters were not to reveal their political preferences; Scoble says right up front that he backs Obama. Which is more frank?
Scoble told me about the wonders of modern tech he’s experiencing. He was interviewing the head of Tesla, the controversial maker of the pricey all-electric sports car. They’re driving around, Scoble shooting live video with his iPhone. A viewer asked Scoble a question about the car’s brakes. Scoble relayed it on, and the driver answered it on the spot.
I pulled out my Flip videocam and asked Scoble about technology-assisted learning:
The Computer History Museum is a trip for computer buffs. Here’s an original Apple 1:
This is Deep Blue, the IBM machine that beat Kasparov:
And this is a five-ton Charles Babbage Differential Engine for computing (and printing tables of) polynomials to 31-place accuracy. One of two made from the 1840s plans.
Many a knowledge worker will tell you, “I love to learn but I hate to be trained.” Learning is in keeping with the democratization of the workplace spawned by the network revolution. Decision-making is passing from the manager to the worker, and part of the deal is learning crowding out training.
Emergence is the key characteristic of complex systems. It is the process by which simple entities self-organize to form something more complex. As training converges with bottom-up self-organizing systems, network effects, and the empowerment of individuals, it morphs into emergent learning.
People who already know the lay of the land don’t want a curriculum. That’s someone else’s opinion of what they need to know. It undoubtedly contains lots of things they either already know or have no interest in finding out. They prefer to cherry-pick what they need in the easiest way available to them.
Courses are dead. Who’s got the time? Courses are almost always separate from work. That goes against the trend of integrating learning and work. Hence, learning from performance support fits better with today’s workplace.
Training program? This is the same as courses, except often more time robbed from work. Since most learning is social, wouldn’t it be more effective to put workers in touch with others, so they can learn from one another?
A busy person detests being told to make time for something to convenience someone else. Self-service learning is more convenient and more economical. I don’t go to the bank during banking hours much any more. It’s more convenient to bank in the evening. The ATM doesn’t mind what I’m wearing or whether I say hello.
Learning things in advance, “just in case,” is a losing game. Until the case arrives, the worker suspects the subject matter won’t be relevant. And when the case does come along, the knowledge acquired in advance is probably long gone. Knowledge, like muscle tissue, deteriorates when it’s not used. Learning something at the moment of need, however, couples learning and application and that has more lasting effects.
When you cannot predict the future, and emergence is unpredictable, you can’t build training programs in advance because you don’t know what you’ll need. Formal learning takes place in classrooms; informal learning happens in learnscapes.
A learnscape is a learning ecology. As the environment of learning, a learnscape includes the workplace. In fact, a learnscape has no boundaries. No two learnscapes are alike. Your landscape may include being coached on giving effective presentations, calling the help desk for an explanation, and researching an industry on the net. My learnscape could include participating in a community of field technicians, looking things up on Google, and living in France for three months.
How would you build a learnscape for emergent learning?
IBM, Oracle, Yahoo!, and Microsoft (ominously close to Yahoo!) had big booths. I It’s ironic to see traditional bloatware providers claim to be loose, flexible, and fleet of foot. Uh huh. Remember Steve Martin in the early days of Saturday Night Live? “Let’s get small.” Scores of tiny companies, most of them with odd-ball names, were doing the booth thing. It’s hard to tell some of them apart. By the end of the year, half of these guys will no longer exist.
In the “Long Tail Pavillion” for small companies I found a some technologies that fit well with the concept of impromtu learning. OpenaCircle is a lightweight collaboration platform which has just what our Cafe group has been looking for: simultaneous video conferencing. CamWii is a very slick screen-sharing app. No client software required. Blazingly fast. Apps like this can support over-the-shoulder learning: live screenshow. I hope I get into CamWii’s beta program before leading workshops on natural learning to Australia in June.
WOT is short for Web of Trust. WOT offers an internet reputation scorecard that pops up when you’re visiting sites. “wOT is a free browser security tool that warns the user about risky websites that try to scam visitors, deliver malware, or send spam. The company, Against Intuition, was founded by a couple of Finnish grad student a couple of years ago. I’m going to test drive this one.
I picked up a couple of interesting O’Reilly books that didn’t feature the usual menagerie on the cover: Adaptive Path’s Subject to Change and Amy Shuen’s Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide. I love most O’Reilly pubs but wonder how long they can continue proliferating new series without watering down the brand. Knowing Your Ass from a Hole in the Ground: The Missing Manual. Some of the O’Reilly digital photography books are spectacular.
As the day was coming to an end, Chris Heuer motioned for me to join him in front of the cameras for a live videochat on UstreamTV. His questions punched my mental hot spots, and we had a rollicking good time. (Check back tomorrow for the full rant. How are people going to cope with mind-blowing change? Unlearning. Visualization. Mindful flexibility. What did I think of this conference? This is not a conference; it’s a ten-ring circus. Normal people (i.e., not us) would have a hard time figuring out whether the activities in the Blogtropolus room were real or science fiction.
Not a week goes by that I don’t hear from a college student asking about informal learning. I am generous in answering thoughtful inquiries, but I do not intend to rob students of learning experiences by doing their thinking for them.
Teachers give assignments to help students learn. Cutting and pasting the results of Google searches until they resemble a paper you might have written saves you time and effort at the expense of your learning. Learning requires reflection. This takes more effort the first few times you try it but saves time in the long run. When you learn, from there on you’ll be building on what you already know instead of continually reinventing the wheel. Unless you’re preparing for a career doing simplistic searches on the net, don’t game the system.
If you are a student, study. Getting answers is easy. Asking the right questions is hard. Read How to Ask Questions the Smart Way by Eric Raymond and Rich Moen. It taught me enough social engineering to get better answers quicker and with less waste.
This arrived in my morning email:
Hi my name is ___, i am a 3rd year student at ____ University studying educational studies i graduate this summer, my final assignment module is informal learning and i have to write a report on the evaluation of an effective informal learning context for learning, included observations and research methods. I was researching and came across your website and you seem extremely knowledgeable in this area, i would be extremely grafeful if you could suggest any interesting ideas, or previously research simliar to this because i am struggling to come up with a creative idea.
This email is more cordial than most but I don’t know what she’s really asking for. A creative idea? How about “What have I learned outside of class and what did it get me?”
Over the weekend, I had visited the wiki for a course on informal learning that the instructor had invited me to review. Here’s the first entry on informal learning:
If Cross suggests that informal learning should be learned through doing then what is the purpose in publishing a book on the subject? Wouldn’t a more effective way of disseminating the information be through a web site or similar sort of collaborative learning tool that everyone could add to? Maybe that’s what the website Informl was supposed to be. When I visisted the site, however, I was unable to efficiently find any information about informal learning and some parts of the web site returned an error message. I think wikis are a pretty good tool for informal learning - they allow collaboration and also are easily searchable. Maybe this should have been the format of the informl website instead.
Having once been a wise-ass college student myself, I don’t mind the snarky attitude. I do find it troubling when a student makes specious observations that end up inhibiting learning. Hence, I responded:
Permit me to offer a few suggestions for navigating the informl website. Look in the righthand column for the link to my wiki. From there, click informal learning, and you’ll find a YouTube explanation, a summary of informal learning, a poster about informal learning, the introduction to the book, lists of references, the first three chapters in their entirety, links to eight articles, descriptions of informal learning tools, and a list of books that influenced my thinking. Most of my major web pages contain a search engine for ten years of my blog posts, a link to articles, and a link to a discussion community. When you’re surfing one of the oldest sites about learning on the web, expect a few 404s; link rot happens.
Frankly, I am amazed you could visit the site and not find informal learning. Where were you looking?
Being a champion of informal learning doesn’t make me think that formal study should be lackadaisical.
People acquire the skills they use at work informally — talking, observing others, trial-and-error, and simply working with people in the know. Formal training and workshops account for only 10% to 20% of what people learn at work. Most corporations over-invest in formal training while leaving the more natural, simple ways we learn to chance.
Informal learning and formal learning are at opposite ends of the learning spectrum.
Informal learning is the unofficial, unscheduled, impromptu way most people learn to do their jobs. Informal learning is like riding a bicycle: the rider chooses the destination and the route. The cyclist can take a detour at a moment’s notice to admire the scenery or help a fellow rider.
Formal learning is like riding a bus: the driver decides where the bus is going; the passengers are along for the ride. People new to the territory often ride the bus before hopping on the bike.
Traditional training departments put almost all of their energy into driving busses. For experienced workers, most bus rides are as inappropriate as kindergarten classes. Mature learners, typically a company’s top performers, never show up for the bus. They want pointers that enable them to do things for themselves.
Learning is what enables people to participate successfully in life and work. It is a knowledge-age survival skill.
The Business Case
Executives don’t want learning; they want execution. They want performance. Informal does not mean unintentional. Those who leave informal learning to chance leave money on the table. Informal learning is a profit strategy. Companies use it to:
Improve knowledge worker productivity 20% - 30%
Increase sales by Google-izing product knowledge
Generate fresh ideas and increase innovation
Transform an organization from near-bankruptcy to record profits
Reduce stress, absenteeism, and healthcare costs
Invest development resources where they will have the most impact
Increase professionalism and professional growth
Cut costs and improve responsiveness with self-service learning
Free-range Learners
Training is something that’s pushed on you; learning is something you choose. Many a knowledge worker will tell you, “I love to learn but I hate to be trained.” Knowledge workers thrive when given the freedom to decide how they will do what they’re asked to do. They rise or fall to meet expectations.
Reinventing the wheel, looking for information in the wrong places, and answering questions from others consumes two-thirds of the average knowledge worker’s time. Good connections vastly improve knowledge worker productivity.
Knowledge management is no longer the intellectual high ground it once was. Why? Because it didn’t work. Knowledge lives in people’s heads, not in mere words. You can no more capture true knowledge in a repository than you can trap lightening in a box.
The informal organization is how most business gets done, yet executives miss it because they can’t see it. Mapping social networks make the patterns clear.
Skills for Today
The best thoughts in the world won’t help you or anyone else if you can’t communicate them effectively.
Engaging in business and learning depends on how well you converse, tell stories, speak in public, and write. All knowledge workers must master these skills in addition to learning how to learn. Stress, unhappiness, and emotions also impact learning — and deserve a spot on the learning agenda.
Most training pessimistically assumes that trainees are deficient, and training is a fix for what’s broken. Training professionals need to think positively: everybody wins if the starting point is “Be all that you can be.”
Look, talk
Humans are sight-mammals. Images+words communicate twice as much as words alone. Pictures translate across cultures, education levels, and age groups.
Graphics are not fluff. Visuals are particularly useful when you need to:
Bring deeper understanding to complex subject matter
Share results of dynamic meetings with others
Help the team “see the big picture” and focus attention
Improve the decision-making process
Conversations are the stem cells of learning, for they both create and transmit knowledge. Open conversation increases innovation. People love to talk. Bringing them together brings excitement.
Business conversations at a major pharmaceutal no longer consist of knee-jerk emotional responses, because people have a means of critiquing the quality of their conversations. They ask, “Is the information valid? Are we making an informed choice? Are we exercising mutual control over the conversation?”
Communities
Business meetings used to come in one flavor: dull. New approaches are creating meetings that people enjoy, often organized in scant time, and at minimal cost. These meetings are not events; there’s typically activity before and after. If something is working well, why not share it with everyone? And why not keep it alive as long as you can?
Successful gatherings are those where everyone participates. No better-than-thou. No podium. No positions carved in stone. Instead of presentations, participants have conversations. Free-range learners co-discover new ways to look at things. practice, although you may not have thought of it that way.
For a long time, I maintained that communities were organic. Like truffles, they sort of sprouted up on their own, where they wanted, and the most you could do was to nurture them by giving then time and space to grow. Times have changed. A quarter of the world’s truffles are cultivated on a plantation in Spain.
Communities of experts in a dozen of Cisco’s strategically vital areas create content through conversations. As fast and easy as it is to search Google, sales people pinpoint and extract precisely what they need from this vast information resource.
Customers are frequent free-range learners. For example, LEGO hobbyists are a community of practice. They bring novices up to speed. They create building standards that enable them to assemble large displays quickly. They suggest new products to LEGO’s marketing department.
The Web
The internet did change everything. Ten years ago, there were 16 million internet users; today they number more than a billion. Google is the world’s largest learning provider, answering thousands of inquires every second.
This informal, spontaneous, vernacular knowledge sharing is not just for surfers. Imagine having an in-house learning and information environment as rich as the internet. You’d have blogs and search and syndication and podcasts and more. You’d also have a platform just about everyone knows how to use. Some companies are already doing this
Learning Ecology
The informal learning train is leaving the station. Why now?
The generation coming into the work force has no patience for spoon-feeding, single-track instruction, or working alone.
Soon, the Boomers will leave the work force, taking their knowledge with them unless it is transferred to newcomers by informal means.
As the global economy shifts from factory work to service work, workers need the human, judgmental expertise and emotional intelligence that one doesn’t learn in class.
Time is speeding up. It’s impractical to try to learn in advance when what you need to know won’t stand still.
As work and learning become one, good learning and good work merge to become a single activity. Don’t start with problems, for that starts you down the wrong path. You may solve the problem, but miss a fantastic opportunity that was yours for the taking.
Formal learning takes place in classrooms; informal learning happens in learnscapes. A learnscape is a learning ecology: learning without borders. Learnscaping involves removing obstacles, seeding communities, increasing bandwidth, encouraging conversation, and growing networks. It’s a natural way to learn and grow.
Graphics by
Author
Jay Cross is an internationally acclaimed strategist, speaker, consultant, and designer of corporate learning and performance systems.
Jay coined the term eLearning. He developed the first business program offered by the University of Phoenix. He coaches organizations on performance improvement and marketing. He often writes white papers, articles, and presentations that help vendors educate their customers. A popular speaker, Jay has keynoted or spoken at events in Abu Dhabi, Austria, Canada, Germany, Scotland, Taiwan, and virtually all of the major learning conferences in the U.S.
Jay is a graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Business School. He and his wife Uta live with two miniature longhaired dachshunds in the hills of Berkeley, California.
John Hagel, reflecting on the main messages from the World Economic Forum in Davos:
Jobs
There was a lot of talk in Davos about jobs especially how to continue to create jobs in the West to compensate for slowing economic growth and offshoring trends. I participated in one of these sessions, where I suggested that framing the issue in these terms tends to miss the point.
Of course, we are all concerned about the availability of jobs, but the more fundamental issue is talent development. If people dont develop appropriate talent and dont continue to refresh that talent, there will be no sustainable jobs and certainly few, if any, high value jobs. Reframing the issue as talent development also highlights the increasing importance of talent as a source of comparative advantage in global markets.
Unworkshops are hybrid group learning experiences in which participants take responsibility for their own learning. Since people learn by doing, hands-on practice and real-world application are center stage. An unworkshop is a combination of scheduled webinars and self-paced activities. Recordings of every session are available for review. Unworkshop activities come in small chunks to accommodate tight calendars. Coaches are at the ready to help you overcome obstacles. Unworkshops challenge you to engage in hard fun. When you earn a Certificate of Completion, you’re invited to join a vibrant alumni community. Unworkshops will challenge the way you think about how your employees learn..
The Feburary 2006 Unworkshop
The last two weeks of February will see the inaugural unworkshop on using internet tools to deliver corporate learning. We will explore how blogs, wikis, RSS, and mash-ups can support informal learning. Our unworkshop coach, Dave Lee, who maintains the Learning Circuits Blog, will conduct individual coaching sessions with each participant and advise you while you are with us.
The good news about paricipating in a Beta unworkshop is that you can expect a lot of handholding, I will deliver every webinar live, and you get bragging rights for helping shape up the program. On the downside, you can expect a few first-time glitches, and we may have six or seven sessions instead of five (and up to six weeks instead of two and a half.) Please submit the information below if you’d like to join us. If you’d rather come aboard after our maiden voyage, click the "Contact me later" button below.
Price for participating in this unworkshop is $300.
Reserve your space now
The first dozen people who sign up will receive a free copy of Naked Conversations : How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers, the brand-new book by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel.
When we have a dozen participants, Dave and I will be in touch by phone and email to check your qualifications, answer your questions, and tell you how to join us.
Telemarketers from the vendor with a push strategy call to sell you insurance as you sit down to dinner. The Hard Rock Café displays Bo Diddley’s guitar pick and plays throbbing music to pull you in. The itinerant Kirby vacuum cleaner salesman pushes; the Gilroy Garlic Festival is pull. Push is generally someone else’s idea; pull is what you think you want.
The Industrial Age was pushy. Owners predicted what would people would buy, built the factory, made large quantities to take advantage of economies of scale, and then tried to convince people to buy. Today change is so rampant and the future so unpredictable that Dell doesn’t build your computer until you order it. You cannot set up in advance when you don’t know what the future holds.
Friday morning, John Hagel told the eLeaning Forum why he and John Seely Brown think the world is shifting from push to pull, and what this means for us.
Where John was eloquent, I will be telegraphic.
PUSH
PULL
Assumes you can predict demand
Assumes world is unpredictable
Anticipate
Respond
Rigid, static
Flexible, dynamic
Conform, core
Innovate, edge
Monoliths, components glued together
Small pieces, loosely joined
Program
Platform
Get better at what you are currently doing
Get better at whatever comes along
Standard content
Standard interfaces
Where’s the value?
New management disciplines for the pull world all involve how organizations relate to one another (outsourcing, orchestration, productive friction). This, in turn, makes one think about where strategic advantage comes from. China is rapidly becoming the center for business management innovation, and this is the source of continuing advantage; copycats won’t catch you if you’re always ahead of them.
All of this is nurtured by networks stitched together with responsive, modular IT. In Informal Learning, I call this “internet inside.” Those of you who were reading my blogs 18 months ago may remember my enthusiasm for the coming genre of IT. (See links to relevant posts.)
Talent
Value, i.e. what it takes to stay ahead, used to reside in killer products or shrewd finance. In the pull world, value results from talent. Talent, in turn, is the result of maintaining relationships. The leading organizations of the future will be those with the ability to create and retain talent. Developing talent will become the role of the firm – and the way people choose who they want to work for.
Instead of rehashing John’s presentation, I want to turn to what push and pull mean to corporate learning. (Altus Learning recorded John’s session; in a week, you can hear the original here)
Push Learning and Pull Learning
This is over-simplified, I know, but I think training is a vestige of the push world that’s being replaced by learning for our pull world.
Push aligns with formal learning; pull with informal learning. Consider:
PUSH
PULL
Formal learning
Informal learning
Training
Learning
Curriculum
Performance support
Training program
Collaboration platform
Mandated
Self-service
Just in case
Just in time
This line-up of features of push and pull learning feels totally natural to me, but I’ve been marinating in informal learning for the last year. Does this ring true for you? Leave a comment.
By the way, I think Workflow Learning lies somewhere between push and pull. Alerts are pushy, though not pre-planned. The learning they trigger is generally self-service performance support, a clearly pull activity.
Group discussions surfaced questions. ” ”
eLearning Forum
My hat is off to eLearning Forum’s new CEO, Del Langdon. When I stepped down after years as eLF CEO, I did not really expect Eilif and the Board to find anyone to fill my shoes very quickly. I told Del this meeting showed me how fat-headed that line of thinking was. Engaging a visionary thought leader like John Hagel is what the Forum should be about. Bravo to Del and the Board of eLF.
My Take on Web Services, Service-Oriented Architecture, XML, and related matters
Fifty-one of you have answered our Climate Scan. (Most people answer the 21 questions in three minutes or less.) We’ll keep it open for another week, so if you intend to participate, this would be a good time to do so.
Preliminary results suggest most survey participants could benefit substantially from free-range learning techniques.
For the four topics below, the blue type is the question from the Climate Scan. The graph shows the responses. My interpretation is in red.
Letting people know what their collegues know and how to reach them is Knowledge Management 101.
I’m amazed that four out of five companies aren’t employing internet technologies in-house. Pssst: People already know how to use a browser, search, etc.
Most participants do not reflect on their major successes and mistakes. The only thing worse than learning from experience is not learning from experience.
Three-quarters of the group doesn’t think they’re learning fast enough to keep up.
Yesterday I attended the Future of Media Summit at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. Host Ross Dawson walked us through his Future of Media Report: check out the Future of Media Lifecycle and the Seven Driving Forces Shaping Media.
Many of the panel sessions involved people in both Sydney and Mountain View. Several times, this led to existentialist moments: trying to get the people on the other side of the Pacific to get back on schedule.
People who pre-ordered 
from Amazon are now receiving their copies.
Informal learning and formal learning are at opposite ends of the learning spectrum.
Training is something that’s pushed on you; learning is something you choose. Many a knowledge worker will tell you, “I love to learn but I hate to be trained.” Knowledge workers thrive when given the freedom to decide how they will do what they’re asked to do. They rise or fall to meet expectations.
Humans are sight-mammals. Images+words communicate twice as much as words alone. Pictures translate across cultures, education levels, and age groups.
Successful gatherings are those where everyone participates. No better-than-thou. No podium. No positions carved in stone. Instead of presentations, participants have conversations. Free-range learners co-discover new ways to look at things. practice, although you may not have thought of it that way.
The internet did change everything. Ten years ago, there were 16 million internet users; today they number more than a billion. Google is the world’s largest learning provider, answering thousands of inquires every second.
Don’t start with problems, for that starts you down the wrong path. You may solve the problem, but miss a fantastic opportunity that was yours for the taking.
Jay Cross is an internationally acclaimed strategist, speaker, consultant, and designer of corporate learning and performance systems.
Pfeiffer published Jay’s book on 
Telemarketers from the vendor with a push strategy call to sell you insurance as you sit down to dinner. The Hard Rock Café displays Bo Diddley’s guitar pick and plays throbbing music to pull you in. The itinerant Kirby vacuum cleaner salesman pushes; the Gilroy Garlic Festival is pull. Push is generally someone else’s idea; pull is what you think you want.
” 
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