Entries Tagged 'need' ↓

Blogs, Wikis, and Web Tools for Learning

Unworkshop?

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.

Save a space for me!

Information and sign-up form

Next Step

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.

John Hagel at eLearning Forum

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. ” ”

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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.

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My Take on Web Services, Service-Oriented Architecture, XML, and related matters

2004
Out of the Box by John Hagel (the best thing to read on web services)
Loose coupling/earthquake
Loose coupling
The Real-time Enterprise
Above All (Powers of Ten for the future of IT)
Business Process Management

2005
Workflow Learning & Web Services
The Transformation of IT
The Only Sustainable Edge
John Hagel, JSB & the Speed of Innovation

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.

McKinsey Quarterly has an interesting free (but you need to register) article entitled The next revolution in interactions.

The gist is that discretionary knowledge work is growing like topsy, and transactional knowledge work is in decline. Routine transactional jobs have been automated or outsourced or re-engineered out of existence. The more complex jobs (McKinsey calls this tacit work) involve interacting with other people, problem-solving, and things that are difficult to reduce to a routine. The complex jobs are higher up the food chain: they pay more and they have more impact on organizational performance.

According to McKinsey,

McKinsey says the shift from routine to tacit work “upends everything we know about organizations.” Geez. Guess we better call in some high-priced consultants to help us figure this one out, eh?

McKinsey offers three suggestions.

1. Funnel routine stuff away from tacit workers.
2. Performance support and workflow learning
3. Web 2.0 and collaboration software

It warms my heart to see that McKinsey and I agreeing on this although I describe it in simpler language. What they call tacit work, I’ve been calling improv and what they call an unclear path is what I’ve been describing as informal learning. My summary would be that while you may get away with treating transactional workers as if they were machines, you’ve got to treat discretionary knowledge workers as fellow human beings.

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I don’t want confusion to arise between informal learning (the subject) and my take on informal learning (my opinions). That being the case, I intend to mark my stuff with the logo informL. InformL.com will soon be the URL here.