Entries Tagged 'tools' ↓

Chief Learning Officer, December 2006, Effectiveness by Jay Cross

“A wiki is a group-editable Web site. Wikis are composed of Web pages you can write on, enabling fast and easy collaboration.” So says SocialText, a company that supplies enterprise wiki software to more than 2,000 organizations, including Nokia and Kodak.

Why should a CLO care about wikis? Because learning is social — people learn through working with one another. Wikis encourage collaboration, and collaboration is the secret sauce of innovation and effectiveness.

Wikis are a new tool in the learning executive’s toolkit. Training departments of yore focused most of their energy on events and processes to push information, much of it prepackaged. Wikis pull people to learn when they feel the need. The information they find largely is created by the users themselves.

Companies are discovering wikis are a way to share knowledge, store the “rules of thumb” of work communities, keep documentation current, cut e-mail bottlenecks and eliminate duplicate effort. They are also lightweight technology. And they’re cheap.

The downside is that wikis are weird. Invented by programmer Ward Cunningham 10 years ago to help coordinate a group of programmers, wikis are often in Courier font, have oddball formatting and are largely unstructured.

Nevertheless, wikis have now become attractive. They are still weird the first few times you’re exposed to them, but it’s not really the wiki that is weird; it’s that we are unaccustomed to collaborative work.

I lead online events that explore the application of Web technology to corporate learning. A wiki holds information about assignments, Web technology, informal learning, our blogs, our mail list and more.

Everyone is encouraged to add to the wiki, correct mistakes and document discoveries. That’s fine in principle, but when it comes time to correct one of my sentences, participants shy away. People respect the sanctity of others’ work. They aren’t comfortable changing someone’s sentences, even if it is for the greater good.

Perhaps that is the most important reason for CLOs to understand wikis. Knowledge work is inherently collaborative. Information hoarding is counterproductive. Wikis are a great way to learn to collaborate.

Wikipedia, the poster child of wikis, is a free, online encyclopedia. It contains 5 million articles in more than 200 languages that are created and maintained by an army of volunteers. (Encyclopedia Britannica contains about 100,000 articles.)

Anyone can add an article to Wikipedia. (I’ve done it.) How reliable can this be? It turns out Wikipedia is very accurate, comparing favorably to respected printed encyclopedias. You see, when a new article is submitted to Wikipedia, a team of enthusiasts checks it for accuracy, bias, redundancy and links to other topics. Wikipedia embodies the wisdom of crowds.

Recently I was with a group of friends the night Joe Lieberman lost the primary election in Connecticut. Someone looked up “Lieberman” on Wikipedia. The article told us Lieberman was a senator from Connecticut and the first Jewish American to run for vice president with a major political party. The next paragraph told us, “On Aug. 8, 2006, Lieberman conceded the Democratic primary election to Lamont and announced he would run in the 2006 November election as a candidate on the Connecticut for Lieberman ticket.” Britannica, of course, has no entry for Lieberman, much less the results of an election 60 minutes after they are announced.

Writely (www.writely.com) Google Docs is a collaborative, online word processor owned by Google, and it’s a great way to get a feel for collaborative writing. Next time you are working on a memo, post it on Writely Google Docs. Take turns tweaking the words. Don’t worry: The only people who can see it are those you invite.

You’ll discover how much more effective this is than e-mailing drafts of the document back and forth. You’ll pinpoint misunderstandings. And you’ll discover the inherent power in close collaboration.

And by the way, Writely Google Docs is nothing more than a page-at-a-time wiki.

We just opened the Informal Learning Wiki. Pay us a visit.

Here are the three segments of the presentation described in the previous post. You can watch them on YouTube:

Or you can watch them right here:

Part 1, ten minutes

Part 2, ten minutes

Part 3, four minutes

If you leave a comment, please be kind.

If you’ve been following the blog, you know that I think we have to turn our attention from building courses to assembling learning ecologies. Here are a few informal learning practices that might seem trivial until you weigh how they can improve the entire learnscape.

Knowledge capture. A fellow whose card I have misplaced approached me at Learning 2006 to relate how he helps his organization retain useful knowledge. He’s a senior guy and clearly the sort who is willing to share what he has learned freely. People ask him questions all the time. When he gets the same question for the third time, he records the answer in a blog. From then on, he simply points new inquirers to the blog entry. Answering only questions that come up keep the blog free of the sort of claptrap that is a hallmark of top-down FAQs.

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If you have a fast connection, you might check out my twenty-two minute presentation on informal learning from yesterday’s Informatology Forum at Reuters in London. It’s PowerPoint-free. Click and go get a cup of coffee. It’s full video and may take 10 minutes to download.

Update: I’ve uploaded this to YouTube.

What differentiates star performers from their run-of-the-mill colleagues? It’s not smarts, creativity, or ambition.

Carnegie Mellon’s Robert E. Kelley spent ten years looking for the differences and found that stars are made, not born.

A nebbish can evolve into a star. What distinguishes stars are the strategies they use to do their work and to work effectively with others — strategies that allow them to double their productivity improvement rates while working less.

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Tags enable you to keep your bookmarks online and to share them with others.

The current social web era started with del.icio.us and the advent of social bookmarking. The simple concept of a tag has turned our interactions with the web upside down. The idea of being able to store your bookmarks online, share them with everyone and see what others have bookmarked - triggered the sequence of events that resulted in today’s rich and social web ecosystem. (Read/Write Web)

Two services own the social bookmarking market, del.icio.us and StumbleUpon. I love them both. del.icio.us enables me to look at what other people are looking at, an enormously powerful tool for discovery.

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This morning I arrived five minutes before my presentation was due to begin. (I was the opening act.) I explained that I didn’t want to miss what I had to say. Now that I tout informality, I do improv; I never know what’s going to come out. We were just getting warmed up when the clock ran out on us. Someone suggested we host an informal learning camp.

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Vyew is the free web-based collaboration tool we use in Unworkshops

Features include:

• 100% Browser-based - No downloads or installs
• Shared viewing of: DOCs, PPTs, XLSs, JPGs, PDFs and more
• Real-time Desktop Sharing and Screen Capturing
• Tools to Whiteboard, Draw and Annotate
• Built-in Text-chat and Teleconferencing

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The Social Media Club. Cool idea. I’ll be jabbering about Informal Learning at their upcoming unconference:

Web 2point2 – San Francisco: November 9th and 10th

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Assembling the Graphic Learning Gallery for Learning 2006 has rekindled my enthusiasm for visualization in learning.

Today I assembled a page of pointers to books and sites that deal with learning graphics. We’ve got books, sites, tools, and articles. Tell me what I’ve missed in the comments to this post.
Adding this entailed opening up the Informal Learning Wiki. It’s not complete, but nothing in life is final except death.