New structures and spaces of learning: The systemic impact of connective knowledge, connectivism, and networked learning
While this brilliant paper from George Siemens deals with schools and universities, it applies equally well to corporate learnscaping. First we create our habits (in this case, classrooms), and then our habits shape us. Here are a few choice morsels.
Limitless dimensions of learning
In addition to formal education, learning occurs through games and simulations, mentoring and apprenticing, performance support at the point of a learning need, self-learning that arises through critical and creative thinking, communities of practice and personal learning networks, as well as the many informal learning situations that arise through conferences, reading, volunteering, and hobbies. A future model of learning must embrace the broad-spectrum of learning situations and recognizes the value of different modes of cognitive and social development that arise outside of institutional structures.
Moving away from hierarchy and classrooms
…a classroom is a physically-bounded space that, again, by its design, suggests a certain view of learning. Learning is seen as bounded, structured, managed by a single expert (the teacher), and occurring within the confines of a small group of peers. In contrast, the internet can be seen as an ecology of learning with different affordances. For example, the internet, with its emphasis on openness and diversity, challenges the classroom conception of authority and expertise. The structured approach of information filtered in advance, by the educator, and presented in a fairly coherent form defines classrooms. In contrast, the internet is a hub of creative chaos. Educationally, the challenge is one of defining the type of ecology that will permit the formation of the broadest array of networks and communities to address the desired learning tasks and outcomes. The concern is not with structure itself, but rather with the assumption that structure is required across all spaces of learning. If ecologies are the spaces of learning, then networks are the structures of learning. Networks do not occur in a vacuum. They arise in a space that both supports and confines their creation.
If you’re not familiar with George’s work on connectivism, and you should be, here it is in a nutshell:
The centrality of networks as an organizing scheme is also reflected in education, teaching, and learning (Siemens, 2006) under the concept of connectivism. Connectivism is essentially the assertion that knowledge is networked and distributed, and the act of learning is the creation and navigation of networks. The distributed nature of knowledge and the growing complexification of all aspects of society require increased utilization of technology to assist our ability to stay current, manage information abundance, and solve highly complex problems.
Concluding thoughts
Education is not an end in itself. Education will continue to develop as the central element in preparing individuals and societies to participate in the information and knowledge age. The critical challenges facing humanity are many. A highly connected and well educated populace appears to hold the greatest prospect for meeting these challenges.
Education is concerned with the act of becoming. As with classical Greek educational objectives, learning assists individuals in coming to understand the world, to contemplate worthy and significant ideas and concepts, or, as conceived in a liberal arts education, learning is the process of coming to understand the world broadly and from many perspectives in order to see one’s role in advancing the needs related to ethics and humanity. While this need has been well-served by traditional education, the forces of technological change, new opportunities to create and share information, and increased ability for interact with peers globally require a new model based on networks and ecologies. The current age should be one of throwing open doors of learning to bring as many potential contributors to our future as possible.
Nancy White has posted a wonderful summary of the way learning is changing in the world. Co-authored with Josien Kapma, the article demystifies communities of practice.
Social interaction provides the context for learning. Our learning is not mandated, it is voluntary…. We participate because we can and we want to improve our practice and we want to produce value for our community. With today’s technologies, we have both global potential and impact. We can tap into a broader set of skills, work with a wider set of perspectives and really work with a unique edge that is valued by ourselves and our organizations.
Nancy and Josien break out six success factors. We’ve been drinking the same KoolAid, for these are major themes of what I call Learnscape Architecture.
From training and classes to communities and personal learning
Our organizational members and employees can no longer be sufficiently served by formalized internal training. The personal background and learning styles of employees are diverse, as are their job-contexts. This determines what and how people learn. More critically, much of what needs to be learned is ever-changing. It is moving faster than we can create structured learning opportunities. While traditional training methods are still useful for repeatable and repetitive tasks (i.e. learning a new software program, manufacturing, safety procedures) many training needs are about evolving practices such as marketing using social media, cross-organizational collaboration or responding to emerging markets. Informal and voluntary learning becomes a key strategy to move faster than we can accommodate with formally constructed training initiatives.
From expert-led to peer-driven social learning
…A new generation of Internet based tools (often called ‘web.2.0′ or ’social networking’) allow individuals to build a unique online presence and profile including what they know; and, they facilitate connections between individual users, allowing each user to build a personal network around a knowledge area. People can find, trace and track others who share the same interest, even if it is very specific, creating a group of knowledgeable peers, and learn with them. They don’t have to wait for the expert.
The millennial generation has far less interest in authority or being “taught.” They learn with and from each others. As HR managers prepare for the future, training efforts must respond to this culture shift. Instead of connecting employees with a small defined set of experts, you help them tap into networks of expertise.
From formal associations to communities and loose networks
People flock together without the need for a mediating organisation. Instead of formal “expert” associations, loose “peer” networks are emerging. The resulting groups can be highly effective learning opportunities. We are used to team collaboration, communities and networks can add extra ‘layers’ to collaboration. Millions of people are gaining experience with these “new ways of learning”, but mostly in the hobby spheres, like sharing music or tips on travel. A great potential for more job-related, productive uses is waiting to be exploited.
From behind the firewall to beyond the firewall
The dramatic drop of costs of ICT (server space, memory, user hardware, bandwidth etc), combined with improved access and usability have transformed information scarcity to information overload. Control over sources of information or channels of communication is no longer the privilege of few. Before, the boss signed letters and the PR department made sure all corporate communications were checked for quality. Now organizations have to deal with the fact that they can no longer keep track of, let alone control all the communications flowing out of the organization. Maybe it doesn’t matter all that much, as what others say or write about the organization is at least as, if not more, important than formal company messages. In this new reality, not secrecy and walls, but transparency, openness, and compatibility with others, are determinants for success. This counts for learning and talent management as well. As people flow in and out of jobs and organizations; they form their personal networks and portfolio (which often span multiple organizations) along the way. The professional and personal, formal and informal increasingly get intertwined. Recognizing the role of these other communities and networks is a prerequisite for organizational vigor. Ignore them, and your talent will either be limited, or gone.
Addressing broader motivations
People’s motivations to contribute go beyond a paycheck or a demand from the boss. Identity and relevance of the job, feeling they are making a useful contribution as well as working on personal development and social capital, are important. You can’t control people; instead you can empower them. Personal motivation is also a prerequisite for innovation — one organization alone and classic knowledge transfer in itself are no longer sufficient for sustainable innovation in an ever more complex and interdependent world. Innovation requires connections and stimulation beyond the people in our organizations. So tapping into the motivations of employees to participate in the larger world is something else to consider.
From the Big Mouth to the Big Ear
With the advent of Web 2.0 the model for communication has been turned upside down. The “former audience” is now just as much a broadcaster as any large organization. The incredible abundance of information and communication has two effects. First, it created an attention scarcity and media fragmentation. Compared to before, our messages need to be very relevant or audiences filter them out. So instead of talking louder to unfocused audiences, now organizations need to engage in meaningful dialogue with relevant partners. Second, it created an immense pool of searchable communications among others. This buzzing universe of linked sites and blogs is an incredibly rich source of organizational information and learning… if we know how to listen. Organizations need to listen to conversations about them, niches or needs they can fill, feedback and suggestions for improving what they do. It is about tagging and remixing and mapping the network of relationships, looking for where to respond, and where to catalyze action. It is a little bit like listening to the universe.
These tasks can’t be done by an individual. They require the diverse “ears” of communities, the wider net of networks, seeking to make connections between people that advance our organization’s learning and goals. If all your employees are part of the Big Ear, you are ahead.
I really, really, really want to read the forthcoming book on communities of practice that Nancy, John Smith, and Etienne Wenger have been writing for the past four and a half years. Rumor has it that it’s coming soon.
My Un-book Learnscape Architecture is no more. After spending a couple of days talking with a Fortune 50 firm about their learning ecosystem, I concluded that Learnscape Architecture was too intellectual and snooty. People just want to get stuff done.
So I re-crafted the un-book to address more practical matters. It’s now titled Learnscaping. I’ve added sections on how to assess organizational readiness and think about cost-justification. I chopped out pages that lacked oomph. I added pages to the accompanying Cloud (the online component).
The price for the former un-book was $20 hardcopy, $40 softcopy. Half bought the former; half bought the latter. I bumped the price of the new hard copy to $25 and cut the online price to $37.50 just to see what happens.
For heaven’s sakes, buy it before it morphs into something entirely different.
From the back cover:
Industrial age workers used machinery to manufacture objects in factories. Now, knowledge workers create value, not on the factory floor, but in what I call learnscapes. A learnscape is the platform where knowledge workers collaborate, solve problems, converse, share ideas, brainstorm, learn, relate to others, talk, explain, communicate, conceptualize, tell stories, help one another, teach, serve customers, keep up to date, meet one another, forge partnerships, build communities, and distribute information. Learnscapes are where and how modern work is performed — including workplace learning.
Historically, platforms for learning have been happenstance affairs, a rippled reflection of the organizational culture. The learnscape architect nudges the platform to help it evolve into an environment that is coherent, balanced, natural, connected, and interoperable. Learnscape architects sculpt flexible, loosely-coupled frameworks for learning. They rise above events to manipulate the connections in processes.
Learnscaping is a handbook for learnscape architects.
Where did the dinosaurs go? The most respected scientific speculation today suggests that most dinosaurs were wiped out 65 million years ago when a massive asteroid collided with earth. One group of dinosaurs did survive the asteroid crash: today we call them birds.
And what happened to performance support? In the 1990s, many people expected performance, to shove technical training into the shadows. Yet eLearning, blended learning, and virtual worlds seemed to have elbowed performance support into oblivion. Recent research finds that this is not the case. Performance support is stronger than ever; it simply hiding in plain sight, having taken on a new form.
The Birth of Electronic Performance Support Systems
Performance Support (PS) was founded on the premise that providing information to a worker when it’s needed is generally preferable to having the worker memorize it in advance. A respected professor of instructional design has written that “Information is not instruction.” A performance support enthusiast might reply that if information gets the job done, it doesn’t matter whether it’s instruction.
Thirty years ago, expedient mainframe programmers upgraded applications by slapping overlays atop original code rather than rewriting the user interface. Users had to jump back and forth between three or four screens to complete a transaction. No matter that applications were clunky and inefficient; that could be covered up with a training program.
Gloria Gery, a training manager at Aetna manager, saw the folly in this approach. Why should people have to learn something that could be designed into the system in the first place? Why not provide them with information when they needed it?
In her ground breaking 1991 book, Electronic Performance Support Systems, How and why to remake the workplace through the strategic application of technology, Gloria described an EPSS as:
…an integrated electronic environment that is available to and easily accessible by each employee and is structured to provide immediate, individualised on-line access to the full range of information, software, guidance, advice and assistance, data, images, tools, and assessment and monitoring systems to permit job performance with minimal support and intervention by others.
Performance Support empowered novice employees to get up to speed rapidly, to perform with a minimum of outside coaching or training, and to do the job as well or even better than experienced workers. Gloria’s goal for EPSS was to enable people who didn’t know what they were doing to function as if they did.
Some organizations heartily embraced EPSS, incorporating it into airline reservation systems, platform automation at financial institutions, and a variety of applications at AT&T. Many people were creating performance support systems without calling it that. The advent of packaged software for consumers required a PS approach since it would hardly be cost-effective to send tutors home with people using TurboTax and Will Maker.
Improved productivity at lower cost is a compelling proposition. Practitioners attended annual EPSS conferences. Large companies and government agencies implemented EPSS. Some traditional training firms feared that EPSS might put them out of business.
Then the cheering stopped. EPSS were not a cure-all. Unless it was tightly baked into an application from the get-go, EPSS required continual maintenance. Few people considered themselves EPSS designers. Modifying EPSS took scarce programming skills. EPSS did not have a home in the typical organization structure.
EPSS runs counter to the traditional goals of IT. IT is more concerned with technical performance: response time, hardware utilization, and throughput; EPSS focuses on the user. IT develops an application and is done with it; EPSS requires perpetual updating to stay abreast of changes in the job environment.
Marc Rosenberg, author of E-learning, former ISPI president, and an early proponent of performance support, describes EPSS as “an enormous opportunity overlooked by the training community.” EPSS is not training, isn’t developed with the ADDIE model, and has been eclipsed by the new kid on the block: eLearning.
EPSS became homeless and slipped off the corporate radar.
Enterprise Performance Support
Bob Mager was the guru of instructional design in the late seventies. His Designing Instructional Objectives and Analyzing Performance Problems were the gold standard of clear thinking, behaviorism, and the discipline required to get government contracts.
“Could he do it if you held a gun to his head?” If the answer is yes, you don’t have a training problem, you have a motivation problem.
Bob saw training as a last resort, chosen only after exhausting all the other possibilities. His thinking meshed with Gloria’s, but he didn’t confine his applications to technical training.
Gloria had started by training staff to use computers; designing performance support into the job was necessarily “e.” Bob built his models to cover any performance problem; his performance support often resided on a piece of paper.
In October 2004, Gloria and I jointly delivered the keynote at Training Fall in San Francisco. It was her last pubic presentation before going into retirement. Our topic was enterprise performance support. We noted that “Business issues around getting to performance are enormous. It takes too long, costs too much, is inconsistent and becoming increasingly difficult due to churn, complexity, and learner differences. We made the learner responsible for integrating and organizing information, and that focused effort on learning, not doing.” And since then, performance support has again fallen off the CLO’s watch list.
Judgment Support
Loretta Donovan, an expert in Appreciative Inquiry and similar group processes who coincidentally went to high school with Gloria, points to the shift of PS from rote tasks to decision-making. Maybe we should call it “Judgment Support”
Earlier generation performance support was most easily applied to non-creative, routine tasks. That meant the architect of the support system or tools could assess the challenges typically met and engineer the support aids, collect more data on where performance stumbled, add support aids, and so on. The user (an individual) was a passive participant in the process, albeit eventually benefiting from the help. That may still make a lot of sense if we are supporting the call center at LL Bean during the Holiday rush.
Learning, and now work, are increasingly collaborative. What’s the opportunity for collaborative performance support? Loretta Donovan again:
…collaborative performance support could be within a formal team or project, or a less structured work situation. What I am envisioning is real time communication, generated by the ‘performer’, using online tools. So a task is being performed, and in an effort to improve/enhance/problem solve, etc, a question is posed electronically: “who’s the expert on this? what should I watch out for? do you have a record of? can I borrow the template for?” This moves the issue from the individual performer being ‘watched for errors’ and suffering their consequences, to the performer as collaborator initiating the network of collective intelligence towards continuous improvement.
Learnscape Architecture
Today, the greatest leverage in corporate learning comes from building on-going, largely self-sustaining learning processes. This process orientation focuses on the organization’s architecture for learning, a platform a level above its training programs and regulated events. The learnscape is a foundation for learning that is self-service, spontaneous, serendipitous, drip-fed, and mentored as well as the formal training that will always be with us.
People who read my book on Informal Learning generally agreed that most learning at work is informal but that most corporate investment goes into formal learning. “But what can we do about it?” they asked. Learnscape Architecture is my answer to their question.
Knowledge workers are responsible for their own learning. Instead of taking whatever was pushed at them, they pull in what they need to know in the form that seems most appropriate. Knowledge workers are their own instructors. They are also their own instructional designers. And they are becoming their own PS consultants. The challenge presented to Learnscape Architects is making self-service learning simply, relevant, attractive, and cost-effective.
Performance Support Reborn
Performance support is blossoming in organizations today under the label of Web 2.0.
Remember the original premise of PS, making information available to workers instead of forcing them to memorize it? That’s how we use Google and corporate wikis and instant messenger.
Gloria sought easy, immediate, individualized on-line access to information, software, guidance, advice and assistance. Learnscape architects have implemented miniature versions of the internet behind corporate firewalls that provide all of these things, from peer-rated FAQs to wizards, on-line help desks, and best practices repositories.
We have given up the idea that competence must exist within the person. Competence exists within our collaborators and within the net. George Siemens and others have given up on the idea that knowledge resides within individuals’ heads; it’s collective intelligence.
The information, rules, and knowledge that used to be spread all over the place can often be found by the in-house Google Appliance. What used to be out of reach is now a keystroke away.
A powerful form of performance support is asking someone who knows. Expertise locators direct workers to the person most likely to have the answer they seek. Presence awareness software shows whether that person is online, mobile, in a meeting, or available by phone. Instant messaging facilitates swapping brief questions or asking if the person has time to deal with a more complex question.
Overall, what are corporate blogs, feeds, aggregators, wikis, mash-ups, locator systems, collaboration environments, and widgets, if not performance support?
Ten years ago, at the Online Learning Conference in Anaheim, Gloria declared that “Training will be strategic or training will be marginalized.” Most chief learning officers chose the second option and ceded PS to others.
It is high time for CLOs to start looking at the entire learnscape. We are overdue to be mindful that in terms of effectiveness, performance support often trumps training. As Gloria said,
Learning must be re-conceived to influence the primary purpose of organization: to perform effectively and efficiently. Good design puts what workers need to do their jobs within easy reach and shows how to use them to optimize performance.
References
Jay Cross and Tony O’Driscoll, Workflow Learning Gets Real, Training Magazine. February 2005.
Gloria Gery, Electronic Performance Support Systems: How and Why to Remake the Workplace Through the Strategic Application of Technology. 1991.
Acknowledgements
Conversations and correspondence with Gloria Gery, Marc Rosenberg, Allison Rossett, Jeathr Rutherford, Stan Malcolm, Gary Dickelman, Burt Huber, Hal Christensen, Frank Nguyen, Clark Quinn, Harold Jarche, Loretta Donovan, Buthaina Al-Othman, Allison Anderson, Jim Schuyler, Harvey Singh, and Karyn Romeis.
An excerpt from Learnscape Architecture
