Social Media and Experimental Innovation

Interesting post by Clark Quinn - Innovating by Conversation - where he refers to the idea of the Experimental Innovator - an innovator who iterates through lots of ideas before arriving at something that works. Clark tells us ...

Surowiecki’s Wisdom of the Crowds, Tapscott’s Wikinomics, and Libert & Spector’s We Are Smarter Than Me, are telling us to tap into the wisdom of crowds, and with lots of examples of how creating conversations with folks can spark new insights.

The thought this sparks is that experimental innovation can be accelerated through broader conversations. This is interesting. Much of Gladwell's discussion of experimental innovation discussed innovation occurring over very long periods of time (10 years). But one of the promises of social media is that we can arrive at innovation more quickly and test it more quickly.

In many ways, this is exactly how we are approaching Work Literacy. It's a big, hard problem. Get lot's of people together to foster discussion, innovation, experimentation.

Learning Organizations, eLearning 2.0 and Edupunk

Janet Clarey wrote an interesting blog post in response to the relatively recent edupunk meme which is basically an ideology that DIY learning and repurposing content is the way to go (and somewhat the ONLY way to go). Janet juxtaposes the recent inclusion of eLearning 2.0 type tools in Learning Management Systems against the philosophy that corporate and commercial is evil of the edupunkers. The questions she raises are:

Is the edupunk ideology saying that the use of social media in commercial learning management systems is an assault on the very philosophy of learning 2.0?

Ideologies shouldn’t be rigid should they? Rather they should be adapted and used in pragmatic ways don’t you think? If you’re a trainer embracing learning 2.0, who gives a rats ass where it lives.

These are fair questions that are also central to the issues of the Enterprise 2.0 Adoption. Corporate IT is interested in rolling out systems that they can control for security, auditing, back-up and a host of other control reasons. This is counter to the very being of a person like Stephen Downes. They would argue that the individual chooses what makes sense in their personal work and learning environment.

As a trainer, you are going to get stuck in the middle of this. If you have a population of learners who have already adopted tools (such as blogging and social bookmarking) for themselves that are different than the corporate tool (the LMS) do you ask them to move? It will depend on the content, but it certainly won't be good for the learner. If your population has not adopted a tool yet, do you have a responsibility to the individual to show them tools that can live beyond their engagement at the company? Do you show them the internal blogging tool only?

The answers are going to depend on the particular situation, but in a few cases I think the answers are fairly well known.

For Wiki-like capabilities, it likely is fine for an LMS to provide these and for learning organizations to use them. Most knowledge workers are used to thinking about that type of content being created for internal use only. It makes sense in many of these cases to keep it inside the firewall. So no problem if their Wiki is tied to the LMS. Just don't make me login to get to it. Allow it to be easily searched. Etc.

But I would claim that if you are talking about blogging as an ongoing learning and networking tool, then you are doing a disservice to learners if you show them only internal tools bundled with the LMS or any tool that is locked inside the walls of the corporation.

These are going to be real challenges for learning organizations and trainers moving forward.

Hopefully, we'll begin to see ways to allow a better handling of inside and outside the firewall solutions. For example, having social bookmarking that allows links to be kept private to a group. Interestingly when Yahoo create MyWeb as a competitor to del.icio.us before acquiring del.icious - they had features that did this. I'm expecting them at some point to put this into del.icio.us so that you can control visibility of bookmarks.

Final thought - I would claim that a bad reaction to this debate is to do nothing because we aren't sure. We need to be building work literacy. This will benefit the corporation and the individual.

Topic Diversity

Through the post on Conference Balance an in thinking about the keynotes at ASTD that I attended (ASTD Keynote - Malcolm Gladwell, Dysfunctional Teams), I realized that one of the reasons that I like going to conferences is it forces me (sometimes slowly and painfully) to get exposed to a diversity of topics. Through my PWLE methods (reading blogs, etc.) I would not have run across the concepts in Dysfunctional Teams. This was a good topic to go through and think about - and to have captured in my blog.

But, if I'm suggesting that conferences should head towards participation and F2F because more people are going to effectively get information through their PWLEs, then am I going to miss good topics like that talk. The closest equivalent are things like TED videos (which are always short and to the point). But more recently those videos have become more and more theoretical. I ran across a video on the topic of making a good presentation that was great. But, I still have this nagging worry that I would miss out if you didn't have keynotes on random, related topics.

Am I just being an Infovore and shouldn't worry about it?

Should I be seeking new information sources that will bring in random but related topics?

Where do you get this kind of information? How do you know to get it?

tag: workliteracy

Conference Balance

Just read a great post by Clive Shepherd - Cutting the Pie - where he discusses what the appropriate balance is at conferences. As you know creating Better Conferences is something that very much interests me. Check out that post, the poll results and the discussion for lots of ideas on how to make conferences better. But Clive's major point is that at today's conferences the mix is:



His definitions are:

• ideas - presentations from gurus, experts and thought leaders, primarily abstract in nature.
• examples - case studies from users, sharing successes and lessons learned.
• participation - opportunities for attendees to interact with each other to explore the ideas, share their own experiences and make contacts that can take follow-up after the event.

He'd like to see a balance:



This is interesting timing for me having just returned from the ASTD Conference. That conference was certainly the old model - mostly ideas and examples. Very little participation. But in fairness to ASTD - it seems like it's hard to get participation when 70% of attendees are relatively new to the industry and are first time attendees.

I personally tried (a little) to create my own participation ahead of the event through getting together at conferences. But I wasn't very successful.

I've always highly encourage participation, but my general sense is that people aren't really that interested in doing the Conference Preparation that might be required to Be an Insanely Great Professional Conference Attendee or using Social Conference Tools

So while I agree, my basic question:

When can you get effective participation at conferences?

It seems like the eLearningGuild is doing a better job at this recently. There were morning discussion groups last time that I thought were great. They are starting to do more with online tools. I think that conferences really need to adopt a mentality of having unconferences within a conference structure to allow for participation of all kinds intermixed with ideas and examples.

I'd be curious to hear thoughts on this as I always struggle with whether going to a conference is worth the investment of time.

ASTD Handouts

Lance Dublin mentioned a couple of handouts today from sessions I was not able to attend. It took me a little while to find this link to the ASTD 2008 Session Handouts. My session (yesterday) can be found: M313 - E-Learning 2.0 for Personal and Group Learning (PDF).