Free - Web 2.0 for Learning Professionals

Work Literacy and the eLearning Guild are partnering to provide you with a great (and free) opportunity to get up to speed on Web 2.0 tools and their implications for learning professionals. This 6-week, highly active, social learning event will introduce you to new methods and tools. It will be moderated by Michele Martin and Harold Jarche, with help from Tony Karrer. This is your opportunity to ramp up your understanding of Learning 2.0 technologies prior to DevLearn 2008 so that you can participate better either in-person or as an outside spectator, and to interact and learn with people who are passionate about learning.

Each week we will share new activities that will allow you to explore different Web 2.0 tools and discuss their implications for learning. The activities can be done at your own pace and will be hands-on.

The program topics and schedule...

Date	Title
09/29/2008	Introduction to Social Networks
10/06/2008	Free your Favorites / Bookmarks
10/13/2008	Blogs
10/20/2008	Aggregators
10/27/2008	Wikis
11/03/2008	Implications / Summary

We will be posting more details of how to get into this online experience soon. In the meantime, you, we're suggesting that anyone who's interested in joining us can start by signing up for the Ning network we're using for the event.

Learn at your own pace...

We have designed the activities for completion at your own pace. We recognize that there will be different levels of interest, experience, and time available for exploration, so these activities will give you meaningful experiences at three different levels:

• The Spectator – These will be exercises or activities that should take approximately 15 minutes to complete. The Spectator level is for people who want just a quick exploration of the tools and minimal interaction.
  


• The Joiner / Collector – For those who want to delve more deeply into a particular Web 2.0 tool, the Joiner / Collector level will consist of activities that take approximately 30 minutes to complete.
  
  
• The Creator – These activities are for people who want to really spend some time exploring and trying out a particular tool or set of tools. The activities will take approximately 75 minutes to complete, and will allow you to immerse yourself in the Web 2. 0 experience.
  

Based on your experience with the different tools and methods being explored, your involvement may take longer or shorter periods of time. You will also have complete flexibility to participate at different levels of activity each week. Our goal is to create a range of opportunities for people to learn about and explore various Web 2.0 tools and their implications for learning professionals in an environment that's fun, supportive, and responsive to your needs and interests.

The goals of this program are to...

• Introduce you to new tools and methods for work and learning
  


• Discuss implications of these tools for learning professionals
  
  
  
• Prepare you to participate in DevLearn 2008 in new ways as an attendee or as a spectator.
  

Event Moderators

Michele Martin is an independent consultant who specializes in using social media tools to support learning, and career and professional development. She has worked with federal, state, and local governments, nonprofits, and corporations to design and deliver a variety of learning interventions. She used online tools such as forums, listservs, and a “virtual office” to support learning in the late 1990s, and has added tools such as blogs, wikis and social networks. She's a co-founder with Tony Karrer of Work Literacy, a network of individuals, companies, and organizations focusing on the frameworks, skills, methods, and tools of modern knowledge work. Michele blogs at The Bamboo Project.

Harold Jarche has found a passion in the area of sharing, learning, reflecting, and collaborating using Web tools such as social network systems, blogs, and wikis. He constantly tries out new tools and techniques, and then uses his pragmatic business bent to recommend the right ones for clients and colleagues. Harold has been a freelance consultant for the past five years, and blogs about learning and working on the Web at jarche.com. Previously, Harold worked as a Chief Learning Officer of an e-Learning company, Project Manager at a university, and Training Development Officer with the Canadian Forces.

Tony Karrer is CEO/CTO of TechEmpower, a founder of Work Literacy, and a well-known consultant, speaker, writer, and trainer on e-Learning and Performance Support. He has twenty years’ experience as a CTO and leader of software development, and eleven years experience as an associate professor of Computer Science. He works as an interim CTO for many start-ups, and was the founding CTO at eHarmony. His work has won awards, and has led him into engagements at many Fortune 500 companies including Citibank, Lexus, Microsoft, Nissan, IBM, and Hewlett-Packard, among others. His blog eLearning Technology won the best e-Learning Blog award.

Examples of eLearning 2.0

During my presentation last Thursday that was an introduction to eLearning 2.0 as part of an online event for the eLearningGuild, I mentioned a few common ways that I've seen eLearning 2.0 approaches used in corporate learning settings:

• Alongside Formal Learning
• Blog as writing tool
• Wiki as a collaborative learning tool
• Editable reference materials (Wiki)
• Internal / External Product information
• Process information
• Sales scenarios
• Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) / support information
• Online reference / glossary
• Experience Capture
• New-hire blog
• Maintaining a “lab or project notebook”
• RSS Reader, Podcasts - Steady Drip

Then I ask the group for examples of how they are using eLearning 2.0 approaches. In the past, I've only had a few people respond, but this time, there were so many responses I couldn't really read them and present. Here are some of the things that people mentioned:

• link new hires and senior staff through a wiki to learn from one another in starting at corp
• questions and answers
• used a wiki to collect data from managers instead of surveying them
• Vodcasts
• wikis and semantic engine for knowledge management and mining
• classroom extension / preclass work
• wiki for java programmers
• sharing info about sustainable practices throughout the corporation
• We are using a blog to assist our Adobe Captivate users with internal troubleshooting and to release important internal standards
• group roleplays that grow over time
• creating learning paths on wikis
• converted help manual from robohelp to wiki for our support team
• We have a wiki where people describe new business processes they've developed.
• new acct mgrs have an online community space
• wikis for student collaboration
• project management
• RSS feeds from social bookmarks to capture reading list for group of SMEs
• We use a wiki to update associates on new documentation
• wikis internally and learning blog pointing users to most valuable resources
• Allow people to post their software tips on our intranet
• Using blog as answering tool and wiki as collaboration tool
• using a wiki to support development and techniques in for WebEx trianing
• blogs for student experience - marketing tool
• wiki on grape varieties
• project WIKIs, best practices dissemination via RSS
• rss feeds for hr pages
• Using a tool like "linked in" to help network our different users with each other, started using blogs.
• internal processes on wiki
• starting to use wikis internally
• Moving faculty bookmarks to Delicious
• use wiki for learners to craft definition of 'seamless service' after searching orgs that proclaim to provide seamless service
• We hope to build wikis that our students can use to share information.
• We use podcasts to release information on department updates
• wikis for SMEs to submit content/feedback
• project Wikis ; resource / tools sharing on wiki
• online reference for patient care
• using podcasts for our ASTD chapter to introduce upcoming speakers
• wikis, blogs, jing to capture best practices, conduct training and elearning resources
• virtual learning environment that encompasses social tools
• Use discussion boards and blogs for reflection and share learner experience

A great list of examples. One thing I really like about the list is how tactical they are. I always suggest people shouldn't try to come up with a big eLearning 2.0 strategy and worry about culture change, but should instead look for tactical implementations that just make sense. These make sense.

There's still work to make sure you support users. But, wow, what a great list!

Social Learning

At first when I saw Grockit and heard they got $8M in funding from some pretty good VCs including Benchmark Capital, I was wondering what was going on. It didn't seem like this was something that could justify that kind of investment level.

Their example at a presentation at TechCrunch was "preparing for your GMAT." It wasn't until they got into Q&A that the light bulb finally went on ...



The spark was the example of a teacher/course/set of students/partner that provided their content into the system so that the students could study through a social learning experience. Two thoughts. Wow, that's a great idea. Man am I stupid not to have figured that out from the description.

(Actually, I've got to say that this was an incredibly bad presentation. Industrial model learning -> social learning. Then a demo that just shows trivial examples. Wow, it was really bad. How the heck did they get $8M from VCs with presentation skills like that - actually it wasn't presentation skills it was bad content.)

The good news is that I think there is opportunity here. When the light bulb finally went on for me, I thought back to when I was teaching. The absolute best learning opportunity was twice a semester right before midterms and finals. I would hand out a study guide filled with questions including past exams. I held an optional study session outside of office hours and class time. It was almost always fully attended. The session was two hours, and I would answer any questions they had. Of course, there's no way for me to go through all of the questions that I had handed out in two hours and show solutions, so what the students did was go through the questions ahead of time to figure out which ones they knew and what they had trouble with or weren't sure. They were extremely motivated and prepared. Almost an ideal class. In two hours, I could go through the content in ways that just wasn't possible at any other time. And, they learned tremendously from each other.

The promise of GrockIt is supporting similar kinds of interactions online. It's a bit like Cramster and CampusBug, but focused more on real-time studying.

Certainly this kind of approach, leveraging the interest of other students, mentors, coaches, experts, etc. into the learning is something that I believe has big time value.

A long time ago I posted about Authoring in eLearning 2.0 / Add-ins & Mash-ups where I suggested that there would be easy ways to add social dimensions to our courses. Examples I suggested were polls or seeing other responses to open-ended questions or discussions, etc. I still think there's value in having these kinds of widgets available to us to include in our authoring. I don't think that Grockit can be the be-all and end-all of learning models. For example, I recently talked about italki - Social Network for Language Learning and Social Learning Objects - Flash Cards that each use different models. Still, it's obvious that lots of people see social learning and new models of content creation as big opportunities.

Part of the difference here between how a GrockIt looks at the world and how the typical learning professional looks at the world is size / scope of audience. When you have a potentially massive audience then you can make assumptions about finding enough people who are interested in real-time interaction. When I think about the relatively smaller audiences that we often have in corporate learning situations, then assuming that you will find five people online at the same time who are willing to interact, that doesn't feel like a safe assumption - unless you suggest when these study sessions will happen. Oh, hey, we could maybe do that. Allow people to schedule themselves into blocks of times when they know that other people will be fighting through the course as well. Naturally, the more social learners who enjoy studying when other people are studying will find this more appealing.

There's also a difference here in terms of who authors the content. Most of the social learning start-ups look for users to author a lot of the content. In the corporate world, that still mostly falls to the training / learning organization. I'm not sure I get where the content will come from, except by capturing things like mentoring notes, best practice answers, etc. Normally when we talk about eLearning 2.0 in a corporate context, it's not this kind of model, it's much more bottom up learning without someone formulating content ahead of time. My guess is that there's something in-between. Some structure provided but much of the content comes from learners using other resources and figuring things out on their own with guidance from experts, mentors, etc. Wow, that sounds a lot like how we learn many different things in our daily lives.

But certainly, I'm left with the question - what will social learning solutions look like in the corporate learning world?

Rules for Copying Presentation Style?

In a previous post - Video and Screencast Styles for Corporate Training? - I had mentioned Common Craft as an example of a particular well-known style that seems to have struck a chord. I'm still looking for examples of other good styles that people have seen.

In the meantime, I ran across a post by Ewan McIntosh who points to a video by McKann Erickson (the big ad agency) that uses the same style as common craft. Ewan tells us -

It's a shame that one of the largest ad agencies out there, McCann Erickson, feels the need to rip-off others' work, without even a casual link out to the people they're attempting to copy. ...

Why, then, have McCann repackaged/stolen the idea and produced something that's mediocre at best, plain boring rather than plain English?

I'm wondering about this. This is obviously a rip-off of the style used by common craft. And as Ewan tells us, it's not well done. They slip into power point looking stuff along the way. The humor isn't really there. But the question this leaves me with ... if I found something that I thought was a good style to copy for the videos and screencasts that I'm thinking about, I was planning on borrowing from it. Would this be wrong?

What are the rules for copying presentation style?

Forums vs. Social Networks?

I'm debating the value of forum / group / threaded discussion software vs. social network software for a particular situation.

It aims at a very broad audience that includes everyone from early adopters to technology laggards.

We generally expect users to break into:

• 5% - Heavy Users - spend quite a bit of time and heavily participate
• 15% - Light Users - spend a little time, participate a little
• 80% - Fly-Bys - spend very little time, read bits and pieces

It is likely that some of the Heavy Users will be technology laggards, but they will want to participate because of the content.

Participation will eventually mean a lot of different things, but initially it will primarily be sharing ideas. A user can do this through posting to a threaded discussion quite easily. They could also do it as comments on a blog.

So, I'm trying to figure out what's going to be the right software / service to adopt, but I'm also trying to think about the differences in:

Forum / Threaded Discussion / Group

Examples are Google Groups and Yahoo Groups. Typically they center around threaded discussions. Generally are easy to get into. Options are simple.

Social Network

Examples are Ning and KickApps. They center around individuals. They form a network of people via interactions, groups, etc. Being a network, they generally are a little harder for people to understand. However, they typically try to give a better sense of the person and make interactions more social.

The distinctions here are horribly gray and most of the services end up with fairly similar offerings. A lot of what it comes down to is the primary view you show users - classic threaded discussion view - or a personal home page with all that is happening in the network.

Some thoughts I have about why we might adopt threaded discussions / forum software vs. adopting a social network solution.

• Longer-term we want to have more of a social network where people will become more social, interact in a myriad of different ways, create groups within the site, and generally will take it into classic social network realms.
• Short-term we want this to be really simple to get into. I'm especially concerned about the user who would want to be a heavy user - contributing lots of ideas - but who has never used a social network. Possibly they've never used threaded discussions either.
  

What do you think I should be considering here?

Clearly, there's a lot more to it than just the software. It's how we use the software. It's providing the necessary direction and hand holding. It's having people ready to help/guide/mentor users.