Online Conference Formats

We've just seen an interesting experience with Jay Cross having pulled together a 24 hour, worldwide discussion on the future of learning at Learn Trends. You can find some of the recordings here.

There's a discussion thread with feedback, and you can read some of Jay's thoughts on doing this. It had very good attendance and the quality of people was very high.

We encouraged people to drop by whenever they were free. They could join in for half an hour, then bail out. Participants did not need to register to attend.

This revolving door of attendance makes measurement tough, but I’ll guess that 250-300 people were involved at least part of the time. On Tuesday morning, we had 125 listening in. On Wednesday morning, we had 50-60. In between, some sessions had 30-40 people, others dwindled to one.

We had about 120 people for the Learn Trends on SharePoint in Corporate Learning and find the recording at SharePoint Video.

We are deciding what we will do going forward. We plan to hold sessions in May and June. Topics are TBD. And likely the topic will partly decide what format we use.

But I very much would like your help in brainstorming what else we might consider doing with the format?

Please help with ideas or pointers to examples.

Also, if you are interested in future conferences, please go sign up on the Learn Trends Ning Group. We will make sure we notify you of dates and topics.

Social Learning Designer

Out of the conversation in Learn Trends around making informal learning concrete, Cammy Bean asked:

Cammy Bean: So is there a market for Social Media Instructional Designing Consultants?

Jane Hart suggested that we use the term Social Learning Designer to describe the role. But what was fantastic is how well this crystallized the central question in my mind. Be it as an individual or as a function in an organization, we need to define what the whole business of social learning or informal learning is all about.

Using a common marketing template, I thought it would be a great exercise to have people define our:

• Buyers
• Benefits
• Services
• Differentiation

Here's the template ...

For _________ (buyers) we help in their desire to __________ (benefits)
by ________ (services) unlike others we _____________ (differentiation).

How do we fill this in for a social learning designer or a social learning organization?

I would very much like to hear your answers.

Here are a couple of examples from the chat to maybe help you get started:

Jane Hart: i work with learning depts to help them create more participatory, collaborative approaches to learning - rather than just shoving content at people

Colleen Carmean: for learning orgs, we help in their desire to increase knowledge within the org by shaping systems that make info needed availalble to anyone at anytime. Unlike others, we do this by creating distributed spaces, places and tools for sharing, finding and creating knowledge.

Blog Post Updates - Effective Pattern?

As part of the Tools Set 2009 series, my first post was Browser Keyboard Shortcut Basics. I was a little surprised that this didn't come up as one of the more popular items recently when I did my Top 20 Posts for Q1 2009.

Now I've got a couple of additional things to add to this information, and it raises a question that I often face:

What do you do when you have an update to a prior post?

I feel like each of my options have drawbacks:

1. Update the original post and create a new post with a link back

Originally, I was going to do this. Just go back and update the original post with the additional information and create a post to say to go look at that for the information.

The advantage of this is that the original post becomes an increasingly rich source of content on the topic. If you want information on that there's only one place to go.

The disadvantage is that people who subscribe to my blog will not see the information in their RSS feed or in the daily email. They have to click. And my belief is that they will not click unless the information is really valuable. Thus, it somewhat gets lost.

The other disadvantage that is completely self-serving is that each post I create has a chance to serve as bait for organic search traffic in the future. I'm pretty sure, but not 100% sure, that long term traffic would be higher by having two posts with different titles than a single post with more links to it – but it only has one title. There are a lot of variables, but since the title and URL are so important for Long Tail Search Engine Optimization, I think having more titles is generally better.

2. Update the original post and create a new post with the additional content and a link back

This is a variation of the above. I would do the same thing, but would also include the new information in the new post as well as in the original post.

The advantage of this approach is that subscribers will get the new content in their feed or email.

The disadvantage is that if I later need to update the topic, then I probably should update both posts – the original and the update post. Otherwise, update posts will be wrong.

Likely, the update post will not be as good for SEO since links will probably go back to the original. However, this is probably in the middle.

3. Put the new information in the update post and add a link to the original post

In this case, I only put the new information in the update post and I edit the original post with a link to the new post.

The advantages here are that subscribers get the new content in their feed or email and that I only have one copy of the new information running around.

The disadvantage is that content on a topic will be scattered around on my blog. If you want to find browser keyboard tricks, you likely will have to visit several posts. My gut tells me that this is not nearly as satisfying for search visitors. It also means that there's additional work to keep track of all the different posts on a topic.

What do you think? Is there another Effective Pattern? Which option would you say is best for me (not too much work) and my subscribers and my search visitors?

Good Posts from Last Week

While there is a little bit of controversy about posting these lists, I'm continuing to use the capability of using social signals to make sure I'm finding good stuff. So here's what came up via eLearning Learning from last week. But I'm keeping it to a bare minimum. And I must say that these are pretty good - it would be a shame if you missed them.

Top Posts

The following are the top posts from featured sources based on social signals.

1. Twitter Job Aid - work in progress- Adventures in Corporate Education, April 12, 2009
2. Reduce Searching Start Talking- eLearning Technology, April 14, 2009
3. Solve problems with screencasting- eLearning Acupuncture, April 14, 2009
4. Augmented Reality in Learning- Upside Learning Blog, April 15, 2009

Top Other Items

The following are the top other items based on social signals.

1. Determining the ROI of Enterprise 2.0 | Enterprise Web 2.0 | ZDNet.com, April 15, 2009
2. The Web: Design for Active Learning, April 17, 2009
3. The (changed) information cycle, April 17, 2009
4. 3 Things to Consider When Building Your E-Learning Courses, April 14, 2009
5. Effective knowledge sharing, April 15, 2009
6. conversation matters: What Do We Get From Conversation That We Can't Get Any Other Way?, April 14, 2009

Top Keywords

• 2009 (108)
• Screencast (5)
• Audacity (4)
• Learning Management System (6)

Conversation on Conversations

Through blog comments and blog posts, an interesting conversation is emerging around – Conversations as Part of Concept Work.   It somewhat started with my post Reduce Searching Start Talking where I suggest that there are points in our concept work where we need to be ready to move from search to conversation.  In the comments there …

Maria H tells us - I think there is time and purpose for all types of information transfer (for lack of a better phrase) and helping people learn when to use the right one is our challenge.

Ken Allan really somewhat crystallizes it as a question of "Knowing WHEN to switch?"  Or more broadly, when is each kind of method appropriate given a specific concept work need.

In Conversation Questions, I pushed this a bit further based on Nancy Dixon - What Do We Get From Conversation That We Can't Get Any Other Way? – looking at the areas of value, but also left it with the challenging question of not only knowing when to switch, but also knowing who to ask and how to ask the right questions.

In Love the Conversation – Ken Allan discusses the complexity of helping concept workers with the skills around this:

The question here is where to start. It is likely too complex for a practical guiding taxonomy to be drawn up and be of any use. Drafting a program to teach adults to use the right means of knowledge transfer is probably at least as difficult as teaching children to be discerning about information accessible on the Internet. There are no hard and fast rules for this. Yet there is no doubt that discernment forms a large part of selecting efficient and effective means for knowledge transfer.

While this is complex, it's very important.  There are very specific limits to using codified knowledge and that Conversation Learning is essential.  Unfortunately, I'm not sure that we really are doing much to address this important Knowledge Worker Skill Gap. 

What's nice is that Ken has helped me to get to these core questions:

• When
• Who
• How

Part of the Who and How question, we've discussed before in the Big Question – Network Feedback – where we discussed different places to reach out for help from your networks.  There was certainly no clear answer and some suggestion that we should be aggressive about reaching out to many of your networks.  I've also discussed it in I've talked about it in Leveraging Networks Skill and Networks and Communities.

Codified Conversations

Separately, Harold Jarche provided some interesting thoughts around issues of codified knowledge, individuals and conversations.  He reminded me of Dave Pollard experience with knowledge management (and it's a conversation I've had directly with Dave):

So my conclusion this time around was that the centralized stuff we spent so much time and money maintaining was simply not very useful to most practitioners. The practitioners I talked to about PPI [Personal Productivity Improvement] said they would love to participate in PPI coaching, provided it was focused on the content on their own desktops and hard drives, and not the stuff in the central repositories.

Dave basically went through a transition from looking at KM as big central codified knowledge bases to going out to individuals and work teams in the organization to figure out how they could be helped on a tactical level. 

Dave provides a very interesting picture of information flows in 2025.

While his focus still seems to be more on codified knowledge, look at what his first item is: conversations.  There is, of course, a really interesting question of how that conversation is captured.  Dave certainly looks at that in his post – the scattered electronic conversation that occurs today.