eLearning Technology

Tuesday, May 05, 2009

Social Network Analysis - Twitter - Social Media - Best Stuff from Last Week

Here is the best stuff from last week via eLearning Learning.

Top Other Items

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

Enterprise: List of 40 Social Media Staff Guidelines, April 23, 2009
NYTimes OpEd | End the University as We Know It, April 27, 2009
The future of e-learning is social learning, April 25, 2009
OpenGov: One big challenge? Or a thousand small hurdles : Tim's Blog, April 28, 2009
Ten Commandments of eLearning Design, April 25, 2009
20 Ways to Evaluate Contributions to a Corporate Social Network | Dave Duarte, April 28, 2009
Ignore This Post If You Don’t Care About Effective Learning, April 28, 2009
Incredibly Dull: Social Architecture, April 28, 2009
“Ba” for Management Development, April 24, 2009
Emergent practices need practice, April 24, 2009
Rough week for higher education, April 25, 2009
The Business Case for Social Learning: Dealing with the "Capability Recession" at Lower Cost, April 30, 2009
The intersection between work and learning, April 30, 2009
Social Learning and Emerging Technology, April 23, 2009

Top Keywords

Profile Photo

I'm actively engaged in all kinds of sites that can be roughly described as social networking. Through this, and because of my My LinkedIn Open Connection Approach where I basically treat LinkedIn like a really big business mixer, I have lots of opportunity to "meet" new people online.

My guess is that about 25% of the people I run into do not have a profile photo. I'm writing this post to encourage you to:

Spend a little bit of time to create a reasonable profile photo
Attach it to every online profile when you create it

And when I say every, I mean every – don't join that new Ning group without attaching your photo. Add it to your Elluminate and WebEx profiles.

It doesn't take a lot to add a profile photo, and it's fairly significant. Why?

It helps me believe that you are a real person. That your request isn't from some faceless person out there in cyber space. You are real. If you walk up and talk to me at a big mixer, I will talk to you. But if you are an unknown from cyberspace with no photo, it just doesn't feel as real.
It helps me remember you. I have a hard time associating names with faces. A really hard time. Your profile photo can be really helpful to me to connect the dots repeatedly.
It shows me you are serious. If I receive an inquiry or link/friend request from someone without a profile photo, I'm much more likely to ignore it. It's a signal that you are just playing around.

A few other thoughts on this topic:

In business networking, using stylized photos or anything other than a normal photorealistic picture says – I'm playful and fun, but maybe not all that serious about all this stuff. It's your choice, but I believe it hurts you on all three of the above items.
Have a reasonably complete LinkedIn profile and link to it everywhere. When I meet someone online, I commonly go search for them on LinkedIn to see who they are and what they do. If I can't find them or they have really limited information, that suggests they aren't as serious about online connections. In my experience, it's not as effective to spend time with them online. I'm not saying this is a rule, but there's a correlation in my experience. And while I'm at it, if you have less than 200 connections, you probably aren't trying all that hard online either.

Monday, May 04, 2009

New Way of Learning

This month's Big Question - Social Grid Value and a comment by Ken Allan on my Learning Goals post really got me to thinking. Ken said:

I don't really think there's any new way of learning, but we may need to experiment with its delivery.

At first I nodded my head, but then I started to wonder...

Is there really no new way of learning?

This is similar to the question raised in Brain 2.0 and I'm not really sure where we landed in that discussion. At the time, I said:

I'm not claiming that the brain itself has changed, but instead what's changing is:
metacognition
metamemory
access to information
access to other people
access to smart systems

And I still feel we are vastly underestimating what is happening around all of this.

Our Better Memory changes what we remember, how we remember, how we find and filter information (Information Radar), how we process information (Processing Link Pages).
The Social Grid and Network Learning have changed when and how we Search which is actually quite a change from how many of us learned to acquire information when we were in college.

In fact, I still believe that this is THE challenge of the next 50 years plus. How do we accommodate the dramatic changes in the ways that humans interact with computers, information and each other? In 30 years we will be able to have implants that give us full, instant access to the web (no typing) including the social grid. Today, our access to all that information and other people is just a bit slower (we have to type). Sorry, I digress ...

So, back to the original question - new way of learning?

Part of the answer of whether there are new ways of learning is how we interpret the "way of learning." What is learning? Some definitions:

the cognitive process of acquiring skill or knowledge
refers to the acquisition, and transfer to long-term memory, of experience, Information, and Knowledge, which may subsequently be used for solving problems, making decisions, and creating new knowledge

If we are talking about brain function, I don't know enough to know whether there really is something different going on in how the brain works. So, if we interpret learning to be purely at that level, then an argument can be made that there's not anything different here because the brain still "learns" in the same way. Therefore the "way of learning" are the same. It's still some kind of physical activity within the brain. Once we are able to bypass visual / reading as our input mechanism from computers and have direct input into the brain that may be interpreted separate from those normal brain signals, then we can be assured that learning is different at this level. But I'm not sure that should be the hurdle we need to achieve in order to start to claim "new way of learning."

If I look at the result of learning which according to the above definitions:

skill or knowledge
subsequently be used for solving problems, making decisions, and creating new knowledge

I believe that so much is changed around this that it really has a profound impact on learning. We are already beginning down the 30 year path I'm describing above. Essentially we've begun to use computers as an extended brain. The social grid represents a Borg-like extended brain that gives us incredible access to expertise and problem solving. All of this changes:

what we learn
how we choose what needs to be committed to long term memory vs. electronic memory
what we need from a future look up standpoint
how we solve problems and make decisions

So while the physical level of learning may not be changing, the context has and is changing. It's changing enough that while it's technically accurate to claim there is no "new way of learning" - it feels misleading.

I believe the way I learn today is very different than the way I learned 10 years ago. And dramatically differently than I the way I learned 25 years ago.

Improved Learning or Business Benefits

Looking at the responses in Social Learning Designer to my services positioning template:

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

There were only three responses:

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 available to anyone at anytime. Unlike others, we do this by creating distributed spaces, places and tools for sharing, finding and creating knowledge.

John: For learning organizations we help build productive, skilled, thinking individuals and teams. Unlike others we do this in a collaborative, active, constructive manner.

This sparked a couple of quick thoughts …

Buyers / Audience – Learning Dept / Organizations

I'm guessing that each of these responses are from a vendor perspective as they define the audience the same and it's not the organization itself, it's the learning organization / department.

Benefits – Learning / Knowledge

In my post Social Learning Measurement – Will Thalheimer points out

there are basically three reasons to measure learning:
1. To prove benefits
2. To improve the intervention
3. To improve learning.

And I think you could make an argument that our benefits could fall in any of the three camps:

business benefits,
better interventions,
improved learning.

When I read each of the benefits above, I read them to be 3 - improved learning. The closest to a real business benefit is "productive, skilled, thinking individuals" – but that's still a distance from what most business people would think of in terms of real business benefits.

This is really a critical positioning issue …

is our benefit improved learning or business benefits?

I realize there will be times for us to define ourselves as one or the other, but I hope that we seek to define ourselves in terms of business benefit.

In my post Social Learning Measurement – there are a host of things that we can measure around Social Learning (which was the focus of the post where these responses occurred). These include things like:

Networking patterns
Learning efficiency
Learning outcomes
Contribution patterns
Content usage patterns
Content quality
Idea to development initiation cycle time
Retention/Employee turn over
Time to hire
Prospect identification cost
Prospect to hire conversion rate
Hiring cost
Training cost
Time to acclimation for new employees

And most of these really are measuring learning outcomes or Intermediate Factors in Learning (see also Intermediate Factors).

Real business outcomes really fall into either: increased revenue or reduced cost. The rest are accepted intermediate factors for the business such as improved time-to-market, customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction, etc. And there can be lots of these intermediate factors.

So going back to a positioning question – I wonder if we shouldn't all be talking about specific kinds of business outcomes or intermediate factors that can be achieved?

Friday, May 01, 2009

Call for eLearning Demonstrations

One of the hardest things to find are real-life examples of different kinds of eLearning Solutions. On May 21, Learn Trends will be hosting a free online event where the people who have developed interesting eLearning solutions will demonstrate and briefly discuss what they've done.

This is an online call for people who can "demonstrate" their system. Even if you can't participate - please help me get the word out on this.

Because of my concerns about bandwidth - demonstrations will really be screen shot slides. Sorry. This makes it a bit harder to demonstrate 3D worlds, video based training, etc. But it can still be done - just screen shot it and plan to explain it.

Generally we are looking for examples of a variety of different kinds of solutions. We hope they will vary from practical solutions to common problems to leading edge solutions. Some example areas and this is by no means inclusive:

Self-Paced Courses
Performance Support Tools
Mobile Learning
Collaborative Learning
Social / Network Learning
3D Learning
Games
Toolkits
Interesting Tools

We especially would like participants who are developing solutions inside of organizations to participate. These are most often the hardest examples to see.

To participate, you must be available May 21 from 9AM to Noon Pacific Time.

If you are interested, please send me an email (akarrer@techempower.com) with:

A brief description
A couple of example screen shots

We expect to have more examples than we can show and discuss in the 3 hours, so we will likely only be able to choose some of what is sent in. We will try to choose a variety of different examples that represent effective patterns.

We are also trying to come up with ways to effectively share examples that are not shown real-time during the session.

Two last things:

Please help me spread the word about this.
If you know of places that examples already are captured, please point me to those. Another aspect of this is beginning to capture examples that will be available online.