Recently, I’ve been seeing a lot of posts come through eLearning Learning that provide eLearning templates or toolkits or other kinds of interesting resources. Here are 20 of them:
And the list would be even better with help - see Curator Editor Research Opportunities on eLearning Learning.
While strife with technical challenges, Nancy White and John Smith’s presentation at LearnTrends 2009 (LearnTrends 2009 Recordings) provided some really interesting food for thought. In some ways this relates closely to the post on Selling Learning Communities.
By way of background, Nancy White and John Smith are gurus around all things Communities and Networks. I’ve worked with Nancy to create the Communities and Networks Connection which helps me continuously learn. And I keep a copy of their book Digital Habitats; Stewarding Technology for Communities
The central idea of the presentation was something that Nancy called triangulation. Now, I’m not 100% certain what Nancy meant by this, but I interpret the idea to organize learning community events where you bring together three groups:
You (or an outside facilitator) facilitates a conversation around a particular need.
Let’s say the need is – Where and how should we apply social learning in our organization?
The facilitator would get the people inside the company to define the problem. Then would facilitate sharing with peers and with experts around the issue.
I’ve seen similar kinds of peer sharing at roundtable events. And it’s really powerful. Adding in the experts would make it even more powerful.
I could imagine where this could be an ongoing sharing dialog that would cross several organizations. For example, you could pull together L&D staff from 10 companies together into a community and then have people like myself and George Siemens who could help facilitate critical issues and conversations and draw in additional outside expertise as needed.
To me, that sounds like a really powerful model.
Great stuff Nancy and John.
It’s interesting at the end of the year to go back through blog posts to see what my Best of 2009 is. I’ll also do a post similar to my post last year 2008 2009 that will look at my 12 eLearning Predictions for 2009. But for now, let me just focus on my Best of 2009.
To create this list, I’m using eLearning Learning as described in Using Special Parameters to Create Year End Post for details on how I’ve come up with this list. I’m including posts from December 2008.
I also looked at the top posts according to read counts. What I found is that read counts are actually dominated by mostly older posts. Here are the top 25 according to read counts:
The ones from the time frame shown above are already listed in the top list.
For some reason, December last year was a really good month for posts and page views.
Jack Merklein from Xerox Global Services did a really great presentation at LearnTrends 2009 entitled - Common tools for Diverse Communities at Xerox Global Services. You can find the LearnTrends 2009 Recording including Jack’s presentation. A few follow-up thoughts.
Jack is responsible for the development, care and tools for learning communities and knowledge sharing initiatives. In practice this means a lot of different things and across many different learning communities. A few of the different communities he discussed:
While the title centered on tools for communities and knowledge sharing and he provided a list of tools …
Existing Tools:
Emerging Tools:
Most of the discussion didn’t focus on tools. Instead, it focused on Jack’s no nonsense ability to make communities an effect part of learning. And particularly, I got to spend time with Jack on how he sells learning communities in the organization.
Jack does an amazing job of finding out what people in the community really care about and need. For one community, they meet every two weeks and a lot of times the topic comes a week before and he pulls in subject matter experts to present. He ensures that the facilitation then focuses on the key issue that the people in the room cares about. I’ve seen exactly this kind of thing work really well before. But I’ve not seen it done as systematically as how Jack has designed it.
Jack was a quote machine during the session, here are some of the phrases he used:
Part of the beauty of Jack and his style is that the language he uses is plain, business oriented. Everything sounds obvious when he says it. In a way, he didn’t feel like he was ever “selling learning communities”. That was my language. Instead, he asked people if they wanted help with a particular problem. If he could bring together experts and expertise and facilitate a conversation on X and then help capture that – is that something you’d want. Absolutely! In fact, we all want that all the time!
In a later session, we discussed the fact that one of the big barriers in many organizations is that they don’t “have a Jack.” Selling learning communities or social learning or anything other than formal learning / training is hard because we find ourselves using the language of learning or learning community.
As an example of needing a Jack, the question - How do you avoid the issue … “I’m too busy” … Jack’s answer is basically, if the value is high enough, you are focused on problems they are faced with right now, they will come. His example is a community that meets on Friday afternoons. Yikes. I’d never plan something then. But he gets amazing participation because the topics focus on hard hitting topics where people need help right now. Senior leaders participate because they see the value. And participation is rewarded through recognition … and sometimes bribed.
Now let’s all be a Jack!
After LearnTrends 2009, I received a note from a person I know and highly respect that said, “I dropped in on several sessions over the last three days and wanted to thank you for your good facilitation skills …”
It’s great to get that positive feedback, but this was actually a bit of a surprise. I often felt during the conference that I was not doing a good job of taking advantage of the expertise that was often in the room.
This was amplified when George Siemens did a highly participatory session where he had the audience list out design considerations for several things like formal vs. informal, etc. Some tweets during the session:
That session flew by and was a great use of the power in the room. A masterful job by George. Great stuff. And something that I believe he and I will be doing together in the future in some way.
Other than George’s session, most of the rest of the conference had active chat, but it was limited in many ways. The time we had for open discussion didn’t seem to achieve that much discussion. It rambled.
My gut tells me that if I had designed things in a particular way, we could have had some truly amazing sessions.
So, please help me so that in a month when I’m designing future online sessions, I can come back here and design something great.
What are some ways that I can facilitate meaningful learning from others in the room during online sessions?
Have you seen examples of something that was powerful?
What conversation would you have wanted to have or see?
Please comment or post with ideas. And if you don’t have an ideas, please just retweet to ask someone else for ideas? And maybe come back in a day and see if some of the ideas help spark other ideas for you.
