Jay Cross helps people work and live smarter. Jay is the Johnny Appleseed of informal learning. He wrote the book on it. He was the first person to use the term eLearning on the web. He has challenged conventional wisdom about how adults learn since designing the first business degree program offered by the University of Phoenix.
I did not want to like paper.il, the new, personal Twitter aggregater. Just more clutter, I thought to myself.
Nonetheless, it is so easy to set up, I filled in the blank with my Twitter list of Internet Time Alliance colleagues. Voila. Our Daily Tweet-news.
This morning I visited my Daily site and learned a number of things I might otherwise have missed. Three-quarters of this was generated one way or another by my prolific pal Harold Jarche, but still, it amazed me how a change of format brought things to my attention. No doubt I’ll habituate but for now, I’m happy to learn things like:
Chuck House speculates that HP’s board was looking for a reason to force Hurd out:
The Voice of the Workplace, HP’s thirty-five year historic ‘measure’ of employee feelings (done every five years) showed in April an astonishing finding — more than two-thirds of HP’s employees would quit tomorrow if they had an equivalent job offer. Not a raise, not a promotion, simply an alternative. That number never used to be in double digits.
Hurd was, apparently, very unpopular with the HP rank-and-file.
Ironically, when I went back to look at this, I was in the midst of cleaning up my already-too-many social connections:
…and now
May 3-5. San Francisco. Internet Time Alliance will be there. For the free part. Exhibits, unconference, and keynotes. Register here.
Since this is half an O’Reilly gig, I wonder why it still has the Web 2.0 monitor. Didn’t Tim O’Reilly tell us it was morphing into Web Squared?
One of the things I like best about Twitter is the collegial, friendly fire-ish banter among L & D professionals. One of the most active of these professionals is the prolific Jay Cross. Jay, with his colleagues in the Internet Time Alliance, has recently produced the 2010 version of his “unbook,” Working Smarter: Informal Learning in the Cloud.
Among the topics often up for grabs lately are ideas around informal learning and the networked learning landscape of the 21st century. Those in the quantitative data/metrics/benchmarking camp argue against the legitimacy of the notion of “informal” learning. As often as not, they claim workplace learning is too important to be left up to happenstance, and requires planning and careful, thorough, design. Cross is clear, though, that he is drawing the “kill the courses, shut down the training department” line with a dramatically heavy hand, admitting that he uses it as much for shock value as anything else, while trying to put forth the idea of workplace learning as different from the traditional view of training course. He also asserts that “informal” does not, as it so often seems to be interpreted, mean “haphazard” or “random.”. Cross acknowledges the time and place of traditional training approaches, particularly for novices (although he questions the decision to put so many resources there rather than with supporting better producers). But seasoned workers, he rightly notes, will not flock to workshops and traditional classes, as they have work to do. Making it easier for them to get to information, to find one another, to learn through collaboration and by accessing meaningful self-service performance support, will strengthen the organization and “help sharp people become sharper.”
As I said on Twitter one night, “I am 93.2% suspicious of statistics about concepts of abstractions like ‘learning’.” While the data we have all seen – along the lines of “80% of workplace learning occurs outside the classroom” – may be appealing, and so quotable, we know we can’t actually measure anything like “learning” in these terms. But we do know that people learn at work all the time, every day, more from one another (even if that “other” is a person who has uploaded a video tutorial, or updated a Wikipedia page) than from anything that happens in a classroom. We know that peer groups and communities exist to share knowledge and support performance, even if they’re bootlegged and kept under management’s radar. We’ve all experienced a need-to-know moment, made better or worse by how quickly we could put our hands on the right information or find the right person to ask. Doubt me? For the rest of the week, as you go about enacting your work, ask how much of what you are doing came from anything resembling a traditional classroom or e-Learning course. Cross leads the reader on a tour of informal, networked learning and performance support, and helps move the conversation from 50,000 feet to 50. This “unbook” is a compilation of his own ideas as well as interjections from his colleagues in the Internet Time Alliance (Harold Jarche, Jane Hart, Charles Jennings, Clark Quinn, and Jon Husband), with chime-ins from many others. There are checklists, tools, and images, charts and provocative questions. And there are honest remarks about the state of learners, many of whom need to stop waiting for directions and start becoming self-directed. For me, the most value in the text comes not from the parsing out of the finer points of informal and formal approaches, but the articulation of the difference between training and learning. Food for thought, from Cross: “If you were to create the organization’s learning and development function from scratch, what would it look like? Are you still doing huge, expensive training-based software rollouts, or shifting the effort into on-point performance support? Have you taken charge of your organization’s learning function, or just training?”
A word about the book itself – it claims it is not one. It’s an unbook, updated every year or so, and published by “Jay Cross and friends,” his colleagues in the Internet Time Alliance Group. Updates appear on Jay’s Internet Time blog http://www.internettime.com so, if they strike your fancy, purchase a bound or e-copy update from Jay’s site, from Lulu, or from Amazon. Where traditional books exist as editions updated every few years, often out of date before they even make it to bookshelves, this unbook is always in Beta. Be aware: While Working Smarter is organized into chapters, it is not the formal, tightly edited, unified work that some readers will expect from a traditional book. I found the organization refreshing, and the get-to-the-point-already style very effective. You can also find Jay on Twitter @jaycross, where he’s a frequent participant in the weekly Thursday night #lrnchat sessions that I help moderate. Join us! 8:30 to 10 PM ET. Jay Cross and Friends. (2010) Working Smarter: Informal Learning in the Cloud. Internet Time Alliance: LULU. $20 paper; $16 e-version, available from Lulu http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/working-smarter-|-january-2010/8259651 or from Internet Time at http://internettime.pbworks.com/FrontPage.
The January 2010 Edition of Working Smarter was released today. Subtitled Informal Learning in the Cloud, this edition focuses on social learning and implementing web 2.0 technology.
The hardcopy version of Working Smarter costs $19.98. Believe me, I’m not trying to fool you with trick pricing. My publisher’s algorithm won’t let me charge $20 even. I figured $19.98 was better than $20.01. Buy the 240-page hard copy.
The download version of Working Smarter costs $12.00. I prefer the hard copy myself but your mileage may vary. And of course you can get the soft copy right away. Buy the download.
Here’s a map of the book:
(Click the map)
Introduction … 3
What can you achieve with this book?…3
Who should read this book?…4
How the book is organized …4
An unbook6
New in 2010 …7
Preface .. 10
Cataclysm …10
Internet Time Alliance…12
Working Smarter … 14
Network Effects …14
Business Results…21
What can we do to improve this informal learning?…23
Techniques and Patterns…24
Rethinking Learning in Organizations…30
Getting Started…35
Informal Learning …36
Genesis of the Informal Learning Poster …37
Cheat-sheet.
Become a Chief Meta-Learning Officer…93
Social media for collaboration…110
Resources on line ….119
The Research Page…119
The Home Page …120
Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies .121
People and their Brains….128
Network Effects…139
Business Results….153
Speak the Language of Business …156
ROI is in the mind of the beholder …162
Perspective ….172
Techniques and Patterns …174
Rethinking learning in organizations …201
Learning is not enough…224
Back Matter….225
Bibliography …225
People…228
About the author..228
Where I’m coming from …229
Maps of Book Content …235
Acknowledgments …238
Index ….238
Tony O’Driscoll and Karl Kapp have a book coming out next month – Learning in 3D: Adding a New Dimension to Collaboration and Learning. Amazon’s blurb:
Understanding the impact that 3D environments, virtual worlds, and immersive learning spaces will have on society, business, and learning is a challenge. Corporations, academic institutions, and government agencies must develop a clear understanding of how virtual immersive environments will impact global interactions, knowledge transfer, work transactions, and existing learning paradigms.
Learning in 3D empowers forward-thinking executives, managers, faculty members, and training professionals to design, develop, and collaborate in the rapidly emerging field of 3D immersive environments.
Learning in 3D: Adding a New Dimension to Enterprise Learning and Collabora
Promote Your Page Too
It’s really smart to publicize a book like this on the web.
Drop by Internet Time Blog the week of February 15-19 when the book stops here.
Guten Tag!
You are invited to attend several virtual sessions of Online Educa Berlin.
Thursday, December 3
Tools of the Trade, Jane Hart
Future of Technical Training
Virtual venue: Adobe ConnectPro http://proj.emea.acrobat.com/simulcast Log in as “Guest.”
Link to descriptions of sessions.
BIG KM (corporate) | Little KM | Personal KM
Lots going on. Books, blogs, bookmarks, tags, etc.
Harold asked himself, “What is it I actually do?”
“Sorting” means filtering one’s sources.
Weekly overview of interesting stuff found on Twitter: tagged as Friday Favorites and posted weekly.
“Categories” are your personal folksonomy.
“Making explicit” is tagging and pigeon-holing.
“Retrieving” is recall.
“Connecting” is following people.
“Exchanging” is conversation, swaps, etc.
“Contributing” is writing articles, sharing tips.
Tools? They switch over time. Microblogging is new.
Your blog is homebase.
Delicious is delicious.
Magnolia disappeared – catastrophically. Harold downloads his Delicious files monthly.
Harold has tags for clients, for projects, and for subjects.
After a while, you realize the power of other people, sharing their bookmarks and tags.
Lilia Effemova’s model
Dave Pollard’s notion of critical thinking overlaps Harold’s PKM model:
DevLearn marked a significant shift in the field of corporate learning. Content and planning have become secondary to getting the job done. In today’s world, that means trusting workers to learn for themselves. The natives are taking control. Learning is mobile. Curriculum is toast.
Skim through the following ideas from several dozen DevLearn speakers. None of these topics were being presented two years ago. Social/informal learning is crossing the chasm to mainstream acceptance. I’ll expand on that thought in later posts and video.
Without a doubt, Web 2.0 is having a tremendous impact on every aspect of our lives, including how we consume, play, work, learn, communicate, relate, participate, and more. At the same time, organizations are under pressure to remain competitive in today’s economic environment, while being prepared to take advantage of new opportunities when they come and also meeting the needs of a multi-generational workforce. By leveraging the thinking and approaches, as well as the tools and technologies, of the Web 2.0 world for learning, organizations are meeting these challenges. Lance Dublin
With the advent of “Web 2.0,” we can begin to move beyond the next generation of e-Learning to the next generation of learning itself: Learning 2.0. Learning 2.0 is transformative, and its successful implementation requires support at all levels. Marc Rosenberg
Google has tapped the power of online collaboration to solve business problems and engage learners. It is easier than you might think to leverage scalable and free technologies to address your organization’s needs. Julia Bulkowski & Erika Grouell
(more…)
Harvard’s MIT’s Andy McAfee’s opening keynote was the perfect set-up for 2 1/2 days of exploring social learning at DevLearn.
Appropriately, he addressed how business is changing; he didn’t have to tell the 1,500 learning developers that they better get with the program. You could feel the rumble of the cluetrain leaving the station.
My notes:
Full-size map of presentation on MindMeister
I’m sure I’ll have more to report when I’ve finished reading his new book.
You’re not letting anything hold you back from hopping aboard the social/informal learning bandwagon, are you?
Yesterday I attended the Enterprise 2.0 conference, “the event that will make your company more agile.”
First up was a Google presentation about Wave. Bare-bones Wave is a snooze; I haven’t been able to see many benefits. But customized Wave looks like a winner and that’s how I think Wave will be deployed. SAP demo’d a business process management application with collaborative charting; prototyping with their “analysis gadget” looked slick. ThoughtWorks showed project task assignments; the individual tracking and comments reminded me of what I’d seen in Brainpark last month. Novell Pulse combined messaging and project management. All of these bolt onto Wave’s API. Wave enables collaboration. Some in the audience were skeptical.
Google said it plans to open-source most of the code. This happens through the Google Federation Protocol. From the Federation website:
Principles
Decisions are made in public: all protocol specification discussions are recorded in a public archive
The Google Wave Federation Protocol is evolving as an open source project, and as the community and technology grows, here are the guiding principles:
Next up was a panel session entitled “Is Enterprise 2.0 a Crock?,” hosted by Information Week’s David Berlind. The panel included representatives of MetLife, Alcatel-Lucent, Eli Lilly, EMC, Booz Allen Hamilton, Medtronic, and CSC. None of them thought Enterprise 2.0 was a crock. In fact, they were raving fans.
The panel addressed Enterprise 2.0′s crockiness along these dimensions:
Most of the discussion focused on workforce transformation. “We are shifting from waterfall design to agile development.” “We’re providing tools and technology to support change agents.” “This makes it easier for people to share and learn things.” It’s best when embedded in workstreams.
Booz is employing enterprise 2.0 to make business processes better, faster, and cheaper through bottom-up change. Others report cutting time-to-completion and speed-to-resolution. CSC has an Enterprise Social Collaboration Officer (who also runs KM.)
The Intellectual Property issue is the old trade-off of governance and democratization. The answer is to trust your employees. Workers have been able to betray secrets with email and phone; enterprise 2.0 is no worse threat.
The Religious Wars issue is recognizing that Enterprise 2.0 is a people endeavor, not an IT project.
Big benefits come from useful apps (like Excel Tips and Tricks), timeliness (realtime competitive information), and innovation (through crowd sourcing).
I mistakenly wandered into the keynote for VoiceCon, the co-located conference, where this character from Siemens was explaining their integration of social software and phone service. Translation: phone tries to make sense of Twitter messages. I tweet “Just arrived SFO,” and my phone resets itself to Pacific time. (Funny, I don’t have to do anything for my iPhone to switch time zones.)
More advanced: I tweet that I’m headed to lunch and my phone is automatically put in vibrate mode for the next hour.
Imagine the parody Doonebury could create around this one.
The expo was listless. People were gathering data sheets on SharePoint, Notes, and lots of undifferentiated collaboration tools.
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