Join Jane Hart and me for an online conversation on Wednesday 23 May 18.30-19.30 pm GMT, 13.30-14.30 pm ET, 10.30-11.30 am PT.

We will talk about whatever you want to talk about. Leave your questions below. Better still, become a member of the Social Learning Centre (free) and leave your questions in the In Conversation with Jay Cross group there.

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Here's Why Google and Facebook Might Completely Disappear in the Next 5 Years – Forbes
Web 1.0 companies never got social. Web 2.0 companies will never get mobile. Mobile companies will never get what's coming next.

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Best articles on Working Smarter, April 2012
GEORGE SIEMENS APRIL 19, 2012 Remaking education in the image of our desires The current generation of students will witness the remaking of our education system. Education faces enormous pressure. It…

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Informal learning tops many training department agendas. Companies are attracted by the low price tag. However, few of them are doing much systematically. They’ve converted a few programs but they’ve failed to improve their learning ecosystems.

We’ve shifted how we think about learning since the Informal Learning book came out. It’s a new ball game and we need to play by new rules. Consider what’s changed:

• We used to think that communities of practice could only sprout up organically. Now we know we create them via artificial insemination.
• The information explosion has hit. We create as much new information in a day as we once created in a millennium, and it’s growing exponentially. People trying to figure everything out all out by themselves are whizzing their way to overload and breakdown; collective wisdom and social filters are the only way to keep up.
• Companies are connecting people with social network technology. Some have so embraced in-house social networking, microblogging, and discussion forums that they define themselves as “social businesses.” The merged workflow/learning that flow through these networks makes or breaks the enterprise’s sustainability.
• Time continues to go faster. New businesses are created in a week and are acquired in less than a year. Competitors are faster on their feet.
• Complexity theory used to be a riddle for scientists to tinker with. Today we all grapple with complexity’s outpouring of unpredictability, volatility, emergence, and uncertainty.
• The tools for building and sustaining networks are at hand and are dirt cheap.
• We used to think that knowledge resided in people heads. Today most of us believe the knowledge resides in networks.
• Web 2.0 has become mainstream. People communicate with texts, Tweets, iPhones, email, and blogs in their personal lives, and expect to be able to do so at work.
• People have become savvy web consumers. Young people who grew up with Facebook, MySpace, Wikipedia, and Google are entering the workforce. New hires ask “Where’s the network? Where do I post my profile?”
• Internet Culture is proliferating. Openness and sharing are default behaviors.
• The web gives unprecedented free access to college courses, how-to videos, advice columns, and experts.
• Network access has gone mobile. Desktop PCs have given way to laptops and laptops are losing ground to smartphones and tablets.
• Connectivity has undoubtedly shifted the 80%/20% ratio of informal to formal learning; it’s probably closer to 95%/5% these days.

I’m convinced that working smarter by boosting informal performance is a key to survival in today’s topsy-turvy business climate. I’ve resolved to show organizations how to increase the effectiveness and depth of informal learning — in the larger context of working smarter in the digital enterprise. Working Smarter is not education for intellectual enrichment; it is how people get better at doing their jobs over time.

QUESTION: How do you know that informal learning works?
ANSWER: How did you learn to walk and talk? How did you learn to kiss?

QUESTION: How can you measure what people learn?
ANSWER: By judging what they do. Has their performance improved?

QUESTION: How can we assess the ROI of informal learning?
ANSWER: Cost-benefit analysis. But hold it, how to you assess the ROI of formal learning?

QUESTION: How do you know learning on the job is 80% informal?
ANSWER: Study after study arrives at that figure but it’s a generality. It depends on the context: what’s to be learned, who’s learning it, and where’s the learner starting from. The important thing is that informal learning is too important to overlook.

QUESTION: Do you want a doctor or pilot who learned informally?
ANSWER: Informal learning is only part of the solution.  I want my doctors and pilots to have learned both formally and through experience. Yes, I want them to engage in frequent conversation with their peers.

QUESTION: How do you know if people really learn this way?
ANSWER: You ask them how they learned to do what they’re doing. Studies find that only 15% of what’s learning in formal workshops shows up as changed behavior on the job. Can informal learning do any worse?

Despite the criticism, many readers were very supportive. I expected managers and executives to flock to informal learning. Corporations leave money on the table — lots of it — by not investing in the combination of working and learning that really works.

What happened? Not much. Companies continued to put almost all of the training budget into schooling novices. They acted as if the natural way of informal learning didn’t exist. Or was someone else’s responsibility. They largely squandered the opportunity to increase their effectiveness by becoming networked learning organizations. I think I’ve figured out why.

Schooling

Business people confuse learning with schooling.

For the better part of twenty years, school indoctrinated us that formal learning was the legitimate way to learn, that teachers and books provided the knowledge one needed to master, and that grades were the measure of accomplishment.

It’s easy to poke fun at the foibles of schooling. Learning is active and most schooling is passive. What’s taught in school is often superficial, boring, and irrelevant. Since school learning isn’t reinforced in real life, most of what’s learned is forgotten before it can be put to use. Could you pass your college’s final exams? Grades that once seemed so important turn out to be meaningless outside of school systems.

Nonetheless, most corporate training departments are modeled on schools. They deal with learners who are enrolled. They provide top-down classes and rigid content. They take attendance, administer tests, and certify participation. They let non-training learning fall between the cracks.

The Road Not Taken

Nick Shackleton-Jones commented on a post on Jane Hart’s blog about this topic:

I replied:

David Price followed up:

Trust is at the heart of this. If you don’t trust people to do what’s right, you can’t support informal learning. We’ll return to this subject.

In the next couple of posts, I’m going to point out how the world has changed since the book came out and things I’d do differently were I writing the book today.

Previously

Informal Learning is Business
Let’s Put Informal Learning to Work

Let’s pretend we’ve just ridden our time machine to 2020. How will professionals keep up? Progress is zipping along faster than ever. The half-life of professional knowledge is measured in days. Most work that’s merely complicated has been automated; working means working with complexity. Software agents are doing our bidding. We’re connected to vast store of information in the cloud 24/7.

To stir the pot, consider these key trends in higher education from the 2011 Horizon Report:

• The abundance of resources and relationships made easily accessible via the Internet is increasingly challenging us to revisit our roles as educators in sense-making, coaching, and credentialing.
• People expect to be able to work, learn, and study whenever and wherever they want.
• The world of work is increasingly collaborative, giving rise to reflection about the way student projects are structured.
• The technologies we use are increasingly cloud-based, and our notions of IT support are decentralized.

These trends from the 2009 Horizon Report are still in play:

• Increasing globalization continues to affect the way we work, collaborate, and communicate.
• The notion of collective intelligence is redefining how we think about ambiguity and imprecision.
• Experience with and affinity for games as learning tools is an increasingly universal characteristic among those entering higher education and the workforce.
• Visualization tools are making information more meaningful and insights more intuitive.
• As more than one billion phones are produced each year, mobile phones are benefiting from unprecedented innovation, driven by global competition.

Certification and compliance drive continuing education in IT, medicine, and other professions. How will those look in 2020?

Join the conversation tomorrow, Friday April 27, at 9:30 am Pacific on Google+. I’ll Tweet the URL @jaycross

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Reading between the lines, I don't think many businesses are embracing social business whole hog. They refer to Yammer as an "overlay" on existing systems. The "systems of record" are still chugging away underneath the social network. People are using Yammer in lieu of the intranet, but in many cases, that intranet is still in place. Going social takes more than shared feeds.

Also, adoption rates are a concern. Is a business "social" if only 10% of the workforce participates? Deloitte has 50,000 people Yammer users; they made 8,500 posts last month. They're in start-up mode, but still, that's not much participation.

Yammer's president described a shift in IT decision-making. IT looked for security, reliability, and compliance. Lines of business were more concerned with ROI and needs. Yammer thinks end users are now controlling the shots; they value usability. Software is following hardware, as freemium apps are riding the bring-your-own-device movement.

"Enterprise social networks are growing at 'social speed,' not network speed." Four factors driving this are: benefits of the cloud, mobility (62% of U.S. workforce works from multiple locations), social (sharing), and viral (voluntary adoption).

No one addressed using social networks to support learning, my current hot button.

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Business or Pleasure? – why not both: The Social Organisation Manifesto
Business or Pleasure? – Why not both. Redefining the meaning of ICT analysis for enterprises, governments and consumers

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This is the second in a series of posts about how business can profit from informal learning. We’re recapping the book before getting into the current scene.

What makes informal learning effective
Informal learning is effective because it’s personal. The individual calls the shots. The learner is responsible. It’s real. We learn in context, with others, as we live and work. Recognizing this fact is the first step to crafting an effective learning strategy.

People with experience like to learn but hate to be taught. People who already know the lay of the land don’t want a curriculum. That’s someone else’s opinion of what they need to know. They prefer to cherry-pick what they need in the most convenient way available. They expect the freedom to connect the dots for themselves. Intrinsic motivation trumps following orders.

This is business
If a learning project–make that any project–does not make business sense, don’t do it. If the return on investment is not so obvious that you can sketch it out on the back of a napkin, do something with a higher return.

The appropriate measure of learning is how good a job one is doing. Training metrics should be business metrics.

Getting down to cases
The book describes how organizations have taken advantage of informal learning.

• Communities of practice rely on practitioners to discover, document, and bring their members up to speed organically.
• Workers become better learners when they understand how learning works, set expectations, know themselves, reflect, take notes, and cement what they learn by revisiting it.
• Conversations are the stem cells of learning. Encourage meaningful conversation by recognizing its value, making room for it, supporting a culture of sharing, demanding candor and understanding, and relying on storytelling to communicate.
• Organizations have relied on graphics to develop corporate strategy and bring it to life. After all, humans are sight mammals.
• eLearning failed coming out of the starting blocks because learning involves a lot more than exposure to content, and you can’t take people out of the equation. A smart organization blends context, reinforcement, interaction, and more into the learning mix.
• A few have invested in building learning ecologies, shared spaces where people learn. They pay attention to social networks to optimize organizational performance.
• Replacing stodgy, over-planned meetings and conferences with spontaneous “unconferences” makes events more relevant and at the same time cut costs.

Previous post on this topic

Six years ago I wrote Informal Learning, Rediscovering the Natural Pathways that Inspire Innovation and Performance. The book came out before iPhones and iPads. Facebook was only available to students. Twitter had not been born. eLearning was still haled as a panacea. Andy McAfee had just coined the term Enterprise 2.0, and nobody was talking about Social Business. It’s time for an upgrade.

This is the first in a series of posts about what informal learning is and how to put it into practice.

Synopsis of Informal Learning
The book made the case that most learning about how to do a job is informal. An organization that fails to address informal learning leaves a tremendous amount of learning to chance.

Most corporations spend most of their training budget on formal learning, despite the fact that most of the learning that goes on is informal.

What is learning?
Learning is how people adapt to changing conditions, and things are changing faster than ever before.

Learning is that which enables you to participate successfully in life, at work, and in the groups that matter to you. Informal learning is the unofficial, unscheduled, impromptu way people learn to do their jobs.

Corporations would bypass learning altogether were it not politically incorrect to do so. Executives don’t want learning; they want execution. They want the job done. They want performance.

Formal and informal learning
Learning is neither formal nor informal; it’s always a bit of both.

Learning that is more formal has a curriculum: content and objectives that are set by someone other than the learner. Often people learn formally in groups at set times. It’s like riding a bus. The bus follows the official route regardless of the requests of individual passengers. Formal learning frequently concludes with some sort of recognition, be it a certificate or grade or checkmark in a learning management system. People participate in formal learning because they are told to.

Informal learning is more personalized. The learner chooses the subject matter and often decides how and when to learn it. Learning may be solo or with others. It’s like riding a bicycle. The bike rider selects the route, often changing in mid-course. The rider may stop short of the original destination. People generally learn informally to get something done, and it’s the ability to do something that demonstrates that learning took place.

Listening to a lecture or attending a workshop are primarily formal learning. Asking questions of co-workers or trial-and-error are informal.

This is the first post of many. You can find more information about informal learning here.

They do not move
I thought I had made a sound business case for investing more in informal learning, but few organizations changed their ways. They continued to put almost all of the training budget into schooling novices. They acted as if the natural way of informal learning didn’t exist. Or was someone else’s responsibility. They squandered the opportunity to increase their effectiveness by becoming networked learning organizations.

More smoke than fire
Today informal learning tops many training department agendas. They’re attracted by the low price tag. However, few of them are doing much systematically. They give lip-service to doing more with less but run a few experiments rather than embracing the philosophy. Times are tough, and they are leaving money on the table. This is crazy-making. I’m convinced that working smarter by boosting informal performance is a key to survival in today’s topsy-turvy business climate.

Showing organizations what to do
I’ve resolved to turn the situation around by showing organizations what to do — how to increase the effectiveness and depth of informal learning — in the larger context of working smarter in the digital enterprise. Working Smarter is not education for intellectual enrichment; it is how people get better at doing their jobs over time.

Research
The first phase is research, identifying what works best, gathering good examples and stories, building learning communities, creating model, drawing the graphics, shooting the video, and communicating the recommended approaches. This is ongoing.

Sponsorship
Vendors who sponsor the research will gain insight into how to design products and services to support working smarter, thereby improving client profitability. Vendors also get bragging rights, insight into customer needs, and guidance on sustainable product development. Sponsors may host webinars, conference presentations, Major sponsors gain access to the Internet Time Alliance brain trust as well.

Status
This is a live project. I’m currently getting my arms around it, reviewing changes over the past half dozen years, and pondering where we’ll be headed in the next two or three.

Help me unearth practical examples and stories of organizations that are taking advantage of informal learning. Among the questions I’m looking for answer to…

• How can an organization accelerate the transition from push learning to pull?
• What skills and attitudes empower an informal learner do well?
• What are the most lucrative ways organizations are taking advantage of informal learning?
• What’s the payback for working smarter?

I’ll keep you posted. Get in touch or leave a comment if you’d like to participate.

Options (not obligations): Because technology is so intimately intertwined with their sense of self, they control it in a way that older individuals often don't. They use the technology with choice – on their own schedule, at their own pace.

Anonymity and the ability to hide: Connecting through technology reduces the need to connect face-to-face. Many have friends they've never met with whom they interact regularly. This creates a strange sense of anonymity — they can be everywhere if they choose to post or, depending on their preference, nowhere.

Confidence and control . . . to be an initiator, designer, problem-solver: This is a generation that is used to asking big questions — and is confident of finding answers. They have had the experience of digging deeply into a burning question because they have access to a mountain of information.

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How Mobile Technologies Are Shaping a New Generation
The cohort I like to call the "Re-Generation" began to take shape around 2008. Individuals at the formative ages of 11 to 13, those born after about 1995, were part of a substantively different world …

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Even worse for hierarchical bureaucracy, Agile thrives on transparency. One of the dirty not-so-little secrets of traditional management is that control thrives on non-transparency. So introducing (real) Agile means exposing all of the non-transparent tricks that hierarchical managers play on their subordinates to maintain power. Is it any wonder that Agile isn’t naturally popular with the command-and-control gang?
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Steve Denning – Radical Management – Forbes
Why do human beings collaborate? Ever since Darwin, biologists have been vexed by the question, because in evolutionary terms, self-less behavior makes no sense. We would expect altruists who act cont…

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In the new management model, power shifts from the notion of “being in charge” to the notion of “being connected”. This means that you don’t have to be in charge to exercise power.

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Why Can't The C-Suite Grasp Agile Management? – Forbes
As a leader, do you honor and appreciate the power of We?* There’s been a lively discussion around my article earlier this week, The Best-Kept Management Secret On the Planet: Agile. I’ll summarize t…

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How do you flip learning?

Khan Academy is the poster child for flipped learning. Sal Khan has produced more than 3,000 short videos on a variety of topics. Students watch the videos before coming to class. In the classroom, they sort out what they’ve learned and do what used to be called homework. Millions of students are learning this way. Recently, Stanford professors offered a couple of courses in this fashion and were surprised when a third of a million people enrolled.

Flipping makes a ton a sense. The learner can watch the mini-lectures when it’s convenient to do so. The learner controls the pace by pausing, replaying, or fast-forwarding. In all likelihood, the presentation by the enthusiastic Salmaan Khan or a popular Stanford prof is going to be more engaging than your local school teacher or grad student teaching assistant. The video can provide content in small, digestible pieces. Once it’s in the can, the video can be replayed again and again. And of course, video delivered online scales without an increase in cost.

More important for learning outcomes, the time spent in class can be put to more productive use. Learners convene to get answers to questions, discuss examples, put what they’ve learned in context, debate, explore, and extend their knowledge. Instead of passively listening to an instructor, they actively engage the material. Instructors, freed of the need to mouth the words of lessons, focus on helping learners understand things and coaching individuals. These activities can take place online, and people can learn from one another in virtual communities and support groups.

Flipping Stanford

In a Science Times essay, “Death Knell for the Lecture: Technology as a Passport to Personalized Education,” Daphne Koller described how Stanford University has flipped traditional courses:

At Stanford, we recently placed three computer science courses online, using a similar format. Remarkably, in the first four weeks, 300,000 students registered for these courses, with millions of video views and hundreds of thousands of submitted assignments.

What can we learn from these successes? First, we see that video content is engaging to students — many of whom grew up on YouTube — and easy for instructors to produce.

Second, presenting content in short, bite-size chunks, rather than monolithic hourlong lectures, is better suited to students’ attention spans, and provides the flexibility to tailor instruction to individual students. Those with less preparation can dwell longer on background material without feeling uncomfortable about how they might be perceived by classmates or the instructor.

Conversely, students with an aptitude for the topic can move ahead rapidly, avoiding boredom and disengagement. In short, everyone has access to a personalized experience that resembles individual tutoring.

Watching passively is not enough. Engagement through exercises and assessments is a critical component of learning. These exercises are designed not just to evaluate the student’s learning, but also, more important, to enhance understanding by prompting recall and placing ideas in context.

Moreover, testing allows students to move ahead when they master a concept, rather than when they have spent a stipulated amount of time staring at the teacher who is explaining it.

An article in Wired, The Stanford Educational Experiment Could Change Higher Learning Forever, describes the wildly popular course on artificial intelligence taught by Stanford professors Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig:

Does it make any sense that school is generally a place where people come together to sit and listen to the person at the front of the room?  It generally doesn’t make the most sense to get a group of people together to sit and stare.  What if instead, educators spent class time doing and homework time for the watching of lessons/lectures.  The other benefit of this is that these can be viewed and reviewed anytime/anywhere.  The result is a lively bustling classroom where students can spend their time learning, talking, doing.

I fear that flipping learning in corporations may meet the same nasty fate as eLearning.

In the early days, 1999-2000, many of us believed that eLearning was the forefront of a renaissance in learning. Not only could people learn at their own pace, whenever they wanted, they’d also be able to ask questions, learn with peers, join communities, access job aids, contact mentors, and create personal learning paths. Workers could attend virtual classes without leaving the workplace. Software would create personalized learning experiences by assembling custom configurations of learning objects.

The eLearning dream didn’t last long. Companies proved more interested in reducing instructor head-count and facilities costs than in improving learning outcomes.  Training departments put PowerPoint presentations on their intranets and acted as if people could learn from them. Vendors put deadly-dull page-turner courses online and called it eLearning.

When times were tough, training departments slashed budgets by replacing face-to-face instruction with online reading. They failed to follow through with the discussions, practice, social processing, and reinforcement that makes lessons stick. It didn’t work. Most eLearning is ineffective drudgery.

That’s my nightmare about flipping learning in the corporation, that organizations will once again confuse exposure to content with learning. It’s great to replace lectures with video clips — IF you retain the opportunity for people to ask questions, interact with the material, practice what they’ve learned, collaborate with others, and periodically refresh their memories. This takes a sound learning ecosystem, a workscape.

Dan Pink thinks we should flip not only schooling but also publishing, the movie business, human resources, and office space. I agree. Business has changed. There’s hardly any business model left that couldn’t benefit from a flip. Break the processes into pieces and see if there’s not a better way to put them back together.

"Although reading the dictionary and the encyclopedia from cover to cover may seem a bit extreme, it often feels like that's what we're asking kids to do who go through formal education."

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Reading the dictionary – Joi Ito's Web
Old school knowledge. I have some amazing friends who tell me that when they were young, they read the dictionary from cover to cover. Other friends of mine have read the entire Encyclopedia Britannic…

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Six years after the publication of my book on Informal Learning, I'm going to work to show businesses how to take advantage of it.

BTW, I recommend playing with whatdoestheinternetthink.net Great fun.

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Things I dislike: jogging, clutter, sniffling, wasting time, slime, chain stores, phone trees, financial engineering, pretention, fundamentalists, tight shoes, sack suits, Republicans, lawyers, parking meters, computer viruses, speed cams, coach class, Windows, pitbulls, slugs, fat people, natto, ingrown toenails, bean counters, poison oak, brutalism, airport inspections, allergies, rotting seaweed, cats, football, bolo ties, golf, Facebook, spam email, learned helplessness, plagiarism, frequent flier reward programs, Christopher Walken, cable t.v. companies, lectures, water boarding, assault weapons, rats, pennies, athlete’s foot, hurricanes, spiders.

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