This blog post is courtesy @quinnovator and his latest post on Distributed Thinking and Learning. So if you are one of my school team mates, sorry but I had to get this out of my head before editing any more of our papers.

Clark’s post is about Distributed Cognition (and now there is yet another book on my winter break reading list..). Here’s a definition from Wikipedia:

Distributed cognition is a branch of cognitive science that proposes that human knowledge and cognition are not confined to the individual. Instead, it is distributed by placing memories, facts, or knowledge on the objects, individuals, and tools in our environment. Distributed cognition is a useful approach for (re)designing social aspects of cognition by putting emphasis on the individual and his/her environment. Distributed cognition views a system as a set of representations, and models the interchange of information between these representations. These representations can be either in the mental space of the participants or external representations available in the environment.

Clark talks about applying distributed thinking to learning this way:

The implication is that having kids solve problems with executive support, but without scaffolding that executive support and the gradual release of those executive skills to the learner, we’re not really developing appropriate problem-solving skills.

Of course I’m thinking how that transfers to corporate learning, in particular technical education. We struggle all the time with trying to figure out how to think people to think – to go beyond the break-fix mentality that you need to start with and get to the point where you can pull back and look at an entire system and anticipate how applying a fix in one place may affect a different area at a later time.

I can teach you how something works, but in there are a million ways to implement and support any one thing. How do I teach you to pull back and see the entire system?

Maybe some of it goes back to information-seeking behavior. Techies have their own language, history, culture. We have our own distributed memory, our own languages that invoke that memory. If a n00b doesn’t have the language to ask some 133t techie a question, they may dismissed as unimportant. I’ve taken to being very sarcastic with some of our younger folks. If I’m asked, why doesn’t it work? I say, “because it hates you”. Not because I’m being mean, but this is how I learned to start figuring things out on my own.

Did you look at the logs? Did you look at the application logs? Can it talk to the outside world? Can it talk to the default router? Did you google it?

I learned not to ask for help until I had gone down every single path I knew about. I learned to think about what could be affecting the problem I was troubleshooting.

I learned who I could ping with a quick IM for a hint. I can’t imagine how twitter would have changed things for  me back then! Those of us who have been around for a while understand inherently the language of twitter, we all still have our ICQ accounts with super low numbers. we’ve been talking in compressed chat speak for 10 years. Its part of our collective heritage.

So is multi-tasking. We know how to IM (or now tweet), respond to emails in a help queue, build a server, test a script, and take care of a problem with sick child all at the same time. We haven’t had the luxury of 8-hour days because people have depended on us to keep servers, emails, networks, etc up and available 24-7. Multi-tasking is a necessity for techies, and now anyone who calls herself a knowledge worker.

So how can we teach these skills? Can we teach this in a class, or does it have to happen OTJ? How do new workers learn the old language so they can have words to do a search for information? I think first and foremost, the folks doing the education part have to speak the language, and have to be part of the culture. Because its very obvious when you try to assert authority but you don’t have access to that small world.

I wonder if its possible to be an information impostor in the world of distributed cognition?

I’ve been mulling this post over for a few days now. But after reading some of Harold Jarche’s posts, I have decided now is not the time to be scared to speak up.

I know everyone does not understand the big deal about blogging. I’ve even heard it said that if people have time to write a blog, they obviously have too much time on their hands. Well, since my blog is all about corporate education, I want to talk about how blogging is actually an educational tool.

Blogging can be used as reflective practice. Now what is reflective practice? This paper (Blogs, Reflective Practice, and Student-Centered Learning) defines reflective practice this way:

Reflective practice is an approach to learning that encourages thought about what has been experienced and seen, which can then drive new theories and investigations to test those theories, leading to new experiences that may, or may not, validate the original ideas. This leads to them being modified, extended, and refined, and the cycle continues.

So basically when you blog, you have to think about what you have read, how that compares to what you already know or what you have experienced, and that comparison helps you to construct new mental models that you articulate in written form (your blog).

That article outlined the benefits to blogging in two areas:

1. Activity
   You have to post regularly, you have to think about *what* to post, you have to collect information/experience things and then distill your thoughts so that you can communicate them effectively. Added to this is the experience blogs give you about internet technologies (html, linking, searching, installing and managing blog software, user design, etc). Blogging follows the reflective cycle of planning –> experiencing –> observing –> reflecting.
2. Social/Pedagogical
   Blogs help form communities. People blogging about the same subject read each other’s blogs, comment on each other’s blogs, and create new posts based on the posts on other blogs. It greases the wheels for the cycle of reflective practice. Blogging helps experts dive deeper into a subject (innovate?), while providing observational materials for novices.

We’re starting to see some reflective practice internally, but not in the form of blogs and definitely nothing that has been orchestrated. So my question is: would blogging work as a reflective practice if we tried to orchestrate it?

Michele Martin over at the Bamboo Blog wrote a post on Creating an Organizational Culture of Reflective Practice where she recommended ways to build structures to support a reflective culture. These structures included creating internal blogs, connecting employee blogs, building blogging into the close of a project, and creating project wikis. Most importantly, she suggests creating “structures and rituals that invite questions, conversation and stories”.

I’d like to see a way to tie blogging to individual learning events, just like K-12 teachers are doing. Not sure how that could happen in a busy corporate environment (esp one that does not value blogging as a way to learn).

One way she suggests doing this is to have your own “Big Question” a la ASTD’s Learning Circuit blog. Since I know alot of EMC folks follow me, I’m going to try it outside the firewall. (cue scary music here!!!) The question is for everyone, not just EMC folks.

Here are the rules:

Answer the question in a blog post of your own. Come back here, leave a comment and a link to the post. If you decide to blog on EMC ONE, don’t add the link here, just let us know to look for it internally. I’ll do a roundup of all the answers I get around December 15.

Here is the question:

Do you use blogging as a reflective practice? Do you blog about things that are directly related to your job duties? Has blogging increased your level of understanding about your role, your organization, or your field of practice?

Today, I set up a demonstration of Second Life for some of my senior management. I signed up for a conference on how to use Second Life for business, and went through some hoops with our IT department to get IT to open up the firewall for me.

It did not turn out well.

I had a little better luck a few weeks ago when I hosted an event for my student organization on ASTD island, although that event was ill-fated as well.

I wanted to put down my thoughts on why Second Life is not reliable as a Corporate Training tool.

Second Life is difficult for IT to support

Second Life (SL) is blocked from our corporate network. I requested that this block be lifted so that we could access the conference in SL. The operations guys in support were very helpful and accomodating. They understand the SL communication paths, and knew what had to happen so I could have an opening in the firewall to access the application.

We ran into problems because things have changed since the last time the ops guys attempted to set access up for someone. For some reason SL changes the IP range for connections. It almost looks like they provide an IP address for each region (maybe island?). This means every time new land is developed, another IP address needs to be added to the list of IP addresses that need to be allowed through the firewall.

I could log in to Second Life at my home on Broadway island, but I couldn’t teleport to any other region. This made it impossible to teleport to the conference. I could not even directly log into the conference, as the port was blocked.

The IT guys told me that they asked SL support (about a year ago) if there was an Enterprise relationship person available, someone who could help them build out a proposal for what is required to support securely accessing SL from our network. Basically, they were told that sort of function was on a “wish list”.

To me, it doesn’t seem like SL is quite ready for prime time on the support side (at least from an Enterprise perspective). Never mind the normal bugs and technical bumps, like the one I saw when I hosted a SL event. The night of my event, the SL database got corrupted at the exact same time our event was to start – so corrupt in fact that logins to Second Life had to be disabled. It’s sorta hard to hold an event in SL if people can’t log in.

If we were to use SL for training, we’d have to be sure that every time we held a training event, every student could log in and access the correct environment. Right now, there does not seem to be a reliable way to do that.

Events in SL should be run as if they were Real Life (RL) events

I signed up for this conference about three weeks ago. I emailed and asked for an agenda, but one was never sent. I went to the conference location and looked around for an agenda in vain.

People are busy. Using these virtual tools is supposed to enable participation for busy people. If you are going to have a 4-hour conference, let people know the agenda! Then folks can decide if it is worth their time to attend.

Also, it is important to remember that as the host of an event in Second Life, you must take extra care that you compensate for the lack of non-verbal cues in your communication. In other words, don’t be rude to your guests! The reason I am not mentioning the conference name is that I was totally appalled at the way I was treated by the person listed in the welcome email as the support contact for access problems.

This person told me there were limited seats, and that I should have noticed that when I signed up. She was very rude to me (via IM). I had her double-check my avatar name on the list. She realized her mistake, and was very apologetic for the way she treated me. It was a little late for that, however. I was a customer, going to a conference she was assigned to support. She was not a very good representative of her organization. I’ll just leave it at that.

Second Life is Resource Intensive

Apparently the avatar limit on this area was 50 people. This is actually a resource issue that could make training in SL prohibitive. Let’s say we wanted to run an entry-level CLARiiON (storage array hardware) class in Second Life. The appeal of SL is that we could have objects the students could access, manipulate, “touch” if you will. In order to do that, the object would have to be created. A script would possibly need to be attached to the object to make it behave so that it is more realistic. The more realistic we make things, the smaller the amount of avatars that can access the area. This means we would have to purchase more land, and build more objects, etc. This quickly turns into a resource issue to purchase, build, manage, and maintain the environment to train a global audience.

Summary

In summary, I can see some uses for Second Life in corporate training. But until there is a cleaner way to securely connect to SL, and until it becomes a bit less resource intensive, I don’t see what is gained by this environment over other forms of training that we already deliver.

This blog post discusses PLEs (Personal Learning Environments) and how they are needed based on how this new industrial revolution we are in is changing education.

The author discusses a 7-country study on ICT Learning (ICTs stand for Information and Communication Technologies) showed workers primarily use Google for informal-based learning. Quoting from the post:

Managers were often unaware of this learning, although they were frequently aware of the problem which inspired it. There were considerable differences in the use of ICT for informal learning between different enterprises. It would be tempting to ascribe these differences to age, sector, size or occupation but it is hard to discern such causal factors from the case studies undertaken. None of the employees in the enterprises studied had attempted to claim recognition or accreditation for the skills and knowledge gained through informal learning. It is not clear if this is because they are not interested in pursuing further formal qualifications or if it is because they are unaware of any opportunities of claiming accreditation for informal learning.

The use of the Google search engine as the major tool for learning is interesting. It raises the question of how people are framing their search terms, how they are refining search strings, how they are selecting from the results of search queries and how they are following hyperlinked texts. For a search result to be useful it needs to produce materials, ideas and concepts which can connect with the learner’s existing knowledge base on the one hand and deal with the issue or problem being addressed on the other.

The article gives a great overview of how industry has changed, and therefore education must change as well. There are so many opportunities as far as education is concerned, especially corporate education, to help people learn faster so that they are better prepared to compete.

I am editing this post, because this month’s Biq Questions are:

• Should workplace learning professionals be leading the charge around these new work literacies?
• Shouldn’t they be starting with themselves and helping to develop it throughout the organizations?
• And then shouldn’t the learning organization become a driver for the organization?
• And like in the world of libraries don’t we need to market ourselves in this capacity?

Back to my post already in progress—

These seem to be the question of the week, they are being asked everywhere. It’s being asked at the No Straight Lines blog (this person blogs about autism too, what a coincidence!!), on the Work Literacy Blog, and we’ve been starting to talk about it at work. And now they are officially the Questions of the Month at the Learning Circuits Blog.

One thing I’ve been thinking about is what happens if we design all this interactive learning but no one uses because they don’t have the required skills to use the instructional technology? As I said in one of my last posts, I think we either have to make the technology invisible or we have to teach people to use the tools.

But more importantly, how can you design with these new tools if you don’t understand them? How can you apply them to your existing systematic learning system if you don’t know what the heck wiki even means? So, yes, learning professionals must learn and use these tools, and then apply the tools to there existing framework.

So what are “the tools”? Here’s my list

• Wikis: How to edit, how to read, how to link to
• RSS Feeds: What are they, how do I read one, once I have a reader set up how do I scan info collected, how do I share info using one
• Blogs: How do I write one. Why SHOULD I write one. How do I evaluate info from one. How do I scan, collect keywords, and rescan to crystallize ideas and information?
• Information Creation tools: Exps: Youtube, SlideShare, Flickr. How do I use. Why/When do I use.
• Tagging: What is this? Why is it important? How do I use with content I create? How do I use to search for info I need?

These are the ones I can think of, just from interactions with my class team this semester, and from conversations I have had with co-workers. I think one of my goals this quarter will be a lunch and learn on at least one of these topics – to help get my co-workers up to speed. Maybe I’ll call it: What is a wiki and why the heck do I care?

Tony Karrer suggests going for the small wins, specifically by taking the following steps:

• “implement a small Wiki that has performance support materials that goes along with your eLearning on that new software application
• at first have it only editable by the authors
• then open it up to edit the FAQ and Common Issue pages by your help desk
• and then open up editing to end-users
• and to more pages”

hmmm

This post has been bubbling in my brain for about two weeks. Our group finally turned in our midterm project, so I have a little time to get these thoughts out of my head.

Before I start let me say something to my group. I am just using our collective painful experience to illustrate a point. If you disagree with anything I say, please leave a comment and set the record straight!

I am in a class this summer called “Designing Online Collaborative Learning”. To the best of my recollection, there were no technical prerequisites for the class. I took the class because I wanted to become more familiar with how the principles of group theory could be applied to a Learning 2.0 environment.

After completing a survey, we were put into groups to create a lesson that has learners define factors that make Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) successful, create causal maps, create a shared theory of CSCL, do research to support that theory, and finally create a web page.

Now my group are self-professed non-techies. And they really are not very technical (it’s true guys!!). About 75% of my time has been devoted to helping and coaching everyone to learn some of the social media skills needed to complete our project. We used a wiki, slideshare (which went down for most of the weekend the project was due!), polldaddy, meebo, and  edublogs.

Now I’ve been using tools like this for about 12 years, so I can figure out the nuances between different sites. If you don’t use them all the time, those nuances are huge barriers. It takes time to figure them out. And if you want the project to look professional, it may take even longer!

My classmates became frustrated because they had to learn these web 2.0 skills PLUS the academic information. I am frustrated because I had to spend so much time coaching my teammates that I don’t feel I learned the academic information at all.

So how does this tie into my corporate life?

Learning 2.0 will not be successful unless it is implemented with good design principles.

Opening up collaboration and communication with the web 2.0 tools is not as easy as just pointing students to one of these sparkly tools and telling them “Go! Learn!”. Asking non-technical people to just learn a new technology places an unfair cognitive burden on those learners. It also places an unfair burden on the technical person in the class.

If the class truly becomes a collaborative group, and I feel mine was, the techie will try and bring the others in their group up to speed. That may take up all the time alloted for instruction – meaning the team learned to use a shiny toy, but did not learn the materials assigned to the course.

I think there is a lesson here too for those people who think Web 2.0 is going to save the world. You may have grown up using a computer, but there are many people in this country who can not afford a computer. There are people who can’t afford to pay for an Internet connection, or they can only afford dial-up. These people are entering the workforce too, and they don’t have the skills you have because they didn’t have access to the tools you did.

I have not heard much lately about the Digital Divide, but it’s still there. Aside from not being able to afford the Internet or equipment, there are lots of people who have to work 2 and 3 jobs to pay their rent. I can guarantee you that if they are able to be online, they aren’t worried with managing their brand. They get online to relax – play poker with their friends, play games, send stupid chain letters even though their techie daughter has told them a million times to look at Snopes first (ok off topic rant, sorry!).

What I am trying to say is, not everyone has the Web 2.0 skills because not everyone has access to the tools, and not everyone has time to get online and develop the skills. This has to be taken into consideration when creating training for a global audience.

I am NOT saying that we should avoid Learning 2.0 in our curriculum. I think these tools are powerful and should be harnessed. I AM saying this new way of instruction must be implemented thoughtfully.

We cannot afford to create instruction that requires the learner to learn how to use the instructional tools as well as learn the class materials. We either have to make the technology transparent, or we have to start teaching some of the Web 2.0 skills to our audiences.

Whew I feel better now that I’ve gotten that off my chest! Let me know what you think of these ideas.

I started writing this as a comment to a post on the Silence and Voice blog. That post is about where are all these users who are supposedly chomping at the bit to use Web 2.0 in educational settings? My comment was getting so long I decided to turn it into a blog post.

I want to add a technical slant as well as an instructional design slant to this discussion.  Just because we have the “L 2.0″ tools doesn’t mean that learners will automagically use them. Similarly, just having the new tools doesn’t mean those tools are the best ones for every instructional situation. These technologies are still just that – tools. To me, this means the use of the tools will require design work.

We have started discussing how we will use these tools where I work (developing and delivering technical training). There is a great potential to use the tools to solve all sorts of problems our audiences face. However, for the transition to be effective and smooth there is also alot of design work that will have to happen up front.

One thing I think is being left out of the conversation is the cost of these new tools. There is a human resource cost: instructors and developers must be taught about the tools, how and when to use them effectively, etc. The audiences must also be  retrained, I think especially in a fast-paced corporate setting. For years and years and years they have been taught to come to class, get info dumped into their head,  and take a test to prove that taking time off to go to training was well spent. After years of this conditioning, we are expecting them to just suddenly act completely the opposite: Be open, be collaborative, feel free to make mistakes, etc. In some industries, undoing that culture of control is going to be a challenge.

There is also a cost for machines, for bandwidth, for software. Is it really any wonder that  E2.0 made it look like this change will happen tomorrow? All of  the vendors presenting there  (including my company) are selling the physical tools that will make this new world happen.

I am working hard to help my organization start to think about how we can use these tools. I’m always surprised at the objections I hear. Some are very valid from a systems point of view, and are things I hadn’t thought about. The things I am learning in my class this semester are helping me to think of ways to overcome the objections, but there is still alot of work to do.

There is a post out there right now about Edupunk, and how they are upset that corporate LMSs. The comment that caught my eye:

“My bias has been for a long time that an LMS is sold by and sold to senior levels in an organization, and doesn’t often involve the people who are directly trying to create better learning within the organization.”

Then I saw this link about the differences between higher ed and corporate ed. Although I disagree with #10 – I complain.

Tony Karrer picks up on the conversation, and mentions that at some point trainers are going to end up in the middle of this issue, in between users who are already using 2.0 tools in their personal learning environments and the official, corporate LMS.

So how do we design so that students can use the tools they use to learn everything else when they come to corporate training classes? I am not sure yet. I have more ideas on how to design collaborative elearning assets. I am learning stuff at school – let’s see if I am able to implement.

I am a corporate training developer. I see lots of blogs about K-12 or higher learning, but where are the corporate bloggers?

I tweeted Sue Waters and she sent me a list of corporate edubloggers

• http://elearndev.blogspot.com/
  
• http://elearningtech.blogspot.com/
• http://michelemartin.typepad.com/thebambooprojectblog/
• http://injenuity.com/

There was only one I hadn’t seen before.