I really like this presentation from Janet Clarey about facilitating learning through the social web. Her ideas on curating and wayfinding are really similar to my ideas about a learning GPS.

She’s right, tech + social has fundamentally changed how we can be together… the question is will we allow ourselves to take advantage of this shift?

Tonight is the first night I’ve been able to sit in on the #DL10 tweet stream – because I was able to “catch” some of Marcia Conner’s keynote.

One thing that was tweeted from her presentation is really sticking with me:

Narrate your work; build your legacy — the footprints that allow others to follow and blaze new trails

That is what this blog is all about – letting people know about how we are figuring how to blend these new tools with the excellent instructional design work that happens at EMC. There’s lots of other work I’m doing with my team that is being documenting  behind the scenes in the EMC Proven Professional Community. I need to share more, because we’re doing some very very cool stuff right now.

Sometimes it really feels like I’m trying to push this huge boulder up an enormous mountain…people want to do social learning. But letting go of legacy, or trying to figure out how to blend old with new, is hard.

People are scared of participating. Sometimes with very valid reasons. People forget that content publication is actually where social media starts. And people definitely forget that the care and feeding of social media takes time and other resources.

But I forget that we are the trailblazers. That being a trailblazer means helping new people over the boulders and mess, cuz there ain’t a road yet. And being a trailblazer means sleeping out in the elements on the ground, not in a comfortable plush hotel.

So big thanks to everyone live-tweeting the conference! And big thanks to Marcia for reminding us to to be the change, to use these social powers for good, and connect all.

I just finished reading The New Social Learning: A Guide to Transforming Organizations Through Social Media by Tony Bingham and Marcia Conner.

Before I get started, let me disclose that I was given advance copies of the book, I’m quoted in the book, and the book uses EMC as a case study.

Now that I’ve done my due diligence, let me talk about what I got out of this book. The book’s first chapter lays the groundwork for discussions about social learning. I particularly appreciated the list of what social learning is not – its not a substitute for formal training, a replacement for employee development, synonymous with informal learning, the same as elearning, or a new online interface (among other things).

The definition given for social learning is: learning with and from others. Adding social media in the mix with social learning provides digital breadcrumbs for different learners to use as they try to make the connections they need to learn.

As educators we know we can’t make people learn, that the learner has to own that process. This book is all about ways to use social media to help people make the connections they need to learn.

One example in the EMC case study is all about connections. One of the first popular wikis on EMC|ONE (our internal social media site) was about restaurants close to our HQ in Massachusetts. My friend – an instructor – put that wiki up. He had been emailing the info as a spreadsheet to his students at the start of his classes for as long as I’ve known him.

If you’re an instructor, you know how every class is a little community. People bring in different experiences, cultures, languages even.  And at a global company like EMC, students are literally from all over the world. So when folks are sent for formal training, building relationships with colleagues in other countries becomes a nice side benefit. And that little classroom community is solidified by eating meals together. No wonder that wiki became so popular – it provided a means for people to connect IRL (in real life), so when they went back to different sides of the world working together digitally was easier.

But what happens if you can never meet? I’m still waiting to meet my colleague Varun who is in India….right now we depend on building our relationship using digital resources.

This book has practical advice and examples of how to create connection opportunities  using social media. I really appreciated the  case study of how Dan Pontefract is using video  get workers to share stories about what they do. The case study about the CIA and social media is pretty amazing as well. There is also a chapter on connecting the dots at in-person events that is timely since its almost time to start talking about EMC World planning.

My advice: get this book and read it! And give it to the decision makers in your organization as well!

According to one of my text books for this semester (Multi-Media Learning by Richard E. Mayer), technology-centered technology has a 100-year tradition of failure. Technology-centered learning approaches designing learning by looking at the features the technology can provide, and then deciding how the technology features can be used to deliver instruction.

This sort of design doesn’t care how people actually learn. That’s why radio, television, and even computers have never impacted education in the way in which analysts have predicted. After a brief sensation about the new tools, the technology fizzles and is never overwhelmingly adopted.

So will the same thing happen to all of the new social media tools?

Jay Cross interviewed Ellen Wagner about this – how do we get past the hype of the tools to the practical application of these tools for enterprise learning? How do we ensure we don’t waste the opportunity the social tools offer because we don’t think about the that 100 year history of failure?

I’m writing this while I’m still on vacation. This week we drove to my hometown, rented a condo on the beautiful Gulf of Mexico, and I didn’t do a thing I didn’t want to do.

I swam. I took naps. I went to a parade and caught tons of beads and candy. I ate food I’m not supposed to eat. I stayed out too late and probably had one too many martinis.

And I read. A lot.

I read A Wolf at the Table – which was written by Augusten Burroughs. He also wrote Running with Scissors, and is the brother of John Elder Robison, who wrote Look Me in the Eye (he also made all the cool guitars for Kiss & has Asperger’s).  A Wolf at the Table is a very, very dark book about the author’s experience growing up, mostly about the relationship between himself and his father. Some of the story is hauntingly familiar…I’m still left wondering if I have done enough for my aspie as well as my “nuero-typical” child.

I’m also reading Here Comes Everybody for my summer semester class. This book is amazing – it explains how what we are currently referring to as “social media” may actually be an indicator of a huge societal shift. I will probably be blogging about this more over the next couple of months, but here’s a quote that really stuck with me. He’s talking about why Linux was able to gain a foothold in the server market even though it is an open source project. He said:

Some threshold of transaction cost for group coordination was crossed, and on the far side, a new way of working went from inconceivable to ridiculously easy. All that remains when costs fall is for someone to recognize what has become recently possible.

What if we substituted learning for working in that quote? Has something changed so profoundly in the way we are able to deliver instruction that something that would have been previously impossible is now very simple?

And is anyone recognizing this? I know I missed another amazing lrnchat tonight, but educational professionals are gathering there (and the there is actually on Twitter!!) talking about this. Some of us are starting to figure out how to do something about what we see happening.

Lots more to come from that book, lots that will be hard for me personally to write about.

But I do have a clear head, and my perspective is a bit more balanced right now. Let’s see how long I’m able to keep that balance!

My mom loves telling the following story about me, to emphasize the fact that I have always been bossy. I am the oldest, and I have one brother who is 16 months younger than me and another who is 3 and a half years younger (there are seven of us in all). Apparently, we all played together very nicely until my brothers discovered that they didn’t have to play exactly they way I told them to play.

Once they figured this out, they would let me play with them as long as I didn’t try and dictate the rules. This is one of the reasons I think I get along with guys so well, I was never allowed to play with my brothers if I started “acting like a girl” (whatever that means!). Obviously, my brothers had found a way to turn the tables and exercise control over me. However, and this is the part of the story that my mother relishes, I still had a way to exercise my power. I would just pick up and leave. Refuse to play because they didn’t play by my rules. You would think that I would have gained a partner when I had a sister but that didn’t work out (thanks alot Sissy!!).

What does this story have to do with corporate education? This may take more than one post, so please indulge me for having to explain this in my story-telling way.

Lots of learning happens in the social spaces, whether it is the social interaction of communities formed during a formal class, or the informal learning that happens when we traverse our Personal Leaning Environment (PLE) to get to the best community for the (learning) job. Knowing the control mechanisms in all the learning communities we encounter may just help us learn faster. And if you are designing instruction, understanding control can mean the difference between enabling and hindering learning for those who participate in the events you design.

Before I get to the control topic, I want to talk about the social part.

Communities follow many of the same rules that the small worlds described by Dr. Elfreda Chatman follow.  Dr. Chatman theorized that groups have their own style, or signature. This signature is defined by particular attributes of a group:

• How the group will handle certain events
• What topics will be discussed
• What topics will be excluded from discussion
• How do interactions happen between group members?
• How do interactions happen between group members and outsiders?
• What is the level of meaning of certain terms and traditions/ceremonies?

If you know all of the components of the signature, you’ll be treated like an insider to the community. You may even know most of the components, and you may be granted access to the community. But if you unknowingly break one of the community rules: you don’t use the correct jargon, or you communicate in a way that is not approved by the group, then your outsider status will be affirmed by everyone in the group.

This is what was happening with my brothers. As long as I deferred to the rules they made for our small group – that I could never tell them how to do anything – I was allowed entrance to the group. But if I got bossy, or “played like a girl”, I wasn’t allowed to play.

Or check out this example. The comic shows the differences in the way HR (one community) and programmers (another community) see the same information, in this case a resume. HR may push your resume through to the tech interview with glowing recommendations, but the programmer won’t understand why someone who only knows one language even made it through to them. You may have fooled HR into thinking you were a programmer, but you broke the norms of the real geek who is now going to pound you with ridiculously nit picky technical questions.

So understanding the style or signature of a community gives you quite a bit of power, starting with the power to belong to a community as an insider. This insider status is important because it gives you access to the real interactions and workings of the group. It is probably what drives the tighter collaborations that lead to real innovation.

On the other hand, if you don’t bother to even investigate what the style of a given community may be, you give that power over to the members of the group. In most cases, you will be given limited access (at best) to communities for which you don’t bother to determine a style.

Let’s get back to the idea of power in a community or network. Manuel Castells asserted:

… in this network society, power continues to be the fundamental structuring force of its shape and direction. But power does not reside in institutions, not even in the state or in large
corporations. It is located in the networks that structure society. Or, rather, in what I propose to call the ‘switchers’; that is, the mechanisms connecting or disconnecting networks on the basis of certain programmes or strategies.

From Network Logic: Who Governs in an Interconnected World

I think that this idea- power residing in the mechanisms that connect or disconnect networks -is really key to designing communities and educational events. We have to figure out how to empower members and learners to create a dedicated connection to the community we have built. We have to look at how the controls we put in place (you know, that list of stuff that defines our community) interact with the signatures of groups with which we have invited to connect. Are there too many conflicts between the group we have created and those invited groups, so that any connection that is made will be constantly flapping? Or have we done our homework about the signatures of all groups involved so that when connections are made, they are stable and lasting?

There has to be a way to increase connectivity by decreasing the likelihood that the use of power will be members deciding to disconnect from the network because of conflicting group signatures. The practical application of making this happen is the hard part….and will have to wait for another post.

If you have ideas on practical application, or if you want to weigh in on the whole idea of power in networks/communities/groups, please drop them in the comments!

I tweeted this question earlier: are there studies that show ways to measure social learning? More specifically, are there studies or research that shows ways to measure the ROI of using social media tools and processes for corporate education?

I know there are posts on ideas of how social media should be used for education. For instance, Tony Karrer recently had a post on the questions that should be asked when doing an analysis for implementing eLearning 2.0:

Content

• What content is already shared through other means? Ex. are lessons learned discussed, or work-arounds.
• Is there information that can be created and shared coming from either a 3rd party (e.g., a help desk, experts, etc.) or from the audience itself?
• What content gets updated more frequently?
• What reference material is already being created that might be a target?

Audiences

• Who has the pain?
• Who’s going through an experience that they would want to share?
• Who is able and active enough to use the tools to create content?
• Does it align with their motivation or can it be aligned with their motivation?
• Are there natural content creators that we could leverage?

Kevin Jones at Engaged learning listed 15 objections to using social media as a learning tool. Objection 13 is “How do you measure ROI?”. Jay Cross gives the business case for informal learning, saying that business that don’t design for informal learning leave money on the table (long post, but lots of good info).

Here are some specific examples I found:

• Tony Karrer posted a link to an interview with GE’s CIO, who said their internal social media skills locator site gets 25 million hits a day. Is that a good measure of ROI for learning – hits per day?
• An article in the Harvard Business Review reports on research that proves the competitive imperative of learning. The article points out that “great execution is difficult to sustain—not because people get tired of working hard, but because the managerial mind-set that enables efficient execution inhibits employees’ ability to learn and innovate. A focus on getting things done, and done right, crowds out the experimentation and reflection vital to sustainable success.”
  The article talks about Learning as Execution. There may be examples later in the article, I can’t afford it though (you have to pay to read more than the 1st page).
• The Cold Fusion Developer’s Network site has an article about how a design firm switched from email to opensource, web 2.0 SaaS (software as a service) delivered solutions, with 2K a month in productivity gains.
• An article in Training Magazine entitled University 2.0 (Sep2007, Vol. 44 Issue 8, p22-24, 3p) suggests the following ways to measure:
  “Measure how the money you spent led to efficiencies, better performance, or valuable talent development (e.g how much you were able to accelerate the development of new consultants so they’re able to bill their hours sooner)”
  ROI may not be the best evaluation. “Instead, measurements around actionable performance indicators make more sense”
• An article in Training and Development entitled The World According to Wiki (2007 vol.61 iss.5 pg.28) has stories of how organizations are using wikis, but really don’t give ways to measure success.

So, how do you measure success when using social media tools for learning? Or, instead of measuring the tools, do we measure the success of the communities using the tools? Or is should we measure a combination of the two – the success of the communities using the tool along with the effectiveness of the tools? What does everyone think?

And does anyone have any links to studies on measurement?