Wow – I’ve had this blog for three years! Unbelievable!

I started the blog when I was a grad student at FSU. Originally it focused on the intersection of social media, corporate education (what I did for a job back then) and my graduate studies.

Since then, I transitioned into “doing” social media full time.  I’m in a marketing role now, but what I do is really more education. And social media. I love it. I’ve changed the focus of my blog from education to storage….because that’s my main focus.

Some stats from Feedburner (which started in May of 2008..):

• The blog has had 34,353 views
• I have posted on lots of topics – geekdom, storage industry topics, women in tech, edutech
• I’ve averaged 286 subscribers (though right now I have 507)

All of this seems unreal. The blog has enabled me to meet so many new people, to become embedded in the educational social media field (with the Beard’s crew!), to get speaking gigs at conferences, and to land the perfect job for me.

For me, blogging is the ultimate reflective tool. I’m overwhelmed that anyone else finds my musings useful….but I’m eternally grateful for the connections this blog has enabled.

I hope you stick around for my storage ramblings…I promise to continue to weave in posts related to social media and education. Here’s to another 3 years!

It’s the last day of December, the last day of 2009, the last day of a decade. But I still want to answer December’s Big Question:

What did you learn about learning in 2009?

Grad School

Personally, I took five graduate courses (for my Master’s degree in Instructional Systems at FSU)

• Development of Computer Courseware: I am not sure if learned anything new about learning in this course – I did learn that my organization at EMC does a very good job of creating computer courseware though!
• Inquiry and Measurement of Instructional Systems: This is the class that started me thinking differences in the language used by education people to describe measurements, and how these differ from language used by MBAs
• Web 2.0 Learning and Performance: I’m not sure if I learned anything new in this class either, but I did get to try out some new ideas I had about aggregating information sources. This is a great class, if you are in the IS program take it when it is offered!
• Introduction to Program Evaluation: This course introduced me to “The Standards“. They are pretty sense guidelines for conducting evaluations, but a nice reference.
• Performance Systems Analysis: This was  my HPT course. As much as we talk about innovation and doing things differently, all systems we analyze (at least from an academic standpoint) are built on principles created by the men who pretty much got us in this mess. Should we be studying them differently – as the bad examples maybe?

Blogging

According to the social signals for my blog posts at eLearning Learning, people liked the printable Twitter Cheat Sheet I posted.

Twitter was big last year. One of the most important additions to my PLE was #lrnchat. How amazing is it to be able to connect with education and performance experts from all fields? The remind me that there are so many ways to look at topics, not to fall into the trap of believing the hype, but to really analyze and evaluate systems…have reasons for the things you suggest and believe. And also not to take it all so seriously, that is nice too.

Another popular post (based on social signals) was one where I tried to find a definition for informal learning. I actually wrote this for one of my executives. I knew if I put my thoughts out there, my PLE would challenge it. And y’all did not disappoint!!

Wrangling with the idea of how to use communities in corporate learning took me back to my undergraduate days (my BS is in Information Studies) many times, especially in a post I made about Communities, PLEs, small groups, & power. This is something I’m still wrestling with. If Social Media is about the social, then finding a way to manage the power networks that allow (and prohibit) connections to networks is critical…especially in a highly political corporate environment. This is probably a core reason you can’t just build it (a community for learning) and expect learners to just show up. I’m sure this will be a big topic for me in 2010 as well.

I also wrote a post explaining how I personally use social media to learn. I compared it to fishing, I guess in a nod to my Gulf Coast heritage. I don’t think I’m unusual, especially for someone who works with technology. I still have to explain to people how important blogging is to me as a source of personal growth. The connections and shared information I’ve made from the blog have really helped me stretch and verify my thought processes.

Wrapping it up..

In summary, I’ve learned that I know lots more about learning than I knew. I’ve also learned that there is so much I have to learn. So, here’s looking to 2010. I’m sure I’ll have more provocative posts, and I’m sure you guys will knock my back down to reality!

Continuing the blogging ROI discussion…..there was an interesting interchange yesterday between my self and Jane Bozarth on twitter about the topic of ROI.

The scenario

Jane and I talked about proving the ROI of a mythical (I think) training course called “Ethics for Firefighters”. She said to prove the ROI of such a course that first the dollar value of the public perception of ethical behavior needed to be determined. I disagreed with this, asking if the real measurement was  public perception,  a decrease in legal actions (both the action and the cost of defending/prosecuting the action)?

Then I think Jane thought that meant I was turning into a cold corporate numbers person because she asked “So ROI for ethical behavior of public servants is based entirely on legal costs?” And that isn’t where I was going at all.

This exchange made me think that maybe there are translation problems between the terms used in Performance Improvement and the terms used by MBAs.

Lost in Translation

I’m not an MBA. But most of the executives I know are. They use MBA terms to manage their people and environments. In one more semester I’ll have an MS in Instructional Systems. I have been trained to look at organizations as systems, and to troubleshoot what is causing performance problems in these systems. I have been taught a completely different set of terms than the terms the MBAs I work for use and understand.

This could be a problem.

MBAs love to talk about ROI. ROI literally means “return on investment”. Now, just like there are good IDs and bad IDs, there are good MBAs and bad MBAs. The good MBAs also see the organization as a system. The bad MBAs only care about quarter-to-quarter hard numbers. Unfortunately, we need to translate performance terms for good and bad MBAs.

Let’s define the term. If an MBA wants to correct me, please feel free! I got this definition from the business dictionary.com:

Earning power of assets measured as the ratio of the net income (profit less depreciation) to the average capital employed (or equity capital) in a firm or project. Expressed usually as a percentage, it is a measure of the profitability which (while not taking the time value of money into account) indicates whether or not a firm is using its resources in an efficient manner. For example, if the ROI of a firm (in the long run) is lower than its cost-of-capital then the firm will be better off by liquidating its assets and depositing the proceeds in a bank. Also called rate of return, or yield.

Sigh. That is why I didn’t get my MBA, that definition just seems so void of human concern. My gut feeling is this is where the translation issues start to happen. So what would be comparable from a systems (or human performance technology) point of view?

The first letter of ADDIE stands for Analysis. In Pershing’s Handbook of Human Performance Technology, there is a chapter written by Dr. Allison Rossett titled Analysis and More. Rosset says “analysis is the process used to figure out what to do”. She provides a this view of what analysis is:

Organizations provide the results of their learning analytics for many reasons. The most popular reason is to showcase the training’s value to the organization. Another common reason is to indicate the quality of the training services provided. Additional reasons are because stakeholders request it or to justify large expenditures.

The way I see it the analysis step, the “A” that is the key repeatable step in every instructional design theory, is central to the MBA concept of ROI. We’re all trying to get at the same thing. MBAs want to prove their organization is using their assets in the most efficient way possible. The problem is that more and more in this age of information, those “assets” are human.

This is where we as performance and learning specialists can come to the aid of our MBA friends. Proving that your human assets, the information workers that hold the means of production inside their heads, are being utilized the best way possible is very different than proving your datacenter or factory equipment is optimally configured.

A potential blogging ROI example

Here’s a real example of how hard this is. Our guys out in the field who install and configure EMC products for customers are very very busy. They usually have much more to do than there are hours in a day. And since they are not machines, there is just no way to configure them to miss sleep and work 24 hours a day so that they can catch up.

I’m going to concentrate specifically on blogging in this example. Our field guys are super smart, and are very quick learners. They have to be, or they would not be able to do the jobs put in front of them.

Now I’ve blogged before about blogging being an excellent way to reflect on new concepts. If I think what our field guys do, I would imagine that if they were able to blog about their activities they could reflect on lessons learned, what would have been helpful to know going into an engagement, advice they would give to colleagues in case they faced the same situations, etc. These sort of blog posts would be useful for other field guys, support guys, engineers, training folks, etc. The blogs may also give management a better idea about how much time certain types of engagements take.

The ROI question is which is better for the company: book these guys out for 100% of their time in customer sites to plow through the workload, or give them some time to blog about what they have been through in an engagement, providing them reflection time and providing insight into the experience for other information workers in the company?

Lets say I proposed this, and everyone bought into the plan. How would I prove hard dollar numbers that the time given to these field folks to blog benefits the company? I think this would take planning and analysis throughout the project lifecycle, here are some guesses on what could be measured:

• Measure time it takes to blog
• Measure traffic to particular blog posts
• Measure time it takes for individual blogging to perform similar tasks after the blog was written (after time for reflection)
• Observe case deflection in the call center (number of calls on topic before and after post is written)
• Measure engineering enhancements made because of post
• Measure training enhancements made because of post
• Measure impact on planning (actual time it takes to do the things talked about in the post vs what was originally planned, utilization rate improvements based on adjustments)

I would think creating a community of support larger than field support colleagues would also have some sort of impact, not sure on how to begin to measure that though.

In conclusion….

I think we have a translation problem between MBAs and ID/performance support folks. ROI is just the end result of analysis. The wrong measurement will always give an incorrect ROI, which is not good for business (is there an MBA term for that?). As education folks, we understand what interventions motivate and support performance for “human assets”. We need to figure out how to communicate this to our MBA colleagues.

I think the problem for the MBAs is getting numbers to prove the ROI of the work information workers are now expected to perform. Those numbers don’t exist in many cases because the analysis is not typically done on the human impact of information work. Its an infinite loop: we don’t do analysis on that sort of thing because we don’t do it, we don’t do it because we don’t have hard numbers, and since we don’t have hard numberswe can’t prove ROI.

What do you think? Am I totally off-base here? Is it wrong to want to collaborate with MBAs to prove ROI?

Someone asked me that very question a few weeks ago. Sincefrom time to time I do blog about the education programs at EMC, is there any way to tell if my words here impact the bottom line of my organization?

My first thought well of course I can see ROI. I’ve increased my PLE. My blog is a place to reflect about the intersection between my graduate studies and the ISD work I do for EMC. So there is ROI – to me.

Yesterday I blogged about the impact that EMC’s FAST release will have on our student audiences. I linked to one of my organization’s programs that is designed to help people with a proven level of technical knowledge keep up to speed. I can tell you how many people looked at the post, and how many people went to the community, and how many people registered (although I can’t tie the last two together). But doesn’t really impact our bottom line either, we provide the intervention as a benefit to folks who have earned a Proven Professional certification.

So, I’m not sure! AM I providing ROI to anyone but myself? I like to think that improving myself makes me more productive, which directly impacts ROI. I think that is a stretch though.

So I’m asking you all for some input. How do you prove ROI of blogging?

A couple of comments to me this week are prompting this post. Someone in my senior management made a comment that I am very active in social media but I don’t really use it to learn. And someone on twitter asked me the question about EMC|ONE, (EMC’s internal social media site):

Here was my answer to that question:

But both of these questions got me thinking about my personal learning environment. Social media plays a huge role in how I learn these days. I’ve been comparing the way I use social media for learning to fishing. Let me explain what I mean.

Its like fishing

There are a few areas for which I am always looking for information:

• Education (for school and work)
• Management software, networking, SANs, etc (for work)
• Autism in adults (personal reasons)

I put out a line to lots of different places, hoping to get a nibble. If I have a project that creates a need to search for information on one of these topics, I just follow the line and look at all the information that has been gathered.

But sometimes there will be lots of activity on the line, so I will go and check on it to see what is going on in that space.

Here are the social media places I look for info:

Newsgator

I use Newsgator for my RSS aggregator. I follow lots of EMC folks, and lots of people who blog about our industry. I follow lots of edubloggers. I also follow lots of autism and Aspie bloggers.

I try to go check on this line at least once a week. But if I get busy, sometimes I forget to check the line.

Twitter

I use Tweetdeck to organize twitter. I follow a lot of folks, and I have them separated into groups like “work” and “edu”. I also have search columns for specific topics, and that is usually related to what is going on for that day. For instance, if there is a conference, I will have a conference tag column. If it is Thursday or Friday, I will have a #lrnchat column.

I can pay attention to tweetdeck more often than I do newsgator. Sometimes I will notice the people I am following are all talking about the same thing, or using the same tag. If I notice that, I’ll try and figure out what has captured everyone’s attention.

I also seem to come across information I need much quicker using my twitter network.

My Blog

I’ve written before about how I use my blog as reflective practice on what I am learning. I also learn quite a bit from the people who take the time to comment on my posts, or to link back to me.

EMC|ONE

At EMC we have an internal social media site known as EMC|ONE. It rides on the Clearspace platform. One way to manage the experience with Clearspace is to receive email notifications for the different spaces. There are several technical communities I follow. I don’t always interact in the community – sometimes I just watch for activity on the line that would either impact or help my course development efforts. I most always share those tidbits with the folks on my team.

I am sure there are other ways I use social media to learn. I didn’t even mention Facebook, IM, diigo, meebo, or delicious.

The point is that these tools help me keep an eye on the subjects I am interested in, even if these subjects change very rapidly. My goal is to find a way to make this way of learning easy for everyone else.

How about you – do you use social media to learn?

Classes started for the Spring semester. One of the classes I am taking is Inquiry and Measurement. Its about the research methods & resources used to conduct good scientific investigations, and how to measure those findings (broadly paraphrasing the syllabus).

One of the books for the project is Researching Real-World Problems: A Guide to Methods of Inquiry by ZIna O’Leary. The first chapter had an interesting diagram of hierarchy of change that made me think of my ongoing thread about using blogging for reflective learning.

Here’s the diagram:

O’Leary says

the process of conducting research is in itself a learning journey that should have an impact on the researcher; conducting research is professional development.

As you go up the hierarchy, research impacts practice, then programmes, and finally policy. All of the steps are encompassed by culture. So as research affects each of these steps, it also has an impact on the organization’s culture.

Is it possible that blogging is one way to research for professional development? As you get better at finding and reflecting on the information you find researching blog posts, you can then start affecting change up this hierarchy of change. O’Leary says conducting research at the professional development stage provides the following benefits to the individual:

• An opportunity to engage in problem based learning
• An opportunity to engage in action learning
• Enhance communication skills
• Develop Research Skills
• Produce new knowledge

Wouldn’t you say that blogging also provides all of those opportunities to people? So can blogging also work its way up that hierarchy of change, including to the point that it changes an organization’s culture?

I promised to write a summary of the responses I received to this post on blogging as reflective practice, so here it is (better late than never!).

Not only did I write about blogging as a mechanism for learning on this blog, I wrote about it on EMC’s internal social media site (EMC|ONE) as well. Here is a summary of the responses from both places:

• Blogging is used to interact with communities of special interests if none exist in your current network. Sometimes people were pleasantly surprised that blogging introduced them to peers they didn’t even know about until these people commented on their blog posts.
• Some people seemed to appreciate the benefits of the reflection they had to do to write a post more than the amount of comments a post received.
• Blogging helps show how online networks evolve and react to information.
• Blogging helps open up new ways to think about a topic.
• Blogging is much more than a “training tool”, it is a “career tool”. I think this is important – I framed the question in a strict instructional technology sense. But I was quickly called on that, and reminded that blogging really is a career tool – it’s probably one of those “knowledge worker skills” that people working with information should really become proficient.
• Many people (including myself) can’t blog about their day-to-day activities, but blogging has helped them learn more about the industry in which they work.
• Blogging helps open up new avenues for development. By reflecting and writing on different topics, as well as expanding your professional network, new ways to use your current skills start opening up.
• A couple of people reminded me of how things used to be done. People used to take the time to write journals, letters, and other written forms of correspondence. Sitting down to physically write these documents required people to slow down and really think about the ideas they were trying to convey in written format. Maybe blogs are a throw-back to those times.

So, I think we can definitely say that blogging can be used to learn. Blogging makes people slow down, think about their topics, and reflect on what they know (or what they think they know). Blogging helps to expand a personal or professional network.

I would think blogging can also be used as an instructional technology for an individual educational event such as a class, or even better a boot camp.

For myself, I’ll continue to blog for all of the reasons listed above. I’m learning so much about our industry, and also learning so much about education. My network has really expanded, I am bummed the economy is tanked because I can’t see me being able to travel to a conference to meet any of them in person. We’ll just have to keep building ties until things look up, or a conference rolls into Boston.

I guess I should answer the questions I asked in a previous post:

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?

I have used blogging as a reflective practice for at least 7 years. I used to be the one who would send in-depth emails full of links to other info to listservs, so I really have been doing this sort of writing for about 10 years.

Currently I write two work-based blogs. There is this blog, which is focused on the education side of things. I also have an internal “Storage Round Up” blog, where I digest all the week’s blog posts about the information industry.

This blog helps me solidify the ideas I get from my graduate studies. It helps me think about how the theories I am learning can be applied in a real-world situation. When I write a post I have to think about what I am studying, what we are doing at work, how relevant any idea I may have is. I research to see if anyone else has written about the ideas I have. I also love getting comments from experts in this field, they always add another dimension I hadn’t thought about.

My internal blog has helped me understand our industry better. I am very technical, in education terms I am definitely an SME. Our company covers such a vast array of disciplines that it’s very hard to keep up with new things. My internal blog has helped me with that – staying on top of new things in the industry. I have also learned lots about our competition (that isn’t the type of thing the education people are exposed to in an in-depth manner). But understanding how our competitors’ products work actually helps me understand our products better as well.

Blogging is definitely one of the ways I learn. I started blogging to share the information I had found so other folks wouldn’t have to reinvent the wheel to find the information.

I guess education is just in my blood somehow.

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?