If you follow me on Twitter or are friends with me on Facebook, you know that I graduated last weekend with a Master of Science degree from the Instructional Systems program at Florida State University.

Here’s a video to prove it!

FSU has an amazing program. I studied with legends in the field like John Keller and Rob Reiser (who was also my advisor). I was able to take the program as a 100% distance student, which was helpful to be because for the first 2/3rds of my program I had to travel for work.

But my real learning did not happen during my studies. I am lucky to have a very experienced set of people in my organization (Education Services) who did not mind me asking them questions about the things I was studying. It was great to see how we really do have a great system in place to execute formal learning. Thanks Lila, Gene, and Ernie!

Also, where would I be without #lrnchat? Because of this online Twitter chat, I connected with other IS grad students nationwide, as well as professionals and some of the superstars in our field. I got my internship at Pistachio Consulting because of #lrnchat. If I had any question about my studies, I could tweet to the #lrnchat community and I’d get links, questions, or just conversation.

I should also mention #cck08. This course set the stage for the way I would question and evaluate everything in my studies. It also connected me to many individuals whose path is similar to my own.

I feel like I am part of the online learning community. As sad as this is to say – I do not feel as if I am part of the FSU IS community. When I graduated last Sunday, at least one other Master’s student and 3 other PhD students walked. No one from the program arranged anything for us as graduates, not even a meet and greet. None of the faculty were even in town – they were at a conference. The student organization did nothing to recognize the accomplishment.

Now, two wonderful ladies I am connected to via Twitter and Facebook did come to see me. In fact, one fellow student, Lea Ann, even took me all around to get pictures on campus (I got my BS from FSU, and attended as a full-time student in Tallahassee), and came to dinner with my long-time friends who had also come to my graduation. My friend I’ve known since my undergrad days could not believe I had never met Lea Ann in real life before graduation day. I had to explain: we’ve talked on the phone, on Dim Dim, on Skype, via email, and lived together through all the tough times of graduate life. We connected through social tools, found a way to make our own small world, and I think it helped us learn.

I would not have learned much without some community to help me learn, to keep me grounded, to challenge the questions I had about different topics. Since I was a distance student, the University just didn’t know how to make and foster that community. Thank goodness there was #lrnchat.

This is the biggest lesson I learned from my graduate studies: Communities ignite learning.

Would I have still finished my degree if I had not been connected to any community? Yes, most likely. But I wouldn’t have gone as deep, I would not have done as much reflecting, and I would not have be able to integrate what I was learning through my formal studies into my work. To do that, you need a community of people – professional colleagues -  to help you put the formal learning into perspective from a practitioner’s standpoint.

This has huge implications for corporate learning. Formal instruction will always be required. You need it when you are a total newbie to some category of information, or when things have changed dramatically. Since I am in an organization that does technical training, we’ll always have the situations that make formal learning important.

But what happens after formal training?  Once people learn the basics, and go back into their jobs or into the field? What happens when they need a way to put the formal learning into perspective from a practitioner’s standpoint? Harold Jarche has a great post about this where he discusses how social learning is really the way we get things done in knowledge intensive and creative enterprises. In the post, he shows a model of the 5 stages of organization learning as seen by Jane Hart and Jay Cross.

I like these new models, but I don’t think we can learn without being attached to a community. I think formal learning is meaningless if the student doesn’t have a way to connect to a community that will help him or her integrate what they have learned into their thought and work processes.

Maybe the question for the enterprise is: how do you foster communities to which each and every worker can attach?

Last night I listened to Stephen Downes’ lecture at #teched about Personal Learning Environments. One quote stuck with me:

The learner is the product of education

To me that means the product of education isn’t a diploma, or a certificate. The product of education is the delta between the individual’s knowledge from when they started the instruction and when the instruction is over.

That makes lots of sense to me. It started me thinking of my daughter. For those of you who don’t know, my daughter has Asperger’s Syndrome. She was not formally diagnosed until she was a teenager, but I always knew her little brain worked differently than most everyone else.

One reason she was diagnosed so late is that she talked very early. She was saying words at 4 months, and talking in sentences before she was 1. She took a long time to learn to walk, and thinking back I believe its because she was having sensory issues. We’d hold her little hands and try and coax her to walk, but if we let go she would sit down and emphatically tell us NO!!!! My friends used to tease me because my daughter would sit on the ground and say, “Mom can I have a cookie” but she couldn’t walk. She was probably about 12 or 13 months at the time.

Of course we encouraged it. So did my brothers, who were all teenagers at the time. They loved having a little parrot around. But looking back, she wasn’t really having conversations. She had just figured out using words was a good way to explore the world. She never did the thing where babies crawl everywhere and stick things in their mouths…she asked questions. She would ask the same question 6 or 7 different ways. And we’d answer 6 or 7 ways if we could. But she could talk before she was one, so didn’t that prove that she was smart and perfect? (And yes of course she is brilliant and as close to perfect as you can get!).

The other thing that is typical of folks on the spectrum is that they usually have at least one special interest. It becomes all they want to talk about. That gets very, very annoying. One of my daughter’s earliest special interests was the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I don’t remember much about it, but she must have been going on and on about Ninja Turtles because one day I told her that the Turtles were named after famous artists.

She couldn’t believe that. So I took her to the public library and we checked out four children’s picture books about Leonardo, Michelangelo, Donatello, and Raphael. Now was my daughter content that I had proved the names came from artists? Was she content to just look at the pictures?

Of course not. She wanted to know the stories behind each of the famous works of art. This led to a new special interest – Greek and Latin mythology stories. At some point a few years later I couldn’t take the Greek stories anymore had to branch off again, I told her that the constellations all had stories too. This sent her off on a journey to discover everything about that topic. I think this helped solidify her love of stories.

So what does this have to do with Downes?

We have to stop looking at a degree as the end result of education. I found ways to use my daughter’s special interests to help her learn more, to help her have more than one special interest. This is important to unlock the potential off of us have. Early on I fell victim to measuring what she needed based on norms – I should have realized her speaking so early was telling me something else.

My friend calls me about her friend’s son quite often these days. She thinks the boy must be on the spectrum, and asks for advice (the boy reminds her of my daughter). The boy is 11 or 12, and his special interest in Mario. He carries a Mario doll to school, he is obsessed with plumbing and mushrooms. They met a young Japanese lady at the beach and the boy immediately drew her a picture of Princess Peach. My advice to her: make sure the parents play Mario! That seems so obvious.

Relationship to Corporate Learning

It seems to me we have to measure by the change in the individual learner. If that is what we measure, how do we create the best environment for individuals to learn? We can’t individualize instruction, so how do we show them the path to the things that will help them learn? How can we help them get from Ninja Turtles to Persephone?

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?

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.