Last Friday I presented at the ASTD New England Area 2011 Conference. ASTD is the American Society for Training and Development for my storage friends. The conference had an underlying theme of getting everyone comfortable and participating with social media. This was the brainchild of Jean Marrapodi. (Brilliant idea I must say!!)

All of the speakers have posted their presentations in the ASTDL20 Facebook Fan page, and follow-up blog posts have been posted there as well. My presentation is embedded below. My presentation was about how to deal with naysayers. There was a great discussion in the room – special thanks to Jim Storer of The Community Roundtable for all the great contributions!

Things have changed since I started giving this presentation – people are now coming to conferences with concrete objections they encounter when they propose social media initiatives. It’s obvious people are moving past fear of social media, and that they are starting to think about how to systematically, strategically implement social media applications to facilitate social learning in their orgs.

The thread of every presentation I attended was that learning professionals are in a position where we can help organizations tame the overwhelming amount of information being created in the digital era. It’s interesting, because as storage professionals we’re working on ways to help our customers deal with the sheer amount of data being created – the actual 1′s and 0′s. Learning professionals are best positioned to help organizations make sense of all the information contained in that data. Kinda cool to be at the intersection of those two disciplines.

Thanks to John Ingham for capturing the live tweetstream that we had during the Social Learning panel at #e2conf.

I was on a panel with Don Pontefract and Kevin Jones. The panel was moderated by Marcia Conner. To be asked to geek out about social media and learning in front of a roomful of people was a dream come true.

See the transcript here. (thanks again John!!)

This week I attended the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. Today I was on a panel about social learning. In the spirit of that presentation and #lrnchat, I wanted to share the biggest thing I learned at this conference.

No matter what anyone tells you, no one really has a clue how to “do” social in the enterprise.

Here’s why I say that:

There is way too much posturing and selling from vendors

There seem to be two vendor camps (which are pretty traditional tech camps I think):

1. Buy one application to rule them all. Let it sit on top on top of all your current business apps, and create social using this one application.
2. Pay a consultant to create apps for a custom social layer between social apps and business apps
   My take-away is that there seems to be a gold rush going between vendors and consultancy firms to gain mind share about the best way to create and manage this social layer.

No one is talking about practical ways to architect social solutions

No one talked about existing legacy applications, in fact many vendors mocked and belittled existing business tools. But content live in these tools. Relationships, histories, cultural breadcrumbs live in these tools.

What are vendors and consultants doing to help companies leverage current long-standing applications in the enterprise, such as email, LMS, and CMS? What should people be thinking of when architecting a social solution? Its not enough to show a loud snazzy video and tell us how sexy a community is, and how we should have that instead of stodgy, old-fashioned email.

Give the digital native crap a rest. Seriously.

I’m not a boomer. I’m not a so-called digital native. I’m a gen-xer. I get this technology because of my  credentials:

1. Education: BS Information Science, minor in sociology, MS Instructional Systems
2. Paid experience: technical trainer, technical training developer, build and release manager, web administrator, systems administrator
3. Volunteer experience: f2f and digital community building in college, for parent organizations, for local environmental and disability organizations

People in my generation have been building and refining these digital systems for about a decade. We understand the technical, political, and social challenges. We are the practioners who are actually getting this work done. Want us to trust you? Stop forgetting we may actually be the key audience you need to reach.

Even worse, look at this from a social community vantage point. By focusing on the 20-somethings, you leave out the older generation who are perfectly able to use social networks to share their life lessons with the rest of us. This whole sharing and learning idea is not just for these yuppie kids right out of college, we should be able to harness 2.0 power to connect the world. Seriously people, think bigger!

What I’d like to see…

I’d like to see a Web 2.0 conference for practioners. I want to get down in the weeds about psychology, ethonography, sociology, APIs, build vs buy, customize vs wait for a platform change, etc. I want these technical details to be able to make more informed decisions.

I’d like to see a support matrix for current business applications and social software. I know I’ll be doing lots of reading about open social, I’m hoping part of this open movement is having vendors be open about their roadmaps and inter-operability with other business applications.

Stephen Downes posted the transcript from a lecture he gave on Connectivism. The post is packed with great stuff that relates to my previous post, as well as social learning – both I’ll need to read and reflect on some more. I wanted to share one quote now, he talks about knowledge in the network being dynamic, tacit, and grown. His thoughts on dynamic are very interesting:

What we mean by that is, it’s always changing. What was true yesterday may not be true tomorrow, what was true tomorrow may not be true the next day. Even if there are underlying facts of the matter, even if two plus two is always equal to four, it’s not always relevant. It might not always matter. There are always facts out there in the world, the world may not be a totality of facts, but it has a lot of them, but these facts come in and out of relevance, come in and out of prominence. So even if there are unchanging parts of the world, our relationship to these things changes.

Sounds like where I work!

Like I mentioned in my wrap-up post from Friday at the Learning solutions conference, I did not care for the last keynote talk.

The keynote was given by Leonard Brody, and was entitled “365 Days From Now: Preparing for the Change Ahead”

My Issues

Here are some the things he said that I disagree with:

• You can’t predict the future using the past
  His main reasoning on this point is that there is so much change at the moment, that the future won’t be anything like the past. I think this is very dangerous, because the changes driven by technology are all actually controlled by social interactions. In the past, greedy people (be it power or money) used social interactions to control and manipulate the masses. Do we really think those kinds of people will treat social technologies any differently? As wise King Solomon said, “There is nothing new under the sun”. And as George Santayana said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”.
• Everyone on the planet has access and is connected to everyone else because the cost barrier of technology is almost zero
  This is just not a true statement. We still have a significant digital divide in the US.  To have access to the technology that is connecting everyone, you must be able to afford the device (hand-held or computer) and access rates. Not everyone can afford food and shelter, at least in the US, and these folks do not have the luxury to be connected to everyone else.
• Behavioral Economics is about slight of hand
  Behavioral Economics is actually the marriage of economics with psychology and sociology. Some programs use it to “improve the accuracy and empirical reach of economic theory“. One of the main premises of behavioral economics is that humans have bounded rationality – which means the rationality of individuals is dependent on the information they have, the cognitive limitations of their minds, and the finite amount of time they have to make decisions (via wikipedia). This is a field with decades of research to back it up. Maybe a bit complicated to understand and explain, but deserving of a better description than a comparison to a magic trick.
• Kids today are genetically smarter, and have more mental capacity than previous generations
  This claim was made with images of brain scans as “proof”, as well as a story of how kids with an electronic device tend not to pay attention to anything that is said to them. Hate to break this to you, but kids of certain ages won’t respond to an adult no matter what is in front of them. A TV, a radio, a boombox, a book.
  And those brain scans? Who were they of? OK, he said one was his. Fine – what about the other one? What type of person? Where were they on the spectrum? What were they doing at the time the scan was taken? Why wasn’t any context given to support this grandiose claim that evolution has picked this latest generation to start speeding up?

Why I think it matters to speak up

I think as learning professionals we should be alarmed when someone walks in and spouts so much unsubstantiated drivel as if it were fact. I’ll go even further: I think as learning professionals in this time, in the middle of the seismic shifts that are going on, it is our responsibility to point out the recklessness of these sorts of claims.

We all supposedly do an analysis when there is an issue in the organization. Based on the analysis, we look for the intervention, which in many cases is training. Why shouldn’t we critically analyze what speakers at our conferences tell us?

We’re at a time when the roles that would traditionally defend us against information imposters are being eliminated by the move to digital. What if defense of truth and logic is one of our new responsibilities as elearning and social learning professionals?

This sort of talk annoys me because I’m very analytical. Its almost like this guy took a bunch of pop-culture buzz words and threw them all  together because he didn’t know anything about education. Maybe that’s ok for Oprah, but this sort of psycho-pop babble will cause my management to throw up all sorts of new barriers for not wanting to move ahead. It makes our field, and social learning, look like a trend and not a viable tool.

I want to use social media to effectively solve problems. Because of that, I’m not interested in half-truths and forgetting about doing the hard work to analyze problems. I’m very interested in learning from the past so whatever solution I recommend will stick and change work processes for the better, for everyone, no matter their social class. I want to use social learning so that people can customize their learning to make sense to them.

I want way more than this guy was able to give us in one hour.

Learning Through Social Media

Friday was the last day of the conference. Marcia Conner (who I am interning for at Pistachio Consulting this semester) had asked if I wanted to participate on a panel about learning through social media, and this is actually why I came to the conference. Besides Marcia and myself, Koreen Olbrish and Mark Oehlert were on the panel.

To start off the session, Marcia spoke a bit about what social media is, and what social learning is. Then we broke the room into four sections, since there are four of us, and got everyone to talk about what they do now to facilitate learning with social media. We sat at the tables with everyone and answered questions and tried to act as mentors.

That session went really fast.

New Skills for Instructional Designers

I tried a couple of other sessions before I came back to this session. I forgot that Ellen Wagner had promised to do a Pecha Kucha, and I walked in on the very end of it. I am very sad about that.

Ellen, Cammy Bean, and Koreen Olbrish presented on the skills instructional designers need today. I didn’t take notes (I was actually multi-tasking – listening and doing work email). They talked about how these days instructional designers need to understand educational design, technical design, and business design.

This really reinforced how lucky I’ve been in my career in education. I started as a trainer, and then became a instructional developer, at a company that also expected me to be a technical SME. The systems approach at FSU gave me the education to start looking at things from a higher business level, and my new position has started to give me the practical experience I was looking for in that area.

Keynote

The Keynote was “365 Days From Now: Preparing for the Change Ahead” was given by Leonard Brody (no website or blog? Seriously??).

I did not like this keynote address at all. It was all I could do to hold myself back from standing up and calling BS. In fact, I think this session deserves its own post.

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?

Besides working on my two performance classes, I’ll also be attending a couple of Boston-based events.

Tues Nov 3 I’ll be at the Mass chapter of ISPI to hear Cammy Bean talk about eLearning authoring tools. Several other #lrnchat folks will be there too.

Tues Nov 17 I’m planning to go to the Greater Boston ASTD meeting to hear Dave Wilkins speak about Social Learning and Social Networking.

This month’s Big Question from ASTD is “what will workplace learning be like in 10 years?”. If you go to their post, there are already some really interesting thoughts and comments about this topic.

Byron said “The best prophet of the future is the past”. I’m a firm believer in that notion, so I’d like to answer the Big Question with a question of my own: what happened 10 years ago to workplace learning?

I’ve been doing some sort of training since I came into the professional workplace in 2001. I just started studying education for my graduate degree in 2007. I have some very experienced, patient folks in my department who kindly talk with me when I ask them about something I am studying or something I have read on a blog that pertains to eLearning. They seem to appreciate my enthusiasm, but they always have this weary look on their face when I tell them about all these “new” ideas. They tell me they were trying to implement some of these very things 10 years ago!

Besides having these discussions with co-workers, there is literature that goes back 10 years or so that talks about CSCL, communities of practice, and all of these things that are the underpinnings of what people are talking about doing today. So I have to wonder, are some of the ideas being bandied about today really that new? Or are they rehashed from 10 years ago? If these are old ideas given new life by improved technology, what happened 10 years ago that got these ideas pushed to the back burner? What can we learn about our past so that we can execute these ideas in the present, so that in our future we’re not going through this exercise yet again?

I also want to say that I do not agree with the idea that the training department should go away completely. For one thing, work is social. Work gets done based on the relationships we have with others, and based on the social capital that we have. This means that there will always be “others” in the workplace. This otherness will be categorized just like it is in general society: by race, gender, nationality, disability, religion, etc.

Knowledge is a form of social capital. I believe very strongly if there is no guidance, “others” in the workplace will not have access to knowledge that they need to have to do their work. This will happen either because they don’t have access to the correct network, or because they are purposefully excluded from access to that information based on their position in the social ladder.

I believe this because of my status of other (a woman in a predominately male field), and my daughter’s status of other (Asperger’s Syndrome). Training departments can be the mechanism that provides each worker with access to the information required to perform his/her job duties successfully.

If we as training groups are aligning to the business and the true competitive advantage of knowledge workers is how fast they are able learn, we owe it to the business to ensure that every worker, no matter their access to social hierarchies in the workplace,  has access to all the tools they need to help them learn.

Maybe in the future learning organizations won’t be the “givers of knowledge”, maybe we become more like librarians that help people find resources (and learn to do their own searches) as they are needed.

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?