Work Literacy

Deliberate Practice - Cloud Worker - Collaboration - Work Literacy - June 2009

Tony Karrer — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 16:25:54 +0000

Work Literacy Hot List

June 2009

Top Other Items

The following are the top other items based on social signals.

Work Together: 60+ Collaborative Tools for Groups, June 6, 2009
Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive « alex.moskalyuk, June 10, 2009
Ultimate Guide to Delicious Social Bookmarking, June 8, 2009
Toward a Pattern Language for Enterprise 2.0 : Andrew McAfee’s Blog, June 11, 2009
Secrets of greatness: Practice and hard work bring success - October 30, 2006, June 3, 2009
Enterprise 2.0, version 2.0 : Andrew McAfee’s Blog, May 31, 2009
How Beautiful it is, and How Easily it can be Broken : Andrew McAfee’s Blog, June 30, 2009
Enterprise 2.0 Reflects the Culture | Social Media Strategery, June 21, 2009
Taking the leap: Social Business Design : Enterprise 2.0 Insights and Strategy | Socialwrite.com, June 25, 2009
5 Tips for Creating, Promoting and Managing a LinkedIn Group, June 29, 2009
Business 2.0 :: Blog :: Headshift, June 17, 2009
Designing Choreographies for the New Economy of Attention, June 23, 2009
Transition Strategies for Enterprise 2.0 Adoption | The Intelligent Enterprise Blog, June 29, 2009
Caselines: Day 4 of Enterprise 2.0 Boston: Lockheed Martin & Enterprise 2.0, June 30, 2009
How to do a Better Job of Project Collaboration Using a Wiki, June 3, 2009
Culture Trumps ROI « Together, We Can!, June 1, 2009
The Content Economy: 15 quotes to spice up your Enterprise 2.0 business case, June 4, 2009
What grandaddy taught me about Information Flow, June 30, 2009
Collaborative Enterprise: Enterprise 2.0 & The Flywheel, June 30, 2009
Managing the 21st Century Organization, June 29, 2009

Top Keywords

RSS - Knowledge Management - Value - May 2009 - Hot List

Tony Karrer — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 17:40:24 +0000

Work Literacy Hot List -

May 2009

Top Other Items

The following are the top other items based on social signals.

The year of the shift to Enterprise 2.0 | Enterprise Web 2.0 | ZDNet.com, May 23, 2009
Enterprise 2.0 Knowledge Management - A Revolution of Knowledge in Three Parts, May 25, 2009
Collaborative Intelligence for companies - YoolinkPro, May 24, 2009
You Can’t Build a Business Case for Social Software, May 28, 2009
Where Knowledge Management Has Been and Where It Is Going- Part One, May 2, 2009
Knowledge Management: Where We’ve Been and Where We’re Going - Part Two, May 10, 2009
Second-wave adopters are coming. Are you prepared? Part 1 / 3 :: Blog :: Headshift, May 17, 2009
2009 is the year of Enterprise 2.0? Hold your horses | Pretzel Logic - Enterprise 2.0, May 21, 2009
The Helpstream Blog - Helpstream Blog - Communities Shouldn’t Be Islands, May 22, 2009
The Social Software Value Matrix, May 6, 2009
Dr. Bonnie Cheuk: To make Web2.0 work, we need Leadership 2.0, May 17, 2009
Enterprise 2.0 Thoughts to end the week., May 17, 2009
Second-wave adopters are coming. Are you prepared? Part 2 / 3 :: Blog :: Headshift, May 17, 2009
Second-wave adopters are coming. Are you prepared? Part 3 / 3 :: Blog :: Headshift, May 17, 2009
The Science of Experience - TIME, May 28, 2009
Unmanaging knowledge - How to tell the boss to back off | Smart People magazine, May 22, 2009
Micro-blogging at Work, May 30, 2009
Learning 2.0 and Workplace Communities - 2009 - ASTD, May 18, 2009
socialstrategy:start [Practical Participation], May 13, 2009
How to become an expert, May 28, 2009
Enterprise 2.0 and the Hype Cycle - Intranet Blog - ThoughtFarmer, May 28, 2009
Enteprise 2.0 is like consulting the doctor… | Bertrand DUPERRIN’s Notepad, May 24, 2009
LCG Enterprise Technology Blog: ROI on social networking? TransUnion is leading the way., May 14, 2009
WSJ Offers Information Overload 101 Again ” KnowledgeForward, May 26, 2009
The Power of Community | workforce.com, May 28, 2009

Top Keywords

ROI - Social Media - Productivity

Tony Karrer — Thu, 28 May 2009 14:01:44 +0000

Hot List for April 2009 from Work Literacy

Top Other Items

The following are the top other items based on social signals.

Enterprise: List of 40 Social Media Staff Guidelines, April 23, 2009
Determining the ROI of Enterprise 2.0 | Enterprise Web 2.0 | ZDNet.com, April 15, 2009
Conducting intranet needs analysis » Step Two Designs, April 20, 2009
Social Media Case Studies | The Parallax View: Social Media inside the Firewall / Enterprise Social Networks, April 13, 2009
WTF? Military Web 2.0 Report Actually Making Sense | Danger Room from Wired.com, April 20, 2009
Enterprise Web 2.0 » Where is the Business Value in Enterprise 2.0?, April 12, 2009
Enterprise 2.0 and the Trough of Disillusionment « I’m Not Actually a Geek, April 13, 2009
ROI of Social Networking for TransUnion, April 13, 2009
Adventures in Social Media: What Do We Use Our Social Media Software For, Anyway?, April 20, 2009
Enterprise 2.0 Blog » Blog Archive » There is No Such Thing as Culture Change, April 6, 2009
Enterprise 2.0: Natural Disillusionment or a Pipe Dream? | Pretzel Logic, April 13, 2009
Enterprise 2.0 culture barriers: Brick wall or Hurdles? | Pretzel Logic, April 9, 2009
Enterprise 2.0 : the CISCO case | Bertrand DUPERRIN’s Notepad, April 17, 2009
conversation matters: What Do We Get From Conversation That We Can’t Get Any Other Way?, April 14, 2009
Being social at work: which communications model to adopt for the enterprise? | The AppGap, April 29, 2009
ROI 2.0, Part 3: We don’t need a Social Media ROI model « The bamboo raft, April 27, 2009
Masterclass: The cultures of collaboration - Inside Knowledge, April 11, 2009
OpenGov: One big challenge? Or a thousand small hurdles : Tim’s Blog, April 28, 2009
The Enterprise 2.0 LifeCycle – Andrea Baker - Enterprise 2.0 Evangelist, April 7, 2009
Can Enterprise 2.0 help companies innovate? « Breakfast 2.0, April 5, 2009
Weblogg-ed ” New Reading, New Writing, April 23, 2009
Principles for Effective Virtual Teamwork | April 2009 | Communications of the ACM, April 21, 2009
20 Ways to Evaluate Contributions to a Corporate Social Network | Dave Duarte, April 28, 2009
How mind mapping software helps you to work smarter - Mind Mapping …, April 23, 2009
What Leads to Effective Virtual Teamwork?, April 18, 2009
Incredibly Dull: Social Architecture, April 28, 2009
Enterprise 2.0 antipatterns roi and metrics, April 27, 2009
Blogger in Middle-earth: Working With Online Learning Communities, April 14, 2009
Connected - Interesting experiment, or critical to success?, April 20, 2009
Musical chairs … « Inside out, April 19, 2009

Top Keywords

ROI (34)
Social Media (113)
Productivity (71)
Knowledge Management (93)
Adoption (43)
Software (149)
Knowledge (154)
Culture (60)
Collaboration (109)
Technology (135)
Team (83)
Design (84)
Connections (53)
Informal Learning (19)
Value (96)
Attitudes (15)
Learning (145)
Social Search (7)
Social Software (40)

Work Literacy Hot List March 2009

Tony Karrer — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 22:30:14 +0000

Hot List - March 1, 2009 to March 31, 2009

Top Other Items

The following are the top other items based on social signals.

OpenTeams - Collaborative Innovation for The Entrepreneurial Organization, March 5, 2009
Fifty Ways to Take Notes, March 27, 2009
cyn.in> Open source Group Collaboration Software for the Enterprise 2.0, March 11, 2009
VizEdu » Blog Archive » 6 Ways To Make Web2.0 Work, March 11, 2009
PR 2.0: Introducing The Conversation Prism, March 23, 2009
SharePoint 2007: Gateway Drug to Enterprise Social Tools :: Personal InfoCloud, March 16, 2009
How To Network: For Introverts | Business Pundit, March 19, 2009
Microblogging Will Marginalize Corporate Email ” I’m Not Actually a Geek, March 15, 2009
How Much Scale Is Needed in Enterprise 2.0 Employee Adoption? « I’m Not Actually a Geek, March 5, 2009
Why ‘time saved’ and other such nebulous metrics are a cop out for Enterprise 2.0 | Pretzel Logic, March 14, 2009
When Goal Setting Goes Bad — HBS Working Knowledge, March 2, 2009
The Incentive Question or Why People Share Knowledge, March 22, 2009
Five Actions Organizations Can Take to Increase Knowledge Sharing, March 29, 2009
How I Address the Question of Enterprise 2.0 ROI « I’m Not Actually a Geek, March 10, 2009
The FASTForward Blog ” Solving the 1:10:100% problem: Enterprise 2.0 Blog: News, Coverage, and Commentary, March 15, 2009
Managing the Fire Hose | Above and Beyond KM, March 1, 2009
Time Management in the Age of Social Media - BusinessWeek, March 12, 2009
A Journey In Social Media: Understanding Corporate Twitter, March 1, 2009
A Rant on Report Outs, March 2, 2009
Setting up an internal Facebook might just solve your company’s communications and engagement problems | Sharing at Work, March 20, 2009

Top Keywords

2009 (678)
Workflow (32)
Twitter (173)
Communities of Practice (36)
RSS (76)
Productivity (75)
Team (101)
Software (175)
IBM (60)
Connectbeam (10)
Search (134)
Microsoft (78)
Social Media (104)
Facebook (78)

Work Literacy Hot List - Early February

Tony Karrer — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 19:07:50 +0000

Similar to Top on WorkLiteracy in January, here’s the hot list for Feb 1 - Feb 14, 2009.

Hot Items:

Hot Keywords:

Top on WorkLiteracy in January

Tony Karrer — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 14:25:34 +0000

Using the approach described in Hot List, I’ve collected the top posts, items and keywords from Work Literacy based on social signals in January.

12 eLearning Predictions for 2009

Tony Karrer — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 06:00:00 +0000

Last year I laid out in January my Ten Predictions for eLearning 2008. In my post, 2008 2009 - written in December 2008, I looked at how well I did in those predictions, and my results were pretty good, not perfect. So, let’s try it again this year …

#1 - “Self-Directed Learning” Increases

Due to economic pressures, companies are going to reduce training budgets to a point where it doesn’t make sense to create content on marginal topics. Instead, we will call this “self-directed learning” and will do our best to support the workforce to learn it on their own with minimal guidance and support.

#2 - eLearning 2.0 Grows - But Creating “eLearning 2.0 Strategy” Fails

One of the better, cheap support mechanisms for self-directed learning are web 2.0 tools. As such, eLearning 2.0 will show continued growth. We will especially see a rapid growth in the use of wikis for content presentation. There will also be growth in discussions and social networks for collaborative learning.

At the same time, organizations who try to create big eLearning 2.0 Strategies will move much slower than organizations who adopt easy to use tools and make tactical use of these tools.

Corollary: if you have SharePoint installed, you will be using SharePoint a lot more this year.

#3 - Increase in Consumer/Education Social Learning Solutions will Increase Pressure for Social Learning Solutions in Corporate Learning

Sorry, I couldn’t figure out a shorter way to say this. 2008 was an interesting year that saw a myriad of new start-ups offering content through interesting new avenues. Social learning solutions like social homework help provided by Cramster; CampusBug, Grockit, TutorVista, EduFire, English Cafe, and the list goes on and on.

What will happen to about 20% of the workplace learning professionals is that some VP/C level in your company will have their teenager or college age kid use one of these services and tell them about it. They will they proceed to wonder why you aren’t doing something similar.

It’s the change where consumer leads education leads corporate.

#4 - Quick Wins & Toolkits

With the tough economy, everyone will be looking for quick wins. How can you improve performance quickly and at low cost? The answer for many organizations will be less training and more performance support in the form of toolkits. Teach me less about communication and give me more templates for important, tough communication points.

Off-the-shelf content companies will be moving to meet this need by emphasizing quick wins through resources.

#5 - Virtual Classroom Tipping Point

Based on a few different conversations and experiences, I believe that we’ve reached a point where virtual classroom training is no longer seen as inherently inferior and a lower value. Some training will still be preferred face to face such as when team building or in-person soft skills are important, but 2009 will be the year when we realize that we should be justifying any in-person training. Price points for virtual classroom training will begin to be virtually the same as for the same in-person classes.

Corrollary: transition to virtual means greater demand for help on effective virtual classroom training and for people who are good at creation effective remote experiences.

#6 - Greater Domination by Leading Tool Vendors - Captivate, Articulate, Lectora, Camtasia

Captivate 4 is going to be a great tool. Articulate has a great tool set. Lectora is great at packaging. Camtasia is good at screencasting. It’s going to be tough for me-too tools to push out these players in the corporate market. In some settings, free authoring tools may do better, but they probably won’t get much traction in workplace training.

#7 - Niche Tools Emerge and Get Traction in Niches

So the caveat to the above statement about the big players getting bigger is that I believe we will see more and more niche tools get traction. We’ve seen some traction by the game show type tools such as those by LearningWare. We may also see use of Flash Quiz Tools, polls, survey tools or something like Harbinger Knowledge’s Team Pod. These things can create fun interactions that easily fit into a course built with one of the above tools. They also fit into a wiki page. It’s also interesting to see effort’s like Articulate’s Community Interactions - which is essentially the ability to add specialized interactions including new types of interactions from the developer community.

#8 - More Wiki Pages - Same Authored Minutes - Less Classroom Minutes

I pretty much already said this, but I might as well mention it again. The above trends around eLearning 2.0, self-directed learning, quick wins and toolkits all suggest that more web pages - authored via wikis - will be the name of the game in 2009. The goal of lower cost will continue the transition from classroom to courseware which will keep the total number of authored minutes about the same, even with the move of content from courses to web pages.

#9 - Knowledge Worker Skills

Topic growing rapidly, problem getting recognized, more and more people offering workshops and solutions to address this

I realized in 2007 that there’s a very important Knowledge Worker Skill Gap
emerging. In 2008, I felt compelled to launch Work Literacy, and help help people and organizations upgrade skills like Leveraging Networks, Network Feedback, Finding Expertise, Using Social Media to Find Answers to Questions, Learning through Conversation and searching, scanning, etc.

2009 is going to be a big year for this issue. The fact that this is one of the general sessions at ASTD TechKnowledge is interesting way to start 2009. We are now offering a Work Literacy Skills Workshop. This is going to get more and more attention this year. Especially as employers move more towards self-directed learning.

#10 - Mobile Learning Niche Growth

Last year I said mobile learning would be well below where people were expecting. While I still think this will be a relatively small percentage of activity, this year, I expect to be a year in which mobile becomes more I believe that we will see continued increase in the percentage of people walking around with mobile web access. This will offer increased interesting opportunities such as:

Real-time Polls - We are just beginning to see tools like Poll Everywhere that allow mobile polling. That way an audience sitting at an in-person conference will have some of the capabilities that they do online. (Did I mention the move towards virtual classroom?)
Job aids / quick reference - about 30% of you are going to be asked to make sure your content is viewable on an iPhone.
Podcasts / Vidcasts targeting mobile professionals (ex. sales people)
Sales challenge scoreboard - For some mobile professionals, specific types of content such as sales challenges will be delivered through mobile solutions.

At the same time, the wild enthusiasm for mobile learning that was present in 2007 and died down a bit in 2008, will remain somewhat subdued. And we won’t see much adoption as the central vehicle for learning content delivery.

#11 - Micro Virtual Conferences

The move towards acceptance of virtual classroom means that there will slowly begin to be acceptance of virtual conferences. Conferences this year will also do this because their other alternative is to be canceled from lack of people able to pay for travel. But because we are all going to be maxed out, expected to do 10% more work with 10% less people, we won’t have time to go for several days. Instead, we will see the creation of things that are in between a full virtual conference and something that’s a few sessions. These things will be more targeted and deeper. Many of them will be from ad hoc sources, such as George, Jay and myself.

#12 - Data Driven

With the economic situation, there will be greater demand for results and thus more interest in data-driven performance solutions.

Remote Collaboration

Tony Karrer — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 06:00:00 +0000

My primary interest here are the methods and tools that allow us to work better as part of remote work teams. In other words -

How do we collaborate together in remote work teams to be as effective or even more effective than a team that works down the hall?

Let me admit that I’m likely in over my head when talking about methods and tools for collaboration. I cannot claim to be an expert, and I feel like this topic demands a lot of soft skills such as communication skills, team skills, handling cultural and work style issues, etc. as well as knowing about tools and methods.

My focus in this post is mostly on the Tool Set and a little bit about methods - as is the focus of this series. So, this post is only a small portion of the answer.

I’m particularly drawing on both personal experience and on experience with the work skills workshops we are offering. At the start of these workshops, we put people into remote work teams. At the core, when I look at what a team needs, it’s a pretty simple list:

Real-time

Voice
Screen Sharing
Document Editing (sometimes)

Asynchronous

Share / collaborate on documents, web pages
Discussion
Notification

Of course, I’m simplifying by leaving out things like video chat, recording, etc.

Real-time Voice

I have had great success with a number of tools. So while I’m listing the following because they are good initial choices, there are a lot of Collaboration Tools out there.

Skype - Fantastic voice tool for 1-to-1 as well as conference calls up to 25 people. See: Quick Start Guide for New Skype Users.

Freeconference.com - For times when someone cannot be online, this service works great to establish a quick conference line.

Real-time Screen Sharing

Again, same caveat - lots of great tools that provide screen sharing. A few starting points:

Adobe Connect Now - free online meetings for up to three people.

DimDim - Still a little rough around the edges, but a great, free tool.

Real-time Document Editing

I’ve had two experiences recently that have really struck me around real-time document editing.

One was having a small (7 person) project team get together on a conference call and have all of us editing the status report real-time via Google Spreadsheets. You could see where people are working. People moved ahead of the conversation and updated status notes so we could skip them. We found we would discuss what needed to be discussed, agree on the next step and see it appear real-time. You leave the meeting with an agreed to status report, action steps, etc. It’s truly a thing of beauty.

The other experience I mentioned in Real-Time Collaborative Editing, Robin Good used MindMeister to allow participants to collectively edit a Mind Map during a session at the Learning Trends. It resulted in a great learning experience and a quite good resource.

Asynchronous Content Sharing / Editing

In terms of using these products with remote work teams, Google Spreadsheets seems to have hit the most important items for me. In addition to the real-time editing described above, it also has notifications of changes to people who are collaborating on the document. For some (inexplicable) reason, Google Docs does not.

I also heavily use Wikis, especially when the desired result is a set of web pages. I recommend pbWiki as an easy to use Wiki solution. If you are not familiar with Wikis - here’s a quick introduction -

Here are additional resources for people new to Wikis collected as part of the Work Literacy course:

5 Uses for a Wiki at Work

Wikis as Personal Space

Examples of Educational Wikis
Horizon Project–Vicki Davis’s “Flat Classroom Project”–outstanding example of how to use a wiki for learning.
Wiki Wake-up Call and Use Cases
WikiPatterns–A great collection of patterns and “anti-patterns” that spur (or impede) wiki adoption

Because I use Delicious as part of my better memory, I like it when work teams use it to share web pages that are relevant to the team. To do that, you must first agree on a tag to use to indicate it’s part of the work teams’ effort. You should already be doing that individually, this only requires an added step of getting agreement with the group.

The next level of my better memory was taking notes. I mentioned that I either do that through working documents or through a blog. Those exact mechanisms should be extended out to the work team. Blogs are an excellent way to allow the work team to see stream of thought of team members.

Other tools that fit into sharing content:

Google Calendar - great calendar tool especially when collaborating on calendars.
Xdrive: Online storage to share files.
YouSendIt: Clean way to send large files.
Flickr: Share and find photos.

Asynchronous Discussion

I personally have found that Ning works great as a tool for all sorts of different needs. Creating a new Ning network is very easy and it gives you a lot of what you would want / need as a work team. Here are a couple of quick guides to getting started on Ning:

How to Create Your Own Social Network with Ning

Start Your Own Social Network in Minutes with Ning

Of course, if you’ve not yet joined some of the existing Learning Communities on Ning, then go do that right now so you are used to how it works.

Work Team Notification

Notification of team members of what’s going on with the team is incredibly important. I already mentioned that the fact that Google Docs does not support notification makes it more difficult to use as a solution.

The bottom line on most work teams is that you want to have a reliable notification of changes, discussion, etc. done by the team; to the appropriate channel; with the appropriate frequency. There are two primary notification channels that most work teams wants:

Email - periodic or real-time notification of changes.
RSS - feed changes into an RSS reader that will be checked as needed

As members of the work team, we should be able to control what goes where and with what frequency.

Teamwork Tips and Skills

If you want a lot more on this, you can go to: http://delicious.com/tag/virtualteams

Other Collaboration Tools

There are a lot of tools that can be considered Collaboration Tools.

Other Posts in the Series

Tool Set 2009
Work Skills Keeping Up
Top-Down Strategy
Better Memory
Information Radar
Networks and Learning Communities
Collaborate
Twitter as Personal Work and Learning Tool
Search
Browser Short Cuts
Work Literacy Workshop

Networks and Communities

Tony Karrer — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 06:01:00 +0000

Mercenary Rationale for Network Work & Learning

As I discussed in Evaluating Performance of Concept Workers, evaluating the performance of a concept worker is difficult because there’s no right answer and most often the evaluator knows less about the subject than the worker.

Thus, the bottom line in evaluating a concept workers performance is by looking at:

Was a reasonable process used?
Are the conclusions reasonable?
How would this compare to results from other concept workers?

To make sure you pass this test - I suggest cheating. And there is no better cheat for the concept worker than reaching out to other people to test your process and conclusions. Basically make sure you can say,

“Look, I talked to a couple of people who have done this before. They said I’ve gone through the right steps. I’ve looked at the right stuff. My answer seems pretty reasonable. If they would have done it, they would have come up with the same thing.”

Limits of Search

In Value from Social Media, I looked at a scenario where I’m evaluating a particular solution for my company / organization. Through Google, I find a lot of information. But in many cases, I will still be left feeling uncomfortable …

What’s really going to happen?
Did I miss something important?
How important are the various issues?
Is my answer reasonable?

These are common questions when only search is used. Often it’s difficult to use search to address:

Experience - What have been the experiences of other organizations (not the canned case studies) when they’ve used this solution.
Boundaries / Existence - I’ve got a particular issue and I’m not sure if answers to that issue exist out there, I’ve not found it in my searching.
Confirmation - I’m beginning to have an answer, but I’d like to get confirmation of the answer based on my particular situation based on experience.
Importance - Some of the issues I see, I’m not sure how important they are in practice, should I be concerned.

However, each of these can be directly addressed through conversation. This is why I say that Leveraging Networks is Key Skill.

I’m coming to believe this is the most important Knowledge Worker Skill Gap.

Network Readiness

Before you can reach into a network or community to seek conversation, you generally need to have spent time on

Building some level of connection (network building).
Being ready to engage to seek conversation (network access).

Patti Anklam, in Seven Leaders Lessons tells us:

High-performing people tend to have stronger, more intentional networks.

The word “intentional” is intentional. You have to look systematically at your networks and communities to be in position to be able to use them as part of your work and learning. As part of your top-down evaluation, one of the points you have to evaluate is whether you have appropriate networks and communities. Even if you are a member of LinkedIn, you may not have links to people in the right fields. Thus, you may have to spend time building some initial links so that you can reach out effectively. Similarly, you should spend a bit of time finding the right communities.

I personally do a lot of my network building slowly. I try to get people into my networks when I meet them (for example connect on LinkedIn). I keep my ears open for new communities and often lurk for a while to see what’s going to happen there.

When I’m relatively new to an area, then I spend much more time building my network. Recently I started up with a new client in a new area. I spent a good chunk of time my first month reaching out (mostly through LinkedIn) to make connections with people who had lots of related experience to get thoughts and ideas around particular issues that we might face - and found a lot more issues that I hadn’t considered. I also signed up to a couple Ning communities where I’m lurking. Now I have a great starting point when I want further conversation.

Conversation Seeking

So bottom line is that it’s really important for us to be able to seek out different forms of conversation inside and especially outside our organizations. There are a myriad of different places and ways to seek conversations.

A few months ago, we asked how people went about deciding where and how to seek conversations. The answer was, as always, it depends.

Karyn Romeis uses a series that goeses from people she already knows who might be experts then to less known connections. She looks at distance vs. likelihood vs. experience vs. cost.

Karl Kapp makes the point that you should ask in multiple places because you never know who might have the answer and the overall cost is negligible.

I think there’s some risk of being spammy if you ask too broad, but Karl has somewhat convinced me that what I really need:

Find networks and communities related to my future needs
Know mechanisms used to seek conversations in these networks and communities
Build enough connection into networks and communities to be ready to leverage
Be able to quickly and with minimal effort seek conversation in appropriate networks and communities.

So, it’s being aware of what’s available, getting integrated enough to have it open for use, and be able to navigate it when you need it.

The top two slam dunk answers here are:

LinkedIn
Various learning communities

I personally also use my blog and twitter

Blog
Twitter

If you look at my top two, they would both be called social networks.

Introduction to Social Networking

Before You Seek Conversation

There’s an acronym that everyone should know - RTFM. It stands for Read the Friggin Manual. It’s a common response to stupid questions posted in certain communities. To me its a reminder that before you ever seek a conversation you should have done your homework.

Your homework is:

Search the web - save related content
Search the community / network for prior discussion - save related
Maybe ask someone you know already for a reality check

This arms you with the basics before you ask your question or seek conversation. It also allows you to ask the best kind of question -

I’ve searched on the web and in this community for information on X and I found A, B, C.

But I am not finding Y, I’d like to find people who can help.

-or-

I’m concluding Z, but I’d like to talk to people who have done this.

You are showing that you’ve done your homework. Your question will be much more interesting. You are providing value via the question with the appropriate links. And this form of inquiry gets much better response.

You will notice that in this template question, I am asking for a conversation. In some cases, I will change it to ask for written responses.

There’s quite a bit about the use of LinkedIn for this purpose, so rather than reciting it here, please go check out:

For me, the bottom line usage of LinkedIn really comes down to three primary activities:

Seeking conversation directly - LinkedIn for Finding Expertise
Asking questions to get written answers and to seek conversation - Searching for Expertise - LinkedIn Answers. Note: I often try to connect with people who provide answers directly (via Skype or phone) to discuss in more detail.
Having discussions via groups - which acts much like questions and I do the same thing.

It’s very interesting to see how LinkedIn Answers and Groups has given us new opportunities to surface interested experts and having that connected to known mechanisms for sparking conversation.

If you’ve never approached a few people for a conversation on a topic via LinkedIn, then you should make that happen within the next month.

Learning Communities

The key here is to have ready access to a variety of communities. Take a look at the Learning Communities List.

Additional Reading

Patti Anklam has a series on living in a network age:

From her series:

High-performing people tend to have stronger, more intentional networks.

Other Related Tools and Methods

MetaFilter - Answers to Anything

Information Radar

Tony Karrer — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 08:06:00 +0000

For many of the roles and projects you will be involved in, part of what you need to be able to do is to put yourself in a continuous learning mode. You need information radar that continuously scans for new, quality information that you should be aware of. And certainly, you have to be able to quickly commit it to your metamemory.

Information Addiction

Let me start this topic with a word of caution. Most of you reading this are infovores. When you find new nuggets of information, you get a chemical reaction in your brain much like an opium hit. This reaction causes you to seek more information. In other words, you are quite literally an information addict. Be careful about feeding your habit.

Assess Information Sources

For this reason, I always start any new task, project, role with an honest assessment of whether I really need to be actively tuned into information and what information that is.

You should also periodically go back to your top-down strategy, assess your specific information objectives and then make a deliberate assessment of different information sources. Which newspapers, magazines, journals, news sources, blogs should you look at, how often, how high a priority is this?

Also assess current information sources to see which can be removed. Managing your RSS Feeds has some good suggestions on how to do assessment in an ongoing basis using quarantine folders.

With that caution, here are some thoughts on the methods and tools I use as part of my information radar.

RSS Readers

A central tool for my information radar is my RSS reader. It allows me to gather information from all kinds of sources (blogs, publications, wikis, calendars, etc.) If you are new to the world of RSS readers and subscribing to blogs, here are some good starting points.

Skim and Remember

In Stop Reading - Skim Dive Skim, I proposed that for most of the information we come across via our information radar, we will not read it. Instead we will, skim, dive, skim. And then quickly add it to our better memory.

Remembering content I’ve seen via my RSS Reader has changed a bit over the past few years. I used to use Keep New or Favorites to save items that I thought were interesting but that I didn’t have time to read or process at that moment. I found that it scattered a big part of my memory into another source, so I’ve stopped using these techniques.

Thus, while I’m scanning I have three levels of remember ready to apply:

1. Visit Pages - If a post, article, etc. looks like it might ever be worth remembering, then I visit the page and skim it there so it goes into Google History. Posts that you have seen in your reader but not visited are not in Google History. They are searchable via the RSS Reader, but that requires that you remember how your originally encountered the information. I believe I’m better off with fewer places to search for things I’ve seen.

2. Tag Page - If while skimming the article you visited, it looks like something I might need later (future anticpated information need), then I save/tag it in delicious.

3. Notes / Blog - As I skim dive skim, I often will take notes into working documents or blog posts about anything that is interesting. I do this more to help me process the material. But it also helps to surface it again. Make sure you save a link to the source as well.

Information Trickles

For information needs where I want a trickle of information to be coming through and if I miss something “interesting” its not a problem. I’m looking for filtering the content to find the best stuff within a narrow range.

Aggregator Blogs. These folks scan through content in a given area and point you to the stuff they feel is most interesting. The three that jump to mind in the world of learning and eLearning are: OL Daily, Big Dog Little Dog, and eLearning Learning.
Delicious Popular. Use delicious popular such as http://delicious.com/popular/elearning this shows web pages that many people are tagging with a particular tag. There is a feed for any delicious page including the popular pages.

Information Floods

For areas where I want to be fairly actively engaged in a continuous flow and there’s a greater need to see most everything, I use:

Google Blog Search - use this to scan for very specific terms and/or links in posts. Unfortunately, it’s a bit broken right now and shows you more than you want but a fix is promised.
Google Alerts - similar to blog search but use this to scan for terms outside of blogs.
Delicious tags - you can subscribe to a particular delicious tag such as http://delicious.com/tag/elearning2.0 or http://delicious.com/tag/workliteracy or http://delicious.com/popular/elearning
Twitter - can provide you a flood of real-time, 140 character posts from people who you follow. I’ll talk more about twitter in a later post, but in the meantime, before you go and sign up for too much twitter, please read Twitter - Nevermind.

Other Tools

AideRSS - can be used to limit a given blog or set of blogs to the top few.

Blogging

For me, blogging fits into more than one category. I’m choosing to put it here as I most often use it as a means of processing information that I come across as part of my continuous learning strategy. It definitely moves beyond a simple information radar and into something more. It also is a big part of my networking and community strategy.

As a starting point

Taking Notes

As an alternative to blogging, another option to help remember and process what you are finding through your information radar is the act of taking notes. There are a variety of tools that you can use. I hate to say it, but I still use notepad or Word. Since I rely on desktop search, they work okay for me. My guess is that in another year I’ll have a different answer.

Independent of the tool, research shows that the act of taking active notes - not verbatim notes but higher level cognitive notes - while you are receiving information improves encoding. Thus, its fair to assume (though I don’t have research proof on this) that while you are skim-dive-skimming active note taking means greater encoding.

Several people have suggested to me that it’s significantly easier to take notes on paper while reviewing online. Ummm … no it’s not. Keep a narrow window open alongside your browser that allows you to copy and paste and add your notes. Oh, and make sure you include the URL. I hate it when I find my notes but then have to search for the page again in my bookmarks or via Google search.

By the way, this is the same technique I use when I’m talking to someone on the phone or in a meeting. A narrow window for capturing real-time thoughts works well for me. Oh, wait, am I talking about better memory now or information radar. I guess it’s both.

A big part of effective information radar is doing more than just having it temporarily pass by your eyeballs.

It’s adding it to memory and processing it appropriately.

Better Memory

Tony Karrer — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 06:00:00 +0000

In Your Outboard Brain Knows All, Clive Thompson talks about how our need to remember is changing.

Neuroscientist Ian Robertson polled 3,000 people and found that the younger ones were less able than their elders to recall standard personal info. When Robertson asked his subjects to tell them a relative’s birth date, 87 percent of respondents over age 50 could recite it, while less than 40 percent of those under 30 could do so. And when he asked them their own phone number, fully one-third of the youngsters drew a blank. They had to whip out their handsets to look it up.

The reality is that we were all trained in school to use metacognitive / metamemory methods and tools as a supplement to our knowledge. I’m only 43, but posts like New Work Skills are a bit of an eye opener that we were taught metacognition using note taking on paper, card catalogs, microfiche readers, rollodex, etc.

For many of us, Nick Carr’s words ring true:

… the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind.

The reality is that metacognitive techniques are changing rapidly - hence so are work skills.

Better Memory Tools and Methods

If you are experience more and more of your information electronically, it stands to reason that we need to be good at effectively using this as a better memory. Most of the people who take our workshops on work skills, say that improving their ability around their ability to remember and organize information is one of the most valuable aspects.

In work literacy terms, better memory relates to keep / organize / refind /remind.

A perfect keep / organize / refind / remind system:

Keep everything ever encountered (without effort)
Organize it (with little to no effort)
Allow you to refind something you’ve seen before instantly based on incomplete information
Create lists and other reminders so that you don’t have to even remember that you know it - i.e., list of people on the team, list of blog posts to go back and read, etc.

There’s a lot that goes on around this and when you look at different projects and roles, this gets pretty varied, but let me explore a few different tools and methods that I apply to this that gets helps me is this area:

Google History - saves every page I’ve visited without me having to do anything and allows me to search for anything I’ve ever viewed at a later time. I don’t like to have to use it, but it’s a great back-up when I’ve not saved something another way.
Delicious - Use this social bookmarking tool to save pages with tags as the organizer for me to get back to at a later time. Since this is likely the one that is most new to people, I’ll dive into more detail below.
Firefox Bookmarks - For pages that I want to launch all the time. I’ll get back to this below.
Microsoft Desktop Search - Desktop search has probably had the greatest productivity improvement for me over the past few years. Google Desktop Search is also great, but I personally have had better results with Microsoft’s integration with Outlook and I’m a heavy Outlook user.

Social Bookmarking

If you are not familiar with social bookmarking tools, I would start with the video above and go to the following to get yourself up to speed.

Then I would make sure I know the basics about using tags.

Choose existing tags to avoid misspelt tags (e.g., libary, libray).
Group compound terms together (e.g., personalLearning)
Use plurals to define categories (e.g., blogs)
Don’t use symbols in tags with the exception of a tag like eLearning2.0 where the “.” is okay. Don’t use # or _

Social Bookmarking as Metamemory

What often gets left out of the discussion of social bookmarking is where it fits into keep / organize / refind / remind. I like to think about the main tools I use somewhat in a series:

Bookmarks in Browser - It’s things you want to launch all the time. I put links to sites that I go to all the time here.
Bookmarks in Social Bookmarking Tool - This is where I proactively keep, organize (and sometimes share) things. I use tags to organize according to topic, role, project, group of people. This creates multiple lists for reminding.
Blogging - I use a blog or note taking as an added level of processing on information that I consume. Short notes on a single resource can be added to the social bookmark. More substantial notes need to get captured somewhere.
Google History - a fall back in case I didn’t know at the time that I would want to get back to an item.

I think of the bookmarks in the browse similar to documents in recent or linked on my desktop. These are things that I want to launch often. I think of bookmarks in my social bookmarking tool as items that I want to organize into lists and be able to easily get back to later. This is similar to documents in folders. And Google History is a bit like desktop search. In case I wasn’t willing to spend the time to save it, I still have a chance of finding it again.

Anticipated Need

The key term in all of this is anticipated need. You could spend all of your time keeping and organizing content. But the real goal is to spend the least amount of time to meet your future needs to refind and remind. The trick is that you often don’t know what those needs will be. So, you are basing this all on your anticipated needs. This is also why spending some time on the top-down analysis is a great exercise. It will help you think through information needs today.

Three Metamemory Practices

#1 - Name Everything

Whenever you start a new project, start working with a new group, take on a new role, or start a new major concept work task, spend just a little time upfront anticipating your needs. Most importantly, at the start name everything and everyone and stick to that name. Every project gets a name. Every person gets a name. It takes a few seconds, but it saves you a lot in time spent refinding and reminding. This name then is on every folder, document, email, tag, etc.

#2 - Include Meta Information

The other practice to follow is to include enough information somewhere associated with every object (document, email, bookmark) so that you can find it again via search. Every email should have in the subject line or somewhere in the message. Even if the sender doesn’t put it in there, put it in the response. I also tend to try to put in the names of participants in meetings in my notes and possibly other names like the client. All of this makes searching SO MUCH EASIER.

This is a big reason why I say that desktop search has become my biggest productivity boost.

#3 - Visit Every Page

Theoretically you can use Google to refind whatever you found before. But I often find that doesn’t seem to work in practice. Thus, I make sure that any page that I might ever want to see again, I visit. That puts it into my Google History. My chances of finding it again go up considerably. This also means that when you find a magazine article that’s interesting. You should go visit it online as well. That’s extra work, but it makes it refindable.

Other Posts in the Series

Tool Set 2009
Work Skills Keeping Up
Top-Down Strategy
Better Memory
Information Radar
Networks and Learning Communities
Collaborate
Twitter as Personal Work and Learning Tool
Search
Browser Short Cuts
Work Literacy Workshop

From Knowledgable to Knowledge-able by Wesch

joanvinallcox — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 06:16:43 +0000

Academic Commons

Michael Wesch is a pedagogical hero of mine. I’ve watched videos his classes made; I’ve watched a video of him explaining his teaching, and I asked a question on Twitter, and even though he doesn’t follow me, got an anwser from him within a few hours! He understands the impact of the new communication ecosphere we swim in, applies his understanding to his teaching, and can explain clearly why this is urgently central to education.

Here is a link to my highlighted copy of his recent Academic Commons article - From Knowledgable to Knowledge-able which I discovered via Stephen Downes. Indeed, as Wesch says, you set up your network and information comes to you.

learning netgen Stephen Downes learning 2.0 wikis web2.0 webtools technology video Downes Wikipedia communication WorkLiteracy Michael Wesch wiki education

Work Literacy Skills - New Workshop

Tony Karrer — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 07:00:00 +0000

Harold Jarche, Michele Martin and I are pleased to announce a new workshop offering that relates to the recent posts on Tool Set 2009 and to the issues of Work Literacy.

Work Literacy Skills Workshop

Was the last formal training you had on knowledge work skills the use of a card catalog and microfiche reader? You aren’t alone in that. While there has been incredible innovation in tools and methods that support personal work and learning over the past 10 years, most of us have had a hard time with our Work Skills Keeping Up. We are left trying to figure out where all these new tools fit in our day-to-day work life and our professional life.

This workshop is a hands-on, collaborative, fun experience focused on the new knowledge tools and methods that are core to effective work. It will focus on what is important to learning professionals.

The workshop puts you into small groups of fellow professionals as you work as a remote work team to experience first-hand the use of these tools in work and learning settings.

What You Get

Foundational methods for effective work and learning in a network
Hands-on use of various tools to give direct experience of their effectiveness
Job aids for after the workshop
Introduction to an international network of learning professionals

Workshop Format

We have designed this workshop for either a one-day, in-person session with an online follow-up, or an online workshop with a flexible format. The online session is designed to support small groups of learning professionals going through at the same time. Participants are partnered in small teams as they work together learning new methods and tools. The specific length of time and scheduling is flexible given the availability of the teams involved.

Participants

The workshop is designed to work well for learning professionals and delivered through:

Learning Departments
ASTD Chapters

If you are an individual or small learning department interested in participating, then please contact us, and we will see if we can have you participate in a public workshop or via an ASTD Chapter.

Topics Include

Collaborative Work and Learning
Top-Down Work Tools and Methods Assessment
Better Memory
Information Radar
Networks and Communities
Search
Collaborative, Informal, Self-Direct Learning

Instructors

Harold Jarche has found a passion in the area of sharing, learning, reflecting, and collaborating using Web tools such as social network systems, blogs, and wikis. He constantly tries out new tools and techniques, and then uses his pragmatic business bent to recommend the right ones for clients and colleagues. Harold has been a freelance consultant for the past five years, and blogs about learning and working on the Web at jarche.com. Previously, Harold worked as a Chief Learning Officer of an e-Learning company, Project Manager at a university, and Training Development Officer with the Canadian Forces.

Michele Martin is an independent consultant who specializes in using social media tools to support learning, and career and professional development. She has worked with federal, state, and local governments, nonprofits, and corporations to design and deliver a variety of learning interventions. She used online tools such as forums, listservs, and a “virtual office” to support learning in the late 1990s, and has added tools such as blogs, wikis and social networks. She’s a co-founder with Tony Karrer of Work Literacy, a network of individuals, companies, and organizations focusing on the frameworks, skills, methods, and tools of modern knowledge work. Michele blogs at The Bamboo Project.

Tony Karrer is CEO/CTO of TechEmpower, a founder of Work Literacy, and a well-known consultant, speaker, writer, and trainer on e-Learning and Performance Support. He has twenty years’ experience as a CTO and leader of software development, and eleven years experience as an associate professor of Computer Science. He works as an interim CTO for many start-ups, and was the founding CTO at eHarmony. His work has won awards, and has led him into engagements at many Fortune 500 companies including Citibank, Lexus, Microsoft, Nissan, IBM, and Hewlett-Packard, among others. His blog eLearning Technology won the best e-Learning Blog award the past two years.

For More Information

Contact:

Dr. Tony Karrer
akarrer@techempower.com

Top-Down Strategy

Tony Karrer — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 06:12:00 +0000

Most descriptions of tool sets start with the tools and proceed to describe the features of the tools. Starting with the tools is what I consider to be a bottom-up approach. It’s left to the reader to interpret where they fit into their day-to-day concept work. I understand why most authors start with the tool. Trying to fit any tool into the myriad of different work lives is really hard. For example, where does blogging fit - well it depends on who you are talking to.

From the perspective of identifying a tool set for yourself, I recommend looking top-down as well.

What’s a top-down strategy?

I’m sure there can be many top-down strategies, but for myself and in workshops I use a particular top-down strategy. It starts by looking at your key knowledge work:

Roles
Projects

For myself, these might be:

Roles

Small Business Owner
Manager
Acting CTO
Community organizer
Expert / Speaker / Writer
Client Advisor
Family Vacation Planner
Fine Dining Planner
etc.

Projects

Design and Conduct Workshops
New product design
Online workshop
eLearning Learning product design
Staying up-to-speed on eLearning 2.0
Spring break plans
etc.

Aside - Speaking of Spring Break plans, does someone want a workshop in an exotic location over spring break?

For each role and project, I ask myself:

What are the key tasks?
What methods and tools do I use for that task?
What information do I regularly consume?
What do I regularly produce?
What sometimes goes wrong or seems harder than it should be? (Problems)
Where do I believe I could have opportunity for improvement? (Opportunities)

I generally look back at the Knowledge Work Framework and its task categories as a trigger to remind me of these things. In other words:

Scan - Staying up-to-speed on a topic.
Find - Includes Evaluate, Narrow / Adjust
Keep / Organize / Refind / Remind
Leverage / Present
Network
Collaborate

I do all of this in a Word document - capturing it as a series of notes. I make sure to identify how my roles and projects fit with the tools and methods that I use. I look closely at my information consumption. And where I spend time. I highlight anywhere that I’ve identified problems or opportunities.

Based on having done this exercise formally or informally with quite a few people, I can almost guarantee that you will have a few aha moments. Many times it is simply because you force yourself to ask the question - is there a better way to handle this situation.

This also sets you up for aha moments as you encounter information along the way. Any information source that was not in your list should be questioned. If it wasn’t on your list, is it just entertainment? Or is there an additional role or project that I should have thought about? Maybe I should get out of the way of this information source?
A really great exercise is to go through this with a peer or as part of a workshop … hint …

Spend some time to do this reflection, it’s well worth it.

Other Posts in the Series

Tool Set 2009
Work Skills Keeping Up
Top-Down Strategy
Better Memory
Information Radar
Networks and Learning Communities
Collaborate
Twitter as Personal Work and Learning Tool
Search
Browser Short Cuts

Work Skills Keeping Up?

Tony Karrer — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 06:00:00 +0000

In New Work and New Work Skills, I discuss the fact that most of us have not participated in formal learning since college on foundational knowledge work skills - especially metacognitive skills. Our last formal learning used card catalogs, microfiche readers, Xerox machines, libraries, etc.

Most of us have strong skills in some areas and are much weaker in others simply due to the fact that we acquire our skills in completely ad hoc ways.

When were you taught:

how to take take notes on a laptop during a meeting,
how to filter a flood of new content,
how to reach out via networks to find expertise,
how to leverage the wisdom of crowds?

Tilde Effect

What epitomizes the situation for me is the Google ~ operator. A lot of people who are concept workers use Google every day and have no idea that the ~ operator even exists. Sure they can get along without it. I only use it in about 2-3% of my searches. And folks can probably get along without using the filetype, inurl or a myriad of other search operators and techniques.

But, the fact that concept workers claim in surveys to be above average in their search skills but they don’t incorporate these operators tells me that there’s a gap.

Tilde Effect - gap between available tools and methods and the average capabilities of concept workers due to the ad hoc nature of work skills acquisition.

My strong belief is that the foundations of knowledge work are changing fairly quickly and most of us learn completely through ad hoc mechanisms that are not likely to yield good coverage. If you could have an expert look over your shoulder at how you do things on a day-to-day basis, you likely could find many improvements. Every one of us would be somewhat embarrassed to have that expert sitting there because we know that we could stand to do things better.

Tangible Impact

The Tilde Effect at an individual level has massive aggregate impact.

A recently released Workplace Productivity Survey, reported by MSNBC, had the following findings:

62 percent of professionals report that they spend a lot of time sifting through irrelevant information to find what they need;
68 percent wish they could spend less time organizing information and more time using the information that comes their way.
85 percent agree that not being able to access the right information at the right time is a huge time-waster.
More than 40 percent of the survey participants indicate an inability to handle future increases in information flow.
White-collar professionals spend an average of 2.3 hours daily conducting online research, with one in 10 spending four hours or more on an average day.

The figure from Basex as reported in the New York Times of $650B as the cost of information overload is staggering.

When you couple this with the fact that we have moved to a knowledge economy where the dominant value is our concept work capabilities and where pace needs to be continually faster - we can’t afford to have a workforce that lags in their concept work skills.

Bottom Line

The bottom line for the Tilde Effect is that we live in a time of incredible innovation that directly affect the methods we use to work and learn. Our work skills cannot sit still. There’s a lot of discussion about 21st century skills to be taught in schools, but what about the rest of us?

And how important is this? Let me rely on a few other people to help here:

We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.
Roy Amara, Institute for the Future.

It’s not the strongest of the species that survive, it’s the ones most adaptable to change.
Darwin

Being adaptable in a flat world, knowing how to ‘learn how to learn,’ will be one of the most important assets any worker can have, because job churn will come faster, because innovation will happen faster.
Friedman

The most important contribution management needs to make in the 21st Century is to increase the productivity of the knowledge worker.
Drucker

We are truly in a time of incredible innovation of work skills. We are struggling to keep up. And we need to collectively be focused on this issue!

Other Posts in the Series

Tool Set 2009
Work Skills Keeping Up
Top-Down Strategy
Better Memory
Information Radar
Networks and Learning Communities
Collaborate
Twitter as Personal Work and Learning Tool
Search
Browser Short Cuts

Tool Set 2009

Tony Karrer — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 05:16:00 +0000

I thought I’d kick off this year by posting a series of posts on topics related to tools and methods for work and learning. I’m hoping to address questions such as:

How do you create a personal tool set or Personal Learning Environment (PLE) for yourself? What should be in your tool set? What are the most important methods to adopt in addition to the tools? Should twitter be part of your tool set?

The information in this series has been something I’ve been presenting, writing, blogging about and more recently doing workshops around.

But I’m worried, because while I just got through writing about my concern in Using SharePoint that learning organizations seemed to be making the same mistake of Not Preparing Workers for Web 2.0. Setting up a SharePoint for a community or work team is very different from teaching them about Personal Learning. It is our personal and professional responsibility to Improve Personal Learning - A Continuing Challenge for Learning Professionals.

In fact, the lack of attention to this topic was the reason I founded Work Literacy in June of 2008. I still don’t think it is getting nearly the attention it deserves. But hopefully 2009 will be the year when that begins to change.

As an aside, what finally pushed me to create this series was a great post by Sue Waters’ about creating your own personal learning network (PLN). This made me look back at a post I did quite a while ago - Personal Learning for Learning Professionals - Using Web 2.0 Tools to Make Reading & Research More Effective. And I realized that I really needed to get moving on this topic again. So, here goes …

What is a Tool Set?

First, let me say that we all have a tool set and a set of methods and frameworks that go along with that tool set. We may not think of this in terms of a personal learning environment and a particular set of methods, but it’s there. Being unconscious about your tool set is unconscionable.

Sue’s description of a personal learning network is:

Personal Learning Networks (PLNs) are all about using web tools such as blogs, wiki, twitter, facebook to create connects with others which extend our learning, increases our reflection while enabling us to learn together as part of a global community.

This sounds a lot like a personal learning environment, personal knowledge management (PKM) and personal work and learning environment (PWLE) and PIM. Yes there are distinctions, but probably not worth considering. So, for the purpose of this description, I’m going to focus on day-to-day tools that the average concept worker should have in their tool set and discuss a few methods for using these tools.

Tool Sets are Personal

A caveat that I make in every presentation on this topic is that studies of personal information management repeatedly show that tool sets and methods for personal work and learning are personal. The same tool and method can be highly effective for one person and not effective for others. It depends heavily on the person, the job, the needs, etc. Thus, whenever I say you “should” be using this tool, I really mean you should try this tool out and consider adopting it.

No Excuses

At one presentation someone told me that it was okay for them not to know about tools and methods because “they would find out about them when they needed them.” I don’t believe that this is really true. If you are unaware of particular tools then you don’t know when they would be useful. And once you begin to really fall behind on this stuff, your skills will atrophy to the point where you are hopeless. There are no excuses. You need to understand your choices, try new methods and tools and adopting practices that improve your work and learning skills. We are all too busy. If you care about being relevant and valuable in 2015, you had better be making moves in 2009.

No Clear Tool Choices

One of the techniques I commonly use now that eLearning Learning has Related Terms is to look at a topic and see what relates to it. For example, Personal Learning, PLE, PWLE, PKM are all pretty closely related. But when I go to PLE and then look at the related Tools, I’m not seeing clear winners. In fact, the top results such as Drupal and Blackboard are likely there because people are discussing how they don’t really support PLEs. They are associated by contradiction.

What that means is that there are so many tools out there that get discussed as part of people’s personal learning environment that there is no clear winner. That also shows part of the value of something like Jane’s Top Learning Tools in that it surfaces some of the top used tools. One note of caution on Jane’s list is that these are both personal learning tools and tools used to create learning opportunities for others. For example, I doubt we are using an authoring tool for personal learning.

Productivity

This series is going to be way too long as it is, so I have to draw the line somewhere. I’m not going to cover a core literacy for concept workers that is what I think of as productivity. Getting Things Done is the classic example of this. If you’ve not adopted the core concepts such as:

Only touching any piece of paper or email once
Defining the immediate next step
Setting up reminder systems

and the tools / methods of:

Where you keep your task list
Keeping the immediately next task and due date
How you handle longer term things
How you manage this list
How you manage your time
What you need to do

Then you really need to go do that. But, I’m going to mostly skip by these issues.

Recommendations

The intent of this series is to capture my thinking at the start of 2009 about the tools and methods for work and learning. There will be a lot coming at you through this series and it will be easy for you to become overwhelmed. So a couple of quick recommendations.

Slow and steady - adopt practices and tools in a slow, steady, measured way. Assess your adoption as you go.
Leverage others - this should be one of your tasks - continuous improvement of your tool set and work methods. And you should definitely engage other people to discuss this with in an ongoing basis.

I would also recommend considering participating in a workshop that will help you get going on these tools.

Other Posts in the Series

Tool Set 2009
Work Skills Keeping Up
Top-Down Strategy
Better Memory
Information Radar
Networks and Learning Communities
Collaborate
Twitter as Personal Work and Learning Tool
Search
Browser Short Cuts

Other Places to Look

Alternative list of skills - I’ve focused on the skills in the initial Knowledge Work Framework. There’s another list of Needed Skills that is a different take and in some ways broader. I’m not sure if the tool set or methods would be different having used that list of skills, but it’s important to consider alternative frameworks.
PLE - Corporate vs Personal and IP Rights - personal rights to content in PLEs vs. Corporate rights to content. (See lots of thoughts on this in: Enterprises that love PLE’s, Cross battles Downes: is corporate learning corrupt?, Blogging Inside or Outside the Corporate Firewall).
Michelle Martin - My Personal Learning Environment and The Psychology and Skills of Personal Learning Environments
Ray Sims - Personal Learning Environment
Knowledge Work Not Separate from Learning
Personal Learning Environments

Ongoing information from eLearning Learning: PLE, PWLE, PKM, Personal Learning, and Personal Learning and Virtual Learning Environments.

Rethinking Learning Styles

Clark — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 09:52:03 +0000

I’ve pointed out the problems with learning styles in the past, but I want to rethink them with you, as we took quite a positive out of them in a unique way. This was back in 99-2000, when I led a project developing an intelligently adaptive learning system (Intellectricity ™; inspired by Joe Miller’s vision of a system that respected who you were as a learner). The system took a unique approach, adapting on the basis of who you were as a learner instead of your demonstrated domain knowledge (though it did that, too, though not like an intelligent tutoring system).

To do this, I looked long and hard at learning styles, including Jonassen & Grabowksi’s uncritical compendium, and (the other) John Carroll’s Cognitive Factor Analysis research. I decided then what I still do now, that essentially all of the learning style instruments are garbage. It’s not just me saying this, but so does a commissioned study by the Learning and Skills Research Centre. And, as I previously reported, psychologist Daniel Willingham says we shouldn’t adapt learning to styles. So, is there anything to salvage?

I want to say yes. The obvious reason is to recognize that learners do differ, and help learning designers be mindful of that. And there are some insights. For example, take Howard Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences. When I was investigating learning styles, I didn’t like having bimodal dimensions, say where you’re either an introvert or an extrovert. The problem is, those are so context-dependent that you could be an introvert in the classroom, and an extrovert in the lunchroom. Or even topic by topic. I liked that Gardner assesses how social (interpersonal) you are separate from how independent (intrapersonal) you are. That became one of our principles when I challenged our psychometrician and our senior cognitive scientist to argue contrary, and they agreed with me.

So we took a different approach. Starting from a premise of how learners differ in regards to learning, we made it more a competency than a characteristic: “how good are you at learning socially” (and I’d now add Marcia Conner’s distinction of small group versus large group) separate from “how good are you at learning on your own”.

We ended up developing 31 different characteristics to evaluate, and chose the 9 we expected to have the most leverage into the first version of the system (which we got up and running). These were across cognitive, affective (read: personality, e.g. the big 5 psychological traits), and conative (motivation, anxiety or ’safety’, etc). We had the system adapt on the basis of these competencies, not in changing the media to accommodate styles, but looking at different sequencing between (what I argue are the important characteristics) of example, concept, practice, etc.

We also believed that many if not all of these learning competencies could be improved, and designed strategies to develop skills over time. The premise did require a long-term relationship with the system, but that was our goal anyway.

The point here being that if, instead of fixed characteristics, we think of a suite of malleable learning competencies as a way in which our learners can differ, we gain two things. First, we find ways we can support learners who have weaknesses in particular learning competencies (dealing with visual data representations, for example), and second, we can develop them in those competencies as well (which goes hand in hand with Michelle Martin & Tony Karrer’s Work Literacy).

It’s also a tangible investment in organizational competency, and potentially the only real leverage an organization can have, going forward. Think: learning skills instead of learning styles, and develop your learners accordingly!

meta-learning

Using SharePoint

Tony Karrer — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 16:06:00 +0000

I’ve been having fabulous conversations about using SharePoint. SharePoint is so flexible and the documentation for it is so big and diverse, that a big part of my goals have been to understand the different ways that training organizations are using SharePoint. In my post SharePoint Examples there are some great examples in the comments. I’ve had conversations with several of these folks in more detail and with a few others.

In this post, I wanted to capture some of the patterns of use of SharePoint that seem to be emerging. This is a bit crude, but I thought that folks might find these interesting.

Using SharePoint before, during and after courses

This typically takes the form of sharing best practices, code examples, templates, links; posting announcements; having discussions; showing calendar items; supporting student profiles; supporting student project work; sharing notes, documents; providing course content. The reality is that what we did on the Work Literacy course or what I did for my Collaborative Learning Course could easily be supported by the various types of web parts within SharePoint.

Using SharePoint for Work Team or Communities of Practice (CoP) Collaboration

Outside of any particular formal learning, many training organizations are using SharePoint to support work teams. Typically this involves many of the same aspects as above: document sharing, calendar, discussion, resources, links, profiles, contacts, etc.

Using SharePoint to Publish to Work Teams or Communities of Practice (CoP)

Another common model is more of a publishing model where the training organization wants to provide on-going communication to the work teams or CoP. They focus more on information push and it’s less intended to have user-contributed content. Obviously, there is a spectrum of using SharePoint to support collaboration and using it to publish. But in discussions there were often distinctions based on what the work team or CoP expected.

Using SharePoint to Publish to Content to the Web

Several training organizations were using SharePoint as a means of publishing web pages for public consumption. These would be external consituents. In some cases, login was provided to allow the third party to more actively participate.

Using SharePoint as Project System for Training Organization

Quite a few people talked about how they were using SharePoint as a collaborative tool to work on projects. They would share course materials, project plans, documents. They had profiles, directories, blogs to help foster sharing between spread out teams. Some used it to track bugs. Some with Subject Matter experts.

Using SharePoint for Event Planning & Organizing

Just like we used a Wiki one year and Ning another to support the online conference LearnTrends, SharePoint can be used to manage all types of events, especially internal events. This is similar to support for courses and much of the web parts used, follow-up techniques, etc. were similar.

Using SharePoint for Software Support Site / Help Desk

Another common use of SharePoint was as a reference site, especially software support site. This provides an easy way to have easy access to support materials. It also makes it easy for the Help Desk to be actively involved in on-going support.

Quick Thoughts on eLearning 2.0 and SharePoint

The reality with SharePoint is that when you go back and look at the great list of eLearning 2.0 Examples, most all of these could have been supported through SharePoint. There are some definite challenges to getting SharePoint set up right, rolling it out in smart ways, helping people the right way, etc. In some ways then, SharePoint is well suited to supporting eLearning 2.0.

However, one thing that was very interesting to find in the discussions is that I feel there is a gap between these patterns for using SharePoint and the idea of helping concept workers address the Knowledge Worker Skill Gap and begin to be able to work and learner better. A lot of what eLearning 2.0 is about is helping the individual to self-serve. They should be at the core.

In SharePoint, there are MySite which is more like a portal page showing RSS feeds, list of SharePoint sites, shared documents. Possibly its smarter use of Outlook that’s the intent from a Microsoft vision of supporting the knowledge worker. But it was clear from the conversations that we’ve not quite made the shift to thinking about personal work and learning environments (PWLE) - see: PWLE Not PLE - Knowledge Work Not Separate from Learning, Personal Work and Learning Environments (PWLE) - More Discussion and Personal Work and Learning Environments.

In looking back at the discussion in Training Design, the suggestion is that there’s a new piece here that has to do with on-going support. As part of this look at using SharePoint, I’m realizing that it’s something a bit more. It’s personal. I don’t quite have the picture yet.

I welcome other patterns that I’ve missed and I welcome people chiming in with how they view the personal work and learning aspect.

No Trust

Tony Karrer — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 04:47:00 +0000

I’ve been reading various mentions of the new report by Forrester, that provides the following information on the sources that people trust. Or basically they show that there’s no trust for blogs.

I held back on posting about this because I thought I was just being defensive. Surely there’s more trust than that. Having just seen posts by Ken Allan and Manish Mohan about this issue, it got me thinking some more about this issue of No Trust of blogs as sources of information. So a couple of thoughts …

Do you see what’s at the top of the list? Email from people you know. The bottom line is that for most of us, we believe people we know (and likely already trust). I certainly feel that way. I ask people I know about things and that’s what often gets me to finally act. This is why I talk about the importance of new skills for Leveraging Networks, Network Feedback, Finding Expertise, Using Social Media to Find Answers to Questions, Learning through Conversation.

But what’s interesting about the survey is that there is a built in assumption that you don’t know the blogger. If you asked me whether I would trust information provided by a blogger I didn’t know, I likely would respond the same way. However, what I’ve found through blogging is that I get to know lots of people including maybe especially other bloggers. Thus, when I see them post, there’s not this issue of no trust. It is someone I know. No the communication is not through email - but it’s very similar. It acts just like that category. When Brent, Mark, Michele, etc. (wow, these folks are like Madonna and Sting - they only need one name) say in their blog - here’s this great new tool and here is how it’s working for me - that fits into the top category. It gets me to believe and possibly act. If I read it from a well known blogger who I don’t have that relationship with, I don’t trust it the same way. Funny thing, probably not very smart, but that’s true.

This does mean that as a person who blogs you must be extra careful of the trust you are given. You have to be honest. You can’t shill. Because most blogs are personal and real human relationships form - you must act in a way that never engenders the no trust factor.

That said, there are a quite a lot of people who come to my blog and who don’t really know me, they don’t have a personal relationship, we’ve not exchanges around 100 Conversations yet, … And it’s a bit depressing to realize that you rank behind direct mail and online classifieds in terms of trust. That they think of what they find here the same way I think about other bloggers who I don’t know. It’s another data point that I will eventually validate through people I do know. A little depressing, but at least it’s a data point.

One last thought, how can people respond that they trust portals and search engines? Don’t these often find blog posts? How can that be trusted? To me, a set of search results are the least trustworthy. Sure, I use them, but do I “trust the results” - no way - no trust here for those sources. Give me a fellow blogger (who I know) any day.

Am I being too defensive here?

What did I learn about learning in 2008?

Clark — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 20:02:06 +0000

The Learning Circuit’s Blog Big Question for December is “What did you learn about learning in 2008?” It’s good to reflect, and using the end of the calendar year is a traditional time. Consequently, I trolled back through a year of blog posts. Whew!

I saw several recurrent threads, but the strongest one is on learning to learn. I think we’ve seen more focus on that this year, particularly with Tony Karrer & Michelle Martin’s Work Literacy effort, and a lot of the discussion at the Corporate Learning Trends conference (most recently). It’s a theme that appeared in Marcia Conner’s presentation, in looking at what to do in tough times. What impressed me is how much it’s been taken on in many places and in many forms, after Jay & I were pushing it several years ago (circa 2003-2004). I’m thrilled, of course.

It’s also a theme that characterizes the TogetherLearn thinking, where it’s about helping people help themselves, but not taking the self-directed and learn-together skills for granted. Which segues nicely into my second learning, which was about social learning. I knew about the importance (having been steeped in Vygotsky in grad school), but it hadn’t hit home quite as viscerally as this year, and I’ve become more than a convert, in fact an evangelist, about the opportunities, both formal and informal.

Interestingly, I’m also beginning to see the emergence of mobile social, and I see that mobile was another recurrent theme in what I talked about this year. I see more opportunities, and convergences, particularly my revelation about mobile web. Twitter, for instance, is social, can be mobile, and can be a powerful learning experience.

So, my personal learning was getting more deeply into the whole elearning 2.0 area, and it’s impact back on strategy, mobile, and even games. And the clear implications that we’ve got to focus on learning to learn skills. There’re some new thoughts brewing, of course, and maybe that’ll play a role in my predictions for next year. But that’s another month’s big question.

Work Literacy

Deliberate Practice - Cloud Worker - Collaboration - Work Literacy - June 2009

Work Literacy Hot List

June 2009

Top Posts

Top Other Items

Top Keywords

RSS - Knowledge Management - Value - May 2009 - Hot List

Work Literacy Hot List -

Top Posts

Top Other Items

Top Keywords

ROI - Social Media - Productivity

Hot List for April 2009 from Work Literacy

Top Posts

Top Other Items

Top Keywords

Work Literacy Hot List March 2009

Hot List - March 1, 2009 to March 31, 2009

Top Posts

Top Other Items

Top Keywords

Work Literacy Hot List - Early February

Top on WorkLiteracy in January

12 eLearning Predictions for 2009

Remote Collaboration

Networks and Communities

Information Radar

Better Memory

From Knowledgable to Knowledge-able by Wesch

Work Literacy Skills - New Workshop

Work Literacy Skills Workshop

Top-Down Strategy

Work Skills Keeping Up?

Tool Set 2009

Rethinking Learning Styles

Using SharePoint

No Trust

What did I learn about learning in 2008?