Much of the Web 2.0 phenomenon has featured applications which are “people-centered.” Ning, Facebook, Twitter and others feature interfaces which center around individuals, and branch out from there. I’ve written in this space before about my concerns that people-centered interfaces present some unfortunate limits to application utility, so it will unlikely surprise anyone that I’m deeply interested in how people find ways to work around these limitations.

I watched Evan Williams of Twitter give his TED talk recently, and was struck by how this piece of the puzzle has evolved.

Twitter started life as a way for people to broadcast to people who are interested in them the answer to the question “what are you doing?”

Thousands flocked to this little app, sharing with their public answers like “Eating breakfast,” “attending lecture,” “procrastinating.”

An early critique of this service was that it commanded attention to the trivial – there are very few people in the world whose breakfast-eating habits most of us could care about at all. I have stopped following people who clearly are mostly posting updates with their most intimate friends as their primary audience, and I’m sure I’m not alone.

Early on, it became clear that for those using twitter as a personal account broadcasting to the entire audience of followers is not completely satisfactory. Broadcasting is nice, but people like to have conversations with each other. Users developed the “@” convention, by which they could direct their statements to other users. Latecomers to twitter sometimes think the “@” makes for private communication – it does not, it just signals when there is a particular target for a comment. But that’s useful, not just for the target, but for the rest of us who might otherwise wonder why a message doesn’t make a lot of sense to us.

Along came Summize, which created a searchable database of all tweets (and was later acquired by Twitter.) Search adds a vast new dimension of usability to all this seemingly trivial information – as the shoe company Zappos has famously demonstrated by searching for tweets which express dissatisfaction with their products or service and contacting those customers directly.

What I find really interesting is the user base response to a search interface which is represented by the “hash tag”. Now that we have search in twitter, users have developed a folksonomy of these tags, permitting the gathering of all tweets around a subject, be that gasoline availability in Atlanta or reviews of a lecture.

Yes, people are fascinated with each other. And they like to talk about themselves. But it’s very hard to sustain a conversation, let alone a relationship, around self-reportage. We like to observe the wider world and make sense of it with one another. My bet is that it is this capacity to search on subjects of interest, and find others who share those interests, will prove to be critical to twitter’s growth and ultimate sustainability. Though it seems most folks will find that they’ll want to continue those conversations in venues which permit more than 140 characters to a single expression, which is why we’ll keep seeing tweets with those tiny and bit.ly url links to where the discussion is really happening…

The Wall Street Journal is famous for being one of the few newspapers to have successfully charged for online content from the very beginning of their web presence. I can recall downloading the personal journal over a dial-up line back in the early 90’s, and still, even in now, in 2008, when mountains of decent financial writing is available for free, the good stuff at http://wsj.com commands a premium behind a subscriber wall. Clearly, these folks know something about about providing value on the web.

So I was interested to see how WSJ’s new social networking space, Journal Community, launched in mid-September, is faring. One of the choices they’ve made which I thought sounded very promising is the requirement that members participate under their real names. Holding users personally accountable for their behavior generally greatly increases the quality of contributions. This policy also tends to inhibit users from saying anything that their families or employers might find objectionable, so it tends to be a tradeoff between quantity and quality.

Journal Community is attractive. It’s got a nice, clean look, a bit like the spaces at Ning.com, but without the clutter. Creating a profile is straightforward process, and gratifyingly, many members have chosen to upload either a photo or an avatar, so discussions with activity look invitingly full of real people.

Sadly though, this initiative is off to a very slow start. The “Featured groups” include one called outdoorbase, which has but 1 member and no topics for discussion. Information Technology, the other featured group, on the other hand, has garnered 281 members, 3 topics of discussion, 1 with no replies, 1 with a single reply, and another with 10. Apparently, WSJ has not seen fit to staff even featured groups with hosts who might goose the conversation along by making sure that first responders don’t feel as if they are alone in a room. The guy who is “owner” for the conversation with 10 replies, which took off on its own, waltzed in over a week after the first post and offered as his contribution a “welcome” post which did not acknowledge any of the prior contributions

A topic called “What is your impression of the Journal Community?" is located, oddly, in the discussion category, garnered exactly one post back in mid-September, which is 14 days ago by this writing, and has received not a single reply, not even from “John Moderator” the discussion’s owner, which suggests that there has not been a staff member assigned to this discussion. Kind of odd, since this sort of feedback would be valuable.

Part of the problem is that there are 187 groups, all with multiple discussions, to choose from. It’s hard NOT to have the Second Life effect (whole lotta space, not a lot of people in it) when the landscape is so broad from the very beginning. It’s difficult for moderators to cover such a landscape, especially if staffing is lean to begin with.

It’s surprising WSJ would make such an error, as they are not new to discussion forums. http://forums.wsj.com is thriving—it has discussions going back to September 2006. Today’s Question of the Day “Should the House have approved the $700 Billion Bailout plan has 206 replies at midday, and last Tuesday’s question “Should Obama and McCain debate Friday evening?” garnered 1393 replies.

Of course moving users into the new space is part of their challenge. I note that the “Are you looking for the Forums?” question which used to inhabit the community home page has disappeared, as have other links to the forum site. But if they hope to shepherd folks into the new space, they really need to organize a welcoming committee.

A recent Wall Street Journal article offers this perky teaser for an article by Kelly Spors:

Use Social Media to Bond With Consumers Social-media technologies can help small firms to better connect with and market themselves to consumers and others in their industries, and they're often free.

Spors' article is a decent survey of current tools, including Twitter, Ning, Facebook and MySpace, with some examples of how different businesses are using them. But it is, as most such articles are, pretty light on examples of proven boosts to profitability from such efforts.

This is, of course, why businesses are being slow to adopt these tools. It’s very nice to have 800 followers on Twitter, but the time it takes to create that following is anything but free, and in the end, the goal is to create and retain customers, not “followers” -- to improve the effectiveness of collaboration with colleagues, not just create a large number of “connections.”

The new tools make it possible to cheaply broadcast an organization’s voice all over the place. Actually connecting with people, however, requires time and attention on all sides of the communication. That I take the time to carefully craft this blog post does not guarantee that it will have any particular utility for you, my valued reader. That you find it valuable may raise the esteem in which you hold me and/or my organization, but that’s a pretty long way from your signing a hefty contract to secure the services of my fine employer.

There is real value, measurable in dollars, to be gained from using these tools. But even when the tool is free, there are real costs in spending the time up front to determine the suitability of the tool for the task to which it is being put, and to evaluating on the back end whether the implementation of a new tool is in fact creating the anticipated value. There is no free lunch. But there are some pretty great meals for those willing to make a reasonable investment.

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I have this nifty macbook pro laptop which I bought a couple of years ago. Like each machine I have loved, this one has quickly filled up. It started warning me about this state of affairs in January. I was able to get rid of some stuff and keep it happy for a while, but by last month, the low hanging fruit had all been tossed. It was time to upgrade.

A quick googling around assured me that I could indeed replace my 100 gig hard drive with one three times as big. Cool! But also, that this process is sort of involved, a lot more involved than hard disk replacement on a macbook, or on my old Toshiba, in which basically all you had to do was take out a screw or two, give a yank, and push the new one in. No, for the macbook pro, you have to loosen a dozen some screws, remove the keyboard, and get right down into the guts of the machine.

So I thought well, ok, maybe I need to entrust this job to a professional. But calling around, the pros who were willing to do it are all 40 minutes to an hour away, and would require me to leave my precious machine in their custody for several days. They’d charge from $80 to $150 to do the labor, which is reasonable for a fairly involved bit of surgery, but none of them stock the new 320 gig drive, just the 250 gig size.

Well, shoot. Back to the drawing board. Or Google. Which sent me to Other World Computing where not only do they sell the parts I’m looking for, but they publish installation VIDEOS in which an affable, knowledgeable, calm repair guy performs the replacement procedure and talks the viewer through it.

I watched the video, and decided that yes, even though I’d botched a similar surgery on my trusty old Toshiba laptop a coupla years ago (In attempting to replace the fan, I sliced through fan wires. Not good. Note that the macbook dates from shortly after this adventure!) with the guidance of the nice guy in the video, I could do this.

So I placed my order with the other world folks. The parts came, I set up a workspace in front of my desktop screen, cued up the video, and went to work. The difference between this experience and the Toshiba one was significant. With the Toshiba, I had the help of some excellent web pages with still photos. But to be able to hear the sound the keyboard should make when it comes up, and to watch the tech struggle a bit to wiggle the disk into place conferred subtle but important information which would have been really difficult to communicate textually, or even with still photography.

The video was very basic. Production values were Spartan. Clear audio, clear video, and the calm, confident voice of the narrator were the primary ingredients. That OWC did not edit down the portions which took longer to do than they probably should have helped, too. It gave me confidence pre-purchase that I was seeing a real person doing a real task, in which complications sometimes arise, and more confidence as I re-watched while doing the task, that the difficulties were easily surmountable. And indeed they were. Half an hour later, I was merrily performing a disk restore to my newly capacious machine.

I’m sure I am not the only person who has made a purchase based on the availability of online training for the task I needed to do. Of course, it’s a little easier, when selling parts, to imagine with some certainty what the learning needs of your public might be.

It makes me wonder, though, what percentage of the training programs we e-learning providers are offering hit that sweet spot, effectively teaching exactly what learners need to know, in a way which permits them to immediately and effectively apply that learning?

As part of the preparation for Elliot Masie’s Learning Systems 2008 conference next week, Bill Bruck did an interview with Elliot. The podcast features Bill’s observations on the state of the learning field, its future trajectory, and how Q2 sees our eCampus fitting into the picture.

I learn in three ways, and I want my learning system to support all of them. Sometimes I learn by being taught; sometimes I learn by going out and finding information I need; and sometimes I learn by asking a colleague. Probably only 5% of my learning is from being taught and unfortunately, that’s the only piece that most learning systems excel at.

Moreover, I don’t distinguish learning from a couple other things I do in my job. I produce knowledge – intellectual property – for my organization, and I produce deliverables for our customers. Most often I do both of these in collaboration with others.
I want my online environment to support all these things, because in my job, they are all connected: work, learning, collaboration, and knowledge sharing.

We may as well call what I want a “learning system” because no one else is looking at providing this – but truly what I want is for this system to recognize and support the fundamental convergence of learning with the rest of my life.
And launching eLearning modules or scheduling me for classes is the least part of it.

As the CPsquare “Long Live the Platform” conference wraps up this week, I’ve been thinking a lot about “community” and its role within the enterprise.

Community is one of those concepts debated endlessly in circles of individuals who have spent their careers involved in one way or another with computer-mediated communication. The central question among this crew tends to be “at what point can you call a group of people who are in communication, “a community”? Back in the day, there were worries that in-person get-togethers of individuals who had formed friendships online would in some way taint the purity of the online community they had formed. That theory proved false – the vast majority of people who form relationships online find that meeting in person broadens and deepens their relationships.

Relationship is the key. People are in community with one another once they have formed relationships with one another. Those relationships may form over shared interests – there are Linux communities and cat fancier communities. They form over shared resources: Friends of the Library, for example. Some of the strongest communities are those which form over shared efforts to meet shared challenges: support groups for alcoholism recovery, parenting and various chronic disease processes are frequently venues where people make deep and lasting friendships.

So how does any of this relate to the business world? Well, if you can get people sufficiently interested in your product that they form a community around their shared interest in it, that can do a lot for brand loyalty and ultimately accessory and repeat sales. For that reason, figuring out ways to encourage the formation of “retail communities” is very high in the consumer product arena, and we see products with MySpace pages so that fans can “friend” them.

Within the enterprise, there is significant interest in fostering knowledge sharing. During the CPsquare conference, Eric Sauve , whose Tomoye platforms, like our own eCampus, use both the traditional discussion forums and the newer web 2.0 modalities to support communities of practice, argued that perhaps we need to expand our sense of online community to include the participation of those who find it too much effort to add to conversations, provide resources, etc., but do contribute by rating the value of other people’s contributions.

My friend and co-worker Charles Roth points out that participating in rating, while useful, more precisely identifies one as adding to what James Surowiecki calls The Wisdom of Crowds . It’s helpful to know that people I don’t know rate a resource as valuable, but the value of that information does not compare to that of the same referral from someone with whom I have an actual relationship, and whose take on the subject at hand I know I either trust or distrust.

Is it enough to provide a platform which facilitates (and provides recognition for) “one-click participation”? Or is it worth it to go to the next level: fostering the formation of mutually beneficial relationships among the individuals who collaborate on the various projects which further enterprise goals?

Resource constraints may indeed force some enterprises to settle for the “crowd” solution. Doing so certainly beats NOT gathering resources and opinions on them, and one-click participation is better than no participation at all.

But it seems to me that fostering the growth of employee relationships beyond shared membership in the “paycheck-receiving community, ” beyond merely reacting to the contributions of others, and into active participation in a true community of practice in which co-workers actively seek to provide each other with insight into their shared challenges is what is needed to maintain agility in today’s rapidly changing marketplace.

Fostering that growth requires more than providing a platform with objects to which individuals can respond. To build the crowd into a functioning community, one must provide the venues for conversation which allow for the development of relationship.

It's an interesting exercise. So far, there have been two presentations, one by our own Bill Bruck on Q2's xPERT eCampus and another by Bob Doyle who has put together a wide range of tools for the DITA users group.

What is emerging, unsurprisingly, is that what makes a platform a good choice for supporting a community has EVERYTHING to do with the goals of the individuals in the community. DITA users are technical writers who meet regularly face to face in regional user groups – what they seek online is generally the opportunity to ask technical questions of each other, and to access references and tutorials on the DITA standard.

Q2's customers are more heterogeneous, but a large part of our business revolves around providing training opportunities and shared workspaces to people who are not co-located. What they are seeking is a way to do collaborative learning and work together on projects without being together at the same place, or at the same time. The affordances we build in to facilitate online conversation are essential for our users, but not of interest to folks who can have their conversations in person.

Some newcomers to the CPsquare conversation are asking for a list of essential features in CoP software. As usual, that's a question which has to be answered with another question – what are the members of your community trying to accomplish?

Proposition: The house believes that social networking technologies will bring large [positive] changes to educational methods, in and out of the classroom.

So opens this week's debate in the ongoing series at Economist.com. I find myself in substantial agreement with both Ewan McIntosh's pro position, and with Michael Bugeja's con position. The two men have taken very different views of just what a "social networking technology" is.

McIntosh includes virtually every technology which puts learners in touch with people who know stuff, and argues the not-very-controversial point that creating such connections enriches the learning experience.

Bugeja considers a narrower definition of social networking technologies, namely, those commercial ventures like MySpace and Facebook who bill themselves as social networking platforms. He suggests, persuasively, that permitting commercial ventures to set the agenda for education is fraught with peril.

They are both right. I've been in love with the potential for online social networking for enriching learning since we found a really weird-looking plant on the glacial kame my son's 4^th grade class was studying, and with a few emails to some folks I know through a parenting list, had links to discussions of this very primitive life form, and the email address of a botanist who studies them. My kids have grown up in a world where it's possible to read about something on the web, and start up a conversation with the author, simply by clicking the link to her email address provided on the site.

A key to the value of a social connection is the context in which the connection is made, whether it happens in person, or online.

That's the main problem with the big commercial network sites – Potentially eeeevil profit-making privacy-invading concerns aside, they make possible connections which don't have any context, and hence aren't that valuable. When a fourth grader emails a botany professor with a question about a strange plant, there is an educational context which adds richness to the exchange – the fourth grader is expressing interest in something in which the professor obviously has interest, and it's fair to assume that the professor has some interest in teaching which complements the fourth-grader's interest in learning, even if they are not in a formal instructor-pupil relationship.

When a college kid "friends" somebody they've met on campus, there is also a context of mutuality. This is why Facebook took off so quickly.

It is a pleasure to be contacted by old friends, by valued colleagues, and to make the acquaintance of people one has never met with whom one nevertheless shares a mutual interest. It is annoying to have to wade through messages from people with whom no mutuality is immediately apparent. I predict that the development of sufficiently nuanced filtration technologies to keep the "spam" down in the social networking apps is what will eventually separate the winners from the losers.

In the meantime, I celebrate the numerous, creative efforts being made daily to harness technology to put people who are interested in learning stuff in touch with people who know a lot about that stuff. That this can be done with a simple static web page with interesting info and an email address is cause for celebration. That it can be done effectively with sophisticated software which permits people who have already identified their mutual interest to continue conversations across time and space is the belief which keeps me working where I do.

Maybe I need a new way to explain what I do? "Hi, I'm Val Bock, and I work in online educational social networking."

Nah, too much of a mouthful, and it sorta sounds as if I give MySpace lessons. But it sure makes the point better than saying "I work in e-learning" does!

The old saw suggests that if the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. We're seeing a lot of that in the social software space.

Apparently, now that every corporate executive has a kid on Facebook, more and more companies in the Web2.0, social software space feel the need to answer "but does it have Facebook-like capability?" with yes.

The thing is, people are still really unclear on which tasks Facebook is well suited for, and which are better handled by different tools.

The latest entry in this sweepstakes is WorkBook: A Secure Corporate Overlay for Facebook

Worklight offers several scenarios which illustrate why they think it would be handy to have Facebook capability in a corporate secured environment. Let's look at these:

	Francesca interacts securely with colleagues at remote offices, taking advantage of Facebook's social networking tools (e.g. send birthday greetings, share your status, send requests, etc.) Um, ok. Let's take these one at a time: Send birthday greetings -- Birthday greetings sent to a Facebook page will only be received if the person checks their Facebook page. It's still customary in most cultures to send such greetings to a person where they are. And while college students may spend a lot of time on Facebook, working people are likely doing their work, and probably more reachable via phone or email. Share your status – to see someone's status, it's necessary to check their Facebook page. IM clients are MUCH more convenient for this purpose. With one glance, I can look at my MSN messenger window and see that my boss is on the phone, my colleague is heads-down pumping out a project report, and the sales guy is out on a call. Send requests – usually, people need a way to store and organize the requests they receive. Email allows people to file requests atomically. Project discussion rooms allow the posting of requests in the space where the project is being tracked, and allow everyone else on the project to see who is asking whom for what. But requests sent to a Facebook page are not manipulable there. They will likely have to be copied somewhere else for tracking. Who needs that?
	Marisa, a civil engineer based in London, uses Facebook/WorkBook to find corporate colleagues in Asia and North America who have already solved a structural challenge she has just been assigned. This is a job for an expert locator. While Facebook offers detailed profiling, and presumably Workbook adds to the mix by adding some corporate-related fields, it's not at all clear how one makes a collection of profiles into an expert locator without developing some shared taxonomy. Where in your facebook page are you going to mention the list of structural challenges you've solved? How is someone going to find that in a search?
	Joe, a field rep in Omaha, posts a link to an interesting article from the Wall Street Journal, so that his peers in other regions can use the information in sales presentations If this is a resource for sharing with a group of folks, wouldn't it make more sense to share that link in a full featured resource library? Say, one which is organized by topic? How are people going to know this resource exists? I'm more likely to subscribe to the "sales related articles" folder if I want that sort of information than I am to Joe's page.
	Rajiv, an Accounts Receivables manager, shares an unpaid invoice record with the appropriate sales manager. Where? On Rajiv's page? On the sales manager's page? Wouldn't this be better handled in a space dedicated to stuff about the client?
	Deborah changes her work-related to status to “working on next year’s budget” I won't know this, though, unless I check her page. If she updates her message on IM though, it'll be displayed in a nice little window which I keep open on my desktop at all times.
	Corporate management announces a recent large deal to all employees and posts a new HR policy to European employees. Where? In an all-hands group and an HR Group? How will people know that new information is on these pages? Through a blizzard of email notifications? If so, why not just send out the text in an email and be done with it?

The thing is, Facebook and similar applications presume that people and their properties are the center of attention. This is quite true in the social world – we make our friends and maintain our friendships based on who they are and what they are thinking about and what they are interested in.

In the work world, personal relationships do matter a great deal. Knowing something about a person's personal life and sharing those personal bonds builds trust. Sharing professional experiences builds regard. But being effective at work requires putting THE WORK at the center of focus, and making relationships around getting the work done. I don't want to have to check individual pages for each of my team members to know how the XYZ project is progressing. I want to go to a space where all the XYZ stuff is being discussed, where documents relating to XYZ are being worked on and stored I want that space to be flexible. I want to be able to tell at a glance what I've already read there and what is new.

I use a wide range of tools to get my work done each day. I appreciate the need to bring together a range of functionality under a single interface. I'm excited by the approaches people are coming up with to try to do this. But I'm darned sure that Facebook is not going to be the Swiss army knife we're all dreaming of. It's just not sufficiently work-centered!

Drakos' opening line "The collaboration support market is being revitalized, with buyers and sellers looking to add social interaction in the context of broad collaboration support." is indeed what we're seeing here at Q2.  The new awareness of social aspects to enterprise knowledge sharing tools usually manifests in sales calls in the form of a comment like "yeah, this is pretty much what we need, but do you have 'facebook-type' functionality?"

Drako's analysis reflects this state of affairs.  He observes "Buyers in the collaboration support market are looking for persistent virtual environments where participants can create, organize and share information, as well as interact with each other."  His "low" baseline for inclusion are features we've had for years in our platform:

• membership management
• access controls
• user profiles
• shared workspaces
• document sharing
• discussion forums

He adds to it his list of "High Expectations of Additional Optional Functionality" and  indicates that the ability to do these things will gradually be added to baseline expectations.

• calendar integration
• task allocation
• task tracking
• workflow
• basic project management
• wikis
• blogs,
• social tags
• social bookmarks,
• social network analysis
• social network visualization
• content feeds
• people search (expertise location),
• team decision support (voting, sorting, ranking, scenario planning and categorizing)
• content rating
  
• reputation management
• alerting

I'd call the first few items on that wish-list the "project management toolkit".  Sites like Basecamp have been in that space for a while. The thing is, project management tends to have some very organizationally specific cultural requirements, and it may be a while before the online tools develop the sophistication of the offline ones sufficiently for established project management cultures to become comfortable using them. At Q2,  for example, we use a combination of Microsoft Project, some software tools of our own design, and discussion forums for project management. When we're doing joint projects with other orgs, we have a tendency to force the issue of using online discussion space for a tool, and we've noticed that people we've dragged along on that path eventually are converted!

Wikis, of course, are a mechanism to facilitate group document generation, and are, I believe, one of those things that are shortly going to disappear from the conversation just as word-processing software has, because their essential utility will make them ubiquitous.  Some day soon, anyone who has to work with documents will know what eventually wins out as the standard wiki the way we all now know Word.  So yeah, if you are in the online collaboration space, and you don't have a wiki, you are probably missing some essential functionality.

The jury is still out on the extent to which blogs will become a must-have in the enterprise social software sphere.  We have pretty robust blogging capability in our software, enabling our customers to configure blogs for internal or public consumption. But we aren't seeing it utilized much at all.  People seem to experiment with blogging for a while and then decide that other tasks on their list are more critical for the advancement of their careers and their organizations. Or, if they are already engaged in blogging from a public site, they just leave their blog in the platform they already understand and where their public knows where to find them.  It may be that being able to link out to blogs will be more important in the enterprise arena than being able to generate them—it will be interesting to see.

Which brings us to the newly-christened "social" stuff.  An important question underlying this functionality for the enterprise is "how much is lost if we limit our universe to our own organization?"  Tagging, rating, and reviewing internal proprietary content is pretty obviously a job for software internal to the enterprise.  Finding people internal to the enterprise who have experience with a given client. project, or skill-set is also well-suited to a platform within the firewall.  But what about those public spaces?  How much is it worth to an organization to have its people "out there" on del.icio.us, on Linked-in and Facebook, sharing their expertise and opinion of publicly available resources?  When employees are searching for new information, to what extent should they depend on internal tools, and when is it important to venture out?  To the extent that they venture out and find things of value, how should those things be brought "in" so that others in the organization can benefit?  In short, when is a filtered network optimal, and when is an unfiltered network the place to go?

We’re thinking about these questions, and trying to strike a balance, creating a tool which fosters the creation and nurture of the internal social network, while making it easy to bring in the best resources from outside.  It's sort of in our blood – we were around when discussion forums evolved from BBS and Usenet to the Web.  (I still get a chill when I think about how cool it was the first time I could post a relevant URL to a discussion forum!)  I believe that the acceleration of global interconnectedness will mean that even for the largest organizations, it will be in discussing information streaming in from outside, comparing it to internal intelligence, and constructing meaning with other knowledgeable people that strategic advantage is attained.

Dion Hinchcliffe did a pretty exhaustive survey of the state of enterprise 2.0 a couple of weeks ago.  It's a great read, if only to get a handle on just what Enterprise 2.0 is evolving into in the minds of people who are thinking about it!

At the core of Enterprise 2.0 is a paradox: What is the best way to incorporate "social applications that are optional to use, free of unnecessary structure, highly egalitarian, and support many forms of data" into a highly structured corporate environment?  Hinchcliffe observes

By the time you’ve installed, configured, customized, and integrated all of the ingredients you’ve brought together, if you’ve lost sight of the specific reasons why Enterprise 2.0 is supposed to work better, your effort will have been in vain. I see this often when Enterprise 2.0 projects don’t provide, say, read access to RSS feed readers to workers or fail to make it easy to create a blog post or wiki page from the Intranet and a dozen other minor decisions made on top of the Enterprise 2.0 tools selected, yet contrary to their spirit and that will be significantly detrimental to the outcome. Best advice: Clearly understand the benefits of these news tools and ideas and then do your very best to ensure they aren’t negated.

Of course, the same lack of clarity which leads to installations which frustrate the purpose of the initiative makes training on how to use these tools more complex, too.  Hinchcliffe describes the training needs:

Just like the previous generation of workers received computer literacy classes en masse and learned how to use business productivity applications such as word processing, spreadsheets, and email, the same will be required for the current generation of workers and Enterprise 2.0. This is even simple guidance such as should something go into a blog post, a wiki page, or mashup app. Also why and when should workers respond to comments and participate in social networking, bookmarking, and internal/external online communities? 

I don't see this sort of guidance as "simple" at all.  It was pretty straightforward to figure out which work should go into a spreadsheet and which into a word processor. The hard part was learning the features and how to activate them.  But where, or perhaps more importantly, whether to post one's thought among a range of new venues for expression, that's a question of corporate culture.  The executive suite is rightfully reluctant to simply adopt wholesale the approach of the early adopters in the org, but they are the only ones so far who've done the experimentation and have a feel for what sort of work fits best in which of the new formats.

During this early, experimental time, it's a little frightening to invest big dollars in a large scale integrated product to support a way of working which is still largely untested.  But it's very expensive in terms of worker productivity and data fragmentation to have critical work scattered among a wide range of different, overlapping applications which don't have integrated search.

We've been working on these issues.

In xPERT Office, we think we have a solution which helps mitigate organizational risk during this time of transition. We offer a platform which integrates a high-powered discussion forum with wiki and blog capability, so users don't have to learn a new interface as they experiment with each of these new ways to present work.  These tools can be made open to everybody, or rolled out gradually as new teams need them.  xPERT Office stands nicely on its own as an office-on-the-web, but can easily be integrated with the enterprise HR system to keep user data sync'd. To ease what can be a difficult transition in workstyle, it permits participation via email for those who aren't quite ready to make the leap out of their inboxes  into a more organized environment.

More importantly, perhaps, we have some expertise in helping an org think through just how the corporate culture they have, and the one they aspire to develop, can be expressed through thoughtful incorporation of these tools into the work of their people.

I've been watching the rise of the social networking sites with fascination.  There has always been a bit of fuzziness (or violent controversy, depending on in which circles one is having the conversation!)  about what constitutes community in general, as well as about what constitutes online community.

I think the rise of online social networking gives us a new angle on this question.  It seems to me that my social network forms with me at the center, and allows me to branch out from there. This explains the online social network software's "me" focus – First you post what it is you want others to be known about you, and then you go out to create connections to others

Community usually forms with something else at the center – a shared geographic location, a shared project, a shared interest – something around which people gather, and as a result of that gathering, develop deeper understandings of one another and of the community focus.  Community is where you get things done.  A social network is an invaluable tool for pulling people into community.

Social networks form bridges across communities. My memberships at the YMCA and the karate dojo have more than once resulted in my introducing a friend from one to the people I know at the other.  Like most people, I've landed jobs (and hence new strong ties to new organizations) as a result of introductions from people I've met in various communities.

Interestingly, though talk continues about whether a "virtual" community (one which exists primarily online) is in some fundamental way different from an offline one, nobody worries too much about whether a "virtual" connection to somebody through a social networking site is fundamentally different from an offline connection.  Now that a critical mass of ordinary people have a presence online, it's more common to be in contact online with people to whom one is already connected offline.  Being introduced online just doesn't seem to make a difference, what matters is the communities in which one participates after the connection is made.

My 18 year old son caved to pressure from his high school friends, and finally made a Facebook page before he headed off to college.  That page was quickly populated by friends from his high school community, and by a friendship link extended to the guy in Texas who was assigned to be his roommate.  These days, his friends page is dominated by people he's met at college, but those other folks are still there, too.  It's clear from just a casual perusal of his wall (I did NOT ask him to "friend" me, as somehow, having a shot of mom on your friends page is not exactly the kind of thing which enhances a young man's image, but I can see his page because my son and I share a new community now – he is attending my alma mater, which makes him "in-network" according to Facebook)  that the network is primarily serving to maintain ties he's formed through his new community membership at college.

My use of the same resource looks very different. Though some of my offline relationships are represented among my Facebook friends, a large number of my Facebook contacts are people I met online first.  That is likely an artifact of my age – most people not working online don't really need an online presence the way I do so they just don't have a page to link to, but I do have a lot of colleagues and friends I've met online in my Facebook network.

There's a fascinating formal debate taking place on The Economist site this week. The proposition put forward is:

This house believes that the continuing introduction of new technologies and new media adds little to the quality of most education.

Speaking to the pro side is Sir John Daniel, President and Chief Executive Officer of The Commonwealth of Learning which is "an intergovernmental organisation created by Commonwealth Heads of Government to encourage the development and sharing of open learning/distance education knowledge, resources and technologies. COL is helping developing nations improve access to quality education and training."

I don't know that I agree with Sir John when he says there's a zero-sum relationship among volume, quality, and cost. Technology changes that, a lot. One of the really amazing things about using the Internet, as in the Open University model, for example, is that there's very little marginal cost associated with opening a program to a large number of additional learners.

What's sort of sad is that the guy arguing the con side, Dr. Robert Kozma, Emeritus Director and Principal Scientist at SRI international, has to carefully qualify his argument in order even to make it. He says "new technologies and new media do make a significant contribution to the quality of education, at least under certain circumstances."

I've spent the last 15 years of my career facilitating the incorporation of technology into educational programs. I wouldn't have been doing this if I didn't think I was in fact adding value to the world.  But it's an area fraught with landmines.

The truth is it's possible, and sadly, common to detract from the quality of a given learning opportunity by adding a lot of cognitive overhead in the form of new technology learners must master in order to access that learning opportunity!  Except in those programs which are explicitly designed to introduce technology, it's probably a bad idea to require learners, or instructors, to master more than one new technological interface per course.  And it's really better for learning efficiency if there's NO new technology at all to master, so that one can free up one's brain to learn the program material which is being presented, without having to be on guard against looking stupid because one doesn't know exactly what to do.

My husband remarked to my son-the-junior-in-college and a classmate of his that really, they should savor their junior year.  As juniors, they know their way around the campus. They know how to figure out what the professors want. They have mostly fulfilled their core requirements, and are free to study the subjects that interest them in depth. And, they don't yet need to devote energy to that looming question of "what's next".  In short, they are free to concentrate on the learning tasks at hand, without all that excess overhead to manage.

I don't know that we can reliably simulate junior year in the groves of Academe here in the corporate training world. But I do think keeping that ideal in mind might curb some of our more technophilic tendencies to throw a lot of cool new stuff into our programs without sufficient thought about where the resources to master that stuff must be taken from!  If it's worth teaching, it's probably worth teaching in a format our learners have a level of comfort with.  And if we've got a brilliant idea for a new format which we really do have reason to believe will improve the cost/quality/reach of our programming, it's probably worth taking some time to train learners in it's use apart from whatever challenging programming we'd like to put into it.

If the web-displayed email list is the oldest form of Web2.0 technology, the message board is probably the second-most venerable form of the read-write web.

For many web denizens, the message board is their first experience with publishing their words in a world-readable place. And though some would like to think this technology too "last century" to be of interest in a world with blogs, wikis, instant messaging, text messaging, and twitter-like micro-messaging, message boards continue to be in wide use, notably in customer-support "communities" for high-tech goods like those at Tivo. A board is literally comprised of message "planks," each with subject line crying out for the attention which will solve a vital problem: "Tivo Crisis: HELP!" is a typical example.  In time, a Tivo employee assigned to answer customer questions, or possibly, a Tivo enthusiast who has encountered this problem previously will see the message, and either ask some additional questions or offer a suggestion, thus ending the transaction and quite possibly the customer's relationship with the board and the people on it.

Message boards offer a range of affordances which tunes them well for this sort of application. Reputation management is a popular one, making it possible for somebody new to see immediately how others judge the value of a stranger's contributions.

There is a difference, though, between leaving a message, in the hopes someone, anyone, will answer, and having a discussion with a group of colleagues who share one's interest in exploring an idea or in moving a project forward.

It is for this latter purpose that discussion forums like Web Crossing, Caucus, and the discussion engine in our own eCampus are optimized.  Teams of people working together over time to create action plans, documents, or  new initiatives have different needs from those who are seeking answers to technical questions. They need to be able to attach a range of different resources, and to be able to search through those resources. They need to compare notes, and bounce ideas off one another. They need to track off-line communications – agendas and minutes from face to face meetings, links to resources elsewhere, recordings of key events. They need to track conversations they are not necessarily contributing to.  Discussion forums provide these affordances, and more.

It's common practice in this era of social software to tack a message board onto an app and pronounce it a social networking or collaborative platform. But if your idea of collaboration requires providing web workspace where people known to one another can think together and riff off each other's ideas, you need software which does more than take messages.  You need a full-featured discussion forum.

Educause has released their study of Students and Information Technology, 2007.  There's not much startling in this report, which the authors characterize as a detailing of evolution, rather than revolution.  More students are using content management systems than ever. More have laptops than ever.  Many have complaints about the unhelpfulness of the college help desk, and the lack of expertise demonstrated by their instructors when the instructors incorporate technology into the curriculum.  Most use email to reach instructors and other institutional staff, and facebook, IM or text messaging to reach each other.

Indeed, email appears to have acquired something of a professional patina. What once seemed like a perfect medium for a quick note, looks, by comparison to the more immediate modalities of chat and instant messaging and mobile text messaging, more and more like something the old folks use to produce official correspondence.

Unfortunately, email's rise to prominence for this kind of communication has not been accompanied by an initiative to teach the art of formal business correspondence.  High school writing texts still teach the formal business letter, which, while not having gone the way of the dinosaur quite yet, is sufficiently beyond the experience of most students to seem utterly irrelevant.

That this gap has significant repercussions for young people was illustrated this week at a college recruiting information session I attended with my daughter.  Representatives from several schools offered general tips on how to conduct a successful college search.  One of them spoke to the issue of email, addressing issues which startled me:

Email is an excellent way to reach us.  You may want to consider obtaining a separate email address for your college correspondence. That address should be "family friendly."  You would not believe some of the addresses we see in our inboxes!

Please use actual words. At our prestigious institution of higher learning, we recognize "to", "too", and "2" as separate and independent concepts.  We appreciate correct spelling, punctuation, and capitalization.  Please use complete sentences.

Yikes. On the one hand, I'm appalled. On the other, how the heck are kids, or for that matter, our employees,  supposed to know what is expected in formal business correspondence if we don't teach them?

September's big question on the Learning Circuits Blog is Where to Work? I think there are fewer questions that are more personal than what working environment is the "best", so I don't think I'll try to generalize, but I will reflect a little on why I enjoy my work.

As is obvious from the placement of this post, I work for Q2 Learning, which markets software to facilitate online training and online collaboration.  Q2's official mailbox is in Falls Church, Virginia, but our offices are quite literally on the web. That link above is sort of our reception area. This blog is a part of our Public Relations department. Behind it is a rabbit warren of project spaces and meeting areas and code repositories and document libraries which is where my colleagues and I spend our days.  Physically, most days, I'm at my desk in my home office, but tomorrow, I'll take my office with me to the car and, through the miracle of wireless broadband through my mobile phone carrier, work from the passenger seat as my husband drives our family to Dayton, Ohio. where he and my son will be competing in the USAF Marathon Saturday.

At Q2, we communicate via IM and discussion post and telephone, all day long, so it doesn't usually feel lonely.  I do think I'd enjoy having an office to pop into once or twice a week, because the full-bandwidth experience of people in person is almost always richer, and often more efficient.  But I'm cognizant of the very real advantages of the 30 second commute, and as the mother of teens, it's difficult to measure the value of being able to offer the house where kids can gather on days off school because everyone knows there is an adult here.  When I do travel, it's really great to be able to reach all the resources I have at the office from where ever I happen to be.

I value the high-trust, highly-collaborative culture of my workplace. I work with some extremely bright, extremely hard-working, and very funny people. Though they are not always acted upon, my recommendations are always considered carefully by the folks empowered to decide, which gives me a sense of high control over my destiny, at least at work!  The partners who own this firm make it a policy to deal as honestly and as transparently as possible with people inside and outside the organization, so even when I disagree with what they are doing, I usually understand what the thinking is which is driving their decisions.  That sort of transparency, and the credibility it builds, has seen this organization through some difficult times.  It also builds a culture of accountability, in which we count on each other to do what we say we'll do, and don't have to worry about being let down.

I love being part of a fast-moving, innovative organization. I love being a part of solving new problems each day. I sometimes am uncomfortable and feel things are moving too fast, but mostly, I'd be bored if they weren't.  And I love being part of a team which brings to market a platform which makes it possible for other organizations to build the same kind of flexible workspace I value so much.

Heher notes the key features of the new app, dubbed "A-Space":

Aside from simply being able to share documents back and forth, experts who are in the same field but work for different agencies could meet each other virtually and swap ideas and information directly. Experts say the current procedures for sharing information is so cumbersome that such communication is now impossible.

"It's just a better way to build and grow that network so that improved analysis can come out the other end," said Robert Cardillo, deputy director of analysis for the Defense Intelligence Agency.

It's so tempting to respond with a resounding DUH!  Maybe if people are actually conversing with each other, instead of shipping memos and planning documents back and forth, important knowledge will be transmitted and even created!

We run into this issue a lot. Many organizations have invested big bucks into document management systems, and IT departments, in particular, tend to view these applications (Sharepoint is a common example) as "the collaboration software we have that everyone needs to use."  But making documents available does not collaboration create. There has to be a way for people to let each other know what's in the doc, and why they should care. And the best way to do this is to have them actually talk to each other!  There is a huge difference between receiving an automated notice that somebody has uploaded a new doc to the shared repository, and being part of a conversation in which somebody says "Oh, yeah, we ran into that a while ago, and I wrote up this thing about handling it. Here it is, you might find this helpful!"

The quotes from people who have their doubts about how effective this initiative will be are telling—

Richard L. Russell, a former CIA analyst who teaches at the National Defense University, says the government needs to focus on building better analysis and human intelligence, not fancy tools.

"You may have a great technological infrastructure for managing information, but if you put garbage into it, the output will be garbage," he said.

Hmmm. It sounds as if he thinks he's talking about a database!  See, the cool thing about mixing people in with the data is you have someone there to say "yeah, this report came out before we knew about the stuff which is covered in this other report you should check out…"

Experts say the service will only be as effective as those who use it. And with many older workers puzzled by their younger colleagues' obsessive use of Facebook and its ilk, full-blown use could take time.

Sigh. Well, yes, any community is only as good as the people who participate in it. But seed it with the right folks, and people might not be "baffled" by the chance to talk to others working on the same problems, the way they are by the "friending of strangers" on public networking sites.

Here's hoping these folks have some really savvy people planning the roll-out. This technology could really help break down the siloing which has been the bane of U.S intelligence…but there needs to be some serious culture change right alongside it, and some senior folks committed to using this tool and requiring it of the folks they work with.

It's only our national security in the balance…

Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach posted a very thorough round-up of current thinking in The Art of Building Virtual Communities  over on the TechLearning blog.  If you haven't read it, do.  I learned of it from industry veteran Howard Rheingold.  I've found over the years that when Howard says something is worth checking out, I'll be sorry to have missed it.

While Nussbaum's focus is around educational community formed on platforms like Ning and Elgg, I found myself thinking about how these principles apply to Facebook and similar social networking sites.

Facebook made the cover of Newsweek this week.  And in other critically important Facebook news, my soon-to-be-a-Freshman-in-college son, Steve, built his Facebook page this week.

I've experimented with several of these social networking sites over time. I have pages on Orkut (which seems to have forgotten everything it knew about me, since it became a part of Google!) Linked-In, MySpace, Facebook, and probably some others I've forgotten. But my use pretty much parallels the use of most people in my age group—I might check in every so often, but my social network page is not the center of my online life. There are a range of reasons for that, lots of competing priorities is a huge one, but it does seem that we middle-aged folk have rather more compartmentalized lives, and often, our online and offline venues are populated by very different groups of people.

With the kids, something very different is happening. Steve has been mentioning "setting up a Facebook page" in the same breath as the other pre-college tasks he needs to get done – get his computer set up, arrange the billing, coordinate with his roommate.  Within the first few hours of putting up his Facebook page, my son "friended" his older brother, the kid up the street with whom he shares a ride to work, and several other of his high school friends.  Apparently, a weeknight in summer is an excellent time to do this, because immediately, his wall filled with comments. 

Nussbaum notes that one of the things which makes for healthy community is "Really active and consistent participation within the community. Community members really start to moderate themselves. It isn't just the moderator that handles issues. And members greet someone when they are new and answer questions and do not just point newbies to a FAQ doc"

Steve's initial Facebook experience included "welcome to the addiction!" notes from several of his friends. And a long, funny post from the kid up the street, who has long served as something of a mentor to Steve, about how not to look stupid on Facebook, which transmitted critical community norms like "Post a picture!" and "Don't use more than one of those add-in applications." That nobody sent him to an FAQ is in part a reflection that all of these initial contacts came from people he met in person, first, and is linking to online, second.  The only person he has *not* already met in person who appears on his list of friends is the guy who will be his roommate when he starts school next month. 

Poring over his future-roommate's page is completely analogous to the way in my generation, we pored over the paper facebook which was mailed out before school started, featuring our high school graduation pictures and a few details we'd chosen to share about ourselves. 

Steve is very conscious of the kind of impression he wants to make on his future classmates. But he's constrained, in a way his dinosaur parents were not, by the ability of people who know him well to access his page and call him on any exaggerations or distortions he might choose to present as part of his profile.  There's a tension between the desire to project the best of who he wants new friends to see, and the necessity of passing muster with the people who "knew him when."

Right now, most of the people he knows on Facebook are his high school friends. In a few short weeks, that will change, and it will be the norms of his college community which will likely be those he will be most concerned about understanding, observing, and reflecting in his Facebook use.

People do "friend" people they haven't met in person, and, according to Newsweek, even marry them. There are "groups" on facebook, but most are named affiliations only, few seem to engage in any group activity—even group discussions are sparse.  For most of its history, the driving power behind Facebook has been the vibrancy of the offline community to which its members are attached – first Harvard students, then other universities. It clearly has a hold on the college-bound high school crowd, but it remains to be seen whether Facebook will have the same "addictive" power for people are not already part of tightly-knit offline communities using this tool to facilitate other activities they engage in with each other.

I think this leaves the rest of us online community folks right back where we've always been. We find that in order to get the kind of passionate commitment we want to see, we need to take care that our communities are meeting real needs in the lives of our participants. It's not about the tool, or the hype or lack of hype attending the tool. It's about who is at the other end of the communication link, and how much we care about staying in touch.

There's a bit of a tempest brewing over the behavior of John Mackey, CEO at Whole Foods. Seems Mr. Mackey was a regular on a Yahoo! financial forum, where, under a pseudonym, he talked up his company. He also used that pseud to cast aspersions on Wild Oats, which is a target for acquisition by Whole Foods.

According to a  Reuters article "Mackey said he "posted on Yahoo! under a pseudonym because I had fun doing it. Many people post on bulletin boards using pseudonyms."

He's absolutely right. It's fun to post to message boards. And lots of people do it under pseudonyms.

There's nothing illegal about it.

Sometimes, though, doing this sort of thing will look pretty bad when the FTC gets around to suing to prevent an acquisition your company is trying to make.

Anonymity and pseudonymity have a valid place in human communication. With the advent of the Internet, that place has grown.  Most folks would agree that it's better that children, especially, participate in public forums under pseudonyms rather than release information which would make it easy for predators to track them down in person.

The freedom which anonymity and pseudonymity permit -- the ability to say what one will without fear of consequences -- is a two-edged sword.  Certainly, that freedom can be critical in enabling whistle-blowing where reports of illegal or dangerous behavior would otherwise not be made because the reporters risk their livelihood. It also is useful in support forums, where people are talking about extremely sensitive personal information.  But that freedom also permits participants to engage in irresponsible behavior which runs the gamut from stretching the truth to issuing hurtful personal attacks on other participants.  Anonymity and pseudonymity also prevent the transference of respect gained for excellent contributions to a space into the contributor's offline life.

It's our experience that if the purpose of a discussion space is the exchange of valuable information,  it's critical that participants be identified by their real names. Otherwise, it's simply impossible for participants to perform the essential task of "considering the source."  Spaces where people contribute under their real names are more readily integrated into the participants' offline lives.  It becomes more worthwhile to take the time to post that tidbit which could help your colleagues when your boss knows that it's you who made that contribution.  And of course, it's a lot easier to maintain decorum when everyone knows that they will be held accountable for what is done under their name.

Mackey has done nothing illegal, but his behavior strikes a lot of people as unethical.  Just as we structure our workplaces and other organizations to encourage ethical, productive, responsible behavior, we need to structure our online spaces to do the same. Requiring that people identify themselves using the name they use everywhere else in their lives is one of the better ways to harness the power of personal accountability towards that end. 

As a professional who has spent most of my career developing technical tools to facilitate communities of practice and training, I think I can reasonably refer to my work as facilitating the management of knowledge. Mostly, I’ve been all about figuring out ways to disseminate knowledge effectively within an organization of people who are charged with collaborating to develop some sort of product which will have value to others.

I’m a curious person, and I love that I have at my fingertips these days the ability to learn about any little thing which tickles my fancy.  I’m the product of a liberal arts education, one who believes that casting a wide net not only makes a person more interesting, but also sharpens their thinking and makes them more valuable to themselves and others.

But, in general, it’s pretty easy to judge whether something I’m learning about is likely to be of greater or lesser value to my employer and my clients.  As a matter of personal integrity, I try to focus the learning I do during work hours on subjects which will make me a more valuable employee.

The question is, at what point do the things I learn become valuable to the people who are paying me to learn?

I would argue that my learning is of no use to my employer until I either apply it to my work or share it with others.

The corporate culture around knowledge sharing is what determines whether people share at all, and also, if they do share, whether that sharing is in a form which is useful to others.

At Q2, we’re a pretty high-trust, transparent, high-information environment. We really try to keep each other apprised of what’s going on, because we’re often pulled into projects which have been started by others.  So everything, including emails exchanged by people who don’t have access to the discussion space, that has to do with a given project is generally posted to the discussion items set aside for that project. Because this makes it much easier for new folks pulled in to come quickly up to speed, we generally encourage our clients to join us in the project-planning space, and tend to have the vast majority of communications in the joint space, with only the bare minimum in “our team only” private space.

What this means is that when any of us come across some tidbit of information which might inform a project, we know we’ll engender positive regard for sharing, and more importantly, we know exactly where to share it so that it gets maximum exposure among the folks who would find it valuable.

Yes, we have wikis, and resource libraries full of relevant documents we can turn to for reference. I’d hate to have to get by without these helpful resources. And of course, we have face-to-face meetings and telephone conversations, too.  But it’s the discussion space I turn to first, to get the context of the project, so I can make sense of the documents.  It’s there I get a sense of who is in which role, and how they have been acting in that role over time.  I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve remembered that somebody shared something important with a particularly colorful turn of phrase—and how being able to search on the remembered phrase took me right to the information I was seeking. Sometimes, I find that the information isn’t quite what I need, but at least now I know who said it, and I can follow up with them.

Several bloggers have remarked recently on how blogging has supercharged their learning—how reflecting on what their colleagues are saying and constructing well-thought-out written responses clarifies the issues for them.

Discussion space facilitates exactly this same process, but opens it to those who are not comfortable standing on the platform which writing a blog implies.

Cultivating a culture in which people discuss issues in shared online space, in a format which captures it in searchable form, is stealth Knowledge Management.  Instead of depending upon people to dutifully catalogue information, discussion space encourages sharing in the form of spontaneous social constructivism…people riffing off each other’s ideas to move towards an innovative solution to the challenge before them.  Given the choice between talking to somebody about something they know about and I need to learn, and searching through a database when I’m not even sure just which terms to search on, I’ll take the personal contact every time.

How might the people in your organization respond to this kind of opportunity?

tc

Josh Catone does a very nice round-up of freely-available collaboration software this week in Rolling Your Own Online Office.  Though our xPERT eCampus is a pretty comprehensive online collaboration tool, we at Q2 do use a few of the tools he mentions – email, obviously, but also Google Docs and instant messaging, and some other stuff too.

What really caught my eye about Josh’s post, though, was the picture he used to illustrate it, which I’ve used here, as well.

This guy has been around for a *long* time, as is evidenced by the tiny screen and great thickness of his laptop – looks like my first laptop, circa 1994 or so.  He's been around long enough that most of us have seen him before, and long enough that we all probably need to admit to the erm, stretching of the truth this image puts forward.

First of all, today’s screens are much better, but squinting at a screen in the blinding light reflecting from sand and water at the beach is still a fast track to migraine-ville.

Secondly, what kind of a dufus leaves his shoes and socks and jacket on while he hauls a beach chair into place?

But on a more important level, there’s a real conflict between trying to appreciate the natural wonder that is a beach and doing serious business analysis. Heck, I’m not even sure it’s possible to type good poetry at the beach, though it might be possible to write it if one were a poet and had a pen and a pad of paper handy  Ubiquitous computing may make it possible to appear that one is working just about anywhere, but all too often, appearance is all that is achieved.  I’m all over working near a beach, and I do love the technology which makes doing so possible, but if I’m honest with myself, I have to admit that for me to be effective, I need to do my computing work where the call of the wild is muted, and treat myself to fully enjoying the environs during my breaks.

I think there’s a similar disingenuousness around the joys of rolling one’s own office.  For those of us who thrive on checking out the latest shiny new tool, these are heady days. It is wonderful to be able to play with a new tool, find that it does just what we need it to, and have the freedom to incorporate it into our work style.   If we’re honest, though, I think most of us might admit that a lot of that time spent futzing around with new stuff to do that evaluation is not very productive.  And to the extent that we are playing with collaborative tools, the utility of a new tool is primarily a function of the extent to which our collaborators also adopt it.  If we’re working together, and I’m trying to manage the project in Basecamp and you are accustomed to using Project, we’re going to have a problem until one of us accommodates the other’s choice of tool.

Generally, when people need to work together, they meet at somebody’s office, where they can count on finding the basic tools they will need – telephone, copier, computers, white board, markers, conference table, chairs. While there might be a call to check that there is, say an LCD projector available, nobody has to spend any time at all on these basic things, they are just assumed to be the fundamental toolset.

Similarly when we work together online, it’s more effective to have at the ready a suite of tools in the online office than it is to negotiate over which tools we’ll all be using.  We think our xPERT eCampus makes for a pretty cushy online office,  though it’ll be better when we work out the coffee thing!

His low-tech representations of the workings of RSS and most recently,  Wikis, using a white board, marker, and cut-outs of screen elements, somehow seem so much friendlier than the screencam approaches we’ve all become accustomed to.

I think the jury is still out on whether Wikis will ultimately become the tool of choice for shared documents.  They are great when you foresee the need to create links back and forth among a number of pages, but I’ll confess, when I wanted to coordinate with my family on Thanksgiving dinner, I chose Google Docs, on the theory that everyone I was working with already knows how to use a word processor, and the holidays are a lousy time to invite people to learn a new interface. 

If Wiki does eventually gain the wide acceptance (and by acceptance, I mean interest in creating as well as consuming content) among the ungeeky that search engines, mp3 and Youtube enjoy, it’ll be in large part because of the really friendly introduction LeFever and his team has created.

Dave Lee is noticing a pervasive, annoying issue for anyone who has advanced from experimenting with social tagging to depending upon it.  In de.lic.ious and my folksonomy he complains about how searches of his tags weren’t showing some of his bookmarks, because his personal tagging strategy is inconsistent:

in my listing of web 2.0 titles, some were tagged with "web2.0", others tagged "web-2.0", yet others tagged "web_2.0", and even a few were tagged "web20".  links to content on informal learning  was tagged either "informal-learning", "informal_learning", or "informallearning."  and it wasn't just inconsistent filling in of spaces.  did i tag the content i was looking for as "workplace learning" or "organizational learning"?  or was it "thebigquestion" or "tbq"? "learningcircuitsblog" or "lcb"?

As Dave notes, this a pain for individuals keeping track of  their  own bookmarks, but gets even more complicated when one would like to know what *other* people are bookmarking under these concepts.

It is issues like this one which we believe make the case for organizations interested in leveraging the advantages of Web 2.0 technology from within a coherent platform like Q2’s xPERT eCampus.  Our app permits individuals to create their own tags, but we also make it possible for the manager of a site to pre-load tags of special interest to the organization.  This way, when somebody wants to tag a post so that it’s easily searchable by other participants by that tag, they don’t have to wonder whether the preferred organizational tag usage is “Sales_Goals”  “sales_goals” “salesgoals” or “Harry’s_harebrained_notions_of_what’s_possible_this_quarter”.  The manager-supplied preferred tag is included in the list suggested to them when they go to tag the response.

We also permit participants to share their del.icio.us tags.

We think organizations can profit from being open to the out-of-box thinking of rest of the wild world of the web, but need not become slaves to the free-for-all.  A way to manage a controlled vocabulary in parallel with an open one is just one way we embed that philosophy in our product.

One of the most active conversations in Jay’s new Ning-based Internet Time Community is “How to start a community?”   

It’s sort of funny. We social constructivists have been long convinced that people learn best from one another.  For us, apprenticeship is the gold standard of learning environments – the training is as close as possible to the actual work for which the apprentice is being prepared, taking place, as it does, in the context of human relationship, the instruction can be tailored to the needs of the apprentice as those needs become apparent. 

It’s just that it’s hard to scale the apprenticeship model to train, say, this year’s class of corporate lending recruits! We accept degradation of the training environment in exchange for being able to train large numbers of learners.

The Internet, together with some pretty sophisticated conversation-facilitation software, makes it possible for people to gather around any subject which interests them and discuss it with others who know and care about the same thing.

So why aren’t people moving in droves to join communities like Jay’s where they can converse with and learn from others who care about the things they care about?  Why are we, 30 years into network-mediated interpersonal communication, still puzzling over how to get people to come, to contribute, and to stay?

Some think it’s because most folks aren’t really all that interested in learning. Others point to the necessary writing and typing skills as a significant obstacle. Still others note that humans communicate better with all of the sensory cues available in face-to-face communication than they do with relatively context-poor text.

Me, I keep coming back to the relationship issue.  I’ll jump some pretty significant hurdles to develop and maintain a friendship or a collegial relationship which already means something to me.  Such relationships can be, and are formed in text environments, but most of us need regular doses of full-bandwidth human contact to form our most important relationships and to keep those relationships on track.  That’s why the convention and visitor’s bureaus have not been put out of business by the availability of cheap video-conferencing.

Online community, and its corporate brother, online team space, can be invaluable facilitators of project work, and of the relationships which are invariably built out of the very human experience of working together toward a common goal.  But they can only serve shared interest. They can’t generate it.

She observes:

The self that grows up with multitasking and rapid response measures success by calls made, e-mails answered and messages responded to. Self-esteem is calibrated by what the technology proposes, by what it makes easy. We live a contradiction: Insisting that our world is increasingly complex, we nevertheless have created a communications culture that has decreased the time available for us to sit and think, uninterrupted. We are primed to receive a quick message to which we are expected to give a rapid response. Children growing up with this may never know another way. Their experience raises a question for us all: Are we leaving enough time to take our time on the things that matter?

This question is one which we in the training business ask a lot.  We find we are being asked to provide quality learning experiences which require a minimum commitment of time and attention from the learner.

When the learning experience is delivered via the desktop, we frequently find that learners are not permitted even the short time frames we announce as the likely requirements for attending to the program.  Learners’ managers expect them to “squeeze in” the training between the emails, phone calls and other tasks which are part of their daily responsibilities.

Even face-to-face training is not immune from these pressures. Where once learners would use breaks to check their voicemail, now they check their email and their instant messaging from the laptops on which they are taking notes or even the computer in the training lab.

Our technology has changed a lot, but our neurology has not kept pace. The truth is, we cannot, and therefore do not process information in “parallel”.  We just time-slice, rapidly moving our attention from one thing to the next. Changing human behavior remains one of the more challenging endeavors we undertake.  Successful change initiatives require time and the full attention of the intended audience audience.

Some organizations address the tyranny of interruption in meetings by explicitly stating that the meeting format will be “lids down”  – referring of course, to the laptops, but by extension, the cell phone and the blackberry. 

It would behoove us as trainers to develop similar social technologies, if we don’t wish our programs to be completely undermined by the technology which makes them possible!

In short, I am lucky enough to work with a group of life-long learners. So when a new learning opportunity presents itself, we are generally pretty good at sussing out the "What's in it for us?" and connecting the new learning to our standard way of doing things. Given our habits and our inclinations, we are pretty easily motivated to learn.

But what we sometimes forget is that not everyone has the same proclivities as we do. Even if you enjoy it, learning isfundamentally hard work that asks you to do things that are unfamiliar and quite often outside your comfort zone. Which leads me to the subject of this blog post: motivation.

Motivating learners is often considered a pre-cursor to actual learning events, sort of a "scene-setting" activity. And it's certainly something that is included in most, if not all, learning events - we are very good at telling a learner not just what she will learn, but how it will help her do her job better. The trouble is, I've found that whatever I say in a learning situation is generally trumped by whatever a learner hears once she returns to her desk. So I'm a pretty firm believer in looking for ways to motivate learners beyond just telling them what they will be able to do with their new-found skills.

The question is, how?

Of course, the first answer is obvious - making sure the learning aligns with business goals and objectives.But beyond that, what can training do to instill a desire to learn in employees? Some thoughts:

• Give learners an opportunity to think out loud about what's in it for them.

The ability to make connections between what we already know and what we need to learn is critical to successful learning, so creating opportunities for learners to ask how learning applies to their particular circumstances is important. Simply telling them is not enough - each learner has a unique situation in which they will need to apply their new-found knowledge and skill.

• Provide not just content and resources, but opportunity to practice.

Most training that's focused on interpersonal skills or relatively complex skills offer some way of practicing - via simulations, case studies, role-plays, what have you. All of these are good opportunities, but we need to remember that they are not real opportunities, so the motivation to perform in them may be somewhat less than say, if a learner had to perform a sales call with her boss listening in. 

• Make performance the criteria for success

In this case, I'm not talking about assessments that measure what you've learned as a result of completing training, but what you can DO.

This really builds on the issue of practice. Once a learner has the opportunity to practice skills, measuring how well she continues to apply them back on the can significantly increase one's motivation to look sharp and pay attention in training.  Mentoring, coaching and on-the-job training are all ways to implement this strategy, but again, the ability to scale can be difficult.

I tend to think that incorporating actual performance into learning is what motivates learners infinitely more than a good affective objective and any amount of pre-work. Unfortunately, while measuring real-life performance is one of the best motivators for learning, it is also more difficult to do, especially on a large scale, because it requires the coordination of people outside of the training environment.

But in cases where performance is business-critical, it seems that motivation is an important quality not just for the learner, but for the organization to invest in a learning model that supports learner motivation from before the training to long-after --  when it really counts.

As a Q2Learning employee, I certainly have some thoughts on how to make this happen in organizations - but am interesting in hearing what has worked for others, and how have you addressed some of the challenges of scaling this to larger initiatives. Any takers?

There’s an image, a map of online communities, making the rounds this week, developed by Randall Munroe, whose sweet, romantic, yet inexorably geeky comics at xkcd are a favorite part of my blog-reading routine.

Regular xkcd readers know that Munroe buries little mouseover “easter eggs” in his images. The map one reads, “ I'm waiting for the day when, if you tell someone 'I'm from the internet', instead of laughing they just ask 'oh, what part?”

The plausibility of that scenario, not to mention the size and diversity of the online community world Munroe illustrates, is testament to just how essential the concept of “community” has become to our understanding of the Internet.

Of course, community has been with us from the start. From the first time somebody used a cc: field in an email, people have used the connectivity of the network to initiate and maintain contact with each other.

For a long time, though, fixed ideas about the computer as an information cruncher, and, of course, our human preference for full-bandwidth, face-to-face interaction with other humans, held undue influence over the world of application development.

Interestingly, what’s emerging is that yes, the Internet as information source is powerful and important. But what people find even more compelling is the opportunity to form groups with one another to process that information.  We want to talk about and share our photos, and our favorite songs. We want to play games together. We want to discuss the news of the day with people who share our philosophies of life. We want to link up with others in our fields of endeavor.

Those of us who feel passionate about the social constructivist theory of learning sort of can’t help but feel we’re living a dream coming true.

Yeah, I’m from the Internet. I work on an eCampus powered by Q2Learning. I post pictures of my kids over at blogspot.  I just recently completed a project honoring a teacher who is retiring from their high school over there, too.  I enjoy the social and professional interactions at Brainstorms, and occasionally participate in the joint pondering of Big Questions over at Learning Circuits. I have pages on facebook and linked-in which are not very well-maintained, because I don’t get there as often as these other places.

How about you?

Many of these companies - who do not have a core competency in online learning - are looking towards an LCMS-based approach to help them in this transition. On the surface, a learning content management system (LCMS) seems to be exactly what the doctor ordered. We believe that this is an approach that will not, in fact, create the world-class online learning programs they aspire to, and would recommend instead what we call the blended "last mile" approach.

The LCMS Approach

The LCMS approach has several attractive benefits, but also some costs associated with each.

Create content: One of the first things that strikes the buyer is that you can create content right there within the tool. It's one stop shopping.

Manage content: Better yet, content is stored centrally with version control and often check-in/check-out, so teams of developers can work together, and content can be easily modified to meet individual customers' needs.

Map objectives:  To customize your courses, you can create a number of small learning objects that each map to a learning objective, and then automatically assemble them into a course.

Adapt content: Best of all, pre-tests can be developed that will then automatically construct courses and modules that focus on exactly what the learner needs.

This approach is especially attractive in what we like to think of as "the Home Depot" type situation, where (a) you have thousands of topics that you need to manage training for; (b) there is a lot of churn in the information; (c) the information is very straightforward (often vocabulary, concept and procedures), and thus (d) the learning objectives are at the lower end of Bloom's taxonomy - listing benefits, describing features, and recognizing appropriate uses.

The LCMS approach has more problems when you have a core set of content consisting of more sophisticated concepts, and you need learners to use higher order critical thinking tools such as making choices based on reasoned argument, generalizing from a set of given facts, making predictions, drawing conclusions, and the like. This is because the strengths of the LCMS approach also contain its weaknesses.

• The strength of the LCMS is its ability to create an "atomic" view of the subject matter, where the overall topic is broken down into small units that can be combined and recombined at will. While this is appropriate for the "home depot" type situation, it is not at all clear that many sophisticated sets of IP can be disassembled in this way.
• Specifically, if you attempt to break down your IP into a large number of small modules, the resulting "molecular"-type products may be more page-turning in nature.
• The content created in the LCMS can often only be edited in the same LCMS; thus locking you into one tool (remembering that most organizations switch their LMS every 3-5 years…)
• There are several fundamental assumptions that may not map well to higher-order learning.
  • There is a one-to-one correspondence between learning objectives and learning objects.
  • The best way to teach a set of learning objectives is to teach them one-by-one with a set of learning objects that can be assembled on the fly.
  • What is to be taught is something called "content" - often content that has "right and wrong" answers, as opposed to teaching the adaptive application of fundamental principles to complex real-world situations.

A blended "last mile" approach

An alternative to the LCMS approach is what we call the blended "last mile" approach, and is useful when the following conditions are met:

• You have a body of intellectual property (IP) that you wish to transmit to others.
• This IP consists of a set of core principles and a set of practices around the effective application of them.
• Mastery matters. It is important that people be truly proficient in applying their skills and knowledge in live situations. This implies that they be able to use such critical thinking skills as analyzing, evaluating, abstracting - and that they be able to not only apply standard procedures, but adapt them or develop new ones in "edge" situations.

In situations like this, we've found the following to be effective:

1. Standardize the teaching of principles. Keep your core IP standard - the vocabulary, concepts and procedures; the underlying principals, the thinking frameworks, and the like. Find the best way to teach this, and devote some real resources to doing it right.
   
   If the instruction will be delivered at a distance, consider high-end eLearning, using scenario-based training with social simulations and the like. If interpersonal skills are central (as they are, for instance, in teaching sales), consider a program which minimizes face time by teaching concepts via eLearning, then a face-to-face workshop for call skills.
    
2. Modify the interactive aspects of training. Start with a bank of model activities: case studies, worksheets, incident analyses, small group discussions, stretch assignments, and action plans.
   
   Customize these activities to go the "last mile" of training, making them fit your customers' unique situations, employing their unique metaphors and jargon, addressing their markets, and integrating their workflow.
    
3. Move from a training event to a learning process. Use a learning delivery system like our xPERT eCampus to deploy the blended program. To reduce time to proficiency, ensure that 50% of seat time is spent over several weeks applying skills on the job with feedback and coaching, using the customized activities you've developed above.

The result can be a program that reduces time to proficiency by applying your core IP to your customers in customized ways, while minimizing the expense of modifications and rolling out a truly world-class learning program.

How can I get started?

There's a right way and a wrong way to go about creating such a world-class learning program.

The right way is to have a master game plan in place before moving forward.

The wrong way is to create basic (read cheap) content initially to get started, with the aspiration that once that's in place, you'll improve it and add on the more advanced pieces.

Unfortunately, that's a little like thinking you'll start with a dinghy, and then add on the additional sails and a few feet more length to turn it into a racing sloop. The dinghy is what it is, and if later you want to build a sloop, you need to start from scratch.

The critical mistake you can make is by starting with the wrong platform (an LCMS rather than a delivery platform), the wrong content (simple page-turning eLearning that address single simple learning objectives v. sophisticated social simulations that teach a suite of objectives at once), and most of all, the wrong design (LCMS-based content v. proficiency-based blended learning); all of which lead to the wrong commitment of resources, vendors, and budgets - which are then much harder to change in the long run.

The Pareto time principle is nowhere more true than in situations like this. Spending 20% on the front end can literally save you 80% on the back end. Start by teaming with a firm whose solutions architects share your vision for the world-class training you aspire to create, and who can create a road-map that shows you the route to take to get you there.

One of the things I find most fascinating (and frustrating) about games is that typically you're not modeling an external goal-set, but are creating one out of whole cloth -- and thus one that the potential user must find attractive, engaging, and fulfilling.  It sets a whole new bar on software "usability."

This observation by my friend Mike Sellers, a long-time game industry exec who is chief alchemist at http://www.onlinealchemy.com/, got me thinking about the issue of identifying goals, and how this process becomes more complex when one is involved with getting individuals to align in the service of organizational goals.

When we’re selling software, the first set of goals we need to meet are those of the people making the buying decision.

The buyers’ goals may, or may not be in alignment with the goals of the people who will be asked to actually use the software.

In the case of collaboration software and training software, disconnects of this sort may result in the successful sale of a license or hosting contract followed by a project which never quite gets off the ground.

The thing is, unlike those in the gaming industry, we e-learning and collaboration folk are charged with facilitating the process of our users getting real work done.  Our users are being paid to serve actual goals.  So we are relieved from the daunting challenge of creating goals, but this also means we really need to resist the all-too-frequent temptation to simply imagine we know what those goals are and what participants need in order to fulfill them, and thus “create an external goal-set of whole cloth.” 

Often, this means we need to do some actual research into just what the goals of the people doing the work are, how those align (or fail to align) with the goals of the organization, and figure out just how much change management needs to be baked into the processes of launching  administering, and participating in a new community space or training program.  In order to achieve an alignment which results in greater productivity for the organization through a process which feels attractive, engaging, and fulfilling for the people who are doing the heavy lifting, we really have to have a good understanding of the environment in which these folks operate, so that our model of the external goal-set bears some actual resemblance to the one already in place.

Wonder what's up with that?

Jacqui Cheng over at Ars Technica notes that voyeurism still rules the web 2.0 world.  She refers to a speech this week by Hitwise analyst Bill Tancer at the Web 2.0  expo in San Francisco:

According to the report, only 0.16 percent of YouTube's total traffic is made up of users who upload videos. Similarly, only 0.2 percent of Flickr's regular users are there to upload photos. Wikipedia was the only "Web 2.0" type site in the report that had decent numbers, but even its participation was relatively low at 4.59 percent of visitors adding or editing Wikipedia entries.

This is pretty terrific news for people who are trying to drive page-views – it seems just a few contributors are enough to attract a sizeable viewing audience.

It’s a little less encouraging for folks who are trying to build vibrant social and collaboration spaces online, however. Good conversation and good teamwork require a balance of give and take.  In its absence, what we end up with is more akin to lecture or broadcasting.

It’s useful to be aware that the default behavior in online space is viewing, not posting.  Armed with this knowledge, we can, from the very beginning of a new space, put in the extra effort and planning which is required to set a tone which makes clear that in our space, full participation is expected, and that to fully participate is to contribute regularly.  Common strategies we can employ include:

• Charging community/project managers with regularly contributing topics for discussion or analysis
• Explicitly requesting input from participants, by name, on issues being discussed (There are probably a dozen posts each week in our internal space which end with “Val, Dianne, thoughts?”)
• Publicizing accomplishments of participants in the space in venues outside the space. (We were stuck on the project until Dennis posted this great idea in the collaboration space!)

Highly participatory online space is an achievable goal. But like most efforts to overcome inertia, it requires some energy input on the front end!

One of the things I like best about the article is the differentiation of virtual communities from other virtual spaces. According to Hagel, virtual communities involve

• establishing connections on electronic networks among people with common needs

• so that they can engage in shared discussions

• that persist and accumulate over time

• leading to complex webs of personal relationships and an increasing sense of identification with the overall community

These elements allow them to evolve shared meaning, trust and motivation in a way that differentiates them from other sites like social networking sites, content aggregation sites and electronic markets.

Readers familiar with our philosophy of communities may recall that one of our rallying cries is "collaboration is about people." To that end we've tried to create heuristics for our communities that revolve around people and relationships, rather than just content and structure.

As our customer base has grown and found new ways to apply our software to their particular challenges, we've certainly added features that reflect more social networking and content aggregation, but I believe that it's our continued focus on the people aspects of community that make us a premier choice for virtual communities.

Check out the posting and tell us what you think!

The current flurry of interest in the idea of a code of conduct for bloggers is a bit amusing to veterans of community building on the Internet.  The issues being raised now about the costs freedom of expression exacts have been well-known since the days when Usenet News first gave anyone with an Internet connection a global platform for self-expression, way back in 1979.

It seems to me that where it is not possible to establish shared norms for what constitutes acceptable conduct, what exists falls something short of a community. It may be a network. It may be a universe. But if you can’t define what bad behavior looks like within it, and you can’t kick people out of it for failing to refrain from bad behavior, what you’ve got is something which lacks an essential element of community: shared culture.

Out here in the wild and woolly blogosphere, we do not have such a community. We do have some smaller sub-communities, and they have some standards.  Learning Circuits, for example, will pull my comments to their blog if I use their space to start promoting my product. They are considering developing some statement of expectations for the affiliated blogs which address their “Big Question”, too. But the truth is, while they can decline to link to this blog if I fall afoul of their standards, there’s nothing to stop me from referencing them when I write things they would prefer not to be associated with.  It’s just that I’m unlikely to do so, because I consider these folks my colleagues and I care about my reputation with them. Oh, yeah, and um, my boss, the one who pays me, cares about our organization’s reputation in the industry, too.  I have something to lose by being a jerk.

Interestingly, some of the bloggers who associate themselves with Learning Circuits have come out against the development of a code of conduct for Big Question answerers.  This is also predictable…people tend to react adversely to restrictions added after they’ve joined a group, even when those restrictions are ones they would cheerfully agree to if they were posed as a condition for joining the group in the first place.

One of the things almost 30 years of being able to form communities on the Internet has taught us is that it’s a really good idea for anybody who seeks to set up a new community, online or elsewhere, to have drafted a set of standards to which people who wish to join must subscribe as a condition of joining.  It doesn’t have to be lengthy. But it should cover the basic expectations, because experience has taught us that “don’t be a jerk” is not concrete enough to give people who really do want to be good community citizens guidance on how to conduct themselves.

My short list looks like this:

1. This space exists to serve [insert stated purpose here] Members are to post with an eye toward furthering this purpose. Posts deemed by community managers to be unrelated or counter to this purpose may be removed.
2. You may not use this space to do anything illegal. (or against organizational policy)
3. You may not misrepresent yourself here. (Anonymity has its place, a fairly limited one, imho, but persistent identity is a cornerstone for the formation of community.)
4. You may not attack the character of any participant here.
5. You may not use this space for commercial purposes of your own.
6. People who believe themselves incapable of abiding by these requests should choose not to join. People who join and later demonstrate themselves incapable of acceding to these requests will lose their privileges here.

Yah, this list is a little dictatorial. It reflects some hard, hard learning that if you want to attract and keep desirable community members, it turns out that you really do need to have a way to keep (or throw) the bums out.

It will be interesting to see how the blogosphere re-organizes itself around this dawning realization.

Tom Haskins paints an intriguing picture in his answer to the Learning Circuits blog big question this month.  He replies to the question “ILT and Off-the-Shelf Vendors – What Should They Do?” with a description of what things are like “now” and the recommendation that given this set of circumstances “Leave a clean corpse” is perhaps the best choice.

I’m not sure we’re really where Tom thinks we are. Frankly, I’m not sure we have good research to prove our sense that  “we've gotten far better results from giving us more feedback and less instruction to build skills,”  though I’d like to think we’ll get there.

And I’m not sure we’ll ever be in the place where we can say, as Tom asserts, “Now that so many of us have built up meta skills (for problem solving, changing strategies, collaborating etc) in online and computer games, it seems silly to teach a concept, skill or policy change as if it's not something everyone can figure out for themselves or team-up to knock out in a jiffy.”

Don’t get me wrong. I’m a believer in informal learning.  But I think there will always be value in taking time out to figure out where the gaps exist between what people need to know and need to be able to do, and where they actually are.  And there will always be a place for well-designed, formal content, prepared by people who have taken the time to find out what works for adult learners, in the quest to fill those gaps.

Subscribing to RSS feeds, tags and searches is a great way for an individual to keep abreast of what’s happening in her field. Contributing to communities of practice is a terrific way to pass on hard-won expertise.  It’s all good.

But it’s not sufficient. In the frantic, multi-tasking environments in which we all work, there is perhaps a more urgent need than ever for content which is the product of careful reflection about just what is essential, and how it fits into an overall framework.  

We think the future of learning is in the engagement of learners with each other, and with skilled facilitators, around that content.

So we aren’t looking to see our friends and colleagues, the content providers, buried just yet. We think we’ll be needing each other for some time to come.

Boxes and Arrows has a great article by Michael Beavers on setting up business stakeholder interviews. While he's focusing on interviewing stakeholders for the development of a Web site or application, much of what he discusses is also relevant to creating online communities.  Pay special attention to what he has to say about identifying influential stakeholders.

With Web 2.0, though, my failed experiments no longer just live on my hard disk. They are scattered all over the Internet.  I realized this as I considered giving Explode a whirl after reading about it in Tony Karrer’s blog.  Explode is an attempt to bring people who are interested in the same thing together across the various networks to which they may belong. The idea is that if you have a page on Xanga or LiveJournal or Blogger or MySpace you can put your explode widget there, and somehow keep connected with your friends who are elsewhere. I thought there was a tag cloud thing involved here somewhere too, but maybe that’s MyBlogLog. I was playing with it today, too. 

I sort of got derailed when Explode asked me to put their widget on my page. My page? Which one?  The one on Facebook? Or Linked-in? This blog? The ones I played with over on Blogger and TypePad? Or one of the multiple places I have photo accounts? My personal web site, the one I built lovingly by hand back in the days before Web 2.0?  The blog I put there a few years ago?

Only some of these options actually permit the addition of foreign javascript, so that limits the field a little.  But the reality is that I probably have 20 some sites on the web, leftover from experiments with various providers of blog, wiki, social networking, and photo services.  I’m not really using any of them all that actively, largely because of the fragmentation of services and of the way the people I need to connect with are scattered around them.  I keep a folder marked “registrations” in my email client which houses the login instructions for all of these places. But the reality is that I would have a heck of a time telling anybody where to find me on the web.  Thank goodness for Google!

The plethora of choices really is a bounty. But I can’t remember which sites do what well. Where should I put the project I’m doing with picture with pictures and heavy text? I know I was somewhere (was it Google's Picasa-now-merged-with-Blogger?) last summer which seemed up to this, but heck, odds are the feature sets everywhere have changed.

I hate to admit it, but it’s so tempting just to retreat back to my email box. I know how to find things there! The key people in my network are all nicely alphabetically arranged in my address book, just a click away!  I sometimes feel exasperated when customers try to manage their discussions from their email boxes, because our discussion rooms on the web offer so much more power and flexibility. But today, I’m feeling a lot more empathetic.

To hear some Web 2.0 enthusiasts tell it, “training” is becoming an outmoded concept. These days, anybody who needs to know anything can find it on the web. It is a new dawn for the autonomous learner.

It is true that the read-write web has brought us an unprecedented avalanche of instantly available information.  If I want a new way to prepare the chicken and broccoli I’ve got in the fridge for tonight’s dinner, a quick Google search on “chicken brocolli recipe” will produce a number of options.

Of course, it helps that I’ve got some domain knowledge.  I know something about what my family likes to eat. And about how much time I’ve got available for preparation, and whether I’m up for a frying extravaganza or looking for something a little less fat-intensive. I have enough experience in the field that I can reliably size up a recipe for whether it looks like something that will work for me, in my kitchen, with my equipment and my skill-set to please my audience.

The Middlebury College students writing papers for their Japanese history course didn’t have that advantage. They are still developing their basic domain knowledge, and their knowledge of their professor as audience.  Hence, they could not recognize that Wikipedia was steering them wrong.

How much can an organization afford to trust “information in the wild” for apprising members of what they need to know?  I’d argue that the reasonable level of trust rises with the domain expertise of the seeker.  It is a huge boon to our organization that our deeply experienced Unix system administrators and our java developers can go out on the web to look for and find ways their colleagues have approached the problems they face.  We are a small organization, and don’t have the resources in-house to train these guys, in the first place. We depend on them to identify what they need to know, and to seek out books, training opportunities, and web sites for their professional development, because they are the subject matter experts in these domains in our organization.

But for the folks who come in green?  They need more than a browser and an internet connection and a mandate to go forth and learn.  We want them learning from our SME’s, about how we do things here. We want them learning the cultural history in which the why’s for how we do things is embedded. We’ve invested thousands of person-hours in making mistakes and learning from them, and we’d really like to leverage that investment by teaching our new hires how to avoid those pitfalls.  We know about some trusted resources, and we want to acquaint them with these resources. We try to hire creative, self-motivated individuals who will be interested in seeking out new ways of doing things.   Until they’ve had a chance to learn for themselves what works well and what doesn’t in “our kitchen,” though, we’d sort of like for them to run any shiny new ideas they find in the wild by us for a reality check before attempting to implement them for our customers.

In short, we want to train them.

I have to admit, I have a varied and checkered educational and vocational pedigree. I began my career as an aerospace engineering major, which has in some respects come in handy, in that I can, in fact definitively say something is not rocket science. 

Rocket science itself however, is in fact a difficult and trying subject that quickly steered me into another direction , which led to another, and another, and another, until I have found myself here at Q2Learning where I get to do a little bit of everything, which actually suits me just fine.

At Q2, we spend a lot of time thinking and talking about what motivates people - both to participate in communities, and to learn. After some reflection, it's pretty clear that what motivates me is that I like to learn about other people's stuff - whenever I work with a client, their content seems bright and shiny, just the sort of thing interests me. (This is true of pretty much every client's content, regardless of the subject matter).

So, the opportunity to design learning plans around someone else's information? Heaven! I get to tear it apart, break it down, chunk it out, and put it back together again for another learner  - sort of like playing with mental tinker toys. And when the structure is built and people are using it, I get to move on and pick up another set of ideas, principles and best practices - what could be better for someone who likes to go from learning one thing to the next? And that's what I like about working in a learning field.

What about you?

In his presentation, he offered a slide with these points:

• The fail fast, fail often method: “users must be treated as co-developers”
• Google discards 80% of new features
• They often prototype and deploy within two weeks.
• Release early, release often: Flickr issues releases as quickly as every half hour

This is the MO of Web 2.0.  It’s dizzying, and fascinating.

And it’s cognitively costly. It’s one thing for those of us whose jobs revolve around keeping up with what new functionality is being explored on the web and how it can interact valuably with other functionality to be downloading stuff, figuring out how it works and finding out that it doesn’t work quite right and sending feedback to the vendor about it.

Similarly, leading edge gamers are often willing, and enthusiastic about spending their leisure time helping to shape the future of their favorite playgrounds.

But it’s crazy to expect that people whose jobs do not revolve around this stuff, but who are on company time trying to get a rather different task list attended to,  should be willing, let alone able, participants in the “co-developer” experience. It’s even crazier to expect that their employers are interested in paying them to spend time in this role.

Organizations need stable platforms on which to support training and online collaboration, so that their employees can concentrate on the content of the training and the work on which they are collaborating, instead of spending endless cycles spinning their wheels, figuring out how to use the @#$% tools.

We need to apply the stuff we know about adult learners to our technology roll-out process. It makes sense to invest in a full-featured platform, but it may best to roll out the features over time, incrementally, so that users have a chance to learn the interface and master it at a comfortable pace.

At Q2, we depend on feedback from our customers to guide our efforts as we continue to develop our software. But we work hard to keep the participant interface intuitive and stable, and we sort of think that we should be responsible for the testing and bug finding, so our customers can just get down to work.  When bugs slip through, it's embarrassing to us. That may be a little old-fashioned, but for the moment, I think we'll take a pass on the "user as co-developer" trend.

I had a wonderful afternoon yesterday talking with Richard Flanagan, recent of Fort Hill Company, and co-author of The Six Disciplines of Breakthrough Learning.  We were talking about the (organizational) training industry, and in particular, how so much training does not seem to be focused on business results. It reminded me of a story told by Wayne Hodgins. He relates how prior to home refrigerators becoming commonplace, people used to store their food in ice chests, and ice was delivered to their door by ice trucks. Within a few years after home refrigerators became commonplace, all these ice delivery companies had gone bankrupt. This was all the more odd since they used refrigerators in the delivery trucks, so they understood the mechanics of the new technology. His conclusion? These businesses failed because they were short-sighted about what business they were in. They thought of themselves as in the ice business, where if they had thought of themselves as in the food preservation business they might have been the early adopters of refrigerator manufacturing. What I came away with from my talk with Richard was the same question. What business are we in?

When we proclaim the wonders of rapid eLearning, it's pretty apparent to me that we're not in the behavior change or performance improvement business. In fact, it's not at all clear whether we're in the learning business at all, or simply in the content publishing business. And if learning were the same as content publishing, universities could all close their doors in favor of libraries.

So what business are we in? What business do we need to be in in order to stay in business during the next down cycle? I would suggest we need to be in the results business, the performance improvement business, the cost containment business, and the revenue generation business.

And the related question comes down to this: Will the VPSales and the CFO be strong allies for you in maintaining and increasing the training budget next year? If not, are you in the right business - and what would it take to get there?

For us at Q2Learning, the answer is results oriented training; training that reduces time to proficiency; training focused on situations where there's a clear line of sight between increased skills and increased top or bottom line. This is where we believe the mind share of the training organization needs to be.

Where is your organization's mind share?

But simply telling people they have to carefully plan their communities of practice is a little like the old Steve Martin gag, "how to be a millionaire" (first, get a million dollars!)

So here is a list of questions to ask when starting a community.

1. What are you planning on doing in a community of practice?
   
   Not only should this be the first question you ask, but you should ask it of a bunch of people - yourself, the executive sponsor, the community manager, your target user group, and your target user groups management.  If the answers aren't generally the same, some calibration is in order.
   
2. What's in it for people to contribute to a community of practice?
   
   A lot of times participants are very gung-ho about a community of practice because they see it as a place they can go to get information and expertise (which it is). But if all of your participants are interested in only getting something out of a CoP, it's going to be a short-lived community.
   
3. Do communities of practice currently exist in your organization?
   
   If the answer is yes, then what's the impetus for moving them online? Some compelling reasons for doing so include the ability to expand participation, add capabilities such as document authoring and blogging, cateloging and categorizing information.
   
   If communities of practice don't currently exist in your organization, ask yourself why not. Technology is a great enabler, but if your organization doesn't actively support CoPs in person, the likelihood of it happening online isn't really any better.
   
4. What are the critical aspects of current collaboration tools that community members can't do without?
   
   If you introduce a tool that's lacking in these critical aspects, no matter how sophisticated tool is otherwise, you are setting your community up for less-than-spectacular success.
   
5. What portion of my people's tasks can community participation take the place of?
   
   The simple fact of the matter is that if community participation is something that is added on to peoples' tasks it will almost always take a back seat to other tasks, regardless of the inherent value of the community.

Of course, this is not an exhaustive list, but getting the answers to these five questions will help you determine the next set to ask - which is, of course, how your voyage of discovering the value of online communities begins!

There are consultants who make big money helping software developers create interfaces to their software which might conceivably be understood by the mere mortals who seek to operate it. Personally,  I’m a big fan of Alan Cooper, who pointed out that the need not to look stupid really belongs at a foundational spot in Maslow’s hierarchy. For this reason, Cooper maintains, attention to user interface should be at the heart of software development, rather than an afterthought once the feature set has been built.

Great strides have been made in user-friendliness since the days when the user interface was a punch card or paper tape.   I’d argue that much of that progress rests on the concurrent training of the computer-using public to recognize interface elements which were at first utterly foreign.

Consider, for example, the toolbar above.  Every school kid knows what that does.  But it was utterly new not so very long ago, and required people not only to learn the meaning of the symbols on the buttons, but also to master new skills of “highlighting” text with a mouse cursor.

Brevity, we know, is the soul of wit. A clean, intuitive interface makes a user’s heart sing (or at least prevents it from suffering palpitations!)  The increased computer literacy of the public means that there is a much greater array of metaphors for which there is shared understanding than has ever been the case before.

But if  software does something new, odds are the folks behind it had to develop new vocabulary and new metaphors to describe its use. Your users will have to learn what these new terms mean, and how the functions they refer to work. And the people who configure the software to customize it for different user groups will have to learn how to twiddle the knobs which control their function.

Just as it takes more time to write a brief piece than it does to write a rambling one, the development of a comprehensive feature set and the flexibility to configure the software “tightly” (to display the only features needed for each set of end-users) requires a lot of time. Even when the actual creation process has been highly automated, just learning how to operate the buttons and levers “behind the curtain” to configure that interface likewise requires a significant investment of time and effort.

Which is to say, that as we marvel at the intuitive interfaces with which we are increasingly presented in the banquet of Web 2.0 applications made available to us as end-users, we need to remain cognizant of the hidden work behind them.  Not only is somebody writing the software, but somebody is configuring it and somebody is maintaining the infrastructure: The physical server, the operating system, the web server, the application itself all require the tender ministrations of either one extremely technical adept individual, or, increasingly, a team of them. 

Adding new functionality to an organization always comes at a cost.  Choosing to go ASP, and paying the vendor of the software to cover the hosting and maintenance can be a good bet.  It may also be possible to contract with the vendor to do much of the configuration work. But odds are, you’ll also need to designate at least one individual in your own organization to be the “savant” who knows what the software does, what configurations are possible, and how to get the necessary configurations taken care of.  And it’s quite possible that the simpler the end-user interface is, the more technically adept your configuration person will need to be in order to be able to create that "utterly intuitive" experience for your end-users.

About a million years ago (in technology time), I worked for a custom WBT house that mandated that every three or so screens in a WBT there was an opportunity for some kind of interaction - the learner had to make a choice, answer a reflection question, take a quiz. When I look back on those WBTs, I really just want to hang my head, because clearly in retrospect these were not the type of interactions that would facilitate learning - they might keep the learner from falling asleep in his chair, but that was the extent of it, I'm afraid.

Of course, there are a lot of highly interactive WBTs out there that take advantage of simulations and gaming technology to create a situation in which the learner is able to immerse herself in an experience that meets at least some of Sweeney's requirements for instructional interactivity: causing learners to think, helping learners rehearse skills and prepare for performance, testing learners' knowledge when they need a progress check, etc.

But one serious downside to the kind of technology that's required to provide such a rich learning environment is cost - especially in cases where you are trying to customize the learning to the learner's particular organization. So how do you create an atmosphere in which learners can avoid the pitfalls that come with traditional eLearning interactivity, while not blowing the budget on a single training program?

Personally, I like the old standby from my ILT days of asking a learner what she thinks, or even better, suggesting that she talk over a concept with her peers, form an opinion, and THEN asking her what she thinks.

I'm not advocating a wholesale return to ILT days, (by any means!), but I think a lot of rigor could be inserted back in to eLearning by incorporating the best practices of face-to-face training: peer-to-peer interaction, group activities, and plain old asking learners to actively participate in the learning process by publishing their thinking.

At Q2, we have a platform that we obviously think is well suited for these types of activities, and the convenience of having everything in one platform is one more argument for blended learning using the eCampus. But even if you're not using a centralized platform, taking advantage of the tools that are available today like blogs, wikis and discussion forums will add a layer of instructional interactivity that I could not have added years ago, even with an unlimited development budget.

If by Web 2.0 we mean the philosophies of open source, wikinomics, driving decisions and power to the users, and "information wants to be free," then yes, there are some fundametal shifts that many enterprises will need to make to adopt and manifest these aspirations. In fact, I would suggest that the freedom for each knowledge worker to choose which open source technology they want to use not only requires a shift in IT, it may effectively hobble or collapse the enterprise. The costs of administration and training are rather staggering to consider, and I haven't seen any discussion of what happens when workers leave their positions and their knowledge is stored in a toolset that their replacement doesn't want to use. The notion that all the information will magically be available to just the right people via RSS and all tools will require no installation, administration, or training is not terribly realistic in the short- to mid-term. No wonder IT departments throw up their hands.

On the other hand, if by Web 2.0 we mean technologies that create a read-write web, the answer is much different. Our eCampus, as a for-instance, is not open source. It is built in J2EE with enterprise java beans on a struts framework offering role-based management and enterprise-level security. It can be integrated with an organization's HR data warehouse. But it also provides discussion forums, blogs, and wikis. It offers native tagging of posts and even integration with del.icio.us social bookmark tags. It supports mash-ups with google maps and calendars. It has deep integrations with commercial instant messaging and web meeting applications.

Applications such as these provide all the participatory advantages promised by Web 2.0, but within an enterprise context where organizations do not want everyone to see every file, do not want every individual to be able to change a wiki page, believe that there should be spaces for limited numbers of people - and want the advantages of Web 2.0 without having to entirely change their philosophy, approach to management, and way of doing business. And without adding untold new responsibilities to their IT department.

And that's a good thing.

I've been thinking about last month's Learning Circuits Big Question "What are the trade-offs between quality learning programs and rapid e-learning and how do you decide?" At Q2, we don't usually think about what we're doing as rapid e-learning (REL), since most REL seems to focus on the quick creation of content objects that have little if any instructional design behind them. Then I realized that we've actually been engaged in a rapid blended learning project for building proficiency in pharmaceutical sales reps.

Our customer needed to move from their traditional face-to-face training mode to e-learning, but was concerned that simply converting the training program's lectures into e-learning modules via Articulate would not build the type of proficiency that would drive sales. So they mapped what they did in class into a blended learning program that had a very simple, yet effective, design.

They stuck with their Articulate e-learning modules on subjects such as anatomy and physiology, product insert information, research studies, competitor information, marketing message, and sales strategy. But they didn't attempt to put "interaction" into the program via simple Articulate games or multiple choice quizzes.

Instead, the created a learning map where each e-learning module was followed by a worksheet. Some of the worksheets had more objective questions, like "what are the two primary counter-indications of the product," and some had more "subjective" ones, like "in situation A, how would you get the central marketing message across so that the physician can best hear it?" Regional sales managers were used as the coaches for the program, and they certified completion of each worksheet - else learners had to resubmit it.  On two "subjective" questions, small groups of learners had an opportunity to view each others' answers and comment on them. 

We did this in our eCampus platform, so that the SCORM objects, coached worksheets, and learner feedback all appeared in an integrated learning map, and were all tracked and administered in one place, and learners were automatically divided into small groups. This made things easier, of course, but the same technique could be used with discussion forums or even email in a pinch.

The speed came in both the two-week development cycle and the two-week delivery time, thus reducing time to proficiency to a month. And this was for developing and assessing skills for immediate on-the-job use - not just ensuring that everyone watched a bunch of PowerPoint slides with audio. I wonder if in our rush to rapid  e-learning we should consider dropping back and spending a little more time in the development and delivery process, with the view of achieving business benefits sooner...

The answer, I told her, depends on what she's trying to do - engage people with the content, or engage people with each other ABOUT the content.

While our blended learning programs have ways of doing both, my money is generally on the second - getting people to engage with each other, because conversations around content seem to drive learning way more than the content itself.

Sexy? Not really. But when it comes to learning, sexy isn't necessarily better. A VNUNet article points to high-end e-learning as not delivering the learning goods, partially because it focuses more on the "glam" factor than on the learning process itself.

Certainly, there is a place for e-learning, and given the choice between a page-turner and a high-end, customized simulation I would take the glitzy option every time, but unless it's supported by additional activity, the chances of e-learning content getting translated into action (that is, behavioral change) is generally slim.

Of course, that's a challenge, because supporting learning requires an ongoing investment of time and resources, not to mention the money required to develop the content in the first place. But without the commitment to smarten up the learning process in general by engaging people in on-going learning conversations, organizations are reducing their e-learning to just another pretty face - fun to look at, but nothing that a learner will take home.

Learning Circuits asks us to ponder our pondering this month. 

I love it when a group I'm a part of gets around to asking this question. It was one on which I was raised, by a wise mother of 4 little girls who knew that spending a lot of time and energy on answering the wrong question can create a great deal of heat and bad feelings, but wind up being a little light on producing any useful results.  Mom would walk into the middle of some heated battle among us and ask "what is the question?" and immediately, we'd go silent, because often, the question had devolved into something that anybody who subjected it to a moment's reflection, even a 10 year old, could see was a blind alley.

For those of us whose incomes depend on the willingness of others to invest in training efforts, some questions are very difficult to ask, because they risk revealing that our services are not needed.  But truly, unless we ask the hard ones, we're sort of shooting everybody in the foot, because it's not really possible to build sustainable success on brilliant answers to the wrong question!

So here's my hit parade for questions we should be asking:

What problem are we trying to solve?

Frequently, in organizational initiatives, there's less consensus around this question than there might first appear.  While the company's CLO may approach us because she needs to trim her budget and needs to find a way to move an established audience through established programs at less expense,  when we talk to others in the company, we sometimes find that other management team members believe that the problem is that current training initiatives are not creating the cultural change they believe is necessary, while subject matter experts think the problem is that established training programs do not adequately reflect the changes in the competitive environment which trainees face once they leave training.  The training audience may believe that the problem is that they are not being given adequate time to digest new material.  

It's not possible to design a solution which will meet the needs of stakeholders unless we first know just what those needs are perceived to be.  Often, there are tradeoffs to be made, and needs/desires of one group which must be de-prioritized to make sure higher priority needs are met.   Knowing whose ox will be gored by the solution proposal is critical to making a case for the proposal which acknowledges the  concerns of all stakeholders.

Is this a problem which lends itself to a training-based solution?

Bill tells the story of an organization which called him in to do some motivation work. It seems that everyone in an office had been informed that the office was to be closed in the next three months, and that they would all lose their jobs as a result of this change.  Productivity dropped like a rock.  So someone had the idea to have an expert come in to work on employee motivation.

Obviously, it is not possible to create motivating forces out of thin air - all you can do is alert people to the conditions which actually exist which reward good work.  This was a case for some other solution, maybe a performance bonus.

Is this the right time for this initiative?

Even when you've identified the problem set and the stakeholders, and determined that training is the most likely approach to solve the issues at hand, timing remains a critical factor.

In our experience, it does not pay to attempt to launch a training program in December.  Whether it's holiday distractions or just the pressures of getting things done before year-end, people just don't seem willing to put energy into training in the twelfth month. 

Training designed to help people cope with a major reorganization can make for tricky timing.  Ideally, the affected folks would be trained before they take on their new responsibilities.  But realistically, who will be going where is often in flux right up until the last minute, and knotty personnel issues often complicate things.  The first weeks in a new position, however, are often too chaotic to make for a good training environment.  

Nothing dooms a training initiative faster than a lack of will on the part of managers to free their reports from their other responsibilities in order to train. For online initiatives, this is an even bigger risk, because there is a perception that because the training is "right there" on the desktop, learners can just "squeeze it in" around their other responsibilities.

If now is not a good time to free people to train, then it's better to just admit to that reality than to put learners in a bind by requiring a performance for which they have not been given sufficient resources.

Facing Reality

The guy who said "you can pay me now, or you can pay me later" was right. It's scary  to ask questions which have the potential to rule out doing business right now.  But the risks of taking business which threaten to  result in ill-conceived or failed initiatives are many, and the rewards of screening for projects which have a high chance of success are not only those of developing a reputation for integrity.  There's something to be said for saving oneself for the fun stuff, and working where you really have a chance to make a difference!

If we’ve been fortunate, what’s required for success of the project has been spelled out explicitly.  Or if it hasn’t been, we’ve been able to ask the right questions and get a clear idea of what the audience who will be judging success is looking for.

How many of us, though, have given thought to how we might communicate to the members of our online communities of practice just what they need to do to make the initiative a success? Given that the participants are often both the creators and the judges of the quality of such spaces, perhaps leaving such issues undiscussed is risky!

My pal Bryan Alexander, who is the new-tech guru at NITLE, is always on the lookout for innovative uses of technology in academia. He recently pointed us to a nifty assignment put out by Kathleen Fitzpatrick , associate professor of media and English studies at Pomona college.

Academic instructors teaching classes in the use of online media have some useful things to teach us about developing rubrics for success online.  Of course, they have the luxury of wielding the gradebook over the heads of their students. Few COP administrators enjoy that level of authority over their audience! 

Still, what if participation in our online spaces had to meet the criteria put forth here?

Project

From MarxWiki

For the students of Media Studies/English 149:

Remember, this wiki constitutes part of your coursework for the semester. In order to receive a passing grade for this part of the course, each of you must create a minimum of 10 new entries for the wiki, and you must be an active editor of already-existing pages. That's in order to pass: in order to get an A for this project, you must demonstrate a generous commitment to the wiki, writing entries that are not merely factually correct but also interesting and helpful, you must actively seek out ways to improve and expand upon the information contained here, and you must do all of this with an attention to quality.

That attention to quality includes the quality of your prose: accuracy of grammar, spelling, and other formal writing issues count.

If you have any questions about this project, or your involvement in it, please see me. --KF

What would it mean to the health of your COP if each participant made 10 substantive posts in the next 13 weeks?  What if half of those were expanding upon or refining the posts of others? And wow, what if making a “generous commitment” to the COP were rewarded with your workplace’s equivalent of an “A”?

Is your COP an important project?  Is it worth the investment of time from each member? If it’s not, then perhaps now is just not the time for this initiative.

But if the management of your organization thinks it’s time to invest in an online COP, perhaps making the concept of “active participation” more concrete by developing a set of assigned tasks, completion of which will be noted in the individual’s annual performance evaluation, might be one way to make clarify that contributing to the success of the COP is not a "virtual" task, but a real one! It might also reassure your "A" members that they aren't "talking too much" but actively contributing in a way which is deeply appreciated by their organization, and encourage your shyer ones to join in. Nothing is quicker to silence a crowd than uncertainty.  A clear understanding of what's expected may be just the shot in the arm your COP members need.

Imagine, if you will, a community organizer taking the time and effort to identify important resources, create multiple opportunities for discussion, learn a new method for administering software, and opening up an online community with great fanfare...only to be met by the sound of virtual crickets chirping.

Not a great experience, especially for a new community manager. As disheartening as such an experience can be, it doesn't have to be the death knell for a new community, proivded that the community manager is willing to learn from the experience, and adjust his behavior and expectations accordingly.

Here are eight actions community managers should consider to inject life into an online community:

1. Simplify
   
   People sometimes mistakenly think that a community with a lot of different discussions looks more interesting than a community with just two or three.
   
   Not true.
   
   When creating discussions, consider the rule of three - three discussion rooms, with three threads to start. Any more tends to dilute attention, and therefore participation.
   
2. Don't overassume the importance of resources
   
   One of the goals of a community may be to create an information clearing house, which is fine, but remember that once people come to the community and get the information they need, they may not have a reason to return for a long time. Resources are important, but they do not drive discussion.
   
3. Generate a little controversy
   
   Communities, like families, are not intended to be completely harmonious entities. Nothing gets people to chime in to a discussion like putting forth an idea that people feel strongly about. Sure, it takes a little more skillful facilitation, but it's worth it in the long run.
   
4. Create an activity plan - and stick to it
   
   You wouldn't create a physical community center with the idea that it would be a place for nothing more than pick-up games and impromptu meetings, so why would you create a virtual community center with that expectation? Creating a series of activities gives people a reason to come to the community center. Impromptu activities and coversations usually take place as a result of people interacting around official ones.
   
5. Assume - or assign - an active role in facilitation
   
   Can you imagine a meeting or training session in which the facilitator walked in the room and announces that this is an opportunity for discussion on topic X, without taking an active role in facilitating the converstation? Yet time and again, this is what seems to happen in online communities.
   
   The medium does not change how people interact, and understanding that facilitating an online community is no different than facilitating a co-located community must drive the way that facilitators interact with community members.
   
6. Put a little faith in the "cult of personality" (but only a little)
   
   Creating a "star attraction" is one way to get people into a community, but understand that it takes on-going commitment from that star personality if you are going to rely on her to get people to keep coming back. Also consider whether featuring a charismatic personality may work against participation...are people less likely to ask questions of someone who has a certain je ne sais quois?
   
   Lastly, consider the availability of your personality leader...if you want to create a forum for your CEO, creating a CEO blog is a great vehicle, but remember that your CEO may in fact not be the person who has the time to publish her thoughts on a regular basis.
   
7. Don't rely wholly on the community for interaction
   
   A popular concept in the 90's was MBWA - management by walking around. The truth is, relationships may be formed, but are rarely cemented in online communities. Taking some time to welcome new members offline - by email, or better yet, by phone, can pay big dividends in creating buy in for the relational aspect of a community. 
   
8. Give it time
   
   Neither Rome nor any other community was built in a day. It takes time to generate momentum. Don't be surprised if your first series of activities generates a little interest, but no more. Instead of adopting the attitude of having done all you can to start a community, think of your initial work as just that - a foundation for generating more interest and participation.
   
   Many community managers aspire to create communities that are self-maintaining, and it can be done, but to expect it can be done quickly is a recipe for failure.

Creating a bustling community (online or in person) is not an easy task. But with a little understanding and renewed commitment, drowning out the crickets with the sound of robust dialog CAN be done.

The Learning Circuits  big question this month is “What are the trade-offs between quality learning programs and rapid e-learning and how do you decide?”

I guess the issue I have with the term “rapid e-learning” is that it’s sort of a misnomer.  There is little evidence that participants in programs regarded as “rapid e-learning” learn a set of material any faster than participants in more traditional programs. We don’t know if they learn it as well, or better in these programs, either. We just know that  it takes less time for us ID folks to develop the program, and that sometimes we can zip people through these programs more quickly.

Now, if you previously were taking 40 hours of learner time and say, 60 hours of trainer time to present information which can effectively be offered in 16 hours, and you’ve found a way to demonstrate that learner mastery is every bit as good, or better, than with your previous program, more power to you!  Similarly, if it used to take you months to develop a new program, and you can develop a similarly effective program in a coupla weeks now, that’s great too!

But let’s get real. A quality learning program is one which results in measurable changes in learner behavior which in turn produce measurable improvements in organizational profitability.

Being able to whip out an Articulate page-turner in a week is a significant improvement in instructional designer productivity over the laborious weeks previously required to work with web designers.  But if the hour spent by the learner looking at that lesson doesn’t change the learner’s behavior, it’s sort of wasted time all around.

We know that moving learners beyond awareness through skillfulness to proficiency demands more than the most elegant presentation of concepts can achieve. Learners need time and space to reflect on the material, to apply it in practice situations, and to get feedback on their first efforts in changing behavior.

That’s why at Q2, we subscribe to the blended learning model. Though content does matter, and it needs to be presented in a logical, relevant way, we see content as just the beginning.  The meat of a good course is in giving the learners chances to apply what they are learning, and give feedback on those efforts. Our platform permits the rapid development of a learning program incorporating content of any form which seems applicable (If you are offering more in the course than just a presentation of content, something as simple as a little .pdf file “cheat-sheet” on the new procedure can be enough to get people started!), synchronous or asynchronous discussions of that material, plus workspace for learners to post assignments for practice and receive feedback from coaches/instructors.

When you have the right people doing the coaching…the folks who know in their bones why the desired change is being forwarded, learners hear from the horse’s mouth what they need to do and why. When learners get the opportunity to talk about the impact of the change on their work with colleagues,  when they practice implementing the change, and they are coached effectively by colleagues on how to do it better, they develop a personal relationship with the material which is just not achievable by watching  the most advanced one-way broadcast or even participating in a machine simulation.

So yeah, round these parts, we do think it’s possible to achieve truly rapid e-learning. To us, it’s an issue of placing the emphasis on a different syllable. By shifting some of the current laser focus on content development to the development of exercises which give learners the chance to practice new skills under the supervision of people who know their stuff,  We've seen that it’s possible to raise quality of the learning experience, beyond awareness building and on to the promised land of proficiency. And we know, from experience, that developing such programs can be accomplished with impressive rapidity.

One of the key values we see in collaboration software is its ability to capture dialogue.

Which sort of begs the question, why do we need to capture dialogue? Isn’t it enough that we’re having it?

In a small organization, it may seem as if the need to capture dialogue is non-existent. My husband operates a solo medical practice, where he depends on a staff of three.  There aren’t staff meetings because it’s generally possible in such a small group to coordinate a response to emerging issues as they come up.  The only memos which circulate are those for which having things in writing satisfies legal requirements… the annual renewal on the SIMPLE plan deduction, for example.  The idea that people in this very busy place, where they’ve long ago worked out how to hold effective communication with all stakeholders, face-to-face in real time, would find value in typing their conversations into a discussion board is pretty laughable.

And yet… there are deep dialogues which take place in that office. They are generally with patients.  And only the physician’s impression of what transpired is documented in the chart.   If there is a misunderstanding, (and studies suggest that when the news is upsetting, people process only a fraction of the information which is being provided to them!)  neither party may be aware of it until the patient returns for another visit, or calls with a question.

I often feel we’re at an advantage on this count where I work. We have a *lot* of conversations with a lot of different clients, and we try to have as many of them as possible in our discussion rooms.  Beyond the obvious benefit of being able to read back to see what we said and remind ourselves of what we’re in the middle of in each of multiple projects we’re involved in, we have the terrific bonus of many eyes on the ball. A team member may chime in with a question which reveals that there’s been an assumption, or perhaps even a set of conflicting assumptions, underlying the conversation to date. Finding out early that reconciling those assumptions will be necessary to going forward markedly improves the prospects for success of the project!

There’s something about having the contributions to a dialogue laid out chronologically which makes it easier to see those hidden assumptions, and easier to address them, as well.  It’s not “interrupting” to post a question, the way it might be if one happened to overhear two team members talking in the hallway.

Teams which make a policy of posting the results of telephone conversations in a place where all affected team members can see them not only keep the team informed, they also help mitigate the risk that a misunderstanding of what has been agreed to throws the team off.  The question “When he said a, was he talking about x, or y?” can be a critical contribution, especially if the original conversant hadn’t even considered that y might have been on the other person’s mind.

I doubt any of us would want to have to document each and every conversation we have. But when it comes to the ones which move projects forward, dialogue “in captivity” can be a lot more functional than its wild cousin.

Which outline, in draft form, a series of beliefs I have about the importance of dialog, some of its key characteristics, and their implications for collaborative technologies.

Rod Boothby points us to a post by Marcel de Ruiter, who had an an interesting post in his Shaping Thoughts blog entitled Are discussion forums the ultimate Enterprise 2.0 killer-app? In it, he says, "discussion forums are not often mentioned among the so called Enterprise 2.0 tools. As if they are not “worth” it? Second, discussion forums might be the easiest in terms of adoption as they exist for so long now (part of Web 1.0). A lot of people will know the tools from their ventures on the Internet. Of all Enterprise 2.0 tools like wiki’s, blogs, tagging, the outsider the “discussion forum”, might be the easiest to introduce and often with clear immediate value."

He lists some of the features of discussion forums as:

Rosanna Tarsiero noted that John Smith, in his Yahoo group on communities of practice, posted a link to Guide And Toolkit For Communities Of Practice. I've been reading it over, and think it's really worth taking an hour or so to peruse if you are a community manager or facilitator for a CoP. Parts 1 through 3 discuss the context within which a CoP operates, provides an overview of what CoPs are, and describes the process for developing a CoP using a 7-stage model. Part 4 discusses a number of very practical and creative tools and techniques that the CoP can use, including appreciative inquiry, brainstorming, circle of concern and circle of influence, concept analysis, force field analysis, and more. Thanks to John and Rosanna for pointing this great information out!

Pine and Gilmore (The Experience Economy) talk about the Progression of Economic Value - POEV - as a key to understanding what it is you offer. At strategichorizons.com, they say: One way to determine what business you’re in is to consider what you charge for: If you charge for raw materials, you’re in commodities; if you charge for physical things, you’re in goods; if you charge for activities you perform on behalf of another, you’re in services; but if you charge for the time people spend with you, then you’re in experiences. Today, consumers seek to spend less time and money on goods and services, but they want to spend more time and money on compelling experiences. The canonical example is coffee. Coffee sold by wholesalers is a commodity. Folgers v. Maxwell House is goods. Coffee sold by the cup in a restaurant is a service, but Starbucks is an experience. How does this map to organizational learning?

Here's one initial thought:

1. Content Object = Commodity. The content object is a collection of information about a topic, often stored in a document management system, LCMS, or even LMS. It might be a PowerPoint presentation, Word document, or even a rapid e-learning module consisting of a PowerPoint converted to flash. The attribute that makes it essentially into a commodity is that it is simply content. There is no instructional design inherent in the object. It is simply packaged information. It is judged primarily on quantity (how much of the domain do we have captured) and somewhat less but increasingly on quality (via reputation management or other means).
2. Off-the-shelf Courses = Goods.  Off-the-shelf courses may be ILT courseware or e-learning modules. In either case, they are designed to teach to a pre-determined set of learning objectives using principles of instructional design. One might choose one course (on leadership or sales) based on (a) price, (b) quality of instruction, and (c) goodness of fit of the pre-determined learning objectives, examples, etc. with one's needs. These "goods" may be lower-end (a Dell library of 400 courses for $80) or high end (leadership e-learning courses packed with videos and simulations for $200 each) - but both are goods in this sense.
3. Custom Courseware = Services. Custom courses may again be ILT or e-learning. They are intended to teach to your specific learning objectives, using examples pulled from your organization. They are truly a service, and usually you pay based on the number of hours required to develop them. Again, the cost rises exponentially, as one can pay from $20k to $50k per hour-long course.
4. Blended Learning Programs  = Experience. By blended learning programs I mean learning programs that weave together individual and group, synchronous and asynchronous, self-directed and assigned learning activities in a planned way to teach new knowledge, skills, and attitudes that are beneficial to the organization and/or learner. They almost always balance individual content acquisition with collaborative activities, and "classroom learning" with application on the job. Unlike the others, learning becomes a process over time, rather than a one-time event.

And the key value differentiator is that this latter type of learning drives proficiency and even mastery.

What do you think of this notion?

I'm a toolophile and I have *tremendous* latitude to try new stuff and see if it works for me, and might work for you other guys,  but y'know, I have all this stuff that has to get done on time and under budget and it's costly to try a new tool, find out it doesn't really work the way I thought it might to make my job easier, and redo whatever I'm doing in the old-fashioned way...even when the tool itself is "free". I've groused about this before, but I think there's a pathological level of self-centeredness around much of the Web 2.0 stuff which absolutely does not translate to spaces designed to forward the efforts of a group of people working on a joint project.

The capacity to consider group needs alongside individual ones is basic to any shared enterprise.  Companies need to consider support and administrative costs for the tools they make available to employees. So I basically see the effective organization as one which carefully chooses the tools which are used for shared work, and which also allows some freedom for the "mountain people" to do some skunkworks stuff on the side.

There's a huge unseen cost to Enterprise 2.0 within organizations which rely on the power of groups to produce results. Some of them include:

• Training: Who gets the average worker-bee who isn't the self-motivated learner up to speed on the variety of new tools that then start seeding throughout the enterprise?
• Succession: People change jobs. Their knowledge should stay. How is that knowledge effectively transferred when it is stored in "personal knowledge management systems" that may use different tools and employ different organizational schema?
• Administration: How can anyone hope to ensure the security of proprietary information, create systems for weeding out the wheat from the chaff, or simply provide necessary access as tools and systems proliferate at the behest of individual workers?
• Access: With all the RSS readers and other attempts to collate information, when multiple open source tools are mashed together, there is still no single simple search on the variety of dynamic pages or unified profiles.

The bottom line for us is that we believe deeply in the power of online collaboration. But within the the corporate environment, we believe that part of collaboration is not just sharing ideas, but agreeing on working norms, guidelines, and tools that make working together possible for groups of people. It often seems that writers about Enterprise 2.0 are more self-employed consultants or academicians who work in environments where individual creativity is the stock in trade, and that some of the loftier ideals may not play out in the average corporation.

My conclusion is simple: Collaboration tools must be chosen and used collaboratively; and that such tools can best be used when they exist (collaboratively) together in a robust platform.

Who are the "knowledge workers" in Enterprise 2.0? Is it the 1,500 claim adjusters who make critical judgments that earn or cost the company hundreds of millions of dollars each year, or the 12 policy writers who develop new guidelines for the corporation? I believe in many cases we've been cherry picking - looking from our own enlightened perspective at the people in the most creative jobs, and forgetting the "hidden middle" - the folks who need to follow and thinkingly apply guidelines, not create new ones: procurement officers, underwriters, financial analysts, and the like. Define it as you will - think of them as knowledge workers and much of enterprise 2.0 falls away; think of them as information workers and much of enterprise 2.0 may apply to a very small number of folks in the organization.

In discussing Enterprise 2.0, John Darling on our team suggests:  From a philosophical hypothesis perspective, for years the supposed "thought leaders" have been expousing that self-forming, self-directed working and learning is the natural order of things and all organizations have to do is get out of people's way.   All in all, the hypothesis only holds true when applied to people who are self-motivated and truly care and are somewhat passionate about their work.  Unfortunately it is my belief, that for a variety of reasons, many of which are the organizations fault, the bulk of people don't truly care enough about their employer or the work they are doing to take it upon themselves to put out the effort required take on new ways of thinking and doing.   However, for the passionate few you can always count on that they will be embracing whatever new tools will help them be successful.

I think that there will always be the "mountain men" in organizations who will be blazing their own trails into the unknown. The next wave is the "pioneers" or early adopters. These folks, while adventurous, still need a trail, a map and a wagon master. It is my belief that it is this group that our product/services are best suited for.  And, it is also my belief that there are far more organizations out there that are much more comfortable with a certain degree of structure and control than they are with the "set them free" model.

So who are we talking about in Enterprise 2.0?

With no central plan, and no ant in charge (the queen never orders anyone to do anything), ants bump into each other randomly. But they have standards of interaction. Ants sample the other ants they meet to see what they are doing. They use pheromones as a standard way of communicating. If an ant meets too many Ants on Midden Duty (ie clean up), and that ant is on Midden Duty, it will switch over to Scavenger Duty. Out of this system, the optimal number of ants are always working on the right thing for the colony, so writes Rod Boothby in Enterprise 2.0 = Emergence Software, quoting Steven Johnson in "Emergence: the connected lives of ants, brains, cities and software".

Further Rod says, In McAfee's article, Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration, McAfee says "When I use 'Enterprise 2.0' as an adjective, I mean "supporting of emergent collaboration." It takes only three simple notions:

1. Many self motivated individual agents
2. Standards for interaction
3. New robust small scale technology used by the agents

There is something very interesting happening in the field of enterprise technology. I called part of it Web Office. Ismael Ghalimi called it Office 2.0. Ross Mayfield calls it Social Software in the Enterprise. Dion Hichtcliff calls it Enterprise Web 2.0.

Most famously, Dr. Andrew McAfee of the Harvard Business School called it Enterprise 2.0 in an article published in MIT-Sloan.

Collections of many Davids triumphing over a few Goliaths

In the free market economy, those individual agents are entrepreneurs, companies and consumers. In a democracy, those agents are voters...It is decentralization: Niel Robertson's quick summary of Enterprise 2.0 is "IT without the CIO".

I believe what McAfee is saying is that everything new and interesting in the Enterprise isn't necessarily emergent. If IT builds an AJAX application that must be used by end users to account for their time, there is nothing emergent about that system. Therefore it isn't Enterprise 2.0.

Enterprise 2.0 is about decentralization of responsibility. This requires a completely different way of managing people. That is also why a Harvard Business School professor is so interested in it.

If you want bottom up corporate intelligence, you also have to give people new types of technology. Most importantly, that technology has to help them build their own solutions. You need to expect your knowledge workers to be creative. You need to expect them to be Innovation Creators.

Some of our internal discussions have focused on some of the less glamorous aspects of this

With no central plan, and no ant in charge (the queen never orders anyone to do anything), ants bump into each other randomly. But they have standards of interaction. Ants sample the other ants they meet to see what they are doing. They use pheromones as a standard way of communicating. If an ant meets too many Ants on Midden Duty (ie clean up), and that ant is on Midden Duty, it will switch over to Scavenger Duty. Out of this system, the optimal number of ants are always working on the right thing for the colony, so writes Rod Boothby in Enterprise 2.0 = Emergence Software, quoting Steven Johnson in "Emergence: the connected lives of ants, brains, cities and software".

Further Rod says, In McAfee's article, Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration, McAfee says "When I use 'Enterprise 2.0' as an adjective, I mean "supporting of emergent collaboration." It takes only three simple notions:

1. Many self motivated individual agents
2. Standards for interaction
3. New robust small scale technology used by the agents

There is something very interesting happening in the field of enterprise technology. I called part of it Web Office. Ismael Ghalimi called it Office 2.0. Ross Mayfield calls it Social Software in the Enterprise. Dion Hichtcliff calls it Enterprise Web 2.0.

Most famously, Dr. Andrew McAfee of the Harvard Business School called it Enterprise 2.0 in an article published in MIT-Sloan.

Collections of many Davids triumphing over a few Goliaths

In the free market economy, those individual agents are entrepreneurs, companies and consumers. In a democracy, those agents are voters...It is decentralization: Niel Robertson's quick summary of Enterprise 2.0 is "IT without the CIO".

I believe what McAfee is saying is that everything new and interesting in the Enterprise isn't necessarily emergent. If IT builds an AJAX application that must be used by end users to account for their time, there is nothing emergent about that system. Therefore it isn't Enterprise 2.0.

Enterprise 2.0 is about decentralization of responsibility. This requires a completely different way of managing people. That is also why a Harvard Business School professor is so interested in it.

If you want bottom up corporate intelligence, you also have to give people new types of technology. Most importantly, that technology has to help them build their own solutions. You need to expect your knowledge workers to be creative. You need to expect them to be Innovation Creators.

Sounds great! But I wonder how appropriate this is in the real-life organizations which we support?

(Next II - Knowledge workers?)

When I talk to proponents of collaboration spaces in organizational settings, I frequently hear the same lament, "this would make everybody's life so much easier if they'd just use the space!

Having sung several bars of that song myself, I started thinking about some of the things that turned the tide and got teams to actively participate in online communities. Sure, there are many, many factors that enter into the success of a site, and a lot of events and activities you can plan that will help drive collaboration (star attractions, event wraparounds, etc.), but there are also some very basic things you can to do get folks in to your collaboration space, and get them doing things:

• Orient them
  
  While a lot of CoP software has very user-friendly interfaces, it's a mistake to assume how to use it will be obvious to all participants. And because it's a semi-public forum, people may be afraid to try things because they believe their mistakes will be obvious.
  
• Give them something to do
  
  Putting people into a CoP with a series of discussions isn't all that different from the old Saturday Night Live skit that gave participants a topic and told them to discuss amongst themselves. A lot of people are great at participating in conversations, but not so good at starting them. Having information in your community for them to react to, or a task (even a simple one) to complete, can get people acclimated to doing things in an online space.
  
• Set a good example
  
  This one might sound obvious, but I've fallen into the trap of starting a new community only to realize a week later that MY picture and biographical information isn't uploaded. I've learned the hard way sometimes that "do as I say, not as I do" is recipe for a rocky start.
  
• Don't co-conspire
  
  I worked on a big, complex project with a team of instructional designers new to online collaboration. For the first couple of weeks I felt like I was herding cats answering the phone, responding to email and keeping track of what I said to whom. And then I realized that our project space was getting seriously underused. So I started saying "no," to my team when they would call or email and began answering questions in the space itself - and only there. The project space took off pretty quickly after that, and my time was freed up because I could answer the questions one time for everyone to see (and I didn't have to wonder if I was losing my mind - all of my decisions were there for ME to see as well).

If you're an online collaboration enthusiast it can be frustrating to have folks who don't flock to the technology in the same way you do, but with a little determination and some small interventions, you'll start to create your own users - who can in turn be your collaboration evangelists themselves.

In Rapid eLearning Tools, Tony discusses tools like Articulate, Captivate, Camtasia Studio, and PowerConverter. He points out that "Most of these fit into the PowerPoint + Audio and most convert to Flash for delivery." Well, here's a news flash: 99% of PowerPoint slides, narrated by SMEs, are not "learning objects". They are content objects. Why?

• These tools don't provide easy support for some of the basic elements one might want in creating an eLearning module - like building scenarios, followed by branching based on learner decisions.
• In my experience, SMEs often provide content at, well, the SME level. Instructional designers provide the translation service to translate high level SME content to what learners need.
• No surprise - since the rapid eLearning process doesn't include things like gap analyses that might suggest what learners need to know, and most SMEs aren't trained to perform one.
• Similarly, while the presentation of content may familiarize learners with concepts, it often does not address higher order learning objectives, such as providing activities which will teach learners how to apply the concepts, or to analyze underlying principles in order to act appropriately for "edge" cases where procedures fail.

In our haste to get folks trained, we seem to be replicating the worst practices of education electronically. Take an expert, give him the tools to lecture electronically, and hope that something will stick. Oh - and throw in a few multiple choice quizzes or flashy mix & match counterparts - they're easy to make using the rapid eLearning products - and they claim that we've even evaluated learing! Heavens! We've critiqued this approach to education for years - why are we taking what is demonstrably a horrid approach to educating young people and using it in corporate environments?

]]> http://teamdemo.collabhost.com/go/Collaborative%20Learning/Collaborative%20Learning~35/?userid=guest&pwd=guest http://teamdemo.collabhost.com/go/Collaborative%20Learning/Collaborative%20Learning~34/?userid=guest&pwd=guest Shawn Callahan summarizes a point that Steve Denning makes in The Leaders Guide to Storytelling. Steve distinguishes between CoPs and [Knowledge] Networks where the latter consists of a group of people who link together for mutual benefit, such as an alumni. While a community of practice is a group with formed for the purpose of improving member practice. Shawn goes on to suggest that the way we perceive the group type as either a network or a CoP depends on whether people have heard and retell the group’s foundational stories. I think this is a very interesting insight, and I would suggest that it applies to blogging 'communities.'

I have believed for quite a while that the term "network" is a much better fit than the term "community" for the collection of blogs that focus on a certain arena. The primary reason I believe this has to do with the nature of conversation and dialog in these blogs, but this is another great thought. Sitting around the fire, exchanging stories of the history of the community - the stories that help shape the communities self-definition. I've experienced this in face-to-face communities, and in online forum-based communities; I don't see the Hyde-park-like medium of blogs as really optimized for the creation of this type of community. That's not to de-value the knowledge networks that are created in the blogosphere, but merely to make a distinction between them and communities.

What are your thoughts? 

It's not the medium - list serves and blogs are both internet based, and if anything, blogs are less restirictive about who can post than most, if not all lists. I don't think it's the ease of use - in fact, I think commenting on a blog post is usually easier than responding to a list serv post, and I find comments are easier to read than threads. I don't think it's the subject matter either - bloggers are at least as likely, if not more so, to post an opinion that should provoke discussion.

So, what is it? Is it the fact that because a blogger posts something on "her own" blog that people are hesitant to say something for fear of appearing presumptious? Or, is it possibly because a person has blogged about it, she has an assumed mantle of authority, or "smartness" on the subject, and respondents don't want to challenge that?

Or is it the expectation that blogs are by nature one-way conversation vehicles? And if that's the case, how do we change that perception to make blogs a tool for dialog?

This article, which I saw referenced by Rosanna Tarsiero, examined eight different VCoPs in a variety of different types of organizations. They analyzed such factors as their creation process (top-down and bottom-up), life span (temporary v. permanent), boundary crossing (cross-functionality), organizational slack (resources available to absorb costs), and a variety of others. Successful VCoPs had constraints - lack of resources, technical problems, unsophisticated members - but they had a common success factor as well. To quote from the article:

Our study suggests that decisions regarding operational leadership are important decisions management and sponsors can make to positively influence the negative impacts of structuring characteristics (especially an obstructive environment, no prior community experience and a low level of ICT skills) on an intentionally-formed VCoP’s overall success. Among the communities in our sample, those whose success exceeded initial expectations had very involved leaders who possessed the ability to build political alliances, to foster trust, and to find innovative ways to encourage participation. These people ended up in this important position because a member of the organization’s management team or the sponsor had decided that they had the right set of abilities and should be selected and given the resources (often time) that were needed to do their work well.

Furthermore, relying on the leader alone to ensure a VCoP’s success may be risky. Leaders are sometimes inexperienced in their role, and even the most enthusiastic ones may need advice. Although the role of coach was not identified by Fontaine (2001), we found that having a neutral third party working closely with the leaders to advise them played a crucial role in the success of [4 of the 8 VCoPs]...

Finally, the results clearly show that the leader has an important influence on a VCoP’s success and that the decisions regarding the leadership of a VCoP are not only in the hands of its leader, but also among the responsibilities of the organization’s management team and the sponsor. While a VCoP needs room to grow, initial decisions regarding the operational leadership need to be regularly monitored, evaluated and actions taken if the situation is not satisfactory (Dubé et al. 2004). This is the only way full benefits can be reaped out of intentionally created virtual communities of practice.

These findings match 100% with our experience. How do you see them?

As I've stated in other posts, I tend to see the blogosphere as an online Hyde Park where you can wander around listening to people express their opinions. Having been informed by them, you can stand on your own soap box and express your own. Each person's blog is their soapbox - or to use another analogy - their own radio talk show where they are the producer and the host. As a long proponent of online dialog, and a participant in conversations that have garnered thousands of responses over several years, it always amazes me that people so often comment on others' posts in their own blog, rather than starting a back-and-forth dialog.

To me, the essence of great conversation is in the "between-ness" - the space between the participants. Done poorly, conversation degenerates into debate, where we try and score points and convince others of our correctness.  Done well, conversation evolves to dialog, where we explore each others' underlying assumptions, beliefs, and experiences that have led us to where we are today, and given us the perspective that we hold. For millennia, human beings have used this type of interpersonal exchange to create shared meanings, develop new understandings, and build relationship, one with another.

In the Learning Circuits Blog, Tony Karrer asks the Big Question for October: Should all learning professionals be blogging? My answer is, "Sure, why not? - at least if they have a point of view they want to share, and the desire to share it." But I'd also add, and this is the important part - But they shouldn't stop there. Blogging is great when you have a point of view and you'd like to share it. But all learning professionals need to exchange ideas with others, to test their ideas, to question their assumptions, to learn from each other in ways that come with dialog.

And, as the saying goes, if your only tool is a hammer, the whole world looks like a bunch of nails. Blogging is great for publishing one's opinions, and for forming networks based on weak social ties. Using it for deep, sustained dialog - the type I describe above - is like trying to drive screws with that hammer. You can probably do it, but why not use the right tool for the job?

In "Four questions about blogs" Andy addresses some basic questions like what software to use and who should be authoring a corporate blog, but it's his answer to the question, "what should I write about?" that really struck a nerve with me. Andy's advice: "Good blogs are varied in subject and length of entries. 'It's this crazy idea that maybe you should talk to your customers like your friends.'"

I'll admit, writing sometimes gives me the willies, but talking to people - isn't that something that all of us can do? If it gives me a new way to think about a tool as powerful as blogs, why not try it out?

eLearning Events Calendar

Timer-based work blocks is the only way I get through big projects; however, having just finished writing a book, I can say that even this effective technique won't help most mere mortals (at least this one) produce 200 pages in two weeks. But over the course of a few months? Absolutely. — Gina Trapani

On the one hand, it lacks many of the features that applicaitons like Live Meeting and Webex have, such as integration with Outlook or VOIP. On the other, it leverages Web 2.0 to integrate with newer applications like Flickr, MySpace, and Yahoo Maps.

The pricing models for major players such as LiveMeeting and WebEx seems to put them out of the reach of smaller companies and non-profits, and makes integrating them into collaboration platforms such as our eCommunity only helpful to enterprise customers. How will it change the collaboration platform landscape as we start integrating these free services into our platforms? Anyone want to see such a prototype?

Way back in 1997, Michael Goldhaber exposed the fallacy of this idea. Writing in Wired, he said,

Yet, ours is not truly an information economy. By definition, economics is the study of how a society uses its scarce resources. And information is not scarce - especially on the Net, where it is not only abundant, but overflowing. We are drowning in information, yet constantly increasing our generation of it. So a key question arises: Is there something else that flows through cyberspace, something that is scarce and desirable? There is. No one would put anything on the Internet without the hope of obtaining some. It's called attention. And the economy of attention - not information - is the natural economy of cyberspace.

As designers of online training spaces and online community spaces, we worry a lot about embedding features which will make visiting and returning to our spaces a pleasant part of the day, something to look forward to, for our clients and their audiences.

An intuitive interface is part of it -- Alan Cooper has rightly pointed out that people will go to great lengths to avoid being made to feel stupid, so it’s crucial that they can make sense of what they have to do to use a space without too much frustration.

Critical information is part of it – people will scale mountains to get to the information they need to do their jobs, but it’s much better if they don’t have to,  and an online space which can be relied upon to have the information they need, up to date and organized efficiently will bring people back again and again.

But we’re human, and while we appreciate ease of use and handiness of information, nothing beats access to the right people for getting and holding attention.  I’m not a game designer, or even a gamer, but I know about, and visit, Terra Nova.  Why? Because it’s got people like Nick Yee and Mike Sellers, scholars and cutting-edge practitioners, writing about what they are up to, and I see gaming as one major trajectory for where online training is going.  These guys respond to comments, which means I can go there and actually get their attention, in addition to giving them my own.  Ok, so I don’t necessarily feel clueful enough to get brave enough to have posted a comment there yet. But knowing I could, and that if I did, those guys are actually there reading what people post, holds my attention.

Every organization boasts similar stars in their firmament.  What’s it worth to a mid-level manager to access the current thinking of top execs?  What’s it worth to be noticed asking a really smart question of these people? What’s it worth to get an answer to that question?  It’s probably worth a click over to the online team site.

What’s it worth, in a trade organization’s site, to access the current thinking of top performers in the field? What’s it worth to be noticed asking a really smart question of these people? What’s it worth to actually get an answer?  It’s probably worth a click over to that online community.

What’s it worth to your organization to get and hold the attention of your folks? Is it worth an hour a week of the attention of your top people?  Asynchronous technologies like blogs and online fora are powerful tools, making it possible for a few spare minutes checking into the site, sharing a few thoughts, and replying to inquiries to pay huge dividends in building an organizational culture.

But just as attention from top people will attract laser-like focus from those who look up to them, neglect will engender neglect.  Abandonment by the stars of a space where their attention is the draw sends a clear signal that “this place is not important, anymore.” A formerly attentive audience will quickly shift their focus elsewhere, thus quickly bringing to an end all return on the investment in creating and populating the space.

It’s a new economy. We’ve got some powerful new tools. But what moves us hasn’t changed. Using these tools effectively is a matter of thoughtfully enabling people to pay attention to each other.

It's undeniable that the role of corporate trainer is shifting in a lot of ways to that of vendor management. And when you have a training department who’s mission is to get content to the masses, then it makes sense to look for more cost-effective ways of doing that – via off-the-shelf content libraries, outsourcing and even customized e-learning.

But the decline in corporate training that is associated with this movement is only part of the puzzle – the remainder really lies with how organizations define training, and how they differentiate their corporate training from outsourced training where it really counts.

Let's face it, there are lots of areas in an organization where content doesn’t need to be delivered by a corporate trainer to be particularly effective - IT training, project management training, desktop skills are all good candidates for vendor-produced and vendor-delivered training. If those are the core competencies of your training department, you should be worried about the future, since most, if not all, of that training can be delivered at a fraction of the cost.

Even when you get into operational training – product information, ERP rollouts and such, there are some arguments that it can be delivered pretty effectively using some custom learning that doesn’t require the face-to-face training that is the training department’s bailiwick.

But, BUT, when you start considering the things that really make your organization “go,” that differentiate you from competitors, then you move into an area where there’s not just tolerance for corporate trainers, but their roles are critical in the successful implementation of the training – if they do it right.

If it's just about delivering the content that’s related to what we call your organization’s “secret sauce” then guess what? It’s no more critical to have a corporate trainer to complete that function than it is to have one to teach learners how to create an Excel spreadsheet. But if the trainer and the training department make it about delivering content, then interacting about content, then taking the information back to the workplace and instantiating best practices as they relate to business-critical skills, competencies and processes, then corporate trainers become infinitely more valuable, and no longer in danger of extinction.

Of course to perform this type of function – translating training to true performance – trainers need to look beyond their traditional toolsets and ask how they can extend unidimensional (e-learning, F2F training) or even multidimensional (traditional blended) learning to deliver coaching, mentoring and performance tracking. The answers are certainly not simple, but the prospect of extinction seems to be a mighty compelling reason to search.

]]> http://teamdemo.collabhost.com/go/Collaborative%20Learning/Collaborative%20Learning~21/?userid=guest&pwd=guest http://teamdemo.collabhost.com/go/Collaborative%20Learning/Collaborative%20Learning~16/?userid=guest&pwd=guest The folks at adweek point to an article in News Observer on infosnacking. It means -- checking e-mail, Googling sports scores, shopping online and surfing the latest headlines -- while at work, according to Webster's New World College Dictionary, which has selected the term as its 2005 Word of the Year, despite its staggering lack of popularity.

In eLearn magazine, Stephen Downes  writes:

What happens when online learning ceases to be like a medium, and becomes more like a platform? What happens when online learning software ceases to be a type of content-consumption tool, where learning is "delivered," and becomes more like a content-authoring tool, where learning is created? … Insofar as there is content, it is used rather than read and is, in any case, more likely to be produced by students than courseware authors.

He answers his own question:

The e-learning application, therefore, begins to look very much like a blogging tool. It represents one node in a web of content, connected to other nodes and content creation services used by other students.

We think this is only half the story - and it isn't the important half.

Downes continues:

It becomes, not an institutional or corporate application, but a personal learning center, where content is reused and remixed according to the student's own needs and interests. It becomes, indeed, not a single application, but a collection of interoperating applications—an environment rather than a system. E-learning 2.0.

Well, perhaps, among those operating in a purely academic context, where learners are presumably pursuing their own personal learning goals. We think the answer looks a little different in the business world. In business, we aren’t really looking to facilitate the development of personal learning centers, so much as we are trying to develop more effective strategies for getting work done. And we understand that few employees, who are being evaluated on their effectiveness in moving the organization toward organizational goals, are interested in developing a collection of interoperating applications to serve as their personal learning environment.

At Q2Learning, we do think that real learning looks a lot more like a conversation than like a book. We’ve also paid close attention to the studies which suggest that keeping learning activities close to the job is what gives it meaning and staying power.

As an example, our eCampus is designed to make it simple to create learning activities in which content is presented, and then put to active use by learners in their daily responsibilities. Our take on "learning 2.0" is that it's important to bring distributed learners together to have conversations about just how that attempt to apply the concepts works out in the field, the challenges they encounter, and the strategies they employ to overcome those challenges.

Absolutely -- learning 2.0 platforms like the eCampus must make it simple to include learner-generated micro-content into learning activities. Blogs, wikis, podcasts, RSS feeds --all these can and should be available to learners.

But we believe that content is just the beginning, the jumping off point for deep learning, which is what takes place when people think together about what helps them be effective, and why.

We believe that learning 2.0 platforms must support these dialogs in both structured learning programs and more informal communities of practice which weave together a variety of collaboration tools as well as content generation tools. The intelligent use of discussion forums, web meetings, email, instant messaging, and chat is every bit as vital to the design of learning 2.0 as sexy content publishing tools. In fact, we believe that this weaving of interaction into the mix is at the heart of how to transform e-publishing into e-learning.

Web 2.0 and eLearning 2.0 don’t have to be trapped in the highly individualized and idiosyncratic paradigm which requires each individual to structure his or her own learning. Organizations, are, after all, about joint efforts. Tools which help learners work and learn together can facilitate the development an effective team culture. Investing in such tools and developing learning programs within them is a powerful way for organizations to develop the competence and agility required to be competitive in today’s markets.