There are some ideas that capture our imagination and provide us with a way forward or a framework for further action or study. For me personal knowledge management (PKM) and wirearchy are two such ideas. These are not my ideas and even though I may not cite the original sources in all cases that I discuss them, I give credit where it is due. I learned this many years ago as an undergraduate. I remember my History professors demanding, “Source?” whenever we made a bold  statement of fact or brought in some new line of thought. I have a link to wirearchy on my header and I ensure that I add references when I publish or distribute any work that mentions PKM. I will mention work by Lilia Efimova, Denham Grey and Dave Pollard on PKM or Jon Husband on wirearchy.

*** Update: There are some “self-corrections” in the comments pertaining to this next section [how's that for speed?] ***

On a related note, George Siemens posts that The Rhyzome Project fails to even mention the published work of Dave Cormier on Rhyzomatic Education. With the simplicity of adding hyperlinks to web pages, citing your main sources should not be a problem, and this is something that the project could rectify quickly. I wonder how long it will take to give the appropriate citations? This could be an interesting case study of the self-corrective nature of the Web and blogs.

The latest book from Clay Christensen and his team, authors of The Innovator’s Dilemma and others, is Disrupting Class, where they examine education. Tom Haskins reviews the book and provides his own perspectives in Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and finally his own assessment on the value of college diplomas.

Tom thinks that the value of a diploma will decrease because knowledge in one field will not be enough for a generation facing multiple job changes and that the economies of scale offered by physical institutions will no longer be as obvious as they were in an industrial, fossil-fuel driven economy. I agree with Tom, and have discussed the challenges faced by universities, most recently in Moving the Ivory Tower to the Web: Part 1 and Part 2:

This is the same problem facing established academic institutions. Current revenues rest with the old way of doing business - students in classes. Going to the new Web model threatens those who make their living with the old model. Therefore leaders in the old hesitate because they are tied to their existing revenue streams. They cannot put the new inside the old. The answer is to locate the new outside of the old infrastructure and let the new unit go after customers who are not served by the current model. This way institutions can hold onto the value of their existing business for as long as possible while building up new capabilities with a different business model.

Furthermore, I would venture that many online universities are not real upstarts in this business, they are just variations on the same theme. Take local Meritus University for instance. An online BBA costs $36,000 for tuition and electronic documentation fees, compared to the average tuition at a Canadian university of $20,000 for four years. Customers pay a premium for the convenience of space and time. This model is not a great threat to traditional universities as it only targets those willing to pay more for flexibility. It may be a threat to more expensive US colleges though and that may be their target market. Still, it isn’t disruptive.

An example of the changing landscape is that participation rates in free learning programs are increasing, witnessed by over 700 members in Work Literacy and over 2,000 in Connectivism & Connected Knowledge. No one is making any money on these, except for the few students registered through the university for CCK08. This is a disruptive model of semi-academic courses being provided to mostly non-consumers (people who would not have paid for it anyway). At this time, these offerings are no real challenge to the existing structure, but acceptance of these programs may prepare the way for an upstart.

The challenge for academia will be in finding where the potential revenue is moving in the new value chain. For example, I give away all of my content on this website, because I know that my revenue is generated through consulting. This has been clear to me ever since I started. The blog helps me learn and connect and raises my profile on the Web. Charging for my content wouldn’t make any sense. Free generates the fees. How will universities be able to meet the challenge of more free content? Would they be able to compete with free tuition, even if it’s not as good? How about free accreditation?

I have some ideas about some new business models, which I’ve discussed with people such as Rob Paterson, and I’m sure that there are other people looking at this challenge as well.

The Institute for the Future published a report last year, that I just came across, on The Future of Work. It discusses the integration of work and technology, which of course is part of my area of focus - learning, work & technology.

Looking at a piece of the Future of Work Map (pdf) I note a good description of many of the themes and issues in my own practice:

future of work - amplified individual

Theme:
the Amplified Individual

Forecast Clusters:
Highly - Collaborative, Social; Improvisational; Augmented

Dilemma:
Collective Creation vs Individual Recognition

Signals:
Co-working Arrangements; Teamwork in Virtual Environments; Social Filtering; Life Hacks; Visualization Tools

Underlying Technologies:
Sense Making & Visualization; Ubiquitous Displays; Amplified Collaboration Tools

There is a lot of food for thought and frameworks for further discussions on the future of work and what it means to our own work. All three documents are available for free download.

I’m speaking in Toronto next month at the SkillSoft Canadian Perspectives conference and have been developing my presentation, which is based on this post and a previous one, on the changing role of training. The presentation is scheduled for one hour but I have taken the highlights and condensed it to less than 5 minutes, which is the time limit for Jing, which I’m trying for the first time. It’s also my first time using Apple’s keynote application.

This is an Adobe Flash file (*.swf), including audio, and should open in a new window:

21c_training

References:

Dave Snowden

Cynefin

Wirearchy

Related: Complexity, Connection & Learning by Dave Pollard

Last month, in Learn the language before you speak to me, I said that you have to understand what it’s like to be a node in a social network and that there is almost nothing like it in the industrial workplace or school system to prepare you for this. The basic premise is that you have to walk the talk before you can criticize.

A recent post by Dave Pollard highlights what can happen when the older generation [my age cohort of which many are in positions of authority] does not engage with the same media as the younger generation. It seems that most young people in the workplace (generation millennium) use IM, text messages and especially their mobile devices to connect with their peers. This generation is ignoring the desktop and the organisational knowledge bases and turning to their own age cohort for timely help and advice. This is a real cultural and age gap that can have a detrimental impact on our organisations:

Aside from the wasted content effort, this means that most young people will learn from peers, not from mentors. How much of what senior people know will never be learned by younger workers, simply because the networks of trust necessary for valuable conversations will not have been forged (and given that Gen Millennium workers are expected to change jobs on average every four years, might never be forged)?

Our generation should know better than to just ignore this situation. It is up to us to engage younger workers, not to complain that they don’t get it. Leadership by example is required, but first we have to be able to communicate. That means observing communication behaviours in our organisations and seeing how we can best connect. It may mean getting a Twitter account and a mobile device so that we can see that quick post about an issue that someone is facing.

Update: This post is featured on The Working/Learning Carnival along with several other interesting articles.

Marketing and training have certain similarities - gaining attention; getting your message across; and changing behaviour. When Seth Godin says that mass marketing is dead, I ask if mass training is far behind:

Marketing had an arc, one that started with personal, local interactions between real people and rapidly morphed into very corporate anonymous actions aimed at the unwilling masses.

Mass marketing really came into its own after the Second World War, and most prominently in the US:

With the foundations in place [high rate of savings, few consumer goods, end of war, interstate highway system], the “mass” aspects of marketing came into existence in the form of mass demand, massive stores, and mass communications.

Compare the rise of mass marketing to mass training. The wars (1914-1945) brought about the systems approach to training, the basis of instuctional system design (ISD), still used by the military and emulated by much corporate training. Both of these mass, one to many, systems appeared at about the same time. They were used to achieve economies of scale and depended upon good one-way communications systems. Both marketing and training at the mass level depend on a limited number of “channels” available to the individual. That has changed.

Why does Godin think that this is the end of mass marketing? Social media:

Social media’s growth in the last three years, though, gives marketers an inkling that there may be something else going on. Sure, they can run spam ads on Facebook, but they don’t work. Social media, it turns out, isn’t about aggregating audiences so you can yell at them about the junk you want to sell. Social media, in fact, is a basic human need, revealed digitally online. We want to be connected, to make a difference, to matter, to be missed. We want to belong, and yes, we want to be led.

Since many (most) people can easily connect with people and information, and are starting to find ways to make a difference in their learning, why would they want to follow a pre-set training program designed in a one-size-fits-all fashion? It actually goes against human nature. Each one of us wants to be unique.

Good trainers know how to personalize and contextualize their sessions, but social media can reinforce this continuously, not constrained by time or space. Successful organisations will move from a training focus, and even beyond a performance improvement focus, to a connecting and facilitating one, with tools such as social media to do this. In an always-on, totally connected work environment, how else could you help people to work and learn? You could design a new course, but that may no longer be a viable option in the near future.

Need a sandbox to test out Web 2.0 tools and techniques and see what they mean for your organisation? You may want to check out our Plug-in Learning 2.0 to go:

Advice on implementation comes from learning professionals, not software geeks. Jane knows social networking tools as well as anyone in the industry; Harold has his finger on the pulse of bottom-up learning and open source approaches; Clark is a passionate advocate of cognitive design, applying what we know about how people think to the design of systems. Jay is the thought leader in informal learning and the convergence of work and learning online.

This service is for organisations who want to be early adopters of social media for work and learning but haven’t figured out a way to do it internally. Our international team has a lot of experience and we work well together. Drop one of us a note and we’ll have a chat. We believe that there is a need for this kind of service and we’ve put together a package that we think makes sense. Comments are always appreciated.

Jay Cross has often discussed the return on investment (ROI) on learning and knows that you can’t properly measure much learning anyway, at least not to a direct cause-effect relationship and then to some monetary calculation:

“You can’t manage what you don’t measure” is nonsense. The vast majority of what senior executives manage is immeasurable. They make judgment calls; they play hunches. How else do you select the right people for key jobs? How else do you choose your partners? How else do you divine the future? Organizations pay senior executives handsomely to buy their ability to make wise choices in the absence of simple measurements.

I liken learning ROI to military morale. The military puts a lot of stock (and money) into the maintenance of good morale but there is no morale indicator scale in real life. Good commanders know when morale is high or low and they how far they can push their troops. They don’t waste time trying to put an ROI calculation on every effort to build a cohesive team.

Charle’s Green says that we should stop measuing ROI on soft skills training and gives several reasons why. Here is one to add to your notebook, so that you have a good response when someone asks about your ROI calculation:

the perversion of individual measurement. Most soft skills deal with our relationships to others. The drive to individually behavioralize, then metricize, has the effect of killing relationships—an ironic outcome for relationship-targeting training.

As much of our work moves online and becomes more collaborative and via multiple social networks, we should remember that quantifying these relationships may be detrimental to the very same relationships that help our organisations prosper.

Paul Lowe is the course leader of the Masters programme in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography at the London College of Communication, and shared his experience using blogs with our Work Literacy group today. Here are some of the points I picked up:

• blogs act as the glue between synchronous events
• blogs are ways of mapping the learning journey
• every blog is unique and gives a whole-person view, which you don’t get with assignments
• blogs encourage dialogue and show how to relate to an audience, which is good for photographers in training
• there is peer group feedback
• blogs allow for rich media - images, video, sound, links to other resources; all of which can be mashed up, tagged, recomposed, mixed - by all participants
• blogs can also be emotional and playful

The MA course lets the students choose their own blog platform so that blogging can continue after the course; a nice step beyond the LMS-centric approach to academic courses. I also noted that student blogs are not used an assessment vehicle which should encourage more open reflection. To ensure that blogs and comments are read, the course assigns small groups of  “blog buddies” to read and comment on each others’ blogs. This course is an excellent example of some pragmatic uses of online social media.

The recorded session is available online, just enter any particpant name and leave the password blank.

Last year I wrote that Instructional Design Needs More Agility, saying that it’s time that the training industry develop its own agile approach or risk becoming redundant. Continuing on the theme of faster and more flexible development, Daniel Lemire thinks that programming could use the greedy algorithm as a basis to manage projects. I mentioned on Twitter that I thought that a “greedy approach” was similar to agile programming and Daniel replied:

@hjarche greedy here means: don’t think globally, make the best choice locally, and the end result will be ok. So, yes, it is agile.

My experience in larger projects is that we spend too much time in planning and then freeze that process once we start development, even if the plan is no longer relevant. In smaller projects planning can be almost non-existent, with a quick decision on what model/approach to use and then it’s off to meet whatever was stated in the contract. Building in agility or the greedy algorithm at the onset seems to give more options to the development team, who now have the responsibilty of confirming that they are on course as they continue to refine the product.

It’s Thanksgiving in Canada and we’ve just finished an excellent turkey dinner. The gang is playing a game, but I’m odd man out - sitting and listening to the antics. Meanwhile, the economy seems to be melting as we wait for our national election on Tuesday. Personally, I’ve been watching this site to help me decide which way to cast my vote.

I’m thankful that for the past five years I’ve been able to work from home and grow my business. My wife also has her studio in the house and we spend most of days together. Usually one of us is available for any family activities that happen during the day. Even with our financial uncertainties, it’s been a good lifestyle, and now it seems that everyone else is the same financial situation that we’ve been in - not knowing what’s going to happen beyond the next month or two.

On a positive note, Andrea has her first gallery show next week and it’s a big leap for her. About as big as when I became a free-agent. The show is called Fibre Optics at Fog Forest Gallery in Sackville until 25 October.

Who knows what the future holds, but for now we are doing what we love and making a living. I can’t be asking for much more at this time.

This past week on Work Literacy has focused on social bookmarks, perhaps the easiest and simplest of social media. Most people are already using bookmarks/favourites with their preferred browser so the leap to social bookmarks is not huge. I’ve learned a few more things about social bookmarking for learning and have discovered that Diigo is used by a lot of educators.

Once again this week, several of the +600 members jumped-in and became guides and coaches, making the work of the facilitators much easier (thank you). This kind of sharing shows that online activities can actually scale well beyond the size of a traditional course, as long as the instructors/facilitators don’t try to control everything.

I also like what Michele Martin has done with her Delicious Portfolio and think I will create one for myself. The portfolio is a good snapshot for those of us who do much of our work online and is easy to keep up to date. I can see this usage becoming common.

Next week (#3) we move on to blogging. The real benefits of blogs, which I noted over three years ago remain today:

• Using a feed reader (via RSS), saves a lot of time and bookmarking.
• The information I get from bloggers is usually weeks ahead of the mainstream press. Call this competitive intelligence.
• By blogging, I have raised my profile on the web and increased visits to my site by a factor of 1000 in less than one year. This is cheap marketing.
• I use my database of posts when preparing reports, proposals and presentations. It helps to have a searchable system like Drupal. [now WordPress]
• Blogging forces me to think and reflect in order to write, so that what was just an idea in my mind becomes more concrete.
• The underlying technology of easy posting and RSS to keep track of things, makes a lot of sense for collaborative learning and collaborative work - two areas of interest for my business.
• Through blogging, I have met a number of business partners.
• Blogging keeps me in touch with a lot of interesting people and expands my view of the world, providing new ideas for my business.
• When I have a problem, especially a technical one, I post it on my site or someone else’s and usually get an informed answer within 24 hours. It’s like a large performance support system.
• It allows people to get to know my opinions before they engage me as a consultant; saving time and potential frustrations.

It’s hard to get management’s attention when things are going well. They’re running off to meetings, golf games, conferences and the like. However, as cash and clients become scarcer, management has to focus on the business at hand and figure out how to do things better. They might even question the role of the training department.

I’ve been in the business of virtual learning and online collaborative work pretty well since the Web entered the business world. It’s been a hard sell over the years, especially since many people would prefer a trip to Florida in the Winter to attend a training course. Everyone deserves some time away from the office, but as travel and training budgets get slashed, more companies are examining learning and working on the Web.

Image via Wikipedia

Recently I’ve been seeing more search phrases like - “open source social networking” and “cheap web conferencing tools” - coming to this site. Necessity is the mother of invention and people are looking for options. Luckily, many organisations have led the way in online collaboration over the past decade and there is a fair bit of expertise around, as witnessed by the range of knowledge on our Work Literacy online learning event. There are also a lot of tools to select from - some would even say too many.

I have a feeling that there will be a growing demand for innovative ways to help people in organisations work and learn together using the Web. For instance, I’m talking with a potential client who does not want me to travel on-site. Since I’m advising on how to move from a classroom teaching model to e-learning, he reasons, we should set the example and do all of our work online. I’m quite comfortable working that way, but it’s taken several years of practice.

I also see a rising interest in online performance support and just-in-time help, as opposed to just-in-case online courses. For professionals with skills in analysing business problems and finding methods and cost-effective technologies to address them, this is a time of opportunity. If people in the learning & development field complain that they can’t get management’s attention at this time, then perhaps they never will.

Image via Wikipedia

Last week on Work Literacy the topic was about social networks for learning. Tony Karrer wrote a good summary of things that were noted, shared and learned. A number of people wrote that Linked-In was for professional connections while Facebook was more for social chatting. Others picked up on this and showed how Linked-In could be used for learning, but there were not a lot of instances of Facebook being used for learning.

A recent article by Marcia Conner in Fast Company is one of the best articles I’ve read on how Facebook can be used for learning, Face to Facebook Learning. She cites the work of one of my local colleagues, Hal:

Or how about the work of Hal Richman, who started the Convergence of Social and Business Networking group on Facebook to explore the learning he was seeing all around him. Early on he conducted a survey and 81% of group members said they like to merge their social and business worlds and 93% said they expected or aspired to meet people they will network and collaborate in the future. One qualitative response captured the essence of many others with, “It is important that business contacts get to see the real you. In that way you present a more rounded and credible personality who is more likely to engage others.” Discussion topics were thoughtful and revealing, helping me as a group member to learn about how others were grappling with important emergent themes.

There are lots of concrete examples and links to explore how Facebook can be used for learning and Marcia has created a group, What are you learning on Facebook?

The first comment on the cover says:

“This one is a keeper. Buy three. One for you, one for someone you care about, and one for a friend who really and truly needs it.” Seth Godin

I was given a copy of Dave Pollard’s Finding the Sweet Spot by a friend and read it on the plane home last week.  I’ve been watching Dave develop the model for natural enterprises for quite some time and even helped to coin the term, so I’m definitely a fan of the “natural entrepreneur’s guide to responsible, sustainable, joyful work”. Natural Entrepreneurship is based on a six step model that is easy to understand, but will take some work to implement, but then anything worthwhile requires effort:

1. Find the sweet spot: Identify your Gift, passion, and purpose
2. Find the right partners
3. Research unmet needs
4. Imagine and innovate solutions
5. Continuously improvise
6. Act responsibly on principle

Implementing these steps does not require an initial outlay of capital and natural entrepreneurs can get started even while they hold down a job. Each step is covered in detail, with practical advice and some anecdotes. A key aspect of natural entrepreneurship is that it is not premised on the unsustainable notion of perpetual growth.

The book is well written and edited and doesn’t ramble on as a series of blog posts might ( a bit what I feared when I picked up the book). I would recommend this book to anyone growing or changing an organisation, from single start-up to small company or non-profit; though there are examples of larger companies in the book.

I will be adding Finding the Sweet Spot to a few select reference books that I’ve used for business strategy work; including Kawasaki’s The Art of the Start and Christensen’s Seeing What’s Next. Now I have to buy some extra copies to give away.

This coming week (#2) at Work Literacy we will be discussing social bookmarks. I wrote about the basics of social bookmarks last year in Step 1: Free Your Bookmarks, which discussed how to get your data onto the Web cloud.

I think that social bookmarks and RSS aggregators are the two basic tools for using the Web for personal knowledge management. For those with limited social media experience, I usually suggest these two tools to get the hang of information flows on the web, which can feel like a tidal wave.

Dave Pollard, who is participating in the Connectivism and Connected Knowledge course notes how social media can have a connectivist aspect:

Refocusing Social Tools: Just as Knowledge Management is now shifting focus and attention from collection to connection, social media need to turn their attention to enabling more, more effective, more informed, more valuable conversations. They need to help us identify ‘the right people’ (to live with, make a living with, love, and talk to) and then connect with them in real time in simple yet powerful ways that mimic, as much as possible, face-to-face conversations. They also need to help us make these conversations and meetings and social interactions more effective — bring more clarity and context, reach consensus, enable stories to be told and remembered, capture non-verbal communication, and pick up from where we left off at the end of the last conversation — keeping us connected, all the time, everywhere.

Social bookmarks are but one aspect and one way to keep connected online, and in my experience one of the easiest ways to get started with web social media.

Getting your bookmarks out on the Web where you can easily access and search them definitely can help with personal productivity. It’s just easier to find things. However, it is only after some time when you have a number of pages marked with your tags and comments and when you have connected with other people that you realize that social bookmarks are more than just a heap of personal links. Other people start connecting to your network and they can annotate a link for members of their network. Suddenly, who you know becomes as important as what you know. If someone in your network knows that you’re interested in an area, perhaps they’ll find and mark a reference that you would never have found. Serendipity can happen, but only once you’ve engaged in the social space.

Here is an example of some recommendations from my network:

Florence Meichel (in French) examines at the US/World financial crisis and looks back at Ivan Illich’s criticism of industrial schooling:

Everywhere the hidden curriculum of schooling initiates the citizen to the myth that bureaucracies guided by scientific knowledge are efficient and benevolent. Everywhere this same curriculum instills in the pupil the myth that increased production will provide a better life. And everywhere it develops the habit of self-defeating consumption of services and alienating production, the tolerance for institutional dependence, and the recognition of institutional rankings. The hidden curriculum of school does all this in spite of contrary efforts undertaken by teachers and no matter what ideology prevails.

Critical thinking and an understanding of the frameworks that guide our political and financial institutions would really help the citizenry to understand the complexities of what is happening. It sure beats listening to politicians and pundits in 30 second sound bites. Unfortunately, it’s what many have been conditioned to accept, because they’re been told that these systems is beyond their understanding.

Is the financial crisis really an educational crisis?

Stuart Henshall says that you should Use the Tools First: Then Talk to Me:

I just walked out of one session where the presenter made a joke about Facebook. I checked; I’m fairly sure he’s not on it. That’s a big problem that exists here. You cannot talk about the impact of wikis, blogs, social bookmarking, tagging, even search unless you actually use them.

I agreed with this as soon as I read it and then wondered why. You don’t ask a doctor to have first suffered a disease before discussing how to treat it. Many academics in business school have never started a company, yet they can talk about the fundamentals of business.

Why is the Web, and especially social media, so different?

I think that one fundamental difference about social media is that they have a strong influence on the user, very much in a McLuhanesque medium/message/massage way. Those who come to web media for the first time are like adults learning a new language. You cannot start with the same advanced mental models and metaphors that you have in your primary language. Furthermore, if you do get to an advanced level in your new language, you may not have noticed it but the language, with its idioms, metaphors and culture, has had a strong influence on how you think in that language.

Social media change the way you communicate. Write a blog for a year or more and your writing (and thinking) will change. Use Twitter for some time and you will get an immersed sense of being connected to many people and understanding them on a different level. Even the ubiquitous Facebook changes how you may think of being apart from friends. Social media can change the way you think.

When you adopt a web social medium you are also starting on the bottom, or at the single node level. You have to make connections with what will become your network, either by connecting to existing relationships or doing something that helps to create new relationships, like writing a post. Starting over again, in each medium, can be daunting, especially for someone in a position of authority who is concerned about image or influence.

Yes, you need to use the tools first. You have to understand what it’s like to be a node in a social network. There is almost nothing like it in the industrial workplace or school system to prepare you for this. Therefore you won’t know what you’re talking about until you learn the new language of online networks. The only way to learn a new language is through practice. Social media are new languages.

PS: I took Stuart’s advice and downloaded the social web browser, Flock, from which I wrote this post.

At the Work Literacy course (starts today, with 365 people registered) we’re using Ning as our social networking platform. According to my co-facilitator, Michele Martin, “Online social networks facilitate connections between people based on shared interests, values, membership in particular groups (i.e., friends, professional colleagues), etc. They make it easier for people to find and communicate with individuals who are in their networks using the Web as the interface.” That’s an okay working definition and gives those new to the concept an idea of what I’m talking about.

We chose Ning because it is easy to manage as a completely hosted service. It’s been around long enough to have the major kinks worked out, the company is well funded and all of the facilitators have used it before. We also don’t expect this community to be active for long after the 6 week course is over, though we could be surprised. We didn’t expect to have so many people sign up either. Our initial idea was to use Ning as the connector, while writing on our own blogs, or the Work Literacy blog. For communities that are going to be around for a longer period of time, a different platform could be more suitable.

I came across Grou.ps recently and set up a demo community. I like the interface and the various options for modules. Grou.ps also includes a wiki module. Like Ning, it is not open source, but the company says that an OS version is coming. Grou.ps has already donated a fair bit of code back to open source projects. I prefer using open source based platforms for any community site that has the potential to scale. With open source you keep the option of migrating the platform to your own servers where you can maintain better control of service.

Another new player that I’ve only looked at quickly is Buddy Press, a social networking framework built on WordPress MU (multi-user). An example of WordPressMU used for education is edublogs. Since I’m already using WordPress and wordpress.org has always been open source, I’m quite excited about this new set of tools. BuddyPress is in Beta at this time, so it may not be best for your first company-launched community. Let the geeks test it out first.

Finally, an older player in the open source community space is Elgg. The free Eduspaces service offers Elgg as a hosted service, which you can test out and connect with the educational technology community.

There are several options to test out social networking online as well as some open source platforms that won’t break the bank and will allow you to tinker with what’s under the hood. As far as the technology is concerned, there are few excuses not to try out social networking for work or learning. Notice that I didn’t have to mention the really big social networking platforms that are getting all the mainstream media attention?

Jay Cross is currently focusing on the ROI of organisational learning initiatives and debunking some of the myths and metrics. His notes from the CLO Symposium include this:

Jayne Johnson, director of Leader Development for GE at Crotonville, delivered the final keynote presentation. Someone asked how she measured the on-going effectiveness of Crotonville; she doesn’t. As for cost-justification in advance, no, GE believes in “launch and learn.” Experiment a lot, and keep what works.

The notion of launch and learn reminds me of the cynefin approach to complex environments:

The cynefin framework looks at five domains (the 5th is Disorder) and it shows how our reliance on backward-looking tools, such as best practices, is not a suitable strategy for complex environments:

Complex, in which the relationship between cause and effect can only be perceived in retrospect, but not in advance, the approach is to Probe - Sense - Respond and we can sense emergent practice.

Probe-Sense-Respond (P-S-R) is similar to GE’s Launch-Learn approach. When no one can understand the vagaries of your situation in a changing, complex environment then the only thing to do is try out new things based on your best judgement then watch, learn and keep trying new things out. Effective organisational practices will emerge by doing things.

This is the big challenge for Web 2.0 for learning professionals as well. There are no best practices or even good practices. There are things that work for some people, some of the time. As learning professionals, our job is to understand our organisation or client’s situation and look outside to see what others are doing. We have to try things out and see how they work. If we wait for the best practices, we will be too late. This is life in continual Beta (change) and the natural world provides some good examples.