Portals and KM

Painting of a Pile of Watermelons

Here is a 24" square painting of watermelons. It is part of a series on close ups of fruits and vegetables in the 24" format. The best way to easily see most of my paintings for sales is to go to my Facebook page - https://www.facebook.com/bill.ives2 - and look at Photos and albums within Photos. I have three photo albums covering my art. One is for discounted pairings under $100.  The other is for most of the rest (over $100). The third is for paintings that I have either sold or ones that are not for sale. However, if anyone is interested in them I will paint another version for them on commission. I will ship anywhere and have shipped art works as far as Australia.

In New Orleans there are currently paintings hanging at two of my favorite New Orleans restaurants. One is Willie Mae’s Uptown. It is located at 7457 St. Charles Ave., New Orleans, 504-417-5424. Here is a post describing the showing at Willie Mae’s. Another is  Riccobono's Panola Street Cafe. Here is a post describing the showing at Riccobono's. It is located at 7801 Panola Street (504 314-1810).I also have paintings hanging at the Albert Brown Salon located at 3424 Magazine Street in New Orleans.  There are a total of 23 paintings in the show including the one shown above. Here is a post about the Albert Brown show with all of the images. 

Review of The New Social Learning

 I was very pleased to receive a review copy of The New Social Learning by Tony Bingham and Marcia Conner. Tony is President and Chief Executive Officer of the American Society for Training & Development (ASTD). Marcia is a Partner at Altimeter Group, founder of the Twitter chat #lrnchat, and writes the Fast Company column “Learn at All Levels.”

Getting a chance to read this timely work excited me for several reasons. First, I began my consulting career in the learning space in the 80s and have remained convinced of its importance for accelerating business performance. I presented at several ASTD session during this period. Second, Marcia was also a colleague of mine at Pistachio Consulting where we did some projects together. I had a chance to review an earlier version of one of the chapters of this book. But most importantly, it is the first book I have seen to help organizations understand and harness the huge workplace learning potential of social media and enterprise 2.0.

Tony and Marcia began with an acknowledgement that social learning has been around for a long time. While social media tools bring new power to social learning, it is not about particular tools as they will come and go. The book is about news ways that social media can enhance social learning and thus the book title. Much of the talk about social media has focused on marketing and while, there is great potential there, the authors bring forth a powerful additional use case. They also point out that social learning is not a new form of e-learning.  I would certainly agree and much of e-learning appeared to me to be disappointing watered down adoptions of technology–based learning from the 80s.

I remember studies in the 80s where people reported that 90% of what they learned that helped with their work came from informal conversations with fellow employees. Now social media can enable those conversations on a global basis across enterprises or in a secure manner within a select group in one enterprise.  When I first saw social media in 2004 the possibilities for knowledge management re-energized my interest in KM. I have began to see the same potential for learning and this book helps to put it in perspective and offers some excellent cases examples.

The book draws on some of my academic heroes, John Dewey, Jean Piaget, Peter Berger, and Thomas Luckman to set the stage of how people most effectively learn through active participation and social interaction. They define learning as “the transformative process of taking in information that, when internalized and mixed with what we have experienced, changes what we know and builds on what we can do.’ I certainly agree and it aligns directly with how Piaget would define learning. Jocelyn Davis, head of R&D at the Forum Corporation, recently suggested that learning might be a major motivational driver on the level of David McClelland’s three main drives achievement, affiliation, and power.  Social learning can draw on a number of these motivators.

The authors list some of the major concerns about using social media in a business context and then offer excellent ways to address these concerns. The book takes a very practical approach and is clearly written with concrete examples through out.

After setting the stage, the authors provide a chapter each covering online communities, the power of stories, micro-sharing, growing the collective intelligence, and immersive environments. Each chapter begins with a detailed case example. The book concludes with some useful tips of making the most of in-person events. I let you read the book to get the useful details.

I highly recommend this book if you want to make better use of social media and enterprise 2.0, if learning is a passion, or if you want to increase the productivity of your workforce.  It is one of the better business books I have seen recently.

Useful Guidelines and Metrics for Speeding Up Your Organization

Here is a very timely book from several thoughtful people at The Forum Corporation, Strategic Speed (Harvard Business Press) was written by Jocelyn Davis, Henry Frechette, and Edwin Boswell and recently released.  Forum has shown great longevity. It was founded in 1971 and I competed against it in the 1980s when I was with a long since gone learning firm. 

I could not agree more with their basic orientation. It is time to engage and empower employees rather than simply fine tune processes and continue to do things to people in the outdated mode of Fred Taylor.  The authors use a nice image of the college campus with paved walkways and barren short cuts across the lawns. You can try to regulate what people do but they will go against the grain if it makes sense to them.

Enterprise 2.0 provides us with better tools to empower and engage employees and enable them to set the proper pathways that better align with actual business processes.  Technology is not the focus of this book but it offers an approach that will work very well to guide enterprise 2.0 adoptions.

The authors did extensive research in creating this book. They looked at hundreds of examples of accelerated and sluggish businesses, created 18 in-depth cases examples, and surveyed 343 senior business leaders in n both fast and slow companies. From this work they abstracted four critical leadership practices than enable strategic speed and conceived of two key metrics: reduced time to value and increased value over time.  I like the value part as too often ROI has focused on speed issues without tying them back to the bottom line.

The book begins with a useful chart of ten differences between fast and slow companies. The underlying themes for fast firms include collaboration, reflection, transparency, flexibility, coordination, innovation, and alignment. These are all issues that are better enabled through proper use of enterprise 2.0 technologies.  Consistent with these themes are three basic principals the authors found in fast firms: clarity, unity, and agility.

They note a bit later that business collaboration is the main driver of unity. In contrast, when there is a culture of internal competition projects and strategies get derailed. I have certainly seen this latter problem first hand. For example, when managers are asked to rank order their teams in performance reviews that is an invitation for counterproductive competition.  This approach can put individual goals above team and company goals.  The authors offer a number of examples where learning activities went across divisional and, even company, boundaries to create greater collaboration and unity.

They also introduce a strategic speedometer to enable you to better measure your company’s efforts on the three fronts of clarity, unity, and agility. Again, this score card can be a very useful metric in evaluating enterprise 2.0 adoption with such measures as the translation of strategy into clear and measureable goals, presence of cross- boundary collaboration, and evidence that people capture and communicate what they learn from initiatives.

I certainly recommend this book for anyone undertaking an enterprise 2.0 adoption, as well as those who simply what to effectively speed up the efforts of their company.  There are many useful examples and practices to achieve these goals. 

Learning 2.0 Boot Camp – The Otter Group

Last week Kathleen Gilroy and I announced our new Learning 2.0 Boot Camp. We have already received some very positive feedback on this program. It allows you to jumpstart your efforts in this space by developing a practical Learning 2.0 project plan. The program is spaced over six weeks with about 24 hours of time requirements. You work in a team to define a project idea, develop a plan, and deliver the plan as a podcast and slide set.

Projects will likely take existing business processes and services and re-develop them into new models based on Web 2.0 services. There are many possibilities. For example, your team may find a way to distribute information more effectively using RSS feeds; or you may design a talent pool system that helps identify new talent for projects; or you may see the need for a wiki for customer service agents. You will document your project work on blogs read by all participants and faculty. And all projects will be reviewed and critiqued by the Learning 2.0 faculty. At the end of the program you will walk away knowing how to use these services and how to apply them.

A five page description of the Learning 2.0 Boot Camp is available for download at the Otter Group site. Kathleen has also started a Learning 2.0 podcast series that is available for free download. Podcast series on Negotiation by Dr. Josh Weiss, Associate Director of Harvard's Global Negotiation and Innovation Project by Dr. Eric Mankin, Executive Director of ICE at Babson, are also available at the Otter Group site. I plan to add a few podcasts to the Learning 2.0 series on ways that blogs can enhance personal productivity.

Learning 2.0 Podcasts – The Otter Group

The Otter Group has launched a new podcast series by Kathleen Gilroy on the subject of Learning 2.0. The series discusses advances in learning enabled by the onset of the broader changes within Web 2.0. You can find the audio and video podcasts at their new Learning 2.0 Tip of the Week Weblog. Last week they posted a 5 minute overview of how we are defining the world of Learning 2.0. This week, they will post a podcast about aggregators.

Ten Ideas for Making E-Learning Work – Cesar Brea

After returning form the recent .LRN conference in Madrid, Cesar Brea offers ten ideas for making e-learning work. They include the following. In his blog post he develops each point with more commentary so I encourage you to go to his post if you are interested in this topic.

1. Subscribe and reply to bulletin boards and forums by email.
2. Provide structured collaboration.
3. Seed content.
4. Auto-tag content contributions by context
5. Optimize user group size and structure to maximize affinity
6. In-line benchmarking. The idea here is instant feedback.
7. User portraits.
8. Personalized syllabi
9. Class Notes Blog.
10. Active moderation.

The open source LRN platform developed at MIT Sloan incorporates blogs into e-learning. It is has a fast growing audience.

Coaching in the Era of Free Agency - David Bayless

David Bayless writes the blog, Dispatches Weblog - Musings on Entrepreneurship on the Economic Frontier. It covers issues of economic development, often in a very in-depth manner. I especially liked his post Coaching in the Era of Free Agency which compares the challenges faced by National Football League coaches in an era where free agency causes frequent personnel changes. Here it is not enough to simply be a good coach. You have to also be a good teacher. David writes:

“In the knowledge economy, employees have more choice because they own an increasing portion of their means of production. Consequently, the average duration of employment has fallen. Nevertheless, productivity is situational, and even employees with broad experience need to climb a learning curve when they join a new company. As their skills increase, employees' opportunities increase, thus reinforcing the cycle.”

I have seen this happen where start-ups do not invest in employee development or large organizations cut back in it with damaging consequences. As Charles Handy, the economist observes in a post-industrial economy, it is people that have knowledge who now own the new means of production, not their bosses. He points out that this change from an industrial to a knowledge-based economy requires a new approach to management. Managers now must understand and operate under the principal that the unique knowledge and skills that employees bring to work is the key competitive differentiator. They also have to be able to bring out this unique knowledge and skill on a football team or any other business.

EDUCAUSE 2004 Annual Conference

Thanks to Al Essa, CIO at MIT Sloan, for pointing me to the EDUCAUSE 2004 Annual Conference in October 19–22 in Denver, Colorado. Al is also Co-Chair of the Board of Directors for .LRN, the open source learning and knowledge management platform started at MIT. The conference seems important for people in education interested in the application of emerging technologies. It would also be useful for those in corporate learning. Among other things, it has the best laid out online conference program I have seen and the site is worth visiting just to see how they did it.

Al mentioned that he is attending the session, Seminar 02P - Decentralization of Learning Resources: Syndicating Learning Objects Using RSS, TrackBack, and Related Technologies, that looks at blog and blog related technologies. It is run by Brain Lamb, author of the wiki paper I review in another post today, and Alan Levine. Brian Lamb is a Project Coordinator with the Office of Learning Technology at The University of British Columbia and Alan Levine is an Instructional Technologist in the Maricopa Center for Learning & Instruction, located at the district office for the Maricopa Community Colleges in metropolitan Phoenix, Arizona.

I look forward to getting Al take on the session. Here are just a few other sessions that seem inviting, content taken from the program.

Post-Literacy: The Past and Future of Ideas - Just as literacy has displaced oral cultures, this presentation will speculate about the nature and characteristics of a "post-literate" capability that would displace literacy. Post-literacy will be imagined in terms of the development of new tools as well as the evolution of humans and human capabilities.

Collaboration to Create Collaborative Learning Environments - With in-person traffic decreasing, and virtual traffic on the rise, libraries must adapt as students and faculty look for facilities to support new kinds of learning activities. This session will focus on one university's progress toward creating a welcoming environment dedicated to collaboration and readily accessible resources

Me-learning – Wayne Hodgins

An email newsletter showed in my box from ONLINE EDUCA BERLIN 2004. Not sure how it got here but I scrolled down and found an interesting interview with Wayne Hodgins, inventor of “learning objects,” on his concept of me-learning. He is also the Director of Worldwide Learning Strategies at Autodesk, As he explains, “the "grand vision" or future of learning I am championing is the state when every person on the planet experiences personalized learning experiences every day.”

This vision is based on the ability to provide mass customized or personalized learning that is highly effective and very efficient. Wayne adds, “Context is what is required to transform essentially meaningless data into useful information by making it relevant to the person(s) consuming it. Context is also the most critical factor for successful learning.”

He then nicely defines knowledge and the unique context in which it occurs. “Knowledge is data put to work when it is applied by people and technology to solve problems. As each problem and each person is truly unique, then the ideal state we want to reach is to have every collection of data, technology, people, etc. to be "just right" to match the characteristics of the situation. By definition then each such solution would be unique because that specific collection of data, people, technology, etc. would have never existed before.”

Next he gets more specific and says that the impediments to sharing or re-using information are the high cost, time, and difficulty of reformatting, re-categorizing, editing out examples that are irrelevant to the new situation, and integrating it all to match the unique aspects of this situation. Wayne says, “The key is to have structured data that is broken down into small individual blocks of information, each one tagged with appropriate metadata so they can be discovered and selected to match the requirements at hand and then assembled into a "just right" package of content.”

Wayne is giving a giving a keynote in ONLINE EDUCA BERLIN (December 1 - 3) and discuss "me-learning: What if the impossible isn't?" I guess advertising this event is the point of the newsletter that came to me. I think Wayne asks a good question and offers a potential way to make it happen. This is something many others have talked about for a while. Is it the alchemists’ quest or really achievable?

Primary School Blogging

Here is an article by Jeffrey Selingo in the New York Times on use of blogs in elementary school classrooms. It points out:

“For teachers, blogs are attractive because they require little effort to maintain, unlike more elaborate classroom Web sites, which were once heralded as a boon for teaching. Helped by templates found at sites like tblog.com and movabletype.org, teachers can build a blog or start a new topic in an existing blog by simply typing text into a box and clicking a button. Such ease of use is the primary reason that Peter Grunwald, an education consultant, predicts that blogs will eventually become a more successful teaching tool than Web sites.”

Sounds like the business world.

Blogs + Egos = Learning? - Louis Rosenfeld

The e-learning Post provides a link on August 6 to interesting thoughts from Louis Rosenfeld, an independent information architecture consultant, on student learning in the blogosphere. Louis argues that tools that allow students to monitor their “egoboo” are a must for learning along with the tools that allow for content publishing. This is similar to observations from Kathleen Gilroy on her experiences with the use of blogs for e-learning.

Highlights of what Louis writes include:

“Had an interesting breakfast discussion yesterday with Bud Gibson, a professor at the University of Michigan business school. Bud is developing a collection of student blogs (or "blogosphere") as the infrastructure and publishing medium for an upcoming course.

But the "real" blogosphere--the one we're using to interact as you read this--isn't just blogs. In addition to tools that help us say stuff (e.g., blogs), there are tools that help us find other people's stuff (e.g., aggregators like Bloglines) and, perhaps most compelling, tools that help us find out what other people are saying about our own stuff (e.g., Technorati). If a student blogosphere included similar "add-on" tools, students might constantly monitor their content's "performance" just as we all obsessively do in the open blogosphere (and hey, come on, I'm sure I'm not the only one).

Understanding how one's content performed in a competitive, if local, information marketplace would surely be quite instructive. Through trial, error, and emulating others' successes, students would learn to write more effectively for the medium, which meets one of Bud's original goals. And students would arrive at their own understanding of the blogosphere as not just a collection of tools and content, but a fuller information ecology, complete with rules, incentives and disincentives, social agreements, boundaries, and metrics to help make sense of it all.”

I think that Louis and Bud are touching one of the main advantages of blogs for learning. This is not about vanity. It is actually the opposite, it is about learning what others think about our work and being able to modify what we do to make it more accessible and useful to others. Traditional e-learning does not allow for this sophisticated feedback.

Blogs devoted to learning and blogs, in general, would benefit from even more sophisticated feedback tools so we could all learn from others. However, what we have now with tools like Technorati, FeedBurner, and Feedster are light years ahead of traditional e-learning.

Lou co-authored with Peter Morville the book, Information Architecture for the World Wide Web (O'Reilly, 1998; second edition, 2002), Amazon.com's "Best Internet Book of 1998. His blog looks great.

AT&T Continues to Evolve

AT&T's announcement yesterday that it would withdraw from the consumer phone market is an interesting sign of changing markets and the potential failure to adapt. The New York Times today said that,

“Despite losing an average of 10 percent of the long-distance market in each of the last three years, AT&T is still the field's leader, with 30 million customers - a 25 percent to 30 percent share of the market, according to Tim Horan, an analyst at CIBC World Markets. It also has 4 million local phone customers. But as a group, the Bells' share of the long-distance market is now 35 to 40 percent - bigger than AT&T's, Mr. Horan said. Together, the Bells now have approximately 40 million long-distance subscribers, he said, compared with about 8 million at the end of 2002.”

It seems like they are selling “typewriters” and “blacksmith tools” for those old enough to remember these things. Also, a few of you may remember when AT&T was the blue chip stock of older retirees? My uncle had some and it traded in the 60s. I think it paid a safe dividend above markets rates. Now it has fallen from 22 to 14 in the past year.

I worked with AT&T as a consultant at a number of points and the people were always great. In the mid-80s I led the development of several CBT programs to help their sales force with the transition from simply selling telecom products and services to selling computers. I certainly take no responsibility for the results. Then in the mid-90s I was involved in the creation of a knowledge management system to support their call center consolidation. In this case, the major benefit was to reduce the learning curve as people took on new areas of customer service. This effort was very successful and got adopted widely across the organization.

I find it a bit sad to see such a major US institution fall on such hard times. Interesting to compare it to IBM, which sold the typewriters I referred to earlier. I also did work with IBM in the mid-80s. In this case, it started with a study of the competencies of their marketing reps and continued with several courses on how to be a more consultative sales person, although at the time the “sales” word was not used and all men wore white shirts and ties. The radical ones wore blue shirts and ties and as a consultant you were expected to dress like the more conservative ones. I recently ordered, "Who Says Elephants Can't Dance? Inside IBM's Historic Turnaround," to get the official version of their transition from Lou Gerstner.

Learning Community Group's Research Network

The Learning Community Group (LCG) is a research and teaching organization that provides schools and community organizations with strategic technology programs. They also provide technology courses for individuals, artists, teachers, community members, and small businesses at their Exploratorium in Boston. They also do research on a daily basis and put it on their site. It looks like a good resource for educators.

Blogs for Course Management

The Electric Lyceum has an interesting post, put up on May 23, on blogs for course management. It says,

“Elizabeth Lane Lawley, assistant professor at the department of information technology at Rochester Institute of Technology, has begun an experiment using Moving Type as a course management system for her "Introduction to Multimedia" class. Already, her early efforts demonstrate the unique advantages blogs hold over conventional course management systems. But her work also uncovers what commercial course management systems offer that blogs lack.’

It adds:

“Laura Gibbs, in her blog post "Blackboard, Students and Publishing on the Web," pretty much captured the differences between a blog-based online learning experience and one provided by the traditional vendors when she said "Blackboard lets faculty members share documents with students, but it does nothing to promote web publishing by students."

Laura Gibbs post was done over a year ago but the issues are still very relevant. Kathleen Gilroy has been exploring this issue on her blog. Also, the Sloan School at MIT has begun to allow professors to place class notes in a blog using a recently added capability within their open source e-learning system, .LRN. Originating at MIT, .LRN is getting widespread global adoption by universities, government agencies, and several corporations with close to a million current users. It now provides support for blogs with full RSS capability, blogger API support, and formatted text entry. Cesar Brea, .LRN board member, discusses what they are doing in this post. It will be interesting to see what happens with this new capability.

Peer-to-Peer Learning: A Parable

I am repeating here a comment I made to Kathleen’ Gilroy's comments on egalitarian and peer-to-peer learning in the Open ACS .LRN Forum so it might reach another audience. I agree completely with her points in this forum and especially like the way she has articulated the concept. I want to share an example that occurred in 1997-1998 using the technology of the day. I apologize that this is longer than most postings and I will drop much of the context for this reason.

A large health insurance organization was changing their IT platform to web-based and, more importantly, moving to a proactive customer service business model away from the traditional transaction model. This effort involved learning new technology and new business processes and attitudes. The traditional authoritarian classroom model for training call center workers took 12 weeks and it was then still 9 months before they became fully efficient. Neither of these time frames was acceptable to transform the entire work force so we integrated knowledge management and learning to both drive down classroom time and decrease the learning curve.

So we decided to turn the traditional learning model on its head. We decided that we were not going to train people at all. Instead, we were going to put all the procedures, information, and knowledge to provide customer service and process claims in a KM system available on the job. We made the workers responsible for their own learning but gave them what they needed to do the job. However, we did not just turn them loose on customers. We put them in a two week simulation where they were given claims to process and access to the KM system to support their efforts. Other off-duty employees called in, simulating real customers. A facilitator, not a teacher, was there to answer questions. In order to graduate you needed to use the system to actually do your new job. Those who got through quickly were then asked to help slow learners, encouraging team work.

We also knew that not all the procedures would be documented in the initial efforts and not all those that were would be right. So we created a simple wizard to have employees write their thoughts on procedures they found undocumented as well as their ideas on how to do those that were covered even better. We gave them examples of how to write good procedures, in a help file, so they could better respond to this task. In the simulation they were required to use this wizard to encourage it use on the job. An organization was set up to evaluate and process their suggestions.

According to participant feedback this proved to be the most popular learning program that most participants had ever experienced. At one point when the new overall work IT system was being introduced sometime prior to release, the employees got much more excited about the KM system that we introduced along with the IT system. It even got a standing ovation after a long day of demos and employees said they wanted it right now, even if the overall IT system was not ready.

What excited business leaders was the significant reduction in classroom time and the reduction in learning curve, reducing costs and bringing forward the benefits of the major transformation of the business. What excited the employees was the egalitarian approach Kathleen discussed, although we did not have the benefit of her excellent peer-to-peer framing of the issue at the time. I have seen this occur, in part, in other places but this was the most dramatic. It would be even better in today’s tools but worked fine with the old ones. If you want more on the integration of learning and KM here is an earlier post and here is another on .LRN as well as a link to their website.

Can blogs re-introduce KM to eLearning?

Since the beginning of KM, advocates have talked about the connection between KM and eLearning. However, this seems to be a dream largely unrealized as the connections have been more at the commentary level than the implementation level. One reason is political, as many knowledge management activities come from IT organizations, while most individual learning initiatives come from the HR organizations. In practice, these two functions are often as “siloed” as the business units they support. Another reason is technical, as past tools have not always made the true integration of eLearning with the core knowledge repositories an easy task. Courses are more likely to have knowledge repositories within the course system than linkages to the actual KM system used within the organization. Most existing connections are simple links between KM and learning within portals.

Several years back, during my Accenture tenure, we designed an internal eLearning course on knowledge management that tried to go beyond simple linkage and illustrate the desired connection between KM and learning. As part of this course we connected the eLearning modules with a treaded discussion in the firm’s Notes-based central knowledge management system. Participants were required to post their assignments in this treaded discussion forum that was open to the rest of the firm. For example, participants had to describe possible value propositions for KM within their existing clients. This could begin to generate a database of KM value propositions by industry and function that consultants could use back on the job. Participants were also required to comment on the assignments of at least two of their colleagues to encourage dialog. However, it took some significant heavy lifting by our technology experts to get this integration between the eLearning course and the KM system to work. This connection had some modest success but the approach was not re-used in other courses. However, many other courses, both workshops and eLearning, required participants to use the KM system to complete course requirements but they did not have any technical integration. This latter approach was much easier to implement and certainly provided value to the course and promoted subsequent use of KM.

Now, a new generation of collaboration tools opens up the possibility of greater true integration of KM and eLearning beyond simple linkage. For example, the LRN tool set built on the OpenACS architecture has both web log and RSS capabilities. This provides the platform for many creative instructional design options and has the potential to facilitate a stronger connection between KM and eLearning.

Getting your eLearning and KM tools for free (almost)

Cesar Brea recently introduced me to an open source elearning and KM tool - .LRN - first developed at MIT and now used by a number of educational institutions, as well as non-profit and for-profit organizations. It supports the integration of learning and KM through a suite of tools that include a portal, course management, learning management, on-line communities, and content management. Included in the features is support for blogs with full RSS capability, blogger API support, and formatted text entry. The learning and KM tools are built on Open ACS or Open Architecture Community System used in Siemens knowledge management application, Sharenet. Cesar serves on the executive board for .LRN and he describes a number of successful applications in a recent blog. While this takes out some important costs of doing KM and elearning, I feel obligated to add that if over half the cost of a KM or elearning implementation is spent on tools, the project is doomed to failure. With this disclaimer, .LRN offers a useful alternative to spending money for a significant portion of implementation costs, especially for educational institutions and it has some great features at any price. Here is a link to the .LRN Forum within the Open ACS Community which lists 7541 members.