Learning Conversations

One of the main reasons people give to avoid using online social networking tools at work is lack of time. This post gives four ways you can play a part in your organisation's learning network, without requiring much time to do so. In fact, some of them may even save you time!

Use the tools provided to increase your speed

As you're looking things up and learning stuff, you'll find items that would be useful to your colleagues. Many social applications come with bookmarklets, or small programmes that let you quickly post a link. In my case, I use bit.ly to easily post links to Twitter. Two clicks and it's done.

You can do the same with extensions in Chrome or Firefox. It's even easier on mobile devices, which have social integration at their heart.

Feed your posts to the right people

If you're using Yammer or similar applications, they often come with a means of automatically filtering your Twitter posts, and pulling them into the organisation's internal social network. This is great if you have an organisation where people are less likely to be on Twitter, but are happy to use the internal tools.

Build connections, and exploit them (nicely)

Once you've got a network of people you follow, and people who follow you, then start using it to ask questions. You'll find that those questions will quickly fly around the organisation, and you'll get answers from people a number of network connections away from you. This is especially true if you find those people who act as the hubs on your social network. They won't have the answers, but they will have the connections to get those answer. (See: Wikipedia - properties of small world networks)

Stop answering the same question many times

If you've answered a question by email, then that knowledge only exists between you and the recipients. If you answer it on a blog, on in a video post, then that knowledge is made available to the rest of the organisation. If the same question comes back to you, then you can easily point people towards the answer.

With more organisations beginning to adopt social media as part of their daily work practices, it's important to pick up on some of the lessons learned from social media use out in the "real world"...

Have a human face

When you're working in a virtual organisation, where face-to-face contact is rare, it's really important to have a photo on your profile. We humans react to faces from birth. Without an image of the person to hang a conversation on, all you have is words, and sometimes voice.

See: 5 elements of a successful social media profile picture

Fill in your profile

Social media is often not actually that social. When you meet people face-to-face, a lot of the time is spent exploring points of commonality: where do you live, which school/university did you go to, who have you worked for, did you read such and such.

It's these little things that help to build a lasting working relationship.

Online, there's rarely the time for such chit chat. So we have to pre-empt it by giving out information up front.

Out in the real world, I try to have just one or two places where my profile (the things I want people to know about me) is kept up to date. At the moment, that's primarily LinkedIn. Every other profile I fill in just links back to that.

If you don't have a public profile yet, it's still important to have one within your work social media system. Choose a place you can link to easily, and put in as much detail as you can to help people gain a picture of who you are.

Narrate your work

Many social media systems contain an ongoing status update page, where everything that's done in the system is exposed to the rest of the community. Usually you can filter this down to just the projects or people you're interested in.

But that only covers the changes or updates the systems picks up automatically. It won't pick up the things that you're thinking about, or trying out. All this is important too.

As Andrew McAfee says:

Talk both about work in progress (the projects you're in the middle of, how they're coming, what you're learning, and so on), and finished goods (the projects, reports, presentations, etc. you've executed). This lets others discover what you know and what you're good at. It also makes you easier to find, and so increases the chances you can be a helpful colleague to someone. Finally, it builds your personal reputation and 'brand.'

http://blogs.hbr.org/hbr/mcafee/2010/09/dos-and-donts-for-your-works-s.html

See: Narrate your work

Make comments and links

Networks die when there are no connections being made. As new people enter the organisation, or new pieces of content get added, pull them into the network by linking to them and adding comments to the content. A strong network is one where links are constantly being made and refreshed.

See George Siemen's seminal article on Connectivism

Ask for help

It's OK not to know everything. In fact it's impossible to know everything. By asking for help you are giving yourself a learning opportunity, and also giving other people the opportunity to demonstrate their knowledge and skills in a public place.

These days, giving away your knowledge is one of the best ways of ensuring your place in the network (and hopefully your future in the organisation!)

Note

This article started off being all my own work, but, on finding Andrew McAfee's Harvard Business Review article, it turns out that I'm using many of his ideas! So, if you want more on this, go to the source: http://blogs.hbr.org/hbr/mcafee/2010/09/dos-and-donts-for-your-works-s.html

You'd think, given the immense problems seen with capitalism over the past few years, that more people would be up in arms about how our corporate institutions deal with people.

I won't pretend to understand very much about how capitalism works, or even much about economics. But I am interested in the beliefs that underpin how our society works, and the effects on society when those beliefs are allowed to work through to their full extent.

Charles Handy's conversation session about the Future of Capitalism opened up a few points that left me thinking..., particularly as I'm now in the market for a private pension.

I'm starting to realise that all the options available for investment in a pension are based on market-values; whether it's the current price of the Euro, of gold, or of the price of the shares in a particular company.

When you "invest" in these, you're not actually making an investment in the thing itself. This particularly applies to company shares. The money invested in them doesn't go to the company to enable it to grow (except in the case of the initial offer of shares). Instead, you're just making a statement of confidence in the thing you're investing in.

Pension funds (one of the main drivers of capitalist thinking and behaviours), through their share ownership, gain a role in the governance of companies, but none of the money invested in the pension actually goes to the company itself.

There must be some benefits to this disconnect, but I'm not sure I understand them yet.

It does seem that the whole pensions market is just a bit of a gamble, all based on how people "feel" about the market, rather than about genuine economic growth.

It would be so much better, in my opinion, if I could invest my pension in schemes or programmes where the money could be used to stimulate growth, to make real products, or generate real benefits for people. For example, personal-lending programmes like (Zopa and Funding Circle).

But that's against the pension rules. I think because the HMRC want some level of independent governance that prevents fraudulent tax avoidance. I'm all for that, but there must be a way to make real pension investments that aren't just dependent on the movements of a market value?

Any ideas?

It's been a long time since my last post (although it looks like I must do that more often, given the number of times it's been read!)

Life has been a little busy around here. Buying a house and changing jobs at the same time!

Yes, that's right... after nearly 12 years working for Capita, in various guises, I'm at last making the jump to something new...

Before I get onto what I'll be doing, I thought it would be useful to make a note of a few of the many things I've learnt over the last twelve years, since leaving the world of teaching.

1. Learning how to do my job is no-one's responsibility but mine. If I can't do the job, then it's up to me to find out how to improve.
2. My worldwide network of peers (some known, some unknown) is one of the best sources of knowledge available - especially when you're working in an area which has no in-house expertise.
3. A management culture that is based on trust and accountability works.
4. Online groups only work well when either a) everyone in the group is totally committed to it or b) there is a critical mass of people with enough in the core to keep feeding the group.
5. The usability of corporate IT systems will almost always fall behind consumer-grade systems because the people doing the buying are not the people using the systems.
6. An open approach to marketing software is a key driver towards greater usability - as the end-users can have more impact on the buying process.
7. My blog has become (to me) an increasingly valuable repository of information and thinking. Far more useful than the scrattly bits of paper that I make notes on...

And so, to the future...

I will be working within the Xyleme team, as a Customer Account Manager, helping their UK clients to get the most value from their Xyleme platform. It'll be exciting, as some of the time I'll be working with big name corporations. At other times I'll be back in the education world - helping large learning providers with lots of content to deploy.

Xyleme is one of the world's leading learning content management system suppliers, and at the forefront of enabling XML-based, single-source publishing, to multiple platforms, in multiple contexts.

I'll be delivering this contract from within my own learning technology consultancy company (Wyver Solutions Ltd). As work on this, and other contracts grows I'll be looking for associates to work with me. If that's you, please get in touch.

There's already one downside that I've noticed to the move... Speaking engagements, which conference organisers were quite happy to give me when I worked at Capita L&D (a supplier), have now, for some inexplicable reason, been withdrawn now that I'll be working for Xyleme. I'm still the same person, with the same ideas. For some reason, people seem to think that I'm now going to be in all-out sales mode... Not my style at all...

Some things will stay the same though. This blog is going to remain my main thinking space. And I'll still be around on Twitter et al - possibly even more so now.

Stay tuned for the next chapter...

A small crowd of teenagers were gathered in the quiet computer room on a Wednesday afternoon. They watched in astonishment as, on a small square monitor screen appeared a rapid succession of numbers - prime numbers - those numbers that can only be divided by one or itself. To work out such a large sequence manually would have taken hours of painstaking, boring work with a calculator.

"How did you do that?" they asked of the young man with the mass of curly light brown hair who was operating the computer. He explained his method, which involved visualising a vast quantity of "pots", one for each integer to be tested - up to 1000, 10 000, or as high as the computer had memory to store.

"Start with the small prime numbers, the ones that we know already, like 1, 2 and 3", he stated. "Miss out 1, but, starting with 2, put a marker in the pots that are multiples of 2. That's an easy set of calculations: 2x2, 2x3, 2x4 etc. Then do the same with 3: 3x2, 3x3, 3x4 etc.

"What's the next pot without a marker? Five. So that's a prime. So, do the same thing with that; put markers in 5x2, 5x3 etc. And the next one? Seven. Same again.

"You keep going until your halfway to your maximum number. After that there's no point, because any number that's left unmarked times 2 will be bigger than your maximum.

"At that point, all the pots that don't have markers will be prime numbers. So, it's just a case of running off a list of those numbers."

It was a simple concept, made possible by a combination of the speed of calculations on the computer and the imagination of the person writing the programme.

After the demonstration, the rest of the group dispersed to their respective computers; to try it out for themselves, to make their game of Snakes run just that little bit faster, or to debug the code they'd spent hours copying in from a magazine.

It was the early 1980's. Micro-computers were just finding their ways into schools, and most teachers (like now) did not have the time or the interest to understand them, or their potential.

We were left to our own devices and quickly discovered how to control these new machines; to model real and abstract situations from physics, and applied and pure maths, to create games, and to play them. Nothing was networked, or attached to sensors or motors. It was just you, your imagination, and the programme.

But we weren't on our own. Some of us grasped some concepts quicker than others, and then demonstrated and explained. Some bought magazines that introduced new ideas. Some went to shows and came back with stories of 16kB RAM packs and 1.2MB floppy disk drives...

As a group we learnt together, but independent of any formal curriculum, and with no support from anyone that you'd recognise as a teacher.

We learnt programming concepts, like loops and procedures. We learnt to be ultra-careful with syntax, to use error messages to help troubleshooting, and to write code together to catch problems quickly.

We learnt about operating systems, directories and files. We learnt that programming with variables meant we could change the way our code behaved by simply changing a handful of settings. We learnt the principles of using one chunk of code many times.

Time moves on, and nearly 30 years later, as I watch my son using Minecraft, I see him learning in the same way. No-one is teaching him, but through a combination of Youtube, the Minecraft wiki, discussing with friends, asking questions, and trial and error he is learning to:

• build virtual worlds with machines and habitats
• manipulate complex graphics files to change the look and feel of the worlds and their characters
• navigate the MacOS directory structure to find the locations for the various graphics files
• create and unpack zip archives
• pack and unpack .jar files to add in code modifications
• search for and find answers to problems in forum postings
• deal with mods that crash Minecraft
• manage a Minecraft server, with its security implications
• manage a Virtual Private Network (Hamachi) so he and his friends can work in the same world

In a similar way to the skills we gained on those Wednesday afternoons, my son and his peers are doing more than unwittingly teaching themselves computer science. They are developing wider thinking and problem-solving skills within a context of sharing, cooperation, peer feedback and self motivated challenges.

What can we learn as teaching and learning professionals from these two examples?

The key is to stop doing the learning for the student. According to Ewan McIntosh, we spend too much of our professional time trying to find ways to shortcut the learning process, which then simply short changes our learners. They become dependent on the professional, and gradually less capable of independent creative thought.

Instead, our job should be one that encourages learners to immerse themselves in the problems that surround them, helps them to synthesise the key information relevant to the challenges into connected ideas, facilitates ideation (the process of generating and collecting ideas), and provides tools and materials that will help them to prototype solutions.

The two videos below, both by Ewan McIntosh, discuss the situation we're currently in, and proposes a solution that is working now around the globe. The solution is called "Design Thinking", a process which encompasses the four components mentioned above: immersion, synthesis, ideation and prototyping.

Yes, it will probably take longer if we let learners spend their time immersing themselves in the problem and all its angles rather than spoon-feeding them the specific parts that the curriculum / training objectives dictate. But don't the benefits of developing self-sustaining, creative problem solvers outweigh that? (Perhaps not if you own a factory, or its modern day, data-processing centre equivalent... or am I simply being unnecessarily cynical?)

The theory

The practice

Tongue-in-cheek, but also true-to-life, animated video (some bad language!) showing the conversation between an organisation and their elearning specialist.

Via: Nick Shackleton-Jones' challenging post on the future of online learning, where he draws a parallel between elearning and the fax machine:

there will still be times when we need to use it, but the days when it seemed ubiquitous and something everyone needed to have are over. The demise of both have similar roots: overtaken by a flurry of smaller, more agile technologies.

It took me a while to understand Twitter. I spent a long time taking the view that it was an addictive waste of time and pretty useless for in-depth conversations.

I realise now that I hadn't grasped when Twitter should and shouldn't be used, and how to get the best out of it.

The following two lists are based on my experiences. I'd love to hear from others too.

Do

• Do treat Twitter like your work kitchen, water cooler or staff room. You wouldn't spend all day there, and you wouldn't expect to be aware of every conversation taking place while you weren't there.
• Do dip in every now and again. Have a quick look at what people are talking about.
• Do consider replying to someone if they have said something useful, interesting or stimulating. If there's nothing there of interest to you, then post about something that you've discovered, thought about or found infuriating. It might start a conversation.
• Do make sure your Twitter profile says something about who you are and what you might tweet about, so people know why they might follow you.
• Do follow people you find interesting. It's the equivalent of having people at work that you enjoy hanging out with in the staff room.
• Do add a picture of yourself to your profile. It gives your Tweets a human face. This is true even if you're Tweeting as part of work.
• Do take a break completely from Twitter for a few days. It'll do you good. Real conversations and thinking need more than 140 characters.

Don't

• Don't be afraid to dip out of a conversation. If someone wants to talk to you directly, they'll mention you in a post and you'll be able to reply later.
• Don't tell us everything that's happening in your life. It gets a little boring.
• Don't be afraid to unfollow people if what they are saying gets boring or irrelevant to you at the moment. It's not personal...
• Don't just post links to your company website. I'm sure you're more interesting than that.
• Don't try to read over every conversation that's happened in the past 24 hours. Just focus on the stuff happening now.
• Don't use Twitter to replace reading blogs, journals and newspapers regularly. It's where the deep thinking is taking place. You do have an RSS reader don't you?

Doing a quick comparison of modern SAAS applications such as Google Docs and Salesforce with your typical corporate, browser-based application reveals some key indicators about whether you may need to update:

• Does your application only work in one make of browser? How is that sustainable when the trend is towards people bringing their own devices?
• Does your application say it works best in a particular screen resolution? You're missing a trick if mobile access doesn't play a part in your application strategy.
• Does your application require ActiveX controls, or similar plugins, to work? Apart from making it browser dependant, this is a sign of out-of-date coding, when, with a modern browser, some JavaScript and CSS, there's little that can't be done. (The obvious exceptions are communication and desktop sharing tools which rely on the plugins to make best use of the available bandwidth and to interact with operating system elements outside of the browser.)
• Does your application force users to learn an interface that runs counter to accepted web conventions? Apart from being inefficient, this sends the message that we don't care about our users.

Do these sound familiar?

#handy2012

One of the sessions at the recent Charles Handy conference was on the topic of "the changing workplace and workforce".

There was nothing majorly new in the content of what was discussed, but it did bring to a head of few topics that I've been pondering on for a while.

Here's a taster of my notes from the session:

On work

The people inside organisations are the holders of the intellectual property (IP).

The organisations simply bribe those people to keep the IP inside the organisation.

Living as a "flea" (an independent contractor) is becoming more popular. In the US now, about 27% of the workforce are fleas.

Life as a flea is more uncertain, but who would really want to be employed?

But fleas need "elephants" (large organisations) who will employ them.

Employing organisations should think of their buildings more like club-houses, with different spaces for meeting, socialising and working. Perhaps something like the Institute of Directors building in Pall Mall

If you have a talent, nobody asks your age.

This is vitally important as state pensions, private pensions and savings become worth less.

Paid work in "retirement" is increasingly important.

"Sensible people reinvent themselves every 10 years."

We should consider a portfolio life, that contains different clients and different kinds of work (paid, gift, study and home) in order to maintain flexibility and to provide resilience in hard times. The balance between the kinds of work changes over time.

On education

Quoted Howard Gardner (who I came across years ago, but put in the same bucket as all the other learning style theories - ie. discredited). My thoughts: Looks like it might still be a useful framework - as long as we don't treat it as a means of labelling children.

Schools should exist to identify what a child is good at (from across all the different "intelligences").

But schools are constrained by exams and the curriculum.

The greatest gift you can give to a child is telling them what they're good at.

#handy2012

Thanks to my friends at Get Abstract, I got an invitation to attend yesterday's Conversation with Charles Handy conference.

This was my first experience of Charles Handy, although I'd been aware of his reputation as a "management guru" for a while. I do tend to be a bit wary of anyone known as a guru, but in this case I was very pleasantly surprised.

The first surprise was that 'conversation' really did mean conversation. I've been rattling on for a long time about events that are no more than presentations being a massive waste of time and money. Learning or behaviour change is far more likely to happen when people participate and engage. Conversations rather than presentations should be the order of the day.

And that's exactly what happened. In each of the four sessions, Charles spoke for a short time, giving some key points, and telling stories. Then he set us a question to consider on our tables. After a while, he opened up the conversation by inviting people to join him on the stage. There was always an empty, third chair on the stage, this allowing a new person to pick up the conversation.

It was a little like the fishbowl method I've previously discussed, but on a smaller scale.

And it felt really effective. As the day went on (and I missed the afternoon so I'm extrapolating a little here), people became more confident and prepared to contribute. By sharing their experiences, it gave the discussion a context, and a dose of reality.

I'll pick up the content of the two sessions I attended in a couple of follow-up posts on 'The future of capitalism' and 'The changing workplace and workforce'.