Below an outline of the presentation and links to all the sources I used.

Innovation

A short explanation about what an innovation manager does and how an innovation funnel works.

Scenarios

The scenario process is explained and the four scenarios that were create at the Online Educa workshop are presented.

Sources

• Learning Scenarios Website
• Scenario planning op Wikipedia

Quantified Self

The history of the quantifying yourself (and the scientist and artists experimenting with it) is shown. Consumer products show that it is now not only scientist and artist anymore.

Sources

• Quantified Self movement
• Vannevar Bush op Wikipedia
• As We May Think by Vannevar Bush
• Steve Mann
• Wearable Computing: A First Step Toward Personal Imaging, an article by Steve Mann
• Gordon Bell
• MyLifeBits
• Total Recall, a book
• Remember This?, an article in the New Yorker about Gordon Bell
• Facebook Timeline
• Feltron Report
• Een interview met Nicholas Felton
• Nog een interview met Felton
• Fitbit
• Wakoopa
• Counting every moment, an article in The Economist about the Quantified Self
• Laurie Frick, experiments in self tracking

Learning

An exploration about what the quantified self might mean for learning (in organisations).

Sources

• Artistotle by Danny Hillis
• Openness and the Future of Assessment by David Wiley

Risks

There are risks around measuring yourself.

Sources

• Delete, a book
• Why we must remember to delete – and forget – in the digital age, an article in the Guardian about Delete
• The Filter Bubble
• Invisible sieve, an artikel in The Economist about the Filter Bubble
• Big Brother Awards
• Bits of Freedom

Peter de Jager on Change

Peter de Jager talk was titled “Reducing Change to Seven Questions”.

According to de Jager everybody believes that “people resist change”. He then gave us many examples of how we all make big changes in our lives (getting married, bearing children, moving cities, changing jobs). Something like having kids is much bigger than implementing SAP. We embrace the former and we resist the latter. What is the fundamental difference between the one and the other? It is: choice. We don’t resist change, we resist being changed. We resist the most trivial thing if we don’t have control.

This means that the first question around change management will always be: “Why?”. The best thing to get people to accept change is to get them involved.

De Jager likes to reduce change to a set of seven questions:

1. Why? Why is it necessary to do this? Don’t just tell me “because”. Why-questions seem to be taboo in organisations currently. We need to change this mentality and make sure that a real dialogue
2. What’s in it for me? The problem with this is that it is not about you, because it is about the organisation. This is unfortunate because with any change it is top of mind of any employee. It requires some honesty from a corporation to address this question. If as a corporation you don’t know the answer, then at least communicate that.
3. What might go wrong? We fool ourselves if we downplay the risk of change: there is always the change that something might go wrong.
4. What will go wrong? There will be problems, guaranteed. Make sure you are prepared.
5. What are your solutions?
6. What will change?
7. What will stay the same?

Peter de Jager has all the marks of an incessant self-promoter (I do realize I am on that journey too, but do hope I won’t get where he is). He presented without slides and clearly had told this exact story many times before. Unfortunately he still managed to lose me during his seven questions story. I am not even sure I captured them all correctly to be honest.

Nigel Harrison on How to be a True Business Partner through Performance Consulting

Nigel Harrison helps people adopt a consulting approach where they ask their clients what the problems is before they jump to solutions (what he calls solutioneering).

In traditional problem analysis we very often jump to solutions. The majority of the problems in our organizations is from previous solutions. Training is often one of these premature solutions. Harrison mentioned the conspiracy of convenience where everybody knows that it doesn’t deliver business value but it is in the interest of the learner, the trainer and the manager to act like the training is great.

His process for problem analysis works like this. Start by asking a few questions:

• Who is involved in this problem?
• What is happening now? This is about the current state.
• What do we want to see? This is about the desired state.

If you do this you can start asking: What is the value to the business if we close this gap? (Don’t forget to ask: What is the cost of doing nothing?)

He has a very nice image of his seven step process for performance consulting (find some more downloads here):

7 Steps of Performance Consulting

This is a simple process, but it does need skillful application to be effective:

• Building trust and support
• Really get into your business goals outside of L&D
• Drawing a systemic model with your client
• Supportive challenge to quantify the problem
• Creativity to develop integrated solutions

Common difficulties with the approach are:

• Dealing with the pressure for solutioneering
• The positioning of L&D
• Own power and credibility

He closed his session by showing how easy it then is to connect learning investment to business value. If you can’t define the business value then Nigel suggest to stop spending the money on the learning intervention.

Yvonne Earley on Talent Management

Yvonne Earley talked about talent management one of the five strategic objectives from her employer Abbott. They have truly integrated talent into their business planning.

The three fundamental things about the program are:

• Visibility of talent across the functions and across the divisions is really key.
• How do we assess our talent and how accurate is our assessment?
• How do we differentiate our talent? Our top talent should be in our strategic business critical positions so that they can have high impact experiences.

Everybody has a talent profile which serves as an internal resume/CV. The manager makes the assessment decisions around career trajectory, their potential (consists of aspiration, ability and commitment), performance, potential next moves, etc. (Leadership) Potential and Performance are rated in a 9 box two dimensional grid:

9 Box Grid: Potential and Performance

Their onboarding process is as follows:

• Getting prepared (pre-hire)
• Getting started (30 days)
• Getting productive (60 days)
• Broadening perspective (90 days)
• Maintaining alignment (the first year)

Earley had an amazing amount of other slides with frameworks and diagrams. Abbott seems to be a very process heavy organisation!

You can download the presentation as a PDF or watch in on SlideShare:

I’ve used many sources to create the presentation. Here are all the relevant links in context.

In the past I have thought a bit about seredendipity and have written a few blogposts about the topic.

Bert De Coutere describes how Learning and Development is stuck in his blog post Learning got stuck in itself…. Steve Wheeler writes about the differences between upstairs (where the Learning Technologies conference was held) and downstairs (where the learning vendors could tout their wares) in his post titled Upstairs downstairs.

If you are interested to learn more about Omphaloskepsis, check out this Wikipedia article.

The following three companies (among many others) offer benchmarking in the learning space: Corporate University Exchange, BrandonHall and Bersin (their benchmarking data for 2011 is available here).

Youngme Moon has written a book titled Different in which she explains why products in a category all become alike. Harold Jarche reviews the book in a blog post titled Different – Review. In that review he refers to Tim Kastelle who lifts stwo diagrams out of Moon’s book in Be Great at One Thing. I remade the diagrams using the excellent Inkscape.

The Wikipedia page about the Cynefin Framework isn’t bad. Dave Snowden’s Harvard Business Review article about his framework and how it can help with leadership is titled Leader’s Framework for Decision Making (and maybe I should credit Mary E. Boone for once).

Automattic is an amazing company. They create and host the wordpress.com platform (more information). The Automattic creed is available on Matt Mullenweg’s website. Matt gets interviewed here. This map shows where all the “Automatticians” are located. Check out this page if you want to know more about Automattic or are interested in working for them.

If you want to know more about Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) you should start here and then quickly move on to what Stephen Downes writes in his piece What a MOOC Does. The MOOC example I decided to reference in the presentation is Digital Storytelling also known as DS106.

The term Edupunk was coined in Jim Groom’s post The Glass Bees and quickly got its own Wikipedia article. Stephen Downes tied together a few good posts about the topic here and this article on BlogHer could also be a good start.

The big open online courses that are now fashionable and are starting to get a commercial face (Coursera and Udacity) owe their debts to MOOCs and the Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU).

If you want to be kept up to date about learning technology “on the edge” then your best bet is likely to pay close attention to Audrey Watters’ blog Hack Education (not mentioned in my presentation).

Mozilla‘s mission page is here and it is worthwile reading their whole manifesto. Their Open Badges program is getting a lot of deserved attention and could always use more participants. You can read about all their learning plans on their Learning Wiki, this is also the place to go to if you want to get involved.

If you are interested in becoming more entrepreneurial and innovative, regardless of whether you have your own business or are working in a company/organisation, you can’t do better than read The Lean Startup.

1. To what extent to you believe soft skills can be trained online?
“Believe” is probably the right verb for this question. Learning technology is still too often driven by opinions. Having said so, I definitely believe in it. First: a lot of soft skills have become online skills: how you behave in an online community, how you share knowledge through microblogging, or how you can be a good team member in an international virtual team. Additionally, it’s perfectly possible to practice all sorts of soft skills online. I see a natural increase of the “fidelity” of the practice process: from practicing in simple webchats, to practice in teleconferences, to practice with webcams or maybe even telepresence spaces. Finally, I think good design enables training of all sorts of skills.

2. What developments in the field of online training of soft skills do you find most promising? Can you name an example?
The biggest “opportunity space” is gaming. Recently I have been investigating two examples of games that try to train soft skills online:

• X-Team is a 3D game in which you have to visit as many pagodes as possible, before getting to the finish line in time. These pagodes are at islands that can only be reached through bridges. Each bridge can only be crossed a limited number of times (you are with 12, but only 6 people can cross the bridge, wat do you do?). Everything is measured, making it easy to guide a teambuilding process through facilitation and adjusting the game’s parameters.
• Code 4 from Hubbub and Demovides is a game that is played in runs of three weeks. This video explains the game (Dutch):

3. What do you think is the biggest challenge in training soft skills online?
Practice is key in developing skills, so that’s the biggest challenge: How do you get people to do what they find really difficult? How do you get them beyond their fear of trying new behavior? Well developed games might just be the solution to this.

4. In the evolution of learning, are there things you hope/desire and/or you’re afraid of? Alan Kay has a famous definition of technology: “Technology is everything that didn’t exist when you were born”. His pal Danny Hillis has an even better definition: “Technology is everything that doesn’t work yet”. We no longer call an elevator, technology. So I’m looking forward to seeing things we still call technology, actually work. For a nice example of how that could look like for smartphones with apps, read this (under “Why Mobile Apps Must Die”).

Being afraid is not something that fits in with how I look at life. I think we, as people, will always figure out our relationship with technology. But if I have to name something, I worry about the integrity of the Internet with the web as a platform for innovation on top of it. The five ”stacks” (as Bruce Sterling calls them): Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft and Facebook are all working hard to build closed ecosystems. We are going to suffer from this in the coming years and it will probably really have to hurt before these silos will be opened up.

5. What weblogs, people or organisations inspire you?
The person I learn a lot from is Stephen Downes. He writes a daily newsletter about this things he, as a philosopher, technologist and education theorist, finds interesting. His newsletter is published under a Creative Commons license and you can freely subscribe. Additionally, I keep a close eye on George Siemens and the Internet Time Alliance and I try to make time to read Audrey Watters: a learning technology journalist with a punk attitude. I keep on top of internet technology in general by listening to Guardian Tech Weekly and the shows of Leo Laporte (especially This Week in Tech). Thinkers such as Clay Shirky, Yochai Benkler, Lawrence Lessig and Douglas Rushkoff guide me.

One of my personal heroes is Martin Dougiamas, inventor of Moodle. It’s his natural leadership and personal character that have made Moodle as succesful as it is today, making even a giant such as Blackboard take notice.

Other organisations that inspire me are those that democratize education and technology in a non-commercial way. Think of Mozilla architects of the open internet (they also have a learning outfit and work hard at an Open Badges infrastructure), or the Peer 2 Peer University, Tactical Technology Collective and Ushahidi. It is no coincidence that all these projects are open-source. I believe in the value of open-source a lot, from a practical and a moral standpoint.

Deze presentatie legt in vijf delen uit waarom de trend om jezelf te meten (quantified self) grote gevolgen gaat hebben voor hoe wij in de toekomst gaan leren (je kunt de presentatie ook als PDF downloaden en dan werken de overlay quotes bij de foto’s wel):

Innovatie

Een korte uitleg over wat een innovatie manager doet en over de innovatie funnel.

Scenario’s

Het scenario proces wordt uitgelegd en de vier scenarios die uit een workshop op de Online Educa zijn gekomen worden toegelicht.

Bronnen

• Learning Scenarios Website
• Scenario planning op Wikipedia

Quantified Self

De geschiedenis van de trend om jezelf te meten wordt uit de doeken gedaan. Met consumentenvoorbeelden is te zien dat het niet meer alleen voor wetenschappers en artiesten is weggelegd.

Bronnen

• Quantified Self movement
• Vannevar Bush op Wikipedia
• As We May Think door Vannevar Bush
• Steve Mann
• Wearable Computing: A First Step Toward Personal Imaging, een artikel van Steve Mann
• Gordon Bell
• MyLifeBits
• Total Recall, een boek
• Remember This?, een artikel in de New Yorker over Gordon Bell
• Facebook Timeline
• Feltron Report
• Een interview met Nicholas Felton
• Nog een interview met Felton
• Fitbit
• Wakoopa
• Counting every moment, een artikel in The Economist over the Quantified Self
• Laurie Frick, experiments in self tracking

Leren

Een verkenning van wat de Quantified Self trend kan betekenen voor leren (in organisaties).

Bronnen

• Artistotle door Danny Hillis
• Openness and the Future of Assessment door David Wiley

Risico’s

Er kleven ook risico’s aan jezelf meten.

Bronnen

• Delete, een boek
• Why we must remember to delete – and forget – in the digital age, een artikel in de Guardian over Delete
• The Filter Bubble
• Invisible sieve, een artikel in The Economist over the Filter Bubble
• Big Brother Awards
• Bits of Freedom

Presentatie

De volledige presentatie kan hier als PDF gedownload worden.

Ikea’s Human Resources department actively uses these videos to share how their culture lives and it can be really be a tool that engages people with the company. Storytelling is all about gaining trust. Authenticity is important. This means there is a big difference between a message coming from high above or a message coming from “the workfloor”. I personally find these type of stories (consciously not using a big Ikea logo in the back) of which they have more than a thousand(!) incredibly valuable. According to Shelton they are also timeless.

She then shared the example of the “home furnishing introduction”. This was an assignment where she, as a learning person, had to help the home furnishing manager with some of her goals around how people should be engaged with home furnishing. She created a story about a guy who is a bit in mess and who starts reflecting on himself through his own home. She played us the first episode. The film was made with as little spoken language as possible as it had to be translated into 28 languages. The video is then used in a two-hour lightly facilitated workshop.

If you want to have maximum impact with your story (on learning), then it is very important to have discussions after watching the film, usually by asking questions about the video.

One more thing I learned from this session is that there is a circular Ikea store built in 1965 Stockholm inspired by New York’s Guggenheim, interesting!

Ikea Store inspired by Guggenheim

His students at the university do everything (and he means everything) using blogs and Twitter. He stopped giving lectures and instead works with students in a single place a few times a week. This makes it very hard for him to follow what is going on. The number of posts that are generated in his courses are too many for him to read them all. If you are facilitating a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) this gets worse. This is why we do learning analytics. This has a lot of attention now with a conference and a Society for Learning Analytics Research

Nike+ Fuelband

Next he mentions the quantified self movement: self-knowledge to self-tracking. If a tool gives you a good mirror about your behaviour, then this might make it easier to actually change your behaviour. He showed many examples from the consumer market (i.e. Nike+ Fuelband or the Fitbit. He is trying to see if you could develop similar applications for learning. Imagine setting a goal for how many words you want to learn every day and a device that shows you how many you’ve learned for the day. He wants to create awareness in the student, so that they can “drive” themselves better. This is different from the current efforts in learning analytics where they are mostly used to give more information to the institution (Duval doesn’t like that). He showed us an example of the dashboard that he uses to see the student’s activity on the blogs and on Twitter. The students have access to this information too and can see that data for their peers: openness and full transparency. This measuring leads to externalities that aren’t necessarily good (think students writing tweetbots to get good score). Duval depends on the self-regulating abilities of the group of students.

At the beginning of each course he tells his student that everything will be open in the course. He might have a debate about this, but he never gives in. He doesn’t think you can become an engineer without having the ability to engage openly with the society. If a student has very conscionable objections around privatey, then he sometimes allows them to publish under an alias.

If you collect a lot of data about people, then you can make technology enhanced learning more of an exact (i.e. hard) science. He wrote a paper titled: Dataset-driven Research for Improving Recommender Systems for Learning.

This whole field has a couple of issues:

• What can we measure? Time, time spent artefact produced, socal interactions, location. Many other things might be important.
• Privacy might become an issue: we will know so many things about everybody. One solution might be Attention Trust which defines four consumer rights for your (attention) data: property, mobility, economy and transparency. Our idea about privacy is changing, he referred to Public Parts by Jeff Jarvis.
• When does support become enslaving (see this blogpost)

His solution for the problems (once again): openness.

Duval’s talk had a lot of similarities with the talk I will be delivering tomorrow. Luckily we both come from slightly different angles and don’t share all our examples. If you attended his talk and didn’t enjoy his, then you can skip mine! If you loved it, come and get more tomorrow morning.

Theo Rinsema, General Manager Microsoft Netherlands

Rinsema talked about new ways of working (“het nieuwe werken”), a concept that in the Netherlands has been appropriated by Microsoft. His first point was that current times have accelerated the amount of change and that this means that we will have to learn contineously. Learning and change are very much related. The causes for this speed of change can be found in a couple of trends that drive change in the virtual world: cloud computing, data explosion, social computing, apps, natural interfaces, connections, computing ecosystems and mobile workplaces. Cloud computing, for example, lowers the barrier of entry in a market. This create more competition and this accelerates development.

Microsoft in the Netherlands went through a change process (1100 people work for Microsoft in the Netherlands). The focused on productivity (can we really become more productive every year or are we just working more hours?), talent (how can we attract more women to our mostly male organization?) and the boundaries between work life and private life (how do we solve the puzzle where our offices are only utilised 24% of the time, people like the flexibility, but don’t like their private/work mix). They were on a multi-year journey where they one of the key elements was creating trust between employees and about creating real conversations between staff (I wonder whether he has read the Cluetrain Manifesto).

They created a few things:

• “Ruimte voor groei-dagen”: an event where the whole organizations get together and works on personal growth.
• “Raad van Anders”: they have about 50.000 visitors a year coming to check out their offices to see how they are working. Rinsema thought that Microsoft was starting to believe too much in themselves. They instituted a “board of others”, inviting non-Microsoft people (young people, government workers, women, disabled people) to come into their offices, have open doors everywhere and then get feedback on what Microsoft does (with the press present). This enables Microsoft to “see with different eyes” (Proust would have said: “see with new eyes”).
• “Silverlight Society a.k.a. project Crowley”: an alternate reality game in which Microsoft staff thought they were in a pilot from Microsoft research about collaborating in a virtual world. Members of this elite group of beta-tester had to solve more and more complex problems day by day forcing them to collaborate with each other and use social networks. 290 people participated.

I appreciated Rinsema’s talk for sounding authentic and for not mentioning SharePoint as an enabler for these new ways of working. This means he is smarter than 95% of the collaboration consultants in this space.

Erwin Blom on the Social Media Revolution

Erwin Blom from Fast Moving Targetsis a journalist who got addicted to the Internet in 1994 when he was working for Dutch media outfit VPRO. He produced a music program for the radio and found out that he suddenly wasn’t the expert anymore, his community of listeners knew more than him. He later became heaf of new media for the VPRO and now works for himself looking at how the net changes many aspects of society.

He showed Draw Something as an example of where people learn very naturally: his children play the game to learn English and learn how to visualize. It is incredible how quickly that game grew and for how much the creators were bought by Zynga. Another example of using game-based things is Codecademy. Another example is Foodzy. It teaches you about your own behaviours around food and teaches you a lot about food. Blom considers YouTube the largest collection of lessons in the world. In general these things work for one person, but they work even better if there are multiple people doing the same thing.

With social media everybody now is a publisher. We have endless means to tell each other stories. We underutilize the potential of storytelling (an important skill). We are now all connected and can ask each other questions and can have good conversations with people that were out of our reach (in many dimensions) before. Knowledge is now available everywhere, we need to learn how to find and select the information. Network building skills and “personal branding” skills are important for future proofing. You have to be present on this platforms and create narratives about yourselves.

He showed a nice example of what his daughter learns from her blog. She is learning about how to tell a story, about how to write headlines, about dealing with commentary about and she learns discipline (blogging twice a week). His son writes at Game Testers United and learns similar lessons. Blom asks himself why this isn’t a part of their school education. Can’t we make schools media production companies?

The Tulser offices

Tulser organised a masterclass with Etienne Wenger-Trayner at their fabulous Maastricht offices. The title (in Dutch) was “Slimmer werken in (online) communities” (“Working smarter in (online) communities”).

Learning How To Work Smarter

Jos Arets, Vivian Heijnen and Joost Robben kicked off the day. Their analysis of the issues around learning and development wasn’t groundbreaking, but is is interesting to see a company who have made this criticism a core part of their value proposition toward companies (they gave us a book titled: Preferably no Training).

According to them there is a lot of pressure on HR in general and the learning and development organization in particular. The shift from an industrial economy to a knowledge economy has profound consequences. The “Internet Storm” has only just started. It is starting to become a commodity and will the basis for completely different business models. If you see how the Internet has changed the music business, the newspaper business, the book business you can imagine how this will affect the learning organization. In most large organizations this shift has not yet happened in learning, they still work according to the old industrial paradigm: knowledge from books → in trainers heads → in participants heads → right or wrong knowledge at the workplace level → only 20-25% workers of the organization. A fast historical narrative would go something like this: Trainers delivered training, participants started to hate training so we develop e-learning instead and now participants hate e-learning too.

What are the problems in Learning and Development?

• Alignment: HRD sits outside the business
• Distribution (just in time, scalable, etc.)
• Wrong solutions for 80% of the performance problems
• Focus on formal learning
• Business models don’t really exist
• (Business) Metrics

Tulser’s solution to these problems is to change the focus from training towards performance. Most problems on the workplace are not caused by a gap in the knowledge of the people working in that workplace. They also advocate a shift away from competences towards a focus on tasks. They want to move away from e-learning toward micro-learning and performance support and from courses to resources and finally from classroom learning towards social and personalized learning.

Their final conclusion: “adapt or die”.

Social Learning Strategies

Etienne Wenger-Trayner

Wenger-Trayner, writer of the infamous Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity, opened his talk by talking about his recent marriage and about finding a companion. His talk will be very much analogous to that story, you should try to find learning companionship. A good companion can make you a bigger “me” and that is really meaningful. In learning you might be able to find this in communities. The ability to have the experience of meaningful engagement is where we will be able to find informal learning.

Great quote from Einstein: “The positive development of a society in the absence of creative, independently thinking, critical individuals is as inconceivable as the development of an individual in the absence of the stimulus of the community”

A community of practice is a self-governed learning partnership among people who:

• share challenges, passion or interest
• interact regularly
• learn from and with each other
• improve their ability to do what they care about
• define in practice what competence means in their context (he gave a great example where it was actually impossible to do the job according to how the people were trained, they had to find out their own methodologies)

In gangs they learn how to survice on the streets, in organizations they provide better service to clients.

Communities of practice is not a technique invented by a consultancy. It is a natural human technique.

In the industrial mode of production, the source of value creation is in the design, the formal is driving the informal and you leave your identity at the door. As we shift, we will see that formal will start to support the informal. The source of value creation is knowledge companies are conversations (compare the Cluetrain Manifesto). In a knowledge economy the distinction between soft and hard skills are not so clear anymore.

Next he started answering questions from the audience:

• Is technology important? Yes, it can make a difference but it barely ever is the driver and it is not necessary for succes. You should think about the community first and the technology second.
• In an organizations do you need to seed the community and be active to get it started? Good communities usually have people “occupying the space” and mature communities are actually full of leadership. And there is a difference between leadership and facilitation. The best leaders are “social artists” that have true ability to create a space where people can engage and also manage to avoid group think.

How to Implement Social Learning and Value Creation

One thing you can try to do is “Horizontalization”, the negotiation of mutual relevance (as an alternative to the Provider-Recipient relationship). The best way to understand the notion of a community of practice is to imagine a social discipline of learning. He has created a little framework with the key processes for this discipline (bring practice in, push practice forward, create self-representation and reflect and selfdesign):

A Social Discipline of Learning

Practitioners need a community to:

• help each other solve problems (this is a very fundamental reason to participate, much better than the usual knowledge sharing imperative)
• hear each other’s stories and avoid local blindness
• reflect on their practice and improve it
• build shared understanding
• keep up with change
• cooperate on innovation
• find synergy across structures
• find a voice and gain strategic influence

One question he often gets is why you should share knowledge if knowledge = power. Wenger-Trayner agrees that knowledge = power, but that doesn’t mean you have to keep it yourself if there is a platform for building a reputation (reflection from Hans: this is where Yammer currently is lacking a little bit).

He showed the following slide nearly as a teaser (apologies, it is hard to read, the top right says: 1. exchanges, 2. productive inquiries, 3. building shared understanding, 4. producing assets, 5. creating standards, 6. formal access to knowledge, 7. visits):

A Typology of Learning Activities

This is an extremely rich picture that shows the broad range of possibilities for informal learning.

Social learning can also be a strategy with communities of practice as the steward of strategic capabilities towards performance. The circle is as follows: Strategy → Domains → Communities → Practices → Performance → Learning → Sharing → Stewardship → Strategy. If you don’t do this, then you are not doing knowledge management. This makes social learning a strategic responsibility and consists of managing a portfolio of domains on a continuum of formality.

What is the difference between a network and a community? There are not two different things, instead they are different aspects of the learning fabric of an organization (i.e. characteristics of a social system).

One thing to follow up is to look at the Value-creation assessment framework.

Entrepreneurs jumping on VCs

Mitch Kapor (Kapor Capital), Philip Bronner and Robert Hutter, moderated by Betsy Corcoran started by framing the problem with current education. Each of the speakers showed shocking graphs of educational attainment, inequity and the job market.

Philip Bronner immediately lost my intellectual respect when he started talking about how Novak Biddle invested in Blackboard around 15 years ago turning Blackboard into the de facto operating system of education. I do hope that this isn’t true. If it is, then I would consider that an affirmation of the problems, rather than part of the solution. Bronner then went on to define education as consisting of three pieces: content, somebody who teaches you the content and a way to certify that you know the content. Education as content: pretty shocking.

Hutter talked about data (Kapor would call them “anecdotes”) about programs that make good use of digital tools getting objective better results. It is Hutters goal to help scale up this programs and the last three years two things have happened that will have a big impact in this: campus wifi is everywhere now and batteries have made a humongous leap forward.

This whole panel is a complete mystery to me (to not call it surreal). Discussing education as if it is a market just sound plain wrong. I believe that the one thing that should have been discussed is the question of the actual purpose of education and who is responsible for providing it. I would suspect that each of the panelists would give a very different answer to that question and that I would have a fourth answer. They seemed to be discussing the wrong leverage points (Kapor started addressing it when he talked about how affluent the US has become and that technolology is necessary but not sufficient to solve the problems). I would have loved to hear what the panelists would say and think about this New York Times piece on education in Finland.

The work of the future will be atomized, with many workers doing pieces of what is today a single job. The hyperspecialization of workers may be inevitable given the quality, speed and cost advantages it offers- and the power it gives individuals to devote flexible hours to tasks of their choice. Just like craft workers of the past, knowledge workers, or hyperspecialists, will engage in peripheral activities that could be done better or more cheaply by others. Using real world business examples the panel will explore directed innovation through hyperspecialization.

The discussion was based on an Harvard Business Review article titled: The Age of Hyperspecialization. From the summary:

Just as people in the early days of industrialization saw single jobs (such as a pin maker’s) transformed into many jobs (Adam Smith observed 18 separate steps in a pin factory), we will now see knowledge-worker jobs — salesperson, secretary, engineer — atomize into complex networks of people all over the world performing highly specialized tasks. Even job titles of recent vintage will soon strike us as quaint. “Software developer,” for example, already obscures the reality that often in a software project, different specialists are responsible for design, coding, and testing.

Or check out this video by Thomas Malone from MIT:

The beginning of the hour was mostly dedicated to the methodology that Topcoder uses to do software projects. They use many true specialists (that compete against each other on getting jobs for these projects) and then a generalist (or co-pilot) whose task it is to pull everything together. One problem with this model was addressed by my colleague Ronald In’t Velt: people might lose passion for their job (and thus engagement) when they have too narrow of a focus in their specialty. According to Christina some people actually enjoy digging down in their specialization, whereas other still manage to reach outside their scope, just because they are interested.

One question that I was asking myself is how you prove your (or someone’s) competency in a very specialized field. Topcoders solution to this is to focus on outcomes rather than on the skills. If people have shown that they can create things that the user likes or fulfil a need, than that is a good predictor for the next project. For me this does not solve the inherent paradox in this. We need hyperspecialized people because our needs have hyperspecialized too. There is therefore a big chance that you are embarking on a project for which there are no previous outcomes. I am not sure that either of the presenters have really thought hard about this issue. If they don’t see it as a problem, then they are likely working with specialists, rather than hyperspecialists.

Philipp Schmidt (CC-license by Joi Ito)

Philipp Schmidt from the Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU) talked about big online learning communities. P2PU is non-profit organization that runs an open source platform that you can use to run courses. Their starting point (and that of their community) is not the institution. Their three values are: peer learning, community and open. Here are my quick notes on his talk.

There is a wave of Massive Online Courses that has captured the imagination of academics. Philipp considers things like WordPress and Wikipedia the starting point for collaborating at scale. Another thing that is at the roots of this movement is the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC). Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig from Stanford have shown us that it is possible not only to scale content, but also scale assignments and assessments. More than 100.000 people registered for the course and around 25.000 students actually finished this very hard course. Thrun has now left Stanford and has started the for-profit Udacity in which he is trying to help companies with finding good computer programmers by selling the performance data of students in their courses. Other people from Stanford have started Coursera. Another example is MITx which will offer a portfolio of MIT course for free for virtual communities around the world.

This part of the MOOC universe has received a lot of attention, but there is a parallel reality of people who have been experimenting with this for a long time. Jonathan Worth, for example, teaches photography. Jim Groom is the poster boy for Edupunk. He runs a course called Digital Storytelling 106. At Virginia Tech they are running a course titled The Plaid Avenger. Nearly all these courses use open source and free tools that they open to the world. They invite people in and manage to attract great speakers because of the amount of students they manage to sign up for these courses. There is likely a much larger community than we can expect.

So what does this all mean? Thrun has said that he cannot go back to Stanford again to teach a normal course. Lots of people online are denouncing the university because of the alternative to them that these massive open courses show. Philipp is interested in thinking about how you would scale online courses in a way that doesn’t stink. P2PU has done some experiments in their School of Webcraft with self-paced and self-directed problem-based (“challenges”) courses. There are a few areas to consider:

• Open content
• Allocation of expertise
• Assessment
• Recognition/Certification
• Community

I will definitely continue the conversation with him on each of these topics.

1. What will be the most exciting (professional) thing you are planning to do in 2012?**

From April 1st my role in the company I work for will slightly shift: instead of solely focusing on learning-related technology the scope of my innovation work will be enlarged to encompass all HR related technologies. This will include renumeration and benefits, talent, recruitment, health and more. It will be a challenge to try and replicate the innovation methodology that I used in learning inside these other domains. I very much look forward to engrossing myself in completely new problems with completely new solutions.

Another exciting thing is the work I am doing inside the Gamechanger team. Gamechanger is a very successful organization and is on a journey to see how the recently emerged hyper-connectedness of this world could influence the way it works. There will be more public information about that project on gc30.com very soon.

In 2011 I have given a lot of attention to serious games for learning and I am hoping to make a next step with that in 2012 by trying out a safety-related 3D immersive game in the field and measure its impact.

Finally, this year I have been given the opportunity to visit a big set of very stimulating gatherings. I will be present (and occasionally present) at Emerge 2012 (Phoenix, US), SxSW Edu (Austin, US), SxSW Interactive (Austin, US), e-Learning Event 2012 (Den Bosch, NL), ICBE Conferenc (Dublin, IE) and Masie’s Learning 2012 (Orlando, US).

2. Which corporate learning trend will “break through” this year?

Here are two predictions and one thing that is imminent to happen, but will likely not make it for 2012.

• 2012 will mark the start of a slow but sure shift away from courses towards resources and networks. This means that learning organizations will have to start creating new business models for themselves as the way that their value proposition, benefits and costs align is going out of whack. If your budgetary unit is a course, if you separate design from development from delivery, if your recovery model is based on course fees, how can you ever move into more of a performance support or community management role?
• Even though there is a crisis all around us, we will see a revival of classroom and face-to-face training. It will be driven by people who are getting tired of the hyperconnected world and are trying to create “reflective retreats” away from the daily business pressures. Yes, I understand this is contrary to the point above, but we are not looking at a homogenous world!.
• “Social Contextualization of Content” is a trend that will become ever more noticable in the consumer space (“How do I know whether to buy something if don’t know what my network thinks about it?”). At some point smart companies will start stepping into the opportunity space for this type of technology in the enterprise market. They do this by delivering two things: a flexible way to capture and represent the social graph of employees (preferably one that also works from an outside-in perspective), and a platform for capturing, managing and displaying meta information about all available content (because everything is starting to become URL addressable it will likely be the browser that is the point where this technology meets the end-user). I would like to develop this argument a bit further in some of my speeches this year. Get in touch if you want to help push my thinking forward.

3. Which company (other than your own) is doing interesting things in the learning space?

I could have named others, but I would like to name three (unlikely) companies here:

• Mozilla, creators of the Firefox browser and shepherds of an open and free Internet are becoming more and more active in the education space. Initially driven by their mission to skill up people on all things Internet and (web)development, they are slowly increasing their scope and reach and are even proposing an alternative architecture for certifications: open badges. Not only is what they do remarkable, the way (or how) they do it is inspirational too. Imagine working for a company in which everything that you do would default to open. Mozilla applies this to their source code, but also for example to their meetings. When they come together to talk about learning, the telcon details, the agenda, the ability to join the conversation and the minutes are all openly available. Refreshing right?
• StackExchange is step by step creating the ultimately way to do Question and Answer sites for one particular set of questions: the ones that could actually have a perfect answer. Their platform is contineously improving and makes use of the latest understanding of how we tick (gamification anyone?) to entice people to keep coming back, ask more questions and give more answers. If you haven’t used it already I’d urge you to go to a community that interests you and try it out. It is a real shame that they have stopped delivering te technology in a “white label” fashion, but I do appreciate their somewhat noble reasons (they only want to have successful communities).
• XTeam Training is based in Israel. They are one of the many companies who have jumped on the Unity 3D bandwagon to start delivering games with a purpose that is external to the game. They are the first however that I have seen to productize their game (rather than offering their services for bespoke development to solve particular problems). Their team development/assessment game is rooted in practical experience working with teams in outdoor sports and they have come up with a few clever concepts that make sure that the people playing the multiplayer game learn certain lessons about their behaviour and the behaviour of others.

Mission Island from XTeam Training

Finally I want mention (again) the person who has given me the most insight in the last few months and somebody who I believe isn’t appreciated enough in our community of practice: Stephen Downes. If you haven’t signed up for his newsletter yet, then please do it here. Try reading it every day for at least a week. If you aren’t intellectually tickled by this particular blend of learning- (actually “living”-)related mix of philosophy and technology with free sharp commentary, then I’d rather not sit next to you at our next dinner party (and you would probably not enjoy sitting next to me either).

4. What was the best book you have read in 2011?

I read in public (although my friends at Bits of Freedom are probably right when they tell me that out of principle one should not give over your reading habits to some foreign company. To see the books I have read that I have rated with five stars, go here

One more thing

Let me finish by asking you a question: Which four questions would you like to ask learning professionals when you meet them?

This video provides a short introduction into the work that was done there (a thank you to Fusion Universal for producing the video, a transcript is available here):

If this triggers you, then do read more about the old boy network, the in-crowd, big data and the quantified self on the learningscenarios.org website and follow the Twitter account to stay up to date.

These are only the first steps, we need people to start bringing the scenarios to life, so help us if you are interested.

1. What will be the most exciting (professional) thing you are planning to do in 2012?
2. Which corporate learning trend will “break through” this year?
3. Which company (other than your own) is doing interesting things in the learning space?
4. What was the best book you have read in 2011?

So here goes, in the same order as during the day:

Steve Dineen

Steve is the Chief Executive at Fusion Universal. We mainly talked about Fuse their video-centric social platform. In the next few weeks they will swap out the current video player and will replace it with one that makes it easier to display subtitles and transcripts, will do bandwidth detection and will allow for much better reporting on how the video has been viewed. They will also roll out adaptive testing with adaptive learning journeys. See here for example:

His answers to my four questions were as follows:

1. The implementation of pull learning, seeing learning as a journey rather than a process and then the provision of the environment to let personal learning happen (as a platform and an environment). Another exciting thing is the Virtual School, they should be going live with a full secondary school curriculum by September.
2. People will start to understand that not all learning needs to be centered around a course. This is a big paradigm shift for which we are now seeing the pioneers emerging.
3. Fusion is not necessarily taking inspiration from the learning technology community. Instead, they are taking inspiration from YouTube. It is incredible to see what they have done to their platform. On design matters they take inspiration from Apple.
4. The four books he enjoyed in the last few months were The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs and Presentation Zen, Good to Great and The Innovators Dilemma.

Barry Sampson

Barry is one of the three partners in Onlignment, a learning consultancy with broad capability. He is also responsible for changing my life by properly introducing me to Markdown, the greatest thing since sliced bread for people who have to do a lot of writing of any kind. They have put a lot of effort into truly blending their own offerings. Rather than just teach a course on learning design for a few days they now design a journey towards independence. For one client they do a workshop first and then one-on-one coaching sessions (virtual and face to face). The end result will include e-learning content created by the participants themselves and guided by Onlignment.

Onlignment's Circles

His answers to my four questions were as follows:

1. Making the circles live. The circles make it very clear what Onlignment is offering and from now on we will only do work on things that fit with these circles.
2. What we will see is a lot of mobile learning done badly (“everyone will screw up mobile this year”). Everybody will deliver e-learning content on mobile technology. It is usually crap on a PC and will be worse on mobile. He has also seen more Moodle vendors than ever before at this exhibit, so Moodle seems to be breaking through too.
3. Two companies that are doing interesting things are Aardpress and Coloni. The former has a Software as a Service (SaaS) version of Moodle and the latter has a great licencing model: you pay on the basis of the space you take on their servers (their roots are a website development company) and they are very actively engaged with their clients.
4. The only book that Barry has read in the last year is a book about becoming a dad.

Lawrence O’Connor

Lawrence was the only person who was excused from my four questions. Instead we had a discussion around topics like mindmapping, authenticity, tools for conviviality (and the speed of transportation), theatre and doing what you love. We spotted Jaron Lanier who has written the thought provoking You are Not a Gadget, but were too late to invite him over to join our lunch.

Amir Elion

Amir works for Kineo Israel an e-learning development company and has written 100 Presentation Ideas which is now also available as an iPhone app. I have had many virtual meetings with Amir over the last two years (he participated in the Learning in 3D reading group for example, but this was the first time we got together in real life.

His answers to my four questions were as follows:

1. The first thing that he is looking forward to is to try and see if mobile learning can be made into something real. It has a lot of potential and is a new way of supporting performance. There are still many questions around it that need to be answered. There is a lot of technical work to do, but more importantly the learning models and the performance support models will need to be rebuild. Kineo is doing pilots with a few clients. The second thing he is excited about is advancing blending learning through using a learning typology. He has started drawing a table explaining which type of solutions solve particular challenges.
2. He hopes the break-through trend will be the open source Learning Management System (LMS) and would prefer that to be Totara. In Israel that is very likely to happen. Many companies there do not have an easy way to track learning now and the fear for open source has subsided. Companies now actually see the advantages of open source: flexibility, lower costs and supplier independence (“there is always another Totara partner”).
3. The companies that are creating the development tools are really moving forward quickly. Articulate Storyline is exciting in how it really supports non-linear learning and now can also work in Hebrew and other right-to-left language. The latest version of Adobe Captivate is also good. These companies really work with the e-learning development companies to incorporate e-learning best practices into their tools. Other than that it is mostly individuals that he learns from. Donald Clark, Cathy Moore with her Action Mapping, Cammy Bean (from Kineo US) or David Kelley.
4. The book he liked was Drive. The concepts of autonomy, mastery and purpose can directly be applied in corporate learning.

Kineo has a tradition of producing very useful promotional booklets. They gave me a copy of the very sensible Designing Mobile Learning (available on the Free Thinking area of their website) . It has ten tips on designing mobile learning:

1. Always ask “Why make this mobile?”
2. Use those off the shelf information and communication apps NOW
3. Bring the informal into the blend
4. Make sure it’s more than e-learning on a tablet
5. Make it tactile
6. You’re in their personal space; you’d better make it worth their while
7. Make the limited space count
8. Consider developing templates for efficient design
9. Extend the impact of your media assets
10. Find the right place to use mobile learning in your new-look blends

and 10 examples of where mlearning can make a difference:

1. Make it easy to review the latest news and information
2. Scan it, learn about it
3. Just-in-time guides
4. Performance support and checklists
5. You know where I am, help me!
6. Refresher learning
7. Push reminders
8. ‘Mobile company uses mobile learning’ shocker… Use the medium they use
9. The LMS on the go
10. Talk to me, interactively

David Perring

David is director of research the UK-based and EMEA focused educational technology analysts Elearnity. Elearnity has been working hard at writing vendor perspectives. The summaries will be available for free and the in-depth reports are available for a fee.

His answers to my four questions were as follows:

1. The most interesting and exciting thing for him is always working with clients who have interesting challenges. It is fascinating to work for people who have different perspectives but also bring intelligence into the process. For him it is the “freshness of working with 10 organizations rather than with one”.
2. He is not sure that there will be any more break throughs in the next year. Certain organizations might have find some “inspirational moments”, a lightbulb going on. Maybe some sales forces will start using mobile technology for its real potential, rather than having people use mobile technology in the classroom. He thinks the economic pressures will mean that there might be a lot more technology assisted learning and less face to face training in the years ahead.
3. He doesn’t believe you will find companies doing interesting things, you will always find people doing interesting things. It is very difficult to find people in organizations who are willing to share the interesting things they are doing: the catalysts for change, the mavens who help organisations reach tipping points.
4. The book he really enjoyed reading last year was Spike Milligan’s Adolf Hitler, My Part in his Downfall. Milligan is a comic genius.

We also discussed how great it would be to create more pencasts, using the Livescribe to sketch out and explain concepts. This is something that is still on my list to try out properly.

Rob Hubbard

Rob runs his own company LearningAge Solutions and is the chair of the E-learning Network (ELN). The ELN was present at Learning Technologies and was campaigning hard for effective elearning through “The Campaign for Effective Elearning” (also see: #c4ee on Twitter. He is very worried that people will start to think that all e-learning is cheap and crap. This would be bad for the industry (I see this kind of reaction in my company already). The ELN will therefore start highlighting things that really make a difference. Rob will be a busy man in 2012 because there is a publishing deal with Wiley Pfeiffer for a book from the ELN and with LearningAge he has created a piece of web based technology that implements the concept of “goal-based learning”, which is all about solving the transfer problem and putting learning into practice.

His answers to my four questions were as follows:

1. He hopes that he will be able to do a very big project which uses games and simulations to train thousands of people up to a certain skill level. Another exciting thing is his Rapid E-Learning Design course (I met Rob as a pilot participant of this truly excellent course) which he will be offering for free for the first time this year. Why free? Because it is a great way to meet new people.
2. Something that really seems to be gathering pace is the concept of gamification. People are starting to take it more seriously and the market is picking up on that, there even was one stand that advertised with “gamify your learning”. He likes how it aligns with the way our brain works: we have always learned through experimenting and getting awards for behaviour that works.
3. HT2 is doing interesting stuff, but in general he would consider science fiction to be more inspiring than what other companies are doing. One thing he showed me as an inspiration was an an interactive storybook on the iPad titled The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore made by Moonbot studios. It is incredible interactive and it teaches children how to play a song on the piano or how to write with the letters in a cereal bowl.
4. He is really enjoying The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson which at some level is basically a book about e-learning and performance support.

Laura Overton

Laura is the Managing Director of Towards Maturity an organization that helps companies get the most out of their learning technology. She was incredibly busy at the conference trying to connect “upstairs” (where the conference is) to “downstairs” (where the salespeople are exhibiting) through organising exchanges between speakers at the conference and attendees at the exhibit.

Her answers to my four questions were as follows:

1. One of the things Towards Maturity is looking at in 2012 is how to use all the data they have for practical change and to stimulate thinking. They will start doing some sector views. Next week they are launching a series of in-focus reports on particular issues that they know are holding the industry back. One of them is the cycle of indifference to change. One research report will be focused on business leaders asking them to demand more and be less satisfied. She hopes this will stimulate some new dialog between business and learning. She would not consider herself a technologist, instead she wants people to act: it does not matter what technology they use as long as they get better results.
2. A lot of people expect social learning to break through. She doesn’t think that will happen this year, especially the use of external social media (i.e. Facebook) will not work. Mobile learning is really on the verge of break through. User-generated content and an openness to that is an interesting thing too. They have seen quite a bit of growth in that.
3. She naturally has something good to say about all the Towards Maturity ambassadors. She likes the e-learning vendors that are really looking at the business issue. They come up with business solutions rather than with elearning modules. Things like natural assessment, storytelling, experiential learning. Concepts rather than the technology.
4. She thought Nudge, a book about influencing and persuasion, was great.

Ben Betts

Ben has his own company H2T and inhabits the edge between academic research and innovative education technology practice.

His answers to my four questions were as follows:

1. He is the most excited about Mozilla’s Open Badges project. He hopes it can help bridge the gap between Open Educational Resources and traditional formal accreditation. Anybody or any organisation can become a badge prodider (it will be one of my goals to start handing out Hans de Zwart-related badges before the end of the year), so he could already see something similar happening as in LinkedIn, “I recommend you and you recommend me”. I could see how you might get a meta-badge ecosystem with accreditors accrediting accreditors (Where would the buck stop? At Stephen Downes?). In 2012 he will also finish his doctorate thesis which is currently titled “Improving Participation in Collaborative Learning Environments” (I hope he doesn’t follow Dougiamas’ footsteps on this one).
2. There was one word that he thought would be the word to watch for 2012. Unfortunately he could recollect it and then had to go for “Curation” (which he think is probably last year’s word).
3. He quite likes what Epic is doing with Gomo, although they still have some way to go. Another great company is of couse Mozilla. He wasn’t particularly overwhelmed by Apple’s iBook announcement.
4. The most interesting book for him was probably the biography of Steve Jobs. He is currently reading Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow. Also good was A Theory of Fun for Game Design which shows that having learned something is the definition of fun in a game. Another great book was Business Model Generation (I just read that too). Finally he would like to recommend Resonate by Nancy Duarte, which is basically “stuff you already know put really complicated” (mostly about telling stories), but it the best example he knows of how a book should be layed out.

Concluding

I didn’t have a lot of time to spend at the exhibit, but did do a very quick walkaround and found companies I just want to highlight:

• Toolwire is going to evolve what they call Learnscapes into gamescapes, using their normal interface and turning it into a realtime multiplayer event.
• I have never written about Lynda on this blog before. They provide videos teaching people how to do things with software applications (think about teaching you a particular effect in Photoshop for example). You can pay per video or get a subscription. They are hugely successful. I consider them another example of a thing that “geeks” have managed to get right, without the rest of the world noticing. Why aren’t they an enlightened example in the corporate learning world? Related to this I will create a theme for myself this year: Open source communities have been the first to find solutions for certain problems (collaboration at scale for example). What can businesses learn from this?

It was a great privilege to be able to speak to these eight people in a single day (I could have talked for hours with each and everyone of them…) and it takes an event like Learning Technologies to bring these people together. I will have to find a good reason to go again next year. Maybe a speaking engagement?