The incredulous tone – and the use of the word evangelical in the next sentence – characterises a lot of the social media debate.  It has become the new orthodoxy.  Training without Twitter?  How backward of you!  Facilitating without Facebook?  Heresy!

Well at the risk of being stoned for blasphemy I will be raising my head above the parapet to raise some ideas which may rock the faith of the converted.  Because faith is what this is.  I’ve asked the questions about where the limitations may be, what the evidence is, how it generates benefits for learners and the organisations which have to pay for it.  I’ve received few answers and less evidence.

Sure, there’s a bit of marketing of learning going on.  Is that what the presence of a facebook logo on every vendor’s exhibition stand is supposed to be about?  Unless I missed a memo I think the users are supposed to use social media to learn.  But do they, really?  Or is it just another place to find information?  Nothing wrong with that but looking something up, using it for a specific purpose and maybe bookmarking the page in case I need it again is not learning, is it?  It’s looking something up.

Skilled information seekers are very important – I’ve written often enough about it being the defining skill for the 21^st Century.  But being able to find stuff on a network is not learning.  These two crucial skills are different in my book.  Committing something to memory is not committing it to the almost infinite memory supplied by Steve Jobs or Bill Gates.  It’s the bit between the ears I’m interested in.

Of course there’s  collaboration – the chance to share information, tips and glorious discoveries.  I have often spoken and written about the social aspect of learning – the importance of learning from each other and learning together.  Projects, action learning, work-based tasks – I’m a big fan of all these experiential and collaborative activities.  Social media then provides a great opportunity to share these experiences with like minded learners without the inconvenience of travel. Doesn’t it?

Theoretically, yes.

Practically, no.

I have had cause to look at a number of these networks and learning communities.  They follow this pattern:

1. The moderator or site owner posts a discussion thread or two and asks for contributions.
2. A number of people post comments.  These consist of “great idea” “this is really cool” “excellent chance to share our learning”.
3. Three months later what activity there has been is entirely the work of the moderator.  The discussion threads have grown to 6 or 7 items.  The responses and site hits have shrunk to zero.
4. Five months later.  Disheartened, the moderator gives up posting any new information.
5. One year later, the network administrator needs the server space and the forum site is closed.

All this despite those very same learners being constantly on facebook when at home.  That’s where they share links on You Tube and all their friends and family submit their comments.  Unfortunately they are discussing their response to CCTV footage of a woman throwing a cat in a bin!

Learned anything?

Yes, if you want to throw a cat in a bin without being headline news, do it somewhere which isn’t covered by CCTV cameras.

The problem is that social media is social – not work.  In their spare time, people act differently than they do during their working hours.  Frankly, this seems pretty desirable to me.

We need to adopt online collaboration as business as usual.  This requires the development of some kind of work media – rather than trying to jump on the bandwagon of the facebook/twitter revolution.  Until then, the facilitation of learning and sharing of learning online is a nice idea but one which is no more that an article of faith.

You can read more about the debate in a Guardian supplement – see http://www.learnevents.com/ld-supplement-in-the-guardian-newspaper.php

Britain’s biggest corporations are hiring large numbers of graduates and starting salaries have increased, with some companies paying up to £42,000.

A survey of 100 of the biggest employers shows that they have recruited nearly 2,500 more university-leavers so far this year than they did in the whole of last year.

So why are graduates still finding it difficult to get their first jobs?

He has coined the phrase ‘cognitive surplus’ to explain the huge brain power available to humanity which he would argue has been lost because of the insidious effect of mass media – not least time spent in front of the TV.  He notes that Americans last year spent a collective 200bn hours watching TV – a thousand times more hours than have so far been invested in the creation of wikipedia.

However, he also notes that current teenagers in the USA and elsewhere watch less Television than the immediate previous generations and that much of the explanation for this is that they have diverted their time  – and in Shirky’s terminology, their cognitive surplus – to online activity and especially making contributions to web discussions and writing comments on everything from their friends’ status to the new You Tube video via the wonders of web 2.0.

Shirky’s central point is that outside of work we have a cognitive surplus – spare brainpower – which is already being used in ways which traditional media and traditional institutions are only just beginning to wake up to.  The answer to the question  “how do they find the time” is simple – they watch less TV!

However, what about using social media within the work environment and especially as an adjunct to training and development activity in organisations?

It seems to me that there is a significant disconnect here.  The question “How do they find the time?” is not so easily answered in the world of work. In a working environment where everyone is desperately trying to achieve more from less is there a significant ‘cognitive surplus’ to make the social media argument compelling in a modern organisation?

There may be space for some to contribute, comment and engage with an audience via web 2.0 tools on corporate intranets, but in my experience that’s because it’s their job.  I was working with a client the other day and looked through their community space for people based all round the world who worked in similar roles – interestingly within the training arena.  What I saw was a familiar experience.  The web 2.0 tool had been established allowing everyone in the community (indeed in the organisation) to post information and comment on the posts of others.  In an organisation with over 53,000 people, the wisdom of crowds argument would expect there to be a significant number of people contributing, debating and coming up with an organically developing set of ideas, concepts and principles.

Not the case.

True there were twenty plus posts on the site – many of them with useful information, content and shared documents. However,  my client who ‘owns’ the site had posted nearly all these  – in fact all save one.  There was one other contributor and one comment on that contribution – from guess who? Yes, the site owner.  Every other post remained unsullied by community comment.

The reality is that in a work environment, there is little cognitive surplus and so we are, for the most part, recipients of the outpourings of those who have a role which involves the space and time to contribute.  The great democratisation of content, the sharing of learning, the wisdom of trainee crowds, is a holy grail which remains lost.

What’s more it won’t be found unless a) there is cognitive surplus at work, i.e. they are not fully employed within their roles, or b) organisations begin to accept and expect that everyone will spend part of their working day contributing to the collective knowledge of the organisation and that they should be employed to do so.

]]> http://www.infinitylearning.co.uk/elearning/2010/06/cognitive-surplus/feed/ 0 http://www.infinitylearning.co.uk/elearning/2010/05/compliant-with-what-exactly/ http://www.infinitylearning.co.uk/elearning/2010/05/compliant-with-what-exactly/#comments Tue, 18 May 2010 07:32:20 +0000 infinitylearning http://www.infinitylearning.co.uk/elearning/?p=736 A friend of mine is a tech wizard. In fact so sought after are his skills that he is called upon by major corporations to resolve network issues which have taxed those with enormous brains and the sallow complexions of those whose dedication to computers means they rarely experience daylight.

In a recent assignment for a major telecoms company, he was required to complete a piece of health and safety e-learning and pass the end of programme assessment before being allowed on site.  He let me glimpse the wonders of the programme which he had been required to complete.

Here was a technologically advanced organisation where everyone uses computers and the latest technology is an intrinsic part of their day jobs. And yet the e-Learning which my friend had to sit through was an example of the very worst use of computer based learning I could ever imagine.  I honestly thought that click through pages, heavy  text on screen with barely relevant images pasted on to each page were things of the past – the ancient past when learning programmes were distributed on 3½ inch floppy disks.   Interaction was limited to hovering over a so called hot spot which launched determinedly lukewarm pop ups.  The traditional numbering system – page 2 of 6 etc – seemed more like a threat than a guide to progress.

The assessment – which plumbed the depths of the question writers’ art – was of course locked until every page had been viewed. Once arrived at, the usual sins had been committed. The longest question always right and every repetitive four option multiple choice included an answer  which was so clearly wrong that the phone-in quiz setter for daytime TV would have been embarrassed to take the premium rate phone charges off those who called in.

Heinous though these e-Learning crimes were, the best (worst) was yet to come.  One size fits all apparently. Yes in order to come on to site to resolve a computer issue, an operation which he assures me provides no greater danger than dropping the end of a dunked digestive down his shirt, he had to complete the section on working at heights. My desk bound, technologically brilliant mate needs to prove to someone (who?) that he can work safely on scaffolding before being allowed through the security gates!

Compliance training has regularly been one of the things for which e-Learning is used.  The trackability through an LMS of online modules, the right/wrong assessments and the chance to audit an individual’s score have attracted those in search of tick-in-the-box security.

Two things disturb me about this.

Firstly, if the health and safety of visiting contractors is important – and we do have an absolute duty here –  surely they deserve something better than this?  How about a programme from which they might actually learn something?  How about a process which truly ensured that they were safe in those areas of activity  in which they were likely to be involved? This catch all, tick in the box programme achieves no objectives apart from giving a false sense of security to the HSE manager that he or she isn’t going to find themselves in court in the unfortunate event of an incident in which someone is injured or worse.  (On that point, however, I wouldn’t want to be the barrister representing anyone who used this programme as the central plank of their defence!)

Secondly, very many organisations start their journey into e-Learning with compliance programmes.  Everyone needs them and an individual’s records are automatically updated.  Whether or not to use e-Learning seems a no-brainer.  But if this is the standard of learning programme which employees and contractors are being expected to use, is there any wonder that e-Learning is often seen as a poor substitute to traditional alternatives?  The fact that a major employer  (who, I should point out has spoken on e-Learning issues at many conferences)  should have this available as a semi public example of their approach to training and learning damages not just them, but everyone associated with e-Learning provision.

This is nowhere more starkly witnessed than in the Punch and Judy debate about National Insurance.  It seems to me that this difference of opinion goes much further than simply an argument about tax.  The recent support for a freeze in National Insurance has been backed by some of Britain’s biggest employers opposed to a ‘tax on jobs’.  While I agree that all taxation on employment needs to be carefully considered – especially in these fragile financial times – there is an undercurrent to the current argument which should worry all of us in training and development.

The tax on jobs argument is a thin veneer for something oft repeated in different guises. Essentially the argument goes that wages in other countries – especially in developing economies and the former communist states in Europe – are much lower than in the UK.  Therefore, the only way UKplc can compete with India, China, Poland and Slovakia is to cut our costs, and the biggest cost of all is employment.  Anything which may reduce our ability to be a low cost producer, beating the emerging economies on price is necessarily a Bad Thing. Really?  Is this the vision we need to reduce the deficit and return our economy to growth?

Of course one of the costs of employing people is training them to do what needs to be done now and developing them for a future world which will need increasingly complex skills and more of them.

Surely a focus on a high skill economy would be a better global competitive strategy.  And developing those high skills amongst the UK workforce will increase overall employment costs – and not by the proposed 1% of NIC increases, but by significantly more if we are to do the job properly.  My experience is certainly that the employers who pay their people best tend to do more and better training.  I don’t see a lot of innovative development at the minimum wage end of the employment market.

And strike me down, but maybe ring fencing some of our tax revenues for education and health so that we have the foundations for a capable workforce may be one of the ways of supporting a growing, high skill economy.

Trainers and people developers should be concerned that any argument which treats expenditure on people as a cost rather than an investment, represents the kind of thinking which ensures that training is one of the first casualties of so called efficiency drives when times are hard.

I don’t know whether raising National Insurance is the right step, either economically or politically.  What I do know is that the sight of business leaders clamouring to denounce any increase in employment costs on the grounds that it makes us uncompetitive is distinctly unedifying and potentially dangerous to our industry.

It was clear from the discussion that this was not an isolated event.  The teacher wanted the young people to embed their knowledge of the basic structure of a cell through an active task in which they made a representation of their knowledge in order to more thoroughly learn these fundamentals.  The process of drawing and labelling was designed not simply to give information but to support the learning process.  This was constructivism in action and I instantly saw parallels between the ‘learning is the same as information’ debates which seem to rule the eLearning 2.0 discussions of the moment.  Is the process of looking something up on wikipedia or describing google as a learning tool any different from what these rebellious teenagers were arguing?   Is interacting with information so that it is internally digested now out of fashion with both learning designers and learners alike?

The essence of constructivism – that learners construct knowledge through making meaning by combining previous knowledge with input from a facilitator or from an information source – has been adopted to work on line – especially where learners are required to interact with online tasks to activate previous learning and to show what they know and have a chance to contribute their own knowledge. (If constructivism as a theory of knowing and learning is new to you, a good overview can be found here: http://www.learning-theories.com/constructivism.html).

The key to the read/write use of technology – so called web 2.0 – is the extent to which learners and subject matter experts use the available technology to contribute and engage in debate. At its best, it provides a knowledge construction and management opportunity in which individuals review comments and add to them or amend them with alternatives of their own.

However it is not an alternative to well designed guided learning which has been created to enable learners to move through a learning cycle in a logical process from theory through to practice and reflection. In some senses, web 2.0 has been embraced by those in the ‘training’ world who do not see the difference between providing information and creating learning experiences.  As a flat, informational medium – with interaction limited to those who have something to contribute – there is a debate about whether the content is that user friendly and whether information presented in this way is brain friendly.  In that it is difficult to recall after having read it, it becomes instant information which is available to be looked up by skilled information seekers. This is valuable in and of itself, but the opposite of learning, which has at its base the ability to file information and experiences in the brain and recall this knowledge when required (having worked out first when it might be required.)

For more on constructivism in an online environment see: http://www.brighthub.com/education/online-learning/articles/38850.aspx

So what do we do with this acknowledgement that linking to images or diagrams or online models in and of itself is not enough to help learners construct knowledge?  It seems to me that providing links to other, web-based information is useful, but that in order for it to meet its potential we need to require our learners to do something with what they have discovered.  We also need to adequately guide them to resources which will help.  We should support them in being media literate enough to interrogate their searches and choose between the credible rather than the downright dodgy (see my previous blog: Can we trust the web? http://www.trainingzone.co.uk/blogs/robinhoyle/robin-hoyle039s-blog/can-we-trust-web)

Further opportunities to help learners construct meaning may involve them in contributing to discussions – not simply as passive recipients of the outpourings of the expert, but as people who can contribute their own understanding and by so doing apply the old fashioned maxim: “To teach is to learn twice.”

It seems we may have responded to the bolshie teenager in all of us by attempting to make it easy for learners to access information as an alternative to learning things.  This may be of value in some situations and with some subjects, but both we and those teenagers about to enter the workforce must recognise that learners do need to actually learn some things and that cutting and pasting won’t equip us to handle life in the modern organisation.

The results of two surveys conducted 6 months apart were pretty positive – training seems, for the most part, to have been spared the worst of the cutbacks and, for 80% of respondents, training budgets have either remained the same or even increased, despite difficult economic times.

As hospitality, events and travel have been cut back pretty seriously in most organisations, unsurprisingly some of the costs of training have also been under the microscope, with organisations quick to investigate training methods which don’t require hotels, lunches and course dinners.  This certainly mirrors my recent experience with more and more requests for advice and guidance about how businesses can best utilise online options to limit time off the job and reduce the costs associated with training such as travel and accommodation.

Innovation often springs from some of the most unpromising of situations – after all, necessity is the mother of invention, isn’t it?

But one quote in the report really struck me.  Along with utilising internal staff to run training programmes and sharing expertise with other organisations, the use of online learning had extended in more than one case to webinars and synchronous online conferences.  This unnamed respondent said:

“We have a total ban on travel and external training – everything is having to be done through our corporate learning portal via the use of web seminars.  But many people are ill-prepared to have their training and development delivered in this way – it is easy to only give the training half your attention by continuing to read/write emails whilst the phone is on mute for example.”

I found this interesting, not just because it shows a great insight, but also that so few organisations have thought about the cultural shift which an online learning approach may require – amongst managers, learners and trainers.

Now as it happens I’m not a big fan of webinars, though I have occasionally been involved in some very good ones.  It seems to me that the skills of an online facilitator/trainer are quite specialised – a cross between a subject matter expert and a radio phone in host.  Not surprisingly, therefore, those less engaged may zone out now and again and emails and Solitaire become a necessary distraction.  That said, I have observed a number of training programmes where busy, stretched executives have been reluctant to put down the blackberry or even close the laptop during the workshop.  At least then the trainer can see them and address the issue directly – assuming they are sufficiently assertive, or sufficiently bothered.

There are other cultural issues with the move online.  When I was involved in evaluating a major programme for one of my clients – a programme available as an online experience for those with network access and good English language skills and also available as a face to face version for those who perhaps didn’t have regular internet connection or needed it in their mother tongue – we found that face to face learners were given ample time off to complete the programme.  The workshop based events tended to be a bit of a sheep dip approach to training – one size fits all. By contrast, online programmes wee much mre tailored to meet specific needs, but learners were rarely given any time to complete their learning and complained that they needed to learn in their own time, at lunchtime or even during their holidays if they were to complete the programme within the agreed schedule.

Perhaps the fact that training has been taken away from the ‘coal–face’ of the day job for so long – sub-contracted to external consultants in conference centres just off the M4 – has meant that the practicalities of essential learning and development taking place in the workplace is too much of a shock.

So, amongst those in the IOD survey who had fought for and saved their training activities, there was a tendency to shift training responsibility online and/or to in house subject matter experts – both options that are certainly better than removing training opportunities altogether in difficult times.

I think many organisations beyond IOD’s survey are also thinking of this approach and if that’s a route you’re intending to follow, here are my three top tips:

1. You need to ensure that those who are now required to facilitate learning are given every assistance to do so – adequately trained to do the role and prepared for any resistance they may face if internal programmes are valued less by learners than the previous external provision (complete with chocolate hob nobs, those little wrapped sweets in the seminar room and lunch on the company).
2. You need to prepare managers and learners through very active communication so that they understand how their roles will be different in the changed learning reality.
3. The delivery of programmes online and/or by local experts needs to be absolutely first class or your learners will compare essentially amateur offerings with the work of professionals – an unfair comparison and one which will always reflect badly on those left to pick up a new and unaccustomed role.

In particular the IOD survey makes a very important point – a recession is really not the time to abandon staff training altogether.  Having been through more than one economic crisis, I can certainly endorse the view that being equipped to handle the other side of any downturn is equally as important as weathering the current storm.

Three things really struck home from the two days of arranged and ad hoc meetings which typify any attendance at trade exhibitions. The first was what a great opportunity an exhibition presents to catch up with people who you haven’t seen for a while. Former clients and collaborators alike added new insights and new opportunities to think about issues from a different perspective. I wondered if the organisations supporting social learning have ever suggested to one of their clients that what they really need is some kind of exhibition of learning projects, activities and outcomes within a large organisation? The value of the face to face, informal discussions around a common theme was really valuable to me – and I hope to them – and reminded me that social learning is real in the face to face world. So why do I remain cynical of the social networking tools being promoted so ubiquitously at the show as an answer to an unspecified problem in the world of learning and development?

My cynicism seems to revolve mostly around structure. The exhibition – a collection of vendors and potential buyers – was a clearly structured situation. What is more, on both sides there was a degree of self interest – a group of people wanting to identify leads and a group wanting to resolve issues within their organisations. What was clear about these short relationships – some more positive than others – was that they were clear transactions. The two groups were united in having differing but coinciding needs and wants which by coming together to share ideas and knowledge they both hoped would be satisfied. I learned from these transactional meetings and I think others did too. My belief that transactions provide a more robust model for social learning instead of the rather formless social structures of Facebook or MySpace was reaffirmed.

The second lesson of the exhibition was about the common ground between potential suppliers and potential customers. For years I have been going on about how much money and resource organisations waste on moving people around the country – or the globe – in order for them to endure endless presentations in the name of knowledge acquisition or training. It seems the message has got through, perhaps because of the economic situation which most organisations face. Again and again I had conversations with people who have suites of face to face courses who are now looking to transfer some of that content online as part of a blended solution. This is not only motivated by cost. Some of the people I spoke to have clearly recognised that online knowledge acquisition is at least a match for attending a lecture if not a considerable improvement.

The third lesson was about the nature of presentations in the 4 seminar theatres around the exhibition. Despite being a learning technologies exhibition, the majority of presenters used badly designed PowerPoint slides as their only visual aid. A 25 year old learning technology using endless bullet points or screen shots of e-Learning tools with the habitual apology of “I’m sorry you can’t read this very well, but what it says is….” Still, at least these people standing up in front of training professionals – who let’s not forget make a living from presenting to others – wouldn’t have the nerve to get to the podium unless they were skilled and accomplished presenters? Well, maybe next year…..

One section of the programme about the Olduvai Stone Chopping Tool, found in modern Tanzania and now the oldest object in the British Museum’s collection at 1.8million years old, was particular intriguing for me as someone who thinks about how people learn and develop. Click here for link
I have long contended that the first humans with larger brains than the other primates with which they shared the savannahs and gorges of Africa provide a blueprint for how modern humans still think, process information and learn. We are all aware of the flight or fight syndrome – the response to danger which was first hard wired into our beings when we faced daily danger from predators and competitor humans. You also may be aware that our initial reaction to information and being able to subconsciously filter out things we consider irrelevant is based on an ability first developed when we walked the savannah and had a split second to respond to movement – instantly working out whether the other life form we encountered was food or whether we were.

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