Polling the Electorate: What would you ask?

Recently,

I was "adopted" if you will, as a LearningTown.com mayor. In essence, I'll be working with a few other colleagues in helping the Masie sponsored community thrive.

That said, we mayors have our first task cut out for us. We are to develop a survey to provide to our prescribed group. Mine of course, being social networking / NextGen learning. So, in light of that, I thought I might ask my blog readers what survey questions they would enjoy asking those people in the NextGen / Social Learning world.

These can really be anything from: "where do you see social learning heading in the next 18 months?" to; On a scale of 1 to 5, 1 being disagree strongly and 5 being agree strongly, social networking / social learning is important to my organization's goals in the next 12 - 18 months.

Leave your favorite question or questions in the comments below!

Thanks for your help!

- Matt

Masie Learning Systems & AG08 Re-Cap

I've finally returned home from an epic journey of trade shows and meetings.

The week has been tumultuous to say the least (despite the travel). The learning space is changing and people are starting to come around to social media. Masie has recently opened his LearningTown.com site, for which, consequently , I'm a "mayor" (read facilitator). This site, while generally distributed across all topics of learning has clearly paved the way for the use of social media in learning.

Both the Masie conference and the eLearning Guild's annual gathering showed the rising level of interest in social media for learning. The term Learning 2.0 is becoming viral, at least among vendors and industry analysts. Maise dedicated a full pre-show session to User Content and at least a dozen sessions at AG08 focused on L20.

At this point, a need has been established and some early adopters have taken that leap of faith. I hold firm on my prediction that learning leaders are now exploring the idea of social media in their organizations for a variety of business purposes. While few vendors are positioning more than a tool set, several have begun to package solutions to address business needs.

With in 24 months, a growing number of organizations will have adopted solutions ranging from, small group collaboration tools to full blow communities. We will keep exploring the trends as they occur. Please post and reply with any comments!

Live from elearning guild's AG08

Greetings all,

I write you from the Hilton in Walt Disney World which is hosting the e.Learning Guild's annual gathering 2008.

The conference is a-buzz, with new technology and fresh ideas. Learning 2.0, the aforementioned convergence of social media / web 2.0 technology and learning has been a resonating theme for many throughout the conference. There are still rather few providers in the space but some interesting new comers like FlockPod are starting to crop up.

Additionaly, those people whom I've spoken with seem very excited about the way L20 will impact their organizations. I've spoken with people from insurance companies, technology firms, health care and even freight rail and there is one constant theme.

This is big.

No one really has a firm grasp on how they will apply it but with a little guidance and some questions, the big 3 concepts are:

1. Retiring / Aging Workforce
2. Connecting to the Gen Y demographic
3. Harnessing and encouraging informal learning

The general feel seems to be that in the next 18 months the market will solidify on what it is looking for and really begin shopping for L20 technology.

The sessions I've attended have been good but most have been kept at a high level as there are few L20 implementations and fewer case studies. I'll post again tomorrow with the recap of what I've learned.

Cheers

- Matt

Twitter and Learning

So its been nigh 2 months since my last post. Enough said.

I have not given up on blogging, but have been overwhelmingly busy more or less implementing the cool stuff we've been talking about for months.

So here is something crazy. Twitter. I'm sure several of you have used it, I do on a regular basis. Though, there are times I question the value of Twitter and what it does for people.

The value of Twitter may not have been fully realized yet though. Besides live Twittering events, and general public-IM, Twitter may have a hidden value to those of us in the learning space.

I was thinking about this this morning and was about to type my idea into our wiki but I though why not socialize this via my, now dusty, blog.

The basic premise of Twitter is to let people know what you are doing, thinking, eating, etc. Essentially for those of you who do not know, Twitter is a tool where you just type in anything in 140 characters or less and its is broadcast out to everyone. People who are specifically subscribed to you in Twitter will see you're message appear in their time line. At which point, you can quickly reply to it if you so choose.... or simply let everyone know that you're having a Coke.

So how does this even remotely apply to learning? Well think about it a second.

1. Twitter has a number of 3rd party application, ala Snitter, that sit on your desk top and allow you to quickly access Twitter via APIs.
   
2. Twitter allows you to subscribe to anyone else on Twitter
3. Twitter allows you to broadcast yourself to anyone following you
4. Twitter allows you to "favorite" a Tweet (a twitter post).
   

Those 4 things make it rather pervasive. So, if you're at your desk and you have just figured out something challenging or have a great little knowledge tidbit you want to share. You can click the window type it out and fire it off. Anyone else finding this valuable can then favorite that little tidbit and access it later!

Clearly it isn't the end all be all solution but hey it could work!

How do you think you could leverage Twitter in your learning organizations?

Push them into it: Forced Participation

Greetings Folks,

So that title is perhaps a bit provocative and maybe just a bit over the top.

The basic premise however, remains sound. A system made to collect; catalog and harness the knowledge of your employees as they move about your organization will not succeed if people do not participate within the system.

Due to data privacy concerns, no matter how intelligent you design the system to capture the data, people will have to opt into it or it could be a serious detraction when attracting fresh talent to the organization. So how do you encourage the use of said system?

I recently began playing with the build-your-own social network platform Ning. I built a whole community surrounding Learning2.0. (you can check it out by going to learning2dot0.ning.com if you want) but, the point is that, shockingly, no one has joined it!

Seriously though, the reason no one uses it is because no one knows about it. Getting people to use any new system is primarily a marketing exercise. Here is a very common approach to getting people to use anything new. Many times, implementation teams will use a few of these concepts but the best results occur when you use them all.

• Advertise the system to your employees! Leverage:
• Email campaigns
• Brown Bag lunches.
• Blogs, Discussion Forums.
• Company Intranet or Portal advertising.
• It needs to have C-level sponsorship and endorsements
• CEO should be aware and support it.
• CLO or COO should be the primary driver behind it.
• It needs to be tied to their personal income.
• Set solid metric for expected participation. (3 flagged items per day?)
• Include it in job specific goals.
• Set metrics for usage. (read 2 entries a day?)

These methods won’t exactly force them to use it, but it will go a long way in encouraging they do.

As always I encourage your thoughts and comments.

- Matt

Connect your retirees to everyone

Greetings again,

I hope everyone is having a great Holiday season thus far. Its been quite hectic for my family as we recently had our car smashed into by a van. All the same, best wishes to all of your families this season from mine.

So, I thought I'd tackle what seems to be a relatively easy concept of the 4 prior bullet points, then make a comment on an article I read about the biggest disappointments in technology for 2007.

So, the bullet:

Connecting retirees to everyone - (Before they leave AND after they are gone and we'll make it worth their while)

Lets break that statement down.

Connect retirees to everyone - simply put, we develop a social network (easy enough to do today) and allow them to connect with whomever they need to connect with. More accurately, as they will be retired or very busy, let others who need to connect with them easily find them and connect to them.

Consequently, this should be a basic corporate tenant. Let your employees connect with one another in anyway they see fit. In addition, provide them the tools with which to do so. For our uses, much of this hinges on the tool we put together in the previous post. Identify, label and track your experts. Then allow stakeholders to follow and engage them.

Facilitating this connection will save time and money for your organization as well as help build your future leaders.

So finally, the last part of that statement: "And we'll make it worth their while". That is mission critical to the success of this system. Tapping the knowledge of retirees after they leave the workforce will become difficult at best. Yes, you'll probably have some small percentage of people who would stay involved for free, however that is the exception, not the rule.

My suggestion would be to set up a reward system(cash or "stuff" preferably) based on the quantity and quality of the information provided by retirees.

You can manage this any way you choose but I'd recommend the following:

• Pay them for posts that rise in "helpfulness" above a certain threshold.
  
• You could determine this via user rating or subjectively via a community manager.
  
• Pay them some nominal fee for being "online" or available to answer emails / questions
• Let them keep their Blackberry for free! pending they answer communications that come to it
• Push questions their email address (let them keep their corporate one or set up an alumni address (i.e johndoe@IBMalumni.com)
  
• Pay them for being "logged in" to your social network
  
• Pay them for blog contributions. Maybe they could be part of a group blog around their prior job function? Pay them for posts and comments.
  

These are just a few ways to compensate them. They aren't going to expect a full salary and if you make it convenient they can respond via their Blackberry from the 15th green or from the beach.

You will also have to accept that some of your top performers are just going to be done when they retire and want nothing to do with you anymore. No amount of money can bring them back! For this reason, you want a system in place gathering their knowledge prior to them leaving.

Please enhance the above with comments!

Finally, I was asked comment on the 13th point of this article. For the most part, its true. The social media market is HUGE. Guess what? This space will get even more crowded before it starts to consolidate.

Everyone wants a piece of the potentially rewarding pie. I agree that, as in all types of technology, the vast majority will die a .com death but there will be some winners. The most important point was that all we've seen from providers(as far as innovation) is the same old thing over and over. Features like cooler looking widgets and faster/better sheep throwing.

My 2 cents? I think you'll begin to see innovation in the space start to take shape not in the form of "cooler blogs" but in how Web 2.0 tools are applied. Applying the concept of social media, crowd sourcing and collaborative content to real business problems and bring folks together for the common good of their organization.

What we are discussing here is just one of many potential ways, albeit a good one, to apply social media. This isn't going away despite what many deem to be a fad. It is the way the NET Gen will do business and life at least until the next technology wave comes around.

Have a great Holiday!

- Matt

Please Save the Knowledge!

Try this on for size:

People are not your most valuable asset!
The things they know and the way they learn and apply what they know are.

Right? I'm talking about knowledge and hows its applied. You might say, "True, but I need the person to do that for me." Maybe not.

So, I'm about to begin a series on ways we can use "2.0" to save the knowledge from folks transitioning out of our organizations.

There are a heck of a lot of approaches to this end. Some approaches exist and some are highly theoretical at the moment. As I see it, so called "transition" folks fall in to one of three categories.

1. Retirees
2. Voluntary Emigration (employee left on their own)
   
3. Involuntary Emigration (employee was asked to leave)

While harvesting the useful knowledge from non-retiree emigrants is an interesting business problem, based on the feed back from Learning 2007 and from other discussions in the field, tapping retirees is the more pertinent topic these days. (and by the way I think we will design a system to do both at the same time!)

So, I suppose the place to start is by identifying what problems the system should solve.

1. When employees retire, they take with them valuable knowledge and experience
   
2. Contracting retired employees back only delays the problem of lost knowledge
   
3. New hires seldom benefit from working with the senior ranks of the company

There is a system that can fix this. Wait before you think of it, NO its not a community.

O.K. I lied, it is a bit of a community but tossing a blog at this problem isn't going to solve it. If it were that easy, it'd be done by now. In addition, just connecting people to people won't solve it or SelectMinds.com would be rolling in money.

Nope the solution doesn't exit yet. At least not as a whole.

A working system will solve the problem by:

1. Connecting retires to everyone
   
• (Before they leave AND after they are gone and we'll make it worth their while)
2. Capturing valuable knowledge intelligently
   
• (i.e recognize each interaction they have, what is is, who its with and catalog it)
3. Tap their daily life quietly and efficiently
   
• (let everything they do be a contribution, each time they type an email give them an easy option to capture that experience into "teachable moment")
4. Push them into it
   
• (make them do it, force them, and above all make it easy and seamless)
  

Lets kick off by exploring those 4 bullet points. No it doesn't yet discuss the delivery of this "captured" knowledge to people who need it or a less web based approach of juniors spending meaningful time with seniors. However, its a start. Next time, we'll begin blowing this out into a system.