Elearning blog: Learning re-imagined

Enterprise 2.0 or Obsolescence: Your Choice

By Shawn Hunter

We had a fantastic interaction and presentation with Andy McAfee, author of Enterprise 2.0, this past week. He did a live, interactive satellite and webcast event to a global audience on the Leadership Development Channel, one of our leadership skills training services.  The interaction was fantastic – tons of great questions from afar – and lots of insights and questions via Twitter during the presentation. 

He opened by debunking a fairly straightforward idea that we hear constantly, “It’s not about the technology.” This is a common idea paraded about in organizations to demonstrate that while, yes, technology is of course changing, it is more about the business models, ideas, and market landscape that surrounds the changing technology.

Myself, I’ve been sucker to that same argument when talking about the importance of recognizing technology as a tacit enabler, but not the point itself.  McAfee wants to point out that now – more than ever before – the technology itself is changing at such a logarithmic rate, that indeed it has powerful impacts on the services and product innovation we provide.

Take at look at the graph Andy presented during the session.  When we weigh asset prices of industrial, transportation and infrastructure costs against the cost of available technology, clearly online technological costs are plummeting, and that has profound implications about how we can, and should, do business, as well as how we interact as communities in the emerging Enterprise 2.0 environment.  The price crash of collaborative technologies based on peripheral equipment like computers (iPads!, NetBooks!) has opened up immense opportunities for people to congregate virtually, share expertise, practices, and insights – and if they choose, to also collaborate in competitive ways in the market.

With the advent of online collaborative environments we are seeing heightened competition from everyone, everywhere, for everything. If you thought your market niche was product based, or particularly regional in scope, think again. With cool collaborative innovation sinks like InnoCentive, people can build iterative new products and services leveraging expertise around the world in a flash.

So as you and your business consider integrating Enterprise 2.0 initiatives, consider that the alternative could be obsolescence.

Forget Social Learning! Make Learning Social Your Priority

By John Ambrose

 

Over the past 18 months, I’ve been delivering a variety of talks to audiences of learning professionals large and small.  The core premise is that

social learning, defined as the contextual blending of social conventions with learning content, will be profoundly transformative over the next decade.

  

 

Well, it’s time we stopped focusing on social learning.  That is, until we’ve mastered learning social.

 

 

What I mean is that every learning professional who intends to remain in this field during the next decade needs to take the plunge.  Now!  Because learning about social technologies comes from experiencing them, not just reading about them.  Like learning to swim, internalizing the real value of social technology requires active participation. 

  

 

Don’t just take my word for it.  American Society for Training & Development (ASTD) President and CEO Tony Bingham recently said, “Understanding the huge impact Web 2.0 technologies have on how the workforce learns is critical to engaging employees and customers, and ultimately, critical for an organization’s growth and success.”

  

 

As a learning profession, we have a long way to go.  ASTD’s recent report “The Rise of Social Media: Enhancing Collaboration and Productivity Across Generations,” found that only 24% of survey respondents report that their own informal learning activities include social media.  This jibes roughly with what I’ve seen from audiences in North America, but overseas I would put this in the single digits based on my informal polls.  We can do better.

  

 

Diving In or Sitting on the Edge of the Pool?

 

 

I found it interesting that the same ASTD study reported that ‘nearly all’ survey respondents indicated they ‘use social media’ in their personal lives.  I believe this obscures what’s really going on.  My hunch is respondents equate ‘using’ to ‘having used or having some basic understanding.’  The vast majority of learning professionals are not swimming in social media, rather they are dangling their legs into the water while they sit on the ledge of the pool. 

  

 

As proof, I’ve been conducting a little experiment with many audiences. I asked everyone to stand and then ask people to sit if they’ve used various social networks or technologies -- from more obscure to less.  In an audience of 75, I’d ask, do you use Orkut? Delicious?  Maybe one or two sit.  Foursquare? Yammer?  Maybe three or four more.  Twitter?  Maybe five, ten will then sit in a really wired crowd. Facebook gets a good chunk to sit, maybe 20 or 25.  Linked-in?  That gets another swath of those still standing to sit -- but not everyone.  Believe it or not in most audiences, there is still a cadre of learning professionals standing!  I resort to YouTube and email to get everyone in the room to sit.  

  

 

My experiment is fun, but the underlying message is serious.  Today’s learning professional is on the front lines of a sea change in how employees will learn.  Navigating this sea requires more than a tacit understanding of one aspect of the water.  It requires the ability to swim.

  

 

Here’s how to jump in and get wet:

  

 

Establish a Facebook profile.  Don’t worry about embarrassing your kids.  They have two profiles anyway – their real profile (for family and adults) and their pseudo profile (for talking to their peer circles).

  

 

Join one or more social communities on Linked-in.  A variety of SkillSoft groups have been created around the world, including SkillSoft eLearning and SkillSoft Government Users Group.

  

 

Get on Twitter.  I know you think it is a waste of time, but just create a profile anyway.  It’s simple and fast. Then use search.twitter.com to search on the teams “#lrnchat”, “#educhat” or “#elearning”.  The  “#” acts as a community tag so it is easy to find related posts.  These are some of the more popular and dynamic learning communities.  Explore.  Click a link.  Reply to a message with a comment of your own.  Congratulations, you just “tweeted”.  Now, follow those with comments you find interesting.

 

 

You are on your way.  You are now in the water.  Feels good, doesn’t it?

Latest Aberdeen Report on Social Learning Available

By Pam Boiros

As you’ve read in a variety of previous posts, we’ve been writing about social learning in general and SkillSoft inGenius on Books24x7, our digital books product, specifically.  The Aberdeen Group just published a Research Brief entitled “SkillSoft inGenius™: A Strategic Response to the Future of Learning”.  I’m happy to let you know that the full report is available as a complimentary download courtesy of SkillSoft.   This report is a follow on to a major research project Aberdeen conducted in September of 2009 that surveyed over 500 organizations on their learning and development programs. 

Some of the highlights of Aberdeen’s report “SkillSoft inGenius™: A Strategic Response to the Future of Learning” include:

- Social learning drives performance

- Organizations that want to sustain success are focused on developing the next generation of top performers

- Methodologies and tools must keep pace with the changing needs of the workforce

- Tools that leverage Web 2.0 functionality, such as inGenius, drive employee performance and productivity.

Download your free copy of this exciting and timely new research report from the SkillSoft website. 

Social Learning Will Fill Enterprise 2.0’s Empty Drums

By John Ambrose

You can’t dispute the numbers. Social media is having a profound impact on the way we communicate and learn.  If the Facebook community was a country, it would be the third most populated in the world, behind only China and India. In fact, this month, Facebook surpassed Google for the first time as the most visited site on the web. Twitter emerged from obscurity at the SXSW Interactive Conference in 2007 to become the third most used social media network with 55 million unique monthly visits according to Nielsen.com.

This has opened the floodgates to companies hawking “Enterprise 2.0” versions of social media tools just for organizations.  At last count, there were over 400 tools and technologies offering some element of ‘behind the firewall’ social capabilities.

So how does a learning leader make quick sense of this crowded field?

The dirty little secret is that these tools all have one common trait. Some would call it a fatal flaw: they are all simply enabling technologies. I call them ‘empty drums.’  What I mean by this is that a successful social community needs three ingredients to be successful: 1) Enabling Technology; 2) Vibrant Community; and 3) Great Content.  With no community and no content, you are left with an empty barrel where users don’t contribute because it looks like no one visits and no one visits because it looks like no one contributes.

Trying to build a culture of successful collaboration through social learning with just one of the three is like trying to sit on a one-legged stool. You will get hurt.

For evidence, take a look at a white paper published by McKinsey last year entitled “Six Ways to Make Web 2.0 Work.”  It looked at organizations that tried using just enabling technology and the lessons learned included:

“Perhaps because of the novelty of Web 2.0 initiatives, they’re often considered separate from mainstream work…Thus, using Web 2.0 and participating in online work communities often becomes just another “to do” on an already crowded list of tasks.” (McKinsey, March 2009)

In other words, after the fanfare of the initial rollout, these sites quickly lost momentum. They did not build or stimulate sustainable collaboration. They did not transform e-learning.

So, what has the potential to fill Enterprise 2.0’s empty drum?  I’ll talk about that in my next blog post (hint: social+learning).  Until then, I’d love to hear from you about what a learning leader should do differently.  Let’s discuss in the comments. 

Many training organizations I speak with are intrigued by Enterprise 2.0 technologies and their promises for creating a viral collaborative community within the organization.  At last count, there were more than 400 companies out there touting ‘e2.0 technologies’ … everything from wiki and blog products, to products that promise a safe Facebook-like or Twitter-like platform that can be rolled out behind your firewall.

Admittedly, some of these products are quite impressive, but they all share one common thread.  They are all enabling technologies. Just software.

Early efforts with these products are mixed at best.  Many early adopters or experimenters with these technologies report a lack of success in creating a sustainable collaborative environment. 

McKinsey, in a white paper entitled Six Ways to Make Web 2.0 Work,published in February 2009, observed the same phenomenon and described it this way:

“Perhaps because of the novelty of Web 2.0 initiatives, they’re often considered separate from mainstream work…Thus, using Web 2.0 and participating in online work communities often becomes just another “to do” on an already crowded list of tasks.”

Does this mean that social environments can’t work in the enterprise? Emphatically no.

But I am suggesting that there is a better way. 

There are three ingredients to creating a sustainable collaborative environment:  1) enabling technology; 2) abundance of content; and 3) enthusiastic community. When brought together, these three ingredients can produce a delicious collaborative result.

So the call to action for those learning professionals seeking to leverage collaboration to drive new levels of learning is simple.  Think about starting not with the enabling technology, but with your existing content and your existing active community of users who are already coming to your learning destination.  For instance, if you are currently using a product like Books24x7 from SkillSoft, why not think about the millions of pages of professional reference content that you already license as “seeds of discussion” for a thriving collaborative environment.  

Social collaboration offers great potential to help informal and formal learning, but the most effective path to accomplishing this will be to leverage what’s already working.

By: John Ambrose

What a Birdy Told Me

I have already acknowledged an addiction to Twitter. And, I am happy to write that I have found yet another reason to love the site. Twitter allows me access to events that I cannot attend.

The # sign is a powerful thing in Twitter-ville. It creates a dynamic page with whatever word(s) follow it, allowing people to virtually gather and weigh in on a topic. #sscafe09 gave the world access to SkillSoft’s Cafe held in Orlando in September. By following that event on Twitter (via searching for that ‘phrase,’) I was able to keep up with the news – SkillSoft is poised to launch the SkillSoft Leadership Advantage and showed a sneak peak of upcoming inGenius – and get a feel for what people were discussing: the power of Web 2.0, the value of social networking in a learning environment and the power that collaboration can have on learning.

I was also able to keep up with the CLO Symposium. Imagine that. I’m sitting at my desk in Nashua, NH, and simply typing #CLOsymposium allowed me to be a ‘bird’ on the wall (sorry, I had to) at the event in Colorado.

The best use of this tool is when multiple people at an event tweet about it together – all using the powerful # sign to allow other people to view their collective wisdom about an event or a topic within the event. It might take a while for people to catch on to this – but it’s a great way to bring an event home to your co-workers in real time. Let’s all meet virtually at the next event and give each other a chance to read what a little birdy said.

By: Rachel Levine

Is your LMS Saasy?

Hi, my name is Stephanie Pyle and I’m a SkillPort-aholic.  Obviously I’m a little bit biased, but recently as we have rolled out a brand new user interface  I’m starting to really love this ‘little LMS that could’. 

I completely understand why some companies need to go with much larger systems and we count most of those big players in the LMS space as key partners of ours when it comes to delivering content.  But more and more, I’m talking to people who are looking for something easier to deploy, easier to run and easier for their learners to use.  At our annual Café event last week I ran a breakout session to discuss the future of SkillPort.  Although there were several areas that we want to continue to build out and work on, the feedback from our customers was overwhelmingly positive and those that had already moved to the new SkillPort 7 version loved it.   

One thing that makes me such a huge fan is the Software-as-a-Service or SaaS model for SkillPort.  This takes the burden of managing the system off of our customers and allows them to really focus on the things that make the most impact in their organization.  Josh Bersin recently posted a blog on this topic called “How SaasY is your HR Software Vendor?  What does SaaS mean to you?” where he explains what defines a SaaS vendor.  At SkillSoft, we have been using this model for over 10 years which I think makes us old-pros in an area that may consider new. 

One of the many benefits of our SaaS model is the getting new content loaded into SkillPort.  As a customer gets new content, it is automatically updated on the system which eliminates the need for someone to have to manage and load it.  And at SkillSoft, our model allows customer to always get new versions of the platforms when they want them.  Each version release is made available to all of our customers, but they get to choose the best time for their upgrade. 

Over the next few weeks, I plan to discuss other key areas that make me such a SkillPort fan.  With a philosophy that you shouldn’t have to train people on how to use their training system, SkillPort is usually worth a look and often fits the bill. 

By: Stephanie Pyle