medida.info

This takes a couple of minutes to load but I think you will find it worthwhile.  It’s a nifty way to thank someone for a favor. Watch it!

Naturally, you can make your own.

Human Capital Institute is hosting a webinar by Dave Wilkins and Jay Cross entitled The Learners Are Taking Over the Asylum.

Organizations that focus on the supply side of the training they provide are looking at the wrong side of the equation. By focusing on the demand side (what learners need) they can facilitate the biggest part of the learning experience-informal learning. While informal learning is spontaneous it is not as informal as it may initially appear. It means orchestrating informal tools to be available in the context of work as it needs to get done. Think of trainer turned into stage manager… their facilitation is more about making tools available than writing content; leaving the learners in charge to create and apply content. This webcast addresses the paradigm shift learning professionals must make to tap the enormous power of informal learning by the organization’s knowledge assets- their people. You’ll discover the advantages of learners taking over without going crazy!

Schedule Live: Wednesday, Apr 21 2010 2:00pm EDT

Easter egg: Note the original title in the event URL.

I’m reading Diane Ravitch’s The Life and Death of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education. Ravitch is America’s foremost education historian. She has been a champion of testing, choice, charter schools, and letting the market forces of the Invisible Hand direct educational policy.

Seeing the lack of results of No Child Left Behind, Ravitch summoned the courage to admit that she was wrong. Big foundations, accountable to no one, have pushed one failure after another. An opinion piece by the New York Sun’s Andrew Wolf writes:

It is not only the foundations that Ms. Ravitch blames for the current crisis: government has also failed in the attempt to reform the schools from above, lacking a clear perspective of how schools work on a day-to-day basis. Thus, the major federal initiative, No Child Left Behind (NCLB), well intentioned as it may have been, ended up damaging the quality of education, not improving it….

Ravitch writes that “Accountability, as written into federal law, was not raising standards but dumbing down the schools. The effort to upend American public education and replace it with something that was market-based began to feel too radical for me.”

Ravitch says:

“Nations like Finland and Japan seek out the best college graduates for teaching positions, prepare them well, pay them well and treat them with respect,” she said. “They make sure that all their students study the arts, history, literature, geography, civics, foreign languages, the sciences and other subjects. They do this because this is the way to ensure good education. We’re on the wrong track.”

America’s corporations are suffering because many high-school graduates are uneducated. Cramming for standardized tests in math and writing have crowded out subjects like history and art. Business needs well-rounded generalists, not people who only study to ace the test.

Here’s a weekend diversion: this site analyzes your Tweets to come up with a profile of how interesting you are.

I thought I was nerdier but I guess I bring it up much in my Tweets. Thanks to Louis Gray for the pointer. He rated a 1 nerd score, too, so I don’t feel so bad. Louis is on top of things.

This afternoon, I keynoted the 3rd Global Learning Summit in Singapore. From my studio in Berkeley.

I’m doing more remote presentations these days. It reduces my carbon footprint. It saves time and money. It’s a win-win. I’m frugal.

We used Skype. Free. My face and/or my presentation filled the big screen in the ballroom. I could speak back and forth with participants and other presenters. I’ve delivered presentations like this in Europe as well. Skype’s sound quality is very, very good.

Cost is no longer an excuse for not getting on board with collaboration.

The slides for my presentation, Working Smarter with Collaborative Intelligence, are here.

Best of Informal Learning Flow

February 1, 2010 to February 27, 2010

The following are the top items from featured sources based on social signals.

1. Rethinking Open Data- OReilly Radar, February 1, 2010
2. 10 Ways to Build Social Media Expertise Using Personal Web Projects- HarvardBusiness.org, February 2, 2010
3. “The Class” – parody of The Office- Digital Ethnography, February 7, 2010
4. Secure Websites in Plain English- Common Craft – Explanations In Plain English -, February 9, 2010
5. The Future of Web Content – HTML5, Flash & Mobile Apps- TechCrunch, February 5, 2010
6. Google Buzz re-invents Gmail- OReilly Radar, February 9, 2010
7. The Great to Good Manifesto- HarvardBusiness.org, February 3, 2010
8. The Man Who Looked Into Facebook’s Soul- ReadWriteWeb, February 8, 2010
9. Shifting Identities – From Consumer to Networked Creator- Edge Perspectives with John Hagel, February 12, 2010
10. If Google Wave Is The Future, Google Buzz Is The Present- TechCrunch, February 9, 2010
11. International Amateur Scanning League- OReilly Radar, February 10, 2010
12. Wikimedia Strategy: Ideas for Strengthening Online Communities- HarvardBusiness.org, February 9, 2010
13. Facebook Wants to Be Your One True Login- ReadWriteWeb, February 10, 2010
14. Brain surgery boosts spirituality- Scientific American, February 10, 2010
15. How To Make Money In Online Video- TechCrunch, February 7, 2010
16. Data not drugs- OReilly Radar, February 11, 2010
17. Intel’s Social Media Training- HarvardBusiness.org, February 3, 2010
18. Blog – Physicist Discovers How to Teleport Energy- Technology Review Feed – Tech Review Top Stories, February 2, 2010
19. Kevin Rose’s 10 Tips for Entrepreneurs- ReadWriteWeb, February 19, 2010
20. How To Make Money In Online Video- TechCrunch, February 7, 2010
21. Four Steps to Gov 2.0: A Guide for Agencies- OReilly Radar, February 8, 2010
22. In Asia, Marketing 101 Doesn’t Work- HarvardBusiness.org, February 5, 2010
23. Exploring Why Social Business Will Drive 21st Century Enterprises- Dion Hinchcliffe’s Web 2.0 Blog, February 1, 2010
24. Meet The First Miners of the New Social Graph - ReadWriteWeb, February 10, 2010
25. Facebook’s Project Titan: A Full Featured Webmail Product- TechCrunch, February 5, 2010
26. Cyber warfare: don’t inflate it, don’t underestimate it- OReilly Radar, February 11, 2010
27. Sometimes, It’s Better to Brainstorm Alone- HarvardBusiness.org, February 4, 2010
28. The internet, depression and drinking a glass of water- Mind Hacks, February 3, 2010
29. 5 Simple Twitter Listening Tips Every Marketer Should Know- ReadWriteWeb, February 2, 2010
30. Israel’s Time To Know Aims To Revolutionize The Classroom- TechCrunch, February 2, 2010
31. Extreme Scale Computing- Irving Wladawsky-Berger, February 11, 2010
32. 30 seconds to creativity- Adaptive Path, February 2, 2010
33. Become a Gmail Master Redux [Hack Attack]- Lifehacker, February 4, 2010
34. Work Smart: Mastering Your Social Media Life- Fast Company, February 8, 2010
35. The evolution of Cynefin over a decade- Cognitive Edge, February 7, 2010
36. Pranksters Attach GPS Device To Google Street View Car- Forbes.com: News , February 7, 2010
37. Informal learning from the horse’s mouth- Informal Learning, February 3, 2010
38. Excellent Technical Resource for Mobile Learning- Workplace Learning Today, February 9, 2010
39. SharePoint Social Learning Experience- eLearning Technology, February 1, 2010
40. EdTechTalk Episode #5: Promoting Learning Through Asynch Discussions- Learning Visions, February 5, 2010
41. [2b2] Long-form, wide-form- Joho the Blog, February 3, 2010
42. Rhizomatic Translations 1 – Buying tech for learning- Dave’s Educational Blog, February 2, 2010
43. Pew Report Interview- Half an Hour, February 20, 2010
44. CopyTrans 4- Lockergnome Blog Network, February 19, 2010
45. A modest revenue proposal to the BBC- Doc Searls Weblog, February 19, 2010
46. Formalizing informal learning?- Learnlets, February 16, 2010
47. Vegetable sheep- Purse Lip Square Jaw, February 10, 2010
48. The Future of Higher Education: Beyond the Campus – a joint JISC, SURF, EDUCAUSE, and CAUDIT report - Fortnightly Mailing, February 7, 2010
49. Get More Done with Less Effort: A Systems Story- You Learn Something New Every Day, February 6, 2010
50. iPAD: a baby boomer, narrative device- Donald Clark Plan B, February 4, 2010
51. Rosetta and Long Now on Life After People- The Long Now Blog, February 4, 2010
52. The pad will blow away the clamshell- Skys Blog @ The Dalai Lama Foundation, February 4, 2010
53. Spotify for Desert Island Discs- edublogs, February 2, 2010
54. Does Apple Think Multitasking Is A Bug Not A Feature? And Other Questions….- stevenberlinjohnson.com, February 2, 2010
55. Reading Joyce’s Dubliners With Imaginary Friends- Full Circle, January 31, 2010
56. Jay’s latest book focuses on social & informal learning in the cloud- Internet Time, January 31, 2010

“As soon as the software vendors and marketers get hold of a good idea, they pretty well destroy it,” writes my colleague Harold Jarche in his post on Social Snake Oil. (That’s his graphic above.) Jane Hart chimed in, reinforcing Harold’s point that “social learning is being picked up by software vendors and marketers as the next solution-in-a-box, when it’s more of an approach and a cultural mind-set”.

I watched vendors hi-jack the term eLearning, and I don’t want to see it happen to social or informal learning. At the 1999 Online Learning conference in Los Angeles, CBT Systems announced it was “Smartforce, the eLearning Company.” This was ground zero. No one else on the exhibit floor even mentioned eLearning. Yet at the ASTD Conference six months later, dozens of vendors claimed to have eLearning. Most of them had changed nothing but their brochures and their signs. The “e”? Perhaps you could ask for help via email.

This old story is playing out again. In additional to social learning, vendors are claiming to provide informal learning. Instead of email, you get blogs and wikis tacked on. This is akin to saying that word processors write novels: it’s hardly the whole story.

Informal Learning in a Nutshell gives my definition of informal learning.

WORKERS LEARN MORE in the coffee room than in the classroom. They discover how to do their jobs through informal learning: talking, observing others, trial-and-error, and simply working with people in the know. Formal learning—classes and workshops—is the source of only 10 to 20 percent of what people learn at work. Corporations overinvest in formal training programs while neglecting natural, simpler informal processes.

LEARNING is that which enables you to participate successfully in life, at work, and in the groups that matter to you. Informal learning is the unofficial, unscheduled, impromptu way people learn on the job. Formal learning is like riding a bus: the driver decides where the bus is going; the passengers are along for the ride. Informal learning is like riding a bike: the rider chooses the destination, the speed, and the route. The rider can take a detour at a moment’s notice to admire the scenery or go to the bathroom. Most of the time, novices ride the bus; seasoned performers ride their bikes. Taking advantage of the double meaning of the word network, to learn is to optimize the quality of one’s networks.

When you see “informal learning” on an LMS vendor’s brochure, you might inquire if they’re using Jay’s definition. And how they do that.

Sleight of hand

In the last ten days, I’ve been invited to attend three different webinars on formalizing informal learning. The topic arises from faulty semantics, a word trick.

None of the speakers really call for formalizing informal learning; that would kill it. What they mean to say is that informal learning is too important to leave to chance. The formalizing means giving an official blessing to building an environment that encourages informal learning. Thus, it’s generally a good practice to provide comfy nooks that foster conversations; it’s malpractice to tell people what they should talk about in those nooks.

Related:
The Informal Learning Page
Social Snake Oil (Harold)
The State of Social Learning Today (Jane)

Maybe it’s just me, but everywhere I turn, people are looking at things from a higher level of abstraction. They’re seeing a bigger picture by rising above the immediate situation. (I dubbed this the Helicopter pattern recently.)

For example, executives look beyond mere execution to their readiness to change strategies. Managers who used to deal with training are focusing on whatever it takes to get the job done. Organizations are going around yesterday’s confining corporate boundaries to form closer ties with customers and collaborators. It reminds me of the famous movie by Charles and Rae Eames, Powers of Ten. The higher you go, the greater your perspective.

Kevin Wheeler, founder of the Future of Talent Institute, and I talked about this trend toward taking a loftier view over lunch in Fremont yesterday. I asked Kevin about the transition from competencies to roles, from specialists to generalists, and from job descriptions to enlightened action.

Are you seeing the same phenomenon?

Une interview
Par Harold Jarche (Traduction Thierry de Baillon)
Mercredi 17 Février 2010 13:21

Jay Cross, Chief Scientist à l’ Internet Time Group, est l’auteur de Informal Learning: Rediscovering the natural pathways that inspire innovation and performance (NDT: Apprentissage informel: A la redécouverte des voies naturelles inspirant l’innovation et la performance), publié en 2006.

J’ai demandé à Jay pourquoi il avait écrit ce livre, et il m’a répondu que peu de choses avaient été publiées au sujet de l’apprentissage informel en milieu professionnel, bien que ce soit ainsi que l’essentiel de l’apprentissage se déroule. Les chiffres ont démontré qu’environ 80% de l’apprentissage en milieu professionnel est informel, mais que peu de professionnels de la formation s’y intéressaient. L’apprentissage informel est une idée très en marge en ce qui concerne la formation et l’éducation en entreprise. Les idées développées dans le livre sont nées bien plus tôt, vers 1999, et comprenaient l’apprentissage visuel et les meilleures manières d’utiliser les représentations graphiques. Avant même de commencer à écrire ce livre, Jay avait déjà rempli plus de 30 carnets sur le sujet.

Le livre de Jay développait des idées inédites. L’idée majoritairement admise à cette époque était que la formation en entreprise était le moyen ciblé le plus sensé pour dispenser de la formation sur les compétences essentielles. Jay a été l’un des penseurs qui contribua à modifier cette attitude. Dans un commentaire écrit sur mon blog en 2006, Jay écrivait, « je me heurte dans mon livre à la question des compétences de base. Mes relecteurs (tous les trois) souhaitent que je supprime ce qui se rapporte au storytelling, à la prise de parole en public, etc., parce que ce sont des compétences personnelles, et donc ne relèvent pas de l’apprentissage en entreprise. » En 2010, il est devenu plus difficile de dire que le storytelling ne fait pas partie de l’apprentissage en entreprise.

plus

Parlez-vous francais? Allez vite à Enterprise Collaborative.

Entreprise Collaborative est un laboratoire d’idées multiculturel permettant d’échanger entre experts et praticiens autour des concepts de social learning et d’entreprises en réseau afin de développer des organisations plus performantes.

Vive la France!

Will Thalheimer reports on Learning Styles Reviewed by Association for Psychological Science AND FOUND WANTING.

Do you believe meshing delivery format with a student’s learning style improves the quality of the learning?

The learning-styles view has acquired great influence within the education field, and is frequently encountered at levels ranging from kindergarten to graduate school. There is a thriving industry devoted to publishing learning-styles tests and guidebooks for teachers, and many organizations offer professional development workshops for teachers and educators built around the concept of learning styles.

For an indictment of learning styles as irrelevant to learning, see: Psychological Science in the Public Interest.

We conclude therefore, that at present, there is no adequate evidence base to justify incorporating learning-styles assessments into general educational practice. Thus, limited education resources would better be devoted to adopting other educational practices that have a strong evidence base, of which there are an increasing number.

Related posts:

Learning Styles and Pedagogy, the definitive report from the UK

Learning styles? Ha, ha, ha

Thanks to Donald Clark’s Plan B for pointing me to this one.

Read this inspiring Fast Company blog post by Marcia Conner. She nails what I have been calling learnscaping.

Growing a culture of service is more like planting a garden than building a shed. A garden requires tending, whereas a shed is built once. A social learning culture requires design, training, guidance, leadership, monitoring and celebrating successes, large and small. People need to know where the organization is headed and why it matters. It’s not easy for people to make the shift from a culture where they fear they are not good enough and need to improve, to one where they feel safe enough to want to improve for the enjoyment of it. Some will think it impossible for a whole culture to shift from fear-based fixes to joy-based learning, from coercion to inspiration. Others have witnessed it and will cheer along.

As you’ve heard many times before, “it’s not about the technology.”

Getting good at social interactions is vital for social learning.

We live in a social world. Every action taken that involves more than one person arises from conversation that generates, coordinates, and reflects those actions. At best, those group actions serve the well-being of the whole: not just the whole of a particular organization, but the whole of life. However, as we well know, many group actions are not life-serving. They are disconnected, existing in a fantasy in which, by analogy, it’s as if they imagine it is possible for the cells in one’s stomach to work against the interest of the cells in one’s heart, without thereby acting against their own interest as well.

Because these group actions, destructive and constructive both, arise from group conversations, those conversations become a potential leverage point for anyone looking to shift the system. People who convene formal group conversations—facilitators, meeting planners, et al.—are particularly well placed to make a difference, and thus we carry an ethical responsibility. We can support processes that empower people, or processes that prevent them from taking charge of their own lives. We can plan meetings that are genuinely open as to outcome, or let ourselves be co-opted by the powers that be as tools of manipulation. We can spread skills for solid group process as deeply and broadly as possible, or we can horde knowledge. Basically, group conversations have power—and the people involved with this project believe that power should be shared . . . and that sharing power in this way serves life.

A group led facilitated by Tree Bressen is working to develop a pattern language for group process.

A Pattern Language is an attempt to express the deeper wisdom of what brings aliveness within a particular field of human endeavor, through a set of interconnected expressions arising from that wisdom. Aliveness is one placeholder term for “the quality that has no name”: a sense of wholeness, spirit, or grace, that while of varying form, is precise and empirically verifiable.

The term was originally coined by architect Christopher Alexander, who, together with five colleagues, published A Pattern Language for building in 1977. Others have since applied the term to economics, software design, liberatory communication, and more.

The group’s goals are:

To support Purpose-driven design. Form should follow function. The most important part of any meeting planning is to get clear on why you are having the meeting. That choice drives all subsequent choices for that event.

To deepen the skills of those who serve as group process guides, leaders, hosts, and facilitators. To assist with their learning in how to do design. To help them choose among many possible processes to create something that will be the best possible fit for their situation at a given time.

To serve as a resource for those who are teaching others to design, lead, facilitate group process.

To increase process literacy among people who are users of process(es)—which is all of us. Our world needs us to wake up and get more savvy about this.

You can see the work in progress and sign on to contribute at the group’s website.

I spent part of yesterday and today writing patterns. I’ll show you what I came up with (in league with Kaliya Hamlin and a few other volunteers).

Our pattern is called Helicopter. It had been named “Go Meta,” but we decided that was not easily understood.

HEART
Most topics of group discussion can be visualized as a series of layers. The helicopter goes up a layer or two to get the “big picture” or a wider vision. Looking at the forest reveals viewpoints of a higher order than looking at just the trees. From the vantage point of the helicopter, you only see the forest.

The Helicopter view is also known as going meta. Meta-learning is learning about learning. Meta-cognition is thinking about thinking.

DESCRIPTION

CONTEXT
“Context” is the Helicopter view from a higher altitude.

INSTRUCTIONS & VARIATIONS
The facilitator may direct the conversation to the helicopter level by asking for similarities between objects. Things that are characteristic of an entire group of topics are generally meta.

Alternatively, the facilitator could use graphics to explain the higher-order process. A process map or social network diagram gives the Helicopter view.

Map the situation to show the connections. The network of nodes and connectors is at the meta level.

In some cases, the facilitator may be able to get the group to the meta level by simply asking about the structure of the ecosystem surrounding the topic in question.

EXAMPLES

• Finding a bottle neck in a system
• Understanding the patterns of communication in a network
• Investigating processes instead of isolated events

RESOURCES
Douglas Hofstadter uses meta as a stand-alone word, both as an adjective and as a directional preposition (“going meta”, a term he coins for the old rhetorical trick of taking a debate or analysis to another level of abstraction, as in “This debate isn’t going anywhere.”). This book is also probably responsible for the direct association of “meta” with self-reference, as opposed to just abstraction. The sentence “This sentence contains thirty-six letters,” and the sentence it is embedded in, are examples of sentences that reference themselves in this way. See Wikipedia article on meta

OTHER

QUOTES
Letter from Isaac Newton to Robert Hooke in 1676: “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.”

Patterns are meta.

If you cannot discern a pattern, perhaps you’re dealing with a chaotic system. (Chaos has no meta.)

“One person’s variable is another person’s constant.” Jay Cross

Pattern Language? A concept invented by Christopher Alexander, award-winning, renegade architect despised by most other architects, but wildly popular among designers and software authors.

Alexander used to live in my neighborhood. I wrote up a little presentation on his Pepto-Bismol colored house. Neighbors complained his house was so ugly it lowered the value of each house nearby by $15,000.

When Uta and I moved into our current house 17 years ago, Alexander was completing the house across the street. A rag-tag group of students put together this concrete monstrosity.

Here’s the view from my front deck:

You can see a little bit of my rooftop in this picture from Alexander’s The Nature of Order.

Alexander’s The Nature of Order and his website tout my neighbor’s house as an example of a successful owner-designed home. The owners loath him. For example, with our first rainstorm, water blew right through the walls into their daughter’s bedroom.

During construction, Alexander had asked, “What sort of windows would you like?” The owners didn’t understand the economics of custom-shaped windows until it cost them $30,000 to replace them with windows that didn’t leak. The project went over budget; last time I visited, there were still bare wires in the kitchen where fixtures were supposed to go.

That said, I’ve read Alexander’s A Timeless Way of Being and A Pattern Language twice. They are classics of design.

Close of Part 1 of 2

Every morning, my email is littered with very basic questions about informal learning. I’ve been ranting about informal and computer-supported learning in organizations for twelve years now. I’m the Johnny Appleseed of networked, social learning

I make 95% of my work available on the net at no charge. You can find it in blogs, presentations, articles, books, YouTube, free book chapters. Google “informal learning jay cross;” go to the Informal Learning Page, for an overview and links..

(20 minutes later) I just set up the Jaycross FAQ. It’s going to encourage people who want the basics to read this interview with the eLearning Coach before asking questions. It’s all in there.

The eLearning Coach interviewed me a few days ago. Fun questions. Visit her site. (Isn’t this great? It’s the Coach’s list of Stock Photo sites.

The Coach

Welcome to readers around the planet! This is the website of Connie Malamed, an eLearning, information and visual designer with a Masters Degree in Instructional Design & Technology and 20 years of experience in the trenches. The eLearning Coach is where I share actionable strategies, practical content, personal reviews and resources to help you design, develop and understand online learning.

The interview:

Connie: A funny thing happened while we were learning informally. A few astute people noticed it, wrote about it and brought it to the forefront of the learning arena. In fact, the buzz about informal learning seems to grow every day. You’ll find it discussed in training forums, featured in conferences and the subject of many presentations.

Social learning technologies, which often facilitate informal learning, seem to have paved the way for greater interest in this approach. So I think readers of The eLearning Coach would appreciate an interview with a person who wrote the book on the subject … literally. Meet Jay Cross, author of Informal Learning, speaker and consultant.

Connie: What is your definition of informal learning?
Jay: Learning is that which enables you to participate successfully in life, at work, and in the groups that matter to you. Informal learning is the unofficial, unscheduled, impromptu way people learn to do their jobs.

Formal learning is like riding a bus: the driver decides where the bus is going; the passengers are along for the ride. Informal learning is like riding a bike: the rider chooses the destination, the speed, and the route. The rider can take a detour at a moment’s notice to admire the scenery or go to the bathroom. Learning is adaptation. Taking advantage of the double meaning of the word network, to learn is to optimize the quality of one’s networks.

That said, all learning is part formal and part informal; neither exist in pure, unadulterated form. The issue we’re really addressing is whether the learning is mainly formal (imposed) or informal (sought).

Three hallmarks of formal learning are: a curriculum, a schedule and recognition upon completion (even if only a checkmark in an LMS).

Coach: What are examples of offline informal learning?
Jay: Learning to walk, talk, eat, kiss, smooch, run or ride a bicycle.

Coach: And examples of online informal learning?
Jay: Getting an answer from the Help Desk, asking Twitter friends for an answer, looking at a FAQ on a wiki.

Coach: What motivational factors underlie informal learning?
Jay: The primary motivation is needing to learn something in order to do something. There are so many forms of learning, it’s tough to generalize. I might want to learn Italian to foster my relationship with Sophia. I might learn to program Cisco routers in order to get a raise. I might seek an answer to a customer’s question.

Coach: How do you think cognitive processes differ when someone is learning informally as opposed to formally?
Jay: Generally informal learning is demand-driven. I’m more interested because I’ve chosen the subject matter and extent of the learning. It’s likely I’ll reinforce my learning almost immediately and that will make it stick. (Can anybody really remember the content of their high school coursework?)

Coach: Formal and structured learning can potentially promote efficient organization in long-term memory. Would this be an advantage of formal learning over informal?
Jay: Organization in a curriculum isn’t efficient unless it’s the right stuff. Generally, informal learning will take less time and effort to learn an equivalent amount of material.

Coach: Is there more potential for picking up incorrect information or developing inaccurate mental models when learning informally?
Jay: There’s potential for picking up incorrect information from informal learning or formal learning or newspapers or television or one’s brother. Learners need to be able to apply tests of reasonableness. Can the information be substantiated? Do others agree? Has it been vetted by thousands of others? Does it make sense to me?

Coach: Are there advantages to informal collaborative learning as compared to informal individualized learning?
Jay: Learning is social. Most learning is collaborative. Other people are providing the context and the need, even if they’re not in the room. Relative advantages would depend on the nature of what’s being learned. I don’t sense that there are absolutes.

Coach: How can organizations optimize the workplace for informal learning?
Jay: I’ve written books on this, but in short, organizations need to trust their people. People confronted by high expectations tend to live up to them. (And when confronted with low expectations, they tend to sink down to a low level.)

There are hundreds of smaller interventions that nurture informal learning. Examples might be setting up facilities to encourage conversation, providing time and encouragement of reflection, displaying graphics that explain company processes, building a social network infrastructure, setting up ways to share information, and viewing learning as part of every job.

There’s a lengthy summary of this at Internet Time Wiki. That’s the “informal learning page” I set up just for people who are curious about informal learning. You can download book chapters, watch a video, find white papers, etc.

Thanks for a great interview, Jay!

You’re quite welcome, Connie. I’m on a crusade to show businesspeople the enormous potential return on small investments in informal learning. Investments in learning return huge amounts; neglect of informal and social learning both demeans employees and leaves gobs of money on the table. Thanks for putting this together.

Addictive Learning That Sticks In a hurry? Enroll in the course here. I announced this free course on Learning to Learn on this blog two days ago. Fifty people have enrolled. Most have completed their first three questions. 16% of the participants answered question 1 correctly and won’t see that one again. Only 8% answered question 2. 10% got question 3 right.

There’s still plenty of room in our virtual classroom. Please join us.

Related
Announcement of free Learning to Learn course

Today I joined more than a hundred people at the Presidio Officers Club for a day-long Social Media Camp. Another 650 attended remotely by via Justin.tv.

Many participants were novices. The majority were interested in social media as a marketing tool. We saw some cool technology, e.g. 12 Sprints (knowledge workflow from SAP). Kevin Marks gave an interesting keynote on Tummlers (moderator – geisha – steward role).

Who do you suppose is in charge of social media within companies? In the group, 10% lodge it under PR. The remaining 90% consider social media a marketing function. Mind you, many in the audience were one- or two-person businesses, so their answers may not account for much. I’m going to take a poll asking who owns social media in large corporations.

Surprisingly, wi-fi was not available, so our online socializing was confined to Twitter.

San Francisco

LIVE

Addictive Learning That Sticks In a hurry? Enroll in the course here. Learn by answering a few emailed questions every other day? SpacedEd co-founder and CEO Duncan Lennox says that is precisely what his product is doing for physicians. (SpacedEd was invented at Harvard Medical School.)

SpacedEd is a platform designed to allow learners and teachers to harness the educational benefits of spaced education. It is based upon two core psychology research findings: the spacing effect and the testing effect. In more than 10 randomized trials completed to date, spaced education has been found to:

• Improve knowledge acquisition,
• Increase long-term knowledge retention (out to 2 years),
• Change behavior,
• Boost learners’ abilities to accurately self-assess their knowledge.

In addition, spaced education is extremely well-accepted by learners.

The SpacedEd approach is predicated on a set of core principles:

• • Short Repeated Bursts: Because it uses a regular schedule and an adaptive algorithm, learning can be delivered in small amounts that can take as little as 3 minutes a day.
  • Push Learning: The learning comes to you on a regular schedule. You don’t have to remember to do it or set aside large chunks of time.
  • Adaptive: The daily content adapts based on past performance automatically to drive long-term retention while requiring less time.
  • Immediate Feedback: Once a question is answered, detailed educational feedback is provided. Users are also given performance data (their course progress and performance relative to peers) which feeds their addiction to the courses.

I was skeptical. People are supposed to learn by answering questions they at first don’t know the answers to? Yesterday I put together a sample course to put SpacedEd to the test. It took less than an hour all told.

Topics covered:

• Formal & informal learning
• Learning celebrities
• History quiz
• Jeopardy questions

When you complete the course, please leave a review at SpacedEd or a comment below.

Charles Jennings has written that we need to learn less in order to know more. In an age of ubiquitous computing, I don’t need to know all the details if I know where to find them.

SpacedEd could be a great way to learn the core learning content, the small orange dot above.

Top Informal Learning links for the first month of 2010.

Yesterday’s #lrnchat was on crowdsourcing. This is an example. The crowd picks this list, not I.

1. Protecting Reputations Online in Plain English- Common Craft – Explanations In Plain English -, January 6, 2010
2. A Few Thoughts on the Nexus One- OReilly Radar, January 5, 2010
3. Networking Reconsidered- HarvardBusiness.org, January 4, 2010
4. Tonight On CrunchGear: Live At CES- TechCrunch, January 7, 2010
5. The opposite of “open” is “theirs”- Joho the Blog, January 14, 2010
6. Tools for Finding Creative Commons Images- Full Circle, January 2, 2010
7. What’s going on with OAuth?- OReilly Radar, January 8, 2010
8. Three Questions Executives Should Ask for the New Year- HarvardBusiness.org, January 4, 2010
9. The Neural Advantage of Speaking 2 Languages- Scientific American, January 21, 2010
10. Questioning Pedagogy- Half an Hour, January 4, 2010
11. Blog – The Case of the Collider and the Great Black Hole- Technology Review Feed – Tech Review Top Stories, January 4, 2010
12. Skinner Box? There’s an App for That- OReilly Radar, January 4, 2010
13. A Better Way to Manage Knowledge- HarvardBusiness.org, January 19, 2010
14. 2010: My Fifth Annual List Of The Tech Products I Love And Use Every Day- TechCrunch, January 1, 2010
15. Facebook’s Zuckerberg Says The Age of Privacy is Over- ReadWriteWeb, January 9, 2010
16. Electric Icarus: NASA Designs a One-Man Stealth Plane- Scientific American, January 19, 2010
17. Google and China: What’s the real story, and where does it go from here?- OReilly Radar, January 14, 2010
18. The Future of Decision Making: Less Intuition, More Evidence- HarvardBusiness.org, January 7, 2010
19. Ten Technologies That Will Rock 2010- TechCrunch, January 1, 2010
20. Top 10 YouTube Videos of All Time- ReadWriteWeb, January 10, 2010
21. Challenging Mindsets: From Reverse Innovation to Innovation Blowback- Edge Perspectives with John Hagel, January 6, 2010
22. Top 10 eLearning Predictions for 2010- eLearning Technology, January 18, 2010
23. How Ford Got Social Marketing Right- HarvardBusiness.org, January 7, 2010
24. The Father of All Business Models- Doc Searls Weblog, January 6, 2010
25. Idle Minds and What They May Say about Intelligence- Scientific American, January 6, 2010
26. Top Tools For Tracking Topics on the Web- ReadWriteWeb, January 21, 2010
27. Congratulations Crunchies Winners! Facebook Takes Best Overall For The Hat Trick- TechCrunch, January 8, 2010
28. The Decade in Management Ideas- HarvardBusiness.org, January 1, 2010
29. Knowledge sharing across silos: Part II- Cognitive Edge, January 12, 2010
30. Flattery Will Get You Far- Scientific American, January 11, 2010
31. Everyday RFID- Purse Lip Square Jaw, January 4, 2010
32. We go with the flow- Mind Hacks, January 28, 2010
33. Four pointers to the chasm between elearning and video game designers- edublogs, January 4, 2010
34. 20 Best Marketing And Social Media Blogs By Women- Forbes.com: News , January 14, 2010
35. The Best Times to Buy Anything, All Year Round [Buying Guide] - Lifehacker, January 5, 2010
36. Massive increase in words consumed- Donald Clark Plan B, January 6, 2010
37. China rising- The Long Now Blog, January 18, 2010
38. Are You Ready For The 21st Century ?- Wirearchy, January 9, 2010
39. Open course-wars, redux… the real nastiness is elsewhere- Abject Learning, January 5, 2010
40. Bright Green: Collapsible Shipping Containers- Fast Company, January 11, 2010
41. Do I Need to Know It, or Just How to Find It?- Workplace Learning Today, January 20, 2010
42. The K-factor Lesson: How Social Ecosystems Grow (Or Not)- Dion Hinchcliffe’s Web 2.0 Blog, January 5, 2010
43. Michael Allen describes the future of authoring systems- Internet Time, January 5, 2010
44. The End of the Industrial Training Era- Informal Learning, January 2, 2010
45. Facebook usage statistics by country – Dec 31st 2009- Robert Paterson’s Weblog, January 11, 2010
46. Disabled Girl’s $10k Laptop Computer Stolen – Turns Up On Craigslist- Lockergnome Blog Network, January 11, 2010
47. Blogging as an Exercise of the Brain- Irving Wladawsky-Berger, January 2, 2010
48. Community as Curriculum – vol 2. The Guild/Distributed Continuum- Dave’s Educational Blog, January 27, 2010
49. Blog Post: If traditional incentives can have a negative impact, what’s the workaround?- Gurteen Knowledge-Log, January 11, 2010
50. Adaptive Path in 2010: A Look Forward- Adaptive Path, January 6, 2010

I find lists like this great for serendipitous learning. There’s always something I haven’t tripped over before. Informal learning is like that.

Prediction #1: The iPad will make eLearning sexy again.
Prediction #2: The excitement will fade within six months.