Reblogged from Heutagogy Community of Practice:

Reblogged from connectivité:

  by  mallix 

As you may have noticed from my last entry, I am interested in how virtual knowledge sharing networks—virtual communities of practice—can be fostered and maintained through social media and/or other e-strategies. In organisations, it is proposed this continual sharing and learning helps the firm to remain competitive and able to respond to change. Also, there is huge potential for tacit knowledge to be shared, and with  …

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In less than a week… it’s #etmooc time! Are you warmed up  yet?

Reblogged from User Generated Education:

I’m feeling a tad guilty that I didn’t write a reflection on 2012 last week, but c’est la vie. I also haven’t been reading as much as of late due to the fact that I’ve been steeped in various projects. However, here are some interesting things I’ve encountered:

• This handy guide to different major learning theories—visualised!
• One method to automatically populate Twitter lists, which was recommended by Michelle Franz .  
• Cultivating a Personal Learning Network that Leads to Professional Change: A dissertation on Personal Learning Networks (PLNs). There is tons of theory and context (and I’m sure other goodness that I have yet to fully dig into).
• A really insightful article about agile project management—a process that makes sense given the increasing complexity of work problems and our own cognitive limitations.
• Need a guide to help your self-directed learning? The Peeragogy Handbook (v1) is out! (download or print version).
• Edited to add: This amazing resource from Harold Jarche on how social networks can help enable the shift towards the ‘coherent organization’.

C’est tout!

Reblogged from Learning in the workplace:

As you will remember the Caledonian Academy conducted some research during the recent Change11 MOOC run by George Siemens, Stephen Downes and Dave Cormier.  The study generated a lot of data, which has been sitting on my desk for some months now. The hypothesis for the study was that we would observe different learning behaviours and different approaches to learning in MOOCs among those with different SRL profiles.

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Reblogged from johnstepper:

Recently, I’ve been talking to dozens of people about career insurance - how working out loud can help them shape their reputation and control their career. In almost every conversation, people were unsure of how to build a purposeful network.

Where do you start? How do you find the right people? What’s the best way to get to know them?

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When teams begin to work in matrices, collaborating across functions and geographies, the skills, behaviours and competencies required for work must also change. This is what I heard yet again this week in a networked learning webinar that I attended. I also learned that leaders around the executive tables across the globe—regardless of industry—are demanding significant performance gains from staff in times of limited human resources.

This recent article from Chief Learning Officer describes the issue well:

According to the Bersin & Associates study, large business investment in social learning tools nearly doubled in 2011 to $40,000. Social learning is no longer an experiment. Companies increasingly use it to drive innovation in their learning organizations. By allowing employees to collaborate, share ideas and exchange information, organizations are empowering users to teach one another and are supporting conversations that naturally foster creativity and problem solving.

The investment in social learning is another example of U.S. companies reinvesting in training to address the skills gap. It also signals a turning away from formal classroom training and traditional e-learning programs to only deliver learning workers need, just in time…

The recession only increased the pressure on learning organizations to become more cost effective, leverage online social learning and align more closely with business needs. These pressures also forced a change in roles within the learning function. Traditional classroom instructors are now delivering more training online and in one-to-one sessions. Learning organizations are moving beyond order taking and are building consulting skills to provide effective recommendations and solutions to business partners.

Again, the statistics on firms’ current capacity for networked performance show that there is a lot of room for improvement—only 1/3^rd of employees are currently displaying capability for networked learning.  We cannot ask individuals to work harder, only smarter and the key to doing this comes down to embedding networked learning activities into daily workflows to help drive network performance. Again, informal learning is where the greatest gains lie and in times of tight budgets, this is welcome news. We all need to learn to ‘work smarter’ and Jane Hart has been working on determining how to introduce this to learners in organisations. (I’m looking forward to seeing where this work leads.)

Though informal learning is the area that provides the greatest impact, networked learning skills should be reinforced throughout other learning activities in the organisation, including formal training. Note: formal training should include intact teams and those who work together through workflows to help allow time for teams to learn and practice how to work and learn together in more of a networked environment. Employees who work together should learn together: Learning together helps to build an understanding of the need for reciprocity, it can enhance relationships and it also ensures that the learning is relevant to the task at hand.

One interesting example of formal learning that integrates networked learning involves the identification of informal leaders to problem solve issues, motivate their peers and reinforce learning. The idea behind this: Informal leaders are ideal candidates for integrating networked learning activities because of the dynamic between them and their colleagues—they are both connected to the ‘ground’ to help peers see the relevance of the learning to everyday workflows and informal leaders have the respect of their cohort needed to motivate and reinforce what is being learned. Here is one example of how to do that:

1. Informal leaders were gathered and selected to be included in training (in this case, the training was to address safety issues)
2. These informal leaders reviewed safety stories and identified behaviours that were reducing performance. They then identified what should be done differently and how they would influence their peers to achieve this goal (in this case, improving workplace safety).
3. Following this, informal leaders delivered a training session for peers where they identified issues through stories, and suggested ways to work differently to become a safer workplace.
4. These sessions inspire reciprocity—a key part of networked learning/work—as peers, who trust their informal leader colleagues, begin sharing stories about why the issue is important… and in essence learn from each other.

Pretty innovative stuff, IMHO.

Reblogged from johnstepper:

The idea of working out loud - using social platforms to make your work observable and to narrate your work in progress - is becoming more popular. Yet even some who see the value of working out loud will say it’s not right for them.

“I don’t like to toot my own horn.”

“I’m more comfortable quietly doing a good job.”

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Unfortunately, illness sidelined my FF last week. But I’m back!

As the world becomes more interconnected and complex, networks—whether that’s learned through Personal Learning Networks developed in Connectivist Massive Online Open Courses or strategies to work in networks within The Coherent Organization—are proposed as the best means to best cope with this new reality.

Sometimes it’s good to go back to the basics and revisit what’s driving these approaches. Not that it was entirely purposeful on my part to do this (I think I owe more to @FredWBaker for his many contributions to my reading/viewing list in that regard!), but seems that recently I’ve encountered (or have perhaps attuned myself to) more resources about complexity.

This great article by Keith Morrison provides good context for our current state of complexity (and goes on to raise important points about the issues that complexity can have in an educational context):

‘Complex adaptive systems’ (Waldrop, 1992, pp. 294-9) scan and sense the external environment and then make internal adjustments and developments in order to survive in those changing external environments … The creation of a unique, and collective identity gives the system and its constituent elements a capability for survival, through increasing differentiation – they become unlike other systems, and, thereby, their uniqueness provides their niche in the world, and that unique situation contributes to their survival … Of course, being too different, just as being too similar, may be threatening to the system; finding one’s survival niche by being similar to, but also different from others, is tricky. This catches the partially antinomial nature of some aspects of complexity theory: cooperation together with competition, similarity together with difference, individuality with collectivity, connectedness with separation, necessary deviance with necessary conformity, diversity with uniformity, partial predictability with partial unpredictability, solipsism with the need to understand collectivities.

It sounds an awful lot like the foundation for networked learning and Personal Learning Networks (PLNs). It also echoes the collective learning and agility envisioned by Senge for the concept of the learning organisation.

I was also lucky enough to run across an article that helped me to situate Kotter’s older change management work with the great ideas I’ve been following through Harold Jarche and his colleagues at the Internet Time Alliance. Thanks to Harold, I learned that Kotter has apparently realised that resilience to change is best supported by agile networks of collaborative, connected learners. If I’m understanding correctly, Kotter’s old stuff was essentially about enacting change in closed systems.

I also watched this TED talk from George Whitesides about establishing a science of simplicity. There’s a lot to take away, but I’ve pulled out a couple of great quotations below:

“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler” – Einstein

“You know you’ve achieved perfection in design, not when you have nothing more to add, but when you have nothing more to take away.” – de Saint-Exupery

Some other great reads that I enjoyed (including two that are side interests of mine):

• Social Learning Strategies from Jane Hart. This is an amazing resource that I think I completely forgot about regarding the  implementation of social/networked learning (is there a difference?)! All answers are in here, I think!
• Wow. This is the result of a study on what the new work skills/literacies will be by 2020 (link to study included in the article).
• Jesse Stommel’s online learning manifesto. Bang on.
• Bonnie Stewart’s companion piece, “MOOCs Are Not a System“