Informal Learning via Social Media: An Example

Explaining the power of informal learning via social media to non-believers can be challenging because in most cases, the non-believers are not social media users and therefore it's easy to revert to "you just have to try it, then you'll understand."  That simply doesn't work with some people.  You need to give them something more tangible to get them to try it.

I had two very specific examples of tangible benefits this week.  One example involved the use of Twitter at a relatively small in-house conference and was 100% work-related.  The other example belongs to the critical gray area of professional interest that s not directly work-related.  I am documenting both, but I'll focus here on the second on.

I recently purchased The Working Smarter Fieldbook.  I've been following the authors from a digital distance for a while, whether on blogs, Twitter or other channels and I purchased the book or rather, the PDF file.  As I started reading through it on my Kindle, I noticed little black squares and my first thought was that some images were missing.  Something must have gone wrong with the PDF, I thought.  After all, this is an unbook, it's not meant as a perfect final product.  I didn't think too much of it.

A couple of days later, I am attending an in-house conference (the same one where I had that other informal learning experience via Twitter) and one of the presenters has an image of the funny little black squares on his slide.  He must have said only two words about it but that was the trigger.  It wasn't a missing picture, it was content I was missing out on because I had no clue what it was.  Now I knew it had a name, it was a QR (Quick Response) code. Armed with that information, I googled QR, ended up on the Wikipedia page.  The next challenge was to get back to the book I had first encountered them in and figure out how to "read" them. Post a question about it on the Yammer Social Learning Community, simultaneously google QR "reader", find the free iPhone app, and that was it, I was all giddy about my discovery.. so excited about it I had to tell a colleague about it later in the day.  Checked the Yammer Social Learning Community later on and there were a dozen or so messages with links to additional information, examples of how people use QRs, etc, etc..  One post specifically answered one of my remaining questions.  If the QR in a book is just taking you to a website, why not just put a standard URL?  The answer is that a URL doesn't change and you'd have to reprint your book or document if you change the URL.  The QR doesn't change.  You can set it to change where it takes you.

Connected the whole thing to a presentation I had seen months ago about Augmented Reality.
Started noticing QR codes at the mall, tried one  -- the first hand experience remains key in understanding what it does.
Started writing this blog post, which took me to additional resources, including the video below.





Resources collected in the process:

• Twitter Account: QR Code News @QcodesR
• 7 Things You  Should Know about QR Codes
• Mobile tagging (Facebook page)
• The World Park (YouTube)

Social Business Software and KM - Percolating

I do my best to leave work at the office and switch the brain to non-work related things when I close the office door.  Sometimes, though, work sticks to my brain. It's often a question or a set of questions that need to percolate for a while. The office isn't a very good place for reflection, so I tolerate reflection and percolation during off-hours.

Here are some of the questions currently percolating:

1. How to ensure a KM impact for social business software
If a social business software is introduced within the organization with the specific purpose of improving internal communications, how can I make sure that the implementation also supports knowledge management?

a.  I set up a KM community within the new platform and champion KM through that space, potentially replicating perceptions of KM as something the KM office does rather than something everybody should be doing (Big Foot approach).

b. I seed KM-related comments, suggestions, resources, etc.. throughout the various communities, turning myself into the annoying KM guru-wannabe who obviously has too much time on her hands.

c.  I make sure not to refer to anything I do as KM and I actively participate in relevant communities, modeling the behavior I'd want to see from all employees with regards to KM (super-stealth approach).

2. Competition between Tools / Too Much of a Good Thing?
If a social business software is introduced within the organization when another tool (a wiki) is on the rise, will there be competition between the two sets of tools and how do you prevent confusion regarding the purpose of each tool?

a. Yes, there will be confusion unless the differences are clearly explained and the two tools are presented as complementary rather than competing.

b. People are going to be reluctant to learn two new tools.  They'll insist on using one or the other because they already know how to use it, rather than pick the most appropriate tool for the task.

c. There's enough space for everyone to play in both playgrounds.  I'm worrying too much and it's a non-issue.

d. It will take so much time to deploy this social business software that everyone will have already developed their space in the wiki and there will be little demand for the new tool.

3. We need PKM too, don't we?
I strongly believe that most people in organizations could use a little Personal Knowledge Management before jumping into Organizational Knowledge Management, yet talking about PKM is even less likely to be well received than KM.  How do I push forward with what I strongly believe in?

a. Go to the KM boss (my boss) and suggest a PKM workshop or online course (yeah, right... I must have lost my mind for a second).

b. Build a PKM module on my personal page in the existing wiki and point people to it  (add a link in my email signature as a starting point).  Don't tell the boss, just do it.

c. Mention PKM in every single conversation until there's a buzz around the term and the top leadership decides we need one of those (just kidding!).

Related Resources

• Some lessons about capacity building in social media for development organizations in the South, January 24, Lasagna and Chips (blog)
  There is a simple diagram in the post mentioned just above that struck me as on the spot and also reflects my perspective on KM.  With KM and with social media tools, you can't build anything at the organizational level until you have a critical mass of individuals interested (practicing personal knowledge management and using social media for their own individual benefit).

• Knowledge Management Below the Radar (blogs.hbr.org)
• Social knowledge management wasn't built in a day (inmagicinc.blogspot.com)
• Sorting through Enterprise 2.0 vs Social Business on Quora (prmktgcamp.com)
• Tools and techniques for knowledge management - KnowledgeBoard (knowledgeboard.com)

The New Social Learning

I've just finished reading The New Social Learning: A Guide to Transforming Organizations Through Social media, by Tony Bingham and Marcia Conner.  It's an easy read, full of examples of how organizations have done it. 

• I can see how social media tools can greatly support ambient awareness and individual learning in the sense that it can help anyone stay current professionally.  It's great for personal knowledge management (if you incorporate reflection time).
• The new social learning helps you connect to a great variety of people you would not have connected with otherwise, but does it really help you in the daily work routine.  For some positions and organizational functions (if your work involves attending a lot of conferences, if you work in the public affairs office of an organization, the knowledge management office, etc), social media is transforming the nature of work.   I'm not sure this is the case for the majority of jobs.  It has also transformed personal knowledge management and informal professional development for everyone.
• How do social media tools affect group / team learning?  I will probably have to take a closer look at the book but I didn't see a lot in there about how social media support small teams and group learning. I can see how it supports learning in a very broad and general sense, but I am more interested whether social media can be applied effectively in small group settings and how. The book doesn't seem to pay a lot of attention to the difference between social media tools that support global connections vs. enterprise 2.0 tools that are really more internally oriented (with some connections to external partners). I have a feeling that many organizations are still struggling with just that and are having to define or redefine how enterprise 2.0 is not just getting employees more connected to the outside world but also more connected internally . Some social media tools are much more appropriate than others for group and team learning.  I'm thinking of the potential of wikis in particular.

• The amount of space dedicated to countering possible detractors is telling, but the critics are not specifically targeting the learning aspect of social media, they're targeting social media in general.  The authors don't claim that learning through social media replaces all learning, but they also don't touch on how this new social learning fits in with other types of learning (such as "learning from experience").

• In my current place of employment, I have recently attended two sessions on social media, both of which were entirely focused on the use of public social media and offered a very PR-oriented approach (how do we get the word out about our wonderful work).  There is nothing wrong with that but I fear that if our collective understanding of social media doesn't go beyond that, we'll be missing out on the greatest opportunities.
  
• You do have to read all the examples offered in the book with a grain of salt.  There was one particular example that made me raise an eyebrow because I knew something about it first hand and... well, the best way to put it would be to say that I have a different interpretation of how successful it was.

Related resources:

• A Framework for Social Learning in the Enterprise (Harold Jarche, February 2010). 
• A book I've had on my shelf for a while: Informal Learning: Rediscovering the Natural Pathways that Inspire Innovation and Performance, by Jay Cross (2006).

Related articles by Zemanta

• Taping the Potential of Enterprise 2.0 for Workplace Learning (fastforwardblog.com)
• Enterprise 2.0 & Social Media Strategies: Social Software - An Enterprise Perspective - Part 1: SWOT Analysis of Wikis (milosvujnovic.blogspot.com)
• Informal Learning :: marciaconner.com (marciaconner.com)

What's YOUR Social Media Policy?

As social media enter the workplace, intentionally or not, organizations in the public and private sector are rushing to develop social media policies and/or adding social media sections to their employee handbook. Some of it is preemptive, some is reactive.

Preemptive
An organization launches an enterprise social networking tool and various groups consulted raise concerns. Human resources has concerns. The legal team has concerns. There are so many unknowns. Let's dig up all existing policies and make sure we add to it to cover all eventualities -- most of which we can't predict. Those we can predict are typically already covered by existing policies.

Reactive
An organization just had a negative experience with some internal abuse of social networking tools and decides to clamp down on anything and everything that might happen in the future. You can spot a policy that emerges from such a situation if some of the language refers to situations that would only apply to a small number of employees.

Whether the policy work is preemptive or reactive, I wonder whether the authors of such policies ever consider how their words might be interpreted by employees.

Employee Reactions
* "That's just the official policy, nobody cares about what the policy says. Just be careful and don't get caught. They can't monitor everyone all the time anyway."
* "Wow! They can use that to fire me if they want to. As a matter of fact, they can probably find something in there to fire anyone if they really want to get rid of someone."
* "They're just targeting employees who get caught watching porn at the office or who spend their days surfing the web and don't do the work. It doesn't really apply to me."
* "Fine. I get what this is all about. Security, productivity, I get it. I think it's time I develop my own policies." :)

Here are some ideas -- not restricted to social media:

* I shall not share links to my personal social bookmarking site with my employer even if 99% of my bookmarked resources are work-related. By extension, I shall not share any relevant web-based information with my employer or co-workers if the information was found during off-hours.
* I shall never use my personal computer to do any employer-related work. It doesn't matter if my computer has the necessary software and the work site computer doesn't. Downloading free software to the work site computer is an obvious no-no.
* By extension, I shall never use my own pens, paper or other supplies to do any employer-related work.
* I shall never try to bypass red tape / bureaucratic processes in order to get the work done. Forget about common sense. It's a myth. Policy rules!
* I shall make sure I understand policy thoroughly and send as many clarifying emails as I feel necessary to my supervisor. Better swamp their email box than get fired over some misunderstanding.
* I shall limit the number of times I check my work email during off-hours. I shall never respond to a work email during off-hours. I shall never check my work email on weekends.
* I shall not think about work too much during off-hours. 15 minutes a day is the limit.
* I shall not mention my employer (especially not in any favorable way) on my blog or other social media tool. By extension, my employer's name shall appear only on my CV.
* I shall not arrive at work early or leave late. Any encroachment on personal time is totally unacceptable.
* I shall make sure to separate employer-related knowledge from what I really know. Only employer-related knowledge is relevant at work.
* I shall investigate surgery or mind-control techniques that might allow me to better separate the part of the brain that deals with employer-related work and the rest of my brain. We wouldn't want too much collaboration between the two. There is no such thing as a gray area of professional interests that isn't directly job-related. That gray area is a danger zone. The brain has two sides: job-related brain vs. personal brain. Everything that is not strictly job-related is personal and therefore should not be used at work.
* Self-censorship is the best policy. Anything that might be misinterpreted should be deleted, never spoken and forgotten.
* I shall make sure that no one reads my blog. If one person reads it, it's one too many. Who knows what they might read into this post?

Get it? Obviously, I'm taking it a little too far and I can laugh at it, but I wish employers would lighten up a bit too. What do we really need? Training? Yes. Policy-driven fear of termination? I don't think so.

Oh, by the way, this has obviously nothing to do with my own employer. I wouldn't want this post to be interpreted as criticism -- that would be against official policy. :)

Oops! I am in clear violation of my own policy. Just spent more than 15 minutes thinking about work-related issues during off-hours... on a Saturday, no less!

Related articles by Zemanta

• Red Cross Social Media Strategy/Policy Handbook: An Excellent Model (beth.typepad.com)