Experience Required

September 1, 2009 at 2:24 pm · Filed under Culture, Learning, Management, social media

Today’s juxtaposition:

• Via @mcafeee, a pointer to a NYT article by Stanley Fish, What should colleges teach, Part 2
• Tweets by @rhappe on the difficulty of filling executive-level social media positions in large corporations

Fish (@nytimesfish) argues for the importance of teaching English composition as a vital requirement for success in any profession. Happe is thinking that it’s hard to fill senior positions because many people who are skilled in social media lack experience navigating large organizations.

One of the questions these both raise for me is the effect of social media practices on our ability to think and communicate, and especially the need to be able to construct models of thought. Dr. Fish provides a wonderful example of how he teaches the “neither/nor” construct, not as a “rule,” but as an experience of learning the pattern. Similarly, I think that the ability to navigate large organizations comes from time spent experiencing the territory.

What is the experience, what are the learning patterns being developed as laptop-toting students express themselves using shorthand? Yes, they (and we who tweet, blog, and befriend) are learning to cope with fragments and put those pieces together. Yes, I believe that the primarly new skill of management is the ability to manage complex sets of interactions and set up boundaries and spaces for possibility to emerge. And yes, I know that the trajectory of my own career experience is based fundamentally on my ability to write.

“Social Learning” Will Be a Core Design Element in the Knowledge Workplace

July 20, 2009 at 1:48 pm · Filed under Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, Intranets, Learning, productivity, social tools

As many of you will know, there’s been a debate going on for some time now about the relative effectiveness and the ROI of formal and informal learning (formal learning being structured-and-scheduled courses and other measurable forms of content delivery, informal learning being the myriad ways people exchange information that becomes incorporated into one’s perspective or ways of doing things).

This debate has been intensified by the growing presence and uptake of collaborative platforms which seek to engage peoples’ social tendencies and mimic the ways they interact with information and each other to get things done.

The points made by these three executives from T Rowe Price, Sun Microsystems and Booz Allen Hamilton aren’t new to those of us who have been following and facilitating the uptake of this new generation of knowledge work tools and methods. 

They do, however, underscore how clear it is that the dynamics spawned by a half-decade’s experience with social computing and social networks will undergo a massive migration into the knowledge workplace of the near future.

.

Learning Executives Discuss Social Learning at the ASTD 2009 International Conference

.

Powered by Qumana

Learning from Each Other

June 30, 2008 at 5:09 pm · Filed under Collective intelligence, Enterprise 2.0, Learning, Web 2.0

A colleague of mine teaches a course in Online Social Networks the Computer Science department at Boston University. He’s done it for two years now, and his teach method has come under some scrutiny, for what he does is pretty novel in a traditional university setting. During the course, each student needs to create a web site as part of required credits for the course work. What my friend doesn’t do it is either to tell them how to do it, or provide him with tools for web site building. He gives them enough direction so that they know where to look and get started, but after that they are on their own — almost. What he aims for is that the students will ask each other what they are doing, where they found good (free) tools to build web sites, and so on. Most of his students come away delighted with the course, though there are always a few who complain that B. doesn’t teach them anything. They overlook, of course, the fact that they actually learned a good deal.

I had similar experience recently during Enterprise 2.0 and the blogging panel that I was on (see my blog on this at Networks, Complexity, and Relatedness). I am saving some bits about content and conversation for a more comprehensive note here on the AppGap anon. We on the panel had decided that we would like to do less talking and more listening so we did not do a usual panel with powerpoints. We merely introduced ourselves and started a conversation, intending to be open to questions and comments from the audience. We ended with a really rich discussion about blogging for business (that was, in fact, not really the topic we’d prepared to discuss). The audience participation was great, including a lot of information about blogging that we as panelists would never have known. Yet, in the conference wrap-up session, I took note when one of the attendees offered the comment that she was very unhappy with panels that didn’t provide content. That is, she came to be taught, and not to enter into a conversation. (We also had attendees who were thrilled with the way it all turned out.)

Learning from each other is a recurring theme for John Seely Brown (JSB), whom I heard talk a few months ago at a client’s. What he said was, “Learning from each other matters.” Speaking of formal education, he said, “we learn from other people in the room, not from graduate school.” Think of the best courses, the best seminars that you attend. Aren’t these the ones that generate the most conversation, that inspire people to share their stories? Learning occurs socially, which is why he feels strongly that Web/Enterprise 2.0 represents the future of learning.

At a subsequent panel on “Developing a Next Generation Workforce,” led by Mike Gotta. That was another great exercise in learning from each other. The conversation wanted to talk mostly about the “millennials/Generation Y” and the impact of their entrance into the workforce. An Xer piped up and made a comment that makes me understand how this shift to social learning is generational. She said, “It all goes back to how we learned in elementary school. When I was in school, we were told that when we finished our assignment we could work quietly on homework or other reading. The Gen-Yers are told that when they finish, they should help someone else.”

I see this as all of a piece: learning to share, learning to learn from others. The role of the instructor? As Andrew McAfee put it (in yet another session at E2.0), the best advice he received when he started teaching at Harvard was to “trust your students,” that is, to set up a classroom environment in which the students are learning not (just) from the teachers, but from each other and collectively building up knowledge.

Person Andrew McAfee

Right click for SmartMenu shortcuts