What’s happening in e-learning…

Not that this is a surprise, but we are in the midst of a global social revolution – you may have heard about it…

It’s called the “social web”, and it’s making networking and participation easier than ever, in whatever area of life you enjoy, the hot new thing to do and discuss.

Apologies in advance to anyone who has read up on this, as you are not likely to learn anything new here.

Brief history lesson

Web 1.0 was what we were all using in the late 90s – using it, you could pretty much tell web visitors about yourself or your company in a kind of online “brochure” web site, hoping that they will be interested enough to email you, call you, or better yet, order something from you online.

Web 2.0 – think of it as wikis, blogs, pod (or web) casts, web quests, and sites like YouTube, MySpace, FaceBook, Second Life, Wikipedia – wants to know what you think – about everything. It wants to know whether you have anything you’d like to share.

Who cares and who’s listening? Anyone and everyone who shares your interests, has a bit of time, and an internet connection. Interested in 13^th century Pekinese dogs – just the brown ones? There’s likely to be a network out there for you, and 157,815 active participants.

What can you do there? Share, contribute, comment, vote, rate, edit – even live a virtual second life. And it really doesn’t matter if you have no idea of how to operate the digital video camera you just got out of the drawer – that’s all part of the fun of sharing your (until now) hidden skills, and thumbing your nose at Hollywood.

Web 2.0 is not really distinguished as exciting new web technology, but it does represent a new way to deliver time-honoured models of participation. Web 2.0 forms have been called “weapons of mass collaboration”^{1 – “Wikinomics” Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams, 2006}, and new businesses are popping up daily to take advantage of these new phenomena.

There seem to be two schools of thought about Web 2.0:

• School 1: Web 2.0 is no big deal… We’ve been writing our opinions in letters and emails forever, and we have no problem commenting and responding!We grew up collaborating on school and work projects, and we’re very proficient at voting, judging and ranking one another.

  We have always had ideas on how to improve every product, politician, and purpose, but we have always liked to be asked first (well, some of us anyway…). If we needed to be heard, we wrote a letter to the Editor, or

  There’s nothing new here – maybe a bit of new technology.
  
  

• School 2: Web 2.0 is a BIG deal… We may know how to write, comment, vote, contribute and collaborate, but we’ve never had such an audience!Never before, in the history of mankind, have we had so much of the world wanting to hear what we think!

  Never before have we had access to so many opinions, so many ideas, and so many experts. And aren’t we having fun as never before, overflowing with opinions, information and new perspectives on life?

  The world is changing in a very significant way – some pundits equate what we’re going through now to the shift from the industrial to the information age in the late 20^th century.

  There’s plenty new here, and it’s not technology – it’s changing the way many people spend their time, and it’s hitting the global corporate world big time.

The winner

The second school of thought looks a winner here, we think. The reason we think so is that so many industries, corporations and governments are recognising that there is big value in mining the opinions, ideas, and participation-inclination of so many, for so little money spent, and they’re fighting to get there first. Where there’s smoke…

Best of all, there are no significant barriers to entry into this new world of participation. Individuals can access it now very cheaply, and given the proliferation of wireless networks, they no longer have to be at home to do it. For some people, time is not money – it’s their new currency, and it has suddenly gained value.

Web 2.0 has allowed this to happen, but it’s the response of so many people, giving so much of their time, which has given it traction. Everyone seems to want to SHARE – scarily so.

So what does this mean to the average corporation?

For some, it’s a bit scary. Organisations like control.

The idea of an unmonitored blog site is extremely frightening, from time management and legal perspectives. What if some idiot says something that doesn’t fairly represent the Corporation? Won’t that open up our potential corporate liability?

Why not monitor it? All signs point to it being perceived as a corporate or management mouthpiece, and usage of the blog will drop like a rock.

The idea that an organisation can self-edit a wiki site is also scary. After all, some people in a company know a lot, and most of the employee population doesn’t know a lot, and that is why they stand in line to talk to the people that know a lot.

Don’t we want just the smart people to edit a wiki? Maybe not – usage of the wiki is likely to be directly tied to the freedom of participation in adding to and editing it.

And new privacy and confidentiality issues are being talked about at all levels of executive management as a result: just as politicians are quickly realising, their ability to control image and message is now being lost to a million mobile phone cameras at hand, and ready to record. This is a slippery slope.

The learning perspective

To many corporate Learning & Development professionals, there is a strong belief in encouraging collaboration in learning, so this is really nothing new. Classrooms work better with it, and e-learning has started to get there in recent years.

Some fear, however, that overuse of collaborative technologies is underpinned by a belief that employees will somehow magically know how to find what they need to know, and be able to tell what’s reliable from what is not.

Think a few years back: high school students writing papers using the new internet – copying and pasting reliable and unreliable sources, blissfully un-judgmental and unaware.

Problem 1: How can employees know what they need to know?

Shouldn’t someone be the instructor, be in control and stand at the front of the room? Shouldn’t someone who knows what they’re doing design the e-learning program – someone who knows best? Or with these new collaborative technologies, are employees going to suddenly be in charge of some of their own learning, and if so, how did they suddenly get so brilliant?

Corporations do like instructors (although they don’t pay them very much), because they represent the spread of approved knowledge – about the right way to behave in a company, about how to best sell a product, and about how to provide great service and make clients happy.

When a corporation utilises Web 2.0 participative models, it steps into a strange new world in which the value an employee receives in using a “corporate” blog or a wiki, and the freedom in which they can participate in it, directly influences their use of it. In other words, if I’m being monitored without knowing it, goodbye new corporate social network!

More and more L&D professionals are asking whether Web 2.0 collaborative learning will take over what they do – after all, if employees are potentially in charge of their own learning, where do their own jobs go?

Our view from the cheap seats? Some employees – admittedly a small group in many companies – do know how to get the learning they need, and don’t need a lot of help. They are what is commonly called “motivated”. Stay out of their way, and offer them carrots only if necessary.

A bigger group of employees do need some assistance. Someone who knows what they’re talking about needs to instruct them in basics, and let them loose in the world of unlimited learning collaboration. A bit of stick, followed by a bit of carrot.

How much will collaborative learning online take from traditional training as practised in many companies? Of course, providing access to learning collaboration will accelerate learning for many employees, decrease time to productivity, provide new learning communities within companies and industries, and solve global warming.

But isn’t it possible that this will all be a bit of…

Problem 2: … wasted time, all in the name of learning?

Since the advent of Web 1.0, companies have generally been afraid of employees going online and surfing, and there is at least some sound data to back this fear up…

Over the years there have been many studies showing substantial employee productivity loss from surfing and fiddling with software set-ups, personalised preferences, etc. More recently, problems have arisen from participation in sites like MySpace, YouTube, FaceBook, blog sites, etc., and increased mobile use in the workplace, text messaging, photos – yipes!

Email activity through corporate email accounts seems to be, at least in part, owned by the company, not the employee.

As a result, many companies have reacted by limiting employee access to all of these fun new things.

Question: won’t all of this actually get worse if employees are provided access to internal corporate blogs, wikis, podcasts, and social networks? Won’t employees waste even more time? Won’t the corporation lose even more control?

Yes, it’s very possible.

Prescient organisations are starting to provide these tools to employees, but are being extremely carefully about monitoring, lest employee fear of observation causes visitation and participation to drop suddenly.

We imagine in years to come that employees will contribute more of what they know to corporate blogs, casts and wikis – and smart organisations will welcome this very inexpensive way to assemble and share knowledge. Exit interviews may become more of an exercise in knowledge capture and sharing, and less “tell us what you don’t like about the company.”

We imagine organisations utilising some of the democratisation functions already prevalent on the web: rating someone’s contribution, participation and online “credentials” – and using these ratings to help with controlling access. Even voting may have an interesting role to play in who, within an organisation, gets to play.

We imagine employee learning will still mostly start with targeted training (remember courses?), but will become more and more about “accessorising” their knowledge – utilising easily accessible knowledge in some of these Web 2.0 tools, and the new tools to come.

Learning about a company’s product line so you can answer customer queries? Take the course assigned to you, but listen to what your colleagues have experienced (casts), look up the definitions and tips they have assembled (wikis), and see what the word in the halls is all about (blogs).

What we used to know as courses will probably look more like grandparents in a photo, surrounded by all sorts of little ones, all helping to form our picture of something.

Stay tuned…

Mickey Clark
Managing Director
The Learning Group

The most common Web 2.0 information types are as follows, and rest assured, this list will be old and out of date by the end of the week:

Podcasts (or netcasts, webcasts, vodcasts).

The term “podcasting” covers a range of media which can be automatically downloaded to either a computer or a personal audio device. The content is usually subscribed to, and delivered in “episodes”, with new episodes being downloaded as they become available.

From a corporate perspective, it is important to ask whether casts will be played on personal audio devices (sometimes called an MP3 player), or on a computer?

Some companies, for example, may offer new employees with an Apple iPod on arriving. Other companies may be highly security conscious and not allow downloads of corporate information on personal devices, but will allow downloads on their work computers.

Option 1: If a personal audio device, then audio, video and text content can be delivered to an employee’s personal player.

This content will not be interactive, but can be automatically updated as new information becomes available, as new episodes. For example, the content may take the form of a series of product videos, with new video episodes automatically added as new products are released.

Option 2: If the content is to be played on the employee’s computer rather than on a personal player, then more options are available for interactive learning content, or “enhanced webcasts”.

In this case, an employee once again subscribes to an updating series of content. The point of the “casting” is that new content arrives automatically on employees’ computers, rather than them having to check (say) their intranet to see if anything new is available.

This webcast can include interactive learning pieces built in technologies such as LearningRoom, HTML or Flash, and these can also have tracking and record results.

An example of an enhanced webcast: an executive is recorded in presentation, and employees are asked to listen to the presentation and quickly answer a few questions about it.

Samples:

http://abc.net.au/services/podcasting/

http://www.un.org/webcast/

Web quests

A web quest is a kind of online exploratory challenge: usually as a learning exercise, employees are asked to either visit certain websites or intranet pages, or perhaps asked to search for a piece of information using their web browser.

Usually the information found will be recorded by the employee in some way – it may be an answer to a question, a description of a procedure, an idea for a new product, or an “open” comment on what they have discovered, etc.

“Interactive web quests” can be created using various technologies, with relevant references, links and descriptions. The employee can then follow links and/or search as appropriate, and then interact with the information they discover, in a variety of question types.

This allows companies to not just provide learning explorations, but track and measure what is found…

An assembly of web quests can be seen at http://www.webquest.org/

Blogs (or web logs)

A blog is a diary-format web site. It allows an author with no special technical skills to create log entries, usually organised and archived by date. There may be more than one author for a given blog. It is very popular as a form of self-publishing content these days.

A company considering allowing its employees to create their own blogs are sometimes concerned about whether to monitor this content (makes it somewhat undesirable for employees to use), or excessive employee time wasting.

Regarding interactivity, readers of the blog can add comments, which can form a discussion thread about the blog entry.

How might a blog be used as a learning experience? A company may want to use a blog as a resource in a web quest, or may simply want employees to contribute to a blog, to share their knowledge or experience – e.g. in how best to answer a client question, to handle a complaint, or to sell a particular product.

Possibly the longest running blog is Dave Weiner’s scripting news, at http://scripting.com, which has been running for nearly 10 years.

Wiki

A wiki is a web site which allows visitors to edit and contribute to it. A wiki is often a reference site, which is then maintained by a community. It is an example of a collaborative environment.

The most famous wiki is Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org.

Companies can use wikis as a central store of knowledge about a particular topic or knowledge area. As with blogs, companies often worry about whether to monitor a wiki, or how much to monitor it.

Similar to a blog, a wiki may be used as a resource in a web quest as a learning experience, or may be used to share employee knowledge or experience.