This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 27th, 2008 at 7:59 am by Dawn and is filed under Industry talk, On-demand learning. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Jay Cross was interviewed for a recent TechRepublic whitepaper entitled, “Informal Learning: Extending the Impact of Enterprise Ideas and Information.” (Free registration is required, search the site’s white papers for ‘informal learning’ and you’ll turn it up easily.)
This exchange illustrated a key difference between Cross’ idea of where formal and informal learning are best used, based on whether the highly structured information is part of the course or the learner’s own understanding:
Wagner: How does informal learning differ from formal learning? And how, if at all, is it the same?
Cross: Formal and informal learning are both learning. They both involve building new neural connections in the brain and adapting to new conditions. They are very much the same. They co-exist.
Imagine a spectrum of learning. One band along the continuum is formal. It frequently takes an industrial-age approach. It’s regimented. Instructions come down from above. Inspectors check on productivity. Frequently, it’s a production-line approach to learning. It’s useful for indoctrinating groups of people with similar needs, for example, novices in a technical environment.
… Just as formal learning is appropriate for novices, informal learning is frequently the best route for people who have already structured the way they see the world or an area of expertise. They aren’t looking for courses or the big picture; they just want to learn what they need to plug a hole in their mental tapestry—just what it takes to get something accomplished.
These things are natural as can be, but we’ve become so inured to confusing schooling with learning that we miss what’s really going on. …
Cross describes formal learning as a format that’s often too slow to be able to keep up with the pace of modern business needs and too unresponsive to any knowledge held by the learners themselves.
Social media can be understood in this way as an extension of conversation, which Cross asserts is the way much of our learning is conducted, anyway. Get people talking more, get them interacting with each other in response to standard training materials instead of just experiencing it in isolation, and more learning just happens.
But is that the same thing as performance support? Tony Karrer responds here to another piece by Cross, saying that while he finds the technologies useful, he doesn’t see them as being the same thing:
[Cross]Overall, what are corporate blogs, feeds, aggregators, wikis, mash-ups, locator systems, collaboration environments, and widgets, if not performance support?
I don’t think that having these things constitutes performance support - or at least not performance support as originally defined. I would say that they come closer to knowledge management than performance support. Or maybe this is all definitional and we are talking about the next generation of what I called ePerformance back in 2003. These resources are rich information bases, expertise locators, learning enablers, etc. But, not really performance support - at least not as Gloria [Gery] defined it. There will need to be another layer to make these things performance support.
In fact, I would claim that because of general lack of skills around the use of these things - as we discuss at work literacy - that they are far away from being performance support. Instead, they enable new kinds of solutions, but they don’t make a novice proficient. …
If these tools aren’t directly performance support by the strictest definition, they do seem to enable peer-mediated, conversational support. Cross noted in the whitepaper that one of the commonest ways people seek out information is by asking a nearby colleague. What are the chances they know the right answer? He pointed out that this is common practice, and likely most people can see that it’s true from their own experience.
Though maybe social media can act as an intermediated performance support mechanism, by increasing the chances that when you ask that question of the person in the next cube, they’ll either have the right answer or know where to look.
If a person is interacting with their colleagues, maybe even colleagues in the same field but at another company, through social media, chances are that they’re getting a steady trickle of useful and relevant information through one of the friends’ activity feeds, reading blogs or tracking one of the microblogging formats. They won’t read it all, can’t.
But then someone new (or new to a topic) comes along with a question you aren’t sure of the answer to, and it’s a strong impulse to just say something, maybe anything, to sound like you know what you’re talking about. We’ve all been there, right? And this is where all that experience in social media steps into the void.
‘Oh, so-and-so writes about this all the time, check their blog.’ ‘I saw a link go by on my Twitter feed about that last week, let me find it.’ ‘Let’s find out who the wiki editor is for that subject, or the most active contributors.’
The social media user becomes practiced in the art of referral, of being an informal reference librarian for certain topics. It plugs people in to a very active sort of knowledge management that’s constantly reinforcing the information about where to find information. We store our knowledge in other people with greater ease and latitude.
I’m not absolutely sure what would be the most descriptive thing to call that, I just like it.
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