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I was having a conversation with someone yesterday afternoon about how the number of software vendors offering wikis, blogs, discussions boards, rapid elearning, etc. was enormous and that there would certainly come a time when things would begin to consolidate and major players would begin to emerge.  This will prevent organizations from having to cobble together these elements and the pain and inefficiencies associated with cobbling.

An ‘ERP of Learning’ is sure to be on the horizon was the synopsis of our talk - then I saw a press release from OutStart today [note - this is not my prediction that this is the 'Learning ERP'...just an indication that it's a comin'] detailing the merger of OutStart and Eedo.

As Chief Learning Officers become more prevalent and powerful and as the trends in learning continue to incorporate elements of informal learning (i.e. communities of practice) and others suitable for knowledge workers it will be an exciting time to watch as the various software offerings in the learning space make moves to secure their future or their fate - there are certainly demands in the market for this functionality and a sole source vendor to provide it doesn’t exist yet.

It’s our combined thoughts that bring us great things.

What a great quote, eh?

This came straight from my wife after a couple years of explaining to her what I do for a living.  After all the talk of wikis, social networking, collective intelligence, blogs, knowledge management, Web 2.0, etc. it was her that boiled it down to that statement.

Being so mired in the world of next-generation learning and development I am accustomed to, and comfortable with, the buzzwords of the trade but it’s sometimes difficult to translate the purpose and benefit of all of these funny sounding things to someone that has little insight into this world.

And her statement summed up quite a bit of it.  So much so that when she said it I sat up straight and wrote it down on a bar napkin [a relic of pre-Web 2.0 for any Gen Nexters that may be reading].

The more I thought about it this really encompasses the theory driving this revolution in how people learn, collaborate, innovate, communicate, etc. and the buzzwords are really just the ‘how.’  Communities of practice, social network analysis, rapid elearning, knowledge management and many others are just methods to accomplish the purpose of my wife’s synopsis - harnessing the power of people connected.

As with many other examples, it takes an outsider’s lens to shed a light of clarity on a topic that can become quite complex when left to the experts.

My Dad grew up in a rural part of Kentucky in the late 30’s and early 40’s. The automobile certainly wasn’t ubiquitous during that period and many of my Dad’s encounters with cars involved some sort of trouble. If they were able to get the engine to start it usually didn’t take long before one of the tires was flat.

Fast forward to 1995 and my first exposure to the Internet. I feel like I’ll be regaling my own children someday about the trials and tribulations from the early days of the Information Superhighway. I’m preparing my stories now…

“Back in my day we used dial-up to connect only after a few minutes of the most unusual noises you can imagine. Then came wireless and we used to have to unlpug and restart our routers daily to keep connected…you kids don’t know how good you have it.”

It doesn’t have quite the same impact as walking to school in the snow with cardboard shoes uphill both ways but, hey, it’s what I know.

Due to our heavy travel schedules my wife and I work from home quite a bit.  Our internet service went out yesterday and this is just the latest in a long line of events that seem to want to keep us disconnected. I know that children being born today will not have these issues to contend with as we’re still in the infancy stage of the World Wide Web and things will only get more seamless.

When I check into a hotel or log onto a remote network there is always a slight sense of relief when I see my home page load.  This is a feeling that my yet-to-be-born children will likely never know.  Being connected to the Internet to them will worry them as much as starting my car worries me today - and that’s not much.

It’s exciting to be part of the beginning of the Internet revolution that has catapulted us into a knowledge society - using Web 2.0 technology I can now compile all of the stories needed to assure children and grandchildren that the Internet as they know it is a blessing for which they should rejoice…if only I can stay connected long enough to post this… 

Way back in my undergrad psychology classes we read much about the classic debate over nature vs. nurture in regard to human development. The ‘nature’ camp believed that we are who we are from birth - our genes (nature) determines how we wind up. The ‘nurture’ camp felt that who we become is solely dependent on how we were raised (nurtured) - we are born a blank slate upon which our defining moments sketch out our eventual selves.

Then someone came along and proposed that perhaps nature and nurture each had a part in developing the whole person. This argument was of course called ‘nature/nurture.’

My reaction to this revelation? Duh.

Of course our genes shape who we are. Of course our experiences do too. The warring camps seemed too extreme and too black and white for me. It was clear that some interaction of how we are nurtured built upon how we are naturally resulted in what we become when we grow up.

I felt the same when reading the recent article in Fast Company, Is the Tipping Point Toast?

The author profiles Duncan Watts and his research that theorizes that the Influentials from Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point are a misnomer. Watts suggests that trends ebb and flow more as a factor of the population’s readiness for them as opposed to the people that started them.

I think Watts makes interesting points and that they’re right some of the time. Am I to believe, though, that a popular blogger with a solid reputation for cogent insight is just as likely to stir up interest about something as someone that’s a known spammer? Tough to swallow…

In our work with clients we often start projects with a social network analysis. This dandy piece of software spits out network maps that provide us an x-ray into how information flows through an organization. We can clearly see the people within organizations that are sought out the most often. And they’re not random.

Individuals can become go-to/influential people due to their personality, insight, access or any number of other variables. It’s helpful to identify these individuals and utilize them in a new twist on change management [where influentials are selected to help with communication rather than the shotgun approach of most change initiatives] or knowledge transfer [where knowledge is downloaded from influentials prior to them being transfered or retiring and leaving a knowledge void in the network]. And it’s always been a foundational element in building a thriving learning community/community of practice [CoP].

So while there are elements of a given population having to be ready to accept a trend, there are also certainly factors emanating from different people that will affect the reach and rate of a trend that they [willingly or otherwise] attempt to start. Similar to the nature/nurture debate, there are elements from both sides that come into play when looking at the final outcome.

I’ve been absent from the monthly Big Questions over at the Learning Circuits blog - mainly due to us getting our own new site up and populated. I almost rang in on February but couldn’t pull it together…even with the extra day for Leap Year! I couldn’t resist March’s Big Question though…

“What is the scope of our responsibility as learning professionals?”

More compelling than the question, though, was some of the fodder and follow-up questions that Tony Karrer shared in the post.

• …a Chief Learning Officer panel discussion where it seemed that supporting informal learning or communities of practice was not something they were considering. 
• Do educational institutions and corporate learning and development departments have responsibility for supporting Long Tail Learning? 
• Do they have responsibility for learning beyond what can be delivered through instruction?

It shocked me to hear about the CLO panel discussion. With the overwhelming research out there confirming that today’s workforce is getting more and more of the information they need to do their job through informal means it’s difficult to understand why CLOs would resist supporting communities of practice or broader informal learning.

I feel that learning professionals should support learning. Period. Whatever form(s) of learning that are most beneficial to the workforce (as well as appropriate members of the value-chain) are the ones that should be pursued. There may be some organizations where communities of practice and/or informal learning don’t make sense as part of the learning portfolio but they should at least be considered.

As we move further away from our industrial society and further into our information society it’s my belief that a big part of learning initiatives will be providing easy access to information rather than supplying more information. The advent of Web 2.0 tools arrived at a great time for the renewed interest in communities of practice and I’m sure there is a symbiotic relationship between the two. It’s not about the technology though…it’s about the possibilities that now exist for what knowledge workers can do with the information they need. Now they can be part of creating and shaping the information they need rather than just recipients of content they are prescribed.

This combined with social network analyses and careful crafting of learning communities results in a sophisticated and dynamic learning strategy that happens to mesh well with the dynamic roles of many people in organizations today. It’s becoming increasingly difficult (if not impossible) to fit everything that someone needs to know into a course of any kind. Execution of strategy is or should be changing rather frequently as markets, customers, etc. fluctuate and the traditional forms of training won’t work as the sole solution for the workforce in these organizations. To ignore this is dangerous.

In an age where formal content is often ‘obsolete upon receipt’ it’s my belief that learning professionals will need to widen their scope in terms of what they will consider using as part of their learning portfolio. As with other investments in complex markets, it often pays to be diversified and to focus on areas where you’ll get the greatest return. Discounting new methods for supporting knowledge workers is akin to keeping all of your savings in CDs, bonds or treasury bills…you’re sure to get a little return but you’re not leveraging all of the opportunities out there; some of which may be better suited to your situation and therefore more likely to get you a better return.

Enterprise 2.0 Conference: Lead the Evolution

Enterprise Search Summit

Web 2.0 Expo

The eLearning Guild Annual Gathering 2008

My wife is in sales and I’ve been watching helplessly for the last week or so as she writes/compiles a massive proposal for a potential client.  She’s worked until 5am more than once and is counting on doing it again tonight.  Many of these hours are spent in version control, waiting for others to complete a section and send it in or collecting the edits of multiple people.

I talked to her yesterday about ways to ease the collaboration amongst her team - a wiki being at the top of the list.  She told me they were using SharePoint but it was limited b/c only one person could work on the document at any given time.  SharePoint is a Microsoft product, though, so they have no choice but to use it and don’t have any wiki options.

While the next few weeks are still sure to be hellish for my wife and her team, the future is looking bright.  In this month’s edition of Fast Company, Robert Scoble writes about Microsoft’s Office Live Workspace - their entrance into the Web 2.0 world.  This is great news b/c it’s bringing these technologies to the mainstream and making them accessible to the vast majority of the corporate workforce.

Scoble is “betting Office Live will be a gateway drug for workgroups and companies to explore the full possibilities of office 2.0–and not just Microsoft’s products” and I’m sure he’ll win that bet.  I’m hoping so b/c I would like a greater population to have easy access to the features that will be provided with this.  Some of the roadblocks we’ve encountered in projects that require the use of these informal learning tools certainly include lengthy discussions with the IT department on the compatability of external vendors with their in-house products (usually Microsoft) - not having that as an issue will make the process smoother for all involved.