MindLeaders: Fueling the Learning Revolution

Using Twitter lists to follow great elearning people

As you might know if you read this blog, I believe that Twitter is not about what you say, it's about who you follow. Therefore, one of the most important tricks to Twitter is finding the right people to follow: people who are sharing good information about the things you're interested in.

Twitter's new Lists feature helps out with that. Anyone can create a list of Twitter accounts and label them anything they'd like. One of the first fun things to do with lists is to look at your own (or anyone else's) Twitter account to see if you're on anyone's lists.

Mindleaders is on six people's lists. You can click the "x listed" number to see exactly what lists that account is on.

That exploration can lead you to some good people to follow. But the power of Lists is when you take a step back and look at the wisdom of the crowds.

First of all, the raw number of lists an account is on can tell you a bit about how valuable that account is to other people. It's like judging accounts by their number of followers, but this number is an even better gauge.

Looking for lists in your favorite topic areas? Check out Listorious. This site is serving as a central repository for the lists that everyone has made. Type in any topic to see all of the lists it knows about that deal with that topic.

You can follow a list to follow everyone in it. Or, if you want to take yet another strategic step back, take a look at some of the best lists and see who comes up in them over and over again. That's the way to really mine for gold. Unfortunately, right now Listorious doesn't do that for us except for one generic, over-arching list of "Top 140 Most Listed People," so we have to do that part manually for the time being.

Here are some great elearning and corporate training lists. They can be followed directly, or you can take a closer look at the people being followed for potentials for your Twitter stream:

• corporate-training
• e-learning
• elearning
• lrnchat
• top-elearning blogs

(Good to see in these lists that the "e-learning"/"elearning" debate is still alive and well.)

Have you made any lists of your own yet? Please share your experiences in the comments section!

Social Media's Rise Doesn't Mean Formal Learning is Dead

The landscape of employee development is shifting under our feet. While learning and development organizations are facing lots of changes, two developments are driving most of them.

·     Technology and social media are allowing information to be shared quickly and easily

·     Learning management and talent management are converging

Remember when e-learning came into the market and there was lots of talk about the death of instructor-led training? Stand up training is still here. E-learning is here. And now we have the influx of social media platforms and a lot of chatter about how it will wipe out formal learning (and e-mail and other forms of communication). And guess what? It won’t.

Formal learning is far from dead. The fact that learning management and talent management are converging is one reason why. Integrating learning into career development and performance improvement will always be formalized in organizations. And of course content lends itself to different deliveries. That which lends itself to instructor-led or e-learning formats isn’t likely to be completely replaced by the new social media and information sharing technologies. So social media's rise hardly means the death for formal learning. It does make for some interesting challlenges though.

Learning organizations are faced with helping organizations integrate these technologies in a way that makes sense. New roles will emerge and new skills will become necessary for learning organizations to move forward effectively.  But the ones who can will reap some real benefits. These new technologies let peers easily share information. They allow transparency between groups. They make it harder to blow smoke about what you are up to. They practically eliminate the ability to information-hoard. Yes, there are some who won’t like that much, but the benefit of easily accessible organizational knowledge is well-worth the price.   

Separate your social media updates by audience

We're in the awkward teenage phase of social media and putting information about ourselves online. Everything feels new, and people are terrified and flummoxed by the idea of becoming searchable.

• "You mean that if a future team member Googles me they might find my latest recipes?"
• "How can these college kids put party pictures of themselves online? What will happen when they look for a job later?"

In our office, there's a fun video on YouTube of our chief accountant boogying at his daughter's wedding reception. (I'll be kind and won't share the name or link.) It hasn't hurt his ability to crunch the numbers one bit. Coworkers get a kick out of it and like him better for it.

In ten years (maybe even five), our worries are going to seem silly. Everyone will be able to Google up a photo or two of their boss, coworker, and client in their swimwear or with a drink in their hand. The lines are blurring between work life and the rest of our lives: we're all going to be considered whole people, and it won't hurt our professional credibility. Before long, the people who have no personal lives online will be the strange ones. ("What's she hiding?")

Until then, just like any kind of socializing at work, common sense must prevail, and while we're in these awkward teenage years we have to deal with them. By all means, get out there online and get involved with the social networks. Online information is here to stay, and we'll only learn how to use it well by trying it out. Each of these sites has a different audience, and the best plan right now is to remember that things you share should be geared for each site's listeners. Here's what I mean on some of the most common social networks out there:

Site	Audience	Content
LinkedIn	Public (mostly). Google-able. Business and professional connections of all types.	LinkedIn is the place where you put on your best business clothes - it's designed that way and wants to stay that way. No option here for photos and videos (except for your profile picture - and you should use that!). This site's purpose and the content you'll put on it is pretty cut and dried.
Twitter	Public. Google-able. Industry and areas-of-interest leaders. Anyone you want to listen to, and those who want to listen to you.	Twitter is all about who you listen to. Think about that as you tweet: go for high impact content that says something about who you are and what you're involved in. Twitter is kind of like a cocktail reception at a networking event - you won't have much time to talk, and everything you say, whether small talk or deep insight, will make a fleeting impression.
YouTube, Flickr, etc.	Public, Google-able. The whole world is watching and searching.	Have a ball here, but remember that everything you post is public. Personally, I share lots of travel and animal photography, but I don't put up family photos or videos. Not for fear of my professional credibility, but just to protect my family's privacy. (Which I'm sure will also be outmoded someday, but I'm willing to be a pioneer myself, not for my family.)
Facebook	Walled garden, and this is the key difference! In Facebook, you have tight control over your privacy settings. Only your approved friends, family, and contacts will see what you post. You can have even more precise control by assigning your Facebook friends into groups and then determining what each group can see.	Go wild. Post those embarrassing videos and photos: falling on your face in a kick line, mooning your arch-rival sports team, your high school prom fashion faux pas. Keep in mind that anything that gets committed to the Internet could someday find its way into the wild, so I don't recommend doing anything completely irretrievable, but this is where you can let those crazy awkward teenage experiments run rampant.

That's the system I currently use when I have a new status update or tidbit of information in my hands and I'm deciding where I want to share it. What do you do? Any other social networks you think should be on this list?

What if Learning Was Free?

A few weeks ago Seth Godin blogged that if TV ads were free, people would have learned to do advertising by simply doing it. Without that barrier to entry, people would just do advertising instead of talking about it and obsessing about it because it’s expensive.

Harold Jarche picked up on the parallels that can be drawn with corporate learning.  Instructional design systems and curriculum development is expensive. It takes time and energy. And once created, no one wants to do it again, or make significant changes to it.

Technology is removing barriers to entry in every industry and discipline. Internet technologies make distributing information to lots of people cheap. Want to engage with a community and ask for their feedback? Consider a focused blog directed at that audience. Want to build a collaborative group? Enter social media platforms. Didn’t get the results you wanted? Try, try again. After all, in the brave new world of technology learning really can be free.

But here’s the trick. You’ll have to let go of some control. You’ll have to facilitate and be a conduit, rather than a director. This can be scary, but it can work. Need proof? Take the Work Literacy site which helps teach Web 2.0 technology to learning professionals. Cost to develop: Zero. Time to create: A week. Content updates: Courtesy of participants. So there’s the proof that it can work. (Check out the site, it’s got some great content.)

Oh and get out there and start experimenting! If it doesn’t work the way you’d hoped, try something else. But stop waiting. The time is now.

What do you think? How has technology removed the barriers to entry for learning? Are you experimenting enough?

The social media truth lies between the hype and the cynicism

There's a new variation of the classic "Did You Know" video about the ways our world is changing.

This one is called "Social Media Revolution" and, of course, focuses on statistics about social media, how rapidly it's expanding, and how we're using it.

The new video is guilty of hyperbole; the number of new Facebook users in the past year or is in no way equivalent to how long it took people to bring televisions into their homes. (Did You Know does a better job of presenting statistics validly.)

It's this kind of Oo-golly-wow-this-is-the-biggest-thing-EVAH hype that brings out the nay-sayers who pile mockery onto anything that smells of web 2.0 or social media as Just Another Fad.

There are two truths under all this: Society always shifts and changes, and social media is changing the way we communicate. Social media is not a be-all end-all, but it is part of a process.

 

I drew this as a linear progression, but that doesn't mean the earlier methods get abandoned - we still talk with our neighbors in our yard. But we're also just as likely to add them as friends in Facebook. And there's an arrow at the end because changes will keep coming, building on how we exchange information and keep in touch with the people we care about.

And for us trainers, this affects our delivery and methods, too - and it profoundly affects the expectations and learning styles of our students.

Don't get swept up by the hype, but don't refuse to explore new options, either. Sure, in 10 years we'll be laughing about how obsessed we were with Twitter and Facebook, but it'll be because we've moved on to bigger and better things. What worked in the past still has uses, but success depends on continually taking advantage of the new.

From Web 2.0 to Enterprise 2.0?

Jakob Nielsen recently released a report on the progress and impact of social networking tools on corporate intranets. Social networking isn’t a passing fad or a trend that can be ignored. As the pervasiveness of social networking tools grows, more people expect to be able to communicate with their friends, co-workers, companies, and customers in this way. For organizations, it means letting go of controlling every communication (which they really don’t anyway) and moving to Enterprise 2.0. For those that do, there are some benefits, including:

·        Breaking down communication barriers

·        Allowing workers to more easily collaborate to solve business problems

·        Engage workers who expect innovation and to share ideas at work

·        Capture and preserve information which is exchanged informally between co-workers (informal learning, anyone?)

·        Self policing communities

Most companies aren’t very far along with Enterprise 2.0. Efforts are largely being driven by grassroots efforts of front-line employees. Senior management, often as not, is a barrier since the perception is that these are “tools that teenagers use.” When considering Enterprise 2.0 tools, there are some best practices to keep in mind:

·        Choose tools that have capabilities to help solve specific business problems (rather than integrating whatever is “hot” on the web)

·        Integrate social tools into the main intranet to avoid double work and having the same content in two places

·        Know and allow the participation inequality that is part of most online communities. The lurkers will benefit from the content as much as those posting it.

·        Ban anonymity

·        Take a thoughtful and staged approach, consulting with employees when needed

You can read Nielsen’s full summary here and also access a link to purchase the complete case study. Where is your company on the Enterprise 2.0 scale?

Can corporate policies keep people off Twitter and Facebook?

According to legend, news happens in threes, and in the past two days the news has given us three major employers - ESPN, the NFL, and the Marines - who have all put new social media policies in place. Each one has approached it differently and given us a wealth of object lessons in one week.

• ESPN released some "additional guidelines" for participating in social networking. They seem to have tripped over their shoes, though: when it happened, one of their workers immediately tweeted that they were now only allowed to tweet for ESPN directly. ESPN has spent the past day trying to clarify and says that their new guidelines are not intended to shut down social media use.
  
  It seems that ESPN's problems stem from their guidelines being pretty vague: how exactly do you interpret the guideline "The first and only priority is to serve ESPN sanctioned efforts?" Is it really feasible to require that "Prior to engaging in any form of social networking dealing with sports, you must receive permission?" Other guidelines, like "Assume at all times you are representing ESPN" and "If you wouldn’t say it on the air or write it in your column, don’t tweet it" make much more sense.

• The NFL seems to be setting up policies that are more restrictive, but also more closely defined and, consequently, less open to misinterpretation. They seem to be putting restrictions on when their employees can tweet: they cannot tweet from meetings. (One glaring issue: this policy seems to only be apply to Twitter - how about a Facebook post? Oops.) The NFL already bans any kind of cell phones or computers on the sidelines, and the word is that Twitter restrictions may apply to game days in their entirety. It has the benefit of being clear, although it's a ham-handed approach. (But what else do you expect from football?) I can hear the hundreds of questions coming in already: What about after the game? What if my baby is born (or insert any other totally-non-game-related thing here) on a game day?
  
  There will always be events within an organization that are secret and cannot be spread yet. The NFL is trying to approach these with a sledgehammer, but the germ of an age-old idea is there: some projects or meetings must begin with "And by the way, this is company confidential, please don't share this outside these walls." With extra emphasis in these social media times.

• The Marines have banned Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace entirely from their computers. I give them a large pass on making that kind of blanket approach, since unlike most offices, when Marines are on duty it's truly a 24/7 life. But even the Marines have only put the ban in place for a year while they sort out security issues, and only for the military computers - so in theory, marines who aren't deployed can still log into Facebook, etc. from home at the end of the day. What kind of guidance is the Marines giving to their marines for that home use?

It's smart - and becoming essential - to provide your organization with guidance and education about the proper use of social networks. The spread of information is like a flood: you can't stop it, but you can do a lot to channel it in directions you'd rather it go.

For a couple of stellar examples of corporate Web 2.0 policies, IBM and Sun have made theirs publicly available and are great examples to take inspiration from if you need to build up your own.

How to Use Twitter to Share Culture

Everyone has been hearing about the importance of social media. Yet I think the hurdle that most businesses face when entering this new arena is how to make the most of what social media has to offer. I saw a great article on Mashable.com that gives some ideas for using twitter to share corporate culture.

• Tweet events such as company awards or entering new markets

• Share corporate mission by tweeting about goals or upcoming plans

• Provide industry insight by tweeting about things that impact anyone in that sector such as legislation or educational information

• Recognize employees by tweeting about benefits and employee achievements

• Highlight customer successes such as awards they've won or how they've used your product/service to achieve a goal

• Use tweets as a customer service tool to answer hot questions publicly and quickly

• Ask questions to your customers and prospects

Twitter can be used to promote your learning program using many of these If the goal is to create a culture of learning, then use social media tools to share that culture and keep employees engaged. Thoughts on what to tweet include:

• New topics or learning tools which have been made available to employees

• Reminders about job aids that apply to a current issue many employees are facing

• Provide updates on long-term L&D projects

• Use as a service tool to quickly answer questions on a new program

• Share how L&D fits into and forwards company goals

• Ask questions of employees on what they’d like to see in their training program

I’m sure there’s more ways to use Twitter to keep employees engaged and excited about their learning options. What others can you think of?

ASTD 2009 Thoughts and Themes

The American Society for Training & Development's annual conference wrapped up last week in Washington, DC. As always, it was a crazy-busy time of talking to attendees at the MindLeaders booth in the Expo and attending some sessions to hear some latest and greatest thoughts on the industry. I had a great time!

Now, with some recovery time under my belt, a few thoughts have begun to settle to the top in my brain. For those of you went or would just like to pretend you did:

Just in case you weren't sure: The economy is still down
The attendance and expo floor testified that the economy is still hitting us all hard. I don't know what the attendance numbers were compared to years past, but the crowd felt a good bit lighter. Sessions still had good attendance, and the people that made it had extra motivation to be there, so the overall effect was kind of a "conference concentrate" - just add water!

Sadly, there were obviously some expo businesses that pulled out, too, as evidenced by the booth-sized "lounges" that dotted the expo floor. From the silver-lining club: it was nice to have some extra chairs to rest tired feet.

Recovery? Any time now, please.

This year's hot topic: Baby boomer retirement
Every year at the MindLeaders booth, there seems to be one phrase that makes people stop in their tracks and want to talk more. Every year, it's a different phrase. This year's phrase was "Baby Boomer retirement." We've all known the retirement wave has been coming for some time, but it must really be at our doorsteps now.

And to pass along the resources I was handing out like crazy to the people who were focused on this, check out the MindLeaders Leadership Roadmap and our new "Leadership in Crisis" white paper for some of our best thinking about ways to build up the next wave of leaders and manage that succession pipeline.

Is there a technology divide among trainers?
This is another topic I've seen the roots of for a few years now, but this was the conference that some people (mostly my techie-lovin' friends and contacts) really started talking about it: are we starting to see a serious technology divide in the training industry?

At one end of the spectrum, we have people who enthusiastically embrace and adopt each new technological advance that comes along: social media, virtual environments, Web 2.0, online classrooms, you name it, they'll try it. At the other end remains a sizeable and adamant contingent who rely on classrooms and manuals to do their teaching and view technological advances with suspicion and/or outright disdain.

Personally, probably obviously, I tend toward that techie-lovin' side of the spectrum. MindLeaders as a company, even though we're all about pioneering new ways to bring technology into training, does a lot of careful study to make sure that the technology we're using is stuff that is readily-accessible for our clients and can bring proven value, an excellent middle ground to strive for.

There will always be a spectrum of positions to this question, but this was the first year that I started to worry about that steadfastly non-techie group, especially because ASTD itself seems to only be tentatively addressing this issue. Are we risking the industry being branded with a "luddite" label and being left behind?

All three of these themes aren't fully-baked, but I wanted to throw the lot out to hopefully stir some deep-thinkin'. What were your impressions from the conference, or if you didn't go, what have you seen from your own vantage point?

MindLeaders joins Twitter with learning tips and ideas

While many of us within MindLeaders are on Twitter (check out our Twitter addresses), I hadn't built a MindLeaders-specific Twitter account. The big question was: what would a MindLeaders Twitter account talk about?

Our personal Twitter accounts, I think, give a great view into the cool people at MindLeaders and the e-learning and training issues and ideas that we're batting around. We had a lot of hallway conversations about what we would want a MindLeaders Twitter account to "say."

Today, we're announcing that Twitter account. Our idea is that the MindLeaders Twitter stream will share all the good training, e-learning, and learning tips and thoughts that we share with each other and our clients. A few of these might be MindLeaders-content-specific, but mostly will focus on ideas that can be helpful to any trainer or HR leader.

Please check us out on Twitter, say hello, and share the word with any other friends in the training industry. If you have any ideas or suggestions about what you'd like to see from us there, please let me know here or in the tweeting world!