Learning Convertibles

Every opportunity is a rich learning experience. How do you see it and covert them to your conscious learning effort?

You can, only if you get to park your emotions, attachment and look at it in silence as a continuum of time than as a siloed experience. What software systems offer is a medium to capture the opportunity. But can you pour out the internalized way of learning in any medium ? Probably not!

Here is where I have seen Learning consultants, KM consultants, proponents of idea management cycle, get to err. The only medium that can bring this internalized learning requires the right ambience, right moment, right crowd, right mood, and be connected with self and time to sink in, reflect, articulate, comment and answer queries in a like minded group devoid of personal interests in the subject. A movie review in a group is one such experience. Contrast it with a written review and you get the picture.

These are the moments that allow for creating self sustaining immutable learning model. It is time, space and mood that determines the impact. Thus creating the people mix and taking time for reflection is an important organization builder assignment.

Sounds unusual. Well, first few chapters of Presence, attest to the belief above.

Comply vs Complete: The difference towards success

Compliance is a bad word in professional environment. It evokes feelings of mass-uniformity, unquestioned obedience, silence, fake complicity and non-inquisitive mind. Compliance characterizes a single risk entity (decision holder is solely responsible for all good/bad) while every one is safe. Compliance is essential too. Without compliance, you cannot deliver; without compliance you cannot expect support; without compliance you cannot make better relations with people.

To enable a change initiative, you need to have change agents who go beyond compliance and seek completeness in the initiative. To achieve a shift in working and thinking styles, it is important to drive for strategic and tactical compliance in same group and in every change agent identified. This is the difference between compliance and completeness (NOTE: "and" is the key here). Strategic and tactical compliance ensures completeness and commitment to the cause. This allows change agents to have an immersive and bearing attitude to see through the success as a shared exercise.

Strategic compliance is to say "yes" to the initiative and contribute in words. Loose words, meeting room exuberance, less of action on ground and support. Tactical compliance is to "take the first step" and then make successive steps. One or the other is what you choose when you are not sure and give a half-hearted support. Tacitly, you know it is going nowhere and wish you are left off the hook. So you comply with the thought or you simply do a bit of your job to escape the wrath. In short, you comply than complete. Factory model is built for compliance (either strategic or tactical), while armed forces are built around completeness (strategic and tactical).

A reason why Vision and Mission remain on paper is a case of strategic vs tactical compliance than strategic and tactical completeness. A vision and mission is strategic, but the tactical approval in every transaction is observed from the same group that put them in place. A loose compliance will reveal that there is not enough commitment to the zeal expected and attributed to the change initiative.

Look out for agents who can complete the strategic and tactical initiatives through their active participation in thoughts, words and deeds. They are your success agents to protect and groom them. They are your cultural ambassadors who needs promotion and visibility.

Agree ? Disagree ? Need your comments.

Content Commerce: The "Halo" effect for e-Learning through social media

Now is the turn for wearing the green hat and lenses to see how can social media be leveraged for better results.

While we are talking of Web 2.0, enterprise 2.0 and the various technologies,  e-Learning industry also caught the buzz word to call e-Learning 2.0 as a new trend. Is it really true ? As e-Learning vendors, we do the same thing - Instruction Design, Instructional Writing, Visual design templates, content population and delivery in standalone or SCORM compliance files, Customize LMS, Launch courses through LMS, Add apps to make it collaborative, and plug in more modules to determine hierarchies, career paths, plan, skills now vs needed, etc. What is news in these ?

Does inclusion of few new mediums qualify it to be e-Learning 2.0 ?

Thinking about it, should we not need another perspective on why e-Learning cannot be e-Learning 2.0 with just web 2.0 enabled version added to its kitty. Let us see what web 2.0 perceptions (can be distanced from reality of 2.0) hold for many like me who see the band marching from sidelines.

1. Web 2.0 is about quick beta: Make it quick and easy. Get up fast and let users contribute to make it better.
2. Web 2.0 is about commerce bottom-up: Earn a user, earn a content, earn a paisa, penny.
3. Grow with more inclusions: Include one and include n amounts the same way in same experience. This means doing N transactions should be as simple as doing single transaction.
4. Create Niches in communities, through service, product: A fast, constant refreshing producer community is niche. A slow moving producer community and ALL consumer community is a drag. Getting vibrant communities and making room for communities to become vibrant through careful plots is the spirit in web 2.0 world.
5. Web 2.0 is about "gains" exchange: I exchange emails, but the emails gain from content richness with the conversation inherent in them. Google could possible gain from human transactions over email to an NI (Natural Intelligence) world. I read a email, review and add/edit/modify the content and reply my take on the subject - Many such reviews is itself a potent information than the original article which started it all.

With these perceptions (they may be perceptual errors as well, which is good in this case), what can e-Learning credibly do to move towards 2.0 band march.

Many things mentioned above apply for e-Learning as well. But what is being done about it? A cool new feature, product addressing one or many of the above perceptions still does not give a wholesome learning 2.0 experience. To have all of above, social media is an important tool. Here, term social media is all encompassing - Water cooler meetings, Coffee shop exchanges, airport lounge talks, quick messaging applications (SMS, Twitter) and other known tools.

One possibility in 2.0 world is to have a vibrant content commerce. A content commerce may be visualized as a transaction between content and the user with the richness being transferred between content and user continuously. While so far, we have the notion that users consume content and the rewards are in day to day work. But why ? The idea of one sided transaction needs a change to call ourselves to be in true 2.0 world.

In traditional way, When I consume a product, I buy the product repeatedly. The consumption satisfies me and craves me to buy more. The company sells the same product composition every time I need it. After a certain predictability, the company tweaks the value in the product for more "upscale" consumption. The consumer upgrades to a higher value stream and continues to purchase them again and again.

However, in a "content" world, same content is consumed only once. I need to buy a book once, to consume it all my life time. To enable content commerce, I need to be consuming the content more times. Social media can make it possible in following ways:

1.  Produced more content with same quality, and same experience around the same AoI (Area of Interest). Multiple authors, multiple perspectives referencing a single theme are a good option to drive repeated consumption. Look at theme based blogs that bring consumers repeatedly to check for updates on their sites. This is critical link for e-learning to survive. Frequent updates to make users check it often will bring about a Learning Organization vision, a reality.
   
2. Promote competition with multiple designs for same content suiting multiple delivery methods. Books, Kindle/iPad, Mobiles, computers, Audio books, Powerpoints, Web, Movies are ideal streams to promote and sell content. If same is available across these mediums, among them, I would be able to select a particular style and composition of content design that appeals to me at various points. I can then buy individual formats based on my immediate need. However, take care: Provisioning the same content in multiple mediums will drive away consumers. Adapt content to strength of every medium. For example, power point needs graphical and one message per slide, books need more text and occasional pictures, movies need a story, screen presence and epic proportion depiction of the content theme.
   
3. Allow me to subscribe to content, use it and add to the content to pass on to make it better. Upscale the content brand for re-consumption through multiple brain exchanges. Notes, Annotations, Analysis/Synthesis, critiques across multiple brain and content sources make repeated consumption possible.
4. Invest in a good aggregation service. A book store for example. I sample book shelves and choose what I need. Aggregators do the same in web world. Putting an aggregation service with what is available in web with the official courses within the enterprise will give users more interest to come to take e-Learning out of interest than compulsion.
   

The above points are not new. Some of them are not web 2.0, either. But should you use 2.0 technologies to become 2.0 or evolve and integrate what is available to beget a 2.0 experience?

These and more are the areas where Social Media get their hands full. Passing along a content to multiple users, making users interact and add their juice before passing it on makes the best playground for making content commerce, a success in the knowledge era.

Abstract, yes. Dream, yes, possible in near future - Hope so :). Many of it are happening as you read this post.
 
Inspirations: http://www.slideshare.net/jimson99/university-20-using-social-software-to-enhance-learner-engagement