The Bamboo Project Blog

What I've Been Up To: Some Social Media Training Resources

For the past few months, I've definitely been blogging less, in part because I've been doing training on social media for several clients. I thought it made sense to share some of what I've been working on, so here are some links. They owe much to the  WeAreMedia curriculum developed by the ever-wonderful Beth Kanter and the folks at NTEN.

• Introduction to Social Media--This webinar and wiki resource page gives an overview of key social media tools and how they are being used in workforce development and with young people, especially around school and careers.

• Creating a Social Media Listening Dashboard--Webinar and wiki page on the importance of social media listening and how to set up a listening dashboard with Netvibes  to monitor what's being said. Beth Kanter's listening literacy wiki was a great resource for this, too.

• Social Media Training for Centers for Independent Living--Back in August, I did a 2.5 day in-person training session with staff from Centers for Independent Living who work with individuals with disabilities. This is the wiki I set up with my co-trainer, Jared Smith of WebAIM from whom I learned a LOT about web accessibility. We used MediaWiki for this project because it's actually the most accessible wiki platform. It was my first experience using wiki markup, which gave me an even greater appreciation for the ease of use of Wikispaces.

In addition to this training, I've also been doing a lot of social media set-up and blogging for clients, which is really wreaking havoc on my own social media practices--hence, less blogging here.

There's a certain irony in the fact that the more social media work I do with clients, the less time I have for my own projects and blogging. I'm also finding that social media for learning has less traction than social media for marketing, creating buzz, etc. I'm always sneaking in the professional development applications of these tools--including modeling using social media as part of my training-- but not really getting people to grab hold of the idea. A certain irony in that, I suppose, too.

Borrowing from the Library to Support Workplace Learning

Joyce Valenza is a librarian rockstar who also happens to be the head librarian at my daughter's high school. A recent post she wrote for the School Library Journal on strategies for teaching and using social media showed up in my Twitter feed the other day. It turns out there are were some cool ideas in it that I think would translate well to workplace learning. A couple of that jumped out at me. . .

Moving Beyond One Trick Single Search

Students aren't the only ones who need to use search engines to get their work done. Most cubicle dwellers these days need to sharpen their search skills and Joyce has some good advice and resources. Check out her Categorized Search Toolkit with links to tons of search engines and videos on running searches. (Here's another great list of search resources and an excellent post from Tony Karrer on doing better searches. And here are some Google lesson plans on search to check out).

Also don't miss Google Wonder Wheel. It's a search option that allows you to  display Google search results in a mind-mapped sort of visualization that makes it easier to see relationships and drill down into related terms. Very cool, but you may need to check it out to see what I mean. (For more visual search engines, check out this post on 4 options)

Joyce also describes some of the strategies she uses to support her learners' search efforts that I think translate well to the workplace. For example, she sets up Google Customized searches to query targeted sites and address specific needs.This could be set up  to search key best practice resources or for social searches of Twitter, blogs, and other resources related to company or occupational keywords.

While we're on the subject of search, she also teaches students about some people-finder search engines to assess and possibly address their digital footprint and online "personal brand." This is something many workers need to learn how to do and should be part of any organization's orientation training, I'd argue.

Personal Information Portals

I firmly believe that one of our developing roles in the learning world is that of digital curator. There is just so much information and people need help in identifying good sources and pulling it all together, something librarians do very well.

Joyce helps students develop "personal information portals" using tools like iGoogle PageFlakes and NetVibes. These are simply feed aggregators that can be customized to include RSS feeds to blogs, news feeds, videos, etc. related to particular topics. I think of them as "dashboards" for collecting information on a particular area of interest into a single page that is automatically updated.

In the work world, this means that we can create customized pages with RSS feeds related to any topics we want. Picture, for example,  a "leadership" information portal with the feeds for key leadership blogs and resources embedded into the page. Or a "management" portal that includes great supervisory/management feeds. These can be shared with others via email, IM, etc. Here's an example of a UK Hospital Management Page--note that there are tabs for different departments. And here's another example for university staff to keep up-to-date on leadership issues. Note that these can be just one page in a larger personal information portal that workers could set up for themselves.

Related to this idea, I've been using Delicious to support many of my clients, setting up tags for various projects and continuing to add to the resources even after my work has finished. It takes me less than a second to add the project tag and is a great way for me to continue to add value and support learning long after I've gone. And for those who use PageFlakes, Netvibes or iGoogle, subscribing to the Delicious tag feed puts these resources right into their own personal information portal.

Telling Digital Stories

Increasingly we are seeing that digital story-telling is a powerful strategy for learning. As instructional designers we can use stories to illustrate key points, especially in designing e-learning. Storytelling is also a good way for learners to process and reflect on learning, particularly in support of reflective practice and communities of practice. Stories also help us to remember things. Joyce has a nice library of digital story-telling resources that could be used in a work setting. Alec Couros also has some resources that he got from his Twitter network.

Wikify Your Handouts

This is a strategy that I've been using for most of the courses and workshops I do--putting all of my "handouts" into a wiki. Actually, my wiki IS the handout. It's the easiest way for me to share links, videos, photos, documents, etc. related to my topic. I don't waste paper and people can keep adding to it after we're done. I can also embed the Delicious tags that I set up for the training and continue to add after the learning event is finished.

Joyce does a version of this with the subject area pathfinders she's set up for students to explore different topics. Here's one I did recently to support a project on implementing social media to support a youth project. 

Many other interesting ideas in Joyce's article that could potentially be adapted for your situations. I strongly encourage giving it a read.

It's Not the Tool That's Boring. It's You.

Great post from Sarah Horrigan on a training she did with University staff on using virtual learning environments (VLE's).  Apparently there were complaints prior to the session about VLEs being "boring," that Sarah decided to face head on, pointing out that it's not the VLE that's boring. It's what instructors do with it.

I asked, 'How many of you put your lecture PowerPoints in the VLE?'. Lots of hands. 'How many of you provide anything more than your lecture notes? Anyone put any additional activities in there?'... no hands. I asked them what that might feel like for their students. Was that an interesting or helpful place to be once you'd downloaded those PowerPoint? Were those PowerPoints really that helpful without anything else? Were they engaging? Have to say, there wasn't a great deal of nodding at this point!

I then got them to imagine a really great learning experience that they'd had while they were at school or university and what made it great. I then asked the group 'did anyone's great experience involve a great teacher?' Hands. 'A really great subject area?' A few more. 'A really great activity or experience?'. Lots of hands and nodding. 'Did anyone's great experience involve how brilliant the room was where the learning happened? How great the chair was they were sitting on? How great the desk was they were using? The pen? Anyone particularly excited by the pen they were using?'. No-one

That's the thing about technology and learning. People are quick to blame the tool, rather than looking first at their own behavior with it. It's PowerPoint that's the problem, rather than how it's used. Or they hate web conferencing because it's "dull." And don't even start with social media--blogs, social networks, Twitter et. al are just a "waste of time."

I understand why learners get sucked into thinking that the tools don't work, especially when they've been the victim of Death by Powerpoint or forced to endure an endless webinar. But for those of us designing the learning, that's just the lazy way out. I can blame PowerPoint or I can look at what Tom Kuhlmann and Cathy Moore do with it and rethink my strategies. I can say that social media is a "waste" or I can see the creative ways these tools are being used and modify my thinking accordingly.

That's not to say that we shouldn't ever complain about technology tools--some of them are clunky and not well-suited to the things that we want to do with them. (Blackboard comes to mind). But blaming a tool for being "boring?" That's just another way of saying "I don't want to be creative." As Sarah points out:

As adults we look at an empty cardboard box and see it as a storage device. Somewhere to put 'stuff'. As children we looked at that same cardboard box and saw a plane. A car. A train. An adventure waiting to happen. What happened to our own creativity? It seems like we get confronted by a 'virtual learning environment' and think that's enough. The learning will happen regardless of the effort we put into it. Wrong! So, so wrong! When eLearning works, it's an amazing, interesting, vibrant, evolving, engaging, rich space. When it's just a shell. A place to download PowerPoints... boy oh boy is it a sad bag.

A sad bag indeed.

Flickr photo via joshme17

Augmented Reality and the Future of Learning & Work

A few weeks ago I was doing a social media training and a couple of participants started talking to me about "augmented reality" and how it was going to change learning and work. I'd never heard of the concept and actually had a hard time picturing what they meant, so I tucked it away as something to explore further when I had more time. Now, via this article from Jeremiah Owyang, I see why they were so excited.

What Is Augmented Reality?

The best definition I could find for augmented reality is that it's  "a combination of the real scene viewed by the user and a virtual scene generated by the computer that augments the scene with additional information." This video is a great example. 

In it you can see a phone being held up to view a street. Through the augmented reality program in the phone, real estate data appears next to each house, including the price of the house, its address, etc. If the house is for sale, then a link to call the real estate agent also appears. You can click on it to initiate the call.

This video is even more interesting from a business/networking perspective.

The presenter is able to create a public profile that connects him to whatever social networks he wants, including Twitter, Slideshare, Facebook, YouTube, etc. As he presents, attendees can view him (and other participants) through their phones and see each person's profiles and connections. In this example, you could also rate the presentation via your phone.

Implications of Augmented Reality for Learning & Work

Although still in extreme infancy, you can see where there are some really interesting possibilities here with big implications for learning and work.

First, as if we needed another reminder of this, memorizing facts, data, etc. will become even LESS important in a world of augmented reality. We can already look up just about anything we want. With augmented reality, the data that we need would be integrated into the physical environment where we needed it with no need for searches. 

Consider this example of how augmented reality could be used in manufacturing. The worker would wear a special headset that would do the following:

• Directs the worker to a pile of parts and tells her which part to pick up. This is currently done by displaying textual instructions and playing a sound file containing verbal instructions.

• Confirms that she has the correct piece. This is done by having her scan a barcode on the component.

• Directs her to install the component. A 3D virtual image of the component indicates where to install the component and verbal instructions played from a sound file explain how to install it.

• Verifies that the component is installed by asking her to scan the component with the tracked barcode scanner  This checks both the identity and position of the part.

No doubt as systems grew more sophisticated, they would include access to troubleshooting information, etc. that would virtually eliminate the need for the kinds of procedural training that currently goes on in many companies.

I suspect these developments would accelerate the trend toward commoditization of work and, therefore, the capacity to send it to places where labor is the cheapest. It will also impact our notions of "knowledge work" and, I think, create even more "blue collar" knowledge jobs. 

Because of the impact on skill requirements in jobs, this will necessarily impact training, both the types of training we do and how we deliver it. We've already been moving in the direction of performance support systems and this adds a new layer that could take us in some entirely new directions.

Augmented reality has a long way to go before it becomes a major force in the workplace, but I don't think it's too early to start thinking about how it will impact what we do and how we do it.

What are your thoughts? How do you see augmented reality impacting the learning business? How do you see it being applied to work?

An "Admirable Use" Policy

Will Richardson has an excellent post, Don't, Don't, Don't vs. Do, Do, Do, in which he muses on "acceptable use" policies of social media in schools and how restrictive and anti-learning they can be. Having spent the past several months working with clients on integrating social media into their organizations, this post really resonated with me. I'm finding that while a few places embrace social media as an exciting opportunity, many more are worried about defining and restricting every possible misuse of social media they can imagine. And I have to say that I'm consistently amazed at how imaginative people are in identifying potential problems. Where's that creativity when they're thinking about using this stuff?

Anyway, Will suggests that instead of a 10-page list of "dont's," we need an "Admirable Use" policy that positively describes the ways in which we'd like to see people using social media for learning. The items he would include are:

“Do use our network to connect to other students and adults who share your passions with whom you can learn.”

“Do use our network to help your teachers find experts and other teachers from around the world.”

“Do use our network to publish your best work in text and multimedia for a global audience.”

“Do use our network to explore your own creativity and passions, to ask questions and seek answers from other teachers online.”

“Do use our network to download resources that you can use to remix and republish your own learning online.”

“Do use our network to collaborate with others to change the world in meaningful, positive ways.”

For companies and organizations, I'd modify this list and add a few other items, as follows:

• Do use our network to connect to colleagues and peers with whom you can share your passions and learn together.

• Do use our network to find experts both within and outside of our organization to gain knowledge, information and perspectives from around the world. Use our network to reach outside of your normal geographic and interest groups to connect with people in a variety of disciplines and from a range of cultures. 

• Do use our network to publish and share your best thinking and ideas. Seek out feedback and opportunities to refine your thinking. Use multimedia (visualizations, video, audio) to further explore and process your thinking.

• Do use our network to explore your own creativity and passions, to ask questions and seek answers from other peers and colleagues online. We know that creativity at work results from exploring a variety of questions and answers across disciplines and we support your ability to do this.

• Do use our network to download resources that you can re-use and remix or that will improve your productivity and ability to collaborate with others.

• Do use our network to track trends and to listen to what people are saying about our industry, your profession, our customers and key problems and issues facing the people with whom we work.

• Do use our network to identify problems and to respond to customer issues and complaints using the same standards of professionalism and courtesy you bring to your daily work. We trust you to use phones and email and to conduct yourself professionally in face-to-face meetings, so we know you will do the same in your social networking contacts.

• Do use our network to collaborate with others--both within and outside of our organization--to change the world in meaningful and positive ways.

What do you think? Would you add others to the list?

Flickr photo via Luc Legay

Community Conversations

I'm currently at the USBLN Conference in Maryland, where we're exploring various "business to business strategies to promote the business imperative of including people with disabilities in the workforce."

Yesterday I attended a great session co-facilitated by Manpower, Inc. where they shared an interesting model they've been using to build awareness about diversity issues. They call it Community Conversations. Essentially it consists of bringing together a bunch of people to experience a unique, diversity-related event or experience and then using follow-up debrief conversations to help participants process the experience and discuss follow-up next steps.

The example Community Conversation they shared was one called "Dialog in the Dark." They brought together CEOS and high-level executives from various companies, along with other community members and had them go through the Dialog in the Dark exhibit in Atlanta. Participants spend an hour in complete pitch-black darkness and must navigate their way through several scenarios, including a grocery store and a "park." It's designed to simulate blindness and the guides who take people through the experience are blind, although participants didn't find this out until after they'd been through the exhibit.

After going through the exhibit, Manpower then sponsored a luncheon and discussion about the experience designed to help the group explore ideas about "disability." They also discussed specific action steps they could take to build on this new knowledge.  The feedback they've received has been incredibly positive. The participants gained a real, visceral sense of what it means to have a disability and the blind guides enjoyed the role-reversal of being the experts in navigating the environment.

From a learning perspective, this model is incredibly potent. The experience is very emotional and taps into people's primal fears about blindness. Apparently even three years after the event, participants vividly recalled the experience. And of course the dialog process is a great way to explore what people have learned through the experience.

I'm starting to think about ways that the model of bringing diverse community members together to go through an emotional learning experience and then have a discussion about it could be applied in other settings. Also thinking about how social media might be able to support the process, particularly in facilitating follow-up discussions and activities. And I'm wondering when I can get down to Atlanta, because I would LOVE to go through the exhibit. 

For more info on Dialog in the Dark (especially if you are in Atlanta), I'm including some links.

• Dialog in the Dark Main Website--this is an international program that began in Germany.
• CNN Report
• Podcast on the Experience
• Reviews from people who have attended the exhibit

Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose

An interesting post over on Presentation Zen about Dan Pink's TED Talk on motivation, that Garr summarizes nicely:

We don't need sweeter carrots and sharper sticks, Dan says. We need a whole new approach, an approach that puts more stock in intrinsic motivation. Dan identifies three elements that comprise a new way of thinking about management:

Autonomy: The urge to direct our own lives.
Mastery: The desire to get better at something that matters.
Purpose: The yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves.

Traditional ideas about management are great, Dan says, "if you want compliance; but for engagement, self-direction works best."

In his talk, (which you should really watch), Dan discusses how science has demonstrated that rewards "narrow focus and restrict possibilities." As a result, when there's a defined task with a clear set of rules to follow, rewards can be a great way to get desired behaviors. But BECAUSE rewards tend to narrow our focus and restrict possibilities, in those cases where we need to "think outside the box," rewards are actually a terrible strategy to use.

Rewards actually impede our problem-solving ability because they cause us to restrict our consideration of other ideas and to focus on only one or two ways to solve the problem.  As one of the studies Dan references discovered, "once the task called for even rudimentary cognitive skill, (my emphasis)  a larger reward led to poorer performance."

In a nutshell, rewards work for tasks where you don't have to think. As soon as you have to engage in any kind of thinking, rewards STOP WORKING.

This is something I've felt intuitively, but the science is really compelling. And the notion opens up a lot of questions for me.

• If knowledge workers are, in fact, the new blue collar workers, then maybe the carrot/stick thing is where we should be headed. But is that really what we need to do to rebuild our economy?   For Americans (and that's the perspective from which I write), encouraging compliance and rule-following is actually the WRONG way for us to go about gaining any kind of economic growth. People who follow rules are fine when you're trying to maintain something,  but to go beyond maintenance, you need people who will ask questions and break the rules. Dan expresses concern that in rebuilding from the rubble of our economic disaster, we are doing so based on old beliefs about what works. I definitely share these concerns.

• In the learning biz, we seem to spend a lot of time focusing on refining our carrots (HR seems to take care of the sticks.) So we think endlessly about how we can tweak our learning to make it more interesting. Can I add a game here or an activity there? Maybe some animation or a video would be a good idea.

There's no doubt that there's a need to make learning interesting. But do we end up getting lost in the weeds, worrying so much about whether or not we have the right game in place we lose sight of the fact that the learning doesn't really engage people on any of the Dan Pink's three dimensions of autonomy, mastery and purpose? Do we need to focus on something else?

• As an instructional designer and facilitator, I find that I tend work on the kind of learning that is more likely to connect to these three dimensions--I have NO interest in doing compliance training and avoid it at all costs. I also subconsciously design training so that it emphasizes these factors. I wonder if I need to be more explicit, though, in teasing out each of these three aspects, asking myself some different design questions? And if so, what should those questions be? 

• What other implications for learning are there in these three dimensions? For example, are there ways to tap into these even when we're designing more rule-bound compliance-focused kinds of training?

Dan has a new book coming out in December called Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us  that explores these ideas in more detail. You can bet I'll be pre-ordering. I think there's a lot to consider here. . .

Some Links for the Day

Recession-Proof Graduate

View more documents from choehn.

I'm on my way out the door to do a 2.5 day social media training session for staff at Centers for Independent Living. My blogging has been so sporadic of late, though, I felt like I needed to do a post before I go. So some links that have been hanging out in my "blogthis" tag on Delicious:

• Is 15 Minutes the New Hour of Corporate Training? --Personally I'm hoping that Clark Aldrich is wrong with this one. I'm starting to chafe a bit at the idea that everything needs to be crammed into information-packed bites that, frankly, give you no time for reflection or going deeper. Ironically, I read Clark's post the same day I read this one on Sandra Lee, the "anti Julia Child." I think we've started to think that all meals should take 15 minutes or less and be concocted of a few quick ingredients that have largely been made by someone else. I'm beginning to long for the days of Julia Child, when you actually took your time and made some things from scratch. The results are so much better.
  

• Your Leadership Legacy in One Sentence--Here's something to add to your one sentence professional development journal--your leadership legacy in one sentence. If you were to focus on crafting a short sentence that you hope would sum up the essence of your current work as a leader what would it be? 

• The Recession-Proof Graduate--Charlie Hoen has some good advice for making yourself "recession-proof" (to the extent that's even possible). My daughter will graduate from NYU this year, so I've already sent this to her. Let's hope it doesn't take her a year to find a job though.

• White Space in eLearning--Connie Malamed writes about putting more white space into elearning. I have to say that lately I've been wondering, though, how to create more "white space" in real life and wondering how these principles of pacing, quantity of information and design could apply. Also thinking about how most organizations aren't doing a lot to promote some white space at work.

• Explosive Introspection--Continuing on a theme here, here's a post from Mark David Milliron on being more introspective that goes well with the notion of reflective practice. Lately I've had NO time for introspection, reflection or anything else other than work or collapse, so I'm longing for a little explosive introspection.

"Fill the Gap": A Flickr Learning Activity?

Through a really excellent article about how the Smithsonian is embracing social media, I ran across their "Fill the Gap" project, in which they used Flickr to engage the public in finding a piece of art from their collection to "fill the gap" to be left by a painting that will go into storage.

This also seems like a really fun learning and community-building strategy to me. In a factory, take a picture of machinery that's broken or that needs improvement and then post it on Flickr for comment and feedback. You could also use YouTube or Vimeo to upload a recorded process or activity to ask for the same thing--"what's wrong with this" or "what could we do differently?" A series of these would be fun, too, related to a similar theme sent out over the course of several days or weeks.

I like the visual aspect, the ability to engage the community and the various possibilities here.

How could you adapt this for a learning activity or project you're working on?

Forget the Kids--It's the Adults Online Who Need Critical Thinking Skills

Stephen Downes points to a column by Larry Magid on the need for today's young people to develop critical thinking skills that will help them better evaluate what they read online. In it, Magid talks about the fact that in the old days" of mass media we had "trusted" news sources that we could generally rely on for the "truth." With the proliferation of media in the Internet age, this has changed. As a result, he says:

Today's media environment provides an opportunity--and responsibility--for parents and schools to teach critical thinking. Not only must young people learn to "consider the source" of what they take in but also think critically about what they post in a world where just about every young person is now potentially an author, photographer, and videographer. Kids--who may never even know who Walter Cronkite was--need to have a miniature version of him inside their head by asking questions such as "Is this true?" and "How do I know it's true?." And when they're about to post they need to think carefully before they broadcast their own versions of "the way it is."

I find articles like this to be pompous in the extreme. They are condescending to kids and dangerous for adults.  They lull us into thinking that somehow we have learned to think critically about online content, despite the fact that we were the ones who grew up in an era when news and information from "trusted" sources was not questioned and therefore we never learned the fine art of skepticism. Meanwhile, it's our young people who are growing up in a world where it's clear that you need to question everything, and absorbing the lessons that go with that experience as they grow.

I've been on the receiving end of countless emails from adults who send me the latest urban legend as though it were truth. Never received one from a young person.  Most kids I know would check out that urban legend at Snopes before sending it on, while most adults don't even know what Snopes is. 

Despite the fact that only 5% of sexual abuse victims are abused by a stranger, it's the adults who are the frantic victims of "stranger danger" thinking, fueled by Internet and TV stories that make it sound like MySpace is more dangerous than your "trusted" neighbor.

It's kids who recognize that you can Photoshop a picture to look like "truth," in part because they've actually done it themselves. They also know that you can do a fake Facebook page, write a false Wikipedia entry or say whatever you want in a blog post--again, because they've done these things or seen them done by someone else. 

If anyone needs training in critical thinking on the Internet, it's the adults who are still living in a world where media is something they consume unquestioningly because they've never had the experience of making it themselves. It's the adults who were raised on "authorities" and "experts," in a monocultural world where many subcultures remained hidden from view and therefore assumptions about "truth" and "fact" were not questioned. 

Our young people, on the other hand, are growing up in a world that's more transparent, where the web of links that we're developing helps them find the more complicated "truths" that underlie what we've always seen as "fact." Young people are the ones who see that transparency is the new objectivity because they have grown up Googling their way to source documents and "smoking guns." They relish disproving and questioning facts, like young people always have, but for once, they actually have tools at their finger tips that allow them to do it easily and at will.

I'm not saying that youth don't need to be critical thinkers or that there aren't areas where they could further develop their skills.  What I am saying, though, is that I'm not sure that it's their lack of critical thinking that's the issue. As they say on airplanes, put on your own oxygen mask before helping the person next to you. I think that before we start preaching to kids that they need to develop their critical thinking, we need to take a good hard look in the mirror at ourselves.