The Bamboo Project Blog

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

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. . .

"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?

10 Questions for Your Reflective Practice

Meredith Levinson has posted a series of 6 excellent questions to identify change agents and innovators during a job interview that she got from Amanda Hite, founder and president of recruiting and HR consulting firm Talent Revolution.

It occurs to me that these six questions would also be great thought starters for both individual and organizational reflective practice. They are:

1. What do you do to build, manage and maintain your network?
   
2. If I Google you, what will I find?
   
3. What do you do to stay focused?
4. What do you do to stay relevant?
5. What innovative solutions have you created?
6. Walk me through a time when you administered change.

To this list I would add,

    7.   What important problems or questions do you see facing our industry? Your occupation?
    8.   What do you do to expose yourself to new ideas and new thinking on a regular basis?
    9.   What big mistake have you made recently and what did you learn from it?
    10. What matters to you? What are you passionate about? What gets you up in the morning or keeps you awake at night?

"How to Open a Banana Like a Monkey": The Anatomy of a Good Training Video

Why this video works (in no particular order):

• It's short--less than a minute.

• It reminds us of how we usually peel a banana and the problems with it.

• There is a demonstration of the old, bad way to peel and then the new, wonderful way--both clearly depicted, accompanied by a verbal description using simple language.

• There are no long explanations on the theory or history of peeling bananas--just straight to the task at hand.

• It's teaching something useful--at least for banana eaters and lovers of efficiency.

• It connects to the "what's in it for me."

• There's something intriguing about learning how to eat a banana from the animal experts--monkeys. That's a good "hook" into the video.

• The camera is focused on the banana and the guy's hands--the important parts of the video. No full body shots to distract from the task.

The only thing that would have made this video better in my mind would have been to see a monkey peeling a banana. Also, I don't know if I would have called it "opening" a banana. Where I come from, we "peel" them. But that's just being picky.

Information Literacy and Habits of Mind

Here's an interesting tidbit published in Science Daily--researchers analyzed 91 studies that included over 8,000 people and found that most of the time we seek information that supports our viewpoints and then screen out everything else:

The researchers found that people are about twice as likely to select information that supports their own point of view (67 percent) as to consider an opposing idea (33 percent). Certain individuals, those with close-minded personalities, are even more reluctant to expose themselves to differing perspectives, Albarracín said. They will opt for the information that corresponds to their views nearly 75 percent of the time.

The researchers also found, not surprisingly, that people are more resistant to new points of view when their own ideas are associated with political, religious or ethical values. . .

This seems to be another piece of evidence that confirms my concerns about online homophily, which of course extends offline as well.

As humans, we're innate patternmakers. But to some extent, we seem bound to find data that supports the patterns we already see, as opposed to seeing new patterns in the data. A few years ago I was trying to learn how to draw using Betty Edwards' book, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. What was most fascinating to me about the experience was how you have to turn off your left (analytic) brain in order to draw things as they really are. When the left brain is in full operational mode, we tend to draw not what we actually SEE (which is the raw data coming in), but our concept of that data. So we don't draw the face that's in front of us. Instead, we draw our idea of a face. For example, we don't place eyes in the middle of the face where they actually are. We put them toward the top because that's our construct of where they belong because of our hairlines. The point is, that while we think we see the data, what we really are looking at is our preconceived idea of what that information means.

I read with interest Nancy White's excellent post the other day on Skills for Learning Professionals Part 2. In it she says that scanning, filtering, connecting and sense-making are critical skills.  I agree with this, but think that maybe Nancy didn't go far enough in thinking about how we develop these skills. She offered a series of excellent questions to ask ourselves in terms of our ability to do things like scan and filter, but they don't take into account the habits of mind and psychological behaviors we bring to the table in developing these skills.  In light of our tendencies toward homophily and pre-conceived ideas, it would seem there are deeper issues at work that we need to consider:

• When we are scanning, how do we combat our natural tendency to only "see" information that fits with our preconceived notions of the world? The skill of scanning isn't just about how well we are able to manage a stream of information. It's also about our ability to actually SEE information in its raw form. 

• In developing our filtering skills, how do we ensure that we are not filtering out information that doesn't fit wth our existing concepts and frames? I suspect that many, if not most of us, are likely to apply our filters in a way that shields us from data we may not want to consider. But this is not effective filtering behavior, particularly if we end up filtering out key data that would change our decisions or ideas about how things work.

• Creating a knowledge network is important, but if we are creatures of homophily, seeking out like-minded connections, then are we really using this skill to its full advantage? How do we make our networks diverse? As I've pointed out before, social technology tends to collude in this process of connecting us to like-minded people, for example suggesting friends who share our interests. But how do I ensure that I'm connecting to people who think differently than I do?

• How do we become capable of objective sense-making based on the actual data that is coming into us, rather than our IDEAS of what the data means? I think that the tendency to interpret information as its coming into our brains is so ingrained we don't even realize it's happening. That's why "beginner's mind" is an aspiration, rather than something most of us are able to do on a regular basis. 

These skills are not just about the technology strategies we use to find, filter and make sense of information. They are also about the habits of mind that we bring to these activities. If we don't address both aspects, then we're missing something here.

Flickr photo via vaxZine

Accessibility and Learning

As I've mentioned previously, I'm working with a couple of clients right now who work with individuals with disabilities on some social media projects and it continues to be a learning experience. For the past week I've been hard at work pulling together a wiki for a 2.5 day workshop we're doing in August on using social media in Centers for Independent Living. We're adapting Beth Kanter's fabulous WeAreMedia curriculum,  focusing on how the tools can be used within a community with varying challenges to accessing the technology. In particular, I'm finding that there are a lot of challenges to using social media with people who have visual disabilities. Here's some of what I'm learning:

• The convention of having links that say "As I've mentioned previously" (see my first sentence) or "go here" does not work for individuals with visual disabilities who are using a screen reader to navigate the web. They need links that are descriptive---that say where you're linking too. This is actually good SEO practice, too, but something I continually have struggled to stop doing as I'm so used to making links out of vague references, as I did above.

• I'm used to embedding Slideshare and YouTube videos directly into my wiki handouts so that people don't have to navigate away from the site to access them. For individuals with visual disabilities, though, this is a problem. They can't advance through Slideshare slides or hit the "play" button on a YouTube video because their screen readers can't give them the information they need to do this. For them, an embedded video is just a frustrating blank in the wiki page.

• Speaking of Slideshare, many of the great presentations on Slideshare make extensive use of photos and graphics to illustrate their points. I find this to be particularly true of technology presentations where there are lots of screenshots and Flickr photos being used. While this is obviously a great way for sighted people to learn about the tools,  if you have a visual impairment, visuals aren't going to be very helpful. 

• Often when I do wiki handouts, I'll use photos to add some visual interest to the page. VIsuals on a page are OK for screen readers, as long as they've been properly tagged so that the screen reader can identify it as either decorative or illustrative of a point and there's some indication of what the photo is about. Unfortunately, Wikispaces isn't giving me that option (or at least I didn't find a way to do this), so I've ended up removing all of the photos to avoid confusion. BTW--this is also an issue for those of us who use photos in our blogs, which may make it more difficult for people with visual impairments to navigate our posts.

The biggest shift for me has been needing to think in very different ways about my materials and how to make them accessible. This project has been a huge reminder to me too of how visual I am in my development of materials, which can be great in some cases, but in others requires a big shift in my thinking.