I had 6 principles of social media which are:
1.     <embed> is the universal acid of the web – we should build around it.
2.    Simple with reach trumps complex with small audience.
3.    Sharing is a motivation to participation - so make it easy and rewarding to do.
4.    Start simple and let others build on top
5.    Providing limitations frames input (Cf twitter, 12seconds, etc)
6.    Complexity resides in the network not the application

If these are true, then number 6 in particular strikes me as having profound implications for what we do as educational technologists.

Martin Weller is Professor of Educational Technology at the Open University in the UK. He chaired the OU's first major elearning course with 15,000 students, and has been the Director for the VLE project and the social networking project at the OU. His research interests are in new technologies, digital scholarship and learning environments. He blogs at edtechie.net

1. Put pressure on the competitors
2. Be perceived as the leader of ideas on your market
3. Build loyalty and a strong community, passionate about learning from you
4. Forcing your organization to keep learning, as the findings of yesterday won’t stay a competitive advantage for long, as they’re made publicly available

A Concept that fits our period
Beyond these 4 advantages, this vision of the Learning Enterprise can be helpful to cope with the complexity of our world, recently outlined by Jeff Immelt, General Electric’s CEO, in a remarkable speach on renewing American Leadership. In fact, a Teaching Enterprise can proactively organize its ecosystem (clients, partners, competitors), aligning it according to its own lines of force, reinforcing its strengths and leadership.

This vision of the Teaching Enterprise is also aligned with the rising value of sharing, which is one of the foundations of the Social Media and Web 2.0 culture : « You are what you share », claims Charlie Leadbeater in the 1st chapter of its book called We Think.

When committing to Teaching, an Enterprise can expect strong and beneficial effects on its Learning processes and behaviors.

A Catalyst for Social Learning
By encouraging its employees to teach, the enterprise will lead them to make their learning and findings explicite, releasing and sharing them with their peers and getting their feedback. As John Seely Brown and Richard P. Adler explained it in their Minds on Fire article, we move progressively from the traditional Cartesian view of learning (« I think therefore I am »), according to which knowledge is a substance to be transferred with the help of pedagogy, to the social view of learning (« We participate therefore we are »), claiming that knowledge is first and foremost a social construction.

By defining objectives and incentives for teaching outside of the company’s boundaries, the enterprise will thus cause changes of behavior inside the company, developing its own learning capacities, inspiring new values of sharing knowledge and networking to its teams, ultimately improving the learning process and its value for money.

Training, Teaching and Employer Branding
Famous and praised companies like McKinsey & Company, Procter & Gamble ou L’Oréal have been building their reputation and attractiveness on the promise of dramatically improving the skills of its young employees, through high quality and complete training, both formal and experiential.

For large or even small companies, sharing and teaching its best practices with the outside world, can help developing their reputation and attracting talents to fuel their growth. Size doesn’t matter, if they have identified and developed a smart and differentiated positioning, as Internet and Social Media bring to the table cheap but powerful tools required to create and sustain a vibrant community of practice. Besides, in the same Minds on Fire article, John Seely  Brown and Richard P. Adler noticed the rising of a Long Tail in Learning, similar to the popular model built by Chris Anderson. Whereas traditional universities offer a limited number of courses in their catalog, Internet brings the promise of an almost infinite number of learning topics and communities of practice, built by people who are passionate about these topics. These subjects and groups can be niche ones, but any of us is almost sure of finding the community that will match her passion and talent.

Social Media : Teaching in Perpetual Beta
In a recent post, Frederic Domon presented the concept of Personal Knowledge Management built by Harold Jarche : it is based on 4 repeating and internal activities (Sort / Categorize / Make explicit / Retrieve), combined with 3 external activities to connect and share with the outside world. Harold Jarche then matches these activities with the free social tools available on the Internet, that enables oneself to increase the productivity of the PKM process.

Social Medial tools like blogs, Delicious or Twitter enable us today to multiply and accelerate these interactive loops of learning, making explicit and teaching and put ourselves in a Perpetual Beta mode. This approach offers several advantages in a period of knowledge in abudance, although of decreasing lifetime :

• Knowledge is made explicit and taught more rapidly
• The learning formats are shorter and simpler, therefore more digestible by the learners
• Their shorter size makes them cheaper to produce and to update
• The approach and the tools promote conversations and the connections between pieces of knowledge

Knowledge and teaching are then no longer frozen : they continuously and organically evolve, together with the evolution of the training needs, with the new ideas that arise in conversations and with new connections between existing concepts and ideas. The process of knowledge creation is moving to a « just in time » approach, very much similar to the Lean Management concepts or to what John Dewey used to call the productive inquiry as John Seely Brown and Richard P. Adler reminded us : knowledge is sought when it is necessary, in order to solve a problem or complete a task.

We are all Learners and Teachers
With these tools ant this peer-based teaching approach, knowledge becomes a property shared by a growing community of practice and is no longer the prerogative of the Master, teaching from her dais. As John Seely  Brown and Richard P. Adler are describing it, the learner is moving from a passive connection to knowledge (Learning About) to an active attitude, progressively integrating and acculturating oneself into a community of practice (Learning to Be). This may sound like the revenge of Socrates over Plato, as emphasize Charles Jennings and David James Clark in their article : “The core of the Socratic approach is helping (not teaching) students learn critical thinking and analytic skills rather than specific content. It is focused on helping them develop the tools and techniques they need to thrive in the real world.”

With the help of Social Media tools (blog, wiki, microblogging, social network), the learner is no longer required to wait for several years and accumulate large quantities of knowledge, before daring to speak and to teach : each employee in a company becomes a potential teacher, who is legitimate to share her knowledge within and outside of the organization.

Of course, most of us may remain « dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants ». But modern tools enable us to easily find these giants, in particular the ones that fit the most our passions, then to climb faster on their shoulders. These tools can even constitute a strong shot of growth hormones for who is passionate about a topic.

Jerome Coignard is Chief Technology Officer at CrossKnowledge. He is passionate about innovation, design, architecture and new ways of using technology. He is fascinated by the way Internet is becoming clever every day, thanks to all of us. Apart from that, he loves New York, his family, baroque music, fencing, cooking, the nature and anything that can be read and learned, especially if it is new.

One of the approaches to improving Customer Engagement and Experiences I’d like to explore is the potential to include customers, partners and suppliers in the Social Learning process. One of the drawbacks of an customer ideation platform/community is that more than 99% of the ideas are never looked at or implemented because they do not take into account the business context and constraints.

Whilst ideation may be a good source for innovation for companies, they can be a source of dissatisfaction for those customers who submitted ideas if they do not receive any acknowledgement for the effort they put into it. So rather than feeling closer to your brand and becoming advocates for it, the quite opposite may occur.

The approach that I would advocate is to educate the customer about your brand and its environment, even let them actively get involved in your internal Social Learning processes of continously striving to gain new knowledge and insights. By infusing ideas from outside of the silos of your organisation, you may discover innovative ideas that will give your company a competitive advantage by

Crowdsourcing has lost favour a little due to the number of uninformed suggestions that bubble up and which generate a lot of overhead to percolate into useful innovations. Smartsourcing has been put forward as a better approach, relying on the ‘better elements’ in your community to exchange with for customer insights. As such I agree with this, but I believe there is an even greater opportunity for informed innovation through the education and deeper implication of those we wish to engage with for smartsourcing by implicating them in collaborative learning.

Education and customer collaboration has the potential to create a real and very deep level of engagement, and thus the germination of fervent customer advocates, who in turn entice others to join this process (and increase the smartsourcing base for qualified innovation).

There is of course the (perceived?) risks of competitors glaning information and using it to their advantage, but examples have shown that this risk can actually be a driver for more rapid innovation integration such as Sage has shown with its ACT! community. 

To summarize, I believe there is an opportunity to create a collaborative community learning platform that will ultimately lead to informed ideation and nurture more fervent customer advocates.

Let me know your thoughts, am I completely off-track, or is this the TGV to Customer Engagement?

PS: Article originally appeared on the blog Social CRM ideas by MArk Tamis

Social learning is real

As Jay says:

In the past, we’ve focused on individuals but work is performed by groups. Hence, I expect us to start helping groups learn to perform instead of individuals.

Why is this important? We have structures and systems in place that promote and validate individual training but we leave almost all of the social learning to chance.

For example:

Would it be better to 1) take a generic classroom workshop on information management or 2) spend a few hours serendipitously learning on Twitter.

Is it more effective to a) read prepared case studies or to b) co-create your group’s case study that can be shared with the entire organization?

Jane Hart’s social  learning definitions:

1. IOL – Intra-Organisational Learning – how social media tools can be used to keep employees up to date and up to speed on strategic and other internal initiatives
2. FSL – Formal Structured Learning - how educators (teachers, trainers, learning designers) as well as students can use social media within education and training – for courses, classes, workshops etc
3. GDL – Group Directed Learning – how groups of individuals - teams, projects, study groups etc – can use social media to work and learn together (a “group” could just be two people, so coaching and mentoring falls into this category)
4. PDL – Personal Directed Learning – how individuals can use social media for their own (self-directed) personal or professional learning
5. ASL – Accidental & Serendipitous Learning – how individuals, by using social media, can learn without consciously realising it (aka incidental or random learning)

Across the chasm

I’ve written before how I use the chasm model to explain my professional work of 1) seeing what is ready to cross the chasm by 2) staying connected to the innovators & being an early adopter so that 3) I can help mainstream organizations. It’s a graphic summary of my consulting practice. As you can see, I ignore the Laggards.

In the field of web social media for workplace performance, what technologies are the Innovators experimenting with?

Which ones are now being picked up by the Early Adopters (like me) and finally, which technologies and ideas are ready to cross the chasm to the Early Majority?

Any other ideas, additions or comments?