How to formalise informal learning

In my last post, I asked some questions about formalising informal learning. And answered them.
If:

• you understand that formalising informal learning will have organisation-wide consequences
• you use the term 'formalise' in a very narrow and specific sense - to create social objects to promote shared understanding and collaboration
• you target your formalising efforts with authenticity and tact

Then you'll be fine.


Four steps to formalising informal learning without messing it up and making everybody think you're a control freak. . .

1. Kill some sacred cows.
I'm thinking particularly about the tyranny of Kirkpatrick, SMART targets, Learning Objectives and numerical ROI metrics.

Seriously, what is it with teachers, trainers and Learning Objectives? (Note: I said 'tyranny'. I'm not saying these things never have value - like Learning Styles, NLP, Multiple Intelligences, Myers-Briggs and all that bunk intuitive stuff, they're especially useful as a starting point, as a social object and a foundation for collaborative work.

2. Pave the cowpaths. Like Walt Disney.
Los Angeles IxDA - Designing Social Interfaces

View more presentations from erin malone.

I read the expression 'pave the cowpath' the other day in a presentation from Erin Malone on Designing Social Interfaces. It's similar to the idea of Desire Paths and the opposite of 'build it and they will come' Potemkin Village (cf Creepy Treehouse).  Don't set things up and expect learners to jump in and play with your toys. Watch what people do and help them do it more easily. Here's an example from Walt Disney:

Shortly after Disney World opened in Florida, Walt Disney called a meeting of all senior personnel to get an idea of how the opening of the park was going.  All members gave their report, some good news, some bad news, including many challenges that had been anticipated during the planning of the park but could not be affirmed until the park was in full operation.  The conversation then moved to maintenance and operations.  The senior official in charge was very upset because the public was not always walking on the paved sidewalks, sometimes they would cut across his manicured lawns in an attempt to get to a certain location quicker.  After a while and many people taking the same shortcut, a unsightly brown swatch formed like a scar across the deep green, finely cut grass.  This particular official asked if chains, fences or signs asking visitors to stay on the designated paths could be erected.  Disney response was simple, but brilliant:

“No.  They’re telling you where to put the paths.”

Time for an interesting and true intermission about Desire Paths
This little intermission is longer than I'd like but it illustrates Desire Paths on the web perfectly.

I'm pretty keen on Desire Paths and the story above is one I've shared many times. I first heard about them on the Fritinancy blog back in 2006.  It was the pre-read/write-web-as-prosthetic-memory days and I promptly forgot where I found it.

Flash forward three years and I have a conversation with somebody on Twitter about something similar to Desire Paths - and the Walt Disney anecdote.This prompted me to do some refinding. It took 20 minutes or so, but I found some links through a circuitous route (I couldn't even remember the name 'desire path' and had to dig back through kottke.org posts). Anyway, I found stuff and shared it with my Twitter friend.

Today, I had a similar problem. I knew the name 'Desire Paths' but I also knew that Nancy Friedman's Fritinancy post didn't have the Walt Disney anecdote. Deja vu.

So, I type "desire path" "walt disney" into Google and the above link comes up - it's the same guy from Twitter who blogged it name-checking me as one of the sources for the post. That, people, is a Desire Path and how informal learning works when it works well.

3. Stop reading so many Learning & Development blogs and start reading the Knowledge Management people.
I felt like a bit of a fraud writing the previous post. For all of our banging on about how to formalise informal learning, the #KM people have been doing it for twenty years (not necessarily terribly well, but they've learned a lot).

I've promised too many people that I'd do a best of #KM blogs round up. So, I'll get on to that and back up what I'm saying here in the next couple of weeks.

But for now, I'd recommend you read The Social Life of Information as a starting point.

4. Look at this
Proximity, Location and Informal Knowledge Spillovers

View more presentations from Ben Spigel.

And four things to avoid. . .


1. Don't get hung up on getting things exactly right
Communities of Practice are a classic example of something we thought was best run 'informally'. Turns out we were only partly right. Informal is as slippery a word as formal is. Informal != unorganised or even Theory Y-style laissez-faire. Training's not dead yet.

2. Don't give in to your political instincts
I think it's essential for modern organisations to embrace informal learning given some of the startling changes (I know it's a cliche but it's true) taking place now. But I find it suspicious that the world is doing exactly what I want it to... Incidentally, this goes for the informal learning is rubbish' people too.

3. Don't forget that participation bandwidth is probably just as important as Cognitive Load Theory.


4. Don't forget that the key difference between informal learning and formal learning is the permeable classroom walls. Informal learning will be eclectic and even promiscuous in where it borrows from, by definition.
You didn't think I'd go a whole two posts without mentioning games, did you?  The ludologists are having some great ideas. This idea - nothing to do with informal learning - of how to think about Learning Objectives as atoms in a skill chain is really interesting, for example. Games and informal learning programmes are all about creating problem-solving spaces.

Social Gaming developers have discovered that the formal elements of design are much less important in social games. The complicated stuff is handled client-side so there's less need for a rigorously formal approach. 

Can we formalise informal learning?

Ecollab ask the question for their second blog carnival:

Informal learning - can we formalise it? Should we? How much? How?

1. Can we? Is it practical?
Any organisation seeking to 'formalise informal learning' would be simultaneously 'informalising the formal' ie potentially ie undermining the bureaucracy and promoting adhocracy. This is radical stuff - we're talking about changing the maze not the rat.

Can we formalise informal learning? It depends on who 'we' are. . .

2. Should we? Can we even define what it means?
This is even tougher. 'Formal' is a slippery word - a mode of speech favouring latinate lexical terms over good ol' germanic grunts; something made explicitly 'official' by signing on the dotted line; something rendered into abstraction. . .

Wrapping a field up in its own technical vocabulary is undeniably useful as an aid to precision and clarity, as well as a shared foundation to build on. But colonising learners' minds with a layer of metalanguage seems to defeat the purpose of informal learning. And seriously raises the barriers to active participation.

Official sanction of informal learning sounds great in theory. Everybody knows it's the way things are done round here and at least you get to have a budget. But odd things happen to gift economies - for this is what unofficial informal learning is - when incentives ie a budget get thrown into the mix.

Abstraction's useful. Dick Carlson's (@techherding) recent post, Beyond the lecture - fighting the learning wars, uses an abstraction as a device to aid understanding. It's great and I've bookmarked it to forward to clients. You should too.

But it's wrong. In fact, all abstractions are, by definition, wrong. Dick uses Bloom's Taxonomy to explain why lecturing won't work and it works well for the audience he's writing for. But here's David Weinberger on the Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom hierarchy (another abstraction, and one that I learned as received wisdom during management training):

The real problem with the DIKW pyramid is that it's a pyramid. The image that knowledge (much less wisdom) results from applying finer-grained filters at each level, paints the wrong picture. That view is natural to the Information Age which has been all about filtering noise, reducing the flow to what is clean, clear and manageable. Knowledge is more creative, messier, harder won, and far more discontinuous.

Real life is messier and more discontinuous. Bloom's Taxonomy has remarkably similar problems to the DIKW hierarchy. We produce abstract models as tools to think with and to act as social objects when we talk to one another. This fact gets lost.

Worse still, when we 'formalise' things, we tend to get mixed up between all three of the loose definitions there are. The result? We end up with officially sanctioned, uncritically accepted hairballs of jargon.

Should we? It depends on what we mean by formalising. . .

How much? And when and where?
Leaders are ready, we've clearly defined what 'formalise' means: how far do we go? Where do we start?

One thing I'm fairly sure of: it's one of those things where it pays to put a lot of effort in up front because being seen to interfere later on could have negative consequences (this doesn't absolve senior managers and Learnign & Development people of responsibility later on - the whole point is that everybody's supposed to take part):

But after that, I'm not so sure. Clark Aldritch uses another abstraction, his 8 Cs of learning define the areas organisations pay attention to when designing learning programmes. (I've made them 7 Cs here and missed out cost for what will be obvious reason - a full explanation of what the Cs mean is here)

Then I gave myself 7 x three types of points - 'love', 'spend' and 'tread carefully' -  and tried to work out where I would spend these limited resources. Here's what I came up with:

It seems I think that organisations should:

• devote their love and attention to the community and the infrastructure for informal learning
• spend cash on facilities and outside coaching
• steer well-clear of content and curricula
• tread carefully around preaching mission ie 'calling'

I appear to have mixed feelings about 'certification' ie motivation. Pay attention and tread carefully? I'm not sure how that works - what do you think?

Massive apologies to those who took the time to comment on the eLearning and Scale posts a couple of weeks ago. The comments were totally awesome and sent me into a hypomanic deep thought session for a couple of weeks. But I didn't make the time to write my conclusions in reply. Rubbish - no excuses. Sorry. I'm in the latter stages of setting up my own Learning & Development business and Donald Clark and Dave Ferguson in particular caused me to rethink the way I'm going about things with regard to eLearning - thank you both.

Next post: How does this translate into actions?

Outsourcing Science to Scientists Lacks Merit

'Rampant' Donald H Taylor (you need to see his picture to understand why he's 'rampant') urges a bit more emphasis on evidence-based practice in Learning and Development, less reliance on myths and a polite tone during discussion of the merits of different approaches (the comments are good too).

I completely agree, but wonder if we're too willing to outsource our science.

North London, a few years before blogs and Social Media. . .
Picture the scene: about fifteen of us are sitting in a classroom in North London on a spring Tuesday evening working towards QTS. We're all practitioners in colleges, adult education or training organisations. And tonight's class is really really tedious. It's about Skills for Life Core Curriculum Descriptors, if you must know. We are restless.

So, one of us distracts the teacher with a piece of research they've read. It's not important what the research says (it's about learning vocabulary because all of us have a connection of some kind with language teaching) but it's one of those evidence-based pieces with practical advice that, for some people, is counter-intuitive, because that's the way they are.

The class splits into roughly two groups. About half the group say the research is probably pointing in the right direction. About half the group say the researchers have made some fundamental errors. And the class debates, ending up agreeing to disagree after things get a bit heated.

Everybody has joined in and contributed, all except for me, who sits there in an all-too-rare moment of reticence. Because, frankly, I'm shocked and a little confused. Why are we debating this?

Blogs and Social Media. . .
Back in the present, I've written about Learning Styles and how they're probably a bit flaky. I've since read similar debunkers on Cognitive Load Theory (which, as a theory, I find quite convincing),
Neuro-Linguistic Programming (which seems a bit bonkers to me) and Multiple Intelligences (which I'm kind of Dilberty about).

All of the posts seemed to cause debate. What are we doing debating all this stuff?

Frankly, I couldn't give a toss if you agree or disagree with a piece of research. What I'd like to know is how you used it in your work and what you learned. It didn't occur to anybody in my class to suggest testing out the ideas on real people in a real learning environment (nor did it occur to our lecturer to suggest it as an option).

The day after my tedious class I went to work and tested the research out on classes. There were no arguments, and I discovered the 'truth' for my situation was somewhere in between the two poles of the class debate.

Learning from deliberate practice is a core competency - not at all the kind of thing you outsource to researchers.

Training Analysis

Here's a problem for you Learning Professionals and Trainng Experts to solve:

Drivers and guards on some of the busiest railways on the planet sometimes 'make mistakes or skip some of the steps they are supposed to do'. They have had some 'close calls because of their mistakes'. They need help to pay closer attention to safety measures.

How would you set about this? Is your Instructional Design sense tingling? Some answers to how one nation approached this after some focused grumbling.

Computer says, "No. . ."


Yesterday, I fought the computers. And the computers won.

It started off okay. I'm supporting some teams to get better at planning. It's a fairly good learning environment I've helped set up, though nothing exciting. The examples were real and challenging. My TTT was minuscule. And it's social; one of the learners commented, "No offence, but I think we're learning more from each other than we are from you." (Yay! A Skinner point!) It went as well as can be expected. What with everybody knowing their achievements were doomed to failure and all.

The problem is their IT systems, which demand constant feeding with endless, mostly useless, context-free bits of data. If the computers aren't supplied with a continual diet of checks and balances, they flash red warnings and fire off email warnings to management. There's not time for much except feeding the system's control-freak habit.

Like I say, it was a bad day. We all had a great time. But the computers won.

Nasty Habits
I used to smoke and bite my nails. I tried to give up smoking loads of times and failed. I bought Stop 'n' Grow for my nails and grew to enjoy the taste.

I quit smoking when we had kids. That was easy. The nail-gnawing was tougher; I had twenty years of failure behind me and I got used to thinking it would never happen. But recently I noticed I'd stopped that too, without even trying. I cut out caffeine just before Christmas. My fingers were a window on my nervousness and agitation, apparently.

Training at work is often worse than useless. Some workers are so frustrated by the sheer amount of time they spend feeding the above compliance-junkie IT systems (and, consequently, not having time for actual work) that they're showing signs of workplace stress. And how does the organisation deal with this stress? Have a guess in the comments, though I suspect the answer is all-too obvious.

Many of the problems that workers have in organisations are not something any amount of training will help. Because it's the organisations which need fixing, not the people. I quit smoking and nail-biting when my systems changed. Managers need to work on their systems before they start 'behaviour change' programmes for their staff.

Pointing Checking
Japan, home of some of the busiest railways on the planet, is also the birthplace of Yubisashi Kakunin. Which translates as 'Pointing Checking' or Pointing and Calling. And they don't just use it on trains; people do it anywhere there's danger if you don't pay attention. It's difficult to describe (there's links to some training videos on How to Implement Pointing and Calling below) but workers basically point at things and say 'Check!' to help them remember to pay attention.

It sounds flakier than aromatherapy and looks like OCD. But I have no idea what I think about it. When I spoke to Japanese people I fully expected them to share my amusement and commiserate with the poor souls forced into carrying out this demeaning ritual. My amusement was met with polite tolerance and my commiserations with bemusement. It's just what some people in Japan do when they're responsible for the safety of hundreds of people.

I suppose you could call it a kind of training, or a job aid, at a push. But I prefer the Japanese description - it's a Total Participation Campaign. (And it's very effective.)

If I were to go back to a client and suggest a Pointing Checking initiative, I'd be laughed out of the building. But their own systems have pretty much the same effect. (Ditto most meetings, internal reports, still having Internet Explorer, MailMarshall or other hyper-aggressive firewall etc etc etc) Huge parts of the work that Learning Professionals and educators do is about sticking tape over a crappy product.

SMART targets in the wild
A great deal of the training and conditioning that Learning Professionals receive pushes you to focus on SMART Learning Objectives after careful Needs Analysis. And this is fine in school, where the really excellent teachers plan "exhaustively and purposefully—for the next day or the year ahead—by working backward from the desired outcome". This is fine because they set the exam and they know exactly what the desired outcome is. Analysis in the classroom is fine.

But in the wild, analytical thinking is less appropriate than synthesis and Systems Thinking. Training and Education struggle to be useful outside of a Total Participation Campaign.

Further Information
If you're interested in Japan, instructional films or general weirdness click through to How to Do Pointing and Checking in your Workplace below. I found the third film entrancing (but struggled to keep awake during the other two).

There's links to more information (and diagrams!) on Pointing and Checking over at Hypergogue: Put our Heart into your Fingers, Point and Call, Okay!

Direct links to the videos, very poor quality, sound in English. Part 1:
Are you Pointing and Calling?

And Part 2:
How to Point and Call, Basic Applications

And the absolutely unmissable Part 3:
Overcoming Workers' Embarrassment

In Part 3, I couldn't help but be reminded of the Internet Time Alliance. I can just see Jay Cross and Harold Jarche leading a Pointing and Calling Social Learning initiative. :)

Obligatory last note: to be honest, I'm not sure if Systems Thinking doesn't apply to schools too. I don't know very much about schools so I've moderated my tone above. One thing I am sure of is that the current mix of clearly defined 'subjects' and exams is mostly stupid. I'd be interested to hear from anybody who actually works in a school, though.


[Massive UX Fail image is from rdolishny on Flickr]