Brent MacKinnon's List: Network Learning

"This is a follow-up from the Networked Learning (PKM) workshop I conducted for the iSchool Institute yesterday. Here are some of the resources I suggested prior to the course:"

"Last week, I admitted that I am an information junkie, and I wanted to follow up this week with a few tips for feeding your information habit by mining Twitter for information. Twitter tools are popping up like weeds lately, so rather than try to be comprehensive, I’m just going to highlight a few of my favorite tools for getting information out of Twitter."

"By far the most important way employees learn to do their work is in the course of doing their jobs. As Picasso said, “I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.” Workers learn through discovery borne of trying things out, mimicking others and engaging in conversation. They do this on the job, not in the classroom.

Jay Cross chairs the Internet Time Alliance and is a thought leader in informal learning and working smarter. He can be reached at editor@CLOmedia.com."

"“There is disconnect between how immersed and digitally connected employees are outside of the workplace, and how their internal communications are being delivered. On the ground, employees are still posting printed communications on the water cooler when they can be engaged, led and informed via the latest digital channel.”"

"The 21st century workplace, with its growing complexity due to our interconnectivity, requires that we focus on new problems and exception-handing. This increases the need for collaboration (working together on a problem) and cooperation (sharing without any specific objective)."

"Link Listening To Social Media Strategy Decisions

Actionable listeningon social media channels means transforming a “river of noise” into insights that allow you to take action. That is, you gain insight, can make a decision, or do something. Listening can help your organization craft conversation starters, figure out how to best start engaging, identify social content that you can incorporate into your content strategy, identify influencers who you can transform into brand ambassadors, or address a potential crisis early in the game.
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"I've been writing a lot lately about positive professional development, trying to think differently about how we approach our own learning and growth. But it occurs to me that for many of us, thinking about career and professional growth can be tough if we're feeling stuck in our current careers. All this "positive" stuff can start to sound like the manic ramblings of a crazy person. Who has TIME for positive professional development when you're just trying to keep your head above water? "

"Connecting with people and innovative ideas is more important than ever. To my mind, in a world where new and interesting ideas can come from anywhere, true value is found by breaking through the silos of sector-only or country-only knowledge and relationships. In such a world, it is not about the number of people you know or the mountain of business cards you collect, but rather about the depth and authenticity of the relationships you build and sustain, the depth and maturity of the connection you have with one another, and about valuing and nurturing the free flow of ideas."

The learning and development field has a lot of good research on how to support workplace performance. Tom Gram has some excellent posts and resources that discuss performance by design. His most recent post, Everyday Experience is Not Enough, summarizes what it takes to support workplace learning. It’s definitely worth reading and following the links to other resources.

Create processes and tools that build learning into jobs and cause informal learning
Experienced employees also learn plenty (sometimes intentionally and sometimes unintentionally) simply from interacting with people, ideas and objects in their work environment using the natural learning cycle I described here.  We can create work systems that can cause this type of informal learning through well designed and visible work processes, feedback, and performance systems. Web 2.0, social networking tools and communities of practice give employees, especially knowledge workers, tools to create, share and use organizational knowledge.

Are you struggling to get Social Media for learning started in your organization?  You might just be going about it all in the wrong order. In the effort to establish a social media empowered workforce, just remember as in the alphabet “L before M” as in “Learning” before "Media". As my friend and colleague Jane Bozarth has said numerous times – we’ve been learning well before social media for ooooh about 5,000 years! So how come when presented with technology we seem to have forgotten this?

Curtis Ogden at The Interaction Institute for Social Change provides a very good summary of the differences between network-centric and hierarchy-centric thinking, called Network Thinking:
Adaptability instead of control
Emergence instead of predictability
Resilience and redundancy instead of rock stardom
Contributions before credentials
Diversity and divergence

he result of sharing is that barriers between departments fall. Silos get broken down and the power distance between leaders/managers and front line employees becomes smaller. And it also creates opportunity for new leaders to emerge, where they are defined not by their title or how much budget they control, but seen as a leaders simply because they have amassed followers.

Harold Jarche moves us away from the expert label to a broader use of skills as participant in networks. Networks, network use and knowledge are key elements of the social artistry skill set.

So the critical skills for people formerly known as SME’s are how to become contributing members of subject matter networks. Part of this is in narrating one’s work and learning. I have called personal knowledge management (PKM) – our part of the social learning contract. One cannot be effective in professional networks without contributing. Subject matter networks are made up of many contributors. A key skill is in weaving the best networks together.

What is a Network?
A network is a system of social ties that links people together in a particular context, generally around topics that interest them or types of connections (i.e., people I went to college with, people I work with, people from my church, etc.)

Networks of organizations have:
Distributed authority--no centralized decision-making figure, no "boss." Typically have coordinators who help network members decide what they want to do and help them do it.
Negotiated agreements about how to accomplish the work of the network.

"Whitepapers & studies on social media, public interest, Internet use and mobile
We believe businesses, start-ups, nonprofits and grassroots organiazations shouldn’t need to spend thousands of dollars purchasing research reports. Socialbrite.org has assembled the following list of free reports bearing on the social media, public interest, technology, Internet use and mobile."

"It’s a fallacy to think of networking as a sales tool. Firstly, it’s not. Secondly, it might instead be one of the defining sources of value in your business. Business strategist Ross Dawson, author of the (free and highly comprehensible) Future of Work Framework explains how."