Grab bag

Last night I dreamt that I was at checking in at some out-of-the-way international airport. I was at a table covered with a pile of receipts, tickets, credit cards, itineraries, printouts, business cards, and notes. I had lost my shoulder bag, so I stuffed everything into a cardboard box. I checked the box as luggage, got my boarding pass, and realized I’d left my ID was in the box. Thank heavens I woke up before I had to go through Security.

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On another matter, Web 2.2 closed with a drawing. My business card came out of the fishbowl, and I am now the owner of a ViewSonic Pocket PC V37. Now I need to figure out what to do with it.

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And another… I’ve been touting the concept that most traditional training focuses on novices, to the neglect of the high-producing people with experience. That’s an over-simplification because a learner may be expert at a dozen things but a novice in several others.

At Web 2.2, Gail Ann Williams, doyenne of the WeLL, told us that new members of an online social community need to understand “How do I play this thing?” Many social network services never get off the ground because people don’t know what to do after filling out the lengthy profile form. A community is more than a shared software environment. For example, a thousand photographers drifted from one photo site to Flickr en masse. (Their first home had been hi-jacked by Brazilians who almost exclusively posted photos from their parties.)

Wait one. I realized that while I have 3,500 photos on Flickr, I have not made anything of the opportunities to connect with others there. Gail said many serious photographers stored their photos elsewhere. Flickr is more a set of visual blogs for keeping up with one’s friends and for interacting with comments. I feel like a Word user who hasn’t found spell-check.

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Blogs exhibit a similar pattern. The front page of internettime.com is the tip of an iceberg. Underneath this week’s material are eleven years of entires, links, and observations. A long-time reader may know what sort of material to expect under the surface, but a novice will not. The fact that blogs are accumulations of daily postings makes them better suited for news bites than for wisdom and trends.

In days gone by, I periodically put posts worth remembering or links to them on topic pages. Examples: Design, How People Learn, Metrics, Time, and others. This enabled me to share information with others whether or not it was today’s hot topic. I used these pages as a memory jog. Of course topic pages decay, and the rate of obsolescence is ever faster. Now we have tags for items in multiple categories. Tags pinpoint things I’d like to see in more context. Give me a map that shows a particular item’s link to other posts or topics. I’m getting lost just thinking about this.

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At Learning 2006, many people said that employee learning is a supervisor’s responsibility. It’s a natural part of the job. That’s a prescription for failure. Supervisors are stretched thinner and thinner these days. Tracking an subordinate’s learning progress is great in theory, but while it’s important, it’s rarely urgent. Besides, training professionals have been saying that supervisors don’t understand how learning works since time immemorial. When did they supposedly get the clue?

Giving supervisors a role they cannot carry out is akin to the bromide that _______ (fill in the blank) needs senior management support. While sponsorship at the senior level improves the odds of success of virtually anything, there’s only so much senior management attention to go around. Many worthy projects do not merit senior management intervention and support. Remember the 80/20 rule?

This begs the question: If supervisors aren’t going to shoulder the burden of training, who is? I’m coming around to thinking that it’s all of us. Each one teach one. Sharing know-how forces one to reflect and that cements the lesson in the teacher’s head.

Afraid that many people won’t qualify as peer-to-peer instructors? At Learning 2005, Malcolm Gladwell explained that subject matter experts do not make good instructors because so much of their thought processes are automatic that they can no longer explain what a newcomer needs to know. Better to learn from someone know remembers learning it herself. New development sequence: learn it, do it, share it, do it better.

Back to the Social Media Club: If you get it, share it.

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A few points from Wayne Hodgins at Learning 2006 that are surfacing in my thoughts:

1. In America, competency means on-the-job. In Europe, competency is lifelong learning.
2. Talking about Gen Y is over-generalization. They are people, too. It’s not like they — or booomers — are all alike.
3. Wayne is focusing on what it takes to be competent: the heart of the issue, not Band-Aids. Personalization means getting things just right, not getting them perfect. This takes lots of small pieces, loosely bound.

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If you are in London this Thursday, you might want to attend the Conference on Informal Learning Online. Charles Jennings, Stephen Citron, Stephen Powell, Nick Shackleton-Jones, and I will kick our thoughts around with four or five dozen folks, mostly U.K. government officials.