Strategies and Techniques for Implementing Social, Collaborative, and 3D Learning

"As for the future, your task is not to foresee it, but to enable it."
— Antoine de Saint-Exupery

I'm belatedly posting some notes from an eLearningGuild online forum, Strategies and Techniques for Implementing Social, Collaborative, and 3D Learning, December 13 & 14. There were a lot of great and notable speakers from the cutting edge of technology-assisted learning. These are kind of long so I'm breaking them up into several posts, which will primarily be of interest to my colleagues in the learning professions.

The first morning the keynote was by Ray Jimenez, CEO of Vignettes for Training, Inc., who spoke on How to Integrate Social Networking and Collaboration to Impact Learning and Performance. He opened by talking about the variety of exciting tools that Web 2.0 provides (e.g. wikis, blogs, etc.) to help learners perform on the job and the common tension, in enterprise environments, between formal structured training and informal Web 2.0 learner-as-author content. He encouraged his audience of learning professionals to nurture the content creators among our learners. Ray posted some additional reference material to his blog including a free downloadable report with some case studies.

The next session I chose was Getting Serious about Virtual Worlds by Christian Renaud of Cisco. He cited some interesting figures from a study done by Pearn Kandola for Cisco on effective communications for geographically dispersed teams. For example, that it takes 4 times long to communicate a message electronically versus face-to-face. In SecondLife (SL), Cisco has a public-facing virtual campus, with meeting rooms, office space, a training area, and a theater-in-the-round. See http://blogs.cisco.com/virtualworlds for more information including virtual event dates. The major drawback of SL: there's no security system to speak of, so they don't use (or recommend) it for confidential information. The Virtual World Interoperability Forum working to de-risk this space.

Christian's thoughts on picking the right tool for an interaction:

• talk to a colleague quickly: telephone
• sensitive meeting: video conference if you can't meet live
• board meeting or close a big deal: telepresence
• pitch an idea: Webex
• disseminate your idea to 100s or 1,000s: webcast/podcast
• intimate gatherings with people you may not know: virtual worlds

One tool doesn't fit all, but they're working on integration between these so you can segue as needed. He said the best business use of a virtual world is when you have an intimate audience of people who can't meet physically and who either already trust each other or who don't require a strong trust relationship for the task(s) at hand.

He also mentioned the Mozilla-based Flock social web browser, and I'm giving it a try. But I'm so accustomed to automatically deleting all my personal info (cookies, etc.) when I exit a browser that it's hard to take the best advantage of its built-in features for social networking tools. I do like how easy it's to see status updates from Facebook and Twitter.

Also in attendance for this session was one of the other speakers: Tony O'Driscoll.

The next session I participated in was A New Model for Informal Learning: Communities 2.0 by Eric Sauve, founder and CEO of Tomoye Corporation and an author on trends and issues of Communities of Practice. Some highlights of his talk:

• Workplace trends driving social and informal learning
• Forrester says "More than 80% of adult learning takes place in informal settings outside the classroom, leaving only 20% for formal learning situations. In spite of the disparity between informal and formal learning in the workplace, corporations invest most of their budgets in formal learning."
• Eric noted we're just starting to find effective answers to this problem but it will change.
• Learners as source of content (YouTube-ification)
• Using the model of the Long Tail: while training organizations take on the low end, learners turn to their peers as the "Long Tail" of learning.
• The low end is time-consuming and costly, the long tail is fast, cost-effective, and validated by users.
• The learning environment, with best practices and supporting technology, becomes bottom-up and learner-centric.
• Validation Concerns
• For example: Are we creating value or compounding ignorance? Does the best or worst rise to the top?
• Collective Intelligence as a community validation method (The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki and Howard Rheingold's Smart Mobs) says that a large group of peers is more effective at complex problem resolution than a small group of experts because in aggregate, the large group has more perspective and experience -- if you can capture it

• Linkages between formal and informal methodologies:

• as part of a blended learning strategy
• using community subject matter experts (SMEs) to validate courseware development
• point learning solutions for capacity building

• Biggest barrier to facilitating user-generated content: people untrained in instructional design have to think about how to be effective at generating learning content.