How in your opinion can we use Web 2 Functionalities such as Blogs and Chat in Corporate Learning?
Good Answers (4)
David H
Adult & m-learning consultant
Best Answers in: Occupational Training (3), Project Management (1), Career Management (1)
Kapil:
Blogs provide a great way to journal what is top of mind. The danger with blogs is that nothing of substance may be posted. Taking some time and educating users on what makes a learning story (see Snowden, second link) will improve the content of blogs. Once the posts have value, the blogs can serve as a running resource. Imagine an expert posting to his or her blog crucial information they just discovered by trouble shooting a problem at a client site. With the use of RSS feeds, the other practitioners that follow this expert in the company (or external if desired) receive a synopsis of the post on their mobile device (and/or e-mail). What is the value of getting this information dispersed globally just minutes after it was discovered? Blogs are an asynchronous learning tool.
Chat provides realtime communication. In the above example, a practitioner has just read the RSS feed and realized she is facing a similar problem--but is not sure about one step described in the blog post. Using chat, she can quickly establish a chat session with the blog poster and ask the question--getting immediate feedback and further guidance.
In another example, the practitioner has a question that she needs answered, but is not sure who the right person is--so she initiates a chat with an alias that starts a group chat with everyone in the company that is willing to answer question in the knowledge domain. What is the value of having a live chat with a global team that is able to provide assistance? After all, in a global company someone is always awake! This is synchronous learning. A chat transcript can also be saved available to others as a record if desired.
Blogs and chats are examples of mobile learning. They provide support for informal learning (read Jay Cross, third link) allowing knowledge to be shared quickly, informally, and delivered right to the mobile device of those that need it.
I have included a couple of links if you wish to read further. The first link is for a Google search that will provide interesting reading if you wish to go further with this inquiry. The second link is for the writings of David Snowden on story telling and multi-ontology sense making. The third link is Jay Cross on Informal Learning.
Cheers,
Dave
Links:
Scott H
Owner - Real Projects - Creative e-learning solutions
Best Answers in: Occupational Training (2), Education and Schools (1)
Hello Kapil,
you pose an interesting question.
web 2.0 tools such as blogs and wiki are already being used in a corporate learning environment both internally and externally.
Dell run a very succesful forum which is now owned by the Dell user community who are able to answer many questions and also provide a unique insight for Dell into their customers.
I personally think wiki's are a very good tool for collaborative and corporate learning, especially where you are bring together teams from different business areas. For example you may have a set of development teams who have come together to work on a project. You can use a wiki to document and iterate new development standards.
Chat
Chat can be used to ping quick questions over to work colleagues. However we need to ensure that this does not replace face to face communication which should always be encouraged. Chat is good to run in a meeting/conference environment especially where the participants may speak different languages.
I've been to large colleges where chat is extensively used by the students to communicate during lectures. For online courses chat functions combined with remote lecture services are an interesting addition.
Blogs
Internally a blog can be used by staff members to share information amongst staff. In larger organisations they can also be used to provide a connection to senior management.
When you use these tools you must also be prepared for content that you might not agree with and you need a strategy in place for how you deal with this.
Many companies are unaware that customers will already have blogs and many of them will already be talking about them. These blogs provide an amazing insight into what people actually think about the products and services.
Using web 2.0 technologies as learning tools we need to think about how they are used outside of an organisation as well as within.
Groundswell is a book that will provide a good starting point if you are interested in this area and want to explore some case studies and develop your own strategy.
Links:
Great question Kapil. Here goes my take on it:
Web 2.0 or 'two-way-web' makes learning a social and continuous process.
Learning actually is a social interactive event.
Picture this.
You enter your office on a Monday morning, settle down in your cubicle, hook up your laptop, open your mail client and trigger send/receive – nothing happens and you get a send/receive error. What would you do first?
Option 1 – Troubleshoot using the help documentation of the mail client.
Option 2 - Call a customer hotline.
Option 3 - Pop your head into the next cubicle and ask your immediate neighbor – what’s going on?
Again, if you are like most of us, you will go for option 3. She might be able to tell you about the new exchange server you need to setup. She might also walk you though the steps to reconfigure your mail account.
That represents ‘just-in-time’ or on-demand, task-based information exchange through social interaction. Simplistic perhaps, but the idea holds true in a complex knowledge exchange scenario within an organization.
Web 2-point-oh or whatever you call a collaborative learning environment exactly help you to do this. Learning is a social event, and collective intelligence is the key for any organizational success. The #1 problem of corporate e Learning today is overemphasized focus on content. Content is scattered all over the organization in many forms and formats - slides, white papers, e-mails (!) etc. These may be not in most articulated or engaging format, and can obviously be improved drastically with rich media, but at least the content is there! What’s totally lacking in most organizations is collaboration, interaction and systematic process of capturing tacit knowledge scattered throughout the organization.
Since we were little, communicating has been about responding to one another. I say to my little daughter ‘Daddy’. She says ‘Dada’. And we go on for a while. That’s how she learns. A response calls forth another response, and a theme develops. It’s how we all learn - until we join organizations. Then we sit down and watch people give presentations; or worse - we put a voiceover on the slides, upload them to an LMS and name the process e Learning!
Ask workers where they learned how to do their jobs, and 80 percent of the time the answer is “at work.” Most learning takes place on the job, outside the purview of formal learning. When we do conduct formal training, 80 percent of it is wasted effort. - Jay Cross (Workflow Learning Gets Real)
Now for the million-dollar question: how do we establish a culture of knowledge sharing and a collaborative learning-working environment in an organization? The technology is here - both for synchronous (virtual classroom/meeting-room, virtual workplace) and asynchronous (blog, wiki, forum, folksonomy tools etc.). Collaborative knowledge sharing environments are a reality now, at least technically. But the hurdle is not technological; it’s mainly political and cultural. Our years of ranking and certification-based education has lent our outlook towards learning a ‘Darwinian’ perspective. And the same learning culture is carried forward by people into organizations after “warming the seat in the classroom”-type learning for 16+ years.
Links:
Part I
------------
That may not be the best way to ask the question.
Web 2.0 tools can help, but the largest contributor to their success will be the people, the manner of their implementation, and consistency of use. For example; one company I worked for had an antiquated mainframe customer database that was preferred over the new glitzy web UI simply because it was easier to navigate and provided more accurate returns to queries.
If a company is going to adopt a particular method of communication for knowledge transfer and wants to be successful, as a first step, must make a long term commitment to the project with senior management taking part in its use. If it is adopted as a fad, or as a tool that will fix the problem because it’s the latest buzz, then it will fail.
Blogs and wikis are a good way to store and share knowledge. If organized well they can be phenomenal tools to augment and reinforce learning, but are not sufficient in and of themselves. They will need to be incorporated into the curriculum in a structured way that encourages, or requires, their use. One of the problems I have seen with them is knowledgeable people withholding needed information to hide issues and/or keep themselves perceived as higher level of value. Their use in virtual learning environments will have to keep this possibility in mind.
Making the tools work really does rely on the people who use it. Look at the top rated personal blogs. There are maintained by some very few people who have the freedom and take the time to make them successful. Time and freedom can be rare commodities in the business world and their absence are impediments to successful implementation.
Instant message (IM) clients are extremely useful within a team setting and can be helpful in some learning situations. Here again there are cautions that should be mentioned. Teams are generally in existence over longer periods of time than corporate learners who may be in virtual classrooms for a week, or perhaps only an hour or two.
The team has the distinct advantage of more time than those in a class to become comfortable pacing the use of the tool within the environment it is used. Classes, on the other hand, are modularized where each module transfers knowledge at a faster rate and over a shorter duration. Add to this the difficulty of typing a question at say 25 words per minute while an instructor can be talking anywhere from perhaps 125 to 200 words per minute. 25 wpm vs. up to 200 wpm is a difficult pair of interfaces to match. This leads us to two more hurdles.
First, we are introducing multitasking into the environment. While the researchers have yet to come up with a definitive answer, I (as a corporate instructor) would argue that multitasking dilutes the effectiveness of one’s ability to transfer knowledge to students. This is especially true when working in the virtual environment you are asking about.
Secondly, as a rule, humans cannot consistently absorb knowledge at the pace it may be presented to them in virtual environments. People think students can handle all the data points coming at them, but they can’t. I see it happening often in classrooms and more so in virtual environments..
I say this as an individual, who at one point in my life, was able to actively absorb and retain the following streams simultaneously: read a technical book, watch a documentary on TV, listen to the news on radio, and have a book on tape feeding into one side of a headphone. It’s a rare day when I can do that now. It is rarer still to find a class who can keep up as they deal with their distractions in a virtual environment or even in a dedicated training room. Cell phones and pagers take people away from the class, webmail has them answering e-mail that may or may not be business related. Lately broadband cellular air cards and web enabled PDAs have made their appearance.
Clarification added October 21, 2008:
Part II
------------
There is not much an instructor can do to counter these behaviors when it is condoned by the business. It is a classroom management issue that in some cases may be beyond the ability of the instructor to address. Web 2.0 will not help compensate for this kind of behavior. You will have to adopt practices that support the successful transfer of knowledge and empower the instructor with specific actions that may be taken for specific student behaviors – and then support the instructor when a student complains.
Finally, a major drawback in the current Web 2.0 technologies is there is not sufficient feedback either to the instructor, or to the students that we all rely on when we are in physical proximity. There are clever icons for students to click indicating mood, speed up, slow down, etc. that are nowhere as effective as seeing a smile, look of confusion and, hearing a nervous laugh, so-on.
A number of compensating measures that must be put in place to minimize the loss of familiarity that a physical classroom offers. Actions such as allowing two way audio communication in addition to IM, and features of the presentation interface.
Can Web 2.0 technology work in a corporate learning environment? Yes it can.
Can it increase the transfer of knowledge and improve the quality of virtual learning environments? Yes, it can do that too as long as the companies adopting it understand web 2.0 is not a magic bullet. There are definite steps that have to be followed as with the adoption of any other enterprise application suite.
Do I enjoy virtual environments? I love them when they are done right.
More Answers (13)
Sasha G
Marketing Services at Peer Evaluations LLC
Best Answers in: Business Development (2), Web Development (2), Job Search (1), Advertising (1), Internet Marketing (1), Search Marketing (1), Change Management (1), Futures Markets (1), Manufacturing (1), Quality Management and Standards (1), Small Business (1), Starting Up (1)
There are a lot of learning. You can run statistics, you can open polls, ou can learn prospects behavior, you can build links, or you can convince possible customers to turn to your site for products/services - you can even find employees just by searching Q&As over there.
I am sorry I am not able to provide any good answers because we do not use either.
Web 2 might only help you to provide a smooth interface. The learning part is on another level
For e-learning you have basic tools like scorm, ims, etc...
Hans W also suggests these experts on this topic:
Jenise C
Effective and Engaging e-Learning Designer/Developer | www.RidgeViewMedia.com | @jenisecook
Best Answers in: Occupational Training (2), Organizational Development (1), Career Management (1)
Kapil,
Good question! One of the speed bumps is for learning organizations behind strong firewalls. For them, Saas models won't work unless they can install the products behind their firewall.
However, we learning folks are still encouraged by Web 2.0 and Learning 2.0, and I recommend you join the e-Learning Guild, and read Dr. Tony Karrer's blog for answers to specific questions.
Links:
Bhanwar S
Innovations in interactivity@ www.HarbingerKnowledge.com
Best Answers in: Occupational Training (1)
Thanks Kapil for the question!
Basically Web 2.0 has provided functionalities focused toward the collaborative/social/informal learning; out of which the Blogs and Chat are the popular ones.
Many of the corporates are using blog to provide the independence to their employees for the feedback and share their opinion with peer and the management. and in corporate the Chat could be is very useful in employee counseling, objection handling, personalization of thoughts which was not there in Blogging and many other such applications.
"chat within blog" is very actively being used by universities and corporates for psychological/personal counseling and training. With the help of Blog they provide the info and for immediate personal assistance the chat box available there. You may like to check out this blog with yahoo pingbox:
http://bhanwar-elearningharbinger.blogspot.com/
JoAnn E
Trainer; eLearning Designer/Developer; Instructional Design/Developer at Icon Information Consultants
I think using new technology and functionality is the best way to interest groups in learning. If we do not adapt to the environment, we lose credibility. Blogs are an excellent way to keep everyone informed about projects, changes, events and achievements without using cumbersome email lists.
In addition, RPGs are an excellent resource for training. Make it fun, they will come.
Magdalena S suggests this expert on this topic:
Damien is a specialist in communication techniques, with special attention to Web 2.0 contact opportunities .
Using a blog could be a great advertising tool for your corporate learning team. You could use the blog to announce new classes. You could post positive reviews of previous classes. Another idea would be providing tips from the blog in the hopes that users will attend the class to learn more.
Chat could be used for many reasons. I would also consider a tool like Lotus Connections or Sharepoint to be like a "chat" system. These tools would allow you to create "user groups" for students to correspond and share experiences after the training is over.
Links:
Pankaj T
Business Dev. Exec. at Second Foundation
Best Answers in: Small Business (1), Enterprise Software (1)
Blogs are a great way since subject matter experts like to write on subjects they excel in, and if the matter is compelling and relevant, readers from across the company naturally come to the blog to read leading to spontaneous learning.
Chat helps because it helps create informal networks across company boundaries leading to instantaneous information exchange.
Another great way are forums, since they spur discussion and debate with every body pooling in with their knowledge.
It makes sense to have an intranet with all these functionalities within it, so that employees naturally take to these tools. We use HyperOffice for our intranet, and all these tools within the solution has lead to the intranet being a thriving community and lots of information and knowledge flowing through it.
Links:
Hi Kapil,
We are using these tools here at ING - Take a look at my blog for more info.
http://ebites.wordpress.com/2008/05/31/informal-learning-ing/
Cheers,
Debora
John James O
Consultant, Educator, Co-author Knowledge Resource Management model, internationally active Certified Records Manager
Best Answers in: Travel Tools (1), Staffing and Recruiting (1), Quality Management and Standards (1), Wealth Management (1), Blogging (1), Enterprise Software (1), Information Storage (1)
Web 2.0 is about functionality applied to business, professional and personal interests and needs. I delivered a session on K 2.0 (essentially, the idea of Web 2.0 and implications for corporate knowledge capture, risk and compliance management balanced with capacity building and innovation). It was interesting to see the (older, but younger than me!) managers who were oblivious to the encroachment of Web 2.0, SMS, etc. into the workflows they are accountable for. It was amusing to see how polite and circumspect the totally wired younger crowd was (including some older than me - think about it).
In short, people are where it is at. If your internal systems do not help people be successful, they'll use (often free) applications to pursue that without you. Corporately, that means decision processes move out of your control. Mapping the reality of knowledge building and sharing to potential liabilities, etc. is not well in hand. And, noting how polite the Web 2.0 users were in the face of managers who think everything is fine, I think there is trouble ahead.
It's a fascinating area.
\
Links:
I have a couple of suggestions from my experience:
1) As any organization grows in number, with diverse skill sets and knowledge required in delivering a client-specific solution, implementing an organization wide instant messaging (chat) tool integrated with an employee-directory will greatly enhance learning. It will enable each employee in the organization to leverage on the knowledge power available to him collectively in the skills and expertise of other employees within the same organization. For example, having a directory which includes every employees technical skills, prior experience, current job role, cv, technical interests and other credentials will enable one to search and find a person who might have an answer to his/her problem. The chat tool can then be used to communicate with the identified person ... today's groupwares do a great job in it!
2) Blogs enable people to share their technical knowledge, thoughts and innovation ideas to a wide audience. Although Wikipedia is not a blog, the idea of leveraging collective knowledge is really efficient. Another suggestion would be to have discussion forums withing the organization. Networking within the company can yield a lot of results!
These and other networking sites enabled by Web 2.0 has changed the boundaries for the flow of knowledge, information and learning and created a new culture in learning.
Julie E
Trainer at 2Checkout.com
Best Answers in: Government Policy (1), Quality Management and Standards (1), Energy and Development (1)
We use an internal blog at my company to facilitate interdepartmental communication. Anyone in the company can post to it, so we'll have anything from roll out notes from development to procedural changes in customer care added to it.
One of the neat things about how our blog is set up is that it's in 2 columns. The left hand column has pressing, work related information in it, and the one on the right allows anyone to post about whatever work related subject is on their mind. Often we will get links to work related articles, inspirational quotes and advice from higher up employees in that section.
I don't think about the blog as a learning tool as much as a communications hub, but it certainly has helped me to provide training information, such as clarifications after a class, quickly and easily.
So my conclusion is that the blog is not necessarily required for training, but it is required for keeping the business running smoothly.
