Connect Thinking Research Blog

I attend the Learning Technologies Conference when I can because it keeps me honest. The room is full of 200 passionate educators all striving to best apply learning technologies to their milieu to improve student engagement and learning outcomes. The audience are chiefly teachers in institutions where courses are mandatory and students are working towards a qualification. I, of course, work in organisational learning.

The themes from this conference I will continue to reflect upon from an org. learning perspective are:

1. “I” versus “we” versus “network” – what this distinction means in relation to our architecture of web 2.0 platforms and our expectation of employee behaviour in these environments.

Consider what large corporate collaboration platforms such as Sharepoint and Lotus Connections espouse they achieve versus how people really perform and interact.  Before implementing such technologies we need to seriously map workflow (“watch where people work, then create the footpath”), ask questions of end users, and ensure we are providing the support that will enable employees to find efficiencies in the technology.

Nancy White reminded the workshop 1. Process configuration is important in communities – less so in networks. 2. Communities can feel strain from size – networks thrive in diversity  3. Community members respond to social pressures – in networks, people make choices for themselves  4. Communities thrive from specific reciprocity (& consequences) – in networks it just “is”.

2. Education should not be a foreign word in organisational learning. Two commonalities of education are ‘mandatory’ and rigorous assessment. Now, I don’t mean to equate education with the familiar ‘mandatory’ of compliance courses in organisations. ‘Mandatory’ is about commitment between the organisation and the employee. How often do employees pull out of courses at the last minute? How often is course content forgotten because of lack of strategies to embed new knowledge back into the workplace? How often is an employee’s attendance at a course the box tick that signals they know the content, when no assessment has been undertaken? Given the investment in training employees, shouldn’t we have higher expectations of completion (which should include workplace exercises) and conduct both formative and summative assessment? Shouldn’t we identify failure and then help those employees to pass, rather than ignore poor performance?

3. Clay Burell and others reminded me yet again the importance of ensuring we as practitioners uncover the gaps in knowledge/skills by asking the employee; not only their manager, and definitely not assume. We need to conduct proper needs analysis. We need to ask the questions 1. What do you know? 2. What do you want to know? 3. What stops you from being best?

Tags: conference, online communities, organisational learning