The Total Learner Experience

Language Communities on the Web

Having spent many years in a language classroom, I was excited to discover the abundance of free language instruction on the web. The three I found the most impressive were Livemocha, Babbel, and Busuu. All three offer interactive language lessons for a variety of European languages while Livemocha includes a number of less traditional languages (such as Persian, Esperanto, and Urdu).  Busuu is based upon the European system of language levels (A1, A2, B1, B2…) and was selected as an official UNESCO project while Livemocha follows the American system of classes (101,102, 201…)

Here is a rundown of each:

Busuu tracks your language progress via a “language garden” where your plant has the opportunity to grow into a tree as your progress through the lessons. Busuu’s strength is vocabulary building since each lesson begins with a picture, pronunciation, English translation, and example sentence. It also attempts to have you learn the language via short passages and related questions.  Like Livemocha, there is also a writing section where other users rate your responses. This feature is the main advantage of a true online community where the website can take advantage of a speaker’s native fluency. Thus, the user becomes both the student and the teacher.

Babbel gives the user more freedom to adjust the language to their level and has a stronger focus on common phrases.  My favorite aspects of Babbel are its forum and the chatrooms. In the easy to use forum, you can ask specific grammar questions not covered in the lessons. For instance, what really is the difference between nouvel and neuf? Also, the chatroom is a quick and easy way to put your language skills to the test. It should be noted that although all three sites offer a great array of services with a paid membership, Babbel is the most limited for users not willing to pay.

Livemocha tries to incentivize its users to progress with a points system that also hands out awards at different levels. While it is rather basic, I can attest that I have continued to practice lessons simply to attain the next shiny medal available. The lessons are very structured. Each includes a section to learn vocabulary/phrases, review them, complete a writing submission, and record a spoken section. The last two sections are then rated by native speakers in the community. In a sense, this tool provides you with free teachers who correct your grammar and pronunciation. One area I would like to see them add would be grammar. This fall before visiting Turkey, I wanted to use Livemocha to learn a few phrases and sentences. However, I found it difficult to extract even basic grammar only from the vocabulary and sentences the site provides.

Creating Effective Training Evaluation

Dolly: Brandon ranted about ineffective evaluations while I was holed up under the 2 feet of snow here. The snow is still here, but my Internet is finally back. His comments about evaluation made me wonder what I consider effective evaluation to look like. Cumulative evaluation should be as authentic as possible. If you want someone to be an effective salesperson, you'd better identify what competencies are required and then have them replicate and practice as best they can in the classroom environment.

Brandon: Good point. I concur. However, more and more organizations are hit with the high-cost of travel and the inefficiency of removing people away from their jobs for instructor-led training. We need to provide effective strategies for authentic evaluation in an online format.

So I can think of two ways to recreate these situations in the digital world: virtual simulation and/or role-playing. Learners will have different profiles. Does someone who is technically minded need the same practice as someone who is naturally a people person? Both these individuals need to come out with the same skill sets at the end, but perhaps they need different practice. Formative self assessments combined with flexible course sequencing can allow individuals to focus on their areas of real need.

That just describes a sales training course I completed using Thiagi's 4-Door Model. It allowed the learner to "self-adjust" the content based on their own self-leveling of knowledge. It does beg the question though: how do you "branch" an evaluation based on different learner profiles? Can you have an effective evaluation instrument via a dynamic system that presents a contextual series of assessment items based on the learner's individual profiles? 

I think that you can have a self-assessment that gives the learner guidance in their own strengths and weaknesses.

OK, so you're talking about self-assessment. What about an actual skills certification? One that can affect a learner's job status, salary, or in the case of compliance or regulatory situations, a learner's knowledge that could have life or death consequences? Can a dynamic evaluation instrument provide the appropriate assessment of knowledge?

I don't know what you mean by "dynamic evaluation instrument".

"Dynamic pooling" is when the system displays content based on a learner's input at the time of input.

What you are talking about now is less about the assessment/evaluation used and more the consequences related to that assessment or evaluation. The SATs are pretty weighty and they've been using a dynamic response for years. A student gets progressively harder questions until incorrect responses are entered. Then a cycle commences where easier and harder questions are given to the student until the logarithm determines what the student's level of mastery is. I'd say that stakes are high, but the College Board feels comfortable using this dynamic response.

Right. So I'm saying we need a similar system in corporate learning where appropriate assessment techniques seem to be a missing factor. In eLearning, there is a cycle of ineffective self-check systems instead of situational problem-based assessments. For example, a colleague was discussing with me the usage of "misconception" problems in assessment. They can present more authentic situations such as posing the problem in a scenario and requiring the learner to identify the parts of the scenario that are wrong or inaccurate. Even using open-ended question types where the system evaluates based on a keyword or series of keywords can be quite effective. How are we truly able to measure whether knowledge or skills are transferred if we're not willing to properly evaluate?

I like that because some people are just natural or trained to be good test takers. That kind of exercise actually accurately tests knowledge that they have, rather than their ability to suss out a poorly written stem or item. I know you are all about performance. Shouldn't people's training be based upon actual deficits in their performance and knowledge? And if they are high performers or can demonstrate mastery of course materials, shouldn't they be rewarded by being allowed to choose their own training regimen, anyhow?

Designing A Degrading Learning Experience

Since Dolly is snowbound in Virginia without internet access right now, I decided to post this week without her... and she is sorely missed. 

Recently I was asked to perform some basic instructional design on an already created eLearning storyboard. One of the duties assigned to me was to edit existing content, and ensure the content was optimized for the engine the developers would use to build the course. As I went through the content, I decided to add a knowledge check interaction at the end of each module. Although these would not be mandatory interactions, they would provide an opportunity for the learner to self-check their learning, and to receive contextual feedback. Before I continue this story, let me digress just a bit about instructional design:

Earlier this year I was presenting to a group of technical writers and instructional designers on what instructional design is. This was a request from a group of technical writers who really felt like they were also performing instructional design duties when they created "tutorials" and/or "labs". They wanted clarification on what my idea of instructional design is.

I noted three primary responsibilities of a typical instructional designer:

1. Applies instructional strategies to aid in the acquisition, creation, retention and retrieval of knowledge.
2. Matches content type to strategy. Creates a learning environment by providing examples and non-examples for teaching concepts and facts.
3. Applies systematic approaches to instructional messaging to aid in learning (pedagogy).

There are a few key components that an instructional designer brings to a learning intervention:

• Designs the information to assist the learner in building on prior knowledge
• Scaffolds the information to enable new knowledge to be acquired
• Provides relevant, contextual feedback in the learning environment

OK, back to my main story... the course design assistance I was providing... Just remember the items I listed above, cause they come into play in this story.

So I was informed that new game templates had been created by the developer that I could leverage to make the knowledge checks more engaging. So, as a game designer, I thought great! Can't wait to get my hands on them. This was a basic "learning by listening" course presented in a PowerPoint-like template to begin with, so any form of interaction would help (I thought) -- until I lifted the hood on the "game" template and peered inside its functionality.

The game template provided was based on the standard Wheel of Fortune format. As you can see in the screenshot below (click the graphic to enlarge), it contains four primary components:

1. Question selection mechanism in the form of a wheel with a spinning arrow
2. A fixed region for the item types. Two types of items are available: multiple choice with single or multiple correct response options, and a true or false type
3. A timer
4. A score indicator

 

The template affords eight game questions. The learner clicks the "SPIN" icon, the arrow spins and randomly lands on a question number. The question is presented in the fixed question region and the timer begins to count down from five minutes awaiting the learner's response which requires selecting a choice, and then clicking a Submit button.

Your first thought may be similar to mine when I came upon this game-like interaction: a nice graphical interface and higher levels of interactivity affording the learner the chance to actually do something. Great!

But as I began to develop the test items, I dug a bit deeper into the functionality, and quickly realized this interaction was not just instructionally unsound, but detrimental to the learning opportunity at hand. A templatized interaction should first strive to be instructionally sound, and then be visually engaging (if appropriate to the learning context). This template has the following problems:

• A game should heighten emotion. It does not meet the basic criteria I establish for a game. A game has to contain an element of play. There are many definitions of play, but one component I look for is heightened emotion. To heighten emotion there must be a compelling desire for the learner to want to engage. Think of the standard Wheel of Fortune game: the choices on the wheel contain different types of elements, such as values (5000 points, 100 points, 300 points) that denote item difficulty. There are also spoilers, such as "Bankruptcy" (forcing the player to lose all their points). Those elements heighten player emotion after spinning the wheel.. "do I want the 5000 point question... oh gosh, I hope it doesn't land on bankruptcy..." This game simply has question numbers as wheel choices. It would not be difficult to change these choices to make them more game-like.
• A game should contain an element of unpredictability. This template displays the same questions in order each time it's played. It does not randomize items from a larger pool. So every time the learner plays, question 1 is question 1. This corrupts the basic tenet of the game: it should easily be able to provide a "new" experience each time it's played. This is not hard to program into the Flash engine. I've done it. This feature would encourage the player to "play again" which potentially increases their ability to learn.
• Visuals should always support the learning content. I wrote feedback for each item before discussing any limitations with the developer (I never thought my feedback would be limited). After the developer received my items with feedback I was told that I must limit the feedback to 108 characters (not counting spaces). By limiting the feedback space, I am forced to NOT display all the feedback I may need for the learner to gain a deeper understanding (which really is the point of the whole interaction, right?). By simply reducing the size of the wheel graphic, I could gain maybe another 100 characters for feedback. The wheel is only the conduit to display the question in this representation anyway, so having it take up MORE screen real estate than the question box itself is just bad design. Reduce the graphic, and give me more room for content. 
• Adult learners need to know there's a reason for what they're doing, otherwise, they will become distracted, bored, and/or question the authenticity of the intervention. To attract the learner to a richer level of engagement, an element of competition is desirable. With multiple rounds, for instance, the player can achieve a higher game level or at least compete against the game for points. This can also provide a scaffolding opportunity. In this template, the score is meaningless -- there is no leaderboard, no saving of the score, and no demonstrable representation of the value of the scoring algorithm. The learner needs to easily understand the "value" of their score. What does a score of "30,000" mean anyway?
• As an instructional designer, I have a better idea of the time element required for the item other than an arbitrary number created by a programmer. When I wanted to control the timing options for the game, I was told that the timer amount was fixed at five minutes. I may have question items in a True or False format that require just a bit of time, and not the whole five minutes. Sure the player can answer quick, click Submit and move on... but with 5 minutes on the timer, where is the challenge?
• Every item type should support learning outcomes. True or False item types simply do not. I can't defend them. This item type is just not instructionally sound. What data does it give the learner? It does provide them a 50% chance of gaining more points. These item types should never be used.

Games designed for learning can be powerful interactions to help attract and engage learners, and have shown to be powerful agents in building problem-solving skills. I have nothing against game "shells" or templates (I worked with Thiagi to design game shells years ago that are still in use today), however, if divorced from sound instructional design, they can be demotivating. If you decide to use templatized game engines be sure to validate the instructional integrity before you adopt and use them. The best is to create them from scratch and design them to your unique requirements. Templates can provide a solid foundation for reusable, rapid development, but they should never take precedence over the ability to create an instructionally sound learning intervention.

Now is the Time to Do Less of More

This week we struck up a conversation about the general state of eLearning design in the corporate world. We ruminate over our belief that companies should consider doing less of more:

BRANDON: So I thought this week we would discuss the overwhelming number of requests for "training" that come from business units and stakeholders. It seems like some people think "training solves all the problems."

I've been on the inside and the outside of several corporate learning organizations over the years, and one trend that I've seen explode recently is a "factory mentality" designed to "templatize" training. I've seen these factories operate almost 'round the clock packaging "rapid eLearning" courses with little regard for formative or summative analysis, or interaction that motivates a learner to participate. It's really a "page turner" world out there in many instances. Some of this is pure economics -- many learning organizations are funded by business units. If a business unit allocates a specific amount of dollars for "training" they expect those dollars to actually be spent, regardless of the necessity or quality of the training.

Why have training if it's not good? I've counseled the organizations I work for/with to do "less of more". I firmly believe if most training organizations just stopped producing about 40% of what they are doing today -- just stopped cold turkey -- no one would even notice.

DOLLY: I think one reason that training can seem so irrelevant is because it is so divorced from the day to day activities that the jobs actually require. So, these people who are in sales for instance, talking and corresponding with clients everyday, come to training and spend 4 days listening to someone speak at them. These week-long explorations of Powerpoint slides don't engage the learner. They just become data dump sessions.

  Yeah, I agree. I personally think sales training should be high-touch, situational, and as contextual as possible. It seems to me that there are two avenues to drive down when producing sales training: basic "transfer of information" about products, services, etc., and scenario-based/role-play simulations that place the participant in authentic situations. At Sun, we leveraged the community for the transfer of information component by providing a user-generated content platform. Sales people ate it up. They could get small chunks of product information or sales techniques from experts in the field and download it to their mobile device. We then had "Sales University" for the mandatory accredited training courses.

And the thing is, if people are just going to be sitting in darkened rooms, why bother going to the expense of shipping them across the country? If it's just memorization of information, there's plenty of fairly easy and cheap ways to get that across in an online setting. However, both face to face and online activities can be so much more engaging and rich.  

Agreed. One thing that seems to be missing is an evaluation of actual sales skills done in a formal manner. If we're training these folks to sell, then we need to really look at each individual and evaluate their readiness to sell. It's one thing to lecture them, have them role-play, provide feedback, and then send them on their way. Where do we assess their readiness to do their job? Is that for their manager to determine outside of the training? If so, is training's role just to "provide the foundation"?  

And  evaluation doesn't have to be a test. It can be a demonstration, a portfolio or series of smaller activities built into the curriculum.  

Yes, one vendor I worked with provided role-playing scenarios in an online format using computer webcams and FlipCams. Participants would video themselves doing their pitch, and then upload it for the cohort and the facilitator to critique. 

In my eyes, that's a perfectly valid evaluation, as long as the learning objectives were to improve their sales pitch, not to learn the capitals of African countries. The whole point is to have evaluation that supports your objectives and curriculum. Excellent evaluation can be painless and seamless.  

What's the Difference Between a Game and an Educational Game?

Continuing our conversational posts, Dolly and Brandon went into Google Wave and discussed their opinions on the difference between a game and an educational game. The distinctions are key for instructional designers to consider when deciding to design a game for a learning intervention. Until we can embed Waves into Typepad, we lay out a simple reconstruction of the Wave conversation, with Dolly kicking it off:

DOLLY: Games vs. educational games. I know, one's fun and the other one is not! Really, though, what are the differences? I think intentionality of design is a key point, because I think that all games -- indeed all experiences -- are educational. Bernie deKoven talks a lot about children's games providing an opportunity to roleplay and work out developmental issues. I know I learned a lot about what a ruthless sort my brother is when he beat me repeatedly at every board game created. So, if we accept that every game has learning opportunities, how do we make sure to include the fun?

BRANDON: Both can be fun, right? The basic difference is an educational game is designed with specific learning objectives and should be able to assess whether learning occurs.  

I think assessment is key. That's the external component that is often artificial. So many times assessment of learning within games have two basic problems:
 

1. It's completely external and separate from the game play.
2. It's too "safe"-- Alex Trebek doesn't give you second chances in final jeopardy. It's FINAL!

I was thinking about that whole shift in board games with the advent of Cranium. Their whole goal was to remove the idea that there was one winner who had all the fun, but that players of multiple intelligences could play and those people could have fun. Bonding, instead of board throwing!

Hmm... Good point -- Cranium could be looked at as a "learning game" although it doesn't have traditional learning objectives, right?

Well, if you look at their objectives they are met. And their learning objectives fall nicely within affective measures and an arts curriculum.

For example? 

Well, the goals of the game include team cooperation and communication through graphic arts and music.

"Game" is such a broad term. A game must include some element of Play, I presume. I also assume a game designed with a learning outcome in mind has structured play (as opposed to unstructured play -- like when a kid plays with blocks).

Garvey said that a game is institutionalized play. Look at football. It's a game, clearly. We wouldn't say that it's educational, but you can learn it (and those who learn it best find it financially rewarding). Also by using it as a metaphor you can teach life lessons and/or management strategies, or you can teach math from the stats of the game.

So this leads me to think about the "game perimeter". Most games have boundaries, right? We step into the perimeter's "magic circle" to play the game. In the corporate workplace, the "magic circle" is the game's play boundary the instructional designer/game designer creates. The trick for instructional designers is to craft what learning occurs while the player is in that circle... so does that mean that the assessment needs to occur inside or outside the perimeter?

I think the best assessments are seamless and inside that perimeter. Examples could be performance-, point- or victory-based. 

So are we saying that the differences between a game and a successful educational game can be minimal if assessment can be more embedded and genuine?

Sure.

10 Ways To Use Facebook for Training

Brandon: You know as I work to create social learning micro-sites on the internal corporate network, it sometimes hits me that in a lot of ways I'm just re-creating what Facebook has already hit a home run with. So, Dolly, the question for you today is: How can I leverage Facebook for training? 

Dolly: What content is best suited for Facebook? Is Facebook for content or is it for social networking and engagement? 

Well it seems that technical training, soft skills training... really any type of learning content would work. The power of the platform seems to be around the integration of peer-to-peer dialogue and sharing with the context of learning. Facebook users are collaborating by default because they are exchanging comments and creating dialogue interactively. What we need to do is make this engaging activity applicable to work/training.

Shall we brainstorm? What are the features of Facebook are conducive to training? 

OK, so let's make it a contest. Let's list 10 ways we can use Facebook for training. I mean we're professionals right? With imaginations like ours, we should be able to easily list 10 ways! Here's one way:

1. Discussion threads. People seem to love engaging in dialogue about relevant subjects. A simple discussion board functionality is key in attracting learners to a higher level of engagement.

Facebook recently took out the updates about when people commented on others' walls. I liked that and was sad to see it go. It allowed me to see what my friends were saying -- even if it was directly relevant to me AND it often introduced me to new people that I liked. You never know what tidbit of seeming off-topic information will inspire a new idea. 

 2. Class notes and links to supporting information. In academic settings I've seen many professors, trainers and facilitators add their syllabi, notes, and links to websites. I'm using Microsoft Sharepoint now to create a wiki where I will host pre-work content and activities for a workshop I am designing. A Facebook-like platform is great for this, although versioning control would be a nice-to-have. 

Sharepoint? 

Sharepoint is Microsoft's collaboration platform. A lot of people are using it for collaborative learning environments. Check out more about it here.

3. Course feedback. Students can provide feedback about their favorite or least favorite aspects of the training.

This is where a "two-way" information stream can provide excellent near real-time feedback. An instructional designer could easily move to a more "agile" design process by using Facebook's social utilities to gain "instant" feedback on instructional content. I've been using similar methods for several years by building database systems. Facebook has this functionality built in! 

4. Student Reflection. Students are required to post some "takeaway" from any training that they just completed in their status, which can help their community at large.

5. Events. If you can get out of the whole departmental competition thing, it could be really interesting to have online "events" that everyone was invited to facilitate cross-company brainstorming for new initiatives.

6. Build your personal network/brand. It's important for individuals to be able to broadcast their expertise and interests. Facebook-like platforms could become similar to an "auctioning" of skills. IBM does this now with their internal Blue Pages. Employees are encouraged to list their skills, expertise, and availability. People can search using keywords to find suitable candidates for their projects.

I like this idea. We haven't talked about LinkedIn, but it seems like this might be an internal version of that.

7. Post-classroom events (extended learning). We used this recently on a leadership training program. Although the primary component of the training course was a 3-day classroom experience, we designed pre-work activities for the cohort to participate in online, and, to ensure retention and reflection we also designed post-classroom activities. The cohort remained engaged, and continued to work on the post-class activities. One benefit were the "breadcrumbs" left behind by the cohorts... subsequent cohorts could learn from them.

 8. Games. We could do a post of different types of games. But clearly all sorts of games are popular on Facebook. I don't play, but I know that Mafia Wars, Farmville and the like have some real appeal. I could see seeking out people who had certain skill sets to form your teams. You and I play Scrabble and its knockoffs. Facebook serves as a portal to every kind of game imaginable. I could also see some scavenger hunts for content and personnel.

How many games on Facebook are designed for learning though? Quite a few I think... it's just not real obvious.

I FIRMLY believe that every activity people participate in teaches or reinforces some learning or knowledge (even if only a physical response). Even if games are not designed with education/instruction/learning in mind, they still have features that can be exploited and minded to fold in formal/planned learning opportunities. I mean, somehow they have made the most inane, tedious tasks on Farmville completely compelling. Who knew? Which leads me to think about another way to use Facebook for training:

9. Quizzes. What kind of programmer are you? What does your desk say about you? What kind of cubicle mate are you? While these are humorous, I could see some actual useful ones, like providing Myers Briggs profiles and the like. Oh, and here's the 10th (I beat you to it)!

10. Fandom. I was interested to see that the number one corporate identity on Facebook is Coke. Their presence was first created by a zealous fan. The page has become their corporate identity, and hugely popular. A lot of times employees can be the biggest fans of a company and hold the most knowledge. Creating a safe environment to tell the positives of the company can offset some of the griping that we all need to do sometimes.

Yes, but some companies are paranoid about their "intellectual property" being made public. It's akin to the music companies obsessing over DRM -- the one thing a company needs to understand about today's information revolution: you can't control everything ... so focus on influence rather than control. Comcast learned this quickly, and adopted Twitter to broadcast network statuses to its customers. Now it uses Twitter for customer support.

 I see we keep returning to the theme that companies need to have a more flexibility in this era of accessible info.

Well there are 10 ways... but there are many more. The big question for companies: are you going to build internal social platforms, or leverage the public ones? It seems like many companies will want to keep their social networks behind their firewalls. This may work in the short-run, but newer generations of workers (Millennials and the 2020 Gen) will want to be able to blend their public and work networks and profiles. That will make for an interesting dialog... maybe we can discuss that one soon? 

  

The Inherent Power of the Motivated Learner

When learners are motivated, anything can happen. My job (as an instructional designer) is to design something that helps the learner achieve that special feeling of wanting to learn, and then broadcasting what was learned to their personal network. Naturally, applying the learning on the job is the key result I can only hope for.

I want to challenge people, get them to raise their game, get them to feel like they can work wonders. Too many corporate learning organizations are operating like factories -- pumping out scads of "content" in basic multimedia format (I refer to them as "narrated bullets"). Too many learning orgs are bypassing more creative approaches to motivating learners and relying on the "pump and dump" method of basically regurgitating marketing messages with a few "knowledge checks" thrown in for comfort food.

All the companies that foisted the simple "PowerPoint conversion" software on the world of instructional design are the key component in the factory "problem."

In this world of information overload, we need to back-up and realize that the #1 approach to take when trying to motivate learners is to construct as authentic a learning experience as possible. Without the ability to properly understand, analyze, and then design the appropriate intervention, we should really question what we're doing anyway. I've proposed that we do less of more when designing new training programs.

Just because a product group releases a new version doesn't mean the audience needs an entirely new training program. With the advent of social media utilities, the rise of "near real-time learning" will serve the learner and the organization more in the long run. By offering creative, learner-centered designs, motivated learners will find it more appealing, engaging, and relevant to interact and hopefully apply what they are learning.

The question for today's corporate learning organizations to ask is simple, "How will you stay relevant when most of what people learn is not through formal training?" Furthermore, "How can you provide the near real-time experiences that will matter most?" A motivated learner will act to get the information, training, and interactions they need (wherever it may be). Are you able to design the type of learning program that will support a truly motivated learner? Are you staffed properly to creatively design what matters most to learners today (and tomorrow)?

Privacy and Social Networking

One of the scriveners on one of my favorite blogs, Bitch, PhD wrote today about remaining pseudonymous while blogging honestly. This is an issue that I think about fairly often as it pertains to me directly, but I also think about it when designing.

Social networking is a buzz word at the corporate level. They want to emulate the parts of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn that support their missions, but the corporation, and us, the employees and public, want to set boundaries and limits on what happens in these spaces, for obvious, but very different, reasons.

Facebook, on one of its many recent redesigns, set a "groups" feature, where you could shuffle people into the categories of your life. There wasn't enough functionality to support the usefulness of that concept, but it has potential.

As designers, implementers and critics of social networks we need to balance the one-stop-shopping convenience of having a single-sign on, while recognizing that most people want to be allowed to stream their message to their own particular audiences.

Alternate Reality Games: Leveraging Collective Intelligence for the Enterprise

Read our new article on how to effectively use the emerging genre of alternate reality games in corporate training to increase learner collaboration and sharing. You can read the article from the eLearning Guild's newsletter, or download it.

Notes on Social Learning

I've been attending quite a few webinars and presentations on social learning and hearing a lot of different approaches, best practices, and tips about implementation -- as well as watching demos of software tools and frameworks designed to help organizations implement collaborative learning environments.

I attended a webinar hosted by HCI about "Social Software in Enterprise Learning: Getting Started" and presented by David Mallon from Bersin. Here are some notes I took:

• Mallon discussed how enterprises should encourage and enable employees to create and use "social graphs" -- networks of people based on varying "node identifiers" such as location, expertise, availability, etc. Similar to what IBM does with its Blue Pages, social graphs make it easier to locate and recruit people with the skills and/or knowledge needed for projects. Social graphs augment a person's ability to search and locate expertise. They then create pathways to connect people. Helping an employee make use of their social graph is in the best interest of the enterprise, and really is about harnessing the company's collective wisdom. 
• The discussion then moved to creating "Enterprise Learning Frameworks" (ELFs -- my acronym) -- an end-to-end map and description of a learning organization's primary components. Mallon discusssed the 70/20/10 model (70% of learning occurs informally, 20% is peer enabled, and 10% is achieved through formally curated systems). Now, with the ELF in place, the 70/20/10 model is changed to an 80/20 model where 80% of learning occurs informally through a Social Learning Environment (SLE) constructed by the organization. We all know that a company can't programmtaically meet all its learners' needs, so a SLE puts data and knowledge in the hands of the performer when they need it. The SLE helps the organization enable more self-directed, self-service, "in the moment" learning opportunities.
• Mallon discussed that there are three components of Informal learning in a SLE (I prefer to call this a "purpose-driven system that encourages informal learning"): on-demand, social, and embedded. On-demand content is made available by SMEs and/or other content-experts in a "rapid fashion" -- it could also be curated content, but the point is to make it available in a format and manner that suits the learner's situation at the time of need; the social component includes elements that help the learner expand their networks; and the embedded component include tools that are smart enough to know learner context (in a software system, on a device, etc.), and is implicit -- it helps the learner understand the success or failure of the task being performed -- potentially through a feedback mechanism.
• The ELF should also include access to tools and technologies for learners to create or modify their own content. Mallon stated that an ELF by its nature incubates a culture of learning across the organization -- a must-have before a vibrant SLE can be fostered.

Here are some best practices for beginning to implement an ELF with a SLE:

• Start simple
• Have a clear purpose
• Inventory your organization and see where collaboration and social learning already occurs
• Ask yourself "why community, why social learning"?
• Always be clear with what are you trying to accomplish
• Study your audience very well
• Architect participation: it doesn't happen on its own Your SLE will require what I call an "active agent" -- This is not a task to be performed by just anyone in the organization -- it is a next-gen skillset.
• Ensure you have a content curator
• Understand that 1% of the network contributes the most, 9% occasionally contribute, and 90% sit around and watch. Use the 1% to your advantage.
• Don't forget culture. The "learning culture" is a major element to a SLE. Help to culitvate a SLE in which sharing knowledge is welcome.
• Don't forget the 4Cs: Conversations, Content, Connections, and Collaboration: the primary elements of a SLE. 
• Don't focus on tools first, focus on the behavior needed, then find the technology to support them.