The set up up was perfect! I was at one of the seminars at Learning Technologies last week and the speaker opened with the question: “How many of you are planning to implement informal learning this year?” About a third of the room raised their hands, 30 people, that’s a lot of implementation this year. I waited for the punchline, but it never materialised.
We did have a very good presentation about the value and impact of informal learning or “learning at the point of need” all of which led to the one logical concluding argument that if you bought the speakers product you would have solved your implementation issue. To be fair, insert GoodPractice toolkits at the end of the presentation and it wasn’t too far away from a lot of pitches I’ve made in the past.
Apart from the missed opportunity at the begiining something in this presentation and others I saw last week bothered me.
A very large part of the Learning Technologies was about informal learning, it was very much the buzz and for that I’m delighted, we’ve been preaching the value of it for years. Everyone was talking about 70, 20, 10 and this has led the big traditional LMS and learning product suppliers to jump on the bandwagon. What I saw last week was a lot of suppliers, with minimum tweaks to their products trying to pitch them as informal learning solutions. “Lets us help you manage and control your informal learning.”
I don’t blame them and anything that can help grow the market is a good thing, but not if it over hypes and devalues the idea of informal learning. Think back to the early days of e-learning when it was the panacea for all learning problems, well there were touches of this at the exhibition last week. If you are looking at informal learning, great, but make sure you understand the way it works and the best way to support it.
Back to my perfect set up question, the follow up from the speaker should have been: “You can’t implement informal learning it’s happening anyway and always has been.” You only have to look at our recent survey on ‘How Managers Learn’ to see that by far the most frequent and effective learning is talking to colleagues.
What you can do is support informal learning. For instance, help people to have better conversations or as our customers do make web resources easily available to people so that they can find answers when they need it. Giving people the skills to search effectively, think and analyse data and ideas and make decisions are all enabling skills which support informal learning. A much better question might have been: “How are you planning to improve the quality of the informal learning in your organisation?”
Thanks for sponsoring this survey and bringing its conclusions to light. My point of view on the importance of using all forms of learning to improve performance is well known. I’ve long said that the most vital learning technology is human conversation and the survey respondents seem to agree. We should set up an online conversation about your findings. Internet Time Alliance and Good Practice chat about implementing informal learning. Put it on YouTube. You guys interested?
Jay, sounds like a great idea, we’re very interested.
Well said, Peter. Sticking plaster over traditional formal instructional models and calling it ’supporting informal learning’ is not really a solution of any value. It needs some thinking, and acting, outside the box. Jay’s ’straight to the finish line’ piece on the Internet Time Alliance blog (http://internettime.posterous.com/go-straight-to-the-finish-line) provides a challenging roadmap that needs to be adopted.
Thanks Charles and Jay’s insight about jumping the curve straight to the finish line is spot on and the diagrams are worth serious consideration from every learning department Organisations are NOT going to wait for learning to catch up with their needs.
Great blog Peter,
I find it interesting that providers can still manage a sales pitch on the basis you describe but it obviously flogs some products. You’re absolutely spot on that it’s not about implementing informal learning but about enabling, encouraging and promoting it. Indeed, this is the challenge faced by most L&D professionals and there’s no product or system in the world which will crack it for us. Getting managers and employees to recognise, embrace and drive their own learning is what it’s all about and the research just published by Good Practice is a useful reference point for this. Great link from Charles to the ITA blog – taking a step by step approach really won’t take us far enough and leapfrogging to social learning might actually create more genuine demand for everything inbetween, creating a better business case for all of this.