Dave's Whiteboard

As an undergraduate, I had a terrific time swimming way over my head in a course on modern sociological thought.  Among other things, we read Talcott Parsons, which is like getting mugged by a noun gang.  I thought I understood what he meant by specific relationships versus diffuse ones, so when Dr. Bauder asked for an example of the latter, I said, “Student and teacher.”  (I mean, it should be a free exchange, right?)

Her reply: “Okay.  What are you doing Saturday night?”

Being specific takes more work

To make the point clear: in a specific relationship, it’s the roles that are specific, and you more or less have to justify including things that don’t fit those roles.  You might shoot the breeze with the grocery store cashier about the weather, or the freshness of the strawberries, but ordinarily you don’t ask about his personal life.

In a diffuse relationship, on the other hand, you have to justify leaving things out.  “You walked right past me and didn’t say a word.  What’s up?”

Many of my professional connections (and some personal ones) are now virtual.  I don’t work in an office; I tend not to have long-term projects.  I don’t have everyday, flesh-and-blood colleagues.  So I need to cultivate my virtual connections: strengthen the existing ones, get the new ones get well rooted.

In the physical workplace, most of your relationships are specific and often defined by various sorts of proximity.  You’re physically close.  You’re organizationally close (same team, same boss, same project, same department).  Or you what I think of as explicit proximity (relative position based on rank) and tacit proximity (based on relative depth of expertise).

As the distance increased (other floors, other departments, other cities), you have to work harder to establish and maintain good working relationships.  People don’t know you.

Reducing friction in your connections

When you cultivate relationships in the virtual workplace, you’re using different tools to increase proximity.  For a long time, we’ve had workplace tools to reduce physical distance and collapse time-zone distance.  Now we’ve got greater (and more frequent) distance, but also more powerful tools.

One concept that’s important to me, as someone who typically works on his own, is the virtual cube-mate.  I like being able to stick my hear around a metaphorical partition to say, “Listen to this.”  Or “Do you know…?”  Or “Here we go again.”

But reducing virtual distance doesn’t mean that distance isn’t there.  And it doesn’t mean your in-person, interpersonal skill transfers to the virtual world.   As the Russian proverb says, your elbow is close, but it’s hard to bite.

I have a pet phrase for asides and parenthetical remarks I’ll make, especially in a one-to-one exchange like an instant-message conversation or a series of direct messages on Twitter: “conversation insurance.”  Things I do or say because:

• I want to make myself clear (or clearer).
• I want to avoid misunderstanding.
• I’m trying to be more like myself.

Some of that’s just common sense (though common sense tells lots of people the earth is flat).  For instance, “I’m not disputing what you’re saying. I just think X applies as well…”  You go a little further because your message is going further.

Some of it, though, is simply engaging long enough (in some complex combination of individual units and elapsed time) that both parties are better able to form a pattern for the other that’s not a bad approximation of face-to-face.  Which, as I think about exchanges over the past two or three days, isn’t so much conversation insurance as connection oil.

I don’t know that there are Ten Quick Tips for this, which is too bad; I could have a workshop.  I do have a couple of notions:

• Walk, don’t run. Trying to connect closely with everyone you know (and everything they know) just makes you one of those LinkedIn Lotharios, the kind of person in whom networking seems like an infectious disease.
• Assume good faith. This guideline for Wikipedia editors encourages people to assume that others are trying to help, not hurt.
• Don’t drive crossways in the parking lot. That was advice from a colleague to his new-driver sons: when you’re at the mall, always drive along the “roads” up and down the parking lot.  Don’t go cutting across the lanes because there’s an opening.  Other drivers may not expect you.

That last point is why I now use emoticons — at least on Twitter.

They’re conventions, not moral failings

I’ve been online a long time.  I’ve never cared for abbreviations like IMHO, YMMV, and so on.  I have a theory that each time someone types LOL, they lose a neuron.  So emoticons ( or, even worse, “smilies” ) made me shudder.

But… as I did online text-chat in Second Life, in French, I worried that my humor (or attempts at it) would be misunderstood.  So I’d add emoticons I saw my francophone friends using.  It hardly hurt at all, and people got to know me.

Likewise on Twitter — especially if I’m making a public comment to someone I don’t know well.  It’s easy to forget, if you’re only thinking of your chosen network, that not everyone knows you as well as you might think (or wish).  I can joke around with some people, but virtual passersby might not understand.  So an emoticon, or a few drops of some other form of connection oil, helps reduce the potential friction.

Online presence is a kind of invitation, but you have to work at figuring out what the invitation means for you.  Sometimes, as with what I call book blogs — HotNewBook.com, set up mainly to promote Hot New Book.  Those are invitations to come in, browse, and buy.  The author probably doesn’t have a lot of time to interact with everyone who’d like to interact with him.

Otherwise, if people are active on social sites, you have to work out how to interact with them.  In other words, it’s just like real life, except the conversation stops if your power goes out.

(I’d like to thank Chris, Dick, Heather, Jane, Kevin, Sahana, and Simon, whose conversations with me this week reinforced for me the value of virtual connections.)

My relationship images are based on this CC-licensed image by Doha Sam / Sam Agnew.
CC-licensed cube-mate photo by el frijole.

Jane Hart’s been collecting reasons why organizations should not ban social media.  I wanted to contribute but didn’t think I could match contributors like Jack Vinson, Harold Jarche, or Jane herself.

As it happens, that glover’s son from Stratford-upon-Avon anticipated the kinds of objections Jane had in mind.  What follows are some notions.  They’re not definitive or sure-fire.  In fact, “they are yet but ear-kissing arguments” (King Lear).

There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
(Hamlet)

Will, living in an age of social ferment, was pragmatic.  Yes, you’re accustomed to making your connections in an organization the way your boss (or your boss’s father) did.

I have no doubt whatsoever that 1890s-era managers fretted and fulminated over the pointlessness of Mr. Bell’s contraption.

We will draw the curtain and show you the picture.
(Twelfth Night)

Social media make it possible to provide…well, a fuller picture.  Not just in the sense of images more easily created, shared, and modified, but in the combination of images with other representations.

By comparison, it’s really hard to fax a video.

I’m not saying images will guarantee you’ll communicate better.  (Two words: clip art.)  But sometimes less (text) is more (meaning), and social media can help carry some of your intended meaning in ways more traditional vehicles can’t.

An honest tale speeds best, being plainly told.
(Richard III)

Here I see advice both for the organization and for the individual.  Speed’s vital: get what you have or what you need, as quickly as you can.  Informal consultation via messaging (Yammer, Twitter, instant messaging); knowledge collection and sharing through vehicles like wikis.

“Plainly told” can also mean “write so you make sense.”  I posted last year about the Washington DC Metro system’s stumbling efforts on Twitter.  The tweets seemed written by a committee, few of whom actually used Twitter.  They’ve gotten somewhat better (see here), though 6 of the 100 most recent tweets were truncated.

(If you’ve been on Twitter for a year and a half and haven’t figured out the 140-character limit, you need to be a bit more reflective.  And maybe when there’s a delay, say “both ways” instead of “in both directions,” trusting that train riders will get the message.)

Love sought is good, but giv’n unsought is better.
(Twelfth Night)

Speaking of both directions, Will has in mind the idea of fans, friends, and followers.  Rather than worrying about your own status (as an individual or as an organization), focus on participating in the communities around you.  Share stuff.  Offer value.  Give credit.  Link to others.  Spread the wealth.

The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.
(As You Like It)

One of the tendencies with social networking is that formal status, credentialization, and the like matter less than they used to.  Not that they’re irrelevant: if someone wants to know about nanoscience, then Andrew Maynard is a better starting point than I am.

But you know from ordinary life that very little that’s useful derives from the status or the credential itself.  No matter how extensive someone’s expertise is, I find it’s good to see that he or she recognizes its limits.  As Matt Ridley said of science, I think useful knowledge is like “a hungry furnace that must be fed logs from the forests of ignorance that surrounds us. In the process, the clearing we call knowledge expands, but the more it expands, the longer its perimeter and the more ignorance comes into view.”

Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt.
(Measure for Measure)

In my experience, it’s private organizations rather than government that trumpet the value of entrepreneurial thinking, agility, openness to new trends — but it wasn’t the government that kept building Chevy Cavaliers, that fought against home video recording, or that shoehorns all training into the lecture-hall, butts-in-seats model.

Yes, there’s a fear that people will waste time on Facebook or Twitter.  That’s because some people will, just as some people use March Madness as an excuse to do nothing all all on the job but yak about brackets and bubbles.

Another side of this: some organizations (public and private alike) are so deeply baptized in the Church of Best Practice that the notion of trying something for themselves is heresy.  I mean, if you’re a pharmaceutical company, might it not be better for you to experiment with social media in a pharma context than to wait till Business Week features a manufacturer’s experience which you’ll then try cramming down the throats of your people?

The end crowns all, and that old common arbitrator, Time, will one day end it.
(Troilus and Cressida)

One real shortcoming of social media — as of software generally — is that you can’t rely on it for the long term.  Google Wave, announced at the end of May 2009, is essentially dead.  Facebook may bestride the narrow world like a Colossus, but so did AOL in its time, and CompuServ before that.

So what Shakespeare’s saying here is, “get thou a grip.”  If you’ve never used a word processor, then learning one is a real challenge.  But once you’ve learned one, you’ve able to conceptually handle another one as your company switches from WordStar to WordPerfect to Word to Google Docs.

No, those aren’t the same.  There are significant differences, but there’s enough at the core to help you cope till you figure the rest out.

As Will might have said if there’d been mayonnaise jars in his time, “Keep cool.  Don’t freeze.”

To unpathed waters, undreamed shores.
(The Winter’s Tale)

This idea flows from the previous ones.  The ease and informality of connections make it possible to go where you hadn’t imagined you’d like to go.  You get exposed to other viewpoints, to experiments in progress, to the cognitive coalface being worked in other parts of the organization.

Those things are hard to do with the monthly newsletter and Human Resource’s weekly email blast.   (And, by the way, if you’re one of the people perpetrating that last item: whatever made you think “blast” was something that’d have a positive connotation for the recipients?)

Everyone can master a grief but he that has it.
(Much Ado About Nothing)

In other words, early adopters, calm down.  Show, don’t tell.  Consider your audience.  Nobody (except maybe you) wants to be using the newest Bright Shiny Object.  Most people want to be getting stuff accomplished, and maybe there’s a way your BSO can help that.

In a similar vein, O grizzled veteran with deep experience (including you, over there, who’ve been on Twitter for three months now):  don’t bite the newbies.  You weren’t born with XHTML coded into your DNA, either.

This above all: to thine own self be true.
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
(Hamlet)

Poor Polonius gets a bad rap.  Even if he was a windbag, at least here the bag’s wafting along some good advice.

First: social media was created to serve the individual or organization, not the other way around.  Using these tools will make you…well, yourself, a person who happens to be using them.

Which is why, if you’re prone to be a jerk, people tend to figure that out whether they encounter you in meetings,  in email, or on Twitter.  (The 140-character limit might help minimize that, but I have my doubts.)

Similarly, if you’re open to new things, if you’re someone who reflects on and shares what you’ve been doing, if you’re participating in spheres wider than your hatband, then social media tools help you to be yourself, and become more like yourself.

I know “knowledge management” is a high-value buzzword; I just tend to feel a twinge of weariness when I see it.  I’m not sure you can manage knowledge; the best you can hope for, I think, is to try and set up weirs, reservoirs, sidings, and whatnot to channel some of the flow.  The idea is that you’ll eventually be able to retrieve it and put it to use.

What helps foster that retrieval?  Note-taking.  I’m not sure I agree with the authors of this study (PDF), who believe that “learning to take notes well… takes as much time as learning to write in a relatively experienced way.”  They see the purposes of taking notes as “to record information and/or to aid reflection.”

A note to take: “and/or” is nearly always the worst possible phrase.  It implies precision but just smudges things.  You’re dithering or obsessing or both.  (See how I managed to say that without “and/or?”)

“Aid reflection” isn’t the term I’d use.  I like Stephen Downes’s description of note-taking as your contribution a two-way communication with the source of learning.  Downes recently noted a post by D’Arcy Norman, who says:

Note taking is not primarily about manual duplication of a set of resources produced by a teacher. It’s an active process of sense-making and internalization. Of visualizing the processes of thinking.

Granted, that’s not the way people often think about note-taking.  For them the phrase is a quick trip back to a lecture hall, with a professor relentlessly flinging chunks of some “body of knowledge” at you.  Eventually you’d have to reassemble them to the satisfaction of the flinger.

I can be  a very traditional note-taker.  As an undergraduate, I adopted two strategies that I thought were worth about 0.75 on a four-point grade scale: sit in the first or second seat of a row, and take notes.  Both of these acted to keep me more awake and more engaged, even during the tedium of English Literature: The Augustans.

I have a longstanding habit of taking notes in ink:

Two of my 101 pages of notes from "Complex Learning in Ten Steps"

Ink’s no more essential to note-taking than a soup spoon is to lunch, even if the lunch is soup.

If I’m trying to capture a lot of information for later analysis and search, my first stop is… Microsoft Word’s outlining.  I’ve created a few outline templates (one with I-A-1-a numbering, one with that technoid 1.0, 1.1, 1.1.1 format, and other with indents and various bullets for different levels).  I type fast and can shift outline levels almost without thinking, which means I’ve got more bandwidth available to take in and reprocess whatever I’m outlining.

Especially when the knowledge stream’s wider than it is deep, I use Evernote.  I like the idea that my notes are in two places–online, where I can access them from any computer, and on my own laptop, where my useful paranoia means I back my stuff up.

Evernote extends the concept of “note,” because I can take photos of signs, whiteboard sketches, or flipchart pages.  Evernote lets me search for text in images, as in the example on the right (click for a larger view).

I’ve used personal wikis to collect information, and I use several blogs as well.  Each wiki or blog has a focus, a way of deciding what parts of the flow to direct into the format.  And by actively directing–through entering text, through tagging, through classifying and moving–I’m working with the information and increasing the likelihood that I’ll recall it in a context that makes sense to me.

Some more-or-less related items I found along the way:

• iPad, Therefore iKludge: David Dobbs writes about problems with noting, and sharing notes, on devices like the iPad.
• Teaching with Wikis: Sandra Porter enables electronic notes for students who forget the dead-tree kind.
• Cognitive Effort during Note Taking (PDF), a 2005 paper that appeared in Applied Cognitive Psychology.

Much of what I found deals with note-taking in an academic setting.  That last paper by Piolat, Olive, and Kellogg makes the point that

…from a cognitive perspective, note taking cannot be conceived of as only a simple abbreviated transcription of information that is heard or read…. on the contrary,it is an activity that strongly depends on the central executive functions of working memory to manage comprehension, selection, and production processes concurrently.

I thought it worth including that statement.  For one thing, note-taking looks obvious–you take notes.  But what you really do, as the researchers are saying, is manipulate incoming information while managing the technical aspects of recording the results of your manipulation.

If you were into straight transcription, like a court reporter, then it’s possible you learn very little, because your focus is purely on the capture.  But for notes to be useful, other than as a transcript, you’re doing things mentally while you’re doing things physically.

Twitter’s a great way to connect with people—or to fire off a wisecrack, which I’ve done a time or two.  Like last night in #lrnchat, when I said:

Every time someone launches another “elearning” with a Jeopardy game, a neuron loses its wings.

At 140 characters, Twitter encourages economy of expression, though you can’t easily come off as concise and nuanced in a single tweet.

Jeopardy games in on-the-job learning are a hot button for me.  Like someone on the bus whose MP3 music is just loud enough that you imagine a mosquito practicing the snare drums, that kind of interaction is mostly harmless but rarely enriching.

Monkey, see?

A Jeopardy game is often a quick fix, like a food-court burger, fries, and Coke when you’re slogging through the MegaMall.  At best, a mediocre choice.  Whatever kind of learning you’re trying to encourage, will dolling quiz questions up in the format of a 56-year-old game show  do the trick?

A more significant drawback is that Jeopardy‘s format unduly emphasizes recall and application.  You’re focusing learner attention on lower-value tasks.  And there’s the disadvantage that few jobs present people with “answers” to which they have to respond with questions.

Where to (re)draw the line

I’ve created interactions based on game formats, including Bingo.  Success came in part from listening to people like Thiagi (Sivasailam Thiagarajan).  One thing he suggests is that you play with, not within, the rules.

So if you must resort to a Jeopardy format, remember that no law requires people to answer with a question.  Nothing forces you to let the winner choose the next question.  It’s far more important to match what people do in the interaction with what they’ll do on the job.

Which explains Call Book Bingo.

Some years ago, a client replaced the paper “call book” used by its sales force with a custom computer application.  Most of the sales force hadn’t used computers before, so to them it felt like a huge change.  The instructor-led training stressed hands-on practice, which meant that by the second day the sales reps felt overwhelmed and unsure of themselves.

So we passed out the sophisticated learning aid you see here, then gave the directions:

• Write a number between 1 and 75 on each line that has a number sign.  Mix ‘em up.  Use each number only once.
• When the “caller” (the instructor) gives a number, check your card to see if you have it.
• If you do, write the answer to the question in that square.

That was pretty much it–except for the time we spent coming up with questions that involved looking up and interpreting things from all the important parts of the call book.  And phrasing them so there was only one right answer.  “What’s the weekly sales volume at International House of Widgets?”  “Does Myrna’s Accounting and Catering include Contract JT-42?”  “How many stores in ZIP code 66431 carry berm flanges?”

There’s a lot there that’s nothing like Bingo: no preprinted numbers, no B-I-N-G-O across the top.  Conversely, there’s a lot that’s very much like the real job: pertinent questions about accounts, and the need to research using the new, computerized tool.

No one complained about the variation from “real” Bingo.  In fact, most often the learners would ask to continue playing till everyone got at least one Bingo.   Often they’d start helping one another as “doing my job” won out over “winning this game in class.”

Play around a little

Mindlessly including a copy of a predictable “interaction” doesn’t make for better learning any more than riding the D train makes you a New Yorker.  As the noted instructional designer Mary Chapin Carpenter urges,

Show a little passion, baby, show a little style
Show the knack for knowing when
and the gift for knowing how…

If you’d like to acquire or strengthen that knack, try this advice from game designer Richard Powers.

Circle image adapted under a CC license from this original by Patrick Hoesly.

The other week, a #lrnchat discussion explored large training efforts.  Eventually the topic turned to fun.  In real life, when organization trainers start talking about fun and learning, I start looking for the exit.  I figure it’s not long before the Happy Gang shows up, determined to make you laugh no matter what, and I want to clear out before they do.

“Making Performance Reviews Fun.”  Sounds ghastly.

I think I have a good sense of humor.  It’s just that institutional attempts to impose humor are a lot like institutional attempts to compose music.  I end up feeling in tune with the universe’s most morose android.

Here’s what got me musing about this: at one point (around 9:35 in the transcript), the #lrnchat question was,  “What are some creative ways, in a mass approach, to make training stick?”

• Cammy Bean said: Use humor. Turn things upside down. Make it worth repeating.
• A bit later, Craig Wiggins said: @cammybean you know, i’m a big fan of humor and levity in elearning, but in some hands the idea of humor is…not humorous.

Craig’s right. Not everyone has a knack for humor.  That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to be open to it.  You shouldn’t force it, thought, as if it were the interpersonal version of making people eat their brussels sprouts.

Which is what I meant when I said in two tweets:

• I am NOT a fan of “fun” sprinkled over learning like pixie dust (clown noses, loud noises, what veg are you)…
• … But humor or just enjoyable attraction can arise from relevant context that has value in eyes of participants.

In the genial chaos of a #lrnchat discussion, people don’t always pause to define their terms.  I have the luxury of taking that time here.  What does “humor” mean in a structured-learning context?  What does “fun” mean in a training program?  Depends on who’s talking.  And on who’s listening.

I believe what people are striving for is engagement: how do you create opportunities for learners to involve themselves with what they’re learning?  This is the sort of thing Carl Sagan meant while about new discoveries in cosmology: they “remind us that humans have evolved to wonder, that understanding is a joy.”

Admit it: some stuff just doesn’t seem all that joyful from the outside.  Adopting vendor-managed inventory systems, for instance.  Deciding whether a building needs an elevation certificate in order to qualify for flood insurance.  Shepardizing a legal case.  Learning basic statistics.

The answer is not (necessarily) to provide balloon animals and confetti, or to toss miniature chocolate bars at the participants while they chant answers to quiz questions.  Often that’s like putting frosting on those brussels sprouts.  Even if people try eating that, all they’re going to remember is a weird taste.

For an organization, the challenge is helping people learn and apply skills that will achieve the group’s goals.  Assuming the people in question do in fact need to acquire or strengthen those skills, of course, so you’re not boring them to death “teaching” things they already know.

That depends much more on relevant, realistic, worthwhile experiences.  Out of those, levity can emerge–if it makes sense.  Horse first, then cart, then passengers and cargo, and then (maybe) mood lighting.  (Later this week, I’ll give a couple of examples from one of those dry topics I mention above.)

So, instead of trying to sneak brussels sprouts pass some unsuspecting diner, work on finding fresh sprouts, demonstrating recipes and cooking techniques that capitalize on their flavor and texture.  Then work them into, say, creating a meal for a restaurant guest who insists on having five different colors of food as dinner.

The customer’s a bit of an outlier, but the core skills (menu planning, item selection, preparation, technique, timing) actually matter.

Humor as an addition to the main topic can also emerge naturally.  By naturally, I mean people use humor to make new connections with the main focus, or to reinforce the connections they’ve made.

• Marcia Conner (at the end of that #lrnchat session) : Last 2 days spent at 100% pixiedustfree event (#wire) & can attest to the fact it can be done beautifully
• And Mason Masteka added a final garnish: My name is Mason, I am a eLearning Dev in Maine and I am celery.

CC-licensed images:
Marvin the android from Wikimedia Commons.
Sprouts with bacon by sling@flickr / Steve Ling.