"Learning is fundamentally social" is more than a decade old

The Institute for Research on Learning came to the conclusion that learning is fundamentally social. It might surprise you that this conclusion was made back in the nineties.

It is obvious that the introduction of social software such as wiki's has increased the speed of learning. The hard question is how to established large companies use this to take advantage in this new era of learning.

Web 2.0:Balancing collaboration and process efficieny through informal learning

In the world of process efficiency it is sometimes hard to plan where collaboration should be used. This is especially the case when processes are being determined by people not directly involved in the process.

So how can informal learning maintain this balance in the new world of wikis, blogs, and instant chat? The answer is to promote informal learning and promote people to share their knowledge through wikis and blogs. Processes will always evolve because the nature of businesses change due to external factors including technology.

You don't need to tell young people to informally learning. Younger people do it now through MySpace, Facebook, etc. But the older generation (including me at 35) is used to being fit into a coporate culture with clear boundries, established processes, and a heirachial structure. I can not tell you how often I've seen a potential helpful product on the net only to see that the program is blocked by my company. Companies who leverage web 2.0 related technologies look to provide employees authorship so the company can benefit. There is a related expression that if you sometimes give away power you will get more in return. Companies today must realize the competitive advantage they can obtain by providing authorship to employees using web 2.0 technologies.

Motivating others to see knowledge as a valuable company asset

My current company which is a fairly larger organization (> 2000 employees) limits what you can view on the Internet as well as what programs you can download.

The company overall doesn't see the value of informal learning or really being open to share ideas, documents, process, etc through company chat software, centralized document system, or a company wiki.

So my question to anyone out there in the blogsphere is how do you open the minds of people to become more active in using new technologies to leverage company knowledge?? Most people in my company view spending money on technologies as a waste of time unless they can tangibly see a profit in dollars without a lot of maintenance overhead.

Well connected with the world means something more...

What does it mean to be well connected with the world? Does it mean you watch the local network world news? It may have been that way 20 years ago but that is not the case any longer.

Do you have your own blog? Do you read/use technocrati, netvibes, RSS reader (Google Reader) del.icio.us, furl.net, ning, youtube, second life, Zoho, myspace, pageflakes, digg, reddit, linkedin, or facebook? There are many others. Do you use Wikipedia?

If you have used any of the above tools or any similiar tools you are connected. Well connected? Well, the word well can be interpreted in many ways but in either case you are reaching out to learn new things from new communities that never before existed.

The next question to ask companies is, are your employees well connected? Do you only use Quarterly meetings and a coporate home page to keep in touch with employees? Do you see any value in using a company wiki? Why not? Do employees feel they do not have authorship?

Knowledge worker and informal learning thoughts

I currently work at an older Insurance company as a business analyst. I won't mention the name because its not important for this post.

I have a fairly diverse technical background in Cobol, Unix, Java, and business analysis. I also keep track of trends in using the so called web 2.0 technologies. I also understand the potential benefit of using a wiki which considering other software (content management systems) is an inexpensive investment.

In asking about has our company thought of using a corporate wiki I get the response, "We don't do that here". But I interpret that response as "I don't think our people can learn that".

So does that mean the skill of a knowledge worker is judged by how well you can informally learn? Should companies start to judge the skill of an employee's abilities on how well he/she considers other means to share knowledge such as a wiki? If that were the case many of my co-workers who have been at the insurance company a long time are in desperate need of these new skill sets. Even though its understood that insurance companies typically lag behind other industries in technology implementation, a wiki doesn't require that much financial resources, only the ability to experiment, learn and share knowledge.

Thoughtful Link on steps to increase the quality of your life

http://web.ionsys.com/~remedy/FLOW%20%20.htm#

First title

Hello World (small humor from my programming Hello World programs in languages like Pascal, C, and Java)

I hope to share some interesting information on using some new technologies that have popped up last year. For example I am going to try and have my family use Zing (www.ning.com) to keep our social network together.

I will also be sharing some excellent articles from other blogs through sharing on google as well

-Mike