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By Dan Pontefract, 08/30/2009 4:56 PM

If you haven’t heard of Marshall McLuhan, well you’re simply missing out on one of Canada’s most innovative minds.

Derrick de Kerckhove, Director of the McLuhan Program of Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto since 1983 wrote McLuhan for Managers in 2003. Shamefully, I didn’t know about the book until this year, courtesy of Jon Husband.

In the book, Derrick (and co-author Mark Federman) introduce the Laws of Media through a tetrad:

• Extend (what does the artefact enhance or intensify or make possible or accelerate)
• Obsolesce (what is pushed aside by the new organ)
• Retrieve (what older, previously obsolesced ground is brought back and inheres in the new form)
• Reverse (what is the reversal potential of the new form)

Harold Jarche has written about the tetrads and applied it to commons-based peer production. I’m sure there are others out there as well.

As I unplugged for almost 4 weeks during the summer, I began mentally noodling what the tetrads may look like in terms of a Learning 2.0 philosophy. I define Learning 2.0 in a corporate learning setting as follows:

• Philosophy – shifting from training is an event, to learning is continuous, connected & collaborative. (simply put – moving from solely formal classroom and eLearning, to formal, informal and social learning concepts)
• Alignment – being less fixated on a centralized training function, and more on a federated (hub and spoke if you will) talent and collaboration holistic entity

Thoughts?

Comments (3)

By Dan Pontefract, 07/29/2009 9:29 PM

First of all, I hate the word training.

Each and every time I type those eight letters I cringe, harking back to seemingly endless drills during my soccer (football) ‘training’ sessions as a youth. Repetitive tasks that enhance or augment a skill – that’s training – although Google brings back over 1.4 million hits on “definition of training” so what do I know.

Learning 2.0, for me, is the switch from a ‘training is an event’ culture, to a ‘learning is a collaborative, continuous, connected and community-based’ culture. Think of it as ’sage on the stage’ to ‘guides & strides from all sides’.

I purposely titled this blog as ‘trainingwreck’ because I believe the corporate learning sector is in a state of disrepair and needs both a severe influx of innovation and a large dose of reality.

Which brings me to my point.

There are few training vendors out there, in my estimation, that are making the shift to becoming a Learning 2.0 partner. This is why I will continue to refer to them as training vendors. (there are notable exceptions of course, but they are few and far between)

I attended the ASTD International Conference in June, 2009, and was amazed — perhaps shocked — when I meandered a path through the exhibition floor only to find myself stuck in a time warp. Training vendors, for the most part, refuse to refine their business models due to what seems to be a fear of impacting the cash cow known as formal content. (ie. ILT courseware/delivery options as well as eLearning)

Well guess what folks … we all don’t have to believe in Kirkpatrick anymore or the fact it’s the 50th anniversary of an archaic model. There is more to this Learning 2.0 puzzle than a 4-level evaluation system linked to a formal piece of learning content, be it ILT or eLearning. (but I digress)

Training vendors need a new business model, and if I were running one of those companies, I would ensure my new business model included concepts such as:

• Virtual SME’s & Ambassadors
  • Become a virtual extension of our communities, learning org, etc. and provide your expertise in the form of informal and social coaching, mentoring, counsel, teaching, exchange, etc. to our organization (ie. embed your staff)
  • Do so not with your own collaboration systems, but through our system. (we want our employees to stay in our house – not venture out to yours – we don’t care about your fancy system if it means leaving the collateral and community that we have inside our VPN)
• Content Variation Model (aka Learning Nuggets)
  • Yes, we still need formal ILT and eLearning, but can you please finally sort out how you can break down your rather large formal courses into pertinent bite-sized learning nuggets
  • Short 5-7 minute videos, podcasts, screen-caps, articles, case studies, job aids, knowledge nuggets, etc. — all in the name of ensuring our employees can get a particular morsel of competence in a manageable duration, and not have to fight through a 5-day course or 6-hour eLearning module to do so
• New ILT Continuum
  • A formal course is just not going to cut it anymore – so please stop suggesting it as your only value proposition
  • Think of an ILT Continuum that starts with informal-social prework of some sort, that gets a community and the social collaboration aspect of learning in motion prior to the ILT start date
  • During the course itself, utilize the informal-social learning tools, processes, etc. that help students get the fact that ‘training is an event’ type of thinking is dead – and that learning is continuous and happens before and after a course
  • Ensure that there is post-course work that (again) embodies the informal-social aspects of a Learning 2.0 organizational model (how does the ILT content become reinforced post-course)
• New eLearning Continuum
  • An eLearning course of more than 1 hour is a waste of bloody money and development time
  • eLearning need not be fancy bells and whistles laden with oceans of content, simulations, etc.
  • eLearning needs to morph into a social learning paradigm – small bits of interactive content that can live and breathe within the informal-social learning ecosystem
  • The learner should not be simply clicking ‘next’ and then satisfied with ‘mark complete’ – where is the continuous improvement reinforcement? How will they interact with colleagues to reinforce the concept? (that’s why it needs to become part of the social learning ecosystem somehow – and not just an electronic page turning course full of fancy graphics)
    • We don’t need Playstation or XBox for eLearning – we need Wii

Those training vendors, whether large, medium or small, who display some of the traits above, in my opinion will ultimately prosper as we shift into a complete remake of the corporate learning sector under the Learning 2.0 banner.

TrainingMag, ASTD and CSTD should really think about changing their names. Training is a really awful word.