This week we are looking at the theme of natives versus immigrants on the web, the technology being explored is twitter. I will leave the discussion about natives to my next blog but wanted to say a few words about twitter service/product which I have never felt comfortable with until now.

 

I will start with an admission – until this week I have never really used twitter. I explored it several times, run a few searches, looked at the discussions, but never contributed (or for that matter even set up a profile). My perception of it is is stronger than that of the BBC: “Twitter tweets are 40% 'babble'” (I believe that they were using a very lenient definition of 'babble'). In fact, a random screenshot taken from the twitter homepage shows the topics discussed:

 

 

So, while war rages in Afghanistan and Iraq, cars in the US are losing their breaks (Toyota) and MPs in the UK are asked to pay back their expenses the main topics being discussed on twitter are – entertainment and boy bands (4/7 topics) and technology (2/7 topics), I tried reading the last thread “OhJustLikeMe” but still have no idea what it was about.

 

On the very first page of “the University of Google” by Tara Barbazon, I found the following quote: “Students, in these ruthless times, desperately wants to feel something – anything – beyond the repetitive and pointless patterns of the casualised workplace and the selection of mobile phone ring tones.” I have to admit that after following a few of the threads appearing as the most trendy in twitter (and I am really not a fan of boy bands) I found little evidence of this on Twitter. If anything this reminded me much more of the nihilism that Dreyfus mentions in “on the Internet”; Twitter encourages you to get lost in the crowd, commit to nothing but have an opinion about everything as long as, it is in less than 140 characters. Whereas some of my fellow students found Dreyfus' book to be disparaging and depressing I was actually encouraged when I ran into this headline: “60% Of Twitter Users Quit After A Month”. Some of the metrics behind that report may be flawed but the comments to the article (and others presenting the same data) all circle around “what is twitter for?”

 

I have to admit that I found twitter to be almost disabling - it seems to encourage the culture of “looking for”, no new idea was actually developed during our chat, things written by other people were simply recycled. So, is twitter the human-based search engine that Dreyfus believes is needed? Not in my mind, simply because - if you do not know to follow then you cannot find the “good stuff”.

 

On a final note, while I do find twitter to be of very limited use in the classroom (and more so in the corporate training environment) I did find the conversation that we had as a group to be very engaging. Saying that, this had more to do with the content of the conversation rather than the medium it was done through. This, along with the Skype conversation we had the week before is pushing me in the direction of synchronous communication – what if we could replace the corporate training 'flip books' with an hour-long chat were people from different locations guided by more experienced employees gets to develop and understand, truly understand, ideas and information. This will never be a tool to cover compliance requirements but in the information economy could be a very powerful, differentiating, tool.

This week the Learning Technologies show (2010) took place at the Olympia exhibition Centre (The 27^th and 28^th of January). Working for a company that offers a number of products in this field I spent both days exhibiting at the event. This gave me an excellent opportunity to contrast where the corporate world is in terms of e-learning (technologies and usage) with how e-learning is used in the academic setting (having been on the course for two weeks now).

It seems as if the corporate world is still using the “traditional” e-learning of two decades ago: the number of companies still offering e-learning authoring (“click on the 'next' button 30 times and you are done”) is phenomenal. On the administrative side the main products being offered are LMS systems (which are mainly responsible for scheduling the presence of employees in classrooms or when they need to go through e-learning packages). In other words while interfaces have changed and systems have been speeding up there is little change in this field from the 1990s.

The buzz words of yesteryear – Mobile learning has now become more common (being used mostly for performance support and just in time knowledge) and so while many companies offer something in this field it is no longer a main attraction.

There is however some good news for corporate learning: the main product which seems to be making tracks is the e-portfolio. In fact, in a number of conversations that I have had during the show it seems as if corporates are finally starting to understand that being able to schedule employee A in classroom B at time C (with an LMS) does not actually mean that employee A has learned anything. Therefore, e-portfolio (and 'Talent management') systems are becoming of greater interest as they offer a mixture of skills and competency management (“what does the employee know” rather than “what does the employee need to learn”).

According to researchers such as Jay Cross most learning is informal. In such a case managing the skills and competencies of an employee rather than what they need to learn is very good news for learning in general. Over the next decade I believe that we are going to see the LMS become a subset of the e-portfolio system (it will still be needed to track learning for compliancy reasons).

The second trend that was obvious at the show is all about “social learning” on the one side this is closer to what is happening in the academic environment but it also acknowledges the way that younger employees (those currently joining the workforce) live their digital lives. The theme of “Google is today's main learning application” is a recurring one appearing in Barbazon's “the University of Google” and other sources. However, we have to remember that these books have all ready been out for a while (3 years in Barbazon's case) and the younger generation look at Facebook, MySpace and Twitter as their main port of call. In other words we have gone from learning from a teacher (with the book) to learning from an infinite library (searching it via Google) to learning from our peers. An example of this is given by Steve Johnson in his article “How Twitter will change the way we live”: describing an instance where a certain celebrity (Oprah) asked for help removing ticks from her dog.

I think that the main significance of this 'peer learning' to the corporate environment (and this is the main point which interests me personally) is that it brings closer the learning organisation as described in such books as Peter M. Senge's - “The Fifth Discipline” and Argyris and Schon's “Organizational Learning II”. Achieving the state of a learning organisation is not possible without the help of technology due to the simple reason of mass – the amount of data generated, updated, stored, queried and retrieved on a daily basis is by far too much for a non-technological system to handle. In his article “How Twitter will change the way we live” Steve Johnson claims that the value of twitter (and this apply to any system which generate great volumes of data) is not in the data it helps create but in the tools that allow users to manipulate and search it and so transform the data into information. I will be following closely the development of these systems for the corporate environment and their impact.

On a personal note, now that the show is finally over the weeks of preparation has paid off and I can finally returned (Begin) to make a more regular contribution to this blog and my studies in general. I look forward to this end to the reduction in day-to-day pressure.

My first blog post and it's for all to see!