Training Industry Quarterly - Fall 2008 - (Page 17) [COVER STORY] Embracing Web 2.0 w ater cooler conversations, instant messaging, a spontaneous meeting in the hallway, a quick phone call to the office “expert” — all of these are familiar examples of informal learning, often described as learning or knowledge that is not planned or pedagogically conscious, but rather unconscious and incidental. Informal learning in the context of enterprise learning and development comprises the 65 to 80 percent of learning that is thought to take place naturally, on the job or in the context of work, and not during formal training. The challenge for CLOs typically has been to translate the substantial informal knowledge-gathering that takes place in a business from a series of random events and interpersonal interactions to a much larger corporate audience, so that content learned during the course of a project or initiative can be made available to anyone. The emerging Internet technologies that make up Web 2.0 make rich exchanges possible without the need for formal structures. Gartner, in its recent report, “Hype Cycle for the HighPerformance Workplace 2008,” notes that convergence in the areas of collaboration, communications and content continues to have an impact on the high-performance workplace, affecting our work processes and how people work and learn together. Social software is challenging traditional work constructs and the relationship between IT and the business. And yes, learning — formal, informal and even improvisational — finally can be harnessed to drive real performance improvement and enterprise excellence. Dr. Tony O’Driscoll coins this convergence the “webolution.” In his blog, “Learning Matters” (August 19), O’Driscoll states, “We are now at a true inflection point where one of the most powerful sets of transformational technologies of our time is training its sights on the one institution/enterprise function that has heretofore managed to emerge unscathed from the application of technology: Education.” So, what’s holding us back? Jay Cross writes in his Unbook of Informal Learning that it is the people and organizational cultures that are holding back the use of Web 2.0 technologies to enable collaboration and exploration between “virtual” like minds. “Schooling has confused us into thinking learning was equivalent to pouring content into people’s heads. It’s more practical to think of learning as optimizing our networks.” He goes even further to suggest that the next biggest business process improvement strategy will be to take advantage of individuals’ natural inclination to share and learn from one another. 17
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