"Informal learning is all around us: it happens all the time, everywhere, because it is the most natural way we all learn. Informal learning is the both the most valuable and the least talked about asset an organization has today to match the knowledge demands imposed by the increasingly rapid pace of change. Unless a company can facilitate unrestricted exchange, promote visual communication, while encouraging open confrontation through the growth of internal and external networks, its workforce will find itself knowing less and less about more and more and uneasy at coping with the complexity of the new work scenarios."
Photo credit: Jay Cross
This is what I wrote recently to introduce Jay Cross' upcoming new book on Informal Learning. It doesn't tell you much about the guy himself but if you were into online education you would probably know that e-learning and Jay Cross are two words that go tightly together. So much so, that most attribute to him the fathership of the term e-learning.
Jay is CEO of the Internet Time Group and the founder of the Workflow Institute. He lives in a wonderful, quiet house on hills of Berkeley, near San Francisco, and we have met more than once, both in person and in virtual space and I have always enjoyed his intellectual curiosity for educational technologies, learning in all of his aspects, human performance improvement, and organizational culture.
He once told me: "I am trying to change the world by helping people learn.
My calling is to spread the adoption of practical ideas through writing, speaking, teaching, and selling ideas."
And so I couldn't restrain myself to include him again, in this short series of conversations about the future of Online Collaboration that I recorded a year ago online.
Jay is nothing like the typical web conferencing CEO or those power users seeking productivity kicks in the latest digital gizmos. He is the one that always invites new points view, challenging what we too often give for granted, and explores new ways of looking at how we can best communicate, inform each other and learn.
Here is the full recording of our good conversation on the future of online collaboration, both in a .mp3 downloadable file as well as in an immediately streamable format you can start listening to right now. Just click the Play button here below.
Full transcript of Robin Good interview with Jay Cross
Robin Good: Good morning everyone, here is Robin Good, live from Rome in Italy and I have with me Jay Cross in Berkeley, California. Somebody who is an expert, a researcher and a scholar in helping organizations learn more effectively by using information in smart and intelligent ways. How is that description, Jay?
Jay Cross: Sounds like it's me all right, I'm ready to go. I'll wait for you to ask me questions.
Robin Good: Jay is one of the featured guests of this series about the future of online collaboration. I would like to open up the set of questions, with you Jay, with a specific clarifying question for many people. Though it may seem obvious, I would like to ask you how do you define online collaboration? What are its recognizing traits?
Jay Cross: Well, I don't know Robin. How do I define online collaboration? To me collaboration - from your ancestors cum laborare - work with, it's simply working with the other folks using the online medium. I think one of the wonderful things about it is it's often give and take. It's live, it's like having a real conversation, except that were not being in the same continent.
Robin Good: Besides sending emails and having Skype conversations, like we often have, do you engage yourself in other types of online collaboration activities?
Jay Cross: I use Skype quite a bit, but I have webinars, which essentially means that I'm trying to change to being a conversation because I want people to be with me rather than just hearing me.
Robin Good: Good. What do you think we are going to do differently when it comes to meeting other people, let's say in a year or a year and half from now? Are things going to be just like they are now or where they heading towards? What are the things that are going to be changing when meeting and collaborating with people online? What do you see coming?
Jay Cross: There are probably going to be a lot of changes, but they're going to come with a package, I think. For one thing, right now we don't have any reputation management software, which goes right along with collaboration tools. If I'm speaking with somebody I don't know that well, it would certainly be nice to have an automatic link that tells me a little bit about them.
Robin Good: Yes. What else would you see coming in the future that may facilitate and further enhance those collaboration sessions?
Jay Cross: It's inevitable, I think that social network software leads to the types of thought that goes behind it, get tied into online communications. Now, it's like making phone calls. I could be very specific. It's not easy to say, "Hey, you're interesting, come into our meeting". I think it will be more open and increasingly things will be like real face to face meetings.
Robin Good: Do you think instant messengers are an important component of online collaboration?
Jay Cross: I think instant messengers are vital. There is funny thing happening, I'm writing a book on informal learning and you'd think that all companies would immediately embrace instant messengers, just because they make things happen faster and better.
Yet, what's happened is that a lot of companies don't have governance at the enterprise level, so one person, way down in the CIO shop, can say, "Oh no, I think they are a security threat" and all of sudden, they lose out on having what would obviously do them a lot of good. IBM tells me that instant messenger was the most rapidly accepted technology that they've ever installed in corporate history and they would not live without it.
Robin Good: How do you see large and major organizations being able to make this paradigm shift that requires tremendous deep changes to facilitate that online collaboration? It's not just the matter of putting the instant messenger on, but there are a number of mechanisms, policies, and procedures that need to be enabled simultaneously to make sure that people can indeed share there documents, files and communicate easily. How do we go over these types of obstacles?
Jay Cross: I think it is recognition, that right now people are collaborating, they are just doing it without much help. If you look at the typical knowledge worker, that individual spends forty percent of his or her time looking for information, often asking people. But, they're only successful in getting an answer about half the time and half that time the answer they get is wrong.
If things like collaboration were seen as a better way to find things out then seeing who is available in the coffee room or who is within shouting distance, the payback on this kind of thing is incredible. Making the a connection with the right person is so valuable. I can cheer pretty strong ROI for that.
Robin Good: Thank you for that clarification. Those terms that ring as "contextual collaboration", do they have any meaning for you?
Jay Cross: Certainly, contextual collaboration - and I'm not just going with the definition that was proposed by people that would charge you for their reports a while back - is sometimes going to be about a specific area within workflow and it's a given that's what you're talking about.
To have the awareness that is your context and be able to pull into the conversation space whatever meter there is on the workflow, so you can talk about real time things as they happen. That's an important context contributor, plus it's impossible to separate content: context and content are like inside and outside. You really cant have one without the other, it's whether you can have them appear in a useful fashion.
Robin Good: Do you see contextual collaboration happening and how?
Jay Cross: One very specialize formed, if you will, is contextual collaboration in a workflow learning environment, where people are able to select who they need to speak with based on expertise rankings, ratings by others, how quickly someone helps solve a problem, by presence awareness - there is no reason calling somebody who is not there, by identifying what sort of tie a person has into the entire web - if they're on a phone or on a high speed terminal - it makes a little difference on how much you can do, there are all kinds of factors that naturally pop up.
Robin Good: But, is contextual collaboration also the drive for software tools to gradually disappear within mainstream applications, or is it for the collaboration tools themselves to integrate and incorporate working tools, so that the collaboration and active the task are a simultaneous continuum?
Jay Cross: Clearly, things are going to change when we have pervasive computing or ubiquitous computing in that then it's going to be more like standing on the deck of the Starship Enterprise and talking and it will route your message where you need it. Until then, a lot of things are going to start with a collaboration tool, perhaps using web services to bring in other things live without hard wiring them, but it will be tools for a while longer.
Robin Good: Good. May I ask you a little naive question that relates more to the features and facilities that you consider part of your online collaboration tool set. Would you somehow rank the first three or four facilities that you use most often when you want to collaborate with other people? What are they?
Jay Cross: Mine are somewhat a limited set, I do a lot of my collaborations from home, so it's things that are loaded on a PC. Lately, I've been using Macromedia Breeze. I'm still not good at using it as a persistent meeting room as opposed to a presentation tool, but I'm getting there. It's got a number of things that are quite attractive: I can have my archive of various things to pull in for show and tell, I have little video snippets of everybody as they speak and it doesn't have so many buttons so you get totally lost.
Photo credit: Niall Kennedy
Robin Good: Yes, but without getting into specific brands and models, I was curious to find out from you what are the type of facilities that you find most needed, in order of importance, when you are collaborating with someone. Voice, text chat, whiteboard, sharing an application, what are those that you think that are really the ones you couldn't do without? That is what I'm seeking to find.
Jay Cross: Simply, voice to voice is one that I could not do without at all. I can always point somebody to a visual thing on the web for them to look at. I was shocked recently when I was asked to address a community of practice of government information technologists. Essentially, I had to call off the meeting because they didn't have the collaboration tool that they could use without putting me through all kinds of security checks. I was amazed, they could have tuned into my system, but it was too much trouble for them, they're run by their security people!
Robin Good: Yes, I hear you there. Is there some kind of facility that, no matter what brand of tool you use, you still find that developers are coming up not in the right format or way? Is there some facility, from an evolutionary standpoint of these online collaboration tools, that you still find very primitive? Is there any one?
Jay Cross: Primitive, well, here we are talking in a medium, which has got a very clear screen and it's recording things nicely, but I've got to push a silly button to talk rather then have it somehow recognize things. To me, the closer we are to a real conversation, where I don't have to push a button, where if we want, we start interrupting one another because we are excited and that's part of the story. The closer it is to reality, the happier I'll be.
Things still feel a little artificial. I will say that I had a hang up for a long time about putting on a headset because it seemed unnatural and it broke my workflow. Right now, I'm speaking into a directional microphone and Robin, I hear you coming back through speakers that are part of my monitor and this is very nice, it's like having a conference call, if you will, rather than being a radio ham operator.
Robin Good: Yes, indeed. Do you find tools or process, from your point of view, to be more strategically important to create effective online collaboration?
Jay Cross: I'm sorry I didn't get the gist of your question?
Robin Good: What I'm asking is: to make online collaboration effective, is it more important to have a specific tool set? A determined type of VoIP, whiteboard and text chat facility or is it more of a matter of what type of processes and approaches you use for your team to interact with?
Jay Cross: I don't know if it's either-or, I think you've got to have both. Clearly, if I put the processes first because of it's not part of somebody's working routines and culture, nothing is going to happen. But, I'd put some standard suggestions, at least. Software employees or people are going to quickly drop out because they find that not everything glues together very well, at least not now. There are no Rosetta Stones out there for us. So, I'm going to vote for both.
Robin Good: I do agree, in fact, that both are very important and it seems that the focus on tools has sometimes been overpowering the correct analysis of what else we also need to do to make that effective. Do you see interfaces of these tools playing an important role in the future of this type of technologies?
Jay Cross: A good user interface always makes things easier and more fun. It doesn't really feel in my gut that that's going to be a giant challenge. We'll be able to ride on the coat tails of what's been developed for software in general.
Robin Good: Are these tools going to cost less and less as we go ahead?
Jay Cross: I think these types of tools will indeed be apart of the package, there won't be any incremental cost. There's no reason an open source sort of thinking shouldn't be involved here, there are common standards. If there's money to be made, it's through installations, it's through getting the right culture in place, it's not from selling a different breed of collaboration software.
Robin Good: Great. I was just going to ask you about open source and what you thought of using those types of tools and if their support for open standards would be a significant advantage, but you have already answered all of those. So, is there any advice that you would like to give out to the industry, meaning those people that develop the upcoming versions and new releases of the collaboration tools that you will use? Is there any very generic-wise advice you would want give to these people?
Jay Cross: Well, this may be too general, but I'll give it a try. I've been studying informal learning for a little over a year now, somewhat intensely, because it's the way most people learn rather than in class or something like that. They are learning through, often, collaboration. But to really wrap my arms around things, I had to redefine learning, because learning is not just the content, it's a whole feeling and sometimes you're learning to become an effective member of a community and things like that.
My new definition of learning is: learning is doing well in the ecosystems that matter to you, probably work, family, hobbies, maybe soccer if you live in Italy. It's working together smoothly and fitting in and receiving as well as sending information, as in the designers mind, I think they will head in the right direction. It begins and ends with culture, with subjective things and with feelings, not with baud rates and stuff like that.
Photo credit: Internet Time
Robin Good: Thank you. Last question from my side is really what do you see as the future of online collaboration for the months to come? What are the things we should expect and what are the things we should push for that we do not have yet to increase our ability to learn, collaborate, work and communicate effectively with these tools?
Jay Cross: You mentioned that Chris Pirillo is going to be on and I just came back from Gnomedex, which is a people aggregator, a conference that Chris puts on. This was an amazing event because it was totally mediated. Picture, if you will, 400 people in a lecture hall theater-type thing, every single one of them brought their laptop.
Most people have got picture phones, some people have got video cams and other recording devices, you could tune into all sorts of chat sessions or you could look at pictures of the guy next to you on Flickr. You'd look on a bulletin board and you could find people for the "Birds-of-a-Feather-Session" that you really wanted to go to and then hook up.
The mesh of electronic support and live happenings was fantastic and the feeling, a number of people said: "This changed my life". The feeling was one that you wouldn't get without the in person part, but the in person part wouldn't have been as good if it weren't through the electronic collaboration support. In fact, a final thing on that is that I'm still reading different takes on sessions that I attended and appreciating, essentially learning more from those events as a result. It's what I call an augmented meeting, it's certainly not what we use to call a conference!
Robin Good: What I would probably define as an ex-event, extending beyond the physical specific location in time into other realms and extending in time before and beyond it. Many of these fascinating things indeed are true and I identify with them. Thank you for sharing them with us, Jay. I would like to thank you personally for having participated in this series about the future of online collaboration.
I would like you to say bye bye to our listeners and provide them with your own URL, where they can follow your research findings and exploration about the future of informal learning, workflow learning and all the interesting things you are working on right now. Thank you Jay.
Jay Cross: Thank you Robin. People can reach me, I'll give you my secret inside page that indexes a lot of things at jaycross.com. For the listeners, I think following up on this theme of combining electronically supported online collaboration and being there in person, that Robin should an event at the Lago di Como and maybe treat us all to a get together at the Hotel D'Este, which is always a lot of fun. It's been a pleasure to talk with you. I always learn more than anyone else does in these sessions. So Robin, thanks for the opportunity. Arrivederci!
Robin Good: Ciao Jay, and thank you again, indeed. Bye bye.
About Jay Cross
Jay Cross is an internationally acclaimed strategist, speaker, consultant, and designer of corporate learning and performance systems. A thought leader in learning technology, informal learning, performance improvement, and organizational culture, Jay coined the terms eLearning and workflow learning. He is the author of Implementing eLearning and he is currently writing a book on Informal Learning. Thousands of people read his Internet Time Blog every day.
Here is Jay Cross in a 49" mini clip explaining what blogs are, and why they are so useful, as he contributed to my open-source video documentary TheWeblogProject.
Find out more about Jay Cross on his blog.
