THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE INFORMATION ECOSYSTEM:

NEW ROLES FOR HUMAN RESOURCE DEVELOPMENT PROFESSIONALS

Marc Weinstein

Tonette Rocco

Maria Plakhotnik

These are exciting and anxious times for professionals who collectively support, create, and deliver training and development in organizations. The pace of innovation in Internet and communications technology is breathtaking, and evidence suggests that the pace of technological innovation is accelerating (Kurzweil, 2005). This has created new options and challenges for training and learning in organizations. Professionals in this field experience this universe of possibilities as a continuous and sometimes bumpy transition to new expectations and new platforms. Even the best among them sometimes confess to certain bewilderment and weariness, a state of eMentia that can sap the desire to learn new technology (Isrealite, 2009). Fortunately, most professionals recover and soon embrace opportunities to incorporate new capabilities that these technologies make possible.

Some, like Jay Cross (2006), believe the most recent developments in Web 2.0 technologies and the advent of the read/write web herald a new era in training and development in organizations when “courses are dead” (p. 39). He argues that “courses are almost always separate from work and that goes against the trend of integrating learning and work” (p. 39). For Cross, the future of learning in organizations for knowledge workers will be through the support of “free-range” informal learning and the development of learning networks. However, free-range learning can be time-consuming and difficult to monitor, and the potential exists to learn “bad” information. Cross (2010) himself more recently concedes on a blog “Optimal learning is a balancing act, not an either/or,” prompting a response from another blogger who made the case that a course is sometimes the best place to start when trying to learn about a topic quickly.

While it may be premature to declare the “course is dead,” there is little doubt that the advances in Internet and communication technologies have dramatically transformed our information ecosystem (Weinstein, Rocco, & Plakhotnik, in press). In this chapter, we describe this transformation and the possibilities for human resource development (HRD) professionals to further support effective informal learning in organizations. In many instances, the opportunities we identify have long been embraced by companies that recognize the importance of learning and the central role knowledge workers have in contributing to innovation and competitiveness (Davenport, 2005; Stewart, 2001). What is new is the extent to which new knowledge networks can be fostered in this new information ecosystem.

THE TRANSFORMATION OF OUR INFORMATION ECOSYSTEM

Most accounts of the impact of exponential growth in technology begin with some account of Moore's law that anticipates doubling of the number of transistors on a computer chip and the halving of its price every eighteen months. The resiliency of Moore's law over the last fifty years has been an important precondition for advances in educational technology. Modern personal computers have the power of mainframe computers of yesteryear, and miniaturization has enabled the creation of new mobile platforms. Importantly, the exponential growth underpinning Moore's law is not unique to computational power. Rather, exponential growth is an attribute of most technologies; many complementary technologies are currently displaying evidence of exponential growth, including storage capacity, data compression, and display technologies (Kurzweil, 2005).

The law of exponential growth of technological innovation has provided a rough future roadmap for the development of known technologies, allowing us to reasonably anticipate the decreased cost and increased capacity of microprocessors, storage, display, and many other technologies. This has given training and development professionals some guidance about future hardware and software capabilities. However, the law of exponential growth provides less insight about the emergence of the read/write web made possible with Web 2.0 tools. And no technology roadmap could provide a sense of the social dimensions of computing, the desire for individuals to share, interact, and create new content. Even less easily anticipated is the improbable development of user-created content and software tools that rival and exceed products resulting from expert-driven for-profit initiatives.

This ability and desire to access and create information are the drivers of this transformation. Search technology has created the market for information. This, in turn, has spawned a number of private for-profit ventures in providing cost-free access to digitization of our intellectual heritage. An enduring innate desire of humans to share and acquire knowledge has further led to the creation of valuable user-created content, enabled by innovations in software and the rise of blogs, wikis, and other collaborative platforms. Rather than using technology to isolate ourselves, we are using technology to connect and learn from each other. We enjoy searching, sharing, and learning so much that entire business models have been developed around our eagerness to share information and to learn from and about others. While we can always fret that the most frequently used Google search terms reflect our prurient interests and fascination with celebrity, we should also be awed by the desire of so many people and institutions not only to put the information of the world online, but also the alacrity with which they generate and share new knowledge in our newly connected world.

From an environment of relative information scarcity, we now have information munificence. From a period of near reliance on experts, we now have access both to experts and to a large corpus of user-created content. This transformation cannot but have a profound impact on how people learn, what students and workers expect from learning, and the relationship of technology to both. Table 1 compares the traditional information ecosystem to the emergent one discussed here. Until recently, knowledge creation was typically the domain of experts. Access to information was frequently restricted and protected by copyright. Experts and specialists provided quality control and, since most information was in print, error correction was only intermittent, if it occurred at all. The absolute amount of information available to those who had access could be measured in gigabytes and the location of this information was in physical libraries or on isolated information systems. By contrast, our emergent information ecosystem is characterized by both expert- and user-created content. Access to information is open and often governed by Creative Commons (Lessig, 2001) licensing that provided guidelines on how information could be shared and socially developed. Communication among experts and non-users is networked, error correction is continuous, and xenabytes of information travel the speed of light across networks.

Table 1. Attributes of Traditional and Emergent Information Ecosystem

NEW CONTENT FOR LEARNING

In The World Is Open, Bonk (2009) provides a breathless compendium of content available on the World Wide Web. The dynamic nature of the Internet and the nature of user-created content assure that no traditional print publication can keep the pace by which new content is being created. Open access reference and instructional materials are created by experts, such as university professors, scientists, or researchers, and non-experts, anyone interested in submitting a contribution. Table 2 provides a sampling and a snapshot of open source material, available free of cost. In this section, we briefly describe examples of expert- and user-created reference and instructional material.

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is an example of an open-access expert-led online reference source. The editorial committee of the Encyclopedia selects and invites experts in different fields to submit contributions. Subsequently, these contributions are peer reviewed in a process similar to manuscripts submitted to academic journals. A similar website includes Interdisciplinary Documentation on Religion and Science that provides a variety of materials whose purpose is to generate a dialogue among researchers, pastors, university professors, and others interested in the connections among religion, philosophy, and science. The website is maintained by several university professors from the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, Italy, and supported by a Council formed by several experts in the fields of theology, philosophy, and science. The International Review of Research on Open and Distance Learning is an open-access peer-reviewed journal related to advances in e-learning.

Wikipedia and its Spanish language sister Enciclopedia Libre and Russian language sister WikiZnanie are examples of open-access online reference sources that are created by non-experts from all around the world. Any user can register to submit his or her entries and edit other people's entries. Another non-expert created site,Everything2, also welcomes submissions from volunteers; however, the submitted entries may be modified or even removed only by the website editors if the entries have poor quality or contain offensive language. Managementhelp.org provides various materials on over 650 topics related to all aspects of management of for-profit and nonprofit organizations. The website is managed by Authenticity Consulting, LLC. But all users can contribute. The NewPR Wiki represents a collection of information for PR professionals, a tool for collaboration, and networking for PR professionals. Similar resources for marketing professionals are provided on Marketing.wikia.com.

Examples of expert-led courses are also available. MIT OpenCourseWare is a project of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that provides educational materials from its undergraduate and graduate courses online. Similar initiatives include Open Yale Courses, by Yale University and UC College Prep by the University of California. Other open-access instructional materials created by experts are not affiliated with one particular university. VideoLectures.net represents an online bank of video lectures, workshops, or seminars created by scholars and experts in different fields from different universities. These experts are invited and their videos are screened by the editorial board of the website. Elearnmag.org welcomes submissions, such as research articles, best practices, how-to essays, or case studies, related to all aspects of e-learning, including instructional design, online instruction, and corporate training.

As is the case with reference material, expert-generated content is now complemented with user-created courses. YouTube, TeacherTube, and Edublogs.tv provide opportunities for non-experts to share their instructional materials on a variety of topics with others. CoolMath.com, maintained by math enthusiasts, provides educational materials to help people of all ages understand mathematics, algebra, and geometry. Salman Khan, an independent educational evangelist, has created over a thousand educational videos available at khanacademy.com that cover material ranging from basic arithmetic to advanced topics in physics, engineering, and biology. The popularity of this site attests to the appetite of individuals for informal learning.

Individuals in organizations are not limited to open source, free content. Many professional associations to which employees belong or can join for a fee host portals that allow access to copyrighted material. Additionally, there are numerous wikis and blogs that individuals can access and contribute to. Of course, these supplement traditional proprietary databases that are pressed to demonstrate their value added when faced with competition from open-source material. For quick queries in natural English, Wolfram Research has created the freely available wolframalpha.com that allows users to pose questions on a range of topics. In the next decade, we can anticipate dramatic advances in natural language databases, as demonstrated by IBM's supercomputer Watson that is posed to compete against the best human players in “Jeopardy” (Thompson, 2010). Table 2 shows a list of these and other sites. This is an exciting time for informal learning; the question is how companies can best tap into these important advances as they support informal learning in organizations.

Table 2. Examples of Open-Access Learning-Relevant Content

NEW ROLES FOR HRD PROFESSIONALS IN THE NEW INFORMATION ECOLOGY

For a number of years, leading academics and practitioners have noted the central role of HRD in contributing to innovation and competitive advantage in organizations. In this view, the task of the HRD professional is to “provide learning and career development activities, performance improvement and management initiatives, organization development interventions, and insights through which organizational effectiveness is enhanced” (Gilley, Eggland, & Gilley, 2002, p. 2). In addition to needs assessment and the design and delivery of training, HRD professionals are engaged in a wide range of initiatives to promote informal learning through crafting mentorships and other on-the-job learning activities. Organizations that understand the important role of informal learning in organizations have already begun to allow and encourage employees to use the World Wide Web to learn and to build learning networks.

In Table 3 we map some of the roles and responsibilities of HRD professionals in promoting learning among knowledge workers in the transformed information ecosystem. In some areas these roles vary depending on whether the learners are new or experienced employees (Mosher, 2009). New employees are likely to be the key beneficiaries of traditional courses. For these employees, informal learning can be haphazard and at times inefficient. Experienced employees not only have a clearer idea of the information they need, but are also more likely to be able to tap into networks of experts both inside and outside the company. A second dimension we distinguish is between knowledge that everyone in the organization needs to know and the specific needs of individual employees.

The role that is most familiar to many HRD professionals is related to the shared learning needs of the employees in the organization. Where the needs are specific to the organization, HRD professionals will blend the best of traditional and distant learning in formulating training solutions. Additionally, these professionals will continue to assess critically the quality of off-the-shelf solutions and determine whether purchasing new products or developing them in-house is the best option. In either case, we are likely to see a continued devolvement of responsibility for technical mastery in the implementation and use of learning management systems (LMS). Although the initial installation of an LMS may be the responsibility of the technical specialist, the management of the system has and will continue to devolve to learning professionals. Also important here will be the support HRD professionals provide to subject-matter experts as they develop courses for both new and experienced employees.

New opportunities for HRD professionals exist in addressing individual learning needs in the transformed information ecosystem. At the strategic level, HRD professionals should be engaged in corporate policies that create an environment in which individuals are empowered to take control of their personal learning needs. On a technical level, corporate firewalls and filters may need to be altered. On a policy level, some accommodation will have to be made between the need for operational efficiency and the need for individuals to learn on a just-in-time basis. HRD professionals can consult with experienced employees and subject-matter experts regarding the value of providing financial support to employees who can benefit from access to content only available from member-only content portals. They should provide input as well into decisions for company support for individual and group subscriptions to copyrighted material.

Table 3. The Role of HRD Professionals in the Transformed Information Ecosystem

In addition to the facilitation of traditional mentoring relationships, learning professionals must foster norms that promote learning networks that include both novice and experts in the organization and those individuals outside the organization. Finally, in collaboration with subject-matter experts, learning professionals will play the role of net librarians and master mashers, as they facilitate both novice and expert navigation of the rich content available on the World Wide Web. e-Learning professionals can capture new learning and assist the organization with knowledge creation by maintaining blogs, wikis, and using other resources to capture and share what they have learned with other workers. The main point here is that HRD professionals can enhance self-directed employees' navigation of the information ecosystem in a variety of ways not delivered as courses. These roles are outlined in Table 3.

CONCLUSION

Although self-directed, informal learning has always occurred at work, the transformation of our information ecosystem has opened up new possibilities. As new employees enter the workforce, they will be acculturated to information grazing and learning. Experienced employees recognize that they are the masters of their own learning needs, and they are likely to be the best ones to know how and where to access new information. Courses will remain an important part of employee training and development, but formal courses are likely to ebb as individuals seek to learn on a just-in-time basis. HRD professionals have an important role in supporting this transition and can proactively contribute to and support company policies that encourage the development of an environment in which continuous access, development, and distribution of new information are the norm. One challenge will be how to measure the value of informal learning in organizations, but this is unlikely to deter the most ambitious companies as they seek new ways to support individual learning in their organizations.

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