Do you use a Second Screen?
Second screens have become the norm these days with the vast majority of people carrying a smartphone or tablet or both! We google speakers during conferences and tweet comments about training sessions we are attending – we have become master multi-taskers.
Although most second screens are personal devices they are increasingly being used in the work and learning environments as additional resources. In his Learning Trends blog on March 25, 2011, Elliott Masie listed some of the potential implications for Learning and Corporate HR given the growing prevalence of second screens in our lives.
Learning Implications:
* People are using their Second Screens to continually enhance, contextualize and expand the CONTEXT side of CONTENT that is being viewed.
* Workers are able to collaborate – internally or externally – with formal or personal clusters of people as part of or in competition with the learning activity.
* Learners will have access to more back-channel and secondary content, context and opinion as they engage in learning.
* Tracking Second Screen activity will be a major challenge, if not impossibility.
* Learners will demand greater connectivity and access to at least some corporate assets on their Second Screens.
* When do we allow or restrict the use of Second Screens at work, in a leadership program or in the field?
HR/IT Implications:
* Selective, layered and location specific access to online assets from Second Screens will be requested from workers at the office, on the road and at home.
* Security issues – including Intellectual Property challenges – will arise as Second Screens are used, especially when the content is cached rather than just viewed.
* Second Screens will rapidly become HD-enabled Video Presence Units, competing with the quality of the $250,000 telepresence suite and placing intense loads on bandwidth.
* Equality and Discrimination issues will rise when employees buy their own Second Screens and are competing for performance with others who cannot afford the luxury.
Given these observations the question now becomes, much as it did with the issue of Facebook in the workplace, how to leverage the Second Screen to enhance learning and productivity. Any Ideas?
The Collaboration Curve: Continuous Learning for Continuous Improvement
“Collaboration curves hold the potential to mobilize larger and more diverse groups of participants to innovate and create new value”
~ John Hagel III, Harvard Business Review
We have all heard of the experience curve and the effects it has on reducing costs and time while increasing accuracy in product and service development- it’s logical. However, the inherent flaw in the experience curve model for business is that once you reach a certain level of expertise the costs, time and accuracy continue to improve only marginally until a new innovation is introduced. And it is with the collaboration curve that the innovation increases.
“We’re seeing the emergence of a new kind of learning curve as we scale connectivity and learning , rather than scaling efficiency”
The more participants you have working on a design or project and the more interactions between those participants in a carefully designed collaborative environment, the more the rate of performance improvement goes up. Essentially, because with continued collaboration comes continuous ideas that translate into continuous innovation. It eradicates the lull in performance improvement that occurs in the experince curve model.
Take Apple for example. They are experienceing a seemingly never ending cycle of expansion through the applications for their devices (iPhone, iPad, iPod etc.) The reason of course is that they crowdsource. Apple doesn’t think of the hundreds of application ideas and advertise them, they merely offer the platform and software neccessary for their users to develop apps based on their own ideas – and because of it the App Store is massive and Apple continues to gain revenue, reputation and offer continuously evolving product.
So I urge you to consider how you are applying the Collaboration Curve learning cycle in your organization?
