The Hitchhiker's Guide to e-Learning

PKM/Network Learning

2011-05-27T15:25:00.000-04:00

I am, at long last, attending my Personal Knowledge Management/Network Learning workshop at U of T, conducted by Harold Jarche.

I'll provide some reflections once I aggregate everything I've jotted down.

John Seely Brown Interview

2011-04-11T15:57:00.002-04:00

Thanks to Jane Hart for the original link.

Watch the full episode. See more Digital Media - New Learners Of The 21st Century.

A Small Planetary Diversion

2011-03-26T21:06:00.000-04:00

Sadly, it lookS like I won't be able to get to see the Ruth Clark workshop in Toronto on the 29th. Sometimes circumstances just don't work in one's favour.

But I'm still hopeful to get to the mlearning workshop in Ottawa at the end of April.

I may be a little quiet for the next two weeks but rest assured I'm not going away.

The Politics and "Business" of learning, Part 2

2011-03-21T11:46:00.000-04:00

Here's the second installment of some posts to my Assessment & Evaluation learners.

Small-p politics is a always such a meaty subject and one that can sometimes become polarizing. So, I'm relieved on two fronts: first, that there's a real richness of commentary here; and, two, that the polarization seems to be almost non-existent. However, there are some additional things I'd like you to consider before this phase of the discussion wraps up.

[name]'s article from the Ottawa Citizen does illustrate one potentially disturbing trend in some sectors of the public education system, and that is 'entitlement'. While one is entitled to an education (by law, in most cases) one is not entitled to a false assessment of one's success. (In simpler terms, "if you want it, you gotta work for it".) Indeed, I'm rather disturbed by the implication of an education system that seems to feel that a "negotiated" pass is more effective in the long run than learning from one's failure. I see parallels in some youth sports where the philosophy is "we don't keep score, and there's no winner or loser."

So consider this as you continue this discussion: What's the impact on the learner when the assessment and evaluation framework can be rendered null through negotiation and false entitlement? What happens to them when the "really" fail at something? Or...in more practical terms, would you want your heart surgeon to be someone who had Mom & Dad go to bat for him/her when they didn't get a pass score in Anatomy 101 and thus scraped through Med School? Or would you want the confidence of knowing there's some real rigour behind their lengthy training?

Now, let's extend this discussion to workplace learning and we can consider formal and informal situations. What happens to the learner or the organization where compliance is an issue, and pass rates are forced upon the educator or assessor? Or, what happens when a peer coach doesn't like telling someone they're wrong about an interpretation of a key skill? Can you think of situations where this could have longer-term consequences?

While the learning content provided for your major project doesn't have immediate life-or-death implications, consider the impact of the failure to meet outcomes. How do you support someone to "get there" and feel they have succeeded?

So, you've all hit on the nastiness of "politics" in learning. The question is: what are you going to do about it?

The Politics and "Business" of learning, Part 1

2011-03-21T11:38:00.002-04:00

I posted the bulk of this entry to the forum for one of the two courses I'm currently teaching. The learners were sharing their observations and frustrations about politics and undue influence in supposedly objective evaluation frameworks.

So, mostly unedited, here is the first part for your perusal.

I must say that I am enjoying the discussions going on here and I wanted to add a few thoughts based on some of the recent comments. These thoughts are based on my own experiences working in a number of different learning environments. I offer these thoughts with the caveat that they're somewhat of a blanket indictment; while I'm sure there are organizations who operate differently than those discussed here, what follows are my observations of a perceived norm across general corporate technical training vendors.

Both [name] and [name] spoke of the idea of wanting to be "liked" as a teacher/educator/instructor, and I don't think anyone would disagree that there's a small element of "ego" at work when you're given the responsibility to train others. However, what one cannot lose sight of is the organizational interest in just how much learners "like" you. In organizations where training is provided 'for profit', customer satisfaction is huge, and rightfully so. However, it has been my experience that because many of these organizations are inserted as an "event fulfillment" provider rather than a strategic partner and stakeholder in someone's learning process, the commitment to learning is somewhat less than it would be if the learning were facilitated through an in-house resource. Training vendors, therefore, are mostly concerned with "bums in seats", preferably repeat ones. So, high satisfaction scores on the end-of-course smiley sheet become the almighty metric for vendor, buyer, and trainer/educator.

This leaves the educator in a bit of a dilemma: Do you do everything but stand on your head to chase a perfect evaluation score that tells you nothing about what you should be improving, or do you risk the wrath of those monitoring your scores by asking your learners to be genuine? Also consider whether or not the educator can really say whether or not the participant actually "learned" enough from you to put new skills and ideas into practice?

(As a sidebar, consider a different environment like military training. Based on my own experiences on both sides of the equation, I know there were very few instructors that I "liked", in fact, there were a number of them that I cordially detested...but I learned something from each of them. As an instructor and later an instructor coach/monitor, I knew that my role was not to be "liked", but to be an effective trainer/coach, and to be a positive role model, and to inspire the people I was responsible for. In that environment, instructor "likes" aren't the metric of the day. Successful performance of the trainee definitely is.)

So when we look at the "business" of training, and what it means in terms of evaluation practice is that evaluation and assessment really tend not to happen through a full cycle of any kind. Most of these folks are living at Level 1 of the venerable Kirkpatrick model for evaluation and are either unable to proceed deeper or unwilling because of the business model. Ultimately, the learners are the ones who lose. Because there's such a limited awareness of other frameworks, the Linus-blanket of the smiley sheet prevails to the detriment of all.

One of the aims of this course is to show people that there's more to evaluation and assessment than just sticking a survey form under a learner's nose and asking for their opinion, or giving them some multiple choice test that doesn't really reflect what they need to know. This discussion should really help to hammer home the fact that putting an effective framework in place AND following through with it is what will really give you the full picture on learner success and the direct impact on the organization.

For some additional reading, if you can get your hands on it, I would draw your attention to Mann & Robertson (1996) for a thought-provoking discussion on evaluation of training initiatives. For example, the survey cited in this article says that over half of the US companies surveyed (52%) used trainee satisfaction as the key metric, 17% assessed transfer of knowledge to the job, 13% examined organizational change, and 13% didn't evaluate any element of their training initiatives.

Reference:

Mann, S. & Robertson, I. (1996). What should training evaluations evaluate? Journal of European Industrial Training, 20(9), 14-20.

S2 Q9) Best bottom-up learning implementation. Or, at least, my most memorable one. (apologies to @LnDDave)

2011-03-18T14:40:00.004-04:00

I pondered the answer to this question for a while because it's been some time since I did any real bottom-up learning, but I drew on one of my experiences in the Army Reserve as an example, and arguably the one I am most proud of although I won't lay claim to the original idea, only its implementation for some of my soldiers.

In my 'trade' in the Army (Armoured Reconnaissance, "recce" to the Brits and Aussies/Kiwis, and 'armored cavalry scouts' to the Americans), Armoured Vehicle recognition was a key skill required at all levels. At the time, we were still training to operate in a Cold War-type, conventional environment as opposed to the regional and sectarian strife going on today.

The 'traditional' method of AFV recognition was through slide decks. In this case, real photo sides, because PPT wasn't widely used in field training at that time. One of the problems with this training environment is that many of the photos weren't realistic. Many of them were like "dealer" photos. The other problem was that the photos didn't represent what these vehicles might look like at a distance or what it might look like from different angles, or half-hidden, etc., etc. In short, success in AFV recognition in training scenarios came down to slide memorization and an ability to draw on a few memorized characteristics in case you got stuck.

On one exercise, some Regular Force folks put a few of us into a mock observation post, gave us binoculars and had us peer out to see what we could see. The Reg Force guys (being better funded than us part-time soldiers) had some 1/76 scale models laid out in a few areas and wow, were they ever hard to spot. It made recognition more of a challenge and at that point I had the germ of an idea.

So, long story short, a year or so later, I was teaching the on-weekends version Corporal's Qualifying Course in Recce and I talked the Course Officer into letting me handle the AFV recognition portion. Fortunately, I was (and sometimes still am) an avid scale model builder and I had a very large array of 1/35 scale vehicles. But, rather than using those instead of slides, I booked the indoor range as my classroom. Through a little bit of math, I set up a simulated environment where the soldiers were looking at vehicles that appeared to be 800M to 1100M away. I set up some 'terrain', borrowed some camouflage nets and a few other tricks and laid out a pretty challenging scenario for the students.

After a general briefing on the principles of recogntion, the soldiers were taken down to the range, handed binoculars, told that there were almost 40 vehicles out there, and they had 15 mins to identify them all from their 'distant' vantage point.

While the scores were lower than the slide memorization, the activity was a big hit with them. They felt it was far more realistic, and understood just how hard it could be to accurately identify these vehicles at a distance...because reporting a fleet of jeeps is one thing, but it what you really saw was a fleet of tanks heading in your direction, the implications are a little different. ;-)

The real confirmation of that success came when an officer I knew from an infantry regiment at our Armoury happened to be in on that weekend. He was downstairs and saw what I was doing on the range. He asked to sit in and simultaneously asked if I would run the same training for his Anti-Armour troops and then cleared it with my CO.

So while it wasn't e-learning at all, I like to think that I set up a good environment for learning and it wasn't something that would have come from the top-down.

You know it's been a productive day, when...

2011-03-17T21:17:00.000-04:00

...when you realize your initial LrnBk Chat posts from the night before for Section two were really well-received (as the day starts)

...when you manage a course-correct with a client who was about to deliver some very disappointing e-learning to their customer and get them turned around in 90 minutes. (in the morning)

...when you find yourself unexpectedly in a sales discussion with two ex-Veeps from your former employer who sought you out to maybe build some solutions for them (over a long lunch, and you're not even in a sales role)

...when you really catch the attention of a "Big 4" client on a new e-learning pilot (in the late afternoon)

...when you look at the time and realize that you have no synapses left to fire to participate in the weekly #lrnchat.

That, dear reader(s), is a productive day.

(now if I could just turn off my buzzing brain....)

Kvetch

2011-03-15T21:26:00.001-04:00

There are times when I would really like to have the ability to make some posts private, like almost every other blog platform can do.

(and yes, I acknowledge the irony of private posts on a public blog, but...)

OK, rant over. Moving on. Nothing to see here.

Q7) "doing stuff " at work or "learning"? A longer post, just for @LnDDave.

2011-03-15T19:45:00.003-04:00

When I read this question (which I mean to answer last week), I was reminded of an interview I had after getting out of my college Graphics Program about a million and a half years ago - long before I considered my part-time training work to be anything other than just that.

When the rather terse interviewer asked me what I expected out of the job, one of the things I said was that I wanted an opportunity to learn something. His response was something along the lines of "oh, you're not here to learn. You should know everything you need already to get started."

Needless to say, I didn't get the job...and thank heavens for that.

With respect to Clive's statement, I (sorta) disagree, but let me first talk about the leaders.

In a number of environments, including some that should know better, there is a "culture of execution" among Sr. Management, and very little consideration given to what I now know is "informal learning", or even continuing education. What I find ironic is that if something goes wrong and someone gets hauled on the carpet, invariably one of the questions that gets asked is "well, what did you learn from this?" I worked as a promoted-from-within Manager for a national technical training provider and I had to fight an uphill battle to get management to realize that their trainers needed time to prep for new courses as well as improve existing parts of their repertoire. It took me quite some time to get them to lower the "utilization" metric (meaning, days in the classroom) so that the trainers weren't being forced to prep entirely on their own time.

So, I see a bit of a divide between the knowledge worker and the manager in that the knowledge worker will often be forced through circumstance to "learn" in order to "do stuff", and is frequently left to their own, likely inefficient, devices.

For me, I know that I used to go to work to 'do stuff' and gave very little consideration to the learning involved, but as I've become more aware as a learner, I am trying to be more conscious of the things I learn along the way of 'doing stuff', even the painful or frustrating things.

So, I disagree with the statement because I'm not convinced that 'doing' and 'learning' should be two separate things.

Q6) Courses, not resources: where not to do it, and Q6a) What are we doing to change?

2011-03-10T16:32:00.003-05:00

Q6) BBC turned away from courses and toward resources. Are their organizations where this would not be effective

I can see organizations that are heavily regulated or have strong compliance requirements remaining largely in the course model. I'm thinking of organizations where lack of "training" may translate into a genuined risk to individuals, organizations, or the environment. So, orgs like Airlines, some primary Healthcare providers, or maybe even the military, although I'd love to eventually be proven wrong on all counts.

Q6a) If you are working towards this vision, what steps are you taking?

Our catalyst was the change 2 yrs ago to partner as a reseller for a rapid e-learning development platform. It gave us some serious flexibility in asset development that wasn't present in our previous dependence on tools like Flash. I know I am also trying to influence the decision-makers, select clients, and our account execs on how we can position these resources as a stronger service offering that reflects a more realistic model for how people want to learn in the workplace.

Lrntect Q1 Response

2011-03-09T21:30:00.001-05:00

Q1) Shepherd says “As none of these [learning methods, learning media, the science of learning] is intuitive and obvious, the client cannot be expected to have this expertise. And for this reason, it is neither sufficient nor excusable for the learning architect to act as order taker.” What are some ways you avoid being an order taker

Our first defense against order-taking is knowledge and ongoing learning. It has been my experience (personally and from observation) that if you get to a plateau with skills or execution, you can only respond by "filling orders" based on previous, apparently similar requirements. So if you don't bother staying abreast of new developments or alternate approaches, you will be stuck in a world of "thats the way we've always done it.

I also believe that order-filling is a result of a failure to fully understand the nature of the needs of the client and/or the learner. In these situations, our desire to give the client "what they asked for" in the chase for billable services outstrips our responsibility to give them "what they really need".

On a more aggressive stance, at what point do we decline these "McCourses" when the client cannot be swayed from their stance? Do we simply bite our tongues and do it, or realize that the relationship is not going to be a win-win and walk away? I realize this gets into a whole other topic of client influence and business development, but do we keep perpetuating bad practice for the sake of revenue?

The reading list grows...

2011-02-21T19:18:00.001-05:00

Disillusioned with my shipping experiences with Clive Shepherd's book from Lulu, I decided to take the (almost) revolutionary step of ordering Clark Quinn's new book Designing mLearning in ebook format for the kindle reader on my PC. Now I've had ebooks on my computer before, but mostly in the Microsoft .lit format -a holdover from my days as an iPaq user - and those were usually Project Gutenberg editions.

(Side note on Fiction titles: I appreciate that people usually want to make money from their book sales, but I have to say that I really object to the extortionate prices that some people want for audiobooks or even for e-books. At this rate, I'll hold out for paperbacks.)

So within seconds of having my order processed, I had the pages of Clark's shiny (shiny from my screen?) new book gracing my laptop screen. So far, Kindle seems to be doing a reasonably good job of letting me make those 'oh yeah, what about...' notes inside the book. Trying to figure out of I can sync it to the iPod as well, but that may need more exploration.

No review planned because I'm certainly not an expert, but I may provide some reflective commentary once I get through the book.

Really wish I had a tablet... :(

A wholly unqualified book review (WIP)

2011-02-20T22:44:00.001-05:00

It took a while (no thanks to Lulu's dreadful low-cost shipping options), but I finally got my copy of Clive Shepherd's The New Learning Architect. Sadly, it's taken me until now to be able to read more than one page of the damn thing (sick child, workloads, yadda, yadda).

So I'm going to keep this blog entry (started Feb 20) as my own mechanism for reviewing the book and making my own observations and comments along the way. I also learned today, after setting up my new personal Twitter identity, that there's an online "book club" chat happening as of March 7. If I'm lucky, I'll be more than 20 pages through the book by then (although at this rate, I wouldn't put money on it). Mark Britz is acting as the facilitator/guide for the chat and I'm really looking forward to it.

I had some initial thoughts as I forge into the first chapter.
I will preface my comments by saying that I may be taking more of an academic view of the book out of habit. One of the things I tend to look for is a list of references from which the book is drawn - unless the book's content and approach is more fact based and where the approaches are not necessarily subjects of extensive research. So, Clive, that's the lens at which I initially looked at this book.

At first glance, the book reads like an Op-Ed piece, because there's nary a citation to be found until page 18! While there's nothing wrong with that kind of approach for a beginner, I was gettinc concerned that the book was going to be too superficial for my needs when I finally saw some footnotes and then some of the User Profiles. I breathed a small sigh of relief and if my little guy wasn't in need of TLC I could have forged ahead with renewed interest. Fear not, however, I'm reading and making notes as I go along.

If nothing else, Clive has given me significant food for thought as I re-examine my career path and options down the road.

New Tweet Space Done

2011-02-20T16:25:00.001-05:00

...well, sort of.

I realized after my last post that I should probably separate my business and personal tweets and other activities. So I've set up a new identity that will point followers here, but it will take me a while to replicate my list of those I follow to the new ID, and I can but hope that a good many business followers will make the trek over to this side of the house.

Also, thanks to my PLN, I learned how to establish Pages/Tabs at the top of the blog. So I can have my lengthier profile attached as a page, rather than chewing up too much real estate on the sidebar.

Still much reading of posts to do for my College learners. My Adult Learning group is a gregarious bunch and the activity has been astounding. My Assessment & Eval learners are quieter, although I suspect the traffic will pick up today and tomorrow.

Design a Planet, or just my little piece of it?

2011-02-19T23:33:00.002-05:00

"The chances of finding out what's really going on in the universe are so remote, the only thing to do is hang the sense of it and keep yourself occupied... Look at me: I design coastlines... I'd far rather be happy than right any day."
"And are you?"
"No, that's where it all falls down, of course."
"Pity, it sounded like quite a good lifestyle otherwise."

Slartibartfast to Arthur Dent.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Book 1

As a small foreward to this (probably) disjointed post, congratulations to Harold Jarche for his 7 years of independent and thought-provoking blogging. He gives me hope that maybe another ex-soldier can make good in the learning world.

As I was participating in the most recent #lrnchat, I commented to Jay Cross that I wanted to be able to participate in more things like MOOCs and other readings, etc. (for example, Clive Shepherd's most recent book is still mostly unread) but scheduling was a challenge. While he agreed he suggested prioritization, although I said to him that negotiating that kind of regular effort would likely require some coordination with those who sign my cheques. He does, as he says, have the benefit of being his own paymaster and secretary. Of course, as I pondered that exchange, I imagined Peter Block telling me that I just wasn't committed enough. ;-)

For all the time I'm spending on what is (relatively speaking) a pretty aggressive and innovative front, I feel a tremendous dissatisfaction that my own development is taking a distant back seat. Part of that, I think, is the post-Grad School hangover, where all of a sudden after 2 years you're not scrambling to read a journal or write a paper or engage in a discussion of some kind. The other part of it is perhaps being in a role where - for whatever reason - there's no overt or explicit encouragement to keep skills sharp or even to participate in events, conferences, or the like. Even my participation in #lrnchat feels slightly ilicit under what is nominally a vendor/reseller banner, but I wouldn't trade my experiences there for anything (although I am considering a separate handle for more of my PLN/personal commentary and only using the main handle for work-specific purposes).

Now I know that part of the recent time issues are of my own making with my agreement to teach two online courses for the College. With 35 learners in one course and 13 in the other, I definitely have my hands full, and - of course - having an active 2 year old does tend to have an impact on remaining time.

So the question is: what to do if I want to keep current or ahead of some of the trend demands? Do I just say, 'screw it' and book my own time to read books/articles/blogs and seek out the brains of my PLN and abandon more event-driven activities? Or do I take a more forthright stand and seek more control over my allowance for T&D and seek out some better Dev opportunities? I genuinely envy some of the folks in my PLN who are in either the right career space or right geographical space to take advantage of conferences, but for us Canadian practitioners who are not self-employed in lucrative thought-leader practices, its a different logistical challenge. Since very few of these big events come to Toronto, one has to travel larger distances and frequently across borders to attend. As an employee in a smaller org., it's also logistics and a certain amount of proposal and rationalizing to convince someone to agree to pay for a flight, accommodations AND conference fees, all the while being generally unavailable for paid work for the duration. While I know that self-employment does have its advantages in

Maybe have a plan?

Ah, there's the rub. Saint-Exupery - I think - said that a "dream without a plan is just a wish". For me, a plan needs to have a goal and some kind of practical outcome. Can I really learn to plan my own T&D for its own sake? I suppose the educational purist in me says, 'well, Duh', but the practical and pragmatic Me has to raise some doubts. "Life", as they say, "is what happens when one is making plans".

But as time goes on, this T&D issue is going to hit critical mass and I can't risk getting left behind in my career. I've put way too much into it over the past few years to put it at excessive risk. I'd much sooner be an in-demand resource than "just another training generalist". Selfish so-and-so that I am, I think I want to be right AND happy.

So, let's see....Social Media, Informal Learning, mLearning....wow. Looks like I have my work cut out for me. Now, where did I put Clive's book...?

Shameless self-promotion

2011-02-15T20:24:00.000-05:00

I just had my blog commentary on the excellent video-based rapid e-learning approach article posted by the good folks at OpenSesame!

Nothing like a little additional exposure to motivate you!

(I'll offer a small w00t!)

N00b Management 101

2011-02-12T18:21:00.001-05:00

While I kept telling myself that my new online courses were College-level and not Graduate level, I realize now that I had confined my assumptions to the level of language used in assignment instructions and forum introductions. I hadn't really counted on people entirely new to e-learning or even people who were not very familiar with computers at all.

(Okay, so I now have some ideas on an e-learning 101 asset, or series of assets, but I digress)

I think that part of the battle will be won by sticking with Salmon's best practices for "weaving" and "summarizing" threaded discussions (but I will need to go back and explore different examples), but the other part of the battle is just getting people to realize how to work through an online course so that it's not a "finish all 14 weeks' content in a few days" event. I will definitely need to take things slowly, use smaller words, and try not to leave anyone behind. I am also going to have to be very careful with showing people the requirement for group work in an online course....I have a feeling that's going to be a rough road for some at the outset.

A challenge for sure, but one I definitely signed up for.

LRNCHAT Reflections from Feb 10.

2011-02-11T15:58:00.001-05:00

Tonight's #lrnchat posed an interesting and completly hypothetical 'what if' scenario: What if you could wipe the slate clean for corporate learning and do it all over again?

Well, I can say that this one definitely sparked some serious interest among the participants, especially those who decided to join #lrnchat for the first time. The transcript of the chat doesn't really show what a number of us were likely thinking: something a long the lines of, "ooh, so many ideas, and so little time", but then some of the neat ideas really came through....of course these are all the ideas that we L&D professionals keep in our personal wish lists, but it's nice to let them our for some fresh air once in a while.

Harold Jarche (@hjarche) was probably the lone voice of dissent and asking why we would wipe the slate clean, equating some of the theoretical concepts of the chat to, as he said, "throwing the baby out with the bathwater", and that we might work more effectively on changing behaviours and other similar efforts.

It really was a neat thought, even though it was counter to the intent of the discussion (of course, that's really the point of these things. If we all agree, then we'll never see the counter-arguments that are likely to smack us in the face like the handle of a stepped-on rake. While I didn't actively pursue Harold's line of inquiry (I was having too much fun thinking up new ideas in the fantasy land we'd created) but I had cause to think of it later. Although, upon relfection, I didn't really see anyone step up and say "hey, wait, we already do this stuff!"

Maybe the sum total of what Harold and the rest of us were saying is this: we really do need to do things differently if we're going to drag mainstream corporate learning out of the weeds and make it more efficient. So perhaps we stipulate to the status quo and make the commitment to changing how learning is perceived, created, managed, and delivered. While there was a good focus on the processes and the approaches that need to change, there was also - not surprisingly - a lot of interest in the technology components. What I found interesting about that was, it wasn't a "this tool sucks" kind of polarization (and I studiously avoided any "Death to PPT" slogans) but it was more conceptual. We need tools that are accessible and easier to manage both in terms of generating content (note I didn't say "course") and also in terms of hosting, distribution, and access. Clark Quinn suggested that you should pilot small, then "leverage the hell out of the results", but I think this is where the @Quinnovator and I may differ on approach. While pilots are a good idea, the risk you run by limiting the pilot by business unit (or "silo") is that while you may have convinced one set of stakeholders of the wisdom of your approach, but then you may have to start the whole process over again to get the rest of the organization on board. So, limit the scope of content, but I'd suggest not limiting the reach.

I could see shades of Tony Bates in some of the commentary about openness and lack of barriers. Learning should, I think, be something that people don't have to fight for and has to be embedded at all levels. We also threw ideas around about creating networks and communities, and gaining access to experts "at the moment of need". We also recognized a need to ditch the concept of a "course" and just replace it with regularly available informational and instructional assets that are easy to keep up to date.

On that note, @LandDDave posted a good picture that reflects what he thinks e-learning should look like...and I can't really disagree conceptually. For your own version, go to google.com, and do a print screen. Save it, and think about it.

So maybe the path to success involves a little bit of revolution. A key member of my PLN, Holly Macdonald (@sparkandco) posted a neat little blog entry asking whether you want to be a victim or an activist. If you ignore some of the G20/WTO-type imagery and think more along the lines of Ghandi, you might just be onto something. It may take a slightly subversive approach to makign the kinds of changes we really want to see....without wiping the slate clean and having to build it all over again.

All in all, another inspiring and thought-provoking #lrnchat.

Thoughts on a "controversial" approach to rapid e-learning development.

2011-02-11T15:31:00.002-05:00

One of the things that popped up in the Thursday #lrnchat was a note from the folks at @OpenSesame about a blog post talking about using video as a rapid content development method. I chimed in because I've had some success creating some quick & dirty assets to support our own rapid ID/Dev ecosystem. So with their permission and encouragement I am recording a few thoughts on the post and what it could mean to organizations and individuals.

The author, Tom Carter, is a senior Insructional Designer in the UK and - like my own employer - his has a genuine interest in rapid e-learning, so as I read through the post, I actually wasn't surprised by what I read, in spite of the caveat that his opinions might be "controversial". In fact, I didn't find it controversial at all. Of course, that makes me wonder whether or not I'm as much of a "disruptive" innovator and experimenter as Tom is, or perhaps his ideas really aren't as controversial on this side of the pond.

An emerging trend in workplace learning (not a new one by any means) is making use of the tools at your immediate disposal to create quick, low-cost, or no-cost learning assets & resources, and Tom uses a great example in YouTube. The sense that I get is that he's really not pushing people to start broadcasting Jackass-type videos into the workplace, but more about using it as a delivery and hosting mechanism. In the same way Terrence Wing has been promoting the use of Facebook and Twitter as a delivery mechanism, Tom promotes this easy and accessible community portal and content in a similar fashion. As he notes, one of the benefits of this approach is that you can really stop thinking about learning as an event-driven and exclusive or restrictive phenomenon, and start enabling continuous, regular access to knowledge assets for your learners. Done correctly, you can also take advantage of the social aspects of this approach to engage and stimulate your learner community.

I shared a similar experience when looking for solutions to the platform certification we were putting together. While we had a number of quite handy reference guides, we wanted to try something faster. Tom's comments about storyboarding and process remaining relevant but less intrusive certainly ring true in this case. As the resident platform expert I knew it was going to be my expertise captured and published for new platform learners.

Through a fortunate happenstance, I came across Jing: a very simple screencast tool that would incorporate voiceovers. The other nice piece of that equation was the ability to host through screencast.com for a ridiculously low annual license fee. And so, a screencast star was born. The process was kept pretty simple. I had already created the standards and exercises for the various certification tasks, so my next step was to create a very simple script to use as my voiceover. The challenge with the free version of Jing is that you have to keep it to less than 5 minutes of recording. While I thought that might be really tough at first, it's amazing just how much you can get through in that time and still make it effective. It also satisfies what I consider to be a basic requirement of e-learning for the modern knowledge worker: it has to be short, focused, and concise. The learners who have been participating in our certification program have indeed made good use of these video demonstrations and are capable of producing some really high quality e-learning content. We also use them for general learner support issues (the certification elements are really the exercises and the coached feedback provided).

So there are some drawbacks to this kind of method and where I think Tom's post may fall a little short for an in-house implementation, and that is how we tie metrics and achievement back to business objectives, or even how we make use of relevant data from the platform(s). We may be able to get some raw, basic data on views, comments, etc., but there's no direct interchange (that I know of) between YouTube and people management systems. So while metrics exist, it's hard to make sense of the data when you're doing it all manually.

We also have some limitations with respect to the video format because they are not as flexible for editing purposes. Now, with a 5-min limit in the tool I use I suppose it's not that ponderous to re-record, but if you had a lot of assets that required editing to reflect a process change, interface update, or something similar, you may have a lot of work on your hands.

This isn't a criticism of Tom, but more of an observation as I ponder the topic: the other acknowledged weakness of this approach as a sole source of instruction is that it's demonstrative only. Learners will still need an environment where they can "fail" and still learn something. The screencasts and videos are great for showing "the right way" to do something, but it is still up to the learner to roll up their sleeves and try it out. So unless that kind of environment exists in concert with the informative or instructional assets, it may lose some of its effectiveness; particularly if you're trying to use this method to support business-critical applications, systems, and practices.

With all that said, Tom is to be applauded for sharing what may be - to some - a radical idea. But if you strip it of the brand and any associated criticisms, the approach and process are sound. When you need to get some knowledge and skill demonstrated to your learner community, you could do far worse than to engage in this form of digital storytelling. If the social and "connective" aspects are in place, then you may have the foundation necessary to break the cycle of "death by PPT" or overly expensive solutions to simpler problems. Just be mindful that it's only one tool at your disposal and that the other supporting elements need to be present in some fashion so you can truly make on-demand assets a reality.

Power to the PLN!

2011-02-02T18:30:00.000-05:00

"When it comes down to it, there are really only two fundamental human activities. Learning is the other one."

PLN, you ask? What the heck is a PLN?

Well, according to those in the know, it is a "Personal Learning Network". Yeah, it's a nice term and all, but let's put this into perspective.

For those of you of a similar generation as me, think back to the people in high school that you might study with, or lean on for help in Calculus, Chemistry, or Physics. Or maybe you were one of the bright ones who had people coming to you to explain things that made no sense when coming from your ~~so close to retirement they could taste it~~ teacher? Well, that's a simple Personal Learning Network.

Fast-forward to this century and the idea of the PLN has regained some traction. We live in an astoundingly connected world and we have access to more information than we could possibly process in a lifetime, but we can create and nurture a Personal Learning Network and take one more essential step towards becoming lifelong learners. Okay, so that might be an idealized state, but I'm not talking about being a permanent student and out-living your professors. I'm talking about keeping your grey matter engaged and working for the long haul because - let's face it - when you decide to stop learning, you might as well drop yourself off at the service entrance of the nearest mortuary because you're done. Like, "stick a fork in you, you're done."

In simple terms, a PLN is a network of individuals (friends, colleagues, thought leaders, etc.) who are in a position to be actively or passively sharing ideas, thoughts, solutions, or sometimes acting as avocatus diaboli and swimming against a particular currrent. Some PLNs are more formalized, and others tend to be stealthy and organic. If you're one of those rare birds who isn't on Facebook, you probably have a group of "friends" from whom you might learn a few things on the fly or upon whom you could lean on. Savvy business types have been using LinkedIn for similar purposes. So why not expand that circle to people

So the next time someone says to you, "figure it out for yourself" you're not necessarily alone for that task. If you're smart, you will already know who to go to and ask some intelligent questions.

Taking (Online) College Instruction by Storm!

2011-02-02T17:39:00.000-05:00

Well, I admit that I never thought it might happen, but as of today I am officially a College-level instructor because my two courses started today.

I found myself in this position by the purest of chance. The backstory is that I live in a relatively major center with a nearby Community College. As a product of the College system I have a certain amount of affection of the methods and approaches used therein. This College runs a number of continuing education courses, including a certificate in adult learning (similar to the one I did years ago). So, I figured I'd send out a general inquiry to say, "ya know, if you ever want/need part-time instructors for this gig I'd be, you know, interested.". Based on my history with unsolicited resume submissions and the like, I didn't hold out a lot of hope for what I usually consider to be a pretty closed system.

Fate decided to keep me on my toes and I actually got a response to my query and eventually got an offer to teach not one, but two of the online editions of said certificate program. That was back in October and I wasn't slated to teach until Feb., so it didn't seem quite real.

But, that was then, and this is now. I've completed the edits to my course, and when I checked in last night I was pleasantly surprised to see that I even had learners enrolled! So, things kicked off today. In my Adult Learning course I have 32 (!) learners, and in the Assessment & Evaluation course I have 12. Of course, these numbers are likely to change as the course goes on, but I'm thrilled. Lots of eager (and maybe not-so-eager) learners to mould, mentor, and guide.

I dug back through my online communities course from grad school and re-read Gilly Salmon's fine book, e-Moderating. I tapped into some of my recent expertise and inspiration and I filled in what I thought were some of the gaps in one course, and worked with another new instructor to re-purpose and re-format another one because neither one of us could make head-nor-tail of the original approach (we also had learner feedback from a previous iteration to support our efforts).

So, I gave them a video introduction and I plan to do some of Salmon's "weaving and summarizing" as the content discussions progress. I may even tap into some other activities through the 14 week run of the course, just to give the learners some other kinds of engagement.

While I find the thought of having to mark that many assignments a little daunting, I'm still excited about this new side activity. I'll blog more as the courses progress.

The Unexpected leads to Energy

2011-02-02T15:59:00.001-05:00

I probably should have written this post last night but sleep and prep took priority.

One occasional part of my job is that I get to go on-site with our clients and work with them. In the recent past this has manifested itself as a mentoring/coaching session for our Rapid ID/Development platform because I'm ex-officio the resident platform expert and arguably the senior Instructional Design resource in-house.

Yesterday was a case in point. I was tasked to do an on-site session for a client (something they were actually paying for as a professional service within one of their projects). The original plan was to do some coaching on some specifics for managing updates to the courses we built for them, but through some fortunate happenstance, it didn't work out that way.

So instead of playing trainer/coach, I got to play Learning Consulant for the first half of the day. The L&D Manager at the client decided that we should take a look at a Harassment & Discrimination document instead to see what we could or should do with it.

I felt like an old war-horse pricking up his ears when hearing the sound of bugles or distant musket fire. Excited, and chomping at the bit to get going!

So....as a small group we took the time to dissect the source content they were planning to put online, and I got the participants to mentally free themselves of constraints and put out different ideas. (What I said to them, was this, "make your ideas so far out of the box you can't see the box with a telescope.")

And, wow...did we get some great ideas.

What did I get from it, you may ask?

Energy. HUGE amounts of energy. I revel in this creative process and stepping past the basics of content development and moving up a level to examine things as a program or continuous process. We stopped thinking of this e-learning content as an event and they started seeing all the contributing pieces that support the learning (formal and informal). I'm also encouraged when L&D professionals don't get all freaked out when the concepts of internal discussions or polling, or Social Media get raised as possibilities. I'm equally encouraged when they see that there are other players in the learning process, like Internal Communications to promote and generate awareness/interest.

Yesterday reminded me that sometimes we do need to get away from event-based thinking and get way, way outside of the box. Sometimes the "impossible" is really just "difficult, but do-able if we really work at it because it's worth it."

As Peter Block says, "change the conversation."

I felt inspired...and it was a day when I really needed it. Thanks to my clients and a little un-planning, we turned a predictable day into an energizing morning with lots of momentum for a focused, practical afternoon.

Dr. Fastbuild, or, How I Learned to stop ADDIE-ing and Love the RID

2010-11-30T19:17:00.000-05:00

I admit, a cheesy and arguably weak take-off on the Stanley Kubric doomsday classic, but the sentiment is there.

There's an almost tragic community (including those who should know better) who espouse the beliefs and all the wonders of ADDIE. I see it time and again in job postings where an "understanding of the ADDIE model" is an essential job requirement.

For an instructional designer planning e-learning solutions.

From organizations claiming to be on the leading edge of innovative solutions and technologies.

Really, guys?

So, maybe it's time to look at what ADDIE is and what it isn't.

What it definitely is NOT is a model for instructional design. There's no evidence amongst educational theorists and researchers to support the claim that it *is* a model. (For more info on that subject, I'd invite you to read Barbara Bichelmeyer's treatise on the issue, along with some interesting commentary in the Educational wiki at San Diego State University.)

In practical terms, it's also NOT designed for scalability, because it's really a waterfall/cascade kind of approach to design. If you have high volumes of content to produce, or a really broad spectrum of stakeholders, you'll get bogged down pretty quickly. We're under constant pressure to

But, let's talk about what it is.

ADDIE is something that really reflects a flow of events and actions when designing and managing the build of instructor-led training content, and it can still work effectively in that sphere. And, let's face it, it's a familiar process....but it's just that: a Process flow. ADDIE is also a good reminder that we need to close the loop on the training cycle - e.g. you don't just "do some training" and call it a day. You need to evaluate and then start the process over again and engage in some continuous improvement activities...but we know that continuous improvement tends to get less attention than it should (a subject for another post at another time).

I know that the next question to emerge from this discussion is something along the lines of, "so if you're dissing ADDIE, what do YOU use, smart guy?"

I thought you'd never ask!

The model I prefer to adopt for building e-learning content follows the lines of Rapid Prototyping (Tripp & Bichelmeyer, 1991). You see, in 'traditional' e-learning development settings, people are spending a lot of time on storyboards and other flat planning tools. In principle this is a great idea because you can get things hammered out on paper before you commit to the challenges of development. But that was of more use in the days before rapid e-learning development tools made things easier for the instructional designer.

So what this means for me (and for clients) is that we can start working on the design and course structure right away. While we have a web-based environment, I'm pretty confident I could accomplish the same thing with the right desktop tool. The client can see the basic structure of the course developing in real-time, and we can even get into the details of selecting screen layouts, assessments, and other course-level parameters. What used to take days and weeks to do back & forth via email and paper now can be accomplished in a matter of hours. More importantly, because we get to work in the design environment right away, the client immediately has a sense of the learner's visual experience - rather than waiting for a "beta" developed from a long storyboard document.
The other advantage of this rapid prototyping method is that we don't have to wait for objectives to be completely defined before we develop content because the development environment is flexible enough for us to make incremental adjustments to suit the evolving outcomes instead of making a wholesale transformation of the course.

So...long, slow method with asynchronous client contact and difficult-to-manage review cycles? Or a collaborative, real-time development of a prototype that evolves and grows through incremental changes that allows us to go from concept to production in a fraction of the time?

I know which one I'd choose...how about you?

CSTD Reflections - Mentoring/Coaching and Appreciative Inquiry

2010-11-21T14:46:00.000-05:00

If anyone asks me what one thing I took away from this session, I'm almost embarassed to admit that I'd say, "Damn, it was hot in that room."

Fortunately, that wasn't the only thing I took away, but it wasn't the most comfortable setting, nor was it really conducive to the kinds of learning that Ann Naymie & Maureen Hannah were trying to get across. (According to them, Peter Block was in the room before them and wreaked a little havoc on the dreadful theatre style seating that the MTCC seems to think is a good idea for conferences.

(Sidebar: Is there not anyone willing to stand up to MTCC and tell them that this sort of thing is just not acceptable? At over a grand a head for admission, you'd think the organizers would have a little pull. But, I digress)

The focus of this session was on mentoring/coaching and the concept of appreciative inquiry. One of my immediate thoughts (echoed by my exercise partner Jackie) was that mentoring and coaching are two separate disciplines and one should not try to confuse or blend the one with the other. If you take this site as an example, that belief seems to stand up.

During the opening few minutes of the session as I began to schvitz from the press of bodies, I was a little non-plussed by the positioning of the session and I thought it might turn out to be a little too superficial. But once we got past the few slides, we had the chance to do some role-play and inquiry practice with a partner or two. As we got through the exercises, I began to see more uses for this kind of inquiry and I was also seeing more reinforcements of the mentoring/coaching differences. It was also good - albeit in a personal/practical kind of way - to practice active listening along with the inquiry and questions. I also tried to take a small page from Peter Block's book and change the nature and shape of the questions I was asking, so that was a small benefit in and of itself.

So, the session had some interesting possibilities for me, even though it started a little weakly, and I'm glad I stayed. I can see ways in which I can change the nature of my inquiries when making those initial contacts with potential clients. I can also see how I'd like to be able to build on my coaching strengths to help (PB) "share my gift" with other people. But I honestly don't know that I'd want to be a mentor for someone. I'd significantly critical of my own shortcomings and painfully aware that my career path that I wouldn't want someone to try to emulate me along either path. Besides, I wouldn't want to take away from someone experiencing the joys of forging their own path.

Lesson learned; stick around...things might just get better.

CSTD Reflections - Saul Carliner and "Staying Relevant"

2010-11-20T21:36:00.001-05:00

One of my laments about things like CSTD is that when you get a speaker whose content hits you right *there* you're so engrossed that you find yourself not taking notes and having to reflect on the experience from memory. That's not to imply that if you're taking notes then the speaker must be bad. I enjoyed other sessions and still managed to take notes. For whatever reason, I was listening to Saul Carliner and didn't want to divide my attention/distribute my intelligence.

His talk was about how we go about remaining relevant as Training & Development professionals. iThere's a certain degree of showmanship and panache in his presentations that I appreciate. He opened with one of those Paul Harvey-type stories about how the biggest challenge for him as a T&D professional was not about education, or technology, or changing philosophies, but it was about finding the right luggage when he travelled. I won't try to replicate the whole tale here because I don't want to diminish the magic of that particular metaphor, but I want to jot down the things that I were most profound for me.

He spoke of 10 key things we can do to stay relevant (and I'm really hoping to get access to his deck so I can remember them all) but there were a few tidbits that caught my attention along the way.

First, he echoed some of my suspicions about the decrease of instructor-led training and spoke of the increase in SME-developed content and SME-delivered training. I think both of those things are critical, particulary because of the nature of what I'm doing day-to-day. SMEs have lots and lots knowledge that just doesn't always make it to a new hire or a someone in a new role, or even to other colleagues in the same department. So the question(s) for me become(s): how do we create a culture of SME knowledge sharing, how do we equip them with the right "tools" to share that knowledge, and how can we measure the effectiveness of that knowledge transfer? I definitely think there are opportunities for us to start looking at our SMEs and ask: if they all retired tomorrow, would we still have enough corporate "intelligence" to be able to function?

Second, he spoke about informal learning. I was sad to have missed Bob Mosher's session on Informal Learning, although one kind soul (thank you @mellissalast for the RT and @cammybean for the liveblog on Performance) kindly sent me notes from a different session of Bob's. But Saul said that informal learning shouldn't have to be teaching the things that should have taken place during formal learning. So, loosely translated, informal learning is (to me) more about knowledge transfer while you're on the job, learner support, and some of the self-directed learning efforts that (should) take place on the job.

Marcia Conner's graphic simplifies things, somewhat. ;-)

So I think there's a huge opportunity for us - as Learning & Development or Training or Education professionals to be doing a couple of things that will contribute to relevance.

First, I think we need to find ways to educate SMEs on things like storytelling, sharing, guiding and coaching. We also need to spend some time with these SMEs doing some targeted 'downloads' of their expertise. I think we also need to develop the right kinds of processes and systems to regulary gather this expertise and identify new SMEs. Of course, part of this challenge will be identifying the owners of this new process and discipline. The first instinct is OD, but what about organizations with a distributed HR function? Is this now part of the skill set of a line manager? (assuming, of course, that we're not all immediately jumping on the Peter Block bandwagon and taking the sovereignty/patriarchy out of our organizations...)

Second, organizations need to develop the strategies and expertise necessary to influence organizations to put more emphasis on (and resources toward supporting) informal learning. I really think this is a hugely untapped market for consulting organizations, but only those that can see beyond just pumping out questionable and mind-numblingly expensive and inflexible e-learning content. In a lot of cases, informal learning represents as much of a state of mind as it does a strategic imperative for organizational effectiveness.

Okay, I'd better tone it down a bit.

The other thing that Saul mentioned had to do with how we manage our careers. It paralleled some of Peter Block's comments about not necessarily worrying too much about climbing any corporate ladder, but he said that someone told him years ago that nobody will care as much about his career as he does; and he's right. He also said some really interesting things about how sometimes people can outgrow a "job" without necessarily outgrowing a "role". I really felt a kinship with that comment because I've been in that situation before and I remember the conflict I felt in those moments...even thought I didn't really have a way to decribe it until I hear how Saul phrased it. To quote him, "...and maybe that's OK."

OK, indeed.

Anyway, Saul's relevance story about Luggage, Hong Kong Airport shopping and Samsonite reinventing itself was a very effective wrapper for his story. It tells me that it's always worth reflecting upon and regularly examining your career directions and choices, rather than waiting to be considered passé by the industry and the consumers you're trying to reach.

Kind of a nice way to head to the end keynote on Day 2, knowing that the world can still be your oyster if you're willing to work at it.

CSTD Afterglow

2010-11-19T20:35:00.001-05:00

I know I still need to compile the remainder of the Day 2 summary and the entirety of the Day 3 Summary, but I just wanted to have this moment to reflect on the concept of the conference and that wonderful Afterglow.

It's been so long since I was at an event like this that I'd forgotten what kind of a mental rush and high I get from this sort of thing. I revel in the exchange of ideas and the challenging of assumptions and the bringing together of peers, colleagues, and gurus.

Words don't really do it justice to this feeling I have, but as @mellissalast said, she was exhausted but still revitalized by the whole process and I think that says it almost as well as anything else I could compose using my few remaining cognitive circuits.

So, what struck me today? I saw myriad possibilites for some of my day-to-day work from @RobinYap and @MarcelloBigotti and the Village Avatars and I had a moments of Wow with @saulcarliner and talking about how we need to re-examine our choices in managing our careers when trying to stay relevant. He posited that it's possible to outgrow a job but still not outgrow the role. Heady, inspirational stuff, that.

However, for any of you who are choosing to peruse this diatribe, I thank you for letting me share the experience with you as a participant and as a blogger and tweeter and thanks for letting my words into your collective consciousnesses. For those of you I got to meet in person, I thank you for (involuntarily) becoming part of my Personal Learning Network (yes, there is alwasy an opt-out *g*).

I'm looking forward to continuing the conversations. It's gonna be a fun ride.

CSTD Scheduling Thoughts

2010-11-18T21:33:00.001-05:00

Apart from my previously discussed ~~crying jag~~ comments about lack of WiFi, today I really felt like a prisoner of the schedule overlaps.

I know it's tough to try and cram everything into a short duration, but I'm struggling to grasp why we had to deal with the overlap between the core sessions and the Thought Leader tracks? For example, @robsof and I were both in the A7 Session on Design Thinking (Valerie Hickey & David Brown), but the session with Karl Kapp started 15 mins before the end of that session AND ran through a significant portion of the lunch hour.

Maybe its just me, but I'm not a fan of feeling like I'm short-changed on any part of the conference experience (yeah, even when someone else is paying for it), because - darnit - that's MY experience. So I found myself rushing through lunch just so I wouldn't be late for the first session after lunch. Even then, if I wanted to make Bob Mosher's session on informal learning, I get my break cut short.

No, I don't know what the solution is, but I'll take a page from Peter Block and hopefully start that conversation with someone. How could we do this differently so we can distinguish between making choices and choosing to sacrifice?

CSTD Day 2 Keynote Summary

2010-11-18T21:15:00.001-05:00

I'll beg your indulgence now because I'm doing this largely from memory. Fortunately, this is a good thing because I was pretty well engaged in my sessions and only had time for quick tweets and not for a lot of reflective notetaking.

Opening Keynote - Peter Block

Wow. Wow. Wow.

Peter gets some pretty significant kudos, but not necessarily for the reasons people might think. First, no PowerPoint. That's right, the man just got up and talked. HE was the presentation. (And he didn't have to go all Carrot Top to do it.) He also had the seating arrangements changed so we could sit in groups and he spoke eloquently but simply about the power and meaning of the circle. I love guys like Peter who really enjoy challenging the norms and - in essence - asking us to throw conventional hierarchical thinking out the window and do something different. Like, instead of answering the WIIFM, maybe challenge people about their willingness to commit even if they got nothing for it.

He said that the circles we say in are symbols of community... and that conferences like these should really be "meaningful discussions interrupted by lectures and small group exercises". Oh, how I wish that were more the rule than the exception.

As educators, we are in the business of the restoration of humanity. (Nice!) He also speaks of the dangers of automating our relationships. While we can speak to people more easily, do we really have anything to say? He wants to use our expertise and practices to help restore our humanity and to re-establish concepts of connectedness, because "humanity matters". He's so right. We've lost so much of that in our workplaces and we desparately need to bring it back. For whatever it's worth, I think that step would do more to make our workplaces healthy long before we headed into Graham Lowe's territory.

Peter went on to speak about training & education as a profession and calmly said that we'll likely not get rich, "if you joined this profession for power and wealth, you screwed up big-time." (much laughter)

I liked his points he was making about the business case for our function, even though I really resent the fact that we have to continually justify "the second-most natural human function" (let me know if you think you know what the first one is.)

Any transformation that we are trying to effect should represent a shift in thinking but also a shift in narrative, e.g. change the conversation.

As a prime example, he says that the Annual Performance review is all about sovereignty and has nothing to do with training, aright. He absolutely brought the house down by applying this conversation to an annual spousal performance review. To me, it was shades of Festivus (Seinfeld) and how George's father behaved; "let us know how you have disappointed the family over the past year." Ultimately, this kind of behaviour and its traction in the workplace is a product of colonial, hierarchical thinking. (So that begs the question of whether no performance review is better than an annual one, if given the choice?)

Organizational hierarchies are Patriarchy covered in a patina of "love", sadly HR is the vehicle for this behaviour. (Me: because they help prop-up the hierarchy? because their job is not about the people, but it's about keeping is all in our places?)

I liked his assertion (paraphrased) that change happening from the top is basically a crock. We need to let go of the concept that leaders are the important piece. For one exercise, try pretending that employees create the bosses. What would that look like? (There was a sidebar funny about the relative effectiveness of government, but they really don't have a deliverable or a bottom line, right?)

Before I forget, let's not forget Time. I love the concept of "not having time" represents a lack of commitment. I admit I'm as guilty of that as the next person, but I'd love to really engage in some self-examinations on levels of commitment and what I might need to do to improve them.

I realize as I go through my notes that I could probably write a small book about this one keynote, but the upshot is that I think there's a huge value in asking questions instead of telling stories, and avoiding likemindedness. My program head at RRU said that I needed to develop a tolerance for ambiguity and I didn't appreciate that she wasn't just referring to what I could find or not find in my research, but also as a good guidepost for future situations (must email her a thank you...again).

We need the humanity, we need the inversion in the conversation. Yeah. Wow.

The thing that still rings in my head was a small comment he made about moving up and getting promoted and that it's really okay if you're able to "share your gifts" and keep contributing. I think that's a conversation I need to have with myself sooner rather than later.

I know you were trying to keep yourself more like Stephen Wright than Steve Jobs, Peter, but you were definitely the hit of the Show so far. Thanks for energizing my morning.

CSTD Conference - My Day 1 Summary

2010-11-17T20:47:00.001-05:00

CSTD Day 1 Impressions and Thoughts

(Warning: This is a long post...feel free to grab what you wish from it)

After years of not being able to attend the Annual Conference I finally got the chance to go, but I will admit that I entered Day 1 with a little trepidation.

With a lot of conferences, there;s usually an opening keynote, then participants head off to their various sessions afterward, but CSTD took a different approach; the first day was dedicated to a large audience setting with a number of speakers all focused on helping us understand the various ways in which academic research can eventually find its way into real practice. As I looked around the room and thought of spending all day in a conference seat there was a little twinge of angst. However, full kudos go to Saul Carliner for setting the stage for the day and for putting things in perspective. I also took the opportunity to change seating locations a couple of times and that had some unexpected benefits, but more on those later.

One critical disappointment - shared by others I spoke to - was the lack of WiFi availability for participants. The organizers were trying to promote and encourage the conference backchannel through Twitter, but for those folks who a) brought laptops in hopes of WiFi, or b) don't know how to use their smartphones to tweet, or c) don't have smartphones or phones with data plans, or d) don't know how to use SMS to Tweet, it left them with no outlet to share observations and comments or to connect easily with other participants (or non-participants). Some of us managed to "get the word out" but if we were stuck in somewhere like the South Hall or somewhere with lousy cell service, this conference would have been held in a relative vacuum.

To their considerable credit, CSTD acknowledged the issue and promised a better solution for 2011. So, End rant. ;-)

The speakers for the day were all recognized experts in their field and - as expected - brought stong academic credentials to the table, but they also had their feet pretty squarely planted in - what many of us refer to as - the real world.

I'll take the opportunity here to put my own OpEd spin on the various speakers and the messages that resonated most with me. The big disclaimer here, of course, is that this is what I observed and grasped from the sessions...your actual experience may vary. ;-)

Saul Carliner - Research Journals

Saul was up first with his initial thoughts about the value of research and who really publishes research results. it served as a good reminder that research is generally shared only with other researchers through the medium of peer-reviewed journals. Access barriers to the majority of journals aside, I note that some of this research is easier to digest than others - something not specifically mentioned, but something I know I experienced in the early days of grad school. The important take-away for me is the concept of research as proof. In general terms, research published in these journals really serves as evidence, rather than inescapable proof.

He also points out that researching journals on their own won't necessarily lead to a transfer of knowledge to workplace situations, but...what it can do is to provide some avenues for experimentation in design and also to help you understand what other people already know. I think that's important because we shouldn't be so completely convinced that what we're doing is "new". Besides, there's no small value in researching (even informally) the lessons learned from any situation, particularly if it helps you avoid a particular - and previously unforeseen - pitfall.

He also talked about the value of research for its potential to unlock different avenues for evaluation, although he does point out that very few of us in the industry get past the smiley sheet stage (sidebar thought: what can we do to change that? Is it just a predisposition to following Kirkpatrick or do we really need a new model that will let evaluations become more organic to the learning throughout the cycle?)

The final big take-away from Saul's comments was that research tends to be looking more in the long-term (e.g. new models, new strategies) and isn't as adept at providing short-term solutions. I think I can see why. the submission and review cycles for peer journals can be somewhat lengthy, so a shorter-term solution might wind up being obsolete by the time it hits the presses...if it gets approved at all. Longer-term solutions are - by definition - more strategic, and thus probably have a longer shelf-life for adoption, assimilation, and discussion. At least, that;s what my gut is telling me. I'll be interested to hear what others think.

Graham Lowe - Healthy Workplaces.

Graham started by getting us thinking about the elements of a "truly excellent workplace". In a quick audience survey there was lots of focus on the human factors in workplace "happiness". I find it interesting that there are fewer comments about appreciating the benefits of a viable business. That leads me to the question, "Could you still have a workplace that offers trust/respect/ownership that ultimately proves to be unviable as a business? Is that still considered "healthy"?"

He also offered a really simple yet effective matrix on Low/High decision latitude and Low/High Psychological demands.

Low Strain Active

Passive High Strain

But I did find it interesting that he acknowledges that "Not all roles can fit in the upper quadrant". So that kind of begs the question for me about the differences between psyhcological demands and cognitive demans and the links to employee engagement in their tasks. Can you have a low-cognitive job but still be in a healthy workplace?

His High Performance practices aren't necesarily new - at least for me, thanks to my involvement with the Employee Engagement survey work at SSHA - but if there;s no culture of innovation (internally as well as externally), it's tough for most orgs to make these workplaces a reality. T&D is, of course, critical, but I think we need to make the distinction between formal and informal learning, and educate learners about the relative merits.

Culture becomes a strategic advantage (I'd say, imperative) in supporting these initiatives. He spoke briefly about healthy vs unhealth organizations and I wonder, "What's the ratio of healthy-to-unhealthy?"

I wonder if this concept is a long-term transformation similar to that of e-health, where it will take the generation of physicians raised with technology to be teaching student physicians for the transformation/adoption to be complete? Will it take the generation of new workers - raised with an expectation of healthy workplaces - where these workers are now leading organizations - to drive the change and make them the rule rather than the exception. Are we already on that path? If so, how far do we still have to go.

He did make a point that I agreed with in principle: he suggests that we can research our organizations, because they should be treasure troves (my word) of information. This is true. But as I noted in a surprisingly popular tweet, "sure, you can mine for data, but sometimes you really need a pickaxe." As my friend Victor is fond of saying, "those that talk about Silos in the workplace deserve to be buried in one."

Carolin Rekar Munro - RRU
Transformational Learning Experiences across Multigenerational Workplaces

(really wish she had used better quality graphics at the beginning of her presentation, but they got better)

Carolin offered us a really good recap of the various generational descriptors and attributes and a good reminder of things like attention spans for GenY for engagement and also employee retention. She also reminded us to be cautious of stereotyping. Probably a good practice for educators to understand some of these general guidelines but also to understand what makes each individual tick.

I really liked her excellent reminder of the polarities among learner/participant opinions and how you can often receive conflicting feedback which makes you question your whole plan. (Sidebar note: I can see how things like "Unconference" can appeal to the right group of learners/participants but you really have to know your audience)

There was an -interesting and inspirational group dicussion about how we prime and prep participants to work and learn together in spite of divergent expectations and polarity of preference. I don't know that there was consensus among the ad-hoc group I was in, but there were some good points being raised by all. One gentleman surprised my by offering the observation that (coincidental with some recent readings at my end) that Learning Styles - as absolutes - are really a crock. More politely put, while they make instinctive sense, a) they don't always apply to different situations, and b) they definitely don't have a lot of rigorous research showing their efficacy in practice.

I love serendipity.

David Livingstone - Relationship between Worker Practical Knowledge and Job Requirements

Tough to have the spot just before lunch when stomach rumbles tend to diminish participant engagement, and it's unfortunate that a lot of really awesome information and research from David's work didn't really make the leap to the audience. I don't want to appear to be too harsh and I'm certainly not critiquing his data because he gave us some interesting statistics, but I think some of the key messages got lost in the sheer volume of text he opened with and the slew of charts. Sadly, it didn't help matters that his data labels got bitten by the font monster. In conversations with some participants at lunch, we seemed to agree that there was some really good stuff in his research findings and anecdotal comments, but they came so late in the presentation. However, these comments and findings did leave a significant impression with me where we saw workers yearning for more autonomy in their roles and really desiring input into the various processes around them. He also alluded to some of the challenges faced by Stelco and Dofasco and their lost generation of workers.

What resonated with me in his presentation was teh fact that a lot of people feel like they have more education/skills than their jobs require.

My lingering questions are: What does that say about our workplace when some employers complain that higher ed isn't preparing people for the workforce? Also, what do we need to do to harness all the "unused" education so that we're not stuck in "use it or lose it" mode?

Karl Kapp - Games and Learning

Q: what role can game splay in the learning cycle and what does the research say? (Google "Kapp Notes" for more details)

Powerful statement for me that goes beyond gaming environments, "[an] extended commitment to self is (required for) the long haul." In his discussion on avatars and immersive simulations, he notes that human social models influence behaviour, beliefs & attitudes (Bandura, 1986)

So, if Bandura knew this 25 years ago, why have we been subjecting people to 'death by [insert name of Presentation Graphics App here]' for years?

I was interested to learn about the research finding of a strong influence from avatars on learners even when their functionality is limited. So, an avatar doesn't have to be CGI movie quality for it to resonate with the learner in a simulation.

Even more interesting was this: more than one avatar can work better than a single avatar. e.g. multiple channels for providing the same information. So how could we plan those channels within a simulation. Are they concurrent? Dependent on content or outcomes? Lots of fodder for the research mill, there.

I was struck by my own experiences using Wii Fit: avatars and their influence on exercise. He showed an example of avatars in a gym/fitness setting. The research showed that if it looks like you, you're more apt to engage and exercise in the real world. Might have to get back at it, I think.

His research also showed, and I'm not really surprised, that there's no requirement for entertainment in a simulation. Helpful, yes, but not required and certainly not applicable for ann learning situations. I mean, if you're an airline pilot you don't want a Don Rickles voiceover if you're doing your Emergency Procedures refresher in the A340 simlulator, but you could probably inject some fun and humour into customer service simulations and scenarios because, let's face it, we've all been there.

Another solid point made was that "simulations aren't good just because they are simulations" - e.g. simulations with no interactivity. Design elements be(presumably instructional design?) can't leave the simulation and the sims need to be embedded into the instructional content to be truly effective. We also have to consider how learners can be embedded in the context of the story. (does this lead back to the concept of "digital storytelling"?)

Simulations have a strong influence on types of knowledge (Declarative 11%, Procedural 14%, Retention 9%) There wasn't a lot of content on this so I think it's worth exploring more.

He quoted a figure of $100K to develop a game-type simulation. (my take: only if you use the wrong tools!)

My take-away thought: "If you become the avatar, you can realize some real changes to life perceptions." Neat!

Thomas Michael Power - Implementing Technology-based Learning

Given that this is more or less what I do on a regular basis (and what I did in grad school), I was tempted to this one a miss, but I'm really glad I didn't because I think this was the hidden gem for the day.

This talk was a lot less about just the basics of implementation but really about a transformative experience getting Educators to understand and leverage the power of technology as a means to support their learning efforts. So, yes, you could say "it's just about implementing it" but the title really undersold the value of the content included and if we get access to the slide decks, you can see why.

He opened by sharing some of his training experiences in some exotic parts of the world and talked about the challenges of trying to front-load a lot of the design process. What really surprised me was the result of the quick poll on the relative effectiveness of ADDIE as a model for developing technology-based learning. A shocking majority of people think it is! Could it be because they haven't been exposed to other models and frameworks? Personally, I couldn't go back to ADDIE for the work that I do simply because I'm now so spoiled by being able to move from concept to production that much faster. ADDIE is so ideally suited to ISD and instructor-led settings, but that methodical, gated process just doesn't scale up for e-learning development...unless you really want to wait 4 months to develop 20 minutes of Level 2 e-learning.

What I liked about his presentation was that his research coincided with my own experiences in changing processes, tools, and approaches to dealing with our customers. Sure, we've still got some learning to do at my place of work, but that's really half the fun when you think about it. If nothing else, I felt a little validation for what we discovered largely by accident.

The day ended with a panel discussion with all presenters. I won't get into the details of that ~~because I was busy tweeting and chatting with some clients~~ suffice it to say there were some good, relevant questions raised by the participants and we got to see a little more of the panelist expertise in action.

So...a good day. One that realized more promise than its superficial description might have warranted. I'm hopeful for similar inspirations and happy findings on Day 2.

A flood of #backchannel, but in a good way.

2010-11-11T23:10:00.001-05:00

I'm a relatively recent presence on Twitter and I admit that I only got onto it for work purposes, but I now cheerfully admit I should have been on it for more selfish educational reasons long ago.

Case in point...

Given the nature of what I do, I gravitated to (and actively follow) the #elearning hashtag on my TweetDeck. The connected nature of things in the interwebz, I soon found this thing called the #lrnchat - a regular chat among L&D professionals and Educators, where 5 questions get posted for participants to ponder and respond to.

Tonight's discussion was on the nature of the backchannel discussions at Conferences. I got to see this in action by following all the #dl10 tags, and I thought back to my own experience blogging the E-LEARN conference (and sharing that experience with Wes Fryer at one point) and I realize how far we've come in such a short time. At the time I could draft little blog updates, or more often, I would compile my own daily summary of the things that meant the most to me at the time....because this was before grad school, I was doing my own reflective learning without even knowing it. But of course, guys like Wes and the other early adopters were the trail-blazers on this path of JiT information and conference backchannel.

Flash ahead to what I've seen in 2010 and I'm in awe of the power of this backchannel. When you think about it, we've all been doing this for years....in fact, I'm pretty sure Aristotle and other early pedagogues had students passing notes back and forth when the old man wasn't looking, or when Roman rhetoric students weren't really enthralled with color and descripto. The challenge then was likely not getting caught, but today the challenge (on the face of it) seems to be simply 'keeping up'.

We can wind up absolutely awash in information and we really need some finely-tuned personal filters to be able to make sense of this massively distributed intelligence, and I think there was a general agreement by all that some conferences could generate a LOT of backchannel, and there were some pretty sage pieces of advice not only on how to manage it, but how to bridge the gap between attendees and non-attendees...and that might naturally raise the question of whether we need face-to-face conferences at all, if a speaker was simply running something via a free conference system and participants were managing all the backchannel from wherever they happened to be seated. That also raises the very interesting question of whether or not we realize the same value from a virtual conference as we do from a face-to-face one? Do we still need that tactile, psychological affirmation that "presence" is better than "presence by absence"?

Some other questions came out of that discussion as the tweets came in at a veritable clip. What do we potentially "lose" if we decide to tweet something "right this second"? Is that "divided attention" really contributing to the "distributed intelligence"? (Jacobs & McFarlane, 2005) Do we wind up killing the flow if we ask the presenter, "sorry, I was busy tweeting...can you repeat that last thing?" (My gut tells me there can't help but be an an immediate impact, but there would have to be some kind of mitigation). Could some presenters feel like people aren't paying attention if they're busy sharing the really cool thing they just learned? What tools and practices might presenters need to help proactively manage and embrace the backchannel?

I also wonder what kinds of practices the attendee (or non-attendee) needs to adopt to weave this backchannel information into their own personal knowledge frameworks? Do conferences need to start really treating attendees as learners and help them build their own learning paths? What would a post-conference roadmap look like for someone from DevLearn? And what might it look like for a non-attendee?

So...lots of questions and I think I might lean on my PLN for answers and clarity, but I think I know this much: The backchannel really unlocks a lot of information for attendees, presenters, and non-attendees alike. It makes the information and content in these events more "open"...and I think freedom of access to this kind of knowledge is an excellent thing. For the presenter, it can - as some observed - provide a window into what things people pick up on, but it can also function as a virtual parking lot for questions and thoughts along the way. The attendee or virtual lurker also gets a lot of information to filter through, but their challenge is still going to be panning through the (relative) info-mud to find that little nugget...you know, the one that makes you go "A-hah!" and fires up that little inspirational engine that made you love what you do in the first place.

Jacobs, N. & McFarlane, A. (2005). Conferences as learning communities: some early lessons in using ‘back-channel’ technologies at an academic conference – distributed intelligence or divided attention? Journal of Computer-Assisted Learning, 21(5), 317-329. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-2729.2005.00142.x/abstract.

Conference Bound!

2010-11-11T20:27:00.000-05:00

Ok, so it's a local conference, but it's a milestone of sorts.

I'm headed to the CSTD Conference and Tradeshow next week. It's been a shocking 5 yrs since I've been able to attend a big conference like this, my last one being E-LEARN 2005 in Vancouver. No, it hasn't been 5 years since I've done any kind of professional development...I did have that whole grad school thing in there, too...but at long last the magical trifecta of availability, workload and all-important employer approval managed to present itself and I'm off, as they say, to see the Wizard.

Having watched - with no small envy - the backchannel from DevLearn, I'll be interested to see what kind of Twitter/Blog backchannel will come from CSTD '10 I had a quick (re)glance at the conference sessions to get some basic picks in (because time was running out to get registered) and there seems to be some interesting stuff on the go. Granted, not as much on the leading edge side of things as DevLearn, but the audience is somewhat different..because it's a bit more of a generalist training & development constituency. However, given that not all in the world is based on rapid e-learning (sadly), I'll be looking at the sessions that help keep my horizons broad and keep me reminded of all the other things out there in the corporate training & development world.

A small toot of the personal horn

2010-11-09T17:34:00.001-05:00

I learned on Friday that a course I designed and developed took first place in the New Employee Orientation category at DevLearn2010. I think I can honestly say that this is the first education package I put together that ever won an award for anything.

Can't believe I'm gonna say this, but, "W00T!!"

Networking by a non-Networker

2010-11-05T15:32:00.001-04:00

I know people who would happy become wall-flowers at a face-to-face Meet & Greet. Sometimes, I'm one of them. Sometimes it's like that old phrase, "water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink."

But it's interesting to see how the dynamic changes when we add a technology layer like a blog or some kind of Social Networking tool (like Facebook or Twitter) to the mix. All of a sudden we have myriad tendrils of communication; some more tenuous, some more essential, some humourous, and some time-limited. I know I'm not saying anything new here about the power of Social Media, but I think it's an observation worth repeating.

After listening to Harold Jarche in today's PLENK session,
I think that I can start taking the steps on the road to personal learning management or personal knowlege management by building out my own "Personal Learning Network". He said, and he's quite right, that it comes down to the people out there. There are some wise people like Jane Bozarth and Marcia Connor who speak volumes about the power of SoMe, but sometimes you really just need to experience it all for it to really make sense.

Today is a case in point. Harold spoke about making use of the tools and resources, so today as I was monitoring TweetDeck, I took a more serious look at some of the connections I had and could eventually make, either through hashtags, blogs, Massive Open Courses or other networks.

I'm still left with questions about how to manage all these connections and how to manage the connections and all the information/knowledge associated with them, but maybe that's part of the journey unto itself. The meaning I make for me is exactly that: mine, and probably wouldn't work for anyone else. But then again, there has to be some shred of common strategy and approach that could be replicated for someone else.

Never a bad thing to have more questions than answers. It's always a source of inspiration.

A little dusty in here koff, koff

2010-11-05T13:53:00.003-04:00

Well, after a very enlightening session on Personal Knowledge Management with Harold Jarche, he reminded me that getting all these ideas out of my head and - as someone said - "taking them for a spin" isn't such a bad thing, so I'll blow the dust off this blog and start plunking down some more ideas.

I dunno what I'll talk about first, but if nothing else, I've taken the Defibrilator Paddles to this thing and can hopefully bring it back to life and get some of my various technical/industry/theoretical/educational/knowledge thoughts in order.

Size isn't everything

2006-07-17T14:28:00.000-04:00

I was reading an interesting post from the E-Learning Queen this afternoon and it (as with other engaging reads) got me thinking...in this case, thinking about the relative merits of size when planning learning content.

Back in my days in the big green machine, lessons and learning objectives were kept pretty manageable. Of course, they had to be...consider the sheer volume of information, for example, that someone on Basic Training has to contend with? So it stands to reason that you have to keep the content focused, with clear and simple objectives...the soldier can then truly learn in a near-continuous fashion and keep up with the cultural transformation they must undergo when they sign on to serve.

So we leap forward to the challenge of corporate e-learning. Barbara Daley has discussed the complexities of blending learning, context and corporate practice. But for me the issue remains "how much"? As in "how much" do we want/need them to learn? More importantly, is the learner actually involved in that decision somehow? Both Daley and the late Cyril O. Houle observed that corporate learning programs (notably Professional Development) were poorly planned and implemented...and 'ignoring the learner' is, in my experience, high on the list of mistakes that organizations make when considering learning.

So where does that leave the learning planner or curriculum designer? Well, if they take a page from the thinkings of Wayne Hodgins, they might feel a little less confused. At the ELEARN conference in Vancouver, he spoke about the Learning Society...in particular, the importance of learning in context and in time. That concept also got me thinking.

"If learning is supposed to be timely...or even 'right now', then you have to think small. Make the learning objective focused and simple and straightforward."

Its all well and good to develop these rich, complex and involved learning programs, but unless we really think hard about how to make those valuable little morsels of learning available to the learner when they need them, we do the learner yet another disservice.

Of course, that statement leads to the inevitable "how small is small?" discussion. But that's for another blog entry.

Technorati Tags: Learning Design, Hodgins, Content Planning, Cyril Houle, e-learning, Barbara Daley

The Tao of "isms"

2006-07-16T19:17:00.000-04:00

(cross posted in shorter form to my Personal Learning Landscape)

It has been an educational weekend, to say the least.

While I've taken the opportunity to start reading my texts for the upcoming pre-residency, I was doing so without the context of a specific assignment or deliverable. I was okay with that. I ignored my good little educator voice and forged ahead, if for no other reason but to get myself into that academic frame of mind.

Saturday AM: my official reading requirements and initial assignment arrived.

To say that I was, after reading the assignment, well in the throes of cognitive dissonance would be a significant understatement.

The initial assignment is daunting in its simplicity: 1000-1500 words (suitably composed following the APA style guide) on my assumptions about learners and learning, and how those assumptions are reflected in the readings. I will, apparently, receive constructive feedback on the submission and we'll revisit it as the residency progresses.

(Sidebar: Hmmm....academic writing. Pretty much diametrically opposed to the business writing I've been doing for the past 10+ years. Even the practicum for my Adult Training & Development Certificate was pretty business-like. The last real academic piece I submitted was probably the better part of 12-13 yrs ago, and I don't think that my treatise on Bismarck's role in 19th Century European/German history would have much value here.)

As with most things, some of the reading was straightforward enough and some of it was like reading Greek. I found myself barraged by a slew of "-isms", "-ologies" and theories and approaches as I valiantly waded through the first (of two) required chapters in my Perspectives on Research text. I haven't seen this much brain theory this side of a Psychotherapists Convention. Everywhere I looked, there was a new term to research, which led to more research and linking. I mean, there was an "-ism" and an "-ology" for almost everything! I was absolutely surrounded and about to be overwhelmed. I'm certain that if I hadn't left a mental trail of bread crumbs I'd be basting nicely inside someone's oven. Just to make things interesting I still had this paper staring me in the face with no discernable starting point. In fact, I felt more lost than when I started.

However, if I may mix my metahpors, there was a light at the end of the tunnel. No, it was not the oncoming train. We were required to download a study paper which dealt with learning and professional practice. About 4 paragraphs in, I was hooked. I finally saw the connections. Meaning was given to my learning/learner assumptions, and I actually saw a starting point for my assignment paper. Associated reference papers were sought, found, and saved for future reading.

Eureka!*

The afternoon definitely went better than the morning. Yes, I still have to get through the research text, and I still have to re-read the first 2 chapters of Making Sense of Adult Learning but I feel a lot further ahead than I did yesterday morning.

I guess it illustrates one of the assumptions that I do make about learners: we need relevance and meaning in order for 'information' to become 'knowledge', and occasionally we need a push in the right direction.

Technorati Tags: Royal Roads, education theory, cognitive dissonance, learning

Translation: Holy crap, I might just have a chance at making this thing work!

Treasure Hunting

2006-07-14T13:25:00.000-04:00

Today's quest is all about collaboration and connections. Okay, maybe not face-to-face collaboration and interactions. But learning from others' experiences and seeing who else is out there.

I guess its my own "best of breed" program.

Tagging my posts with the relevant keywords was something I had left alone in more recent submissions, but I played catch-up and added a few here and there. I figured that Technorati was probably a better way of making those initial connections than just blindly googling my afternoon away. So you may see a few more links here and there on the sidebar from sites I found particularly compelling or relevant to what I'm trying to accomplish.

My hope is that traffic will grow. Comments will appear. Dialog begins. Learning and change can happen.

After all, learning is supposed to be an instrument of change.

Technorati Tag: e-learning, collaboration, dialog, blog, technorati, tags

More e-learning for Northern Ontario

2006-07-13T14:57:00.000-04:00

I'm more focused on the corporate learning end of things, but this announcement for Northern Ontario was nice to see. To say nothing of being long overdue (and don't go dredging up your favourite boogeyman, Mike Harris....the blame list is long and distinguished)

"20 new e-learning centres to open"

Technorati Tags: e-learning, Ontario, Distance Learning

Today's challenge

2006-07-10T15:58:00.000-04:00

Adding interactivity and dynamic content to a process/best practice learning package.

How do you take a common-sense 'book' and turn it into a self-paced learning package?

In classroom settings there are opportunities for discussion and anecdotes and peer-level synergy. Even practical scenario exercises have a place.

Can this be effectively replicated in a self-paced environment?

Such is my current challenge.

Technorati tags: e-learning, interactivity, e-learning development

Off to the Wild, Wild West

2006-07-05T20:53:00.000-04:00

Yes I know its been a while. I have no-one to blame but myself.

I will be starting the MA in Learning and Technology at Royal Roads University starting in early August. Needless to say, I'm excited about the whole thing, despite the sheer blunt force impact it will doubless have upon life, work, family, etc.

A strange feeling is coming over me as I head back to the land of serious academia for the first time in over 15 years. Granted, its not as though I haven't been in classes of any kind over that time, but the full-time, long-term pursuit of something other than a class completion certificate is daunting and exhilarating, all at the same time. OISE is largely to ~~blame~~ credit for my desire to get back into a real 'learning' mode. While I was there, I really got the 'school bug'; which is somewhat surprising considering my somewhat laissez-faire attitude while I was in University the first time around.

On the personal side, I see this program as somewhat making up for my long-incomplete undergrad. On the professional side, its a way for me to advance with a real credential in hand. I'm really just about as high up as I can go with my hard-won 'nuts and bolts' experience and achievements.

I really wanted a different way to manage notes and references and, more importantly, the relationships and links between them, So I'm adding a couple of elements to the process.

First, I'll be more active on this blog. I'll be recording class and program-specific thoughts and experiences.
Second, I've established a Learning Wiki. I'll do some experimentation with the Wiki concept with my own readings and writings. I have also set up a little 'Learning Landscape' through Elgg.

I have to say, to the second point, that this PBWiki is a neat little tool so far. ("PB" referring to "Peanut Butter", as in, "it should be as easy to make a Wiki as making a Peanut Butter Sandwich.") Many thanks to Mark Federman - via Google - for the pointer.

Elgg also offers, at first blush, some very interesting possbilities for connections, social networking, and the learning opportunities therein.

So there's the latest. My first two texts have arrived and I'm diving headfirst into the first one. ("Making Sense of Adult Learning" - Dorothy MacKeracher)

Only four and a half weeks until I'm off to Victoria!

Technorati tags: e-learning, Royal Roads, PBWiki, Personal Learning Landscape, Elgg

Hot idea du jour

2005-10-31T12:59:00.000-05:00

I'm transcribing this idea not because its new or even revolutionary, but because I simply wanted to do a self-brainstorm.

This idea was inspired from some discussions at the recent E-Learn conference in Vancouver.

Mobile learning.

Hmmm....how can I accomplish that within my workplace? I mean, anything's possible with a little effort and research.

So, here's the challenge for me. Find a way to easily and effectively deploy browser- or Flash-based content to a team of potential JiT learners via their Blackberries. I threw this idea at my boss and he's intrigued. So part of this morning was spent digging for resources on Blackberry development and some of the concepts and constraints.

Stay tuned. This could get interesting.

Technorati Tags: elearn2005

E-LEARN 2005 thoughts - Thursday PM

2005-10-27T17:54:00.000-04:00

Quite a full afternoon of events, starting with the Networking lunch. Each table had a specific "subject/topic" and I probably could have sat at 3 different tables and enjoyed each experience. At my table (Courseware Development & Authoring Tools) were attendees from New South Wales TAFE (Australia), Limerick University (Ireland), Sweden, Carnegie-Mellon University (USA), Foreign Service Institute - US Department of State, the BC Institute of Technology (Canada), and yours truly . It was quite interesting to see the different approaches taken to designing, developing and delivering courses in the online world. Some common choices of tools, to be sure, but the overall thought processes were markedly different. Some were focused on blended learning, some were looking at dedicated self-paced options. We all faced similar challenges with adoption/awareness and buy-in, as well as challenges with just getting content developed and maintained. Common issues with no geographical barriers.

I felt quite badly for the presenter who was stuck with a Mac/PC issue and wasn't able to get her presentation on the Learning Object Life Cycle. Heinz Dreher from one of my morning sessions was in attendance and we had a rather thought-provoking chat on the way up to our respective rooms. We discussed some of the issues from her presentation as well as the panel discussion before lunch. That panel had obviously touched something in him, because he observed that a lot of people are "missing the point" about all this learning development. "We've forgotten why we're doing it and who we're doing it for," he said. He's right, of course. As designers, a lot of us tend to get lost in the tools and the technologies and we really forget about the learner experience. Do we know what they want? Do we care? Should we? Again, more food for thought.

I love the little sidebar discussions like that one. I get a lot more out of those than I do from some longer presentations. Its she sheer rush of those little "eureka!" moments that truly make this job worthwhile.

Finally, I had the opportunity to sit through another award winner, Diane Newton's presentation on the role of the Australian Army instructor in the e-learning process. As a former military person, I had a personal interest in her presentation, but I was really surprised to see both the breadth and depth of content that the Australian Army's Training Command had created and made available to its soldiers. Not surprisingly, there were some cultural challenges with taking this approach and I can see a lot of the growing pains, but I can also see some real advantages to much of what they are trying to accomplish. The depth of her reasearch work was excellent. Almost makes me want to go back to the consulting world and make nice-nice with the folks at DND.

Technorati Tags: elearn2005

E-LEARN thoughts - Thursday AM

2005-10-27T12:56:00.000-04:00

To start the day, Curt Bonk from the University of Indiana was the morning Keynote speaker. Touching on his session from Monday he talked a lot about the sharing of knowledge, particularly Open Courseware, Open Source tools and the like.

I was amazed at the sheer volume of academic materials available online. One project of note was the OOPS initiative from Lucifer Chu from Taiwan, where he is translating all of the MIT open courseware into one of the dialects of Chinese as a largely volunteer project.

Heinz Dreher from Curtin University in Perth, Australia, showed some of his efforts with a natural language grading/marking tool. I have to say that, as a veteran of the multiple choice examination world (MCP, ITIL, etc.) I welcome the inclusion of natural language assessment in the e-learning world. While still largely a prototype, I think it holds great promise for the corporate world.

The folks from the University of Saskatchewan talked about their work on Learning Object Content Management systems. Wow. Simple, clean, and lots of interesting features to really glean worthwhile information about learner activity, and to stream learner paths, while working in a LO environment. Their LORNET efforts are part of a national initiative focused on telelearning using learning objects. I can't wait to tinker with their environment.

Next up before lunch was a panel session on Future Trends in Learning, Technology and Standards, and one of my favourite speakers, Wayne Hodgins, was on the panel. Wayne is always a great speaker and entertaining as hell. I had the opportunity to hear his keynote address at the Microsoft Certified Trainer conference in New Orleans in 2000. Awesome stuff. Even though Wayne tends to be looking anywhere from 5-100 years out, its still thought-provoking to see some of the patterns and trends illustrated in some of his forecasts and planning.

What struck me was that Wayne is right-on about the need to remove the "e" from e-Learning. Learning technologies tend to overwhelm the importance of pedagogy (echoing Curt Bonk) and that there needs to be a better focus on "personalized learning" versus "ubiquitous" learning. Sheer volume of information is useless without context, audience, medium, and timeliness. Needless to say I have much to think about when I return to the office. We also need to address, he says, "un-learning"...that is, how to transform previous learned behaviour and enforce new behaviours and new patterns of action for better results. (Shades of what I experienced trying to break the traditional mould of applications training.) His final comments was that the personalization of learning cannot be something that we thrust upon the user. Too much choice is as deadly as not enouch choice. Personalization must be user-centric, rather than what I'll call "negative option marketing"

As usual, a really fantastic panel session, although I admit that the speaker from Simon Fraser really had a hard act to follow and his content was somewhat pale in comparison to Wayne's.

Technorati Tags: elearn2005

E-LEARN thoughts - Wednesday PM

2005-10-26T23:31:00.000-04:00

I changed my schedule so I could attend Dr. Vladimir Uskov's session on Technology for Advanced e-Learning. His expertise is evident and he has been able to build a lot of in-house tools to support his own e-learning efforts at Bradley U. It was educational (no pun intended) to see where some of the barriers exist when trying to offer the full virtual classoom experience. (Video compression/bandwidth issues, etc.) He clearly has some success with his work at the University. Looks like something to emulate, in principle if not in specific application. )

Knowledge retention is always an issue and I took in the session entitled "You want me to remember what??" Their tool was the "Profound Learning System" being prototyped through a number of diferent groups learning Outlook. The results of their test series (immediate posttest, 30 days posttest, 60 days posttest) were quite interesting to me. As a classroom veteran its a little alarming to see how retention drops off after a relatively short time.

(Comment from audience member sotto voce: "what a stupid question to ask" after seeing one of the posttest reviews. Odd and vitriolic reaction.)

The charts were a little tough to view, but I'm looking forward to picking the presenter's brain after the session about PLS and what it could mean to us.

(Had the chance to speak with him and he very kindly pointed me in the direction of the vendor who is apparently re-tooling their product as we speak. )

My final session is with the group from Belgium, presenting Tools2Team: a web-based Knowledge Management tool. At first I thought they weren't serious about their features wish list, but they really are trying to add a staggering amount of capacity to a web-based tool. Could it really be all things to all people? So far it looks promising in principle, if a little rough in its initial presentation.

Technorati Tags: elearn2005

E-LEARN thoughts - Wednesday AM

2005-10-26T16:49:00.000-04:00

Quite an enjoyable opening session this morning with Allison Rosette where she talked a lot about convergence and knowledge transfer.

I admit that I am somewhat of a traditionalist at heart, so her references to Mary Broad's research on Transfer struck a chord, but I was particularly interested in her statement that the distinctions between 'before, during and after' are starting to disappear. Very interesting food for thought. I can really see some concrete ways to implement some of the 6 strategies for converging work & learning.

Quite disappointed to see that one of my morning presenters hadn't made it to Vancouver. Too bad the staff here didn't pick that one up on their cancellation sheet.

Enjoyed the presentation from the ladies at Penn State about their blended learning efforts. Funny what you can accomplish without a significant capital investment.

The session about incorporating blogs as learning and knowledge management tools was a confirmation of a personal suspicion. Had the chance to sit with Wesley Fryer and take shameless advantage of the wireless signals to blog, share ideas, and demonstrate some of our own JiT transfer. Life imitating art, after a fashion.

Technorati Tags: elearn2005

E-LEARN 2005 Link

2005-10-26T13:29:00.000-04:00

Please bear with me while I recover some archived posts on e-learning and some of my own experiences with processes, tools and techniques. I look forward to staying in touch with some of the folks I met at E-LEARN 2005 as well as making new contacts.

Comments and input and idea-shares are always welcome.

Technorati Tags: elearn2005

Live facilitation thoughts

2005-08-19T11:12:00.000-04:00

Sitting in the Virtual Classroom demo that S. arranged for us for today, I was thinking back to some of the lessons learned in my own experiences with these kinds of e-learning events.

As someone who was primarily a classroom instructor, it was a very interesting switch to the virtual class environment. As a classroom instructor, you depend on participant feedback, body language, expressions and all that "human" interaction. For example, you have no doubts that the participant in physically "there" for a classroom session. In a virtual session, its like you're teaching where your students are on the other side of a wall from you.

Let's talk about what's "missing":

Visual cues from the student - all the body language, facial expressions, signs of participation in an activity
Visual cues from the facilitator - as above, body language, gestures, plus all the "on-scene" help in labs and activities
General classroom synergy - no experience can adequately capture what happens when you bring a group of people together for some kind of learning activity.

We should also talk about some of the general advantages:

Location independence - facilitator and students don't have to be co-located
Private communication - students can communicate directly with the instructor to ask questions or make comments through a chat tool.
Archived communication - as above, questions can be raised at any time via chat and saved for future reference
Multiple media/method integration - a richness of presentation can be achieved with very little effort. Much of this work could be done on the fly or on-demand.

Some of the overall disadvantages can be debated ad infinitum, and I'd never say that synchronous facilitation is a panacea, but it is an effective tool at the facilitator's disposal.

What I do want to share here are some of my learning experiences with live sessions and some things that I have found to be important for my own ongoing use.

Language:

I am not necessarily a natural comedian, but I often use carefully-selected pieces of humour in my normal classroom delivery. For some reason, a lot of humour and sarcasm and wry observations are far less effective online. This effect is usually attributed to the lack of visual cues. Misinterpretation of comments becomes a risk factor to consider in delivery and planning.

Delivery:

Off-the-cuff delivery is a bit of a challenge while engaged in an online session, and I found that some of my normal rapid-fire delivery simply didn't 'reach' some of my earlier audiences. There were a lot of contributing factors here, not the least of which was the lack of visual cues, but it had more to do with technology limitations. A lack of bandwidth can really impact what the learner actually receives at their end. For a while I was at a bit of a loss as to what do do, but I looked to a common cousin of e-learning: Radio broadcasting. On-Air broadcasters tend to have a smooth, yet simple, delivery. I took a look at what I was trying to say, and I started to simplify it. I then hit on another idea: scripting. During some of my earlier exposure to e-learning, I was running repeated live sessions. In order to maintain consistency, I started to script my sessions. I built a simple script template where I could include the current step of my presentation, the portion of the script to be delivered at that point, as well as any demos or interactive tasks required. The real advantage of using a system like this was that I could very quickly train new instructors on how to delivery specific modules.

Rehearsal:

A polished, concise delivery really does make a difference. I alluded to some of those issues in the section above, but I figured that 'nailing down' my script would go a long way to a successful delivery. A colleague had a studio-quality 4-track recorder that he brought into our e-learning studio, and I would take the time to run through my presentations and play them back. I can't say enough about what I learned and gained from hearing my own delivery and being able to get closer and closer to "speaking less, but saying more"

Facilities:

One of my previous employers was getting serious about live e-learning delivery in the early days of the trend. Inspired by a US-based training vendor, they actually made dedicated space available, much like a small radio studio, so the sessions could be held in a quiet, controlled environment. Online facilitators have enough to worry about, and it made sense to minimize distractions and outside interference. The 5 computers in the studio were dedicated for delivery, co-facilitation, archiving, practice, and the like.

Integration and Consistency:

One of the major failings of the early efforts in live e-learning was failing to capitalize on that initial push. While our initial efforts were successful, we didn't capitalize on that success and integrate more online sessions with our core classroom offerings. One of my colleagues and I proposed a "talk show" format for a recurring online session (much like a regular radio talk show) in addition to future blended offerings, fiscal pressures at that employer saw them abandon the overall effort in favour of a focus on pre-packaged TBT offerings. Was that the right thing to do? The debate could go on endlessly. The end result was that we lost a valuable way to reach our customer base and keep them connected.

Again, this entry isn't exhaustive or complete...just a small sample. What are your thoughts? What have you experienced in "live" facilitation? What could people do better? What do you dislike about live facilitation as a learning vehicle?

Flat=Bad, Depth=Good

2005-04-19T09:12:00.000-04:00

Somewhere up in the Gateway city, there are instructors at a College who are thrilled that I'm getting a chance to use the graphic design diploma I slaved so hard to get 15 years ago.

I spent part of the weekend and all of yesterday re-designing our standard e-learning background and interface because, frankly, I wasn't happy with the one we had whipped up. Now that I think about it, it was a little dull and awfully PowerPoint-like. Strangely enough, I went through this same process of revisions when I was designing the logo and look and feel for my consulting business and its web site. My initial design was flat and "okay" but subsequent revisions and ideas got me to a more 3-D look that almost "leaps" from the screen. That's kinda what I have going now. This might not be a big leap for some, but I'm feeling like what we have now is a bit more polished and 'professional'.

So there's my "lesson learned" for this week: add some depth and some subtle 3-D effects to your interface and you move away from the "slide show" kind of content and towards a more multi-media kind of effect.

Lesson #2: Interactive buttons are a bitch to create (mouseup, mouseover, mousedown, etc.), but well worth the effort at the end.

I had to do a bit of an end-run around the design process and use some of my own software tools to accomplish this end, but I think the result is worth it. We now have a new background, with a bit more "real estate" to work in, and a nice, slick bottom navigation "console" with a new suite of buttons and controls.

I look at it this way: if I can get professional-looking content developed entirely in-house, that has to be a winner somewhere...

Interesting e-learning link

2005-04-17T15:17:00.000-04:00

I tripped over this one purely by accident, but it does link to some solid resources and readings.

Epsilon Learning

Webcast/Webconference/e-Work Tools

2005-04-12T22:40:00.000-04:00

I was fortunate to have been exposed to e-learning relatively early on the corporate side of things. One of my first e-learning experiences was becoming an online facilitator during CDI's early trials with online learning sessions. In this post I'll talk about some of the tools I've used for these purposes as well as my experiences.

Placeware - This was the very first tool we used for online learning "webcasting" at CDI (sorry, I refuse to call it a "webinar".) Its best market is for conferencing and remote work or collaboration. While at the time it didn't have a good audio/video integration, it was awesome if you wanted to have "breakout" sessions with the online participants. The look and feel was like that of a conference, complete with virtual rooms and virtual "seats". It also offers whiteboards, shared applications, etc. etc. The overall facilitator could even move between "rooms" as needed. Placeware is now owned by Microsoft and is branded as "LiveMeeting."

Centra - We moved to Centra early on in our online learning experiments because it had better audio/video integration. I admit, I really liked the Centra environment. It had the ability to get participant feedback through chat, or other emoticons. The facilitator even has the ability to generate surveys and questions on the fly and incorporate them in the presentation. Our particular installation also let us upload and store presentations converted to HTML, or in their native format (in our case, PowerPoint) so that a participant could always access a presentation even if the Live session was over. We could record and save our content as well. The "on demand" feature was a real bonus for us. Centra offers both hosted and turn-key solutions. They've made a real effort to position themselves as a good online learning platform in addition to being a solid e-work and e-conferencing tool.

At the time we weren't doing a lot of tracking of learner-specific stats, but we did know that participants liked having access to the content whenever they wanted to access it. We weren't doing a lot of Learning Object authoring at the time, so I can't speak for how effective Centra is at handling such things. However, I wouldn't put it past them.

WebEx - I used WebEx at my last employer. While it is a good conferencing support tool, I didn't find it as effective for e-learning. The interface was pretty basic. There was no integrated video service, and (more often than not), I had to use an external Teleconference provider to have any supporting audio, as opposed to something more integrated. The whiteboards, surveys and shared applications worked fine, but after my experience with Centra I was, frankly, disappointed. My biggest complaint about WebEx is that I couldn't provide content "on demand." Even recording and saving content needed a proprietary tool. I could only store recorded content in this proprietary format. Perhaps that was a limitation of a hosted solution, I'm not sure. Basically, if I wanted to have an event running, I needed to actually be there to start a saved version and then monitor it.

What I did like, however, was that I could save a presentation, burn it to CD, include the WebEx player, and then distribute it. For some of our customers who couldn't seem to attend scheduled sessions, this was a great solution. I wouldn't, however, describe WebEx as an e-learning platform. It does conferencing and webcasts, but that's about where it ends.

Again, there's no shortage of Webcasting and online broadcast or e-work tools out there. Again, a Google search on this topic yields big results.

Message Boards

I should talk for a moment about message boards. I like these kinds of tools for offline, threaded discussions. The nice thing is, most of these kinds of tools are free and simply require a web server for access. I see them as a way for online learning to mimic real-world environments with messages, discussion and interaction. Most of these tools are Freeware, as opposed to OpenSource, or there is a very minimal cost associated with licensing. Tools like Ceilidh, WebWiz, vBulletin, phpBB can add another dimension to a real online environment. You're welcome to brand it as an e-community if you wish.

e-Learning LMS/LCMS tools

2005-04-12T13:48:00.000-04:00

I'll preface my comments here by saying that we've only deployed an LMS strictly as a prototype (as of the date of this post.) We're not actively using it to host and deliver content. This isn't an exhaustive list by any means. Simply entering the term "Learning Management System" into Google will yield a huge result.

There are very blurred lines between the Learning Content Management Systems and Learning/Learner Management Systems. Some tools may indeed allow you to manage a library of learning content and components as well as offering the delivery, hosting and tracking elements. My only suggestion here is to get some solid demonstrations of the product to see how well they will suit your needs. Do NOT, repeat, NOT, rely on just the product fact sheets. While many of the products available can eventually get to some kind of solution, the effort required to get there can be arduous and, frankly, painful and frustrating.

LCMS:

EEDO Interactive offers a tool called Force Ten which really, really impressed me. Positioned as a Web-based Learning Content Management System, it really offers good abilities to both manage content as well as develop it. The feature I particularly liked was a workflow-based development process. It was possible for you to actually author content through the browser window, and then add routing information to escalate the content to a reviewer or to another author. Very, very clever. Expensive to implement in-house, but clever. EEDO does offer hosted solutions which definitely make them more attractive.

TrainingPartner is the LCMS we used in my days at CDI. While we used it as a scheduling and course management tool, it is a full-featured LCMS. There are no hosting or development features on board, but the reporting capabilities are awesome. Important for me is that they're Canadian (Victoria, BC.) They actually recommended EEDO to me, as well as recommending KnowledgePresenter. (They are now the Canadian distributor for KP.)

LMS:

ELM is the LMS offered by Outstart, the makers of TrainerSoft. It was comparable in features to the LearningSpace LMS that was featured during the course. TrainerSoft (if I recall) offered both an implemented solution as well as a hosted solution.

aTutor is an open-source Learning Management System, developed at the University of Toronto.

Moodle is another open-source Learning Management System.

OCCAM is yet another open-source Learning Management System.

While "free" is never a bad thing, you should be prepared to do a lot of customization of the software yourself. If you're not comfortable with handling the nitty-gritty of systems administration, I'd recommend leaving these tools in the hands of those who have said skills. As much as I might appear "technical", I'm not that much of a code geek.

EnQPlus is kind of an all-in-one tool that I saw demonstrated by a former colleague. It didn't suit my needs at the time, but it might be worth further exploration if someone is curious. Contact Jeff Woods at Mindvault. He's reselling the tool.

e-Learning Authoring Tools

2005-04-12T09:18:00.000-04:00

Now that we've talked about some of the planning stuff, I'd like to share some of my experiences with authoring tools. Where possible, I'll also offer some pros & cons about tools that I'm using and also to tell you what I'm using them for. (I know, I know...sentence-ending preposition...)

Content Prototyping:

PowerPoint. Nothing really beats PowerPoint for basic prototyping and some proof-of-concept work. We have a very specific look and feel that is applied to all of our publications and online presence, so I don't have to worry too much about re-designing navigation elements and suitable colour schemes. The ability to quickly add elements like audio and other multimedia are also a plus. The disadvantage for PPT is that I can't easily add any tracking code for an LMS. Not that its impossible, just very, very difficult to do on my own.

Authoring:

The tool I am currently using is called KnowledgePresenter. The current version is a vast improvement over the last (2004) edition. I like KP2005 for a couple of reasons: its somewhat similar to PowerPoint in that you can work on a slide by slide (screen by screen) basis for developing the content. It also lets you make use of a library for frequently-used items (headings, graphics, text boxes, etc.) For people who like granular control, there's an impressive properties sheet to play with. The Professional edition (the one I purchased) also ships with a simple LMS, as well as tools for screen capture and simulation-building as well as an assessment/quiz builder.

The folks at Knowledge Presenter also offer a great list of lessons, tutorials, whitepapers and other documents to assist you in flattening the learning curve.

The downside to KP is that it doesn't offer a big array of templates for pro-programming your learning. It also doesn't have any kind of "Outline" creator so that you can quickly lay out your major step/screen/slide headings. It's not as well documented as I'd like, but the user support forums are quite good and you can learn a lot from both the user community and the support staff who actively monitor the questions posted.

TrainerSoft is another tool I evaluated before moving to my current employer. Its similar in approach to KnowledgePresenter. However, it's a bit more expensive for the authoring tool. The vendor does offer an excellent simulation builder, but at $8000 USD it's quite pricy. It did offer a "tree" view of your Learning Object and the associated screens, which I liked, but I ultimately chose KP at my current exployer because of the bundled features and better cost per license. Having said that, their sales follow-up and customer service were excellent.

DazzlerMax was the third tool I looked at. I couldn't really relate it to any other application I've used. It presents a very interesting "timeline" view and a unique way of seeing the relationship between the various elements on a slide. However, I found this approach to be incredibly granular and it was tough to see a completed Learning Object when faced with a dizzying array of objects and properties.

Other tools like Saba and Authorware were either too expensive for my considerations, or they had an extremely steep learning curve, so they didn't make the cut.

Tools aside, I still tend to storyboard with pen & paper. Shades of my old graphics background, I guess. Old habits are hard to break.

Learning Object development links

2005-04-11T11:47:00.000-04:00

The following documents and papers were really invaluable to me in my research and they clarified some of the mystery surrounding Learning Objects. I didn't "get" the whole concept of LOs because I couldn't equate them to the more "linear" process for developing materials for classroom training.

While there are some links over on the right side, these ones are a little more specific.

The Herridge Group: Joanne Mowat is the principal for Herridge, and she's also had a long involvement with the ISPI (International Society for Performance Improvement) in Toronto. On her 'White Papers' page are two documents I found to be very, very helpful: An Introduction to Learning Objects, and Learning Objects and Instructional Design.
AliveTek: This e-learning consulting firm has a number of Articles and documents worth reading, in particular, the Learning Object Storyboard, and the Learning Object Analysis Sheet. I use these two forms regularly.
Article: We're Not Designing Courses Anymore. An interesting article comparing traditional ISD with e-learning concepts.
Article: Gagne's Conditions of Learning. One of the articles I read made reference to his model, so it may be worth a look. Not e-learning specific, but interesting nonetheless. This article is a precis of Gagne's work.
Article: Repurposable Learning Objects Linked to Teaching and Learning Styles. A somewhat more in-depth paper on LO development. While there is some product-specific discussion, I found the overall content to be quite interesting.

Let me know if you find any of these useful. The big winner for me were the 2 papers from Joanne Mowat along with the storyboard and analysis sheets from AliveTek.

Course Observations and Clarifications

2005-04-11T10:51:00.000-04:00

I mentioned some of these comments in my course evaluation and to some of you privately, but I want to offer a little bit of clarification on a couple of points on e-learning that S. made during his presentation, and also to clarify the "message" that the course may have delivered.

MESSAGE: e-Learning means software development

FACT: e-Learning does not have to be a software development project for your organization. There's a phenomenal amount of content and information that you can develop in-house without writing a single line of programming code.

MESSAGE: e-learning means spending/investing a lot of money

FACT: as with the myth above, you don't have to invest a lot of money in e-learning to get modest results. Even though we purchased an authoring tool where I work, that investment was relatively small. For organizations with almost no budget, there's a wealth of tools and resources out there. Google was a big research tool for me. Toss in some keywords and see what you get. Having said that, there may be some overhead costs that you can't avoid. But weigh those costs against the Return on Value you get from transforming your learning environment.

MYTH: you need to purchase a LMS or LCMS

FACT: e-learning can take place in your organization without either of these tools. When it comes right down to it, a LMS is basically a web server that can store your content and provide tracking mechanisms. However, if you want to start small, all you really need is some kind of tool to author content, and a means to distribute it. You can even start with PowerPoint, or some kind of HTML editor to generate content. As long as you follow some good e-learning planning and development practices, you can achieve great results.

My take on it: start authoring some basic content, get it distributed, then see what kind of tracking metrics you need.

Other random thoughts: I think there was a LOT of confusion about technology, and I sensed a lot of frustration about it. You'll gain more from a real understanding of the planning and strategy steps for building e-learning in your workplace than you will from becoming versed in the subtleties or SCORM/AICC and that sort of thing. I'm not a standards whiz and I don't plan to be. Nor am I a software developer or database administrator.

For those of you at the strategic, as opposed to tactical, level for e-learning...focus your efforts on planning and strategy. In the long run, the knowedge/skill/awareness outcomes are the same. e-learning just gives you a different vehicle to get you there.

e-Learning Openers

2005-04-11T10:15:00.000-04:00

Hello, all.

As promised for my OISE classmates, I'll be providing a list of documents and resources and other stuff related to e-learning. Depending on what people want to see, I might even add other stuff like Best Practices for Virtual Classrooms, and stuff like that.

I apologize for not consolidating this list elsewhere, but there's a lot of content out there, and I figured that a simple e-mail wouldn't cut it.

Your comments and input are welcome.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to e-Learning

PKM/Network Learning

John Seely Brown Interview

A Small Planetary Diversion

The Politics and "Business" of learning, Part 2

The Politics and "Business" of learning, Part 1

S2 Q9) Best bottom-up learning implementation. Or, at least, my most memorable one. (apologies to @LnDDave)

You know it's been a productive day, when...

Kvetch

Q7) "doing stuff " at work or "learning"? A longer post, just for @LnDDave.

Q6) Courses, not resources: where not to do it, and Q6a) What are we doing to change?

Lrntect Q1 Response

The reading list grows...

A wholly unqualified book review (WIP)

New Tweet Space Done

Design a Planet, or just my little piece of it?

Shameless self-promotion

N00b Management 101

LRNCHAT Reflections from Feb 10.

Thoughts on a "controversial" approach to rapid e-learning development.

Power to the PLN!

Taking (Online) College Instruction by Storm!

The Unexpected leads to Energy

Dr. Fastbuild, or, How I Learned to stop ADDIE-ing and Love the RID

CSTD Reflections - Mentoring/Coaching and Appreciative Inquiry

CSTD Reflections - Saul Carliner and "Staying Relevant"

CSTD Afterglow

CSTD Scheduling Thoughts

CSTD Day 2 Keynote Summary

CSTD Conference - My Day 1 Summary

A flood of #backchannel, but in a good way.

Conference Bound!

A small toot of the personal horn

Networking by a non-Networker

A little dusty in here *koff, koff*

Size isn't everything

The Tao of "isms"

Treasure Hunting

More e-learning for Northern Ontario

Today's challenge

Off to the Wild, Wild West

Hot idea du jour

E-LEARN 2005 thoughts - Thursday PM

E-LEARN thoughts - Thursday AM

E-LEARN thoughts - Wednesday PM

E-LEARN thoughts - Wednesday AM

E-LEARN 2005 Link

Live facilitation thoughts

Flat=Bad, Depth=Good

Interesting e-learning link

Webcast/Webconference/e-Work Tools

e-Learning LMS/LCMS tools

e-Learning Authoring Tools

Learning Object development links

Course Observations and Clarifications

e-Learning Openers

A little dusty in here koff, koff