How to Optimize Organizational Learning

Recently while researching on the web on topics regarding Communities of Practice I came across the Community Intelligence Labs (CoIL) website. While it seems the website may have gone the way of the Brontosaurus (the last update was in Feb 2004), it's resources are still there for the viewing. Among them I found the following 14 guidelines on How to Optimize Organizational Learning written by Entienne Wenger in the summer of 1996 for the Healthcare Forum Journal.

I thought it would be interesting to get your take on these 14 guidelines now 9 years after Wenger first penned them. He introduced these guidelines with:

Here are the 14 guidelines to help you work with rather than
against the inner logic of organizational learning:

1. View learning as work and work as learning. Recognize learning in all it's forms in order to find ways to nurture it and connect it across the organization.
2. Count on the informal. That is where work gets done.
3. If there is a learning problem, look for patterns of social participation and exclusion.
4. Keep learning as close to practice as possible.
5. Treat Communities of practice as assets.
6. View individuals as members of communities of practice, not by stereotyping them, but by honoring the meaningfulness of their participation.
7. Encourage the formation and deepening of communities of practice by legitimizing the work of pulling them together and valuing the informal learning they facilitate.
8. Manage boundaries between communities of practice as opportunities for learning.
9. Expect transformations, misunderstandings, and reinterpretations when people, artifacts and information cross boundaries of practice.
10. Value the work of brokering learning among communities; it often does not look like work.
11. Be attuned to the emergence of new practices at boundaries.
12. View the organization as a constellation of interconnected practices.
13. Put communities of practice in charge of their learning, recognizing that they need access to other practices in order to proceed.
14. Make sure that the organizational apparatus is in the service of practices, and not the other way around.

Obviously, 9 years later, some of these guidelines are either proven or widely held to be true. I also would say it's obvious that communities of practice are thriving that would indicate that these guidelines are being well applied. Some of the questions I'd like to hear the LCB community chime in on are:

• Are any of these guidelines obsolete, or impractical to such a level, that they should be struck from the list?
• Which among the 14 are the "pain points" that corporate cultures just can't seem to get past, thus blocking the emergence of vibrant CoP's?
• What's the role of collaborative technologies to date in this? Have they helped nudge along a very slow adaptation process? Or have then hindered the effort?
  

What's your most memorable conference experience?

What makes for a conference event with impact? I'm building a list of what works best. What's your most memorable conference event? What delivered the most learning impact? I'll tell you mine; tell us yours in the Comment section.

About ten years ago I attended a presentation by the late Gordon MacKenzie, the "creative enigma" of Hallmark Cards and author of the wonderful book Orbiting the Giant Hairball. He hung a clothesline across the stage at the annual meeting of the Instructional Systems Association and pinned a dozen doodles on 8 1/2" x 11" sheets to it. The audience would point to a sheet, and Gordon would tell its story.

Gordon's stories were heartfelt, emotional, and often very personal. At times it felt like the story was telling Gordon rather than the other way around. Gordon broke into tears several times, and tears streamed down our faces in empathy.

Gordon shared another story with me over lunch. When he started a day with no particular objective, he would tell himself that during the day he was going to be amazed. And he always was. Gordon taught me a lot about feelings and sensitivity to others that day. He also demonstrated that the sequence of stories in a presentation isn't always that important. I mourned when his widow told me Gordon had passed on.

"Grand Theft Auto"ing Edutainment Software

Grand Theft Auto might be the worst game series ever, in part because it might be the best.

Almost Microsoft-esque, GTA has absorbed and fairly seamlessly integrated different genres, including driving games, first person shooters, fighting games, gambling games, flight simulators, adventure games, shopping games, role-playing games and more.

My last post got me thinking. What if one took a GTA approach to edutainment software?

What if you could create, over multiple iterations, an experience that both included a generic, open ended "real-world" environment with specific missions to increase capability?

You could absorb:

• Pet simulators/trainers
• Lemonade stands
• Tycoon (designing interactive environments, such as store layouts and zoos)
• Designing (building cars for example, or new computers, or new clothes. If a persistant world had a GTA visual structure, you could see hundreds of people wearing your trendy new hats as you walked down the street)
• Business building/ logistics
• Logic games
• Historic settings
• Physics simulators
• Medical/vet
• Ecosystems/genetic engineering
• Space
• Traffic Emergencies
• Negotiation simulators

Trucks, dinosaurs, dating, status, shopping, horses could co-exist in different locations as themes and reward structures. Mathematics could exist as an optional but useful lens. Multi-player and massively multiplayer would of course be optional key components. Building up business empires, huge houses, and vast social networks could start at humble activities, including creating great inventions and training animals. You could call in favors, as well as generate more and more people loyal to you. You could live in the stables, or labs, or making deliveries, or in the operating room as well if you wanted to.

I'm in!

Once a Booming Market, Educational Software for the PC Takes a Nose Dive

The New York Times ran a piece today about the crash and burn of the K-12 educational software market. To sum it up, once thriving, large, and profitable, the industry niche today, well, isn't.

I would be the first in line to buy any software that helps my son. But my own personal experiences with the "edutainment" software was pretty unsatisfying.

There were technical problems, production problems, quality problems, and just uninspired content problems.

Often times, the game elements, such as the cartoon rabbit, were not things to which my son could relate.

The general genre itself, the adventure game punctuated by unrelated, abstract exercises, was pretty uninteresting, especially as it was disconnected from the content.

I wrote in Learning By Doing:

Some game-based models use adventures games, a genre popularized in early computer games. Students traverse maps, either from a firstperson or top-down perspective, looking for pieces of information or performing small tasks to unlock new parts of the map.
This was the model for much of the early educational software. ("Sure Miss Squirrel, you can come into our clubhouse filled with toys and friends. But you have to identify these right four physics laws to get the key." There are also corporation examples, that might read, "Sure Mrs. Squire, you can come into the executive board room filled with stock options and great contacts, but you have to identify the right four ethics policies to get the key.")

Besides the reasons mentioned by the article, Will Wright has mentioned one reason he thought was the problem: increasingly kids are choosing/buying software, not adults.

Here are some reflections I have for the edutainment marketplace:

• Interactivity is key, with real interactivity around the learning, not just propping up workbook style content.
• Math is especially tricky. Math doesn't exist on its own! Math is itself a pedagogical layer, a set of tools to better understand the world. It needs to be handled as such, not futher burried under more and more layers of abstractions.
• Game elements need to be specific to the user. Anything interjected to be "fun" has to be able to be modded very easily, almost like skins. Any student should have a choice of at least five different themes.
• Building rewards creativity, and gives more ownership to the player.

Having said all of that, edutainment needs to be re-invented. As with American car manufacturers after producing Gremlins and Falcolns, there is so little credibility that a new brand has to emerge.

E-Learning: Channels, piracy, and outrage

I said back in a speech in 1999 that e-learning was over-rated in the short term and under-rated in the long term.

I believe that statement is probably more true today, at least for the formal learning area. (Tools like Google and IM have proven the killer-apps for the informal areas.)

Wearing my analyst hat, I am looking for at least three things to see when formal e-learning hits the big time:

• One is channels. We have talked about this on this blog. When e-learning becomes its own category at Amazon, that will be a milestone. The best producer of the types of simulations I would call branching stories, WILL Interactive, created an experience about sexually transmitted diseases. Users play one of two characters as they live an afternoon and an evening, making key decisions. The experience is honest, educational, relevant, and potentially life saving. Why isn't this in every library in the United States? There are plenty of people "studying" simulations. I would say to all of them, use your resources instead to go on a mission and get that single experience widely distributed. You will both learn more, and help more, than studying eight year olds playing computer games or bringing together academics and corporate people to talk about best practices in simulation design.
• The second is piracy. Are people ripping off e-learning courses? Are e-learning courses being downloaded, tinkered with, and being resold on the black (or gray) market? Are some government officials in a poorer nation deciding that it is worth a bit of heat to distribute knock-offs of life improving exeriences? Why not?
• The third is outrage. We are seeing a tiny taste of it with University of Phoenix. At some point, however, the success of formal e-learning will be putting a lot of professors out of work. More importantly, there will be complaints of vast homoginization of high school and university content. Ironically, there will be a race, between using simulation techniques to actually better preserve local ways of doing business, and the the propagation of single ways (much, much better skills than are possible today) that will threaten to erase diversity of knowledge. Buzz words like mono-knowledge will get headlines.

Are we there yet? We are not even close.

San Francisco and Los Angeles as different (but complementary) models for Formal Learning

There continues to be a movement in corporate formal learning programs to uber-empower the learner and focus the role of content designers to a more infrastructure role. Google and Instant Messenger are the perfect model for many. And I mostly agree with this "Bay Area" position.

But I also believe that "Passionate learners come from Passionate designers." Call it the "Los Angeles" take. The best movies, television shows, books, and computer games come from people passionate about the content, (although they rely on and assume the infrastructure). This passion was often true during the mom and pop instruction era, and it has to be more true in the era of scalable instructional content as well.

Being involved in, and watching, this passion around content is one reason why the educational simulation/ serious games movement is very interesting to me.

Smackdown Learning

I find myself drifting to Kathy Sierra's blog, Creating Passionate Users, because it seems a lot like creating passionate learners. Plus it is wacky and inspirational.

I have no clue how I first stumbled on it, but take a look at this recent entry- The Smackdown Learning Model.

What happens to your brain when you're forced to choose between two different--and potentially conficting--points of view? Learning. That's what makes the smackdown model such an effective approach to teaching, training, and most other forms of communication.

Cognitive dissonance meets Celebrity Deathmatch. You gotta love/hate it.

SimJournal: The "problems" with richer content

Simulations require more content than linear content. Much more. This changes a lot.

• There is an exploration of failure. Most corporate people don't like talking about, let alone mapping out, things that went wrong. Obviously finding people to talk about failure in detail is difficult.
• You can't be politically correct at the expense of accuracy when creating a simulation. Can you imagine making a simulation of a car that works the way the designers hoped a car would drive, instead of the way a car really drove? Of course not. Likewise, simulations that present idealized world views are quickly found out.
• The more content, the harder it is to translate to other languages. Many people act as if ease of translation of a course is a good thing, not a bad. Of course it takes less time and resources, but less content is less content. Some say, "simulations get into cultural issues and behavior, which makes them harder to localize." I say, "simulations get into cultural issues, so they actually work."

I think the best quote about simulations comes from outside the field:

Nineteenth-century mathematicians discovered to their discomfort that as the conceptual machinery of mathematics became more precise, it became more difficult.—David Berlinski, The Advent of the Algorithm

SimJournal: Stumbling upon a great score

Every once in a while, some one will do very well in Virtual Leader, but doesn't know why and can't repeat it.

The tools are there to analyze the play, but they quickly move on, assuming that they are just naturally good. Then they hit a wall, sometimes even replaying the same situation, get stuck, and then get very frusterated.

For some people, this strikes them as being unrealistic. But the more I think about it, the more I realize how very realistic it is. There are too many managers who got lucky a few times, and then are desperate not to understand their own success, but just assume they are naturally gifted and get promoted.

Simulations will continue to change our view of learning, and even our view of ourselves.

Computer Games and Classrooms already share one limiting feature

People, such as myself, are advocating a time when classrooms borrow more lessons from computer games. But they already share one, not-so-great similarity. They are both self-referential.

• Doing well within the world of a computer game, be it buying the biggest house or uniting the world, is in itself victory. There is no need to transfer that to the outside world before getting the accolades. And you are not directly better prepared to actually buy a bigger house, or unite the world, for having played the game.
• Similarly, most classrooms are self-referential. Getting the 'A' does not mean that you were successful outside the classroom, just inside.

Now in both cases, there may be correlations. The 'A" student and great gamer might be better able to get and perform complex jobs. And in the case of the 'A" students, they can stay in the self-referential academic world indefinitely, eventually getting tenure. But there is also the opportunity to 'game' the systems, building skills sets that actually hurt the opportunity for success outside the enclosed environments.

With all of that as background, I found these ideas on massively multi-player online role playing games (thanks, Kevin Kruse for sending it to me) very interesting. There are at least two parts to it. One is what happens when games have consequences outside the self-reference. The second is, how can gamers, like our life-long academics, never leave the self-reference and do quite well.

Still, with the exception of a few monks, the vast majority of us are going to have to transfer skills, knowledge, and perspectives between these various walled gardens. Smoothing those transitions are both quite difficult and, I suspect, world-changing.

Learning to Control our Moods

In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, author Philip Dick imagined a society where people regularly took drugs to change their mood.

The only two pills I personally take are vitamins and the occasional Tylenol. I love my morning coffee, enjoy a dose of chocolate every couple of days, and probably have one alcoholic drink a month, on average.

But I realize that I am increasingly using my Ipod (with no music, mind you, just podcasts) as my personal mood regulator. I listen to IT Conversations when I want to build a healthy motivation and "white collar" work level, including driving to a meeting. I listen to political commentary when I want to physically rev myself up, say when doing yard work. And I listen to movie reviews at the end of the day to wind down.

I noticed a similar trend in myself when I started organizing Internet bookmarks/favorites by day of the week. Some clicks were better for Monday, and others for Friday or Saturday.

I believe this kind of mood awareness/engineering may become increasingly relevant for both deploying personalized learning programs and even planning formal learning events.

Criticizing the person versus criticizing the idea

One aspect of Virtual Leader that I have liked is that it forces players to differentiate between criticizing ideas and criticizing the people who sponsor them.

And yet, the exact mixture of the two provides a lot of additional information as to how raw, even how religious, the conversation is getting.

A post I made on schools and business hating each other definitely hit a bit of a nerve with some people outside our community, posting in.

But no topic raises such primal emotions as talking about post-literacy. The very idea that books are "just" a technology, three steps forward and one step back (my own working definition of any technology), strikes some people as blasphemous. It comes off as anti-book, as if being pro-automobile is the same as being anti-walking. One friend asked me not to use the phrase around her.

We are going to have to begin talking about post-literacy. The irony is that as we explore the topic, our love for reading and writing will become more heightened, not less.

Flow

Dutch composer Simeon ten Holt wrote Canto Ostinato (mp3 file) for various instruments and flexible duration. Ten Holt uses repetition and minimalist permutations to create an original, evolving work with ever-shifting moments. These parts are woven together into an overlapping and flowing whole.

One popular arrangement is to have three or four pianos facing each other in the center of a room, and normally, unlike conventional performances, the audience is allowed to move and surround the performers as they play.





Canto Ostinato has 106 figures or parts and the players themselves, decide on the stage, how many times they repeat each section, etc. Ten Holt has said, "that what happens on-stage is like you're looking at an object from different angles, and the object is changed by the input people put into it. If you look at an object from above or below, it's still the same object, but the colours are different, the shapes are different, and that's what happens on-stage. So the players' input is very important."

Canto Ostinato has become a metaphor for a new approach to design (Thackara, 2005). The composer, score, musicians, stage, and audience all interact in subtle, yet complex ways. Neither the musicians or the audience knows exactly what will happen next as the arrangement is quite flexible. But they are not flying blindly as there are principles and to a point, a score. Thus, the situation itself, in a sense, becomes designed.

Flows are not just one element of social organization, they are the expression of the processes dominating our economic, social and symbolic life - Manual Castells in The Rise of Network Society.

Notice how this relates to performance management. There is a space of flows in each performance situation -- techniques, technologies, information, sounds, symbols, people, and the performance itself. Yet, like the Canto Ostinato, while there is a score (goal or blueprint); life unfolds anew, thus, each situation basically designs itself.

Fredick Taylor's Scientific Management tried to freeze the performance and then totally script it. While Taylor's method focused primarily on the process itself, flow is more about helping people to develop so that they can perform. The manager becomes more like Ten Holt in that he or she givers her players a score to follow and conducts them, while at the same time giving them the freedom so that the situation is allowed to design itself, rather than just becoming a carbon copy. Thus, rather than just simply following a script, interaction becomes a major part of the performance.

Reference
1. Arrangement (mp3 file) by Jeroen Van Veen

Evaluation of Formal Learning Programs is a marketing activity

One should not evaluate a formal learning program to justify that the money and time were well spent. One should evaluate a formal learning program to get resources for the next program.

If there is a "level 6" evaluation of a training program, it is, "did it lead to growth of the training program/growth of the training group/promotion of the sponsor?" If not, all other metrics are irrelevant.

Of course lessons learned should make the next program (the X+1 program) better. But the driver of those improvements is to get an even better evaluation of X+1 than of X, so that selling the X+2 program is easier.

There are those who view marketing as selective truth telling at best and lying at worst. That is too bad, because ultimately marketing is evolving the premise for a sustainable vendor relationship. It involves as much listening as talking.

Credibility is hugely important, therefore. Honesty is a sine que non of any sustainable brand. But the culture of the group has to be growth through success, not just introspection. Evaluations should be done looking forward and outward, not backwards and inward.

How effective is your learning evaluation?

The evaluation of training is too important to be left to trainers.

At the individual intervention level, at the strategic enterprise level, and at all points inbetween, the quality assurance processes applied to formal learning initiatives in most organizations are, in my experience, rudimentary at best.

Training departments are usually stretched thin, and don’t have the time or resources to do a “proper” quality assurance job at either the course level or at the aggregate departmental level. Implementing a regimen that elevates the strategic importance of evaluation (across all levels) and places it on a more professional level will do two vital things. It will improve significantly the effectiveness and efficiency of all learning activities; and it will save a tremendous amount of unnecessary, un-useful, or redundant work.

My fear is that with the advent of LMS-based evaluation and record-keeping, the information we have about the quality of our learning activities is becoming more narrowly focused, and its usefulness is becoming further diluted. Just as LMS functionality tends to constrain the nature of our design of instruction, it constrains the nature of our inquiry into its impact.

I’d like to see more training departments creating evaluation units and staffing them with a trained expert or two who can help get past the simplistic "smile-sheet & ROI" approach and start building systems that put the important issues on the dashboards of individual trainers, instructional designers, and senior learning managers.

Short Essay Question (worth 20 points)

In a fictitious Fortune 1000 organization, there is a 20-person group dedicated to managing real estate assets. Seven of the people were chosen to take a two-day, off-site course on negotiating, which all but one attended.

Questions:

• How do you think the members of the team felt who went to the training?
• How do you think the members of the team felt who did not?
• What does this say about the perception of training?
• Is this situation a good one or bad one for the organization?
• Could/does this situation happen in your organization?

You have five minutes to respond.

24 Questions about computer games and education

1. Are computer games inherently counter-cultural?
2. Are some computer games bad for children?
3. Do computer games herald a revolution in education?
4. For a given curricula, where would one ideally use books? Where would one ideally use computer games/educational simulations? Given educational objectives, how do you support them with computer games/educational simulations?
5. How can computer games/educational simulations augment existing curricula; inspire new curricula? Do computer games/educational simulations increase the types of content that can be learned formally?
6. How can modding be used to better use existing computer games in formal learning programs?
7. How can teachers/professors/trainers use existing computer games (as is) in formal learning programs?
8. How can you create a marketplace for educational simulations?
9. How do you create a computer game for education?
10. How do you measure the effectiveness of computer games/educational simulations?
11. How do you use a computer game structure to capture and model expert behavior? What then has to happen to make it an educational simulation?
12. How does someone who grew up playing computer games learn differently than someone who did not?
13. How much should an educational simulation cost? To build? To buy?
14. Should educational simulations be fun, the way that a computer game is fun?
15. What are educationally relevant artifacts from computer games/educational simulations?
16. What does one learn from a computer game? What does someone learn from Civilization III? Grand Theft Auto? What are the new frameworks/vocabularies needed to talk about this new content?
17. What is the impact of looking at computer game genres, as opposed to computer games? Do we need new genres for education, or are existing computer game genres sufficient?
18. What is the relationship between production values and effectiveness?
19. What should a professor do about computer games? What are early steps? What are later steps?
20. What toolkits exist for an e-learning developer to quickly and cost-effectively make an educational game?
21. When should an educational simulation be single-player/multiplayer/massively multi-player?
22. Which computer games today are appropriate for formal learning programs?
23. Which computer games today are worthwhile from an instructional/liberal arts perspective?
24. Will educational simulations be to computer games what documentaries are to movies?

Brainstorm: The New Curriculum for E-Learning Developers

I have a question for this community. If you were a university offering an advanced degree in Instructional Technology, what are the tools (not philosophies) you would strongly urge your students to learn?

Digital Tools / Paper Mindsets

Someone, perhaps unwisely, gave me keys to this blog and asked me to write. We'll see how long it lasts...

For this first post are some long held observations on the use of communications technology. We know and see people spending a majority of their workday, or just walking around town, plus what they do at home, in front of the computer, the cell phone, the blackberry-- immersed in digital tools. However, it sure seems we still think in a paper mindset. Think about our terminology. We read web pages. We insert bookmarks to remember pages. Heck, I am surprised we do not refer to web sites as web books.

Mainly I am thinking of email, both boon and bane of our workday. Sharing information by email in our organization is the expected norm-- and the scourge of spam is bad enough in terms of time and productivity wasters, but also when it is used be well intended people in an inefficient way.

The ones that make me scratch my head are messages that arrive with subject lines like "Tuesday Planning Meeting Agenda" and upon opening the message is no agenda, no message, just an attached Word document. This makes the agenda, essentially text only content, yet one more click, and one more application launch away. And what does one really do with a nicely formatted list of basic bullet points? Print it? When I send agendas, they are right there in the body of the email, readily scanned, right there ins the message.

One of our groups, actually a technology group, has done this for years. But they've recently stepped up the level. They've created a portal for online community building. Oi! So the meeting notice is like, this, "Upcoming meeting. Click here for agenda." I click there. It's certainly a portal like pile of boxes and links. I find the one labeled meetings. I click the link for this month. It's another web page. I click a link that is labeled "agenda". What do I get?

It's the same old Word document. So now the agenda is about 3 clicks and an application launch away. It's what happens when we are stuck in document - paper - print mindsets. It is all about the "page" and not the content.

This was a puny example of a syndrome I have elsewhere labeled email attachment disorder. Beyond Google's gmail, general e-mail is about the worst and most inefficient system for organizing information. Much of the information shared in our system has no permanence beyond what is stuffed into an email. But there is no long term organizational memory or archiving of email, it is rarely widely searchable, and for large media files, it is sent to many more people than will actually view it. It is a paper mindset, stick a copy in everyone's mailbox.

For as long as I've been responsible for our office's online content, I've had to urge, remind, nag to always plan up front that everything we do have some sort of electronic presence, record, etc, especially for those that are unable to participate in our activities. Groups I am responsible for put their agenda up as a URL and filled in later by meeting notes. Our Ocotillo Online Learning Group has held monthly meetings back to 2000, which I know because all meeting notes have been archived, making them potentially searchable and internally linked to relevant content. This is what happens when you think about information in a web mindset, freed from the constraints of single throw away documents.

How about the N-factorial e-mail messages needed for N number of people to plan a meeting? For a different tactic, see Lee LeFever's Common Craft article on Wiki and the Perfect Camping Trip. Now that is using digital tools in a non-paper frame of mind. And it's been done in real life.

This web thinking is playing into our new plans to cease the print publication of a long running journal, which costs our unit thousands of dollars per year plus intense time spent in editing (getting the one off print version perfect), in lieu of a web publication that will, we hope, expand the range and types of content we can publish, plus add features not available in print.

We are trying to break of the proverbial box, which is after all... a paper product.

So what's it like in your organization? How does it organization and archive its processes? e.g. is there organizational memory? Are digital communication tools used to push around electronic bits of paper? Or does it really leverage the power of the digital terrain? Are they thinking digitally?

A Chart of Consolidations (US Centric, E-Learning Centric)

Tools of E-Learning Hacks

This is an odd industry, sometimes a very cruel industry. What amazed me when I first entered it, and what still amazes me today, was the amount of hacks that people generally accepted as experts. There was/is this bizarre premium on volume and intensity over actually well thought-out and/or well-researched and/or deeply intuitive statements.

The framework/snake-oil of many of these hacks is: say something that superficially sounds smart or interesting, but that can't be taken any deeper.

• Any statement that starts something like: The X Myths about e-Learning, Training, Learning, or whatever is always suspect. Most of so-called myths have very little supporters, or are bizarrely vague in and of themselves. i.e. Myth #1: E-Training equals E-Learning, or Myth #2: People only learn in formal training situations.
• Another hack device, one that I have mentioned here before, is invoking every hot new technology. Training/Learning should be more like TiVo, or iPods, or Computer Games, Segways, or Viagra, or GPSs, or whatever. Don't get me wrong: if you are Kurt Squire and just finished your dissertation of actually using the computer game Civilization III in the classroom, I want to hear all about it. But if you just watched your kids playing a racing game on an Xbox, and want to make a sweeeping statement, you don't win visionary points from me.

Anyway, enough of that. I would like to show you how smart I am and tell you why Harvard Business School is doomed. And all of this fancy new technology is a waste as well.

Think about it. Why spend two years of your life, and all of that work and money, to get an advanced degree? The point is to control your life, right? All you really need is an email with tomorrow's winning lottery number. The infrastrucutre is so simple: an email address, which everyone has, and even a very old computer. Text only. You could even get it on your cell phone or pager (that would be m-learning). Or someone could call you and leave a message on the phone and answering machine you already have! And be honest: you may not spend three hours doing all of your homework, but you would definately spend three hours to get to the right store to buy a lottery ticket, right? You would be set for life!

That's the future. Yup, Harvard and all of those other places that just don't get it are doomed.

What is your favorite hack device?

Pop Ups and Spam

Just a quick operational note to everyone.

Apologies to anyone who was subjected to a barrage of pop up advertisements. I have shut down the "Invite or Seduce?" flash poll (the trend was pretty obvious anyway!) because it was this Bravenet tool that was the culprit. Because LCB is entirely volunteer and operates with no financial support we seek out free resources. Unfortunately, most of these come at a price of advertising being pushed through your website. I will continue to work to keep this to as unobstrusive a presense as possible. If you are aware of any free web-based tools which are also advertising free, please let me know.

In addition, if you run across any spam comments, please drop me a quick note by hitting the "email the Blogmeister" link in the sidebar. I found 14 spam comments this morning throughout LCB. Fortunately they were fairly benign in content, but I may have missed 1 or 2. Scouring through the comments in Blogger is not easy.

Thanks everyone! Now I can get back to reading all the great discussions you all have been posting in the last few days! WOW! Keep it up!

Dave
Your humble blogmeister.

Brainstorm: What have been the major e-learning mergers of the last five years?

I have a question for everyone reading this blog. What do you think have been the major e-learning mergers over the last five years? List them by year if you have that information off the top of your head, but the actual merger is more important.

Merger mania in and around eLearning

First, on Monday, WebEx buys intranets.com for $45M in cash (details) then today SumTotal buys Pathlore for $29M in cash (details) and $19M in stock. And then I hear that back on July 27 Premiere Global Services announced that it was buying Netspoke for $23.2M in cash (details).

So a virtual meeting company buys a collaboration company.
A LMS company buys another LMS company.
And a communication services company buys a collaboration company.

Looks like the convergence that Elliott Masie has been talking about taking place is finally happening. Anyone familiar with my posts and company knows that I am a big believer in the power of collaboration (and ideally done to such a level of integration that it results in mentoring not just with 'experts' but also with your peers) so it is heartening to see that finally we are moving past 'simplistic' collaboration (i.e. like stand-alone web meetings) in learning with WebEx+intranets.com and PGS+Netspoke while the fragmented LMS sub-industry is getting so much needed consolidation with SumTotal+Pathlore (and remember that SumTotal is the March 2004 merger of Docent and Click2learn).

All of this comes of the heels of SkillSoft releasing SkillSoft Dialogue, their version of a virtual classroom and NETg buying KnowledgeNet last year for their virtual classroom technology/LMS resulting in their Knowledge Now suite.

Are we finally getting to the point where educational content is merging with collaboration technologies which is merging with learner management infrastructure?

Collaboration is important as it allows learning to become a continuous process and acts as a quality feedback loop while helping to generate new content out of the resulting interactions, all of which sits on top of the learning management system. It has been long neglected in the eLearning industry due to it's complexity (trust me I founded scholars.com and struggled with the scalability of it's mentoring model long after SmartForce bought it) for it has been far easier to manage content objects than collaboration objects. I always said while at SkillSoft/SmartForce/CBT Systems that the value of SkillSoft is not the 5000+ hours of training but the fact that you could potentially tap into the collective knowledge of their 3 million users. Of course the Internet bubble burst and they went back to the tried-and-true model of producing generic content.

Anyway ... sorry for the rant but I have been concerned about the health of the eLearning industry over the last 2 years and I am glad to see this much needed consolidation taking place. Hopefully it will result in some truly innovative stuff versus people scrambling to get into liferafts. Think social networking analysis, workflow learning, collective intelligence, presence awareness, expert locating, communities of knowledge (made up of smaller communities of practice) ...

Or as BusinessWeek recently put it - The Power of Us. If you haven't read their cover story on how mass collaboration is shaking up business you should as they talk about how large scale collaboration has changed the delivery of services like auctions (eBay) and product like books (amazon.com) which makes you think about how mass collaboration could change the sharing of knowledge which until recently has been done on a small scale, typically geographically driven, basis or through static content.

PS - for those that care it is interesting to note that the 2 collaboration acquisitions were basically done at 2x trailing 2004 revenues (Netspoke) and 3x projected 2005 revenue (intranets.com) while the LMS acquisition was done at 2x trailing 2004 revenues (Pathlore). These multiples are indicative that there is a resurgence of interest and hence increased value.

Schools hate businesses, businesses hate schools

As a gross generalization, schools hate business and businesses hate schools.

Let me defend that:

Schools hate business
1. Many academics view any skills that empowers an individual outside of academics as either "vocational" or "turning students into drones of capitalistic societies." (Yet they have no problem rewarding skills that turn students into drones of academic environments.)

I mention teaching subjects like "project management"and"solutions sales" to teachers and they recoil.

2. Professors are even encouraged to downplay their consulting to corporations. Even in b-school environment, what consulting is done, according the school mythology, is prostitution, a pursuit of lucre at the expense of integrity, unless it is done at the board level of a Fortune 500 company.

3. A lot of academics smile when the stock market dives, vindication of both their world view and their own personal career choice.

Businesses hate schools
1. Businesses rail against classrooms, even their own training classes. Corporate people love to complain about training classes. "Classes don't work!" "Training doesn't teach anything." "No one ever learned anything of important in a classroom." Many training books and training professionals love quoting high profile individuals (such as CEO's or brand-name consultants) hacking at classrooms, thinking "beyond the classroom." If you listened to all of them talk, you would assume that employees are spending half of the lives trapped in basement lectures. Most people spend less time in classes than they spend waiting in line at their organization's cafeteria. It reminds me a bit of the supporters of the a flag burning amendment. I wish people wouldn't burn the American flag as much as anyone, but as far as I can tell, there is just not an epidemic of flag burning. And there sure is no epidemic of too much classroom training. The railing is really just posturing.

2. Business people love talking about academic reform. But when a company is performing sub-par, business people don't talk about Xerox reform or corporate reform. They talk about change management, growth, and re-invention. They talk about "taking a short-term profit hit" to "restructure."

3. Even amonst the corporations that do the most training, I have never seen a business sponsor an internal remedial history class, or art class, or literature class, or any kind of liberal arts experience. They say they respect it on a resume, but if you don't arrive with it, they are sure not going to give it to you.

4. And businesses fight hard for tax breaks, which come out of school pockets.

All with a big smile
But both sides hide their animosity reasonably well. The development side of schools want donations from businesses. They talk to parents about preparing students for the future. Businesses want to appear helpful and benevolent and part of the community.

It is only after the love-fest meetings and PR events do the real feelings emerge.

And I believe the friction, the misalignment, this cold war between these two hurts students, hurts our GDP and standard of living, hurts schools, and hurts business.

The Hope of T+D
In our profession, literally of the people reading this blog, lies either the opportunity to bring these two worlds together, or to create a bigger wedge to push them apart. It is an opportunity (and yes, responsibility) that I hope we all consider as we present our ideas, shape our strategies, postore, define ourselves, and invest in and execute our plans.

Innovate's special issue on the role of video game technology in educational settings

Innovate's special issue on the role of video game technology in educational settings is now available.

It features such power-thinkers as Gee and Squire.

I had an opportunity to present a take on what I believe is absolutely necessary for the next step in schools: the 20 simulation genre solution (this is in the second half of the interview), as well as explore throughout the truism "what is taught is governed by what can be taught" and the crippling bias of linear media.

Love it? Hate it? Get it? Let me know.

Why it is hard to trust analysts

I was recently asked to write an endorsement blurb for the back of a book by an author who had made the the same request of at least 19 other industry "experts."

I am assuming no more than five would make it to the back of the book. So if I cared about actually being quoted, I would have to write something amazingly positive. "Sell your children if you have to buy this book and make it your new reason for living. Quote it to friends. Post aphorisms from it on your walls. THIS BOOK WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE ."

This reminded me of when I was at Gartner.

First, reporters would call me and several other respected e-learning analysts. The wanted a projected market-size in billions, and frankly would quote the biggest number. So if you wanted your name to appear in the Wall Street Journal or on ABC news, shoot high.

Second, if you have a beat within any "neutral" media organization, be it for a publication, a broadcast, or as an analyst, you have to compete for resources within your organization. So again, it benefited you to be as inflationary as possible. (And don't get me started about Wall Street!)

I hope the book will be a big success and I am sure I will recommend it personally to clients. But I turned down the author (I turn down over half the books that people ask me to do).

Having said that, I have no doubt the person will get at least five of people to say, "You must buy it now. YOU WILL LOOK BACK AT THE TIME BEFORE YOU READ IT AS A CRUEL CHARACTURE OF LIFE," or something like that.

Creating an environment where the best of the best builders thrive

I have often sung the praise of IT Conversations, which has so many great presentations, and a few duds.

One presentation I both loved and would consider required listening is Paul Graham's presentation on Great Hackers. I had thought, by the title, this would be a piece profiling evil programmers. Instead, it talks about why and how companies attract and keep the best of the best.

One of the key points for me was the need and ability to focus for extended periods of time without being interupted. This speaks against cubicles specifically. But also, it gets to the issues that great producers of IP have to put themselves in the right mood, and that the threat of constant interuption can prevent one from putting oneself in that state of productivity, as well as the reality.

I would greatly value other people's reactions to the presentation.

Why Internal Training Departments can't keep Type-A personalities

I believe training should be one of the most important parts of an organization. Yet training is often (not always) one of the least important (if that is just perception, or reality as well, depends on the organization,). One thing I have tried to understand is why this discrepancy.

One observation I previously posted was that training promotions often lead to career ghettos.

But something that I would like to explore here is the reactiveness of training. Training almost always sweeps up after the parade.

• There is a big crisis, it is studied, it is researched, task forces look at root causes, and THEN training is presented as an answer and implemented.
• A new application is developed, piloted, tested, and THEN training is developed
• Sales people pioneer this great new technique, it is identified, vetted, and THEN training is brought in to scale it up.

This constant lag drives Type-A's batty. Almost all leave the department. Some flee to vendors, but then they still have to deal with the Type-B's who are left in the training department.

It is hard to know how to circumvent this, or even if it should be circumvented. But in understanding the role and profession, it is hard to ignore it much longer.

The "can you learn from computer games" gotcha!

David's comments got me thinking.

There is an emerging argument with which I disagree that goes something like:

"Some of you are saying that computer games teach.
If you say computer games teach, aren't computer games teaching violence?"

My argument back is saying:

• Chess teaches you some general strategy.
• Chess does not teach you how to kill kings.

We all must increasingly look at content through the lenses of linear, systems, and interface/cyclical. The reason is not just that we should think of teaching that type of content, but that we are teaching that type of content. This gets to the whole school issue as well.

Consider:

Every day, in every class, students learn interface/cyclical skills. Again, these are the highly precise skills they learn through constant repetition. Here are some examples of the types of cyclical content that our K-12 experiences have taught, and we refine in corporate classes:

• How to be called by the teacher when you know the answer;
• How not to be called by the teacher when you do not know the answer;
• How to be the first to answer all of the easy questions;
• How and when to ask for extra help to feign interest;
• When to make eye contact when listening to a teacher;
• How to draw in notebook when pretending to take notes;
• How to obtain very good snacks/lunch; and
• How and when to observe classmates without getting caught.

Classes also inadvertently teach students a tremendous amount about the system in which they are. This is where I would like to also quote John Taylor Gatto:

• The first lesson I teach is: “Stay in the class where you belong.”
• The second lesson I teach is for students to turn on and off like a light switch with every new topic.
• The third lesson I teach students is to surrender their will to a predestined chain of command.
• The fourth lesson I teach is that only I determine what curriculum the students will study.
• In lesson five I teach that a student's self-respect should depend on an observer’s measure of his or her worth.
• In lesson six I teach is that every student is being watched.

Until we get a handle on these different content types, we will teach mostly the wrong stuff, even/especially if people test well.

On Being Digital

So first I read about age being a factor in Tom Hoffman's post, Outta My Way Geezer!



Then I see this cool movie by Stephen that he refers to in his post about Moviemaker.

So, here's my movie about the subject of being digital.



So using Moviemaker or another tool that shows you are a digital native, what do you think?

Happy Movie Making,
Donald Clark

How Bill Gates is overhauling High Schools

Over the past few years I have read several articles about the US$30B (that's right, thirty billion) Gates Foundation set up by Bill Gates to fund several key initiatives including improving education and global health. Of course you can do a lot of good with that kind of money and though I have read articles on the foundation it always seem to be more PR oriented than talking about end results. With regard to education Bill is probably best known for his recent speech that contained the quote "America’s high schools are obsolete". However I came across today a very interesting article that specifically talks about how the Foundation is giving out large grants to encourage changes in high schools and uses one high school as a concrete example.

Bill Gates' Guinea Pigs
The Gates Foundation wants to remake American education, and ground zero for their billion-dollar experiment is Mountlake Terrace High School. Results so far? It's been a learning experience.

This notion of creating smaller specialized communities within a high school I think is a very interesting concept (my high school had over 3,000 students) and I wonder what implications it could have for corporate learning and adult education. We keep hearing about how learning is more informal and less formal but high schools struggle with the same sort of challenges we face - high drop out rates, low test scores, one-size-fits-all mentality etc.

How do we balance the notion that for communities "smaller is better" with "the bigger, the better" (see the recent BusinessWeek article The Power Of Us - Mass collaboration on the Internet). How much does it matter anymore what we know versus who we know? Is knowledge disposable? (like water; after learning how to drink you just dip into the well when you need it).

What do you think?
Is the foundation just wasting it's money?
Who cares - this has nothing to do with adult learning!
This is the next generation of workers so we better pay attention

Hit the Comments link below and tell us your thoughts!

Text- The Neglected Media in Multimedia Design

Occasionally we gloss over the basics. Here's a good resource, Usability News, and a good read on single versus multiple column layouts that we can apply to learning and elearning materials.

In summary, the major findings regarding line length, justification, and multi-column displays and online reading have been:

• Longer line lengths generally facilitate faster reading speeds.
• Shorter line lengths result in increased comprehension.
• The optimal number of characters per line is between 45 and 65.
• Paging through online text generally results in better comprehension than scrolling.
• Reading speed is faster for both single and multiple columns, but preference is for multiple short columns.
• Left-justified text is read faster than full-justified text.

From Is Multiple-Column Online Text Better? It Depends! by J. Ryan Baker, full article here: http://psychology.wichita.edu/surl/usabilitynews/72/columns.htm

Apologies about the duplication to readers of my own blog, but I thought this worthy of posting here. Even an immersive VR simulation has been known to start with or include some text.

Online Learning in Higher Education

IRRODL (International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning) has a nice article on the diffusion of online learning into mainstream college offerings. In addition to some very interesting data in their review of the current state of online learning, the authors put forward four variables that their research indicates are key in the adoption of technology for online learning by faculty members:

1. levels of interaction in their online courses (more is better)
   
2. technical support
3. a positive experience in learning and developing their online course
4. the discipline area that they teach

Higher Ed folks, does this research ring true for you? What's your experience with getting faculty to adopt online learning? Everyone else, does there seem to be parallels in your areas?

Esse quam videri

That's Latin for "To be, rather than to seem." It's the state motto of North Carolina, and that's the only way I know that, for I left my Latin studies behind long ago.

If you work for a business, be a business person.

T+D (formerly called Training & Development) is the magazine of ASTD (formerly known as the American Society for Training & Development). The cover story of the last issue tells WLP (workplace learning and performance) professionals that Business Acumen is Priority One.

The article, Build Your Business Acumen, tells us that we WLP professionals "need to think and talk like their internal customers." The article advises readers to understand the business and how it operates, to use business terminology to gain credibility, to recognize business priorities, to create a value proposition, and to advance the learning and performance business agenda. Follow the instructions and you can become an Enabler, trusted by management to help run the business.

This is fine advice but it doesn't go far enough. You can do more than sharpen your business acumen, use management's vocabulary, and position yourself as an understanding, savvy helper. Instead of acting like a business person, why not become one? "Earning a seat at the table" is not enough; you need to be invited back frequently.

If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it's a duck. If a WLP professional looks like a business person, walks like a business person, and talks like a business person, why shouldn't she join a business community of practice and become a business person?

Am I being too subtle? You are paid to help create value, not to train people or design learning environments: those are but the means to an end. Make yourself profitable. Add value. Don't fake it. Just do it.

As Janis Joplin advised, "Don't compromise yourself. You're all you've got." Esse quam videri.

Fireworks are Fabulous!

To our colleagues from the US, the Blog Squad hopes you had an enjoyable and safe Independence Day weekend. To everyone else, don't you just love it when an event calls for fireworks?

Well we're about to launch a number of firsts for Learning Circuits Blog. Some cosmetic like the new masthead for the top of the front page (the fireworks won't be there forever) and some clean up of the screens to finally a nearly complete archive of LCB's history back to April 2002.

I hope you noticed the quote included in the masthead. This thought from The Cluetrain Manifesto is a perfect description of how the members of the the Blog Squad have represented to me what they'd like LCB to become. A place for light hearted buy serious discussions leading to new insights and ways of doing our jobs. And it needs to involve you as well. We're not the "experts who have the crystal ball" regarding eLearning's future. The solution will come in collaboration with verterans of our field as well as the newcomers with new ways of thinking.

A few weeks ago, we added an FAQ and in the next week or so we'll be adding an interactive Blog Squad roster section to the site that will help you get to know the members of the team better.

There's a lot popping here at the Learning Circuits Blog, so forgive the noise. But we just had to shoot off a few fireworks to let you know!

iPods for Learning

Apple has sold over 15 million iPods worldwide and sales are not fading -- 5.3 million were sold in the first quarter of 2005. The iPod has also spawned a major accessory and peripheral boom (e.g. cases, speakers, and radio transmitters).

Unlike a lot of fads, such as the Hula Hoops or Pet Rocks, iPods actually affect behavior. Duke University saw iPods as a teaching tool and gave each incoming freshmen one, however, it recently stopped this practice (almost all of the incoming students already own one anyway). The iPod is no longer just a sound machine for listening to music and podcasts as it now stores photos, notes, and books.

Recently, a communication technologies class at Marymount Manhattan College created audio guides to nine Museum of Modern Art paintings. They're part of a project on how new technology empowers people to break free of traditional media, in this case the museum's own human guides. You can get them free of charge at MOBS.

So, do iPods have any any value in a corporate training setting? For example, could you place an audio and visual guide of your organization on an iPod and send new hires on a "tour" of their own, rather than having them sit through a PowerPoint presentation? Or perhaps record a step-by-step procedure of a task, along with a few picture and/or notes to an iPod and use it as a training device? Or use a podcast as a lecturing device?

Cheers,
Donald Clark

Multi-media elearning...

I'm curious what elearning designers and managers are doing with multimedia. Five years ago, text was the leper of elearning design. Video, games, simulations, and audio were intended to replace, not augment text learning. Clark Aldrich has posted on games and simulations on this forum. What are others doing?

In my recent experience, text seems to be more dominant than ever (and I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing). What has caused the stall of media development? Is it expense? Several years ago our department at Red River College spent hundreds of hours in video design and development in order to expand our reach to geographically dispersed markets. The video has been well used...but not quite for the intended market. On-campus learners are using it to review in-lab presentations. Learners have a way of messing up a designers intentions :).

Unfortunately, I haven't heard much excitement around multi-media elearning lately. The hype is gone. Though I imagine, that somewhere in the bowels of academia and corporate training departments, some really exciting stuff is happening. It's just not surfacing yet...

Dear Blogmeister - June 15, 2005

Hey everyone. One of our readers has a question for the community.

... I have a question for you. I am looking for some examples of
wikis and blogs used in classes (corporate, higher ed or even K-12 ) or in
professional publications or newsletters or the like that are being used
when learning, delivering training or developing training. Not blogs or
wikis about learning or training, but ones that are being used as part of
the process or learning or delivering/developing training. (I did not see
any of these on Learning Circuits and why I am directing this question to
you).

Do you know or resources or sites or links that you could point me to?
Any/all would be great!

Vicki Cerda
VP Programs, Miami ASTD Chapter

Vicki, here are a couple of resource sites that you can start with. There are various listings on each of these sites. In some instances there are community resources (chats, forums, etc.) as well.

edublog awards - the best in educational blogging
educational bloggers network - a great practitioners' site
Xplanazine - a great overall resource site
eSchool News Online - an amazing site focused on k-12 and technology. It's somewhat overwhelming in its scope so I'd suggest you start out in the ed-tech insider section.

I hope these sites and other suggestions that I'm sure will come from the Blog Squad and the LCB community will help you!

Good Luck,
Dave
your humble blogmeister

Workflow learning vs. the "me-focus" culture

The idea of workflow learning is surprisingly controversial. I attended the “Innovations in E-learning” symposium last week, put together by George Mason University, the US Naval Education and Training Command, and the Defence Acquisition University. I was interested in hearing what Jay Cross, Clark Aldrich, Harvey Singh and Ben Watson had to say about workflow learning, collaboration, and simulations, since these are things I have always been passionate about.

Jay’s presentation, as usual, was delightfully challenging, non-linear, evocative, and provocative. But the presentation on “embedded learning” by Michael Littlejohn of IBM astonished me. He provided a well-structured overview of the practical deployment issues of embedded learning. My surprise was not so much at what he said, but that it was being said by IBM. If Big Blue is advocating it, then workflow learning has come a long way, baby.

I did a piece on this on my own blog, and have already had a lot of back-channel skeptical feedback. In all that I have read about workflow learning, I have yet to hear anyone argue that it is not a great idea conceptually, but there are a whole lot of people who can’t believe workflow learning will ever work in practice. They are blinded by their culture.

It reminds me of the mid-to-late 1990s when I was promoting online learning to a resistant training community, who could not believe that anyone would prefer a computer to a classroom, or that any online learning could be as effective as that delivered by a trainer. Many were also desperately afraid of having to re-invent themselves. At the time, my mantra was “it’s warmer on the web,” because I was trying to get through to trainers that online learning was all about connecting people, building communities, mutual mentoring, and sharing experience. To a largely techno-skeptical audience numbed by the self-indulgent atrocities of CD-ROM courses, online learning was never going to fly.

The key that unlocked the e-learning Pandora’s box, unleashing a few gems within a cloud of pestilence, was a culture shift. Corporations started taking for granted ubiquitous desktop computing and internet connections, and started looking to leverage them to improve business processes and cut costs. Trainers started to get as myopically starry-eyed about e-learning as they had about PowerPoint. Workers started to appreciate the need to keep themselves current, valuable, and marketable because it became clear that companies were not going to provide more than the basic essentials. Training vendors saw a need to defend against more tech-savvy competitors, as well as an opportunity to broaden markets and raise margins. Quite a lot of learners had a few good e-learning experiences, mind-sets started shifting from resistance to acceptance, if not enthusiasm, and e-learning was airborne.

Workflow learning requires similar, though probably more dramatic, organizational and personal culture changes. A major prerequisite for workflow learning is a culture that fosters collaboration and sharing, that rewards (rather than punishes) individual support initiatives, that builds a fundamental responsibility for informal coaching and mentoring into every employee’s job description, and that places as much value on time spent helping others perform as it does on time spent performing. Another prerequisite is a widespread personal attitude toward supporting others that values highly the giving of both time and knowledge – two things most workers jealously protect. It's not about the technology or the processes (though of course they are important), because without the individual will and the corporate mandate, the technology will gather dust.

To change corporate culture, you need to demonstrate to senior decision-makers how much money can be made or saved (preferably this quarter) as a result of the proposed change. If they buy into the financial reward, corporations can move mountains. But how do you formalize, in a way that bean-counters will accept, the ROI from something as apparently fuzzy and informal as workflow learning? IBM advocates thinking small and running a pilot. That may be a starting point, but it's not a strategy. Do you need to get conceptual buy-in at CEO level and have a bold shake-up, top-down, in order to achieve any sustainable culture shift? Or do you abdicate and wait for a bottom-up worker-driven evolution that effectively bypasses formal learning systems?

However you do it, without a culture shift away from the "me-focus" that most organizational review/reward systems instill, and toward a "we-focus," workflow learning just ain't going to fly!

Godfrey Parkin

The Power of Us

For anyone who has heard me rant about the power of the Internet being it's ability to connect people together on a scale previously not possible it is invigorating to see that the June 20th US edition of BusinessWeek is all about this topic. The cover story, titled "The Power of Us" is an excellent article about how the Internet can connect all of us in new and exciting ways (there are also some online exclusives like Tour the Collectives of Cyberspace which are well worth checking out).

Continuing this theme of collaboration Sam Adkins wrote an article called "Innovations in Collaboration" for the latest issue of the Chief Learning Officer magazine which is a great indepth review around the state of collaboration for learning (I have known Sam from his early days at Microsoft where he created the Microsoft Online Institute! (my first company, scholars.com, was a founding partner with Microsoft)). I'm happy to see that more and more people are starting to realize that the Internet is more than connecting people to websites, it is about connecting people to people to leverage their existing knowledge so we can learn/work better faster (for anyone following the writings of Jay Cross (blog), this kind of collaborative mentoring is an essential part of his concept of workflow learning (website)).

Of course the challenge is that for collaboration to be effective it needs to be linked back to something, like an underlying event or topic (i.e. something that provokes collaboration versus being just passive). Collaboration for the sake of collaboration just doesn't work anymore (just look at the state of the commerical social networking companies out there). Patti Anklam has it right when she talks about "object-centered sociality" in her blog posting "Linking Out and Looking for Objects". Effective mentoring (rant - collaboration to me is a guy using a nickname to go into an AOL chatroom to talk about essentially nothing; collaborative mentoring is about forming deeper long term relationships where something of value is exchanged) is more than technology, it is focused around optimizing the connections both between users and the collaboration technologies. You need things like eBay's rating system or Amazon.com's feedback forms when you start connecting tens of thousands of people together; the vast majority of whom do not know one another and thus have no context for evaluating interactions (this notion of trust and reputation). Heck, it is about making the whole process scaleable because the value of the network increases exponentially based on the number of using (basically known as the 'network effect') so you need a lot of people in order to get effective knowledge sharing occuring across all types/groups of people.

You think learning objects (i.e. *content* objects) was/is exciting? Wait until this kind of collaboration gets (better) integrated into the process of learning!

What do you think? Is the collaboration in online learning today good enough or do we need to improve it (or does it really matter?)

What do you think?

Clark Aldrich is touring the continent to introduce his new book, Learning by Doing. I've been fortunate to hear him twice in the last month. Talking with diverse people in new places gets Clark thiinking about many issues. He has been sharing them here. Some people think it's great to have a steady stream of intriguing ideas; others consider it undue self-promotion for the book. The Learning Circuits Blogteam has mixed feelings.

What do you think? Leave a comment.

By the way, here's what greeted me this morning on Amazon:

Understanding Systems Content

Anyone who creates formal learning experiences has to understand how something happens in order to present it, to test it, and increasingly to create an environment where people can play/practice in it.

To do this beyond the most simple examples, the next generation of educational content creators are going to have to get good at identifying and building systems. Spreadsheets, STELLA, and some of Forio's tools all are places to practice. Computer games are places to see the results of some interesting systems that others have built.

Just some of the terms that soon should be commonpace are:

• Energy of activation
• Feedback
• Feedback loops
• Negative feedback loops
• Blancing factors
• Delay
• Pendulums
• Noise
• Load balancing
• All-or-nothing activation
• Fuzzy logic
• Throttles
• Butterfly effect
• Geometric growth
• Primary variables
• Secondary and tertiary variables
• Chaos theory
• Rate determining steps
• Calibrating agents
• Nodes and supernodes
• Short-term fixes
• State-based systems

We will have to look at physics and chemistry, engineering, even environmental studies for the right language. This list may seem daunting to some. But I believe it will be second nature to increasingly large numers of instructional designers.

Open Source E-Learning vs. bundled vs. merging vs. stand-alone

There are a lot of e-learning things. LMSs, LCMSs, Virtual Classroom Tools. Online courses on Windows and biology 101 and ethics.

The question used to be, what would be bundled? Would EPSs bundle LMSs? Would IM bundle virtual classrooms.

Then the question is, what will be merged/acquired. Which LMSs and LCMSs will merge? Will content vendors merge with other content, or with tools?

Now there is open source.

How we will do what we want to do is getting increasingly interesting.

A Reading from "Learning By Doing"

If anyone is interested, I read a bit from my new book at Second Life; the 13 minute downloadable MP3 is posted. It gave me a chance to present one of my favorite charts:




It suggests in order to understand "The Humanities" (the wisdom of the people who came before us), one thing you have to understand is business strategies. In order to understand business strategies, one thing you have to understand is personal improvement. And in order to understand personal improvement, one thing you have to look at is what you do everyday.

All of the most important skills/knowledge/wisdom cut across all these layers. Just focusing on one layer is almost always distorting. Most importantly, viewing content as just linear is crippling.

Accepting this view, one might see a unification

• between academics and business,
  
• between what we know and what we do, and
  
• between understanding the past and impacting the future.

Living by Eating

How many times have you or someone you know do something over and over again, yet learn nothing from it? If you are like me, then at least a few times.

On the other hand, Elliot Massie once said something to the effect that if you hand a salesperson a crumpled and smudged fax that explains how to increase her sales and thus increase her commissions, then more than likely, she will learn how to increase her sales. So did she learn by doing? If you call reading "doing" something, then she "learned by doing." If I turn an idea or thought over in my head (reflect) and learn something new, am I'm doing something or am I'm doing nothing?

In the July 23, 2004 edition of Science Journal, it was reported that information is obtained by two means; 1) trial-and-error tactics and 2) watching others. So if we watch someone do something and gain information from this act, did we learn by doing?

So when we say we "learn by doing," what exactly do we mean? Is it the same thing as saying that we "live by eating?" Or does it mean something more specific?

Aldrich Axioms of Resistance to Change in Formal Learning Programs

1. There is a difference between supporters of learning and supporters of e-learning.
2. Every new formal learning technology/approach is judged against a standard that older formal learning technology/approach would fail.
3. It is easier to criticize more/precise content than less/vague content.
4. There is no e-learning that is so cheap that people will not complain about the price; there is no e-learning so brief that people will not complain about the time it takes to consume it.
5. If a formal learning program has six new features and one traditional feature, people will evaluate the program on how the one traditional feature compares to existing programs; Any thing wrong with any part of a program invalidates the entire program.
6. There is no right way of spelling e-Learning.

See you in Second Life Tonight

I will be speaking at the Second Life Future Salon tonight. If you don't know about what I am talking, you owe it to yourself to at least check it out by clicking here.

Full Spectrum Warrior debate

Some people are criticizing the US Army's involvement with the computer game Full Spectrum Warrior. Although I was not involved in any way in the project other than doing a case study for LBD, I take the attacks very personally as attacks on necessary innovation.

The US military had always been good at building accurate simulations around pieces of equipment. The goal of FSW was to develop two new capabilities:

• Using simulations to train softer skills
• Add "game elements" to a simulation to increase voluntary participation.

Both were accomplished in spades. The commercial success of FSW both proved the second point, and also probably served as a great advertisement for the US Military. Further, FSW can be deployed using a $150 off the shelf Xbox, instead of $10 million dedicated hardware (which took some negotiating, as Microsoft loses money with each Xbox sold).

Game elements will always be controversial. Simulations by themselves are really boring. An accurate military simulation would have a soldier standing around, with no action, for days, weeks, or months, before something "happened." Just cutting right to the action is a game element.

Game elements are controversial even when they surround the simulation elements, because they consume resources, but more so when they selectively subvert the accuracy of the simulation, such as making bigger things happen sooner than real life.

Traditionalists will far too quickly damn an entire program for not getting the mix of simulation, game, and pedagogical elements right the first time (the only acceptable sin for them is too much pedagogy). I, for one, support the people willing to take risks.

Simulations, Microcosms, Apprenticeships, and Skunk Works

I wrote a book called Learning By Doing, all about the use of computer simulations in formal learning programs. But in many ways, it should have been called "Learning By Doing Part I."

Other, critical "learning by doing" techniques includes Microcosms, Apprenticeships, and Skunk Works.

Microcosms are small, controlled, comparable, but "real" worlds or projects, such as growing a garden, planning a party, running a meeting, baking a cake.

Apprenticeships are learning from someone with more experience, often in exchange for performing some menial task.

Skunk Works are teams that are trying something that has never been done before, with the goal of getting real feedback from the marketplace or enterprise.

The role of technology in all of these can be transformational, suggesting projects or"matching people up" at the beginning, giving real-time workflow centric advice during, and then tracking results afterwards.

Why I hate speaking to groups of twenty

For years, I have had a pretty significant fear of public speaking. Thankfully, through blood, sweat, and tears, I have been moderately successful at resolving that. For the last several years, I have had the honor and, yes, pleasure of speaking with groups ranging from two people to many thousand.

Here is a curious observation from that.

• I like speaking with three people, because I can customize my material to the very specific needs of the individuals.
• When I speak to hundreds or thousands, the audience seems pretty happy (with the exception of Stephen Downes!) if I can give some useful information and perspectives, and keep them relatively entertained and motivated to go deeper. There is also a lot of energy to tap and play back.

But fifteen to twenty people in an audience is always very, very hard. It is small enough so that people feel that the presentation should be highly customized (like a one:three experience), yet there are always many groups who want to take the conversation in very different directions (high level, low level a, low level b, etc).

I will continue to play with techniques, but for now, twenty is a very lonely number.

The way formal learning ought to be

I was up in St. John's, Newfoundland at the end of last week. There is a lot to love about that part of the world, including the people, the architecture, and the rugged beauty of the land.

What I did not expect to find, however, was a state of the art simulator. But at The Center for Marine Simulation, they have one of the best in in the world. It is for training people who will run a ship, including the captain.

The crew works in an accurate replication of a bridge.

This bridge is about 25 feet wide and about 9 feet deep. This entire bridge rests on a six motion base.

Huge screens show dynamically rendered computer graphics in a complete, 360 ring seen through all of the windows of the bridge.

When you are in the simulation, you feel the rocking of the wave, the impact of the wind, even the chop when you put the boat in reverse. I found myself quickly pacing from one end of the bridge to the other to get a visual fix on an object to reinforce what my radar was showing me.

The formal learning also, of course, includes comprehensive instruction on the front end and debriefs (or after action reviews) on the back end.

One of my mantras has been, the organizations that care the most about training use simulations. You can tell people who built this center really care.

Aligning Training Processes, Tools, and Metrics

I don't know why, but I have been getting a tremendous amount of interest recently in a concept I first put forth a few years ago called Learning Accord.

It suggests that you can rank many aspects of a Formal Learning Program (FLP) from tactical to strategic, including:

• Type of learning material;
• Types of results needed; and
• Processes used.

With this organization, you can accurately predict how well a program will work. The most successful FLP's have a great deal of accord between the material, results, and processes, and the least successful have significant discord. So if you are planning any FLP, I would strongly suggest an early meeting between buyer, builder, and deployer around the issue of accord.

If you are interested in learning more about the idea, use the link above (Learning Accord) or check out the appendix in Learning By Doing. After that, feel free to email me and I can send you a ppt of the charts, including an academic version that has not been published anywhere.

CSTD Fredericton

Well after finally getting my wireless to work I am able to upload some blogging from the Canadian Society for Training and Development (CSTD) conference in Fredericton (links in this post are to my summaries).

Clark Aldrich led off with a talk called Simulations, Computer Games and Pedagogy. It took a long time to get to the point, so he really didn't get inot a lot of detail.

Then, in one of the breakout sessions, Darlene Burt and Darren McKinnon of the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce did a really nice session on the development and deployment of a personalized learning system for customer center staff, New Communication and Information Technologies Emerging in the Workplace. Good, comprehensive presentation that was well organized and didn't skimp on detail.

Good things about the conference so far: good mix of people, and not the same crowd I see at academic conferences. Talked with many people thus far. One good talk. Some interesting displays.

Bad things so far: the Delta Hotel here is declining in quality (room wasn't restocked, no milk for coffee in room service, convenience store closed). No signs at the conference and no rooms listed in the conference schedule - as a result, I missed this afternoon's session, as there were no sessions scheduled for the one room (the lecture theatre) I thought there would be.

One Version of the Future

Per Mindy B's request, here's my version of our future.

I can elaborate a little now. As to a longer focus on workflow learning, we have several members of the LCB Blog Squad who are very involved in such efforts. I'll encourage them to post some of their thoughts. Jay Cross and Tony O'Driscoll laid out a more detailed vision of workflow learning in the February Training.

From a very high overview, I think we'll see changes in what learning interventions are and changes in what the Learning and Development function does.

Supervisors at all levels will be held responsible for the development of their employees. My growth strategy (versus developmental plan) will be focused on building my strengths and will be a matter of public knowledge so my colleagues will be able to help me meet my personal goals while we work together. Employees will be given opportunities to learn whenever, however they need.

Let's say I'm a marketing director with budget responsibility for my department. A week from today there's a meeting to launch the budgeting process for next year's budget. When I logged onto my work portal this morning my tablet PC reminded me of the meeting with to do's from my supervisor's memo. It also has organized last year's budget, my budgeting notes, a guide from finance on corporate budget strategy for this year - with my bosses reactions and directions included.

My system also gives a list of requested initiatives from my notes for meetings with my business partners, industry benchmarking numbers for similar initiatives and a reminder that I never took the training for the forecasting component of our new financial software - with a link to the online training. Outlook has even identified that my staff can meet with me at 3PM on Monday and is holding the time on everyone’s calendars waiting for my approval. Finally, I have my comments regarding budget processes for each of my direct reports culled from our reviews over the past year, L&D’s suggestions for materials to share with each, and coaching tips for me.

To guide the development of interventions that anticipate employee needs, we learning professionals will have to become proficient in systems thinking, business processes, change management and strategic planning. We'll get so close to our business partner that we'll become one of them. Needs analysis will truly be about what is needed and what the best solution(s) is – not the best training solution. Assessment will become focused on helping employees develop self-awareness of what they need to know to execute on their business objectives and pave the way for where they want their careers headed.

You asked who the vendors will be. Some will be the vendors you know today - SumTotal, GeoLearning, SAS, Oracle, etc. But don't be surprised if you're learning business process tools from Hyperion or Verity, synchronous meeting tools from Interwise or Skype, team/community enablement tools from UberGroups or Google and data mining and content management tools from Documentum or Fatwire.

So what do you think Mindy? Are you prepared for the change?

Just Showing up

On my long-term and short-term projects, I am around motivated and talented people.

But a theme has come up when talking to colleagues. A lot of people these days, according to a lot of good sources, are just "showing up. "

They are just showing up to meetings, unprepared.
They are showing up to league basketball games without having done much practice.
They write reports and letters without doing much research.
I have seen sales calls when both sides knew nothing about the other.

If the theme is just "showing up," however, the expectations seem to vary.

Some people still expect to be great. Some people think we will revel in their wondefulness, unprepared as they are.

Others just want to get by. The years of incredible rewards for incredible efforts are over, they think. Why push?

Both have implications for formal learning. But first, let's test the premise. Are people seeing this in their own workplace?

The reality of knowledge work

I installed a wireless home network this weekend, and it was a lot harder than I thought it should have been (three XP computers and a TiVo with new Linksys wireless stuff). I spent over an hour going online, Googling user groups, until I got what I needed to configure everything. The experience was similar to when I got a wide screen television, and had to change not just the user settings, but the accessed-only-by-secret-code factory settings.

The fussy, brittle, politically correct, theorist side of me was indignant at both activities. What about 'Customer satisfaction,' seamless integration,' 'quality assurance,' 'user interface,' blah blah blah?

And yet the rest of me was realizing how old I must sound. "I can't believe I have to go get gasoline for this new-fangled automobile. Why Bessie just needed some grass." Or even, 'why does the hardware store sell me these grass seeds that will need to be mowed once a week?'

So I spent an hour doing knowledge work. Big deal. What was I belly-aching about? Networking software and televisions might get easier over time, but what comes next will require just as much adapting.

It is easy to theorize about learning in the future. It is just a bit harder when it takes up a Saturday afternoon.

On being 85% right...

I remember the first time I was aware of reading a professionally published book and finding a typo. It was a Stephen King novel and I was at summer camp. I found the misspelled word, and even though I knew it was wrong, I reread it again and again, and finally looked it up in a dictionary just to confirm what I already knew.

Today, I almost wish that more words in some of the things I read were misspelled. It would remind me that the author is imperfect, and I should take his or her thoughts in the appropriate light.

This reasoning made me reflect upon some of my own rules for writing.

Rule 1: When describing about the uknown future, shoot for 85% accuracy. Aiming for higher than that makes you boring, and lower than that makes you just another industry hack.

Rule 2: When describing about the present or inevitable future, be specific enough so that it is obvious when you are wrong. This can be embarrassing in the short term, but what learning isn't?

Rule 3: Let people know if you are describing the first or the second.

Globalization depends on an informed and educated citizenry.

When talking and writing about simulations, one fun technique is to take a famous quote and change it just a bit. Here are some:

I made a perfect simulation about growing a company. The only problem is that it takes twenty-five years to play.
—With apologies to Steven Wright

An inexperienced learner is thrown by frustration, but a good learner uses it.
—With apologies to the late actor Carroll O’Conner

High production values that restrict immersion I wouldn’t give a fig for. High production values that open up immersion I would give my career for.
—With apologies to Oliver Wendell Holmes

The genre is the content.
—With apologies to Marshall McLuhan

Globalization depends on an informed and educated citizenry.
—With apologies to Thomas Jefferson

Teach someone a computer game; and you have engaged him for today. Teach someone a computer game genre and you have engaged him for a lifetime.
—With apologies to the old Chinese proverb

See you in New York tonight!

I hope to see some of you at ASTD's famed New York chapter for a presentation and book signing tonight.

Here's the link:

http://www.astdny.org/events.asp



Clark