The Genetic Differences Between Games and Instructional Design (Clark Quinn Beats Me to the Punch)

Darn Clark! And here I was going to spring this same post. Anyway, since you already spilled it, I want to follow and extend a bit.

What Clark posted was a little re-cap of part of the keynote that Nintendo president, Satoru Iwata delivered to a packed house at this year's Game Developers Conference. I'll say that I was in the audience that packed the San Jose Civic Auditorium (we were actually 2-3 deep standing around the top and some were left outside - the capacity is slightly over 3,000). Let me just say - the dude was ON! Forget the problems of english not being a first language - Iwata was engaging, funny, personable and darned interesting.

Clark, in his post, points to a section of Iwata's speech in which he (Iwata) lays out the "Four I's" that Nintendo uses as game development standards. They are:

"First, is it truly innovative - something different from what has come before? Second, is it intuitive? Do the control of the game and the direction of gameplay seem natural? Third, is it inviting? Do you want to spend time in this world? And finally, how does it measure up in terms of interface? Can the player connect in new ways?"

Here is what I want. Quick - someone start talking to me about how these are not valid design considerations for learning. Start telling me about how what we do is serious and this stuff is just frivolous, meaningless - dare I say the "F" word? Fun? Tell me about constraints. Tell me how learning is different from gaming. Tell me about how so much of our thinking about learning is calcified and how we as an industry seem to have lost the ability to think within frameworks such as this. Someone tell me how putting the "next" button in the lower right-hand corner (oohhh maybe with rounded edges instead of square ones) is inviting, intuitive, innovative or considers the user as a requirements generator in the design of the interface at all!

I swear I think I know what it is - and the news is both good and bad. The good news is that's its not really our fault - phew - as instructional designers, we were just born like this. Like color blindness or being tone deaf- our handicap doesn't prevent us from functioning in the world - just from perceiving it clearly. The bad news is that its genetic - this goes to our core and it reveals the shocking fact that gaming and instructional design (note: I did NOT say learning) come from two distinct evolutionary branches.

Gaming comes from play and art and music  - from a creative place. Where does instructional design come from? There are a few probable fathers but chief amongst them is World War 2. The real drivers were the need for effeciency and effectiveness. Not exactly the most forgiving or indulgent of parents. So now we come to present day and shocker!...processes derived from a need to have a conscript military force rapidly trained in set patterns...are breaking down in the face of generational and technological changes that were never anticipated or dreamt of at the dawn of ISD (at least not by instructional designers).

So we have a practice, a set of ways of knowing what to do, that are radically unable to keep pace (and its getting worse) and all we can seem to talk about is how to generate templates faster. We need to be talking about gene therapy; about some radical treatments that can save the best values of ISD and yet jettison - in some wholesale fashion - the outdated and outmoded ways of thinking about humans and how they learn (but that's really not what we think about is it?).

What is the answer? I don't know. I know enough to listen though when a man speaks who has a set of design principles flexible enough to produce both Super Mario Kart and Brain Age. Let's stretch people...left leg...on three....

Let's Talk Some Serious Numbers

OK. So I just got back from a week in San Jose at the Serious Games Summit / Game Developers Conference. I have a lot to post about things I saw/heard there and I'll probably split the postings between here and my blog. I did want to throw these numbers out though as a discussion starter...they are from Philip Rosedale, CEO and Founder of Linden Lab 'ne Second Life.

• Number of residents: 166,000+
• Number of ongoing educational or 'Serious' research projects: 100+
• Size of Second Life: 32,000 acres (bigger than Boston)
• Amount of real world currency (in US$) traded annually for goods and services (i.e. paid between residents): $160,000,000 (yes, that's million)
• Number of user-created objects: 10 million
• Size of user-created data: 10 TBytes (yes, that's a T)
• Number of unique items sold/traded monthly: 230,000
• Number of events per day: approx. 500
• 43% percent female
• 25% non-US

Keep in mind - Second Life is NOT a game - it is a platform.

BusinessWeek piece on Serious Games

In case you are interested, here is a link to BusinessWeek's new piece on serious games used in corporations.

Take a look at the screen shots through the context of Situational Awareness.

Gaming Classrooms

When showing a great simulation to an instructor, I often get back the following response.

"It seems like students could game this." Then the instructor leans back, smiling triumphantly, as if having delivered the killing blow.

"Well, the simulation represents about 15 hours of student time. Sure, if they wanted to put in an additional 15 or 20 hours, they could probably get a better score not on their successful integration of productive knowledge, but on finding the cracks in the scoring algorithm and level design." I reply. "But that would almost necessarily come after they learned quite a bit."

The instructor shakes his or her head. "The whole gaming thing troubles me. We need to have a higher level of integrity in any kind of grading or scoring."

Here, for the first time anywhere, is what I really want to say:

"Listen. I have been gaming classrooms for my entire life in order to get better evaluations, comments, grades, or certification scores. I have been dressing appropriately, feigning interest in topics that bore me beyond belief, cramming for tests in a way where my command of the information has a half life of hours desperately hoping that I forget the information moments after I write it down not moments before, skimming tangential sources to ask the one question that makes me seem much more knowledgeable than I really am, interviewing past students to see what will be on the test, playing back what the instructor said without understanding it at all, and pretending to take notes when I am really designing a biosphere in the margin. You want to talk about gaming? What do you think all of your students are doing all of the time?"

On the Sublimity of Practice

I am writing up an article on the nine paradoxes of educational simulations for T+D magazine.

When talking about my personal favorite, number four, I had two comments I just couldn't wait to share.

Jake Stahl, Director, Client Systems Delivery, Purdue Pharma, “If Joe Montana said to me that throwing a football is simple, I would agree that from his perspective it is. But can he explain to me in words how to do it, or does he need to show me? Once he shows me, do I now know, or do I need to practice? Once I practice, have I perfected it or do I need to fine tune?”

To Jake's comment, SimuLearn's Ken Kupersmith added, "And, finally when is my skill good enough, or should I always be striving for improvement. Even professional baseball players have a spring training every year to practice and improve, and often they have practice during the season when they do not schedule a game."

So often, formal learning seems like a desperate chase to cover as much ground as possible, inevitably at the expense of depth. We love long lists of learning objectives"covered." But the real magic might be in "learning" less but practicing more.

I need your advice on learning profiles

full disclosure - As some of you may know, I joined Thomson NETg in January to run one of their strategic business units called Collaboration (essentially what was KnowledgeNet whom they acquired in late 2004).

Very exciting (at least to me) but what I need is your feedback on a tool that Thomson NETg developed which I think is a hidden gem. By answering 25 online questions it builds a high-level personalized learning profile (for overall learning not just eLearning). I took it and found it to be very useful plus there is little marketing or promotional BS.

A sample question is:
When you get to work on Monday morning, you discover that, over the weekend, a new phone system was installed in your company. The first thing you need to do is to set up your voice mail for the first time. All employees have been given a short manual about the new system.What do you think you would do?
• I would read the manual, then attempt to set up my voice mail.
• I would start setting up my voice mail and never refer to the manual.
• I would start setting up my voice mail and refer to the manual only if necessary.
• I would ask someone else for help before attempting to set up my voice mail.

Knowing that many of you are experts in this field I would really appreciate it if you could look at it and post your feedback in the comments below. Is this useful or just cleverly cloaked marketing?
http://learningprofile.netglearning.com

There is also a good document that goes into the educational theory behind the tool but is more self-promotional:
http://www.netg.com/pdf/NETg_WhitePaper_Profiling_the_Adult_Learner.pdf

Thanks,
Ben

If you get prompted for some reason to login to see this stuff just use my email address ben[dot]watson[at]thomson[dot]com

"Research" as Pawn to Support the Status Quo

I love research, maybe a bit too much. I love measuring effectiveness. I love making sense of chaos that enables predictability. I love presenting hard evidence.

And yet...

And yet the phrase "we need to do research" more often than not is a code phrase for, "we just don't want to move ahead" without having to justify the action, or to appear in favor of something while trashing it. When George W. Bush, early in his presidency, said that he wanted to study global warming, he did not mean "I really want to act on this; let's make it a priority to understand the exact nature of the problem so that we can apply comprehensive yet targeted solutions," what he meant was, "I don't want to deal with it."

Our industry seems addicted to this best of all excuses, both because it plays to a supposed strength (we are smart people who like talking about using our brains and employing a rigorous process), and our weakness (we hate pulling the trigger).

kowabunga dude!

i just had the experience that i'm sure happens to many of us.  i was reunited with a long lost favorite website. the collaborative learning environments sourcebook was one of the first resources i use when i began learning about communities of practice.  unfortunately somewhere along the way i "lost" my bookmark for it.  (thus the power of bookmarking services like blinklist, de.licio.us, and the like.)


but what struck me as worth blogging about was that i rediscovered this resource through practicing one of the first forms of informal learning that the internet spawned - web surfing.  back in the barbaric dark ages of web 1.0 before rss, news aggregators, blogrolls, technorati tags and folksonomies, most "webbies" would wander around from site to site, following whatever link caught their imagination. 

today the web is about finding information you "know" is there and thus tools from google to tags to rss feeds are created to help you pinpoint what you need to find as quickly as possible.  but back in the day, the internet was still evolving.  you really had no idea what you might find.  there was even a time when browsers didn't have book marks. (i recall having a legal pad with urls scribbled on page after page.)  so you would just sign on, log into a site you knew had some interesting links, pick one and off you would go, surfing from one site to another.  it was like a scavenger hunt every time you went on the net. 

my favorite discoveries back then include a site called "the big red button" where fellow surfers would leave their impressions of their experience having found the big red button (it was picture of a big red button. it didn't do anything. but thousands of people left notes.) and another site which stripped the captions off family circus cartoons and visitors wrote their own captions - most too off color to repeat here.

now don't get the wrong idea, if i'm trying to get a project done and need information or just trying to stay up on the latest in our profession, i'm very happy to use my rss feeds and google to get the job done fast.  but i realized that i've kept my web surfing skills up and i use them regularly to just discover new things.  just to explore and learn.

then i wondered, i never hear anyone talk about surfing the web anymore. 

am i the only one still practicing this ancient craft?  do you secretly sneak off to you computer at work to hang ten hoping to find a site with a wicked cool design that blows you away?  or a site for radical environmentalists in southeastern oregon seeking to protect beavers' rights to dam any river they want?   or a gnarly site with pictures from a berlin burlesque show?

over on eelearning i've posted a flash poll. pop on over there and let me know if you've totally co-opted to the web 2.0 thang, or if you still are with it and get stoked lookin' to catch the big one.  if you have some rad stories to lay on us of your surfin' days, it'd be so chill if you'd lay it out in a comment below.   



hang loose dudes and dudettes!

JayFeeds - a corporate learning aggregator

Stephen Downes' Edu-RSS had been my favorite source of learning & education news for years. Stephen is on hiatus and I am suffering withdrawal pains, so I figured I'd pick up the slack. I've experimented with half a dozen aggregators but have found none to my liking. They are ugly or incapable of dealing with the number of feeds Stephen maintained. I also realized that many of the listings on Edu-RSS held no interest for me or were topics for which I had other sources I liked.

JayFeeds | JayFeeds - River View

JayFeeds is a group of twenty blogs that I enjoy reading. Most focus on corporate learning. Less is more.

Ageless Learner Blog

Connect @ EDUCAUSE

BABSONKNOWLEDGE.ORG

cogdogblog

Communication Nation

Donald Clark Plan B

Edge Perspectives with John Hagel

elearnspace

Harold Jarche

Jane Knight, eLearning Centre

Joho the Blog

Parkin's Lot

Internet Time Blog

InformL Blog

Robin Good's Latest News

Dave Lee's eelearning

The Experience Designer Network

The Learning Circuits Blog

e-Clippings (a division of blogoehlert)

elearningpost

judith meskill.

T+D Blog

Currently running on BozPage, I'll change the URLs here when I find a better aggregator.

Permanent home of JayFeeds

(Bookmark it because the target URL changes periodically.) I'll also put it in the sidebar of Internet Time Blog.

If you don't care for my choice, start a new BozPage and make your own.

This is Your Brain on Poverty

For some time it was believed that animals grew no new neurons in the cortex of their brains upon reaching adulthood -- their fate was basically sealed by their generic nature. This was apparently proved by Pasco Rakix, a neuroscientist. However, Fernando Nottebohm soon found that adult canaries made new neurons when they learn new songs. So Rakic replied that it was only adult mammals who could not grow neurons. But soon afterward, Elizabeth Gould found that rats do. Thus Rakic zeroed in on primates. Gould found them in tree shrews. It was then only higher primates. Gould found them in marmosets. So Rakic finally zeroed it down to old-world primates who could not grow new neurons. Gould then found them in macaques.

Now it is almost certain that all primates, including humans, grow new neurons in response to new experiences, and loose neurons in response to neglect. Thus, with all the determinism built into the initial wiring of our brain, experience with our surrounding environment refines and in some cases rewires that initial wiring.

Along with her discovery, Gould noticed something else -- put the brain under stressful conditions and it starves itself by failing to create new cells. There are severe social implications with this. Environments that are boring, have stressful noises, poverty, etc., have playing fields that are no longer level when compared to enriched environments. The brains that live in impoverished environments never have a chance as poverty and stress are no longer just concepts but are actual parts of a person's anatomy.

Christian Mirescu, one of Gould's post-docs probably said it best, "When a brain is worried, it's just thinking about survival. It isn't interested in investing in new cells for the future."

So how is this impacting us? America has one of the highest childhood poverty rates among rich nations (only Mexico's is higher and they are not really all that rich). As David Berliner writes, "The USA likes to be #1 in everything, and when it comes to the percent of children in poverty among the richest nations in the world, we continue to hold our remarkable status."

Berliner, the Regent's Professor of Education at Arizona State University, started to dig into the data of high-stakes testing and poverty. He discovered that when you take the scores of the poverty-stricken out of the national averages, then the U.S. ranks up there with the best of other nations. Leave them in and we plainly suck -- we are very near the bottom of the heap as compared to other rich nations.

Thus our high poverty rate ensures that our national student test averages remain low. Our answer -- more high-stake testing. In other words, we keep trying to test a disfigured brain, hoping that it will somehow work its way out of poverty and become a productive member of our society. Yet all too often...

Woman hold her head and cry
Cause her son had been shot down in the street and died

Wanna tote guns and shoot dice.
all mah life i've been considered as the worst. lyin' to mah mother even stealin' out her purse
crime after crime
from drugs to extortion
i know my mother wish she got a abortion

Woman hold her head and cry
Cause her son had been shot down in the street and died

From "Hold Ya Head" by the Notorious B.I.G. [featuring Bob Marley]

In the end, poverty becomes both nature and nurture, which helps to ensure that it stays a visious circle.

Reference

THE REINVENTION OF THE SELF - Jonah Lehrer From the FEB/MAR 2006 issue of Seed

Our Impoverished View of Educational Reform - David C. Berliner

Blogs as knowledge management

Blogs are knowledge objects that can make bottom-up (i.e. useful) knowledge management a reality. As you may be aware, I've become a champion of using Web 2.0 technology to upgrade corporate learning and performance. In his Journal of the Hyperlinked Organization (JOHO}, David Weinberger describes the role of blogs inside corporations:

I continue to believe that for many companies the best path to blogging is by using them internally as a knowledge management tool. The dream of KM has been that people will write down what they know. KM regimes, however, have assumed they would have to discipline people into doing that. Blogs entice people to write down what they know and to share it widely. A project blog or a department blog not only surfaces and shares knowledge, it also makes it searchable and archives it. And once a company gets used to internal blogs, it's only natural (if anything about a corporation can be said to be natural) to open up some blogs to trusted customers and partners, bringing them into the intellectual bloodstream of the organization. And then why not open some blogs more widely? Thus companies inch their way into the blogosphere.

Doesn't this make more sense than paying consultants to install some humongous KM system that nobody uses? Shouldn't we be capturing the know-how of front-line workers who actually know how? Why aren't more organizations getting on board with this?

jay

Build a better flipchart and the world will beat a path…

As everyone on this blog knows, I’m eternally searching for a flipchart killer and have never failed to express my disappointment with the trends most of us (including myself) think will:

1. do the job,
2. convince people that it’s sufficiently worthwhile (in terms of functionality) for them to adapt to,
   
3. provide the comfort zone for them to adopt it as their standard landscape.

I have to thank the poster Socinian for drawing my attention to Croquet, which looks to be a key element in the revolution awaiting us. Why? Because in many ways it emulates the flipchart… and even does a bit more! It creates flexible 3D space (potentially the comfort zone, but that will depend to some extent on the use of graphics to create the right atmosphere) and within that space it allows for multiple and varied display opportunities (thus emulating the flipchart), which can be used in classical or non-classical ways. Its peer-to-peer architecture means that actions and activities can be freely initiated and shared, objects and creations can be explored and developed in common. (At least that’s the impression I get from the 90 minute video presentation). It also appears to integrate communication technology in a way that (to my naïve view) will potentially put Breeze and its competitors in the Model-T class. In short, it respects the personality of all the users, whether trainers, facilitators or learners. It also breaks down the limits on the kinds of actions one can engage in during learning sessions, while at the same time highlighting the social dialogue-based nature of all significant knowledge exchange and development, opening up the possibilities for deployment of imagination, initiative and fantasy, and thereby highlighting one of the constraints of “mere” simulation (where the rules are never those of normal human behavior since freedom of initiative is bound by the constraints of the program). And of course it looks nicer than the nicest flipchart.

But if it’s “better” and broader than simulation and other more traditional e-learning modules (from drills to interactive video) and more powerful than a flipchart, it doesn’t invalidate them or cancel them out: it can integrate them into its working space, re-establishing just proportions in a (virtually) human setting and giving them the value they deserve as tools within a process and environment rather than be-all and end-all solutions. As you may surmise, I’m looking forward to seeing Croquet on all our desktops and am beginning to look at ways to harness its power for meeting specific needs.

But for all its breadth Croquet won’t do the whole job, even though it appears to come close. Nobody wants to live their whole life in a 3D graphic environment. Alice herself had other things to do than dream of the world on the other side of the looking glass. Another exciting find that may help define the future is ODEO, an application that allows anyone to use audio for asynchronous dialogue and personal podcasting. It's absolutely simple to use. For me it already provides a viable and effective (though partial) answer to the need for e-coaching, especially in the fields I’m most concerned with: communication skills.

We are (at least for others) our voice. Voice has long been neglected in learning and the arrival of the Web has exaggerated in many ways the domination of the written word, thereby adding to the neglect of voice. (One of the nice things about flipcharts is that they recode talking as writing and therefore require speech input). ODEO – absolutely free of charge – allows anyone to communicate with voice or already recorded audio to selected people (e.g. a group of learners) or to the whole world (podcast) and, in bloglike manner, to allow those who receive the message to reply vocally. It’s asynchronous (in contrast to the totally synchronous Croquet) and therefore makes it possible to create an ongoing and controled vocal dialogue, to plan phases of work and practice. In short, it can be a vital tool in coaching learners on two major fronts: evolution of the expressive personality (social skills and personal image, an unrecognized key to success and even to "good grades") and mastery of domain-linked discourse (the basis of authentic learner output, something that has always been neglected in knowledge-based learning strategies, but which is one of the key outcomes of informal learning).

Our new Web culture is one of sharing discoveries and insights. I was delighted to discover these two initiatives, which are the result of fantastic work by a lot of dedicated, imaginative and talented people. I’m sure there are others. This is an invitation to those who know more about these and similar things to enter the fray and start looking at the real value that’s being created. One of these days I may have to envisage retiring my flipchart!

Homeschooling and the Creative Class

My son Slater was included in this week's BusinessWeek piece on home-schooling. Some nice phrases:,

• vowed he'd never put his kid through the eye-glazing lectures he endured in school
• done by a growing number of creative-class parents
• No longer the bailiwick of religious fundamentalists or neo-hippies looking to go off the cultural grid, homeschooling is a growing trend among the educated elite
• The No. 1 motivation, research shows, is concern about school environments, including negative peer pressure, safety, and drugs. In some circles homeschooling is even attaining a reputation as a secret weapon for Ivy League admission.
• conventional education: a mass-production institution that is failing to adapt. Schools, critics say, are like old industrial assembly lines, churning out conformists who could function well in rote factory jobs or rigid corporate hierarchies but not in New Economy professions that demand innovation and independent thinking

Evolving the formal learning model is incredibly difficult and complicated. Everything needs to change, from curricula to expectations to content providers to role of parents and businesses to teacher training and promotion to lawmakers.

As I have mentioned here, when a SimuLearn team went to China to begin the localization process of Virtual Leader, they were invited as guests of the State by the Ministry of Education, and put up in the same suite that is used for Presidents and other Heads of State.

When thinking about the revolution, I sometimes think that, a la Quality, it will happen overseas first, and then after ten years of economic pounding, the US would be forced to respond. While I still think that is the probably scenerio, movements like this one, and people who are dedicated not at an intellectual level but a lifestyle level, give me hope that it can not only start but also happen at home.

Personalized Learning- Lessons from Tim, Pizza Hut and Betty

Data can help personalization, but data is a means, not an end. I stumbled into a nice reminder of that. Tim Sanders, Leadership Coach at Yahoo delivered an interesting keynote at DigitalNow last year. Follow the link below to learn how the CEO of Pizza Hut and a single customer shared a great experience when he called her.

Tim Sanders - Betty the Pizza Lady (Windows Media, 7 very worthwhile minutes)

How can we data mine the impersonal performance results to create this sort of memorable, high-impact experience for learners?

OK, Now Let's Talk about Me!

Well not about me. Let's talk about Learning Circuits Blog.

In the Learning Circuits Blog Wiki, our current topic of discussion is LCB and its future. We've just finished a year of activity on LCB that saw increased publication by the author team, increased participation by our readers through comments, and a five-fold increase in the number of visitors. So why examine what we are doing and consider changing what we do?


Simply, we're not sure that what we are doing is really serving those we seek to involve. One result of this "self-reflection" might be that we find out, everyone is happy and we shouldn't touch a thing. But we've had indicators that this may not be the case. The author team is struggling to balance LCB and the rest of their obligations and participation by others is sporadic.

Add to this the introduction of new capabilities through new technologies that have enhanced our ability to share and communicate with each other. We've begun to wonder if there isn't a better way.

One of the clear mandates that has come from conversations amongst the Blog Squad is that we need to involve you and the others who come to LCB to read and participate in the discussions held here. After all, this is your blog, your community.

So through this wiki and a soon to be posted survey that you're encouraged to complete, we want to know what you want from LCB. The more participation in this discussion, the better chance we have of making it a dynamic site you'll come to because it enhances you as a professional.

I and the Blog Squad invite you to join us in the LCB Discussion Wiki for a lively dialogue about making LCB a better LCB! When you enter the wiki you will have read only rights. If you would like to add your comments or change anything that appears on the discussion you need to login. You will find a button at the top of the page that reads "log in to edit." (When asked for a user ID and password, enter your name or a screen name for the user ID and "learning" as the password.)

Dave
your humble blogmeister

Honesty, Oprah, and the Formal Learning Industries

The Oprah/James Frey conversation, the Enron trials, even a recent post here got me thinking.

The Formal Learning Industries absolutely requires honesty, for Big Skills and technical ones.

• Honesty in the end-learner.
• Honesty in the subject matter expert.
• Honesty in the creation and delivery of Formal Learning material.
• Honesty in the conversation between program manager and sponsor.

Honesty is more than just not technically telling a lie, although that is a good place to start. Some common recent public dishonesty:

• Stating something that one thinks and hopes to be true as definitely true.
• Not saying something that is highly relevant because the question wasn't asked the right way.

For getting the truth from a SME:

• Zooming in, getting more detail.
• Asking surprising or novel questions.
• Interviewing multiple people, and at multiple times.
• Building a model, like a simulation or even a time line.
• Doing anonymous interviews.
• We love a good story. But if a story sounds too good, too neat, to be true, it probably is.

For getting the truth from end-learners:

• Doing 360s and sharing results before a program.
• Interviewing customers and co-workers.

We are at a time when the truth seems to be constantly under attack, from spammers to advertisers to writers to leaders.

Lack of honesty hurts all industries, but it devastates ours.

Money Motive Can Revitalize Classrooms

Steve Mariotti left his import/export business to become a New York City teacher. He has taught at some the city's worst schools. At first he says he was a horrible teacher who often lost control of his classes.



One day he asked the kids what was wrong with his teaching style. One kid said, "Well, we did it because we can't stand you. You are boring." He replied, "Well was there ever at time when I was a good teacher, when I touched you or taught you something that had any value?" The same young man said, "The only time you really had value to us, to me, was when you told us about your import/export business. And you'd bring ladies shoes in from Agra, India, add $1 on for insurance and freight, take it down to the Lower East Side and sell them for $7, and your income statement would be $126,000," Mariotti recalled.

The student had remembered that story from the beginning of the term. "Here was a guy that had been defined as - as brain-damaged, emotionally upset. People were afraid of him. And he'd re-created in total a Harvard Business School income statement," Mariotti said.

It is not just about the "greed" (making money), but also about a good story that has real impact. People, no matter what age, must see a learning moment as relevent and important. If that teaching or training moment has no real impact on the learners' lives, then why should they bother to remember it? While it may seem logical for one to learn math, our emotions have more much more impact upon us because they personaly inform us as to what is really important in our lives. And good stories, like Mariotti's, work because they are able to draw the learners in, rather than simple tell them something.

Full 20/20 story, to include a short video, at ABC's site.

Report from ASTD TechKnowledge 06

This morning, hundreds of us packed the ballroom of the new Hyatt Regency Colorado Convention Center for the opening of TechKnowledge 06. Incoming ASTD president Kevin Oakes thanked the Rocky Mountain Chapter, advisory boards, hard-working staff, platinum sponsors, silver sponsors, planning committees, and others. Kevin and I go back quite a ways; Oakes Interactive was hawking multimedia training before the Web was invented. If I'm not mistaken, Kevin is the first educational technolgy specialist to lead ASTD.

Elliott Masie took the stage to encourage us to adopt Extreme Learning. We should devote half our time to making incremental improvements in what we've already got, for instance fine-tuning and revamping existing programs. The other 50% should go into things that are dramatically different.

He demonstrated a cool little device that projects a working keyboard on virtually any surface. (Elliott advises you not to use this as a sample of dramatically different thinking unless you want to lose your job.)

What if we started every day with a five-minute learning clip?

Business Week's one-question customer service evaluation: would you recommend this to a friend? Not a bad measure for the training business. Who's going to be first to base a training manager's pay on this?

Elliott described a cardiologists' conference where four large videoscreens are showing surgery live. An expert panel gives advice. The entire audience clicks in answers to questions. The Wisdom of Crowds meets medicine.

Elliott offers a new recruit three hours of face time. She says she'll take a pass, asks if he doesn't have a CD version. "Why would you want a CD instead of a live CEO?" The fearless recruit says, "You don't have a fast-forward button."

Excerpted from Internet Time Blog. Would you like to see more excerpts from other blogs posted to Learning Circuits Blog? Leave a comment.

SimWord of the Day: Throttle

The degree to which we can predictably facilitate in the transfer of Big Skills depends quite a bit on the ability to accurately capture them. If we don't do a better job of capturing them, we will be forever stuck on the training justification infinite-loop.

One reason for some lack of success in transferring big skills is that most of us in the knowledge-capture biz think too much in terms of linear content, and therefore have crippling blind spots. These posts are designed to challenge that.

One critical modeling analogy is the throttle. With a throttle, there is a simple analog relationship between input and output. The harder you press on the gas pedal, the more fuel goes into the engine, and then the faster the car goes (unless you are out of gas, or you hit a tree, you are topping out, or....).

We all use management throttles every day.

• How hard to push the under-performing employee?
• How much funding do we put towards a project?
• How much of our own time do we spend responding to a critical email?
• How active do we want to be on that conference call?
• How hard to push a security initiative?
• How hard to look for nutritious food, versus being content with what is at the buffet table?
• How much do we care about our job?

In capturing domain expertise, the throttle is an input mechanism, and must have a defined relationship to one or more simulation systems.

Part of the SimWord of the Day Series....

Further Beyond the Blog?

Just when you thought it was over, it's BACK!

Well kind of.

We received a email from Jim Belshaw, CEO of the Ndarala Group, a consultancy in Rosebery, Australia. Seems the Australian Higher Education system and training are being assailed much in the same manner as Sam Adkins and David Grebow have done here in the States via LCB.

Ndarala has published a very nice staff paper Special Feature: Is Training Snake Oil? revisiting Sam's Post and the comments that followed. Jim wrote asking permission to affiliate their article with our Beyond the Blog: Snake Oil Revisited. Given the quality of the article I gave him the go ahead to us the Beyond the Blog logo with the article and I'm adding a link to their article to the BtB archive.