Today my father died. It wasn’t unexpected, he’d been ready for years, and we’re fortunate that his final demise was relatively quick and painless. He was an interesting guy: born in east Colorado at the edge of the prairie, he grew up with wide open spaces, even spending time as a cowboy (“stupidest job in the world” he used to say, “hard work, low pay, and no girls”).

His dad had a bank that was wiped out by the Depression. My grandfather continued to work until he paid back every single person who’s money he’d lost before he again started settling his own financial future, and this had a great impression on my dad.

Named for his dad, he shared his Dad’s preference for being called by his middle name, Nives (pronounced Neeves). It’s become a family tradition for middle names, shared by me and my first-born son. May it continue.

He had an amazing talent for building and fixing things. He used to build radios and trade them for things like cars. He was a good story-teller, and from what I heard it’s amazing he managed to survive to an age where his youthful temper mellowed and he was able to settle down and have a family. When I knew him he had remarkable patience, certainly with machinery.

He never finished college, but spent time in the war in the Navy (the picture is from his days serving as a tail-gunner in a dive-bomber, the duty he was required to have to balance his time in then-secret radar). After the war he visited his sister in Southern California, and ended up working for Northrop Aircraft for 32 years until he retired.

He migrated to facilities because he knew every sort of engineering: electrical, hydraulic, civil, you name it he knew how it worked and how to plan it, build it, maintain it, and dismantle it. He would stand up to contractors, employees, even management when he was right, and convince them to do it his way.

He avoided management as long as he could; they finally promoted him while he was on vacation, and he ended up with responsibility for the entire mile-long plant in Hawthorne. I hadn’t known him as a leader, but while he had no patience with fools, he was blind to color and background and his employees from Hungarians to Burmese were fiercely loyal. I learned from the notes from his retirement party that he was relentless in ensuring there was justification for requests for facilities services. I got a chuckle from this note: “people learned to disagree with him one way, with respect” (the “one way” was underlined by hand).

After retirement (he left early, when the job wasn’t fun anymore), he traveled the world with my mom. They were quite humble and frugal throughout their lives, and rode in local buses and stayed in the cheapest accommodations in the most interesting places, with new stocks of stories to tell such as camping in tents with lions padding around outside(!).

They greatly valued education; really the only reason to be excused from the dinner table in the middle of the meal was to go look up something in the encyclopedia or the dictionary. We knew we had to try our hardest, but they were happy with whatever the outcome of that was.

When they weren’t traveling he volunteered time doing what he’d always done for almost anyone, fixing things, particularly as a handyman for a local shelter. Tragically, a late diagnosis and botched surgery for Dupuytren’s cost him the use of his hands, and brought to a close his one real passion in life. Subsequent persistent pain and loss of hearing also contributed to his lack of enthusiasm in his last years. Yet he still welcomed a drink, a laugh, and beamed at the sight of his grandkids.

I was always impressed that he maintained his idealism throughout his life, caring about doing the right thing rather than the expedient thing. He was security-oriented, and passed up many chances to do better financially to ensure we were never without food and shelter. He had his flaws, but he was a very good man overall, and I was proud to call him “Dad”. Rest in Peace.

What questions should we be asking? is the Learning Circuits Blog Big Question for the month. Mentioned is a fear that we might not be asking the right question at any particular time.

Perhaps because I’ve just finished reading Verna Allee‘s The Knowledge Evolution (all about systematic levels of knowledge; an insightful book, it even discusses wisdom :), but the core of my responses is the way to ensure you’re asking the right question is to take a level step up and ask if your question fits into the bigger picture.

One of the things I keep seeing is that people are focusing on elearning tactics, while not considering how those tactics fit into a strategy. If you’re asking about how to better support conversations, you should make sure that you’ve got a culture that ensures sharing. If you’re asking about creating portals, you should ensure that your instructional design is up to scratch.

So I guess my short answer is that your first question should be if you know where you’re going, and if you do, you should be asking questions about the next step along the path. If you don’t know where you’re going, it doesn’t matter what you ask!

This video is making the blogspace rounds.   It’s both a fascinating use of the medium (wonder how it’s made), and an insightful way to get your mind around what (portions) of the ‘read/write’ and ‘social’ web is all about.   Think about it from a learning perspective, where a community is sharing their developing understandings, and you can ‘mashup’ (link programmatically) two different information sources to create a new application.   Very cool.

At the TechKnowledge conference (good conference, and a better venue next year I’m sure), I had the honor of being on a panel with my fellow committee members who are some really interesting thinkers around elearning, including Frank Nguyen from American Express, Cris Stewart from Four Seasons, Paul Sparks from Pepperdine University, and ably chaired by Paula Orologas of the Capital Group Companies. We were talking about new trends, and I didn’t think until too late that what I’d like to end with is the trend I don’t hear people talking about but wish they were.

As a bit of context, for one I heard a very interesting talk from Visa about how they were single-sourcing their content, to make their content development more practical and deliver in more ways. I’ve talked before about content models, and here was someone pushing that agenda forward. I subsequently had a conversation with another conference attendee who was taking the idea even further forward. The point being, that if you structure your content you can scaffold (read: support) the development of content, and you can do some powerful things as you’ve semantically tagged the role of the content.

Second, I volunteered for ‘face time’, which allows speakers to volunteer to be available for free 20 minute consultation sessions. In one of those, I talked to a fellow who was developing technical training. In this case, I suggested using mental models as a key. The benefits of mental models are that while they may take longer to develop initially, that’s for one or two uses of the model, and with software that model gets used across many different commands spread across quite a few menus, you’re going to get real power. So, you present several examples of how to do things linking the model to the software interface, and then you have the learner predict how to do several more, using the model. From there, if you’ve done it right, you shouldn’t need more training, learners should be able to predict, from the model, how to do new things. And some ancillary benefits: if you change some of the interface, this shouldn’t be a burden; if a learner forgets a step, they can typically regenerate it. And they can predict how to do new things. It’s because of the relationships in the model tying together the disparate bits.

My hope, then, is that this becomes the year of the model(s). The trend that I’d like to see is more people taking advantage of these powerful ideas, moving beyond procedural and hand-crafted elearning to systemic and systems-thinking based learning support. How about you?

Last week during the TechKnowledge conference (being on the program committee meant I not only had to attend most of it but also organizing meetings, hence the delay in any postings), I had a chance to go to a beer and cheese tasting with some of the leading bloggers (and thinkers) of eLearning, including Tony Karrer, Jay Cross, and Harold Jarche; our host was Jim Javenkoski (naturally, most have already blogged about it).

Several things are of interest here, but of course let me start with the beer. Jim works for Unibroue, which is a premium Canadian brewer with a line of Belgian-inspired beers (they stole their brewer from Chimay, probably the leading Belgian beer maker). For those who don‘t know, there‘re bottom-fermenting lagers (some of the best are the Eastern European like Pilsner Urquell), and top-fermenting ales (e.g. most of the British classics), and then all sorts of variations. The Belgians are ales, but they really push the flavor limits with not only clever variations on the basic grains, hops, and yeasts (besides water, the basics of beer), but also spices, fruits, and more.

The tasting was about beer and food combinations, and on my flight to New Jersey (I‘m here on client work) the inflight magazine had an article on beer and food combinations. According to them, such pairings are the newest rage. How last week; before our tasting, Jim had been running beer and chocolate tastings! A number of places cook with beer and then serve with beer, and I‘ve been a fan for yonks. When I lived in Australia I made my own beer, as the usual stuff was too expensive and not good enough, though better than the average American swill (America does have some really good craft brews, however). So it‘s not news to me, but I‘m thrilled if the word gets out about good beer and good food (which has to result in more of both).

So what‘s this got to do with learning? Jay expands on his “the best learning technology is conversation” by saying the second best learning technology is beer to support the conversation. Which may be perceived as a ‘bloke’y thing to do, but a) the new beers are very much for the discerning palate (my mother-in-law is into good beer!), and b) wine or cocktails will do as nice (ok, there’s some concern that cocktails could too quickly lead you beyond reasonable conversation). Pick your poison, er, social lubricant (properly applied, of course).

We did have some amazing conversation. And, with blogging, the conversation goes on beyond the face-to-face conversation, and will rope back around again the next time we get together.

One on one mentoring is the best learning situation at the bottom of the learning curve. However, a cost-effective alternative, when someone‘s a novice, is to address the foundational knowledge (the ‘received wisdom’) asynchronously, or in other forms of courses (though they should be wrapped with conversation, to develop the later ability to collaborate). But when you‘re into the realms of expertise, negotiating shared understanding with your peers is the way knowledge advances. Good conversations are the key to advanced learning, however mediated.

Lisa Neal over at eLearnMag has got a number of top elearning folks to make their predictions for the industry in 2007. Since she didn’t include me (she’s promised to next year ;), I’ll lob my own here.

I think gaming’s crossed over to the mainstream, whether you call it Serious Games, Immersive Learning Simulations, or what have you. More tools are supporting at least the level of Branching Scenarios (Captivate, SimWriter, SmartBuilder, to name a few). Coupled with the eLearning Guild‘s forthcoming report on the topic, I expect by the end of the year there will be quite a few more in place or under development. And I expect thinking through when to use them will have an impact on the quality of the instructional design overall.

I also (finally) see the mobile movement making strides. I’m not sure the average training group really gets the potential yet, but I’m hoping it will cross the chasm this year, and predicting we’ll have several more really great examples. Unfortunately, I don’t see Apple opening up the iPod or the new iPhone to allow us to put learning apps on there, but the tools to use mobile phones and smartphones as learning augments, not elearning lite(tm), are becoming practical and able to link back to LMS/LCMS’.

Finally, I expect to see more strategic approaches to using technology to augment performance, stepping through a richer focus including performance support with job aids (ala Allison Rossett’s new book), eCommunity, single-sourcing, and informal learning. While I think this will be more idiosyncratic than systemic, I think the beginning of the wave will be seen.

I do hope it’s a great year for one and all, and the best yet for using technology to really impact our ability to innovate, solve problems, and make the world a better place.

Sorry I haven’t been posting, but my (reasonably short) paper on Learning Wisdom has been this week’s topic of discussion over at ITFORUM. ITFORUM’s a group of largely university-based faculty and staff in instructional technology, but the regulars are people who are quite knowledgeable about learning, technology, and the cultural constraints around them. My paper this week was the second one I’ve written for them; the first appeared 10 years ago, and was the basis of my book Engaging Learning.

In this paper, I’m asking questions about what is wisdom, how you could teach it, what a wise curriculum and pedagogy would be, and how technology might facilitate wisdom. Though admittedly few, there have been great contributions from around the world, with thoughts on whether you can assess wisdom, what elements might contribute, and more.

It’s clear that the issue is striking a chord, but it’s also a ‘hard problem’, as came up in an earlier discussion on the topic. Still, it’s my personal mission, and I’m sticking with it.

Last night I addressed the local chapter of ASTD on the topic of instructional design for how people really learn. It’s very much like the article I did for eLearnMag on improved ID, and the interesting thing is how valuable people felt it was.

Despite the warm and fuzzies for me, it’s actually kind of scary that it was that valuable. I’ve heard that people are executing ID by rote without really understanding it, and I know I’ve seen way too many examples of eLearning that didn’t really seem to get what the point of the learning elements are. Still, it’s a revelation.

I recall seeing some of the award winners from the various self-appointed bodies to anoint those who pony up the cash to compete, and thinking that behind the polish, there wasn’t solid learning design there. I’m going to get a chance to speak again about this (among other things) at the eLearning Guild’s always excellent conference, the Annual Gathering, but I realize that there’s a good reason why eLearning’s getting bad press. We deserve it!

It’s not rocket science, but there is science behind it, and we’ve got to stop following the cookie cutter that says we have to have: an introduction, concept, examples, practice, etc, without understanding why they’re there!

So, please, make sure you know why you’re doing it, and how it fits in a learning experience. To paraphrase Dorothy Parker, you can drag learners to learning, but you can’t make them think.

And moreover, when you think about our real goals for learning: retention over time until an appropriate opportunity, and transfer to all appropriate situations, we need to use what’s known about achieving these: cleverly, flexibly, efficiently. After all, respecting our learners has to be one of our goals, and being respectful of their time by making our learning maximally effective is one of the things we should feel duty-bound to do.

Ok, so the Learning Circuits Blog has their January Big Question out. I wonder where they get these? Are they solicited from questions real users have? That’d be cool. The reason I ask is this one seems like a no-brainer…

The question is: What are the trade offs between quality learning programs and rapid e-learning and how do you decide?

Actually, the short answer to the latter is which one will cost you less ;). If we think that by informing our learners of the reasoning and the change they’ll be able to make the change, we don’t need a full course. If we think that we’ll need to inform our learners of the change and then given them considerable practice to address reliable misconceptions in execution and hone their abilities before they won’t make mistakes that cost dollars and lives, we’ll need quality learning.

Which, of course, informs you of the tradeoffs. Quality learning costs more, but delivers reliable change. Rapid learning costs less, and works if you have compliant or expert learners who only need an information update to change their behaviors.

The point is that we need to be looking at a broader space of solutions than just elearning courses. If we move to a performance focus, we’ll see that there are times where just an update of how things have changed is sufficient, or we only need to change the references or job aids, and sometimes we have a need for a major change to skill set.

From my message to Training Magazine this morning:

Imagine my surprise when I received an automated phone call at 9:45 PM (Pacific Time!) from Training Magazine with some NASCAR person trumpeting something which I now realize was this new promotion. Imagine my anger as I smashed down the phone after being disturbed that late by a machine from an organization I thought was reputable.

I don’t know what sort of caffeine-fueled sleep-deprived marketing drone thought auto-phone calls about this at *any* time, let alone late at night, would be a good idea, but I would very much like to suggest the contrary.

Please put me on your ‘do not call’ list for all such ham-fisted marketing campaigns. I’m always happy to talk to the pleasant folks at VNU who coordinate my presentations at events like Training 2007, but having a machine interrupt my evening is an experience I’d like to never have happen again.

Need I say more?