I received an email from someone I don’t know this morning who said “I am a fellow blogger in the training and e-learning industry. I thought you would be interested in sharing with your readers…” and proceeded to tell me about a new intiative. The concept wasn’t bad, albeit old, but she somehow forgot to mention that she was married to the co-founder of the thing. In essence it’s a listserv that they have the cheek to want to charge for membership. Heck, you can do the same thing for free in Yahoo groups or any number of places! For example, ITFORUM has been happily running very good listserve on instructional technology for years, and it’s free.

I can’t imagine how this person thought this was a viable approach, essentially insulting the intelligence of the intended audience. The point of the Cluetrain Manifesto was that with the internet, information could be shared more quickly, and credibility would be everything because you’d be found out too quickly otherwise. Well, this person, and this initiative, violate that constraint.

I get grumpy at anyone who sends me those junk letters about so-and-so’s dying wish and hasn’t bothered to check it out with Snopes (the urban legend site) first. Guess this person figured I wouldn’t bother connecting the dots. However, when you’ve been on the internet as long as I have (I did my first elearning project in 1979, back when it was ARPANET), you get skeptical.   My advice, be skeptical, check things out, and beware hype. And if you’re looking for publicity, add value, don’t blow smoke.   Caveat emptor!

Well, it’s been a while, but I was completely off the grid week before last (last week was catching up) as I went with four buddies into the wilds of Yosemite with our lives on our backs. Tents, stoves, clothes, food, even water filters, about 50 pounds to be totally independent for 7 days.

It’s a time to reflect on what’s important, to get back in tune with nature’s rhythms, and time to talk. One of the most interesting learnings is something that I recall from past trips. One of the guys had a business goal he was trying to achieve, and the quality of the discussion while you’re hiking from a meadow up to a high Sierra pass is truly impressive. We covered many options, alternatives, brought up barriers and opportunities, and helped him refine his thinking.

The trip has always been organized by one guy (this was the 20th anniversary trip, though it was only my fourth year), who invites his board member and holds his board meeting during the hike!

I think that when there’s a passion to get something done, setting the circumstances up to take the time to workshop the idea is one of the best steps you can do. And being out in nature is one of the best stimulators of appropriate mind-sets.

Which is, in some sense, obvious, yet too often we don’t allow brainstorming, working together, and making the environment safe and comfortable enough to allow thoughts to pop up even if they’re bad. We know this is good for innovation, yet we too often create an environment with too much pressure, too much competitiveness. This was one of the topics that came out in the Creating A Learning Culture conference, and is reflected in the book. It’s also part of what Creative Mastery does with their clients.

Make sure you apply an atmosphere and context that matches your goals. And get out in nature, both for the pragmatic boon and the spiritual restorative. Remember, we need wildness on our planet!

I had a great conversation with my brother-in-law on Sunday. He’s in charge of the training for a division of a sector of a major organization. He took over a group that was stuck in analysis paralysis, and has started executing against their concepts.

What he’s doing is mostly face-to-face stuff, and it’s very broad and general. He doesn’t call it training, he calls it learning (hear, hear). His attitude is very much about winning back trust in the group first, and is happily doing lots of different wild, fun things, and then learning from the outcomes of those experiments. He’s fortunate in that he’s got a supportive leadership (now), a relatively hands-off management, and a budget.

He’s not doing a lot of ROI analysis at this point, but he did a lot of consultation beforehand about what the big pains were, and I have to say that I laud his approach; it’s pragmatic and it seems to be working. Find the big issues, and address them in an open and engaging way to rebuild trust. The rest can follow.

What I forgot to ask was what he intended to do once he had those wins on the board!

We’re in a rush. A rush to get content to learners (rapid learning), to get the minimum to them to get them over the hump (performance support), to not waste their time. All valuable, all I’ve lauded. But…

The UK eLearning visit that I co-chaired mentioned the Slow Food movement, and the thought’s stuck with me that there’s a flip-side we’re forgetting. It’s about having a long-term relationship with the learner, where we care about them, and are interested in developing them as people, not just as cogs.

So I’m hereby initiating the Slow Learning movement. It’s a move where we care about our learners as learners, helping them with their suite of learning and problem-solving skills as well as their job-related skills. There’s an ROI here, as Jay Cross and I have argued for (warning: PDF file). It’s a move where we care about learners as individuals, not just helping them be better, but wiser as well. It’s about using technology to use drip-irrigation over time as well as the firehose for the moment.

I think there’s a concrete value here that we’re missing, an opportunity, maybe even money we’re leaving on the table. It’s about improving our workforce from within. It could be about helping them better understand their organization’s mission, about helping them be better innovators, and even just making them feel valued and decreasing turnover.

Won’t you join the Slow Learning movement?

Right after my opening keynote at the International Conference on ICT in Teaching and Learning in Hong Kong, David Jonassen presented via a canned video and a live video chat Q&A afterward. David’s presentation on his long term work on problem-solving dove-tailed nicely with mine, as I talked about how to design learning experiences around meaningful decisions, and he talked about different categories of those meaningful decisions. (On a personal note, I was thrilled to hear he was going to use my book in a class of his!)

He started with the claim that we need meaningful education, and that problem-solving was a core skill going forward, a theme I too support. He argued that we also needed to recognize that the types of problems we teach learners to solve in school bear little resemblance to the types of problems our learners face outside of schoo, and that we needed to change the types of problems we introduce learners to. An astute observation!

He made off-hand comments that I suspect not all the audience picked up: the importance of addressing new concepts and problems qualitatively before addressing them quantitatively (contrary to much done in schools), quoting (I *think* it was Gardner) that theories have no meaning until they’re applied, and that our learners were coming to us too spoon-fed with overly simplistic problems and consequently that it was hard to develop richer abilities to flexibly apply schemas (nor, I might add, with mindsets about persistence and willingness to fail).

He also talked about how while he supported problem-based learning,
I’ve taken to given challenging problems as group assignments in my classes when I teach, having them wrestle with some ambuigity as part of developing a decontextualized approach to applying the concepts to the outside world. The problems are simplified to unrealistically focus on particular aspects, but are otherwise framed as Requests For Proposals or grant opportunities that they might really face. They sometimes complain, but I do think at the end of the experience they’re better equipped to solve the problems we want graduates to be able to solve. It’s nice to be able to blame David!

Who’d have thought it’d be fun to spend two mornings studying the constitution? I’m in San Diego at one of the We The People: The Citizen & The Constitution teacher institutes (from the Center for Civic Education), looking for ways technology might support this activity, to either make it more efficient, more effective, or broaden the reach.
Susan Leeson, a former Oregon Supreme Court Justice and expert in political theory and public law has been riveting in bringing to life the context in which the US Constitution struggled to be born. Far from a miracle, it almost didn’t happen. Documenting the personal and political intrigues, she also communicates the philosophical tensions that led to the document that has governed this nation for more than 200 years.

It’s quite clear that you couldn’t replace her, and any experience would have to find different ways to develop the understanding. Personal passion, personal presence, and effective pedagogy trump anything else you can do. Note that it’s interactive, not a monologue, but her ability to bring it alive, make it a story, and connect it to the context and causes, is a powerful lesson for moving from our tendency to teach this as a set of facts (3 branches of government, checks and balances, etc). Much as I can imagine a compelling game that let you role play this would be a strong second, hearing her would be my first choice.

So I guess my real task is to figure out what to do if and when we can’t have her! Which is, of course, is probably as it should be.