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eLearning 2.0

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During the 1st day of Mark and Brent’s Collaboration summer seminar, they got folks active: starting blogs, wikis, webtops, etc.  They’re doing a great job:

c2sss

Naturally, in addition to the tactical questions (“how do I move this tab”?), the conceptual questions started: when do you use a blog versus a wiki, how do you make sense of all the options out there.

Now, as part of my performance ecosystem, I think blogs are a personal reflection or a history (as I told an attendee, it would be great for capturing a ‘war story’), whereas wikis are for collaboration to create a unified view of something (e.g. the way to tune a network).  I don’t think blogs support a rich discussion and aren’t that collaborative.  Also, one of the problems I see is that we often forget old tools in the excitement of new tools: discussion boards are a great way to have an ongoing conversation; you don’t need some new tool for this. Yet wikis are really good for capturing the output of a collaboration.

Also recently I’ve been having conversations with folks about integrating tools to meet larger needs.  Ning is a tool that provides ways for individuals to have profiles, to have forums, to list events, etc.  Increasingly, LMSs also have these capabilities.

The interesting thing is the great spate of tools out there: Google, Central Desktop, Zoho, Wetpaint, PBWiki, an ever growing list. There are suites of web meeting apps, web-based productivity tools, etc. How do you make sense of it? I think there’s another ‘bubble’ with these, and eventually a bunch will fail and out of the ashes a few will persist.  The good thing, I think, is that by getting your hands dirty with a variety of these, you’ll access some generalized skills.  And web apps are not going away.

I believe training anybody on any particular tool (even the seemingly ubiquitous Microsoft Office suite), is the wrong way to go.  Talk to them about the skill (writing, creating presentations, etc), and then give some assignments across a couple of different tools.  This gives you transferrable skills, which will equip you to communicate and collaborate regardless of the latest wave of tools.  And that’s what’s important, in this day of increasing change.

DevLearn ’08

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Up in the mountains, there’s lots to reflect on, little time to capture it. However, I do want to note that DevLearn is again on the horizon (November), which will include keynote, preconference sessions, concurrent sessions, and more.

I’m really looking forward to Tim O’Reilly’s keynote, as his description of Web 2.0 is fairly definitive.  I reckon I’ll again be part of the pre-conference sessions on Serious Games, er, Immersive Learning Simulations, and Mobile Learning as well.  I have a concurrent session on deeper instructional design which is stuff I really believe is fundamental yet seemingly not widespread, and fortunately has been well received in a few prior instances.

The real excitement for me is having a chance to catch up with some of the brightest folks in the business, like Tony Karrer, Will Thalheimer, Ruth Clark, Judy Brown, David Metcalf, Mark Oehlert, Brent Schenkler, Frank Nguyen, Lance Dublin, Karen Hyder, Michelle Lentz, and more, as well as the new folks I’ll meet.

The Guild’s conferences have always been a highlight of the year for me, so I hope I’ll see you there!

A Moving Experience…

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Yesterday, we moved furniture (OK, so bad puns are an occupational hazard :) ).  More specifically, a large solid wood entertainment center piece that even empty is surprisingly heavy.  And had to come down six steps and then up three.  Just my wife and myself (and for those who don’t know me or us, we’re not large people).  We seriously debated hiring two or four laborers to assist moving it.  However, we found another way…

Sitting down and thinking, we decided we could break it down into little steps.  First, we waltzed it over to the top of the steps. This was the most scary part, controlling it going down.  We put it on it’s back, and slid it down the carpeted steps onto some blankets, controlling the slide.

Now, the harder part, getting it up the three steps to the next room.  We stood it back up rather than take it up on the back; that had been important going down, but wasn’t for the upward trip.  We got my son to push from the back (didn’t really need it, but he was hanging around…), and we each took the front up a step at a shot.  Finally, I went to the back, lifted it up, and pushed while my wife tugged it forward.  Success!

The reason to recite this is not the impress you with our meager strength and effort (as if), but instead to highlight the lesson that taking a monumental task and breaking it down into littler steps is a really useful meta-learning technique.  Sitting down, working through the alternatives, imagining how you’d manage that particular approach and what you’d need.  With patience, a willingness to stop and rethink, and a little bit of courage, you can move mountains!

Off the grid

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High SierrasIt’s time to get away from electronic diversions, and spend some time in nature, once again. Off to the high Sierras, up near timberline, lakes, rocks, trees, and wild critters.  There’s no phone connection, so no internet, email, etc.  And with nought but a twitch and a shudder, I shall endure :).

On a side note about mobile, I’ve got two invitations to talk mobile at the beginning of next year.  A sign that we’re finally hitting our stride?

Back at the end of the week. Hope you too are finding time to recharge your batteries.

Ain’t it Tweet?

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OK, so my colleague/mentor/friend Sky finally got me on Twitter.  If you don’t know twitter, it’s a microblog, where you post the equivalent of a SMS (text message), maximum 160 characters.  People I respect are into it, but I’d wondered the advantages.  Sky told me he was using TwitterFox which lets you put it in your Firefox browser.  So I installed it, and managed to get it running (tho’ I may still be mucking a few things up).  And finding out that people will ‘follow’ you in the hopes you’ll visit and see their ads, e.g. weightloss; there’s spam everywhere; something I’m doing wrong?

So far, I’ve been on it a few days (@Quinnovator), and find it easy to update what I’m doing, harder to use it as a reflective tool.  I’m also only following a couple of folks I know, as I haven’t found an easy way to find folks I know who might be tweeting.  So far, some interesting things are coming through and I’ve answered a couple of questions.

One of the few folks I am following, however, pointed me to this site, recommendations of how to use Twitter as a college student.  I like where someone looks to a technology and finds the learning affordances (what I try to do myself).  I’ve not the experience with Twitter, let alone the additional apps people are building (e.g. retweetme, a twitter reminder system), as yet, so it’s nice to see someone else doing it.

I’m not going to be SMSing my tweets (I’ve a limit on SMS messages, and like that I never come near the limit), but I will be giving it a spin through the browser interface.  Any recommendations?

Mathematics or mathematician, reconsidered

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“Don’t teach kids mathematics, teach them to be mathematicians.” (I believe it was Seymour Papert)

It was in the scoping phase of a new project where this came to mind, and I realized that, depending on your definition of ‘mathematician’, I don’t want them to be mathematicians either, but I want them to be mathematical problem solvers.  That is, I don’t necessarily want them to be able to create mathematical theories any more than I want them to be able to recite math formulas; I want them to be able to solve problems with mathematics.  And, as Jonassen tells us, the problems we give kids to solve in schools bear little resemblance to those they need to face in the real world.

My thoughts wandered further, however.  I wondered if we could create rubrics around what a good math problem-solver looks like, and have students evaluate each other and assist one another in becoming good problem-solvers.  Like Brown and Palincsar’s Reciprocal Teaching, they could take turns solving problems and looking at how they do it.

Of course, I want to generalize it, and find rubrics that define meaningful skills like searching, design, research, problem-solving, etc, even for adults (ala work literacy) that individual can use for self-evaluation, but also peer or guide evaluation (360; level 3, etc) and mentoring. Particularly for digital literacy.

What do you think; would you like a set of such metrics and a social support infrastructure to self-develop in the use of new technologies and skills for accomplishing your goals?

Lead the Charge?

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This month’s Learning Circuit’s Big Question of the Month is whether learning organizations should be leading the way in the use of Web 2.0 technologies. Or, to be more exact:

  • Should workplace learning professionals be leading the charge around these new work literacies?
  • Shouldn’t they be starting with themselves and helping to develop it throughout the organizations?
  • And then shouldn’t the learning organization become a driver for the organization?
  • And like in the world of libraries don’t we need to market ourselves in this capacity?

The short answer is yes, we (I’m assuming most of you are learning professionals) should be leading the way. It may seem like an odd locus for technology awareness, but it’s really about technology affordances for organizational effectiveness, not just new technology. That’s why it shouldn’t be IT, or operations, or engineering, because they’re focused on a task, not the meta-level look at how the task is being accomplished, can be improved, etc. And that’s the unique perspective that makes the learning organization the right instigator.

Learning folks have the perspective of looking at the performance needs of the organization, and are charged with helping people meet those needs, but that also gives the learning organization the opportunity to improve them. When it’s the product or servce, it’s the user experience group (that, ideally, gets in early in the design process), but internally, it’s the learning group.

Which means the learning organization can’t be just a training group, but that’s part of the strategic picture I’ve talked about elsewhere. The point being that to truly help an organization you have to move to a performance focus, moving people from novice, through practitioner, to expert, and giving them a coherent support environment. To do this, you need to know what’s available. And, consequently, the learning organization has to experiment with new technologies for it’s own internal workings to determine how and when to deploy them to organizational benefit.

To put it another way, if not the learning organization, then who? Of course, there’s the political perspective as well, demonstrating currency, but I’m more concerned about adding real value. Learning professionals need to know it, bring it to bear when it’s valuable (and skewer it when it’s not), and in general be seen not only knowing what’s what but also what’s hype.

Marketing is smart in general, but it’s not hype, it’s helping transition the perspective from a training group being an expendable cost-center to a learning capability that’s central to organizational effectiveness and performance. Which is where a learning organization should be, right?

Learning out loud

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In an article I was reading, they mentioned how Patagonia was tracking the environmental footprint of some of their products. The point they made, however, was that doing this was part of their ongoing experimentation/research that they were publicizing to get others to join in towards making this a more sustainable world (my inference). The phrase they used that intrigued me was the quote that they were “learning out loud”.

One of the reasons it intrigued me was that I realized that what I’m doing with Learnlets is indeed ‘learning out loud’. But I hadn’t really reflected on what that could mean, and I think there are some really interesting opportunities here. First, by learning explicitly, we can reflect on our own learning processes, looking at how we learn, essentially initiating double-loop learning.

Second, others can watch us learn, and learn with us. They can also learn to learn. Learning together, we can learn more effectively. I think this is a critical component of the Work Literacy movement looking at how to improve at work; they’re making their thinking explicit and asking for participation.

One of the Big Questions was Should All Learning Professionals Blog, and I replied. My answer then was that all should reflect, and I’ll add now that doing it publicly (blog or otherwise) is an opportunity to have others participate and even add value. Yes, there’s a risk involved, but I’ll suggest you throw ego to the wind, and take a chance on greater learning.

So I’ll keep on learning out loud, and hope to hear you, too. Let’s learn together; better, and have more fun doing it.

It’s hard to reflect…

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…when you’re up to your, er, backside in projects (paraphrasing the old alligators/swamp draining story).  It’s been a whirlwind week or so, and this is an apology of sorts for the lack of blogging. Several projects are getting busy at the same time, and we also took a trip south to see family. It’s hard to be reflective when you’re just trying to keep the wheels on.

The trip itself was a whirlwind; we had to be flexible (“willows, blowing in the wind” as my wife kept saying) to accommodate other folks plans and the extreme heat. We were making hotel reservations on the fly, night by night pretty much, and shuffling folks around trying to get people together. However, the kids got to play with their cousins, and we managed to make all the important connections (with the caveat that we missed my brother and one of his kids, as they were overseas at the time we had to come down). Saturday was ‘water play’ day; even though we’ve got water restrictions here in California, it was also too hot to go anywhere, so we got a slip-n-slide and some water guns. Note: it’s never too late to have a happy childhood, as I’ve how had the slip-n-slide experience I never got to try when I was young!

Work’s also blazing along. I had a couple of conference calls while we were on the road (not the easiest), and didn’t make much progress on projects ranging from online learning to corporate elearning strategy. Now it’s catch up time. The good thing is that together with my various partners on the projects, I think we’re adding real value to the organizations we are assisting.

Still, while various thoughts have crossed my mind, nothing’s coalesced sufficiently that I’ve been able to post, and it’s hard to justify the time away from pressing needs. Which is the case everyone faces, I know, but it’s important to take time to reflect. And I have, but it’s been about specific projects and taking a larger picture on them, which typically is not appropriate here (too specific, and of course confidential).

Still, lots of thoughts are percolating, and you can expect more soon. Hope your summer is fun and productive!

Work Literacy

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Tony Karrer, one of our top bloggers/thinkers on elearning, pointed me to WorkLiteracy a few weeks ago, and I’m really excited about the idea, though have yet to have time to really dig in (was in Boston two weeks ago, NJ and LA last week, and several big projects right now; my apologies for the lack of posting). It’s about identifying and developing the skills of the knowledge worker, tapping into the social network.

Naturally I’m quite excited by all this, as it taps into two of my key memes: meta-learning (or learning to learn), and 21st Century Skills. It’s all about helping people learn to be more effective (meta-learning), and focusing on the skill-set for the future (21st Century Skills).

I’m thrilled to see this emerging here, as well as the movements I’m seeing in other places as the recognition grows that the skills of the past aren’t going to carry us into the coming years. We’re seeing it come from corporate groups thinking about the skill sets they need, futurists looking at trends, and now people at the coal face coping with their own roles and thinking about the longer term implications and broader concerns for society (a wise perspective, to be sure).

So, I fully intend to participate, but there’re already a good group of folks, and it’s too important not to get you started. Check it out!