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FALLing down…and picking up

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My wife always insists that fall is my busy time, and I never get it. This year I am so getting it. In addition to speaking all over the place next month (and the attendant house-keeping details like actually creating the presentations!), people have been asking for assistance with grant applications & proposals, the list goes on.

The good thing is I can’t complain about being bored. The bad thing is that attempting to keep up with the surge in workload means I find it harder to blog. Not just to find time, but it’s hard to be reflective when you’re in active cognition mode. AKA “when you’re up to your a** in alligators, it’s hard to remember that your original objective was to drain the swamp”.

So for one thing it’s an apology, but it’s also a recognition that this curse is hurting organizations. Several years ago, when Jay Cross and I were pushing the notion of ‘learning to learn‘ (still one of the best cost/benefit values I can think of), people would say “we don’t have time to reflect”. And I can see it is still true.

Yet, it’s not wise. You need to take time to reflect, and companies that have built it into their DNA are reaping the benefits (Google being the poster-child). Yes, there’s increasing competition, and pressure, but the way you succeed is by out-thinking, not outworking. Are you freeing up your innovators and problem-solvers to think ahead, as opposed to addressing other people’s concerns? Are they in tune with the organization’s mission and thinking how to take it to the next level?

Sow what do you do? I think you go beyond the Theory of Constraints type of management and create a learning culture, inspire people, and them empower them with a performance ecosystem. Are you taking the time you need now to get the advantage you’ll need tomorrow? Yes, it’s an investment, but one I think you can’t afford to miss if you want to still be here the day after…

…which is when I head off to a board meeting, so I better get back to work (he says, bringing the conversation full circle).

A business blind spot?

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I’ve mentioned before that I think there’s a strategic framework behind elearning implementation, and have been talking about it a bit here and there. Of course, the real test is if anyone says “hey, that’s me”. I’m not seeing it, and I’m curious why, as I believe I see it all over the place.

I got into the space through a partner organization, where their clients who’d been doing tactical stuff started asking for assistance with the longer-term picture. It became obvious there is a higher level, and an emergent way to look at it. I increasingly see organizations who’d benefit, but getting to the right person, and getting them to see the need, and of course most importantly getting them to actually buy into trying a solution has been difficult. An earlier post talked about someone who needed it, but was looking for free assistance. Probably worth every cent it cost.

I’m actually wondering if this is an unseen need. That is, organizations need it and don’t realize it. I’ll be talking about it in various ways at several upcoming events, , but I’d welcome your feedback on whether it’s too early, too obvious, too obtuse, or what.

Future of Corporate Learning Freevent

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George Siemens is organizing a free event: Corporate Learning: Trends and Innovations – Nov. 15 – 20, 2007. I’m one of the speakers, others include:

  • David Snowden
  • Jay Cross
  • Rebecca Stromeyer
  • Richard Straub
  • Donald H. Taylor
  • Janet Clarey
  • David Wilson
  • Bill Bruck
  • George Siemens
  • Tony Karrer

I don’t know all of them, but I know enough to know that this should be really good. Moreover, they’re using a wiki to start discussion beforehand and continue afterwards, and other innovative things.

And, while you have to register, the conference is free. Sounds worthwhile; I hope we can cross virtual paths through the conference!

Learning Futures

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Yesterday, the Institute For The Future held an event that focused on some work they’d done for the Knowledge Works foundation last year, looking 10 years out on Forces Affecting Education. They mapped 6 “Drivers of Change” (grassroots economics, smart networking, strong opinions strongly held, sick herd, urban wilderness, and the end of cyberspace) across 5 categories (family & community, markets, institutions, educators & learning, and tools & practices). I won’t define them, because you can look at the map yourself. A small group of us representing educators, learning technologists, learning foundation folks, learners, and parents, all concerned and informed, reacted as part of their ongoing research.

Some of the premises were an embarrassment of riches in resources and changes in the market dynamics, and there were some interesting juxtapositions. For instance, there were potentials for both coming together and increasing divisiveness. The ability to view different opinions is broader, but so is the ability to find people of like views and form a hermetic group. A related concern is one that’s been appearing in the Serious Games discussion list, about how to strike a balance between a Second Life and a first life. Some may be happier in an alternate persona, and others completely reject it.

Another issue was learning to learn (not only by me :). That is, given this breadth of channels, how does one learn effectively? We talked about where the locus of that responsibility, and I suggested that’s the new role of schools. A concomitant concern is how to make these resources accessible in a manageable way. One point made was about the differences between textual literacy and new literacies around interactive worlds. Are they equivalent?

Similarly, we touched on curriculum and pedagogy: what should we teach, and how should we teach it? We didn’t get to service learning (which I picked up on from another’s scribbling), but I think there’s a lot to say for that approach as a pedagogical approach which integrates assisting community, building skills in an integrated and useful way, and allowing values to emerge (back to wisdom).

I pointed out as a side note that everyone’s view of context-sensitivity has to do with location, but we’re ignoring time as an alternate opportunity, it’s not only where you are, but what you’re doing there. If you’re at a school for classes versus a sporting event, you might want different information. If you’re in an important meeting, it might not matter where it is so much as this is one that is about negotiation and you could use some support.

I don’t think there’s an easy answer to one of the underlying questions: we know we need change, but where is it going to come from? It’s coming in lots of small ways, but the ‘school’ is so institutionalized not only in law but in culture that it’s almost impossible to replace, yet it’s also remarkably resistant to change. So can it happen incrementally, or will it have to be cataclysmic?

Overall, there’s some great fodder for thought in the map, and opportunities to discuss it as well. What do you think is in the future of learning?

Intro to eLearning

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It continues to amaze me how new eLearning can be to some folks. In June I spoke on behalf of a colleague to a group of HR managers, introducing eLearning. I also was interviewed on elearning for a small business magazine in New York in July. Now I’m opening the eLearning Guild’s September Online Forum Introduction to eLearning.

I’ll try to put eLearning into perspective, about how technology gives us new affordances to meet organizational needs, dispel some elearning myths, and of course talk about eLearning strategy. Of course I’ll briefly cover games as part of taking instructional design beyond content-and-quiz or classroom online, and mobile as part of increasing reach.

It’s sometimes hard to realize, when you’ve been using technology to support learning for 30 years, that some people are just coming up to scratch, but that’s the reality, and I do try to live in reality (guided by concept, of course ;). That’s OK, I’m certainly happy to share lessons learned rather than have folks keep making the same mistakes. Maybe we can save them some money now, so they have more for some of the fun stuff that’s just waiting to be done!

If you’re just getting up to speed, I suspect that the Online Forum will be a great way to do it. Hope to see you there!

Content, context, and experience

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In my (next to) last post, I talked about print versus screen reading, and at the end made a comment about publishers. I want to extend that comment here, and to do so I need to go to Pine & Gilmore’s Experience Economy.

I’ve talked about it before, but the premise briefly is that we’ve moved from selling services to selling total customer experiences (the pre-sales, the sale, the product or service, the support). Hence the success of Apple, which creates amazing experiences, generating great customer loyalty and satisfaction. So how does this bear on publishers?

The hoary old cliche’ is that publishers need to realize that they’re not about books, they’re about content (the analogy being to the railroad companies who suffered when they didn’t realize they were in the transportation business). On the other hand, the current discussion in industry is that now context is king. The point is that content can be customized to the immediate need. What the experience economy tells us is that the differentiator will be the overall experience. So, is experience or context king?

I want to suggest that the answer is ‘yes’. Contextualized content creates a positive experience. However, I want to argue two facets to this. Publishers do need to move to where content is semantically tagged for when there are smart systems that can contextualize it. However, I want to suggest that they also need quality information design to create a good experience even when it’s unable to be customized.

That’s come into play with educational publishers. Pine & Gilmore have argued that the subsequent economy will be the ‘transformation economy’, with experiences that transform us. I want to suggest that quality learning design will be the differentiator, and it definitely means going beyond traditional instructional design and incorporating cognitive science research and emotional engagement. I immodestly suggest that Engaging Learning is part of the solution, but the point is much bigger. It’s about reorganizing content to focus on meaningful outcomes, and then aligning the experience to achieve those. While incorporating the semantic hooks as well.

So, I’m arguing that the content business needs to look to both quality in design, and elegance in implementation, to support either or both scenarios: customized and quality experiences.

Strategic trial

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I just finished a report for a client, and I’m psyched. They were really great folks to visit, and I feel like I really gave them some valuable thinking. I’m doubly psyched since the eLearning Strategy framework I’ve been working on (and presented at the eLearning Guild‘s last always-great conference) proved useful in helping to analyze their situation and generate recommendations.

elearningvaluenet.jpg

It’s not a ‘pull off the shelf and use’ framework, it requires customization to a particular context, but it’s proved useful in helping to support analysis and guide recommendations.  And it’s in flux, as it’s already improved since it first appeared on the model page (only slightly).

The point is that the steps have entailments, and while there are several entry points eventually you want to fill in the lower parts to provide a solid foundation as you move up. I hope to have a chance to talk about this more at an upcoming conference. Or perhaps with you?

eLearning Tools?

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In my elearning strategy session at the elearning guild, I included the following graphic as a model to think about how tools can help populate a performance ecosystem (aka learnscape):

PerformanceEcosystem

The point being that different tools fit different spaces in terms of who they serve in terms of experience, and whether they’re more individual or more group. The desktop/mobile may become less clear, but still makes sense for now.

I’ve seen folks trying to understand where blogs, wikis, etc fit into the space of learning tools (and realize that some of the tools have a broad reach and I’ve tried to place them in their center of impact; maybe I need some circles or auras or something indicating reach).

So, do you think I’ve got it right? And, do you think it’s useful?

eCulture for Organizations

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Ok, the title’s a little broader-reaching than the post will be, but it’s some thinking that was prompted by Henry Jenkin’s presentation at the eLearning Guild conference, which Jay Cross has covered. The one new point I took away was the implications of “rip, mix, burn” for eLearning. What will learners do in the new read/write environment?

My first reaction was that many workers won’t have time or interest in messing with the information, but as someone (Mark Oehlert?) challenged me, the new generation will have it in their basic approach to life. And, of course, in my own approach to thinking how people work (warning, PDF) I want them to go back and edit resources if they find them inadequate. The final nail in my own reaction’s coffin, of course, is the fact that we want experts to collaborate. That’s part of the point of the learnscape (wish my own eLearning Strategy talk hadn’t been at the same time as Stephen Downes talking about PLE’s, which is getting lots of buzz, though I’ve checked out the PPT) where we share our own thoughts and work together to get new understandings.

What should our attitudes be about taking content and altering it satirically, ironically, etc? We want people to be innovative and constructive. On the other hand, various actions could be construed as destructive (e.g. personal attacks) or just wasteful. How do we deal with this? I originally was thinking that anything that wasn’t justifiable as constructive should be banned, but then I tried the other way around, that anything that isn’t obviously destructive should be tolerated (within bounds?), and that seemed even better.

We may not always be able to discern the contribution, but lateralness must, I think, tolerate some non-obvious experimentation. It’d be easier to force members of an organization to have to be at least able to make a case why some creation is a contribution, versus having to discern whether it’s actually a problem, but I think there’s a reason to do otherwise. In the latter case you’re putting the onus on the organization to find fault, but I think it would be supportive of a more productive culture than asking everyone to justify their actions. You’d just need a cultural rule that says “nothing personal about anyone, customers, bosses, peers, or subordinates… it can be about a particular thing they did, but not about them”, and so on.

The point being that we want people to feel like they can say anything as long as it’s not personal. They can challenge organizational decisions, whatever. However, quid pro quo is that they have to stand behind it, with attribution. Another unforgivable would be to misuse someone else’s identity. However, we should have a channel for anonymous comments. It’s about building trust, really. So we maybe our guide should be something like the Cluetrain Manifesto.

So, what other rules will we need? Ideally, we’ll want a culture that can not only acknowledge mistakes, but even reflect and propagate the resulting wisdom (you can’t celebrate error, but I heard a great story about a company that rings a bell when the lesson is learned, to promote the lesson). Where dissent is tolerated, but acceptance expected once a decision is made, even if it turns out to be wrong.

I don’t have all the answers, but I think the question is important.

Upcoming Talk: eLearning Strategy

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I’ve talked a bit before about eLearning Strategy, and have refined the thoughts into what I hope is a pretty systematic picture about what the different tactics are and how they can be aligned into a coherent approach. It includes ways of thinking about the different needs, the different tools, and systematic steps to get from content on a screen with a quiz, or virtual classroom, to a performance ecosystem (Jay Cross’ learnscape).

I’ll be presenting the thoughts at the eLearning Guild’s Annual Gathering, and as this is embryonic, ‘m really hoping to get feedback and hear things I’ve missed or ways to improve it (of course, I’m hoping it’s already valuable).

If you’re responsible for eLearning Strategy, or thinking about it, I’d love to see you there and in particular hear your feedback!