I was boarding a plane away from home as Apple’s announcement was happening, so I haven’t had the chance to dig into the details as I normally would, but just the news itself shows Apple is taking on yet another industry. What Apple did to the music industry is  a closer analogy to what is happening here than what they did to the phone industry, however.

As Apple recreated the business of music publishing, they’re similarly shifting textbook publishing. They’ve set a price cap (ok, perhaps just for high school, to begin), and a richer target product. In this case, however, they’re not revolutionizing the hardware, but the user experience, as their standard has a richer form of interaction (embedded quizzes) than the latest ePub standard they’re building upon.  This is a first step towards the standard I’ve argued for, with rich embedded interactivity (read sims/games).

Apple has also democratized the book creation business, with authoring tools for anyone. They have kind of done that with GarageBand,  but this is easier.  Publishers will have the edge on homebrew for now, with a greater infrastructure to accommodate different state standards, and media production capabilities or relationships.  That may change,  however.

Overall, it will be interesting to see how this plays out. Apple, once again making life fun.

This morning Elliott interviewed Cathy Casserly from Creative Commons and Dean Kamen. Cathy was a passionate advocate for openness and sharing. She talked about going further into learning, and I was reminded about Project Tin Can, making a more general learning path. Dean recited his interesting childhood and then launched into his inspiring project to make science cool again.

Yesterday I attend SDL’s DITAFest.  While it’s a vendor-driven show, there were several valuable presentations and information to help get clearer about designing content.  And we do need to start looking at the possibilities on tap.  Beyond deeper instructional design (tapping into both emotion and effective instruction, not the folk tales we tell about what good design is), we need to start looking at content models and content architecture.

Let me put this a bit in context.  When I talk about the Performance Ecosystem, I’m talking about a number of things: improved instructional design, performance support, social learning and mobile. But the “greater integration” step is one that both yields immediate benefits, and sets the stage for some future opportunities.  Here we’re talking investing in the underlying infrastructure to leverage the possibilities of analytics, semantics and more, and content architecture is a part of that.

So DITA is Darwin Information Typing Architecture, and what it is about is structuring content a bit. It’s an XML-based approach developed at IBM that lets you not only separate out content from how it’s expressed, but lets you add some semantics on top of it. This has been mostly used for material like product descriptions, such as technical writers produce, but it can be used for white papers, marketing communications, and any other information. Like eLearning.  However, the elearning use is still idiosyncratic; one of the top DITA strategy consultants told me that the Learning and Training committee’s contribution has not yet been sufficient.

The important point, however, is that articulating content has real  benefits. A panel of implementers mentioned reducing tool costs, reduced redundancy savings, and decreasing time to create and maintain information.   There were also strategic benefits in breaking down silos and finding common ground with other groups in the organization.  The opportunity to wrap quality standards around the content adds another opportunity for benefits.   Server storage was another benefit.  As learning groups start taking responsibility for performance support and other areas, these opportunities will be important.

And, the initial investment to start focusing on content more technically is a step along the path to start moving from web 2.0 to web 3.0; custom content generation for the learner or performer.  A further step is context-sensitive customization. This is really only possible in a scalable way if you get your arms around paying tighter attention to defining content: tagging, mapping, and more.

It may seem scary, but the first steps aren’t that difficult, and it’s an investment in efficiencies initially, and into a whole new realm of capability going forward.  It may not be for you tomorrow, but you have to have it on your radar.

I attended the CLO Symposium with my ITA colleagues Jay Cross and Jane Hart.  It was an interesting event, with a theme of “Game-Changing Learning: Development for the New Normal“, held at a classy venue on the beach, and was well-organized.  (You can see Jay’s writeup here.)  And the keynotes that I saw were in synch: Stephen Covey talked about the need for trust and Jon Katzenbach on how to build culture were both excellent, as was Dan Pontefract’s story on making collaboration intrinsic to Telus.  At a lower level, however, the conference felt mired in the past.

Jay, Jane, and I ran a unpanel where we took questions from the audience and took turns answering it.  Some folks even had trouble with the format, apparently!  We got questions about how the role of the learning unit changes, about myths and new tools, and about measurement.  Our riff inspired some subsequent inquiries if we could assist.  Well, but of course!

A lot  of the other sessions also seemed to deal with measurement.  A special lunch was held specifically around creating a standard set of measurements: effectiveness, efficiency, and business impact. While the latter is business specific, the other two could be handled. Efficiency tends to mean things like amount per hour of training, etc.  Effectiveness was less clear, but I’m afraid we’d see pre-post test messages instead of number of people completing the competency test (happy to be wrong).  My problem here is that this stuff shouldn’t be a topic in 2011, it should be already well-practiced  and in the repertoire. We should be thinking about how to start tracking meaningful activity in social networks, the value of performance support and more, not old stuff about courses.  And, how to tie it back to important deltas in organizational performance.

As for addressing the social and informal metrics, while I addressed this a bit earlier, let me go a bit further.  If you are putting in performance support (e.g. a portal, but *ahem*, well-designed) or social network, you should be asking yourself what it should be achieving.  Is it closing more sales?  Generating higher revenue per sale?  How about less time spent on customer calls?  If you put in an HR portal, you should expect less calls to HR.  If you put in a social network among sales folks, you might expect a higher percentage of closing. Figure out what change this should  affect, and then find a way to measure it. Which should be the indicator that you have a problem in the first case!

Which is not to say there weren’t good topics on tap too: leadership development for agility, bridging the gap between IT and the learning unit, informal learning, etc.  But when other topics are ‘how to talk to executives’, in- or out-sourcing talent, and on-demand training, it’s clear we’re not where we can, and should, be.

“The future is already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed”, as  William Gibson  has said, but I guess my concern is with some of what is considered game-changing in an era where the new normal is continual innovation and perpetual beta.  Things are moving too fast not to already have mastered the basics of measurement, and be thinking about adapting.  The ability to talk ‘business’ should be a pre-requisite for the job, and the strategic issues need  to be culture and collaboration.  We’re getting there, but then patience has never been one of my strong suits ;).