I now get an occasional request from some educational organization or initiative, where they tell me about something or point me to it, and then suggest (or request) that I blog it. I generally don’t. I also get offers to link to someone educational, and they’ll return the favor. I haven’t done this, ever.

Why? First, because this site isn’t about creating a money stream (at least, not directly). This blog is about my personal learnings about learning, so unless there’s something I think is interesting or illuminating, I have nothing to communicate. It may keep this blog more ‘esoteric’, but that’s what I believe is the value proposition.

It’s also, to be perfectly honest, a way to let you know my thinking in case it’s of interest to you personally or professionally, and in the later case it’s inherently a form of marketing, but marketing for me, my thinking, and my capabilities. I haven’t thought about monetizing it, in that I haven’t considered putting ads on (not even sure how I’d do that ;).

It does mean that unfortunately there are times when I’m a little slow to keep posting, like when I’m on the road, busy, or on vacation, but that’s the tradeoff. No promises that things won’t change, but I do intend that any changes will be to make a more interesting and informative experience.   That work for you, or do you have some other suggestions?

With the caveat that I’m one of the speakers, I’d like to bring the eLearning Guild’s upcoming Summer Seminar Series to your attention. They’ve put together two back-to-back seminars that cover the latest trends.

The two seminars cover social networking, and serious games. The first seminar is led by Mark Oehlert and Brent Schenkler, who not only are fun, dynamic, individuals, but are totally into new tools. And that’s a good thing, because they’re insightful and articulate about the role these new technologies can play in organizational improvement. I track both their blogs just to keep up with what’s happening in these arenas. I’ll get to kibbitz (and learn), but they’re the two leaders of this session.

Which leaves Jeff Johannigman and myself to lead the second workshop on serious games, ILS, etc. Jeff’s got a commercially-validated track record of successful games and a consequent insight into how to create compelling experiences, and provides the perfect foil for my focus on the learning side. Of course, he’s now focused on learning, so we’ve got enough overlap to make this fun (we’ve co-presented before on games at the ILS symposium at the last Guild conference). I expect Mark and Brent will likewise kibbitz on the side in this one. We’ll augment some of the best parts of my workshop on ILS design with his insights on game design, as well as covering issues of development, corporate relevance, etc.

If you can’t tell, I’m excited about this series! I think that together, they cover some important components of acheiving the performance ecosystem: advanced ID and eCommunity. Being run by the eLearning Guild, of which I’m a fan because they do such a good job of providing value for money just reinforces the expectations that the experience will be worthwhile. So, if you’re looking to get in-depth on either topic, or better yet both, this is a great opportunity. Set your calendars for August 11-14, and definitely hope to see you there!

Innovation is an increasingly important element in organizational survival, I‘ll suggest. If we accept the increasing rate of change and growing speed of execution, innovation in products and services will be critical to maintain competitive advantage. Whether it‘s completing in ‘red ocean’ markets, or exploring ‘blue ocean‘ opportunities, the ability to continually generate new ideas will be a necessary component of organizational strategy.

So, what do we know about innovation? Naturally, I‘m curious (:).

First, Tony Karrer, blogging at ASTD‘s ICE conference, cites Malcolm Gladwell outlining the principle (which I‘d heard before, but can‘t recall where) that there are two types of innovators: the one-shot wonder, and the steady innovator. The former has something big that they accomplish largely on their own (and tend to get known for), and then there‘s the more common, less heralded steady innovator who works with teams to bring ideas to fruition (I‘m immodestly hoping I‘ve demonstrated the latter). Also, as Sawyer tells us (as I blogged before), innovation is not generally individual, but builds upon others. Certainly, it‘s the way to bet. Now, how do we implement it?

Surowiecki‘s Wisdom of the Crowds, Tapscott‘s Wikinomics, and Libert & Spector‘s We Are Smarter Than Me, are telling us to tap into the wisdom of crowds, and with lots of examples of how creating conversations with folks can spark new insights. The old saying is that the room‘s smarter than the smartest person in the room, though with a caveat: if we manage the process right (e.g. it can‘t be that the loudest person gets to win).

As a start, it‘s time to get your own people working together in effective ways. You need to build eCommunity, getting your people talking to one another, helping one another, and making explicit what‘s currently tacit. This isn‘t as easy as it sounds. In talking with an organization that facilitated organizational innovation for others, most of their work was not teaching innovation per se, but making an innovation culture.

Starting internally is a first step, but also consider opening it up to customers, partners, and more.
The time to start experimenting is now. If your culture‘s not supportive, start finding ways to shift. It‘s only one component of an overall eLearning strategy, but one that may be the most important for the organization to get in place.

(Sorry for the delay, I don’t like to wait this long between blogs, but as soon as I was back from the Guild conference, and catching up with the backlog, I was off to a gig.)

We’d gotten our kids bikes, but we don’t have an ideal situation for it. Our backyard is wood deck, pebbled concrete, steep driveway (cars have had trouble getting up), and (semi-) landscaped hill. Our neighborhood is similarly largely vertical, and even the cul-de-sac is small and still somewhat with a grade. My son got on top of riding while at his cousin’s, but my daughter never did.

However, there are lots of bike paths in the flats down the hill, and my wife really wanted us to do some bike rides together. In the past couple of weeks we bought some new bikes for the kids that suited their current sizes, didn’t put training wheels on for the daughter, and tried to get them both used to the new bikes.

In the cul-de-sac, my daughter did a couple of shots of riding with us running along behind holding her up, and managed some, but never got very comfortable nor skilled. So, this past Saturday, we went down to their school playground and had them ride around.

My wife started with my daughter, and next thing I know, my daughter’s riding around on her own! Her story is that Mom let go without telling her so she thought she was ok. My wife’s story is that daughter yelled out “let go” so she did. Regardless, suddenly she was peddling on her own, turning, everything. And with a huge grin on her face; she was so thrilled! As were we.

So Sunday the family took that bike path. And I was the one with a grin on my face.

The lesson was that with the right tools, motivation, support, and environment, learning is magic. Are you making your learning experiences like that?

I previously mentioned the second edition of the eLearning Guild’s research report on Immersive Learning Simulations (read: Serious Games). You can now sign up for a free webinar about it that will be held Thursday morning.

I will talk a bit about my cost screed, and Anne and Kevin will be there to talk about their bits, and of course Steve will overview the data. Hope to see you there.

The Learning Circuit’s Blog Big Question of the Month for March is “what is the scope of our responsibility as learning professionals”. It’s an interesting question, and what prompted it is an interesting read in itself. I’ve been on the stump in a variety of ways suggesting our responsibility is quite broad, if we want to matter to the organization, and we should.

First, I believe it is the learning professional’s scope of responsibility to go beyond courses to resources and job aids, portals, knowledge management, eCommunity, etc, populating the ‘performance ecosystem‘ to support individuals throughout their development and meeting their performance needs. This is the foundation of my elearning strategy, though of course it goes beyond elearning and eventually covers all learning, including coaching & mentoring, instructor-led, organization of workspaces, informal learning, etc.

That’s pretty good, but it’s not enough. I think there’s a broader issue of Creating a Learning Culture (disclaimer: I co-wrote a chapter), which involves ensuring that the climate is supportive for learning, where individuals believe it’s ok to reflect, share ideas (even mistakes), and more. I think that this shouldn’t be taken for granted, but is the result of deliberate effort, and that the learning professional should be working to develop and promote this.

How much would you pay for this now? But wait, there’s more! I think the biggest gap, and the biggest opportunity, is in developing learners as learners, scaffolding them into a learning culture where they are confident and competent self-learners, understanding their role in the learning process, taking command and actively engaging in learning. And this, too, is a role that learning professionals should be supporting. It’s a layer across the previous activities, but should have the largest organizational payoff.

I suppose this seems like quite a lot, but it’s really at core about creating the learning environment in an organization, which includes lots of elements including the culture, goals, as well as resources. As I captured it in a diagram for thinking about the learning environment:

our responsibility, to me, means watching out over all of these, and ensuring that the area within the organization is as optimized as possible, and in alignment with the elements outside the box. So, do you buy into this?

Today we held the Emerging Trends panel session at the TechKnowledge conference. We‘d intended to use an audience response system (aka ‘clickers‘), but of course the technology didn‘t work at that moment, so my colleagues (Frank Nguyen, Ann Kwinn, and Jim Javenkoski) and I winged it with questions from the audience.

Second Life came up a couple times. Joe Miller was the keynote on Wednesday, and in his far ranging and thoughtful presentation he reinforced my previous thoughts on what the fundamental learning affordances are, and helped illuminate a point that hadn‘t really gelled for me.

Using Tony O‘Driscoll‘s diagram, he elaborated on the topic of the current state of virtual worlds. In 1995, when you first looked at HTML, did you have any idea that the web would grow to where it is today? The argument is similar for Second Life, in that the first generation of the web was “Democratization of Access”, where now anyone could find information. Web 2.0 is “Democratization of Collaboration”, where you can create, share, and comment. He called virtual worlds the “3D internet”, and here it‘s the “Democratization of co-creation”.

Besides that, the panel still felt that it‘s about socialization and spatial capabilities, and, as Frank said, that if your objectives didn‘t match those, a virtual world wouldn‘t need to be your solution. I also recited the barriers that Joe had mentioned – usability, download, and processing load -as a way to reinforce the point that there‘s considerable initial investment, and I believe that such worlds make sense when you are intending to have a long-term in-world involvement.

Several questions danced around the relevance of instructional design and the teaching thereof. I pointed to the ongoing dialogs, and we generally agreed that the teaching wasn‘t as aligned to real world practice as it could be, but, as Ann pointed out, ISD principles still apply (our brains haven‘t changed).

Another question came out about the real world validity of Web 2.0. I cited an audiocast of a cutting edge project leader who used BaseCamp, Twitter, Deli.cio.us, IM, and more to keep his team aligned, and my own use of technologies to accomplish various business goals. Jim raised the point that Web 2.0 is a way to have the communication be two way, not just from the designers to the victims, er, learners.   These tools may initially take up extra time, but once ‘assimilated’, they are proving to be time-savers in productivity as well.

One individual pointed out how there seemed to be two camps of instructional technology: traditional eLearning which was instructivist and a second that was social. I agreed and pointed out how we really need to wrap instruction with collaboration from the get-go to help learners immediately recognize that dialog is part of the process and enculturate them into the community.

We also talked about the pragmatics of introductions of technology. To a question about moving the government along, I suggested that there‘s a ‘late adopter‘ advantage of avoiding mistakes (though I‘m not so certain it‘s strategy rather than inertia :), and that solid examples with ROI were the best leverage.

Another question on how to get people to use wikis seemed to suggest that in the particular instance, wikis were the wrong tool (the goal was capturing ‘stories‘). As it pushed one of my hot buttons, I suggested that we should not forget to do a proper match between need and tool, nor forget older tools in the flush of new technologies; in this case a discussion list would probably be a better tool. However, my real answer is that when the need is a resource, a wiki can be a collaboratively improved resource and the way to get participation is to make sure the resource is valuable. I would add, now, that a session I heard indicated success in using incentives to get initial participation, and that may be pragmatic, if not principled ;).

Many thanks to the participants, I thought it was a nice way to cap off the conference.