Learnlets

Content engineering

11 August 2015 by Clark 2 Comments

We’ve heard about learning engineering and while the focus is on experience design, the pragmatics include designing content to create the context, resources, and motivation for the activity. And it’s time we step beyond just hardwiring this content together, and start treating it as professionals.

Look at business websites these days. You can customize the content you’re searching for with filters. The content reacts to the device you’re on and displays appropriately. There can even be content that is specific to your particular trace of action through the site and previous visits. Just look at Amazon or Netflix recommendations!

This doesn’t happen by hardwired sites anymore. If you look at the conferences around content, you’ll find that they’re talking industrial strength solutions. They use content management systems, carefully articulated with tight definitions and associated tags, and rules that pull together those content elements by definition into the resulting site. This is content engineering, and it’s a direction we need to go.

What’s involved is tighter templates around content roles, metadata describing the content, and management of the content. You write into the system, describe it, and pull it out by description, not by hard link. This allows flexibility and rules that can pull differentially by different contexts: different people, different role, different need, and different device. We also separate out what it says from how it looks, using tags to support rendering appropriately on different devices rather than hard-coding the appearance as well as the content and the assembly.

This is additional work, but the reasons are several. First, being tighter around content definitions provides a greater opportunity to be scientific about the role the content plays. We’re too lax in our content, so that beyond a good objective, we don’t specify what makes a good example, etc. Second, by using a system to maintain that content, we can get more rigorous in content management. I regularly ask audiences whether they have outdated legacy content hanging around, and pretty much everyone agrees. This isn’t effective content governance, and content should have regular cycles of review and expiry dates.

By this tighter process, we not only provide better content design, delivery, and management, but we set the stage for the future. Personalization and customization, contextualization, are hampered when you have to hand-configure every option you will support. It’s much easier to write a new set of rules and then your content can serve new purposes, new business models, and more.

If you want to know more about this, I hope to see you at my session on content at DevLearn!

Meta-learn what?

6 August 2015 by Clark Leave a Comment

If, indeed, learning is the new business imperative, what does that mean we need to learn? What are the skills that we want to have, or need to develop? I reckon they fall into two categories; those we do for our own learning, and those for learning with and through others.

When we learn on our own, we need to address what information we want coming in and how we process it. This falls under Harold Jarche’s Personal Knowlege Mastery of Seek – Sense – Share. To me there are two main components: what you actively seek, and what comes to you.

What you actively seek really is your searching abilities. Several things come into play. One is knowing where to look. When do you google, when do you do an internal search, when do you check out a book? And how to look is also a component. Do you know how to make a good search string? Do you know how to evaluate the quality of the responses you get? I see too often that people aren’t critical enough in looking at purveyed information.

Then, you also want to set up a stream of information that comes to you. Who to follow on social media? What streams of information? How do you find what sources others use? How do you track what’s happening in your areas of interest and responsibility without getting overwhelmed? This is personal information management, and it requires active management, as sources change. And there are different strategies for different media, as well.

Note that this crosses over into social, but people don’t necessarily know you’re following them. While there may be a notification, they don’t know how much attention you’re paying. I’ve talked about ‘stealth mentoring’, where you can follow someone’s tweets and blog posts, and they can serve as a mentor for you without even knowing it!

There’s some processing of that information, too. What do you do with it? How do you make sense of it? If you hear X over here, and Y over there, you should try to actively reconcile it (e.g. as I did here with collaboration and cooperation). Do you diagram, write, make a video, ?

Of course, if you do process it, do you share it? Now we’re crossing over into the social space more proactively. There’re good reasons to ‘show your work’; in terms of helping others understand where you’re at in your process and for them to offer help. And sharing your thinking can help others. Your thoughts, even interim, can help you and others sort out your thinking. There are some skills involved in figuring out how to systematically share, and of course some diligence and effort is required too, at least before it becomes a habit.

And, of course, there is explicitly asking for help. There are ways to ask for help that aren’t effective! Similarly, there are ways to offer help that won’t necessarily be taken up. So there are skills involved in communicating.

Similarly, collaboration shouldn’t be taken for granted. Do you know different ways to collaborate on documents, presentations, and spreadsheets? Hint: there are better ways than emailing around files! How do you manage a collaboration process so that it maximizes the outcome? For instance, there are nuances to brainstorming.

There are lots of skills involved, and not only should you develop your own, but you should consider the benefits to the organization to developing them systematically and systemically. So, what did I miss? Wondering if I should try to diagram this…

Teasing apart cooperation and collaboration

4 August 2015 by Clark 6 Comments

There have been a couple of recent proposals about the relative role of cooperation and collaboration, and I’m trying to make sense of them. Here are a couple of different approaches, and my first take at teasing them apart.

Dion Hinchcliffe of Adjuvi tweeted a diagram about different types of working together that shows his take. He has coordination as a subsidiary to cooperation and on to collaboration. So coordination is when we know what needs to be done, but we can’t do it alone. Cooperation is when we’re doing things that need to have a contribution from each of us, and requires some integration. And collaboration is when we’re working together with a goal but not clear how we’ll get there. I think what’s core here is how well defined the task is and how much we contribute.

In the meantime, Harold Jarche, my ITA colleague, as a different take. He sees collaboration as working together to achieve a goal that’s for the organization, whereas cooperation goes beyond. Cooperation is where we participate and assist one another for our own goals. It’s contribution that’s uncoupled from any sense of requirement, and is freely given. I see here the discussion is more about our motives; why are we engaged.

With those two different takes, I see them as different ways of carving up the activities. My initial reaction is closer to Dion’s; I’ve always seen cooperation as willingness to assist when asked, or to provide pointers. To me collaboration is higher; it’s willing to not just provide assistance in clearly defined ways such as pointers to relevant work, answering questions, etc, but to actively roll up sleeves and pitch in. (Coordination is, to me I guess, a subset of cooperation.) With collaboration I’ve got a vested interest in the outcome, and am willing to help frame the question, do independent research, iterate, and persist to achieve the outcome.

I see the issue of motivation or goal as a different thing. I can cooperate in a company-directed manner, as expected, but I also can (and do) cooperate in a broader sense; when people ask for help (my principles are simple: talk ideas for free; help someone personally for dinner/drinks; if someone’s making a quid I get a cut), I will try to assist (with the Least Assistance Principle in mind). I can also collaborate on mutual goals (whether ITA projects or client work), but then I can also collaborate on things that have no immediate outcome except to improve the industry as a whole (*cough* Serious eLearning Manifesto *cough*).

So I see two independent dimensions: one on the effort invested, just responding to need or actively contributing; and the other on the motivation, whether for a structured goal or for the greater good.

Now I have no belief that either of them will necessarily agree with my take, but I’d like to reconcile these interpretations for the overall understanding (or at least my own!). That’s my first take, feedback welcome!

The future of libraries?

29 July 2015 by Clark 1 Comment

I had lunch recently with Paul Signorelli, who’s active in helping libraries with digital literacy, and during the conversation he talked about his vision of the future of the library. What I heard was a vision of libraries moving beyond content to be about learning, and this had several facets I found thought-provoking.

Now, as context, I’ve always been a fan of libraries and library science (and librarians). They were some of the first to deal with the issues involved in content organization, leading to information science, and their insight into tagging and finding is still influencing content architecture and engineering. But here we’re talking about the ongoing societal role of libraries.

First, to be about learning, it has to be about experience, not content. This is the crux of a message I’ve tried to present to publishers, when they were still wrestling with the transition from book to content! In this case, it’s an interesting proposition about how libraries would wrap their content to create learning experiences.

Interestingly, Paul also suggested that he was thinking broader, about how libraries could also point to people who could help. This is a really intriguing idea, about libraries becoming a local broker between expertise and needs. Not all the necessary resources are books or even print, and as libraries are now providing video and audio as well as print, and on to computer access to resources beyond the library’s collection, so too can it be about people.

This is a significant shift, but it parallels the oft-told story of marketing myopia, e.g. about how railroads aren’t about trains but instead are about transportation. What is the role of the library in the era of the internet, of self-help.

One role, of course, is to be the repository of research skills, about digital literacy (which is where this conversation had started). However, this notion of being a center of supporting learning, not just a center of content, moves those literacy skills to include learning as well! But it goes further.

This notion turns the role of a library into a solution: whether you need to get something done, learn something, or more, e.g. more than just learning but also performance support and social, becoming the local hub for helping people succeed. He aptly pointed out how this is a natural way to use the fact that libraries tend to exist on public money; to become an even richer part of supporting the community.

It’s also, of course, an interesting way to think about how the locus of supporting people shifts from L&D and library to a joint initiative. Whether there’s still a corporate library is an open question, but it may be a natural partner to start thinking about a broader perspective for L&D in the organization. I’m still pondering the ways in which libraries could facilitate learning (just as trainers should become learning facilitators, so too should librarians?).

The New Business Imperative

28 July 2015 by Clark 7 Comments

Learning is the new business imperative. It is now an indisputable business reality: companies must become more nimble and agile. As things move faster, new processes arise, and the time to copy a new business approach drops, it becomes clear that continual innovation is the only way to not just survive, but thrive. And this doesn’t, can’t, come from the status quo.

And if the answer isn’t known, as is inherent in situations like problem-solving, trouble-shooting, new product/service creation, and more, then this, too, is a form of learning. But not the type addressed by training rooms or eLearning courses. They serve a role, but not this new one, this needed approach, We need something new.

What we need are two things: effective collaboration and meta-learning. Innovation comes, we know, from collaboration. Collaboration is the new learning, where we bring complementary strengths to bear on a problem in a process structured to be optimally aligned with how our brains work. And we need to create a culture and set of skills around continually learning, which means understanding learning to learn, aka meta-learning.

Accelerating the development of these capabilities means doing things different and new. It means sowing the seeds by instigating a learning process that develops not only some specific needed capabilities, but also the meta-learning and collaboration skills. It means understanding, valuing, and explicitly developing the ability of people to learn alone and together. It means making it safe to share, to ‘work out loud’. And finally it means scaling up from small success to organizational transformation.

This is a doable, albeit challenging move, but it is critical to organizations that will excel. Learning is no longer a ‘nice to have’, or even an imperative, it is the only sustainable differentiator. The question is: are you ready? Are you making the new learning a strategic priority?

A Nurturing Culture #blimage

23 July 2015 by Clark 2 Comments

My colleague Jane Hart dobbed me (and several other colleagues) in for the #blimage challenge. I usually resent when someone publicly asks me to do something, but fortunately this is easy and, well, it is Jane ;). She presented the following image and our task is to blog about it:

So my take is how things grow in a nurturing environment. Here plants are flourishing under the energy of the sun. This to me is a metaphor for the benefits of creating a culture in which learning can flourish. I’ve earlier detailed what the research says about the elements of a learning organization, and it’s clear that you need a culture with several elements.

First, learning independently has to be enabled. The resources to learn need to be there, as does the time for learning. Further, the ability to learn on one’s own shouldn’t be taken for granted; identify, model, evangelize, and develop these abilities.

In addition, learning is social. The possibilities to learn together need to be facilitated. There need to be ways to find individuals with complementary skills to learn together. This in particular means collaboration: learning while innovating on solving new problems, devising new solutions, and more. It also means being willing to share. It has to be safe to ‘show your work’! Again, don’t assume skills for learning together, but scaffold the development of these abilities.

It is really important that leadership reinforces learning, both by supporting and more importantly by practicing visibly! There’s evidence that when leadership doesn’t share, others won’t truly believe it’s valued.

So there’s my blog on the image. Two colleagues also were challenged with this image and have replied; you can see what they came up with:

Jane Bozarth

Charles Jennings

Rather than dob in anyone in particular, I will simply recommend that you take your own stab, and here’s a proposed image:

I hope to hear what you come up with; drop a link in the comments if you do!

Engagement

21 July 2015 by Clark 2 Comments

I had the occasion last week to attend a day of ComicCon. If you don’t know it, it is a conference about comics, but also much, much, more. It covers movies and television, games (computers and board), and more. It is also a pop culture phenomenon, where new releases are announced, analysis and discussion occur, and people dress up. And it is huge!

I have gone to many conferences, and some are big, e.g. ATD’s ICE or Online Educa, or Learning Technology (certainly the exhibit hall). This made the biggest of those seem like a rounding error. It’s more like the SuperBowl. People camp out in line to attend the best panels, and the exhibit hall is so packed that you can hardly move. The conference itself is so big that it maxes out the San Diego Convention Center and spills out into adjoining hotels.

And that is really the lesson: something here is generating mad passion. Such overwhelming interest that there’s a lottery for tickets! I attended once in the very early days, when it was small and cozy (as a college student), but this is something else. I haven’t been to the Oscars, but this is bigger than what’s shown on TV. It’s bigger than E3. Again, I haven’t seen CES since the very early days, but it can’t be much larger. And this isn’t for biz, this is for the people and their own hard earned dollars. In designing learning, we would love to achieve such motivation. So what’s going on?

So first, comics tap into some cultural touchstone; they appear in most (if not all) cultures that have developed mass media. They tell ongoing stories that resonate with individuals, and drive other media including (as mentioned) movies, TV, games, and toys. They can convey drama or comedy, and comment on the human condition with insight and heart. The best are truly works of art (oh, Bill Watterson, how could you stop?).

They use the standard methods of storytelling, strip away unnecessary details, have (even unlikely) heroes and villains, obstacles and triumphs). And they can convey powerful lessons about values and consequences. Things we often are trying to achieve. It’s done through complex characters, compelling narratives, and stylistic artwork. As Hilary Price (author of the comic Rhymes with Orange) told us in a panel, she’s a writer first and an artist second.

We don’t use graphic novel/comic/cartoon formats near enough in learning, and we could and should. Similarly with games, the interactive equivalent, for meaningful practice. I fear we take ourselves too seriously, or let stakeholders keep us from truly engaging our learners. We can and should do better. We need to understand audience engagement, and leverage that in our learning experiences. To restate: it’s not about content, it’s about experience. Are you designing experiences?

Locus of the Revolution?

15 July 2015 by Clark 1 Comment

If we’re talking about beginning to use IT in alignment with how we think, work, and learn, a question arises about who should be in the lead? It could be HR, it could be L&D, it could be IT, or it could even be the business units that are taking advantage of the opportunity. What makes sense?

In one sense, it’s about using IT well, and that theoretically is IT’s job. They’re supposed to provide an infrastructure that supports the business. They typically have not only the back end engineers, but the front end designers for any custom applications, and should be evaluating any off-the-shelf solution for viability as well. Of course, this typically isn’t the case, as an eminent IT guru opined to me that IT doesn’t understand people. In general, IT folks are highly selected to be able to do things most people can’t, and they’re not necessarily valuable when they can think like other people.

Well, then, maybe it’s HR; the whole talent development perspective should include considering the tools to hand. Unfortunately, HR isn’t particularly astute about people nor technology. They are more about administration and control than about empowerment and success. The HR policies we tend to see are almost antithetical to the culture that most promotes innovation.

It could also be the business units themselves; they are being seen to create solutions to self-learning and collaboration rather than wait for them to emerge from other environments. And they certainly (should) understand their own needs. Unfortunately, they’re not likely to really understand people or IT either. Too often they don’t realize what is effective.

Let’s be clear, there are successes in all the categories above, but they’re typically more from an astute leader rather than a systematic organizational strategy. And that’s not a repeatable approach. We need better.

Ideally, L&D should own it. They (should) understand people, and be able to work with IT in a product relationship to develop a full performance ecosystem that integrates learning, performance support, and social into a coherent whole. Where the environment is optimized for an organization to not just survive, but thrive. This comes from the people, but it requires knowing how to help people perform and deliver.

It requires new skill sets for sure, including working with IT, culture and change, facilitating innovation, performance consulting, and more (organizations like ATD & LPI are updating their competency definitions in these directions). It requires getting strategic about metrics, impact, and business goals. The vision of L&D being the critical core to organizational success through delivery of optimal execution and facilitation of continual innovation is what the Revolution is trying to achieve. This is a chance for L&D to move from the periphery to the center. It’s worthwhile, but there isn’t infinite time; organizations need solutions, and they’ll get them wherever anyone can seize the opportunity to make a productive improvement. L&D has the opportunity, and here’s to hoping they don’t squander it.

Being Deliberate

14 July 2015 by Clark Leave a Comment

This past week, I took off a few days to get into the wilderness with some colleagues. Five of us got dirty, smelly, and sweaty while hiking in the backcountry. These are smart, successful, interesting, and funny folks, so the conversation was not PCâ„¢, but wise and witty. And, of course, we got to places like this. But, in addition to beauty and wisdom, there was a lesson for me, too.

The first day out in the wilderness, the sky was threatening, and close to dinner time it suddenly turned worse. I was rushing to finish pumping water, couldn’t find the bag for the outflow (to keep it separate from the inflow) and didn’t quite make it back to the tent before the skies opened up. I got a bit damp, and worse when the zipper on the fly wouldn’t close. Every time I reached out to try again, I’d get even more drenched. The worry, of course, is that you get your down sleeping bag wet, and it will lose all insulation capability!

Well, the bag stayed dry, and the next morning we dried everything out, and were fine for the rest of the trip. The interesting opportunity for me, however, was how I proceeded from then on.

The next time I had to pump water, I took my time. I very deliberately found a good place to sit, and took special care to work with setting up the inflow and then the outflow. I did so similarly with firing up the stove and boiling water for dinner and breakfast. There was a pleasure in taking time to do it carefully and right. Now, there are certain things I naturally do the deliberate way, and other things I rush through. My realization is that there’s value in thinking more carefully about which things to do deliberately, and there’s an inherent pleasure in doing the things right that matter to you.

There are the arguments that the internet is making us stupider, and value in doing things the hard way. I think that the important thing is to choose for yourself which things to ‘outsource’ or do just good enough, and those which to take on and do a personally good job on. For example, I used to work on my cars myself (I could rebuild a carburetor, gap a distributor, etc; skills that are irrelevant now :), but as things have changed it’s not a worthwhile role for me anymore. So the lesson for me was to pay more attention to which things I’m doing carefully and which I will choose to decide quick enough is good enough (and which to have others or apps do).

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