Search Results for: align

Think like a publisher

2 May 2011 by Clark Leave a Comment

Way back when we were building the adaptive learning system tabbed Intellectricityâ„¢, we were counting on a detailed content model that carved up the overall content into discrete elements that could be served up separately to create a unique learning experience. As I detailed in an article, issues included granularity and tagging vocabulary. While my principle for the right level of granularity is playing a distinct role in the learning experience, e.g. separating a concept presentation from an example from a practice element, my more simple heuristic is to consider “what would a knowledgeable mentor give to one learner versus another”. The goal, of course, is to support future ability to personalize and customize the learning experience.

Performance Ecosystem

Back then, we were thinking then as a content delivery engine, but our constraints required content produced in a particular format, and we were thinking about how we’d get content produced the way we needed. Today, I’m still thinking that the advantages of content produced in discrete chunks, under a tight model, is a valuable investment in time and energy. Increasingly, I’m seeing publishers taking a similar view, and as new content formats get developed and delivered (e.g. ebooks, mobile web), the importance of more careful attention to content makes sense.

The benefits of more careful articulation of content can go further. In the performance ecosystem model (PDF), the greater integration step is specifically around more tightly integrating systems and processes. While this includes coupling the disparate systems into a coherent workbench for individuals, it also includes developing content into a model that accounts for different input sources, output needs, and governance. While this is largely for formal content, it could be community-generated content as well. The important thing is to stop redundant content development. Typically, marketing generates requirements, and engineering develops specifications, which then are fed separately to documentation, sales training, customer training, and support, which all generate content anew from the original materials. Developing into and out of a content model reduces errors and redundancy, and increases flexibility and control. (And this is not incommensurate with devolving responsibility to individuals.)

We’re already seeing the ability to create custom recommendations (e.g. Amazon, Netflix), and companies are already creating custom portals (e.g. IBM). The ability to begin to customize content delivery will be important for customer service, performance support, and slow learning. Whether driven by rules or analytics (or hybrids), semantic tagging is going to be necessary, and that’s an concomitant requirement of content models. But the upside potential is huge, and will eventually be a differentiator.

Learning functions in organizations need to be moving up the strategic ladder in terms of their overall responsibility for more than just formal learning, but also performance support and ecommunity. Thinking like advanced publishers can and should be about moving beyond the text, and even beyond content, to the experience. While that could be custom designs (and in some cases it must be, e.g. simulation games), for content curators and providers it also has to be about flexible business models and quality development. I believe it’s a must for other organizations as well. I encourage you to start thinking strategically about content development in rich ways that stop with one-off development, and start thinking about putting some up-front effort into not only templates, but also models with tight definitions and labels.

New Horizon Report: Alan Levine – Mindmap

20 April 2011 by Clark 3 Comments

This evening I had the delight to hear Alan Levine present the New Media Consortium’s New Horizon Report for 2011 to the ASTD Mt. Diablo chapter. As often happens, I mindmapped it. Their process is interesting, using a Delphi approach to converge on the top topics.

For the near term (< 1 year), he identified the two major technologies as ebooks and mobile devices (with a shoutout for my book: very kind). For the medium term (2-3 years), he pointed to augmented reality and game-based learning (though only barely touching on deeply immersive simulations, which surprised me). For the longer term (4-5 years), the two concepts were gesture-based computing and learning analytics.

A very engaging presentation.

Snake Oil and (April) Fools

4 April 2011 by Clark 4 Comments

For April Fool’s of this year, we (the Internet Time Alliance, with large credit to Jane and Harold) posted a message on our site:

The Internet Time Alliance (ITA) has spent much of the past year on a mission.

We have located and assembled a huge collection of informal learning content.

Today we’re publishing it and offering a free subscription to all individuals as well as corporate rates.

“Without content there is no learning. Repositories of informal learning content
such as this will underpin much of the social and informal learning over the
next 5 years.”
Lois Kean, CLO, Polar Foil LLC*

Sign up today for the ITA Informal Learning Collection!

Clicking the link took you to another page where we explained:

The Ultimate Content Collection for All Your Informal Learning Needs!*

*Nothing but snake oil here, folks.

The Internet Time Alliance can help you navigate the snake oil and work smarter with Informal and Social Learning. Any time after April Fool‘s Day, that is

While the ad was a joke, the issue is real: folks can still believe that there’s no learning without formal content. That may be true for novices, but those who know what they’re doing and what they need can very well learn from resources they find on their own, and from each other!

The content may be out there, or it may have to be co-created, but it can’t be in the hands of formal designers and it can’t all be found in the corporate resources. As things get more complex and faster and more unique, the need for access to others and the rich resources of the internet are a bare minimum. There’s a role for formal learning and formal content (e.g. performance support), but supporting learners to have access to a much richer suite of resources than an L&D team can design can really empower people. Moreover, having them help each other and create new understandings and knowledge is the key to making progress in this new, faster, world.

We’re seeing companies succeed with these approaches, in small instances and across the organization. It’s not that there isn’t a role for formal content, it’s just that, as my colleague Charles Jennings talks about, the 70:20:10 rule (individuals tag valuable learning as coming 70% from the workplace, 20% from mentoring/coaching, and only 10% from formal leaning) suggests that our investments in effort and support are not matched to the value of the contribution.

You do want to go beyond just formal learning. It may seem we go over the top, but I’ve found that if you want to get people to Y, you have to talk about 2Y to have any chance. If you just talk about Y, you’ll get them to .5Y. And we really believe that the benefits – a more positive workplace, a more nimble organization, greater innovation and problem-solving – significantly outweigh the relatively low costs.

So, what’s it going to be, snake oil or social and informal learning?

*Lois Kean is an anagram of SnakeOil and Polar Foil is an anagram of April Fool

Thinking through social learning

24 March 2011 by Clark 5 Comments

In preparation for our webinar with Citrix and the eLearning Guild, I’ve been thinking through the benefits of learning socially, specifically for formal learning. I’ve articulated before that I think it’s about processing, but I like to try to capture my thinking in a graphic, and hadn’t done so before. I did so now, and thought I’d share it.

In this representation, an individual, in creating an output such as a blogpost or a response to a discussion question in a forum, or a response to an assignment, has to do some reasonably robust processing. Typically, by going from thought to an external representation, you find that you’ve got some gaps and have to fix them. Eventually, however, you come up with what you think is right. And you submit it, say, in formal learning, and eventually may get feedback from an instructor.

But consider where you share that representation, and someone else comments in a way that indicates a different perspective, say in the discussion forum or to your post; then you may have to rethink what you said in light of that alternate viewpoint. You have to do some additional processing.

Then go further: suppose that a team has to come with a convergent answer. Then you might get a number of cycles of expressed viewpoints, additional processing (by all members of the team), sufficient to come to an agreed-upon view. Then you have lots of alternate ideas, and re-processing going on. That, to me, is the power of social learning. In that process of negotiation, you are thinking again and again about a topic, let alone with additional input and viewpoints.

Now, there are lots of nuances that have to go into this, such as designing an assignment that has enough ambiguity or challenge to have sufficient variety in viewpoint, but not so much as to lead to an inability to eventually agree.

This, of course, also is what happens in informal learning, if we end up discussing a problem to solve, or even just blog our thoughts and get comments. As Jay Cross says, the most powerful learning technology is conversation. It’s even better, however, if there’s a resulting artifact, a representation that captures the understanding, as the externality reduces the opportunity for misinterpretation.

So, does this representation make sense to you?

Pseudoteaching

17 March 2011 by Clark 4 Comments

As a nice complement to my last post on Understanding by Design, comes this piece on Pseudoteaching that Donald Taylor (who runs the excellent UK Learning Technologies conference) pointed out. The premise is that much teaching that appears good to both the instructor and observers is really ineffective. And this is instructive in a couple of ways.

First, it’s easy to believe that if you’re preparing, and presenting eloquently, you are communicating. And that isn’t necessarily so. For learning to stick, there are several necessary components, the most important being that the learner needs to be engaged in meaningful activity. That’s not likely the case in the classroom where learners are in your control. Now, if you’re giving meaningful assignments before the lecture, and then extending the learning afterward, you have a chance. Otherwise, the content is likely to fall on deaf ears.

And, to fend off the hoary old canard about why do we attend conferences then (and I give a lot of talks): if people are doing meaningful activity, like their jobs, then a presentation related to their work can serve as a valuable reflection opportunity. So, speaking to practitioners makes sense: it can provide new insights, inspiration, and more. But not for learners who don’t have meaningful activity and aligned content resources.

Which brings me to the second point, you need to start with thinking about what you want learners to be able to do after the learning experience, and then align assessment and learning materials accordingly. Like the post author, I too probably was “doin’ a Lewin” when I first started lecturing, but I coupled it with meaningful and challenging assignments. And not as well as I now would do, but I improved over time and if I ever get a chance to be an instructor again, I will continue to improve (I’ve got some courses or a program I’d love to run).

It’s real easy to delude ourselves that good production equals good learning, but the evidence is to the contrary. Similarly, it’s easy to convince ourselves that we’ve given the learners the necessary information. That doesn’t work either. You’ve got to understand learning, formally or intuitively (and the latter is not the way to bet), and align the elements to succeed.

That’s if a significant skill-shift is what’s needed, and there are lots of times a course isn’t the answer. But when it is, get it right. Please. We really can’t afford to waste money and time like it is all too easy to do.

Understanding by Design

16 March 2011 by Clark 1 Comment

I have long advocated, in consonance with sound learning principles, that in a good design process works backwards:

start with the desired outcomes as capabilities,
align assessment to the outcomes,
and then design the learning experience to achieve those outcomes.

This shouldn’t be new. Recently, I was pointed towards Wiggins & McTighe’s Understanding by Design, which turns out to be a curricular approach predicated on just such lines. I am of mixed feelings.

First, I am thrilled to see someone in formal education talking about looking at more meaningful outcomes, particularly aimed at “clarify learning goals, devise revealing assessments of student understanding, and craft effective and engaging learning activities”. This is something I’ve been trying to argue for in my work with formal education, e.g. with publishers, schools, and more. It’s a more enlightened approach to design.

On the other hand, it’s sort of like my reaction when we investigated what should be covered in continuing medical education and were told that we should proselytize evidence-based medicine: “what have they been doing ’til now?!?!” I continue to be amazed at how folks go about things in ways that do not reflect what we understand about doing things well. And what I’ve seen of their 6 Facets of Understanding seem a bit vague (and mea culpa, I have not read their thorough exposition, but it seems like YAT, Yet Another Taxonomy), though I’m perfectly willing to be wrong about that.

Interestingly, they apparently do not recommend applying this approach to individual lesson plans, and instead constrain it to curriculum level goals. I can see how the focus should be on the goal, not the time-frame, and I personally believe in spreading out learning over a longer period of time.

It’s nice to have another label to attach to good design, so I laud the initiative, and hope we can get more good design, and more understanding, in our schools and everywhere else.

Social Media Strategy thoughts

8 February 2011 by Clark 2 Comments

What is a social media strategy for outreach? Really, it‘s about demonstrating your thinking, your values, and background. It‘s about interacting with appropriate people in ways that reflect who you are.

Here is some thoughts about how that maps out in two areas: Facebook, and Twitter. I‘m mentioning these as two of the most viable and visible tools for social media engagement.

Twitter

Having a twitter account is a necessary start, maybe several. One might be just a daily thing people can follow, but it has to provide value. So, for example, you might stream out an interesting bit of the day. That, alone, however, is not enough.

A second important role is to engage people. More important than the first idea is to â€˜be‘ an entity. If an organization is on social media, and increasingly they should be, it needs to be interactive. This is accomplished in several ways:

point to what the organization is doing
point to interesting things outside of the organization
re-tweet relevant stuff that others post (which requires following interesting people)
respond to people replying to that account.

These require resources, essentially a person or persons who handle these duties. Done well, these activities demonstrate that there is an interesting mind and a sincere heart behind the account.

Facebook

The same is true of a FaceBook page. Not only should people be friending it, they should be coming back to be engaged the organization, but now also with their colleagues also interested in the organization.

There are different ways to be on Facebook: as a static page, or as a â€˜presence‘ with dialogs, groups, etc. A static page might get a few â€˜likes‘, but you really want to build a site as a place to come for folks interested in the organization and it’s work. There need to be discussions supported (and interacted with). There need to be updates. There needs to be a way for people to have a dialog with you. You need information: photos, events. Use apps to create polls. In short, it’s about interaction around the organization and it’s work.

Again, the message is that you‘re active, engaged, you really care about what you do. And, again, it takes resources.

Twitter/Facebook Integration

These two elements do not live independently. Your Twitter strategy should be aligned with your Facebook strategy, so your tweets point to new information on Facebook, your Facebook account reflects your tweets, etc. Your tweets should drive traffic to the Facebook site, but not exclusively.

There‘s more that can be incorporated: blogs (I use twitter and my blog more than my facebook page, but I‘m an individual not an organization). However, your elements shouldn‘t be too fragmented. E.g. only have separate Twitter handles and Facebook pages if your separate initiatives have to maintain unique identities. However, that‘s a branding issue, and not a place I‘m qualified to talk about. Once you‘ve got the identity, then you need to align your Facebook and Twitter strategies.

So, you should be doing this, and you need to be doing it well. If you don’t do it right, you may as well not do it at all.

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