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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.

Ok, this is a gripe and somewhat political; fair warning.

My son has a VSD, a ventricular septal defect. It’s a tiny hole in his heart wall, not growing, so the doctors say “don’t operate”, and he’s perfectly (almost obnoxiously :) healthy. Our insurance provider, however, says that unless we cut into his healthy body, they won’t cover him. They have to, actually, because of HIPAA (thankfully). BUT, they won’t cover him under our family plan (which has gone up 400% in the past 4 years), and we have to have a second, separate, and much less coverage policy for him.

This makes him, effectively, a second class citizen.

As an independent consultant, I can’t get small business insurance where a plan would have to cover the whole family (and can’t just employ my wife to qualify). So let me be clear that I’m for the US to move to a one not-for-profit medical insurance system, nationally. Don’t tell me it doesn’t work, because I lived in Australia for seven years where they have it and it works. It’s not perfect, but it’s bloody well better than our system here in terms of coverage for everyone. And of course you should’ve seen the results that show the US system is worst and most expensive of the major countries. Scandalous.

I’m a bit dismayed that the major candidates’ plans aren’t willing to go this far. And, by and large, their plans won’t help my health care costs. Given that the forecasts are for more independent workers, this should be of more concern.

The alternative would be a regular job, but so far no one’s come through with an offer that affords me the level of contribution I can and want to make. So, anyone want an ‘on call’ elearning expert for the cost of health, disability, and retirement benefits for me and my family?

I’ve seen that my colleagues have been running their blogs through a ‘readability‘ test. I’m not sure how reasonable it is, but I took a punt and:

I’m pleased that it’s readable (I wouldn’t want otherwise), but I admit I’ve always thought that I’m too conceptual, so I’m a little put out! ;).

On the other hand, the code they ‘recommend’ has as an alternate a ‘cash advance’ site(?!?). Given that Cammy Bean’s is ‘genius’ level, and Jay Cross’ is ‘jr. high school’, maybe it’s random? I respect both, but I don’t find that big a difference between their outputs. Caveat emptor.

The Learning Circuits Blog big question of the month for September is “Where to work?” (PS I don’t know why I can’t get a straight URL just to the question.) It’s kind of a tough question, really. For whom? When?

When I look at the broad categories of who works in eLearning, first there’s a breakdown between ‘education’ and ‘the real world’, the latter of which roughly breaks down into corporate, government, and not-for-profit. The reason I separate out education is that there elearning is much more about education, not training. The others reverse. My definition of the distinction is a continuum from performance in very specific contexts (training) to broad applicability (education). Increasingly, we’re seeing pushes down on education, and up on training, however.

And we need to recognize that in many instances, we’re talking about a broader picture, where the a second dimension is performance support versus full instruction.

To be honest, though, it doesn’t so much matter where you work as what you do, who you work with, etc. The main thing is to align your job description with what you want to do: if you want to tinker with code and systems, be a develop, not a designer. If you want to figure out who should learn what, do curriculum development, if you want to create content, be a designer, etc. If you want to do a bit of each, work in a small organization.

Then choose based upon manager, company culture, location, and all the rest. Realize that you’ll never get the perfect fit, it’s all about tradeoffs. So know what’s important to you, and maximize your priorities. But that’s basic job counseling.

Of course, you have to be realistic with your strengths and styles too. Interestingly, a friend who has been doing counseling was interested in something new that involved teamwork and computers but not really software engineering. I thought elearning was a viable suggestion (though I did caveat with my ‘bias’). I do believe that understanding people, technology, and business (whether from interface design, learning design, or business intelligence perspective) is a valuable skill set going forward!