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Predictions for 2009

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Over at eLearn Magazine, Lisa Neal Gualtieri gets elearning predictions for 2009, and they’re reliably interesting. Here’re mine:

The ordinary: Mobile will emerge, not as a major upheaval, but quietly infiltrating our learning experiences. We‘ll see more use of games (er, Immersive Learning Simulations) as a powerful learning opportunity, and tools to make it easier to develop. Social networking will become the ‘go to‘ option to drive performance improvements.

The extraordinary: Semantics will arise; we‘ll start realizing the power of consistent tagging, and start being able to meta-process content to do smart things on our behalf.   And we‘ll start seeing cloud-hosting as a new vehicle for learning services.

I’ve been over-optimistic in the past, for example continuing to believe mobile will make it’s appearance (and it is, but not in the big leap I hoped).   It’s quietly appearing, but interest isn’t matching the potential I’ve described in various places.   I’m not sure if that’s due to a lack of awareness of the potential, or perceptions of the barriers: too many platforms, insufficient tools.

I continue to see interest in games, and naturally I’m excited.   There is still a sadly-persistent view that it’s about making it ‘fun’ (e.g. tarted up drill and kill), while the real issue is attaching the features that drive games (challenge, contextualization, focus on important decisions) and lead to better learning.   Still, the awareness is growing, and that’s a good thing.

And I’ve been riffing quite a lot recently about social networking (e.g. here), as my own awareness of the potential has grown (better late than never :).   The whole issues of enabling organizational learning is powerful.   And I’ve also previously opined about elearning 3.0, the semantic web, so I’ll point you there rather than reiterating.

So there you have it, my optimistic predictions. I welcome your thoughts.

Coping personally, organizationally, and societally

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Having just come back from DevLearn (which rocked; my hearty thanks to all participants and organizers), and now engaged in the Corporate Learning Trends conference (free, online), I’m seeing some repeated themes, and interests.   It’s a busy time, since we‘re deeply engaged in the latter, but some messages are coming through so powerfully that I’ve got to reflect on them.

In this time of economic uncertainty or outright fear, one of the resonant themes is ‘how to cope’. Marcia Conner, one of our forward thinkers, is going to be talking about the topic of coping tomorrow at 10 AM PT, and I’m looking forward to it!I believe that’s important at the societal level as well.   We need to invest in our capabilities when things are down so we’re poised to capitalize on the upswing. Jay invited me to share his breakfast byte at DevLearn on the topic.

We brainstormed with the attendees, and came up with some interesting points.   At the personal level was to be nimble, strategic, and develop yourself.   Tony Karrer talked today about investing in knowing how to use the tools effectively, building upon all the tools that Robin Good and Jane Hart had described yesterday (simply amazing tools).

The organization level of that is to develop infrastructure and capability.   Dave Pollard today talked about moving from Knowledge Management 1.0 to 2.0, empowering people to self-help. What can you do to foster creativity and innovation on a shoestring when you can’t cope with full-fledged initiatives?   Can you get a small social networking tool initiative going that can help people help each other?

A couple of recurrent themes were selling this to management, and managing the proliferation of tools.   For the former, I reckon it’s about helping more than just novices, but providing self-help.   It depends, of course, on what your needs are and consequently what you choose to implement, but the outcomes can clearly be linked to organizational goals and problems, like reducing time-to-information, increasing productive collaboration, and sharing.   For the problem of tracking the tools, I think the key are the needed affordances.   I’ve been focused on finding the affordances of the tools, but it’s another thing to think about the affordances an organization needs and map tools into them.   Briefly, it’s about collaborative representations (prose, graphics), pointers to relevant topics, etc.   More work to be done here, I reckon.

These topics are being discussed at the Corporate Learning Trends social site this week (and ongoing, hopefully) and you can join in.

Note that I think these are relevant societally as well.   We developed some serious infrastructure through the WPA, and the Interstates, and it’s crumbling.   At some point you need to build it back up (rebuild differently?) to meet the needs.   That may increasingly be things like networks (and healthcare) as well as things like bridges.   I think this is key to thinking about how to invest for the tough times; focus internally until times get good again and be poised to rebound.   It’s like your body rebuilding while you’re asleep so you can restart the new day. Of course, you need to have hoarded the resources.   May be a way short-term shareholder returns damage long-term survivability?

Here’s hoping the economic situation is short and mercifully gentle, and that you all survive and prosper!

First eLearning?

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This month’s Big Question from the Learning Circuit’s blog is, basically, where do you begin?   Of course, that begs the question: what do you already know? Design, ID, a tool, ?

However, it appears that the question sort of assumes a preexisting master’s in ID/IT.   Which, if it’s done well, includes several different tools, lots of ID, a whiff of interface design, some experience prototyping different types of interactions (sync, games, etc), and one major project with project planning, prototyping, testing, and production.   Which, of course, is a dream.

Regardless, I’d recommend Clive Shepherd’s 30 60 minute Master’s (NB: you have to open an account), my own 7 Step Program (PDF) on the reading side.   Then I’d recommend taking a topic and storyboarding, testing, refining, prototyping, testing, and refining.   All before you actually start building.   I don’t really care how you prototype: it can be PPT, raw html, whatever.   Or a rapid elearning tool, but don’t put hands to a development tool ’til it’s mapped out on paper (you don’t want to prematurely converge on what the tool makes easy until you’ve figured out the best design).

For production, there are lots of tools out there. Apparently Udutu is free to author in, and there are lots of tools out there, SmartBuilder, Lectora, etc.   Whatever your org already has it’s mitts on.   Of course, if you’ve gone more creative in your design, you might need to actually work in, say, Flash.

But get the design right first; as I say, “if you get the design right, there are lots of ways to implement it, but if you don’t get the design right, it doesn’t matter how you implement it!”

Design: final heuristics

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Part 4 of the 4 part series:

Here‘re the final suite of heuristics I came up with many years ago as a result of looking at our design process and the barriers our cognitive architecture can put in our own way.

Full Spectrum Design: One of the most insidious problems observed in educational multimedia is a tendency to incorporate all the solution into the computer.   The system will be the repository of all the text, sound, graphics, etc, and the instruction.   Unfortunately, this does not properly reflect what’s known about reading text on screen and the role of the teacher.   In conjunction with the No Limits Analysis, another way to get the best design is to consider the full spectrum of media, particularly considering delivering text on paper, having the instruction accomplished by an instructor, etc.   The proper use of the term multimedia is to consider all the available media and their use and to distribute the instructional task across all of them.

No Limits Analysis: After assembling a team, the first step in the design process is analysis, and an important component is proper information gathering to ensure that all relevant possible sources of inspiration have been considered.   However, before we consider what others have done in the same, we should see what we come up with when we think as if there were no limits.   This occurs after the pedagogical problem has been identified but before other examples are considered.   The step is to consider how the problem would be addressed if there were no technological limitations, as if anything could be accomplished as if by magic. Arthur C. Clarke said “any truly advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”, and we‘re really at the stage where the barriers are our imaginations, not the technology.   So stop and think what an ideal solution would be.   You may not be able to achieve what you imagine, but you certainly can‘t if you don‘t identify that option, and you‘ll prematurely limit the solution space.

Kitchen Sink Analysis: After the No Limits Analysis, comes the systematic consideration of other corners of the design space or other relevant prototypes for modification.   Lewis & Reiman suggested that “plagiarism” is an appropriate design strategy (as far as your lawyers would let you, as they cautioned), where ideas are lifted from existing designs rather than reinventing the wheel.   An expansion to this concept is to not only look at what others have done but to also consider how instruction might proceeded without computer support, what theory suggests as an approach, etc.   In short, the suggestion is to exhaustively search all potential sources of input into the design process, including the proverbial ‘kitchen sink’.   This process is both to help populate the design space and discover all constraints.

And let me add one other that I didn‘t explicitly include before:
Lateral input:   Research on brainstorming and creativity (cf D Bono), has shown that besides being systematic and covering all the known or plausible solutions, lateral thinking is valuable. After you‘ve been exhaustive within the box, find ways to get ‘outside the box‘.   Use random inspirations: play a game, doodle, get some random input!   Get silly!   It may not be politically correct anymore, but back when I worked for a learning game company, the CEO (hi, Sky!), used to bring in pizza and beer on Friday afternoon and have some idea sessions!   There are lots of tools and approaches, just make sure you make some concerted effort here.

OK, that‘s it for this series on design.   I hope these past few posts give you some useful guidance or ideas.   I welcome your own!

First: https://blog.learnlets.com/2008/09/design-design-as-search/

Second: https://blog.learnlets.com/2008/09/design-our-barriers/

Third: https://blog.learnlets.com/2008/09/design-the-first-heuristics/

To-Learn Lists?

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The Learning Circuit’s Blog Big Question of the Month is about To-Learn lists: whether they make sense, how to implement them, etc.   Interesting question.   On the face of it, it seems useful: identifying and focusing on explicit and specific learning goals.   In practice, do they make sense? Do they even exist?

i would suggest that they do exist, and that every time a manager and employee agree on a development plan, there’s at least an implicit To-Learn list.   Obviously, a competency path in an LMS is similarly a formal TL list. And we have an implicit one when we sign up for a course, whether online or face-to-face, buy a book on a topic, or access an online tutorial, FAQ, help page, etc.

I do think that being explicit about learning is valuable, hence my focus on meta-learning, and having clear goals is a way to make them happen.   On the other hand, I think many of our learning goals are small and immediate (like my desire to figure out how to fix the CSS on my website and this blog).   Would it make sense to capture them in the context and generalize them to be thought of at other times?   Probably, and consequently another way we could use our mobile tools to make us more effective (I regularly capture ToDos in my mobile devices, which is why the iPhone is still making me crazy!). And there have been times I’ve put things to look up into my ToDo (though these days I often just look them up in the moment).

So, I think they’re a great idea, maybe not separate from ToDos in general, but worth thinking of as a sub-category, and worth taking the effort to make explicit.   Little bits of learning over the long haul: slow learning!

Distributed Learning

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Distributed learning is an idea that I think offers an untapped potential, what with the new technologies we have.   I’m not talking here about distance learning, but instead a combination of slow learning with ubiquitous learning.   The idea is to combine learning on the go and on-demand with a long term relationship, personalized awareness, and mixed media.   Think of it as cloud computing for your learning goals.

There are strong reasons for spreading learning over time (Will Thalheimer‘s got a whole white paper on it) –   think drip irrigation.   We can use technology to do this in a contextually relevant way; not just random elements, but wrapped around the events in our life.   With some knowledge of our schedule, and our learning goals, a system could pop out little relevant bits of learning to develop us over time.

Imagine that you’ve learning goals about communication, and about coaching.   Assume, for the moment, an imaginary curriculum that places ‘authenticity’ after ‘understanding the other’s point’, and that you’ve completed the latter.   Then, before a business meeting with a potential new contact, you might get a message to “‘say what you mean, mean what you say, without being mean‘, after you ensure you’ve heard them”   that comes in right before the meeting.   After the meeting you might be connected to a coach/mentor, to see how it went.

Later that same day, you’ve got a review meeting with one of your reports, and as your coaching curriculum’s next topic is “focus on behavior, not person”, you get not only a relevant message beforehand, but a customized job aid to take with you (filled out with the individual’s last details and your particular area to work on), and a self-evaluation form afterward.

Which is not to say you don’t also have the opportunity to request particular information beforehand, so there might be a custom ‘pull’ portal available to you with things you’re likely to need (in addition to the general search tools you already have).   A smart system might recognize that it’s been too long since some knowledge has been applied, and choose to send you some challenge to keep the knowledge active, at least until it’s part of your internalized repertoire.

Why is this of interest?   It’s about developing people over time, in the ways they want (an individual should could choose their goals, though there could be ones also negotiated with an employer).   It’s about taking advantage of your life’s occurences, not removing oneself from it to learn.   It’s being contextualized sensitive to not only where you are, but ‘when’ you are.   It’s about being opportunistic, effective, and efficient, rather than intrusive, effortful, and minimally effective.   Which is not to say that there might not be more concerted chunks, particularly at the beginning, or at major inflection points, but it’s the optimal blend – an information model, not an industrial model.

We’ve got the capability (Clarke’s “any truly advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”), but we need the will and the resources.   Anyone game?

eLearning 2.0

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During the 1st day of Mark and Brent’s Collaboration summer seminar, they got folks active: starting blogs, wikis, webtops, etc.   They’re doing a great job:

c2sss

Naturally, in addition to the tactical questions (“how do I move this tab”?), the conceptual questions started: when do you use a blog versus a wiki, how do you make sense of all the options out there.

Now, as part of my performance ecosystem, I think blogs are a personal reflection or a history (as I told an attendee, it would be great for capturing a ‘war story’), whereas wikis are for collaboration to create a unified view of something (e.g. the way to tune a network).   I don’t think blogs support a rich discussion and aren’t that collaborative.   Also, one of the problems I see is that we often forget old tools in the excitement of new tools: discussion boards are a great way to have an ongoing conversation; you don’t need some new tool for this. Yet wikis are really good for capturing the output of a collaboration.

Also recently I’ve been having conversations with folks about integrating tools to meet larger needs.   Ning is a tool that provides ways for individuals to have profiles, to have forums, to list events, etc.   Increasingly, LMSs also have these capabilities.

The interesting thing is the great spate of tools out there: Google, Central Desktop, Zoho, Wetpaint, PBWiki, an ever growing list. There are suites of web meeting apps, web-based productivity tools, etc. How do you make sense of it? I think there’s another ‘bubble’ with these, and eventually a bunch will fail and out of the ashes a few will persist.   The good thing, I think, is that by getting your hands dirty with a variety of these, you’ll access some generalized skills.   And web apps are not going away.

I believe training anybody on any particular tool (even the seemingly ubiquitous Microsoft Office suite), is the wrong way to go.   Talk to them about the skill (writing, creating presentations, etc), and then give some assignments across a couple of different tools.   This gives you transferrable skills, which will equip you to communicate and collaborate regardless of the latest wave of tools.   And that’s what’s important, in this day of increasing change.

Learning by doing

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Well, this weekend was an interesting one.   On Saturday morning I not only resurrected my site, but got my Twitter experiment advanced by managing to insert a tweet feed into the blog sidebar. Of course, it formats strangely, and I haven’t been able to fix it yet.   I tried using the span command, but around the Javascript it didn’t seem to work.

Then it was changing the bathroom light fixtures.   Successfully, following on a recent toilet replacement exercise.   In between was an absolutely great block party our neighbors organized, with activities for the kids, food and drink for all.   Learnings from each exercise!

One of the things I tweaked to was that if we sit down and start using the right tool for the job, have patience and persistence, and be willing to stop and think, we can get more done that we thought, we just have to be brave (he stays, still in anxiety mode over making a deck on the slope in the backyard).   Of course, we’re benefited to the extent we see more standards in tools and equipment (I like that they’re standardizing on electrical hardware, which makes it pretty much plug-and-play, even if it took some creativity to end-run two different boxes in two different bathrooms, ahem).   Slowly but surely, the house is being transformed.

The second learning is on community.   By pulling together all the neighbors on our cul-de-sac, we’re building an awareness of each other, which supports us helping each other.   The usual suspects pitched in, and some new folks were invited to join.   It was a lovely evening though the breeze picked up to the point where people started heading out for sweaters before coming back.   I had to think: why can’t the whole world be getting together in their neighborhood and having a party?   Of course, it’s hard when they’re bullets flying by, bombs going off, etc.   Sigh.   Still, creating the right environment for getting together creates the right environment for sharing, and that’s where learning happens.

So, use the right tools, set the right context, and be willing to work and reflect and improve and continue on.   Hope you too had a good weekend!

Summer Seminar Series

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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.

Summer seminar series

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!

Mobile in 5 Paragraphs

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A colleague asked me for 5 paragraphs on mobile:

Let‘s get that straight right from the beginning: mobile learning is not about courses on a phone. mLearning is where we really bring home the message: “It‘s not about learning…it‘s about doing”, because while there are learning implications for mobile devices, it‘s really about performance support. Yes, one of the applications of mobile devices is learning augmentation, extending the learning experience over time through distributed presentations, examples, and practice, but the real opportunities are providing context-sensitive support for the mobile workforce. Increasingly, the workforce is mobile, whether directly for work or indirectly, e.g. commuting, and they have the devices (“Have you already purchased a mobile learning device” “Let me rephrase the question: do you have a cell phone” “Hello…”). Not taking advantage of it is just leaving money on the table.

The variety of mobile devices is vast, spanning media players, handheld gaming platforms, PDAs, cell phones (though that name is no longer apt; cellular technology is long gone), and, increasingly, smartphones. There are convergences, however, where many mobile devices are now phones, media players, PIM (Personal Information Management, read: contacts, calendars, memos, and ToDos), GPS, and more. If you‘re having trouble with any of these TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms) BTW, you can do a search on them to get them defined.

The issues are in how to develop content and resources for these devices, and the answers stack up like a pyramid. The bottom is the proverbial “low hanging fruit”, the content you already have that can be made available “as is” or converting the files to mobile formats. So, your PDFs, your audio recordings of presentations, any videos, and of course your web pages/HTML. The next level is taking all the content you will continue to produce, and proactively capture it (if you‘re not) and ensure that it‘s an automatic feature of your process to produce mobile ready versions. The top is to develop specific mobile resources, and that‘s where we‘re reaching the tipping point: instead of custom tools, we‘re seeing the major tool providers now providing mobile output options. The mobile web is another increasing option, as more and more mobile devices include browsers. As I say, “480 x 320 is the new 1024 x 768”. Mobile is hitting the mainstream.
And, it is hitting it in many ways. There have been instances of successful courses on mobile devices, but that‘s not the sweet spot. One of the more useful options is in augmenting online or face-to-face courses.

We know learning retention fades fast unless reactivated, and mobile gives us a great way to do that. We can send out different ways of thinking about it, more examples, and even new forms of practice. In fact, we should start rethinking the course, moving to blending including mobile as part of the extended experience! The second major big win is in making accessible support for the mobile workforce. We can provide manuals, trouble-shooting, even remote part ordering, to the field engineer. We can bring customer refreshers and updates, cross-selling recommendations, and purchasing capabilities to our mobile field force. And more.

Organizationally, the workforce is more distributed, more mobile, and needing to be more opportunistic and contextually optimal. Mobile is an enabler of increased individual and organizational performance. You need to treat it like any other initiative, managing the change process, but it also leverages other changes that might be happening. Knowledge or content management, mobile device deployment, webinars, many are the initiatives that, with a marginal extra effort, make mobile an additional delivery channel and opportunity. Take advantage of this new direction!
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