June 21, 2001

Knowledge Management

Knowledge maps, knowledge architecture, taxonomies, and more from KAPS Group

On the rebound? Peter Martin, writes in CLO:

The Market Is Coming Back to Knowledge Management In hindsight, knowledge management was a recklessly defined initiative. [See below.] Companies were going to be able to ?empower the intellectual capital of their enterprise? with ad hoc software purchases. Over time the initiative lost its cachet, very much like the ?portal??a key element of knowledge management. As the meaning and value of the portal has risen from the ashes, so has knowledge management. The comeback for knowledge management can be traced to the economy, consolidation of vendors, technological advancement and enterprise software vendor buy-in.

To Verna Allee, it's all a matter of making connections. I think she's got it.

KM=BS? An abstract of T.D. Wilson's The Nonsense of Knowledge Management

Life On The Internet: Could Blogging Assist KM? from Amy Wohl
Knowledge Blogs Are Tough

Denham Gray's amazing KM Wiki

What's knowledge?

Knowledge management is a high-fallutin' buzz phrase for creating and sharing know-how. A hot item circa 1998, overuse has watered down KM's popularity as a category. To vendors, KM became "whatever I want to sell you," be it document-tracking or warehousing good ideas or building web pages or reinforcing innovation or focusing on intellectual capital.

Knowledge is like the sound of the tree that falls in the forest when no one is there: it doesn't exist unless people interact with it. Nurturing innovation and rewarding the sharing of ideas fertilizes seedling ideas. Setting up processes to highlight what's worthy and weed out useless undergrowth help grow heathly trees.

While it may carry a different name in the future, knowledge management anchors one end of the eLearning continuum and is vital to improving organizational performance.

"Knowledge is information that changes something or somebody -- either by becoming grounds for actions, or by making an individual (or an institution) capable of different or more effective action." -- Peter F. Drucker in The New Realities (The same might be said of learning.)

Knowledge Management is a case of the blind men and the elephant. KM refers to one or more of these activities:

  • creating and populating a repository of in-house knowledge
  • measuring the dollar-value of chunks of knowledge
  • facilitating the transfer of knowledge
  • creating a knowledge sharing environment
  • building a corporate culture focused on innovation and knowledge creation

At a minimum, do these things:

Databases:

  1. Corporate yellow pages
  2. Best practices system that captures lessons learned
  3. Competitive intelligence

Infrastructure:

  1. Groupware
  2. Empowered Chief Knowledge Officer

Culture:

  1. Top-down belief
  2. Spirit of sharing and collaboration
  3. Experimentation encouraged

Five Basic Principles of the Mind

  1. Minds are limited.
  2. Minds hate confusion.
  3. Minds are insecure.
  4. Minds don't change.
  5. Minds lose focus.

Jack Trout


In 25 years, knowledge will double every three months.What will that do for learning requirements?

Doug Engelbart


"Knowledge Management is the broad process of locating, organizing, transferring, and using the information and expertise within an organization. The overall knowledge management process is supported by four key enablers: leadership, culture, technology, and measurement."
American Productivity and Quality Center

A wealth of knowledge exists and can be generated among people with a passion for learning and a willingness to explore connections across traditional boundaries.

Meg Wheatley


Tom Stewart's Intellectual Capital, fun to read and source of the ideas to the left.

Information and knowledge are the thermonuclear competitive weapons of our time. Knowledge is more valuable and more powerful than natural resources, big factories, or fat bankrolls.?

Thomas A. Stewart, Intellectual Capital

 

Jack Welch of GE: We soon discovered how essential it is for a multibusiness company to become an open, learning organization. The ultimate competitive advantage lies in an organization?s ability to learn and to rapidly transform that learning into action.

And, in GE?s boundaryless learning culture, the operative assumption is that someone, somewhere, has a better idea; and the operative compulsion is to find out who has that better idea, learn it, and put it into action fast.

 

"If HP knew what HP knows, we'd be three times more profitable."

Lew Platt

 


Come together

Tom Barron, drawing on the ideas of GartnerGroup's Clark Aldrich and others, presents an astute view of the impending merger of e-Learning and Knowledge Management in A Smarter Frankenstein, lead article in the August 2000 issue of Learning Circuits.

Take an eLearning course. Chunk it into discrete learning bites. Surround it with technology that assesses a learner's needs and delivers the appropriate learning nuggets. Add collaborative tools that allow learners to share information. What do you get? Something that looks a whole lot like knowledge management.

Just In Time

Embedded Help
Performance Support
EPSS
Wizards

Knowledge Management
Traditional KM
Combined eLearning/KM
Just in Case Classroom Replication
Self-paced courseware
Virtual classes
Simulations
Skills-building sims
Games
  Connvergent
(Discrete-path)
Divergent
(Infinite-path)

The training function is accustomed to limiting its scope -- offering a curriculum that provides grounds for assessment. KM is open-ended, encouraging participants to share whatever works without an intermediary to translate things into lessons. Oil and water? The accelerating pace of business is already obsoleting the authoring function -- there's not enough time for lengthy development cycles; intitutive authoring systems are replacing middleman authors by taking content directly from the expert's mouth.

An obstacle I've personally never overcome to my satisfaction is countering the hoarding of knowledge by those who believe knowledge is power, or are perhaps too self-motivated to contribute to the good of their organizations.



What to Blogs have to do with it?

Weblogs (AKA Blogs) are important. If you're not familiar with Blogs, read Rebecca Blood's excellent Weblogs: A History and Perspective.

1. Blogs are a free authoring tool that enables anyone with a net connection to publish content on the web. The doors are open.

2. You cannot keep up with the raw flow of information being posted to the web without a lot of help. The Blogs of people you trust point the way to the good stuff. For example, I read Camworld because it has proven worthy of my time; I've grown to trust Cameron Barrett -- I know where he's coming from.

3. In time, organizations will encourage in-house Blogging.


 

Tacit & Explicit Knowledge


Nonaka's
Knowledge Creation Spiral

In an economy where the only certainty is uncertainty, the one sure source of lasting competitive advantage is knowledge. When markets shift, technologies proliferate, competitors multiply, and products become obsolete almost overnight, successful companies are those that consistently create new knowledge, disseminate it widely throughout the organization, and quickly embody it in new technologies and products. These activities define the knowledge-creating company, whose sole business is continuous innovation. (source: Ikujiro Nonaka, The Knowledge-Creating Company, Harvard Business Review, November-December 1991)

Explicit Knowledge

Tacit Knowledge

You can write it down. Easy to share.

It?s tough to explain. Tough to share.

Left brain, pragmatic ? learned. Think classroom.

Right brain, idealistic ? internalized. Think watercooler.

Theory of organization =

Machine for processing information

Living organism with a purpose

Knowledge =

Formal, systematic, quantifiable

Know-how and ingrained mental models and perspectives. Subjective, hunches, intuitive, highly personal.

Metrics =

Quantifiable: increased efficiency, lower costs, improved ROI

Qualitative: increased effectiveness, embodies company vision, expresses management aspirations and strategic goals, builds organizational knowledge network.

Impact =

Increases immediate capabilities

Profoundly shapes how we perceive the world around us.

Communicated =

Via words, textbooks, CBT

Via figurative language and symbolism, metaphor, analogy, modeling.

Other sources

The Economics of Knowledge, Eric E. Vogt. "Knowledge is a perspective shared by a community which allows for some effective action. ...the economics of knowledge dictate that we think in terms of creating collection systems that allow for the instantaneous sharing of these new perspectives. Collection systems allow us to listen to the needs and concerns of customers. Collection systems allow us to tap into the global flow of creative ideas and fuel the imagination of our knowledge community."

Journal of the Hyperlinked Organization (JOHO). David Weinberger has the most level-headed approach to knowledge management you'll find anywhere. He's also a laugh riot. JOHO is one of my favorite reads on the Web.

Weinberger? He's a commentator on NPR, and co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto.
"Jay of InternetTime.com, has put a link to JOHO on his site,
www.meta-time.com. We hereby declare www.meta-time.com
to be the new Finest Site on the Web."

Knowledge Management News, Brad Hoyt. Sporadic ever since Brad joined a start-up but worth the wait. Pointers, reflections, jobs, events.

University of Denver: Organizational Learning and Knowledge Management

Karl Erik Sveiby's impressive "library" of on-line resources

ASTD on KM -- an overview of what's going on in the field

E&Y Center for Business Innovation -- a great resource

Scient sells KM as something that strengthens them and their customers

The Knowledge Management Paradox: How to Manage Your Most Strategic Asset, CPT

BRINT -- exhaustive and exhausting links and essays. More is more?

Thinking Business -- the document tracking end of KM

Leverage the Value-Hierarchy of Knowledge

Different skills produce different levels of impact.

Difficult to replace,
low value added

Staff jobs, skilled factory workers, experienced secretaries

?Know the ropes but don?t pull the strings.?
Don?t directly impact customers.

INFORMATE à

Difficult to replace,
high value added

Irreplaceable role in the organization;
nearly irreplaceable as individuals

Create the products and services
that draw the customers in

CAPITALIZE

Easy to replace,
low value added
.

Unskilled, semi-skilled labor.

Success not dependent on these individuals.

AUTOMATE ¯

Easy to replace,
high value added

Designers

Work is valuable but not this particular individual.

DIFFERENTIATE or OUTSOURCE ¯

Often, the value added is the information subtracted.

A hired hand is not a hired mind. Routine, low-skill work, even if it?s done manually, does not generate or emply human capital for the organization.  Unleashing the human capital already resident in the organization requires minimizing mindless tasks, meaningless paperwork, unproductive infights. The Taylorized workplace squandered human assets in such activities.

?Informate? = change the work to add more value to customers.

Outsourcing frees resources to continue developing high-return expertise.

Capitalize means providing opportunities for learning. People need to feel they?re ?in the game,? and not ?being kicked around by it.?

How to Capitalize on High-Value Knowledge

Structural capital company property builds on corporate yellow pages, knowledge maps, speedy transfer. Do enough and no more; many overinvest. HP and others find that demand-driven approach is more effective than pushing information into people?s emailboxes. Avoid overinvesting by making it okay not to know everything ? leverage the expertise of specialists. When a manager brings in a problem, the experts teach her how to apply the lessons of a module to solve it.

Customer capital, the relationships of the company with its customers, is measured by market share, customer retention and defection, and profit per customer. This is the most valuable capital of all it's where the money is but ironically, it's also the least well managed. Tom Stewart has a wonderful line, The customer today can call the tune because he knows the score. The goal is to maintain an increasingly intimate relationship. Empowered customers deal directly with companies' databases.

Ten Principles for Managing Intellectual Capital

  1. Companies don't own human and customer capital. Companies share the ownership of human assets with employees. They share ownership of customer capital with suppliers and customers. An adversarial relationship with employees destroys wealth.
  2. To create human capital it can use, a company needs to foster teamwork, communities of practice, and other social forms of learning.
  3. To manage and develop human capital, companies must unsentimentally recognize that some employees, however intelligent or talented they are, aren?t assets. Invest in proprietary and strategic knowledge workers; minimize all other costs.
  4. Structural capital is most easy to control because companies own it, but customers are where the money comes from.
  5. Structural capital serves two purposes: to amass stockpiles of knowledge that support the work customers value, and to speed the flow of that information inside the company. Just-in-time knowledge is more efficient that knowledge stored in the warehouse. 
  6. Substitute information and knowledge for expensive physical and financial assets.
  7. Knowledge work is custom work. Mass production does not yield high profits.
  8. Analyze your value chain to see what information is most crucial. The knowledge work is generally downstream, close to the customers.
  9. Focus on the flow of information, not the flow of materials. Information once supported the real business; now it is the real business.
  10. Human, structural and customer capital work together.

Source: Thomas Stewart, Intellectual Capital

   Knowledge Management: Four Practical Steps jay @ 25-Apr-00
 

Ideas @ Work > by Diane McFerrin Peters

(Harvard Management Update, Vol. 5 #3, March 2000)

Most companies underestimate the importance of intangible assets such as knowledge, creativity, ideas, and relationships. All these account for more value in our economy than the tangibles. Yet it's difficult for companies to get their arms around intangibles, so they rarely protect them as carefully as they do bricks and hardware. What would you do if your smartest people suddenly left? How can you ensure that what one department or division learns is widely shared throughout the company?

1) Create a setting for sharing knowledge.
Access to knowledge breeds more knowledge, and the best KM techniques ensure that everyone's involved. Try an open meeting policy.

2) Eliminate communication ?filters.
Politics, turf, and implementation responsibilities can squelch ideas in traditional communication channels. Going outside the channels?for example, by allowing people to skip levels?leads to more ideas on how to do things better.

3) Prioritize the tasks.
Most companies' to-do lists contain twice as much as they could ever accomplish. A prioritization process can align brainpower and effort behind what's truly strategic. Senior leaders get together to rank all vital activities first to last, no ties allowed. The process lets people challenge assumptions about the value of long-running projects, share knowledge about what is being accomplished, and break down the departmental barriers that bottle up ideas and creativity.

4) Keep time budgets.
Few individuals and fewer organizations get a true read on where their time and effort really go.

Picasso had a collection of masterpieces in his home. They were hung slightly crooked, and visitors couldn't resist the temptation to straighten them. But Picasso felt that when a painting was straight, the observer focused on the frame around it. When the frame was crooked, the beauty of the image jumped out. It's the same with knowledge. Instead of trying to put boundaries around it, we should be letting it jump out of its frame.


Posted by Jay Cross at 11:14 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Making It Work (Implementing)

Change
Management
+ Consumer
Marketing
=

Why this community? Organizations implement eLearning to improve the performance of their people. The successful ones gain organizational backing through change management and ground-level support through internal marketing.

We set up this site to build upon the concepts in our book, describe new findings and insights, and give our readers the opportunity to share best practices. Welcome!

Template for Developing an eLearning Implementation Action Plan

Twenty pages of forms, checklists, and text.

Fill in the form to complete your comprehensive plan.

FREE Download


Conference Presentations

Lance & Jay's PowerPoint slides from the ASTD Conference in San Diego, May 2003

Watch the video of Jay and Lance's keynote presentation at TechLearn 2002



Free Consultation with the Author



We want to help you succeed.
Call Lance Dublin at 1.415.759.1258 or email him at ld@pacbell.net to schedule an appointment. The first 15 minutes are on us.



Implementing eLearning, the Director's Cut

Find out what didn't get into the book. Typos, far-out ideas, and topsy-turvy presentation. This is unedited. From the heart. Unexpurgated.


Tips & Best Practices Examples

Communications plan for NCR University from George Brennan
eLearning Brochure for Pharmacia from Donald Oguin. Also Cafeteria table tents & Poster ( pdf )

Decades of Marketing in 5 Minutes from Internet Time Group

Customer Experience Meets Online Marketing at Brand Central Station from Boxes & Arrows

The Marketing FAQs

Survey Says? Identify Your Objectives from HBS Working Knowledge

"Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood." Daniel H. Burnham

Change Management 101 by Fred Nichols

Please contribute to our community. If you're really proud of your team's accomplishments, send your stories and artifacts to us: jaycross@internettime.com or ldublin@pacbell.net

Critical Success Factors: eLearning Solutions , Cappuccino, Deloitte

Cisco's e-learning development vision - It's a process with up's and down's.

Best practices: people

Online Instructor Competencies from Learning Peaks, Patti Shank. A good online instructor wears many hats.
What's an eTrainer? & New Role: eLearning Guide , Internet Time Group 2/2000
Smile, Everyone! It's Time for Your Computer Training, Fast Company, 5/2000. Empower the learners and let them have fun!

Worst practices: people

The Training Weenie Syndrome : Five Foolish Things Trainers Do To Demote Training © INSIGHT ED Patti Shank Trainer, don't shoot yourself in the foot.

The Lie of Online Learning, Training magazine, March 2000. "Let?s move learning out of the workday and into the employees? own "uncompensated" time. No one wants to tell you that the anytime of online learning is supposed to be after work and that the anyplace is at home."

Learning in the Real World . Skeptics' views on why we should be cautious about putting computers into children's schools. "In the real world we can teach, explore and learn the patterns of connection which link different people, plants, animals and places. If education software even attempts to deal with these crucial concepts, the limits of the media may make the presentation inflexible, superficial, and inadequate." Much of this reasoning applies to computer-mediated training of adults as well.

ERP Training Stinks , CIO (6/00). "The average ERP implementation takes 23 months, has a total cost of ownership of $15 million and rewards (so to speak) the business with an average negative net present value of $1.5 million. And the news gets worse."

    "But the consensus that's emerging is that the training that matters isn't techy, "this field shows this; this button does that" training. In fact, what we normally call training is increasingly being shown to be relatively worthless. What's called for, it seems, is an ability to figure out the underlying flow of information through the business itself. The traditional view of training may blind the unwary to its significance and to the tightly woven links that exist between training, change management and staff adequacy."

"The first problem is that word: training . It conjures up images of dogs jumping through hoops. This is not helpful."

Motivation

Is it Time to Exchange Skinner's Teaching Machine for Dewey's Toolbox? (Yes.)


A New Role: eLearning Guide

Learntivity's Attention Links Zounds - Compelling Experiences

Motivation in Instructional Design. ERIC Digest

Emotional Intelligence

Emotional Intelligence Services
Emotional Intelligence Consortium

Bringing EQ to the Workplace (research paper)

What Daniel Goleman calls emotional intelligence is the source of ROI, human happiness, responsible behavior -- well, what more could you want? It's taken a backseat to such mundane issues as IT training because its payoff is not immediate, engineers don't get it, and it's a tough nut to crack. This is a major opportunity.

Technical


Network Architectures For E-Learning Applications
tells how Cisco wires things together in support of content on demand, broadcast, and virtual classrooms. Microsoft Research on Telepresence

Adoption and barriers to eLearning & Approaches to Implementation , both from David Simmonds at Forum Corporate

Change Management and eLearning by Tom Werner

Sales Knowledge Management by Carl Binder

Benchmarks for Success in Internet-Based Distance Education

A study of distance learning benchmarks at six colleges prepared by The Institute for Higher Education Policy for the NEA and Blackboard. April 2000.

While the methodology is a bit dodgy (literature review followed by ratings from administrators, faculty, and students), the study is provocative.

The benchmarks considered essential for quality Internet-based distance education are:

  • Institutional Support -- a technology plan that addresses security, backup, system integrity; technical reliability; and central support for infrastructure
  • Course development -- periodic updates, require students to engage in analysis, synthesis, and evaluation
  • Teaching/Learning -- interaction between student and faculty (voicemail and/or email suffice), constructive and timely feedback, students learn research methods
  • Course structure -- triage up front to cull out unsuitable candidates, supplemental course nfo that outlines objectives, concepts, ideas, learning outcomes, library resources (virtual is okay), common expectations for tme to complete assignments and receive feedback
  • Student support -- hands-on training in system use, help line, rapid turn on answers
  • Faculty support --- technical assistance in course development, instructor training, written resources to deal with issues arising from student use of electronic data
  • Evaluation and assessmen t - use several standards, learning outcomes are reiewed regularly to ensure clarity, utility, and appropriateness.

Quality on the Line

Coach Roles

goal articulation
acting as a role model
challenging questions
achieving results
personal growth
gaining and keeping balance
giving expert advice
dealing with adversity
making tough decisions
social skill development
improving skills
inner peace and reflection
lifestyle decisions
finanical or economic well being

Strategies for Learning at a Distance

Morgan (1991) suggests that distant students who are not confident about their learning tend to concentrate on memorizing facts and details in order to complete assignments and write exams. As a result, they end up with a poor understanding of course material. He views memorization of facts and details as a ?surface approach? to learning and summarizes it as follows:
  • Surface approach:
    • Focus on the "signs" (e.g., the text or instruction itself).
    • Focus on discrete elements.
    • Memorize information and procedures for tests.
    • Unreflectively associate concepts and facts.
    • Fail to distinguish principles from evidence, new information from old.
    • Treat assignments as something imposed by the instructor.
    • External emphasis focusing on the demands of assignments and exams leading to a knowledge that is cut-off from everyday reality.
Distant students need to become more selective and focused in their learning in order to master new information. The focus of their learning needs to shift them from a ?surface approach? to a ?deep approach?. Morgan (1991) summarizes this approach as follows:
  • Deep Approach:
    • Focus on what is "signified" (e.g., the instructor?s arguments).
    • Relate and distinguish new ideas and previous knowledge.
    • Relate concepts to everyday experience.
    • Relate and distinguish evidence and argument.
    • Organize and structure content.
    • Internal emphasis focusing on how instructional material relates to everyday reality.


Improving Distant Learning

The shift from surface to deep learning is not automatic. Brundage, Keane, and Mackneson (1993) suggest that adult students and their instructors must face and overcome a number of challenges before learning takes place including: becoming and staying responsible for themselves; "owning" their strengths, desires, skills, and needs; maintaining and increasing self-esteem; relating to others; clarifying what is learned; redefining what legitimate knowledge is; and dealing with content. These challenges are considered in relation to distance education:

  • "Becoming and staying responsible for themselves" . High motivation is required to complete distant courses because the day-to-day contact with teachers and other students is typically lacking. Instructors can help motivate distant students by providing consistent and timely feedback, encouraging discussion among students, being well prepared for class, and by encouraging and reinforcing effective student study habits.
  • "Owning one's strengths, desires, skills, needs" . Students need to recognize their strengths and limitations. They also need to understand their learning goals and objectives. The instructor can help distant students to explore their strengths/limitations and their learning goals/objectives by assuming a facilitative role in the learning process. Providing opportunities for students to share their personal learning goals and objectives for a course helps to make learning more meaningful and increases motivation.
  • "Maintaining and increasing self-esteem" . Distant students may be afraid of their ability to do well in a course. They are balancing many responsibilities including employment and raising children. Often their involvement in distance education is unknown to those they work with and ignored by family members. Student performance is enhanced if learners set aside time for their instructional activities and if they receive family support in their academic endeavors. The instructor can maintain student self-esteem by providing timely feedback. It is critical for teachers to respond to students? questions, assignments, and concerns in a personalized and pleasant manner, using appropriate technology such as fax, phone, or computer. Informative comments that elaborate on the individual student?s performance and suggest areas for improvement are especially helpful.
  • "Relating to others" . Students often learn most effectively when they have the opportunity to interact with other students. Interaction among students typically leads to group problem solving. When students are unable to meet together, appropriate interactive technology such as E-mail should be provided to encourage small group and individual communication. Assignments in which students work together and then report back or present to the class as a whole, encourage student-to-student interaction. Ensure clear directions and realistic goals for group assignments (Burge, 1993).
  • "Clarifying what is learned" . Distant students need to reflect on what they are learning. They need to examine the existing knowledge frameworks in their heads and how these are being added to or changed by incoming information. Examinations, papers, and class presentations provide opportunities for student and teacher to evaluate learning. However, less formal methods of evaluation will also help the students and teacher to understand learning. For example, periodically during the course the instructor can ask students to write a brief reflection on what they have learned and then provide an opportunity for them to share their insights with other class members.
  • "Redefining what legitimate knowledge is" . Brundage, Keane, and Mackneson (1993) suggest that adult learners may find it difficult to accept that their own experience and reflections are legitimate knowledge. If the instructor takes a facilitative rather than authoritative role, students will see?their own experience as valuable and important to their further learning. Burge (1993) suggests having learners use first-person language to help them claim ownership of personal values, experiences, and insights.
  • "Dealing with content" . Student learning is enhanced when content is related to examples. Instructors tend to teach using examples that were used when they received their training. For distance learning to be effective, however, instructors must discover examples that are relevant to their distant students. Encourage students to find or develop examples that are relevant to them or their community.

Learning for purposes of IT Certification must combine the motivational and social reinforcement academia is working on with the PI/simulation approach of traditional IT training.

Enabling Learning in a Digital Age, 1998

This is about kids but applies to adult learning equally well.

The model that education has used for centuries considers the student a vessel to be filled at regular intervals with knowledge. The alternative I hope you´ll strive for is seeing the student as co-discoverer of knowledge and the teacher responsible for seeing that the discovery takes place. This model may mean we don't need to be confined to a classroom if discovery can take place in different spaces, even cyberspace. The impact of today's information revolution on schools goes vastly beyond replacing the old blackboard with a shiny whiteboard. Technology is revolutionizing the very nature and dynamics of the conventional classroom experience; this new learning environment, by design, emphasizes students, autonomy and independence.Classroom learning will become student-driven, interactive, experiential and collaborative - all goals long-cherished by many educators but never before attainable. Students will no longer passively receive information but will manage and synthesize it and even contribute it.They become not only takers, but givers – creators -- of information. This level of interaction will herald new types of student communities of practice.The world need more problem-solvers. It needs more explorers.

It needs more rough edges.

Enable learning, don´t teach. a good teacher doesn´t teach at all. They enable students to teach themselves. And it´s not just symantics. Enabling learning is entirely different from teaching.

While a significant part of learning certainly comes from teaching, much comes from exploration, from reinventing the wheel and finding out for oneself. Until the computer, the technology for teaching was limited to audiovisual devices and distance learning by television, which did little more than amplify the activity of teachers and the passivity of children.

The computer changed this balance radically. Suddenly, learning by doing has the potential to become the rule rather than the exception. Since computer simulation of just about anything is now possible, one need not learn about a frog by dissecting it. Instead, children can be asked to design frogs, to build an animal with frog-like behavior, to modify that behavior, to simulate the muscles, to play with the frog.

The opportunity is an unrealized potential.

The Future File

Posted by Jay Cross at 11:13 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Learning Standards

 

Standards

The Emerging Standards Effort in eLearning by Ed Cohen, eLearning Magazine, January 2002:

Torrents of tags
Much of what SCORM has assembled is preoccupied with the tracking, tagging, and storing of content objects. The standards dwell at length upon "metadata," specifying the identifying tags that all learning objects in a course should carry-be they graphics, text, animations, or simulations (see "A Primer on Metdata for Learning Objects," e-learning, October, p.26). For those who envision a future in which users wander through vast content repositories filled with such objects-plucked from various courses, each of them immaculately categorized and easy to use-SCORM is a dream.

This focus on metadata labeling is understandable, given that we all believe reusing course content will be crucial in the near future. Oddly though, this standard may be both too demanding and not demanding enough. If SCORM is ultimately dominated by a giant catalog of tagging requirements, it would pose a daunting hurdle for companies with large amounts of legacy content for dubious gains. And it would ignore important principles of instructional design-which, if they were established as a uniform standard, would help trainers and teachers get the most out of their courseware.

Online Learning, November 2000:

"Web-based training standards entered a new era in June when the major developers agreed to make learning management systems (LMSs) and content from different vendors work together. The agreement between the Aviation Industry CBT Committee (AICC), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the Instructional Management Systems (IMS) Global Learning Consortium is not an official partnership ? yet. And because it is informal in nature the responsibilities of the respective parties haven?t been clearly defined. But it was determined that the Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) Initiative of the Department of Defense, which was the catalyst for the new spirit of cooperation, would act as a coordinating body."

Standards: The Vision and the Hype, Learning Circuits, by Tom Barron The drive to create industry-wide technology standards for e-learning is gaining momentum and adherents. But some see perils--and posturing--amid the promise.

All about Learning Technology Standards, LINEzine, Wayne Hodgins. Learnativity has the articles, presentations, and links of standards visionary Wayne Hodgins.

Achieving Interoperability in e-Learning, Learning Circuits, by Harvi Singh.

In today's Internet economy, achieving integration and interoperability in digital systems is increasingly important. Such integration is possible with open protocols, which allow an organization or system to exchange information with suppliers, partners, and customers in a format that accommodates each organization's system. The same approach is being applied in the e-learning arena, where a new breed of software application frameworks and approaches seek to enable true interoperability of separate systems. This article examines trends and enabling frameworks for making true interoperability a reality.

An Intro to Metadata Tagging, Learning Circuits, by Harvi Singh. Get ready for the Dewey Decimal Classification system of e-learning

The Instructional Use of Learning Objects, a book on the topic

Standards Groups

Advanced Learning Infrastructure Consortium (JAPAN) -- Objective is to establish an active society by reasonably and effectively providing a learning environment which enables anyone to learn anytime, anywhere, according to the goals, pace, interests and understanding of individuals and groups. Also, to foster experts who will be the origin of global competitiveness. Targets: Advanced learning infrastructure that are from Primary and secondary institution to high school, company training, and tertiary school; Technology and Service; Learning system and contents that use information technology, such as network. Examples: e-learning, Web-based training, technology-based training, computer-based training, long distance learning.

World Wide Web Consortium -- Develops interoperable technologies (specifications, guidelines, software, and tools) to lead the Web to its full potential, specifically XML.

Learning Technology Standards Committee (LTSC) of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) -- Formed in 1996. The mission is to develop technical standards, recommended practices, and guides for software components, tools, technologies and design methods that facilitate the development, deployment, maintenance, and interoperation of computer implementations of education and training components and systems.

Alliance of Remote Instructional Authoring and Distribution Networks for Europe (ARIADNE) -- Develops the results of the ARIADNE and ARIADNE II European Projects, which created tools and methodologies for producing, managing and reusing computer-based pedagogical elements and telematics supported training curricula.

IMS Global Learning Consortium, Inc. (IMS) -- Developing and promoting open specifications for facilitating online distributed learning activities, such as locating and using educational content, tracking learner progress, reporting learner performance, and exchanging student records between administrative systems. IMS -- Meta Tags and Knowledge Bits

Advanced Distributed Learning Network -- Purpose is to ensure access to high-quality education and training materials that can be tailored to individual learner needs and made available whenever and wherever they are required. This initiative is designed to accelerate large-scale development of dynamic and cost-effective learning software and to stimulate an efficient market for these products in order to meet the education and training needs of the military and the nation's workforce of the future. It will do this through the development of a common technical framework for computer and net-based learning that will foster the creation of reusable learning content as "instructional objects." Check out Plugfest 5.

The Aviation Industry CBT (Computer-Based Training) Committee (AICC) -- An international association of technology-based training professionals. The AICC develops guidelines for the aviation industry in the development, delivery, and evaluation of CBT and related training technologies.

The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative -- An open forum engaged in the development of interoperable online metadata standards that support a broad range of purposes and business models. DCMI's activities include consensus-driven working groups, global workshops, conferences, standards liaison, and educational efforts to promote widespread acceptance of metadata standards and practices. (If you're invited, don't get out your passport. That's Dublin, Ohio.)

BUILDING BLOCKS. HOW THE STANDARDS MOVEMENT PLANS TO REVOLUTIONIZE ELECTRONIC LEARNING, a good overview from University Business

Judy Brown's home page

SCORM is mil-spec. It will probably work in military apps where standards can be rigidly enforced, and where performance outweighs price much more than in the commercial sector. SCORM comes from the same place as $1000 hammers and $10,000 toilet seats.

Corporations may find it easier to standardize learning as part of the Semantic Web. It's XML, interoperable, flexible, and will soon be the underpinning of business transactions. What better way to integrate learning and work? The Semantic Web would enable us to build performance support directly into the job (rather than as an add-on.)

Standards definitions
Posted by Jay Cross at 10:59 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

How People Learn

What's important

Learning is the pathway to doing. If an instructor teaches something and nothing changes, no learning took place.

Learning is learnable. You can get better at it. We set up the Meta-Learning Lab to help people learn better, faster, deeper.

"Knowledge is constructed, not transferred. It's built out of known chunks. It's always linked to the situation, thus 'situated.' Skills and knowledge do not exist outside of context. Everything is connected, in mental, physical, or social space." Peter Senge, Schools That Learn

Theory

This book is the best summary of what it's all about.

How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School, John D. Bransford, Ann L. Brown, and Rodney R. Cocking, editors. "This volume synthesizes the scientific basis of learning. The scientific achievements include a fuller understanding of: (1) memory and the structure of knowledge; (2) problem solving and reasoning; (3) the early foundations of learning; (4) regulatory processes that govern learning, including metacognition; and (5) how symbolic thinking emerges from the culture and community of the learner."

Robo-teacher has left the building

eLearning was born during the dot-com frenzy. Like many start-up ideas, the first descriptions of eLearning were oversimplified, extreme, and wildly optimistic. Otherwise rational people defined eLearning as putting all learning on computers, as if it had to be all or nothing.

Imagine the savings in plane fare, instructor salaries, and keeping people on the job instead of at the class! Employees could learn anywhere they could plug into the net, whenever you wanted. Learners would save time by studying only what they needed. They would learn at an optimal pace, neither held back nor bypassed by the rest of the class. Cool.

The only problem was that this sort of eLearning rarely worked. Learning is social. Even in the classroom, lots of learning takes informally, between students. Workers learn more at the water cooler or coffee room than during classes.

Learning requires much more than exposure to content. Most people drop out of 100% computer-led instructional events. These same people learn well when computer-mediated lessons are combined with virtual classes, study groups, team exercises, mentors & help desks, off-line events, and on-line coaches.

As the hype cools down, we find that learning hasn't changed; it still requires a variety of activities. Computers can make aspects of learning more convenient but they don't eliminate the need for human intervention. The presumption that eLearning would automate every aspect of learning today seems irresponsible. That dog won't hunt.

For great overviews, see Learnativity and Marcia Conner's Learning & Training FAQ, especially How adults learn.


The old way of looking at learning:

Teach = Fill their empty heads. Assess = See what's inside.

From the Institute for Research on Learning

Constructivism and other theories

Today we realize that learning isn't pouring content into heads. Rather, the real deal is an interaction between what's incoming and what's already there. Learning is rewiring the brain by sculpting new pigeonholes and adding connections.

Theories of Learning, from Funderstanding, explains constructivism, behaviorism, and so forth simply.

Greg Kearsley's Explorations in Learning & Instruction: The Theory Into Practice Database is an awesome resource.

Marc Prensky's Digital Game-Based Learning has a great list of theories of how people learn:

Learner-Centered Psychological Principles: A Framework for School Redesign and Reform, American Psychological Association, Board of Educational Affairs (BEA) 11/97.

Bloom's Taxonomy

Cognitive learning is demonstrated by knowledge recall and the intellectual skills: comprehending information, organizing ideas, analyzing and synthesizing data, applying knowledge, choosing among alternatives in problem-solving, and evaluating ideas or actions.

Affective learning is demonstrated by behaviors indicating attitudes of awareness, interest, attention, concern, and responsibility, ability to listen and respond in interactions with others, and ability to demonstrate those attitudinal characteristics or values which are appropriate to the test situation and the field of study.

Psychomotor learning is demonstrated by physical skills; coordination, dexterity, manipulation, grace, strength, speed; actions which demonstrate the fine motor skills such as use of precision instruments or tools, or actions which evidence gross motor skills such as the use of the body in dance or athletic performance.

I think of these as training the head, the heart, and the hand.

Practice

Best Practices

Implementing The Seven Principles of Good Practice

Internet Time Group has found that people learn best when they...

Excerpts from the LiNE (Learning in the New Economy) Zine Manifesto, Brook Manville and Marcia Conner (6/2000).

Learning requires engagement

Methods of engagement include:

1. Presenting information as tentative, which asks the learner to engage in assessing its veracity.

2. Offering opportunities to compare one's views to those of others. "18% of Americans feel public money should not be 'wasted' on art."

3. Feeding back information from a group of peers. "In a poll, 32% of you professed to never have seen porn on the web."

4. Providing challenges that call on one's exformation. "Exegesis means (a) pulling a tooth, (b) tracking feedback, (c) assembling unrepresentative cases to support one's argument -- what Nietsche often did, or (d) disinterring a body from the grave." Go ahead, take a guess. The answer is here.

5. Making connections to other contexts, e.g. You want to learn to fly. Let's compare flying to driving a car. Your mind begins mapping the differences and similarites.

Methods of Delivery

Live face-to-face (formal)
• Instructor-led classroom
• Workshops
• Coaching/mentoring
• On-the-job (OTJ) training

Virtual collaboration/synchronous
• Live e-learning classes
• E-mentoring

Self-paced learning
• Web learning modules
• Online resource links
• Simulations
• Scenarios
• Video and audio CD/DVDs
• Online self-assessments
• Workbooks

Live face-to-face (informal)
• Collegial connections
• Work teams
• Role modeling

Virtual collaboration/asynchronous
• Email
• Online bulletin boards
• Listservs
• Online communities

Performance support
• Help systems
• Print job aids
• Knowledge databases
• Documentation
• Performance/decision support tools

from Allison Rossett

Internet Time's Method Matrix

Distance learning is no less effective than traditional means, the "No Significant Difference Phenomenon".

 

Changing the Interface of Education with Revolutionary Learning Technologies by Nishikant Sonwalkar

Learning Styles for Online Asynchronous Instruction

Apprenticeship
A building block approach for presenting concepts in a step-by-step procedural learning style.

Incidental
Based on events that trigger the learning experience. Learners
begin with an event that introduces a concept and provokes questions.

Inductive
Learners are first introduced to a concept or a target principle using specific
examples that pertain to a broader topic area.

Deductive
Based on stimulating the discernment of trends through the presentation of simulations, graphs, charts, or other data.

Discovery
An inquiry method of learning in which students learn by doing, testing the boundaries of their own knowledge.

 

Making Training In The Enterprise Pay Off, Datamation

Why schools suck

A narrow view of how the American public school system got so screwed up. (The Germans did it.)

Schools may be the starkest example in modern society of an entire institution modeled after the assembly line. This has dramatically increased educational capability in our time, but it has also created many of the most intractable problems with which students, teachers, and parents struggle to this day. If we want to change schools, it is unlikely to happen until we understand more deeply the core assumptions on which the industrial-age school is based.
? Peter Senge

Mechanics

The Neurobiology of Memory & Learning from Hughes

Motivation

Employee Motivation in the Workplace


The answer is "C". Both Nietsche and I are guilty of using exegesis to make our cases. BACK


"I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand." -Confucius
"If I hear and see and do and teach and practice, I understand even better." -Jay
Information is not instruction.
Yeah, so? Doing is what counts.

Real learning is not what most of us grew up thinking it was. --Charles Handy

Meta-Learning Lab

The Distance Learner's Guide

I never allowed schooling to interfere with my education. --Mark Twain

Great diagram of the brain

Marc Prensky matches content to learning activity to game styles.

"Distance education should be called 'not-so-distant education.'" Bill Clinton, Online Learning, October 1, 2001

"One's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions."
-Oliver Wendell Holmes

Let's Tie the Digital Knot by Seymour Papert is a wonderfully feisty, common-sense look at education with fresh eyes.

Paradigmatic Vision Using an Internet connection in the classroom to enliven the fourth grade math curriculum is a good thing. By all means do it if you are a fourth grade teacher. But do not confuse it with the prescribed activity of developing a vision of the future of learning.

As an exercise of the educational imagination to strengthen your visionary powers, think about a world in which there is:

  • No such thing as fourth grade, because age segregation has gone the way of other arbitrary divisions of people.
  • No such thing as a classroom, because learning happens in a variety of settings.
  • And no such thing as curriculum, because the idea that everyone should have the same knowledge has come to be seen as totalitarian.

 

Leftovers & Oldies on this topic

Posted by Jay Cross at 10:54 AM | Comments (8)

eLearning Information & FAQ


eLearning FAQ

What is eLearning?

Related pages:

Community

Implementation

Knowledge management

Virtual classroom

Culture

Motivation

LCMS

Metrics

Organizations

Visual Learning

eLearning

These are the absolute best sources of the bunch:

elearningpost , from Maish Nichani
eCLIPSE, from Jane Knight
Learning Circuits, from ASTD. Now, with blog.
OLDaily - Online Learning Daily, from Stephen Downes
eLearning Guild - check out the Journal
Learnativity - Marcia Conner's FAQs and Wayne Hodgins' standards

LiNE Zine, LINE = Learning in the New Economy. Edited by chaord Marcia Conner. Provacative, high-quality, original.

Big Dog's Bowl of Biscuits -- for instructional design reference

TechLearn Trends from Elliott Masie. Once the pacesetter, this one's getting a little loose. TechLearn Trends is personal, another venue for Elliott to channel his outsize personality and prescient observations to his fans. Breezy.

eLearn Magazine, from ACM
eLearnspace, from Geo. Siemens

OnLine Learning News from VNU Media/Bill Communications
Online Community Report from Forum One
Virtual University Gazette from geteducated

KM, computing, the future

Rapidly Changing Face of Computing (reborn!)
Journal of the Hyperlinked Organization, from David Weinberger. Hilarious take on knowledge management. Intense learning + entertainment = the way life should be. Now, with blog.
Tomalak's Realm strategic Web design stories, e-commerce, usability, intellectual property, electronics/technology futurism, more

Research sources

EPSS Central
Performance Centered Design
Cisco eLearning
Educause Effective Practices and Solutions
ASTD -- generally broad but shallow
Gerrit Visser (Europe)
HR Executive Work Index, Workforce, SHRM Online
Information Technology Association of America -- 900,000 jobs to fill!
Institute for Human Machine Cognition -- concept mapping is us
Software Design Smorgasbord -- KM, visualization, UI, performance support
Education Organizations Resources Directory, U.S. Department of Education

 










 

 

 

Magazines

Learning
T+D (formerly Training & Development -- ASTD
CIO -- excellent on knowledge management, IT training
Training -- VNU Media
e-Learning Magazine -- Advanstar
IT Training -- Haymarket Business Publications, U.K.
Performance Journal -- ISPI, instructional design
CLO -- new kid on the block. from MediaTec
Certification -- MediaTec Publishing

Knowledge management
KMWorld
KM Magazine
CIO Magazine - KM Research Center

In 2000, most magazines began making past issues available online.

 

Education
The Chronicle of Higher Education/Distance Learning daily
T.H.E. Journal (Technical Horizons in Education)
The Technology Source
The Educational Technology Journal

great list of online journals

Oil and water, Jews and Arabs, education and training...
  eBusiness & strategy
Strategy and Business (Booz)

Mercer Management Journal
Cap Gemini E&Y Center for Business Innovation Outstanding!
McKinsey Quarterly
Santa Fe Institute Update
Technology Review -- MIT. Come on, push the envelope.
These are fantastic catalysts for thinking out of the box.
 

What is eLearning?

eLearning


According to Jay Cross, information architect of Internet Time Group, "eLearning" is the target model for corporate training in the next three to five years. It will be a key survival skill for corporations and free agent learners and is a convergence of:

  • loosely organized corporate ecologies
  • a business climate of permanent white water
  • technological advances, including high-speed broadband networks
  • a shift of power and responsibility from organizations to individuals
  • emergent best practices, from performance support to training to knowledge management.

Says Cross, "Successful leaders inspire members of their organizations to work smarter. Collaboration, learning portals, and skill snacks have replaced Industrial-Age training. The Web is revitalizing personalized learning and meaningful apprenticeship. Learning is merging with work."

Here's what lies ahead in our not-too-distant training future, according to Cross:

  • personal software agents that crawl the Web to screen and feed information to personal portals
  • connected gadgets and gizmos that simplify (and complicate) our lives
  • plug-and-play training modularity
  • learning standards that create interchangeable, Lego-like objects that slash costs and development time
  • personal files and programs that run directly from the Internet.

More info www.intemettime.com

Training & Development, November 1999


SmartForce, Learn Fast, Go Fast, pdf (11/99)
Disclosure: SmartForce was an Internet Time Group client..

Will Companies Ever Learn? "Learning has got to be connected directly to the business," says Judy Rosenblum, former chief learning officer at Coca-Cola. "The idea is to stay away from a standard 'learning program.' Instead, learning needs to be embedded in processes, projects, and experiences. If you put your energy into people who are ready and willing to join you, and if those people add value to the business, others will come."

Get Smart Online, UpsideToday Special Report (4/00)

"Training is moving online for the same reason that companies attempted outsourcing 10 years ago," says Gartner Group analyst Clark Aldrich. "Not because it's better but because it's cheaper and more measurable." There are technical barriers to implementation, some of which are overcome by outsourcing. Pressures for eLearning include demands for global reach, reduced time to market, flexibility, just-in-time learning, and cost savings. Even with he right internal systems in place, companies often find it challenging to navigate such a young market to find the right fit. The metrics are murky.

eLearning: Rhetoric vs Reality, Gautam Ghosh

Embedded help
Performance Support
Knowledge Mgmt-Based JUST IN TIME
Classroom replication Immersive Solutions JUST IN CASE
CONVERGENT DIVERGENT

Into the Future, a Vision Paper by Wayne Hodgins and Jay Cross (2/2000) for ASTD and NGA. In HTML, not pdf.

Cisco eLearning
Disclosure: Cisco Systems is an Internet Time Group client.

The Future of Online Learning by Stephen Downes (7/98), a classic

Getting Started with Online Learning, Macromedia, "designed to help authors create learning applications that succeed."

Web Based Training Information Center



The eLearning FAQ

Caution: I wrote this in March 2000, before the dot-com bubble burst, and it remains somewhat overenthusiastic. Here's a more current take on what's going on:


The State of eLearning
.
Guest lecture at the Business School of San Francisco State University, October 2, 2002.

 


Definitions

eLearning is learning on Internet Time, the convergence of learning and networks and the New Economy. eLearning is a vision of what corporate training can become. We've only just begun.

eLearning is to traditional training as eBusiness is to business as usual. Both use the net to augment tradiitonal means.

This FAQ addresses corporate learning. In this context, effective eLearning dramatically cuts the time it takes for people to become and remain competent in their jobs. For context, check out the first eLearning White Paper ever written.

More definitions

eLearning is the convergence of learning and the Internet.

Howard Block
Bank of America Securities

eLearning uses the power of networks, primarily those that rely on Internet technologies but also satellite netowrks, and digital content to enable learning.

Eilif Trondsen,
SRI Learning on Demand

eLearning is the use of network technology to design, deliver, select, administer, and extend LEARNING.

Elliott Masie,
The Masie Center

eLearning is Internet-enabled learning. Components can include content delivery in multiple formats, management of the learning experience, and a networked community of learners, content developers and experts. eLearning provides faster learning at reduced costs, increased access to learning, and clear accountability for all participants in the learning process. In today's fast-paced culture, organizations that implement eLearning provide their work force with the ability to turn change into an advantage.

Cisco Systems

eLearning is dynamic. Today's content, in real time, not old news or "shelfware." On-line experts, best sources, quick-and-dirty approaches for emergencies.

eLearning operates in real time. You get what you need, when you need it.

eLearning is collaborative. Because people learn from one another, eLearning connects learners with experts, colleagues, and professional peers, both in and outside your organization.

eLearning is individual. Every e-learner selects activities from a personal menu of learning opportunities most relevant to her background, job, and career at that very moment.

eLearning is comprehensive.
eLearning provides learning events from many sources, enabling the e-learner to select a favored format or learning method or training provider.

Greg Priest,
SmartForce,
The e-Learning Company

eLearning [is] the delivery of content via all electronic media, including the Internet, intranets, extranets, satellite broadcast, audio/video tape, interactive TV, and CD-ROM.

Connie Weggen
WR Hambrecht & Co

We define eLearning companies as those that leverage various Internet and Web technologies to create, enable, deliver, and/or facilitate lifelong learning.

Robert Peterson,
Piper Jaffray

eLearning is using the power of the network to enable learning, anytime, anywhere.

Arista
 

Best Practices

Accept no substitutes! Anyone with a web site can claim to provide eLearning. How does one separate the real stuff from the bogus? Legitimate eLearning is more likely to:

  • Focus on the needs of the learner, not the trainer or institution
  • Take advantage of the net: real-time, 24/7, anywhere, anytime
  • Bring people together to collaborate and learn together
  • Personalize, often by combining "learning objects" on the fly
  • Offer more than one learning method, e.g. virtual classroom and simulation and self-paced instruction
  • Incorporate