A reader asks:
I'm looking for a mix of books for my ID team, which comprises junior learning designers and more senior folk such as myself. I'm interested in the learning design/learning model side rather than the technical side. Currently, I'm not too interested in books dealing with companies implementing e-learning strategy (I have some of these already). To give you some ideas, I'm already considering:
Sims and the future of e-learning - Clark Aldrich
Digital game based learning - Marc Prensky
More standard texts for junior staff
E-learning and the science of instruction - Ruth Clark
Michael Allen's guide to e-learning
(n.b. especially the CD of sample programs)
You've made some excellent choices right off the bat. I like all of these.
I probably wouldn't turn to books since the web has such good stuff, e.g. Boxes and Arrows, eLearningPost, old LineZine articles, Big Dog for background, First Monday, MIT Future of Learning Group, Learning Circuits, George Siemens, CIO, HBR, the Learning FAQs, Stephen Downes' pointers, and my own Internet Time. Links to most of these are on my eLearning Jump page. The web is currently the only place to read and/or order information about Workflow Learning.
Of course, it's presumptuous of me to recommend books for people whose background and job responsibilties I know not, so I'll simply list books that have introduced useful frameworks and ideas into my thinking.
Blur by Stan Davis and Chris Meyer
Future Perfect by Stan Davis
The Future of Knowledge by Verna Allee
The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman
Things That Make Us Smart by Don Norman
Orbiting the Giant Hairball by Gordon MacKenzie
The Springboard by Stephen Denning
Don't Shoot the Dog! by Karen Pryor
Serious Play by Michael Schrage

Visual Language by Robert Horn
Information Architecture by Louis Rosenfeld & Peter Morville
The Inmates are Running the Asylum by Alan Cooper
Emotional Intelligence or anything related by Daniel Goleman
Education and Ecstacy by George Leonard
Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich
Designing World-Class Learning or something similar by Roger Schank

What Every Manager Should Know About Training by Robert Mager
Living on the Fault Line by Geoff Moore
Performance Consulting: Moving Beyond Training
by Dana Gaines Robinson, James C. Robinson
What Mangement Is by Joan Magretta and Nan Stone
The Wealth of Knowledge: Intellectual Capital and the Twenty-first Century Organization by Thomas A. Stewart
Intellectual Capital by Thomas A. Stewart
No Significant Difference by Thomas L. Russell
Information Anxiety by Richard Saul Wurman

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward Tufte
Mindfulness by Elizabeth Langer
Mindful Learning by Elizabeth Langer
The Cluetrain Manifesto by Chris Locke, David Weinberger et alia
any three by Peter Drucker

The Leadership Challenge by Jim Kouzes
Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability by Steve Krug
Architect for Learning: Using the Internet as an Efffective Educational Environment by Philip J. Palin and Kari Sanhaas
I believe in wringing the ideas out of books. After I jotted down this list, mainly by touring my bookcases, I realized that I've talked or corresponded with more than half of these authors. Not that we're pals. Simply exchanging a few sentences with someone seems to plant their lessons more firmly in my head.
I also highlight books with yellow markers (I prefer the lemon-scented ones) and make marginal notes as I read along. Soon after finishing a book, I generally write a synopsis of what I want to retain. (You'll find reviews of most of the books on the list at www.internettime.com ).
Most designers would probably better spend their time learning about the business they are in than finetuning their design skills through reading. For many years, I worked with financial services training. I read American Banker every day. I read Mayer's books on banking. I read every page of the Bank Analyst's Handbook. I read banking magazines. I talked with bankers about their concerns. The greatest designers in the world won't have credibility, or understanding, if they don't know the territory.
What books have you found essential?
John Patrick on Weblogs
Contagious Media
By Marcia Stepanek, CIO Insight
November 25, 2003 in eWeek
Blogs in business.
Credible guy. Probably more credible than you, dear reader.
So true. KM is like some cat-Lazarus who keeps arising from the dead over and over...
Why is this a big deal for business?
There is no question in my mind that blogging is already beginning to reshape how information is created, published and shared. Blogs have the power to introduce new voices into the mix, which will enrich the quality of information available. Voices not necessarily heard before, thanks to limitations of money, access or hierarchy—you're not the CEO, you're just a guy with a big idea—now you can bridge those gaps.
I've been pushing the concept of blogging for almost as long as blogging has been around. My track-record at identifying the next big thing but failing to make a dime off of it goes back twenty years. I've been a raving champion of personal computing, online community, the net, the web, AOL before it was AOL, Cisco when you could count the staff on your toes, eCommerce, instant messaging in corporations, web cams, and more recently informal learning, workflow learning, contextual collaboration, and blogging.
It will morph into different formats and smart syndication will become prevalent, but trust me on this: blogs are going to be a driving force in business.
A very cool tool that aggregates RSS feeds and parses them into categories. Roland Tanglao explains:
This is where RSS aggregators help, and where K-collector, which is a topics-based RSS aggregator, can make the difference.
K-Collector is a server based RSS aggregator that automatically builds an onthology of posts organised by topics which are defined by the users. The topics as markers for points of interest around which K-Collector can cluster information. In particular it can be used to filter and categorize content coming via RSS from newspapers, magazines, web sites, weblogs, email, data bases and other sources.
Besides, being tightly connected to a weblogging environment, the K-collector aggregator allows an organisation to leverage the most powerful information filter available: ourselves. Each of us has developed the skill to quickly detect relevant knwoledge in the huge flow of information that we receive every day. By using weblogs and aggregators, each person can contribute by highlighting this knowledge and share it instantly with others.
This allow the organisation to be aware of the surrounding world and to take timely action when needed.
W4 k-collector would let me pick the concepts I want to follow, giving me a personalized news board.
It's easier just to experience W4 than to read a description of it.
(thx to Stephen Downes for the link)
Another cool thing: a Reverse Dictionary. Start with a definition, get a word.

Rebecca Stromeyer tells me this will be the biggest Online Educa to-date, with 1500 delegates from 66 countries when it kicks off next week in Berlin.
If you're in Mitteleuropa, you can still register. Unfortunately, I'm going to miss Online Educa this year, after thoroughly enjoying the mix of academics and corporate types in 2001 and 2002.

Christmas Markt on the Ku'Damm in 2001

The toy department at KaDeWe

The Brandenburg Gate last year

A third of the time I post something, I get an error on the outgoing ping, for example:
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The Japanese maples are the only trees showing fall colors in this speck of Mediterranean climate on the shores of San Francisco Bay. Our weather confuses the plants into blooming and shedding leaves one species at a time. Transitions are slower here than environments with more extreme seasonal patterns.

It's Thanksgiving morning, the wind is blowing leaves from those Japanese maples around the yard, and somewhere down below in the People's Republic of Berkeley, students or aging hippies are probably protesting Puritan brutality toward Native Americans at the first Thanksgiving. The pesky Europeans never paid for what they got! Who's the savage, the generous host or the ungrateful interloper? But I digress....

After taking a few photographs of leaves to get my priorities straight, I set out to do some shotgun learning. No, I'm not going after the squirrels, raccoons, and skunks that live in the back yard. Rather, I'm hopping onto the net to sift through items in some favorite hangouts just to see what's out there today. It's more edgy and less predictable than reading the New York Times.

I opened Stephen's Edu_RSS Feed. After a few items in German (too early in the morning for that) I came to a link mentioning The Web: Design for Active Learning. "This handbook will present the idea of interactivity as it applies to a cohesive design including high interface, content, and instructional design." This took me to the Carving Code blog, and that linked me to George Siemens'eLearngspace blog. Eventually I got to the original article, a piece by Katy Campbell, who's with Academic Technologies for Learning at the University of Alberta.

I got lucky. The Web: Design for Active Learning turned out to be exactly the puzzle piece I needed to add to my growing framework for Instructional Artistry.

You've heard it said that "You make your own luck." It's related to "Fortune favors the bold," Virgil's maxim that you've got to try hard to get anywhere. My pathway down the web was not entirely random, even though the result was unexpected.

For years I've maintained a list of links to favorite hangouts, the eLearning Jump Page. Stephen's Edu_RSS heads the list of Top eLearning Reference Sources. Stephen and I have met. We often read one another's work. I haven't met the author of Carving Code F2F, but I respect what I've read there in the past. I've been tracking George Siemens' work since his blog first appeared. George has addressed the eLearning Forum via Interwise. I'm delighted with the interview with me that George posted this time last year.

We who share our thoughts online, driven more by personal interest than commercial reward, are a loosely-knit Community of Practice. People ask where I find the time to blog. I explain that this is the way I think. It doesn't take much extra time to divert a few sentences into blog. That trail of words and images becomes a lure to people on paths that parallel mine.

I'm thankful to have a medium for starting conversations on things that interest me.
![]() Dave |
Thirty of us joined Dave Winer this evening at the King Tsin restaurant on Solano at the Albany/Berkeley border for feast and conversation. We filled four tables. I talked with a couple of people who didn't know who Dave is! Unlike the Chinese dinner event in Palo Alto a few months back, where everybody had a camera, I seemed to be the only one taking photos and rudely flashing at people as they ate. In the great majority of my shots, everyone has their eyes closed. Dave's M.O. at these dinners is to start a new table when the one he's at fills up. This keeps the group from feeling like there are tables for adults and tables for children. Unfortunately, given this game of musical chairs, I didn't get to speak to Dave all evening. Next time I'll arrive late. |
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Mark & Chris contemplate the whole fish that arrived after we were stuffed. | |
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These are both Scobelizers. | |
![]() Sylvia pulled the group together. |
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![]() Oh, boy, nothing like a big plate of broccoli for dessert. |
← Tom Hunt, sys op and teacher at Longfellow Middle School in Berkeley, told our table that adolescents learning to program is parallel to their learning a foreign language. Do it early on and the student will speak fluently for life. Learn a language as an adult, and you end up sounding like Henry Kissinger. Tom believes that fluency in one programming language begets fluency in another. If schools were flexible (ha, ha, ha), wouldn't we map the curriculum to the plasticity of students' minds? |

Yours truly. I told you we had our eyes closed.

1.
Listen to Sam's presentation on Workflow Learning.
3. Download free reports.
4. Drop by and bookmark the Workflow Learning Institute.
Most of the time, I read Maish Nichani's elearningpost for pointers to other people's stuff. Today I was impressed by his eloquence in describing his own learning at the BodyWorlds exhibit:
Instruction and experience seem to take different routes in explaining. The informality of experience just seems to explain things a lot better, and at a higher plane too. We can call it the power of the narrative or it just could be that we humans (me at least) are hardwired to make sense of the informal. We are sense-making creatures and thus thrive on fuzzy conditions that force us to make sense of the situation. Maybe that's why we consider the formal to be mundane.
Maish's observation crystallizes an important factor in learning informally: fuzziness. This is akin to what lends a story impact -- enough left out that the listener's mind can create its own story, a joint effort of making meaning in a shared space. "I enjoyed the book more than the movie because the colors were better."
While old-school instructional design purists busy themselves with structuring learning, I seem to be working to dismember it. This lends new meaning to "back to the basics." Once again, the honest, friendly voice of The Cluetrain Manifesto trumps officialdom and hype.
Maybe it's time to counter the supposed efficiency of Human Performance Technology (HPT) with the effectiveness of informal learning head-on. ISPI describes HPT as "the systematic and systemic identification and removal of barriers to individual and organizational performance."
ISPI tells us to:

In my intellectual adolescence, I always took systematic to be a good thing. Now I have my doubts. The dictionary defines systematic as
Roget's entry on systematic lists "Arranged or proceeding in a set, systematized pattern: methodic, methodical, orderly, regular, systematical." Makes me think of McDonald's hamburgers.
If embracing HPT reduces design to things that are orderly and regular, I wouldn't embrace it. Nor would Edison, Galileo, Monet, Shakespeare, Bohr, Coltrane, Picasso, or Scott Adams.
Maish has kickstarted my thinking about replacing instructional design (which is really instructional engineering) with something entirely different: Instructional Artistry.


The Race of the Time-Keepers, Elgin Ahead
Harper's Weekly, February 10 1872, Page 13
Note: A hundred and thirty-one years ago, time did not fly. It ran.
In other news, I just finished the first part of Zeldman's Designing with Web Standards.
I am going to take the plunge into compliant, semantic mark-up. If I do this right, you won't notice a thing except faster download of pages.
This feels like the right time to separate content and format for once and for all. I generate too many words to contemplate doing it later in life.
I used to do my HTML with Notepad. I've since done sites with HotDog, Fusion, HomeSite, ACEhtml, Cute HTML, and Dreamweaver 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and MX 2004. The most effective tech learning experience I've ever had was View/Source. See something I like? See how it's done. Do it. Marvellous. I'm afraid I'll be losing that with CSS stylesheets and so forth.
Today I had to look at some code from way back when. Geez. Line after line of superfluous cruft. So that nudged me into the revamping of all the content.
Of course, I'll consolidate and prune as I go along. If less is more, I don't have much of a site.
Denham Grey has written a wonderful synopsis of lessons learned with knowledge management. He absolutely nails it. With no puffery. A must-read. Sample:
Aha said the sage, what you need is balance, a bit here and some from there so: Start small, grab the low hanging fruits, avoid enterprise wide technology solutions, culture an ecology of communities, encourage an informal idea market, work on hiring profiles, start new web forums that cut across silos, play with language, cultivate the emergent activists, encourage boundary spanners, staunch the IC outflow through professional networks by listening to frustrations, always watch the outfield, make business intelligence & customer knowledge everyones job, listen to newbies, kill loosers fast......
OK test yourself:
* Do we really recognize and value knowledge creation (innovation)?
* Do we reward learning (even when it comes from failure?)
* Do we match quality talent with quality ideas even when they are not our own?
* Do we cultivate relationships and show empathy for intellectual diversity?
* Do we encourage deep dialog and creative abrasion
* Can we discover, share and use key business rules?
Denham and I have yet to meet, but he's my primary source of KM wisdom. Go read the rest of his article; it's all precious.
Thanks, Maish, for pointing this one out.
From the "About Me" section of Denham's blog,
Incidentally, Denham's "About Me" is the first resume page I've seen that doesn't list its subject's name. Extreme modesty?
I spent five or six hours today at O.J. Simpson's alma mater, Galileo High School in San Francisco, taking part in the first EdBlogger conference. Half the crowd was blogging the event live and chatting online and sometimes just reading their email.

I was the lone corporate guy (or maybe one of only two) amid a crowd of 40 ed bloggers. Just about everyone else had a cute little Apple laptop in front of them.
A few of the things that caught my ear:
Relationships are tough to put in a repository.
The RIAA gets in the way of spontaneous access.
What's the defining characteristics of a blog? New stuff on top, according to some.
The atomic unit of a site is the page; the atomic unit of a blog is the posting; the atomic unit of a wiki is a change.
More easily recognized in the schools than in business: phobia about writing in public.
One participant introduced himself as "sys admin and principal."
My BOF (birds of a feather) session drifted into talk about Wikis:
Wikis first dealt with a project on pattern langauge in software. Many entries argued a position: "This is how it should be." The Wiki-words (links) were nouns. I wonder what a verb-word only Wiki would look like.
Most Wikis are short-lived. The passion dies.
"Wiki gardeners" tidy up unruly entries.
(Jay:) Participants rarely seem to violate the trust implicit in giving them control over making/changing entries.
(Jay:) To encourage comments on ed-blogs, shouldn't commentary be graded?
The BOF continued down to Ghiradelli, with lunch at McCormick & Kuleto's. It was a beautiful day.
Web culture in conflict with community-controlled school culture.
What nurtures blogging? (1) Repression (So Polish girls blog about sex; boys in Iran talk politics.) and (2) No street life (As in frigid Finland or blazingly hot Sinapore).
Social engineering, a future problem. One fellow's son receives spoofed messages from "teacher." Justin Hall's tales of sexual awakening -- without forewarning his partners -- could grow.
Freedom. Not clear about student blogs and politics.
Back at Galileo, memes from panels:
If blogs are digital paper in a binder, Wikis are erasable white boards.
One great aspect of blogs is that you can review things that are still works in program.
IT is so primitive now. Imagine if you had to call the Help Desk to use the toilet. Whoops, we have a toilet paper read error. Let me put you on hold....
Tim Lauer
Karen Claxton
Chris Kelly & Paul Allison
Phil Wolf
A posting to Learning Circuits Blog last week stated that "Training doesn't work. Knowledge Management doesn't work. eLearning doesn't work."
Nonetheless, learning works. Workers in some organizations are learning to perform complex tasks in record time. If traditional training and KM and eLearning don't work, what do we call it when learning works? And who's in charge of that?
At eLearning Producer in San Francisco, Deloitte & Touche presented Creating an Integrated Blended Environment using Simulations, Coaching and Teamwork. Their challenge was to get 6,000 professionals up and running, individually and as teams, on a "methodology," i.e. procedures for a consulting engagement. Deloitte decided early on that the learning context would model the work context, involving teams, performance risks, peer interaction, and mentors. They gave a demo; it was quite engaging.
A primary element of the learning experience was a simulation of a project that was punctuated with decisions to make. After an introduction, all learning was learning by doing. Upon completion, the learners had experience applying the methodology, working with their team, using support services and help lines, and figuring out the best way to get the job done.
Notice that what's working for Deloitte bears scant resemblance to the standard definitions of eLearning. There's no course. You don't need an LMS. You learn with others. The boundary between learning and work is blurred. Deloitte hasn't developed a "program;" they call it an "environment."
In another eLearning Producer session, my friend Marc Rosenberg pointed out that we're learning all the time, not just in a classroom. Learning is formal and informal, explicit and tacit, trial and error, doing and observing, guided and unguided. Our sources are courses, instuctors, the web, experts, books, documents, friends, newspapers, and so on and so on. Sometimes it's appropriate to go after learning; other times it's better for learning to come to us. If you know where to find an answer, you may not need to learn it at all. Success comes from applying the right tools in the right proportions to accomplish the goal.
While Marc was making his eLearning Producer presentation, Conrad Gottfredson was in the next room, making much the same point. He bought a book in London, Learn Scuba Diving in a Weekend. Clearly a mismatch of medium and message. Rather than decry the weaknesses of eLearning, we must compensate for them so that the learning that needs to take place does take place. The toolkit must contain more than "class" and "online." As designers, we must match the learning modality (including animation, video, collaboration, e-labs, telephone, on-job coaching and the like) to the human requirements (rapport, perception, inspiration, prescription and so forth).
You've probably read my thoughts on this before. Give an instructional designer an eLearning hammer, and every analysis points to the need for more eLearning nails.
The new learning embraces such things as:
At the November eLearning Forum, we grappled with what to call ourselves. If eLearning doesn't embrace the items on the above list, we've got to dump the term. So what do we call ourselves? The Learning Forum is not compelling. Someone suggested the Distributed Learning Forum but many things on the list don't have to be distributed.
The Transformation Forum, The Community of Change, The Human Side of Enterprise, The Emergent Learning Network, The Know-How Group?
Part of the dilemma is that the basket of tools and techniques above has no home on the typical business organization structure. Responsibility shared by all forfeits responsibility by any. The effectiveness of our people is too important to hand over to the training department and too humanistic to give to the CIO. The chief learning officer was supposed to tackle this, but CLO has been much more successful as a magazine title than as a position with clout in organizations.
Help me out here.
What business are we in?
It's late. I should be in bed. But this simply cracked me up> EDS: Running with the Squirrels. Things have apparently changed since the days when Ross Perot was calling the shots.
Perhaps I'm easily amused this evening, but this quote from Michael Schrage also brought a smile to my face:
More of the same

The "Work in Progress" label atop this classic is wonderful. It's so honest. Nothing is ever anything but a work in progress, is it? Only religions and cranks lay claim to ultimate truth. A work in progress allows the reader to engage the content, knowing that he or she has the opportunity to take the work further. That's what engagement is all about.

This is an interim report on the November meeting of eLearning Forum. Our webmaster and CTO is busy building simulations for a client so I'm sharing some of the proceedings for those of you who are curious about what went on. Altus Corp recorded lots of the session; in a while you'll be able to listen in on your iPod.
We met at the Silicon Valley World Internet Center, which is housed in Leland Stanford's former winery. The Center is a warm, inviting space -- perfect for the think tank sessions that are held there and the eLearning Forum's session on where we're headed in the future.
The overarching theme of our first afternoon meeting was June 2005. What do we see up ahead? There are three aspects to this, and hence three parts to our session.
I'll continue this in the Continue... section for the benefit of the bandwidth-impaired.
![]() Jay and World Internet Center CEO Susan Duggan |
On the first day of eLearning Guild's eLearning Producer conference, Damien Faughan, Charles Schwab's Director of Infrastructure & Technology, gave a presentation on eLearning in the Post 'New Economy' Business Climate: How to Successfully Re-position eLearning.
Most people who make presentations describe a world without flaws. Everything works, everyone's simpatico, it's smooth sailing, objectives are met, and the boss is happy. Back in the real world, we've endured a lengthy recession, layoffs, disenchantment with anything dot.com-ish, and retrenching. Damien Faughan is the first person I've heard tell the truth about what should happen to eLearning in an economic downturn. I'm a Schwab customer and I respect them even more because they have folks like this fellow who faces reality and makes good decisions in response to a rapidly changing business climate.
Damien spoke about the preoccupation with 'cool' technology that puts coolness ahead of business benefits. This "technolust" has manifested itself in the appearance of every kind of eLearning product -- few of which really served a real business purpose. At the end of the day, all learning needs to be strategic and transformational, learner-centered and focused on contributing to the business.
What differentiated this presentation was the candor with which presenter extracted lessons learned from real life. Learning professionals need to think like business people when business conditions change. We can't remain married to learning solutions when business environment changes.
Among the lessons:
Many things have changed:
Executive management should be engaged as sponsors of learning initiatives. They need to understand the role of learning and the appropriate use of various learning modalities. One of the ways this is accomplished is to create a Learning & Development Committee or a Curriculum Council comprised of executives who review and sponsors each new initiative.
The learning/eLearning function must focus on:
In the past, T&D employees needed to be able to deliver stand-up classes, manage vendors, design, assess & evaluate. The new vision requires new skills, such as:
Last Sunday I made my way down to the Hillside Club on Cedar for Berkeley Cybersalon: Libraries and the Future. I had no idea what I was getting into but figured it had to be better than TV. Besides, I don't get out enough.
Daniel Greenstein, president, the California Digital Libraries Initiative, explained the economics of research publications; it's not a pretty picture. Since '86, inflation has risen 75%; the fee for research journals is up 400%. A majority of the pubs are sold in "baskets" by commercial publishers. Changing things will involve faculty shunning the price-gougers. This is the same argument corporate training managers face. Vendors want to sell the whole store; customers want only what they want.
Anne Lipow, director of the Library Solutions Institute, is concerned about the human element in research libraries. Research librarians are often idle, awaiting patrons' queries. They can point people to the best sources, save time, and improve the quality of research. Where do librarians fit n the digital world? This, too, has a direct analogy in the training world. There the question is, "What happens to the instructors?" The answer is that some of them before facilitators, guides, coaches, and organizers, both online and in the real world. In the Information Age, surely there's a role for librarians -- so long as they don't refuse to budge from their comfort zone behind the counter.
Brewster Kahle, founder of The Internet Archive, was the real treat, an enthusiastic visionary. His goal is universal access to all knowledge, and he has plans on how to get there.

Off line, Brewster described what it would take for universal access, Mind you, the Web is growing by a couple of terabytes a month. To capture the world's knowledge, Brewster sees the need for six locations with a petabyte of storage and gigabit/second access. Whew! Brewster is founder of the Internet Archive. See How the Wayback Machine Works. Before that, he came up with WAIS and Alexa.
Brewster is founder of the Internet Archive. See How the Wayback Machine Works. Before that, he came up with WAIS and Alexa.
![]() | ||||
| When you first registered with us and created your Yahoo! ID, our system presented a single "Yes" or "No" option for receiving all types of marketing communications. At some point you said "No," and after that we no longer sent any of these types of messages to you. In March 2002, we began rolling out an updated marketing communications system. Instead of just a single "Yes" or "No" choice, we created a new Marketing Preferences page where you decide.... When this updated system was first announced in March 2002, we told you we'd begin sending you messages about Yahoo! products and services across all categories, even though you had said "No" to messages under the old single choice system. We also told you that you could still say "No" to these messages by visiting your Marketing Preferences. But we did not completely implement this change until now. Starting January 1, 2004, Yahoo! will begin to send you messages, via email or postal mail, about our own products and services.... | ||||
| New Yahoo! features and events. | Yes No |
| Special offers, online sales, and shopping tips on Yahoo!. | Yes No |
| Travel specials and exclusive deals. | Yes No |
| Managing personal finances. | Yes No |
| Entertainment, games, and sports. | Yes No |
| Finding a job or an employee. | Yes No |
| Meeting someone special or a new friend. | Yes No |
| Staying in touch with friends and participating in online communities. | Yes No |
| Managing my time and contacts. | Yes No |
| Using Yahoo! for research and surfing the Web. | Yes No |
| Building web sites for personal or professional use. | Yes No |
| Ways to sell things on Yahoo!. | Yes No |
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See what you could be receiving. Check out some sample special offers from Yahoo! | |
The MASIE Center has just released:
Eighty-two pages of cogent explanations, history, processes, and reference sources. This is one of those reference works, like a good dictionary, that you need at your fingertips for answering questions about standards you may be a little fuzzy on.
I do take issue with the report's "simple working definition of the term e-Learning" as:
Isn't all learning or training is prepared, delivered, and managed using some learning technology? And deployed either locally or globally? By this definition, wouldn't the scrolls in the ancient library at Alexandria be eLearning?
At last night's eLearning Forum we talked about what we wanted to be known as. eLearning is divisive and carries too much bad baggage. We want to embrace KM, collaboration, simulation, and other things that don't fall neatly into the eLearning category. Our mission statement was projected on an erasable white board in the front of the room. Richard Clark walked up and crossed out the "e." I crossed out the "learning" and wrote in Doing. Someone suggested "Distributed Learning," but that doesn't capture it for me.
This is all sort of ho-hum compared to the response to Sam Adkin's post on Learning Circuits blog, We are the problem. We are selling Snake Oil. Sam begins by saying:
Training does not work.
eLearning does not work.
Blending Learning does not work.
Knowledge Management does not work.
Yet we collectively reify our denial and project the root of the problem out to an external institutional framework. We are the source of the problem because we are selling snake oil. It doesn't work but there is still plenty of money in it.
In a little over two days, thirty-five people have replied, generally with well-reasoned analyses. Is this the gunshot to kick off the new learning revolution?
My only comment thus far: You want to make an omelet, you break a few eggs.


eLearning Forum meets tomorrow afternoon at the Stanford Barn to talk about what's coming down in the next 18 months and what we plan to do about it. We've also put aside more than an hour for personal networking, lubricated with free-flowing two-buck Chuck.
I'm one of five concurrent opening acts. To put PowerPoint behind us, we asked Michael Carter, Soren Kaplan, Clark Quinn, and Kevin Wheeler to send in a single PowerPoint slide. We will blow these up to 3' x 2' at Kinko's and put on the equivalent of an academic poster session.
What talking points would you list if you were doing this?
Here are mine:

The fields I expect to be plowing 1½ years hence are the impact of web standards, contextual collaboration, and what to do about this nearly universal phenomenon:

Today I joined more than three hundred people at the Parc 55 Hotel in San Francisco for the first day of eLearning Guild's eLearning Producer. It was more than worth the time. Unlike the BS-laden events, David Holcombe and Heidi Fisk keep this event grounded in reality.
Will Thalheimer led a down-to-earth but eye-opening presentation on what works in eLearning. Properly applying spacing, repetition, and feedback can double eLearning's result and efficiency. (I'll fill in the details after I absorb more of the lessons -- and get some sleep.) Deloitte's Harold Cypress described the development and rollout of a simulation/coaching/teamwork situation to help thousands of professions learn complex methodologies. Damien Faughnan gave a cautionary tale of lessons learned at Charles Schwab.



Will Thalheimer

Harold Cypress, Deloitte

Schwab's Damien Faughnan

Kit & Bill Horton, Patti Shank
Clark Aldrich has written a personal story about developing a new genre of leadership development program. He takes you along for the ride as he becomes disenchanted with eLearning, quits a prestige job to find a better way, surmounts numerous hurdles, and ends up with Virtual Leader, a product you can buy today. Unlike most books on learning, Clark's is well written and witty; it's fun to read.
"What would the world be like if eLearning truly worked?" If eLearning could bestow understanding and the ability to control things, the training organization would be more important than the lawyers. I'd be bragging about last night's learning experience.
Of course, eLearning has not lived up to its potential. It's mainly virtual classrooms and online workbooks. The lessons have been degraded to the lowest common denominators of bandwidth, packaging standards, and generality. eLearning is sometimes no more than the pre-reading in a "blended" solution.
There is an exception: the learning of people who must perform. Life or death. Soldiers, pilots, nuclear power plant workers, and Wall Street traders. They learn from simulation.
Clark posits three forms of content: linear (most of what we're exposed to), cyclical (hitting balls on the driving range), and open-ended (with multiple paths and outcomes).
He recounts the early days of eLearning from his perspective as the chief analyst in that space at Gartner. Vendors visit with dog-and-pony shows, some tripping themselves up irrevocably in the first ten minutes. Hundreds of companies and not one that was sufficiently compelling to inspire him. Or others. eLearning is to learning as fast food is to nutrition. It's all linear. It's crap.
Next Clark quits his secure, prestigious job at Gartner to create exemplary eLearning, the best-of-breed that the eLearning vendors never showed him. He?s out to build a 'concept car' that will guide the industry.
His chapter on "The Myth of Subject-Matter Experts" skewers leadership gurus mercilessly. They don't have the three forms of content. They don't have very deep models. They have anecdotes. They want a fortune to have their grad students cook something up. At a leisurely pace. If you're thinking about taking content from nationally-known authorities, read this chapter first.
After months of research, reflection, blind alleys, and enough tid-bits to cover the walls with Post-It Notes, Clark and his mates arrived at a model of leadership that had the ring of truth. Leadership is "Getting a group of people to complete the right work." This is great stuff.
I should know. Six years ago, my firm's EVP told me our clients needed a program on leadership. Could I come up with a model that could be the foundation of a workshop? Something compelling. (Worldwide, a million bankers had participated in our workshops. We considered ourselves the crème de la crème of bank training.)
I jumped on the project with gusto, reading Bennis, Kouzes, von Klausewitz, Peters, Drucker, my former professor John Kotter, and dozens of others. Eventually I boiled leadership down to a model of leadership and management accompanied by a page of bullet points.
I appreciate Clark's model and methods because they are so much better than what I came up with. Clark would call my results "linear," the ultimate slur. Clark's model is good enough to become a Harvard Business Review Classic.
About a third of the way in, the book totally changes direction. Clark takes us into the nitty-gritty of constructing the Virtual Leader simulation. We learn about principles of simulation, set design, character creation, animation, speech generation, control of movement, and magically making the cast autonomous, like Pinocchio turning into a real boy and wandering out of Gepetto's workshop. Some of this was fascinating but other parts of it read like Popular Science. The story from the first third of the book had turned into a how-to talk. This section was well crafted but it wasn't what I wanted to learn.
The final third addresses what happened when they flipped the on-switch, the futility of grades, why there aren't more simulations, and < a href="http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/">what's wrong with schooling.
Summary: Almost all training is linear. The world is open-ended. This is why almost all training fails. Simulations are open-ended. They are expensive but they work. Simulations are the way of the future.
Many readers will enjoy this book: there's a lot of substance. But I don't expect many people will enjoy it thoroughly. You see, it's more like three books bound in a single cover. Even though it's pricey ($50 at Amazon), I'd buy the book for the first third alone. Only a fool would try to create a sim without reading the center section. Were I either buying or marketing simulations, I'd read the whole tome but the last third would ring my chimes the loudest.
Thanks for letting us ride shotgun, Clark.
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I am a designer.
Design Principles for Clock of the Long Now (Hillis)
design is not merely an indicator of esthetic taste, but a social phenomenon that both mirrors and shapes how we think. Whereas objects of art reflect the personal vision of their makers, manufactured goods - which are designed to be salable and profitable - tend to embody more generalized beliefs about society, and so ''can cast ideas about who we are and how we should behave into permanent and tangible forms.'' Modern office equipment in ''bright colours and slightly humorous shapes,'' for instance, can help perpetuate the myth that office work is fun; just as modern, streamlined kitchen appliances can underline the contemporary faith in progress and technological salvation. SOURCE
design tradeoffs
Balance...............................................Instability
Symmetry..........................................Asymmetry
Regularity...........................................Irregularity
Simplicity...........................................Complexity
Unity..................................................Fragmentation
Economy...........................................Intricacy
Understatement..................................Exaggeration
Predictability.......................................Spontaneity
Activeness..........................................Stasis
Subtlety..............................................Boldness
Neutrality...........................................Accent
Transparency......................................Opacity
Consistency.......................................Variation
Accuracy............................................Distortion
Flatness..............................................Depth
Singularity.........................................Juxtaposition
Sequentiality......................................Randomness
Sharpness..........................................Diffusion
Repetition..........................................EpicodicityTog's First Principles of Design
Anticipation
Autonomy
Color Blindness
Consistency
Defaults
Efficiency of User
Explorable Interfaces
Fitts's Law
Human-Interface Objects
Latency Reduction
Learnability
Limit Tradeoffs
Metaphors
Protect the User's Work
Readability
Track State
Visible Interfaces