Books for ID Team

A reader asks:

Hi Jay,

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:

New e-learning approaches (ish) - for me to learn more

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.

The Social Life of Information by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid

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 Blogs

John Patrick on Weblogs
Contagious Media
By Marcia Stepanek, CIO Insight
November 25, 2003 in eWeek

Blogs in business.

"John Patrick is president of Attitude LLC and former vice president of Internet technology at IBM, where he worked for 34 years. During his IBM career, Patrick helped start IBM's leasing business at IBM Credit Corporation, and was senior marketing executive during the launch of the IBM ThinkPad. Starting in the early 1990s, Patrick dedicated his time to fostering Internet technologies. One of the leading Internet visionaries, Patrick is quoted frequently in the global media and speaks at dozens of conferences around the world."

Credible guy. Probably more credible than you, dear reader.

"Knowledge management wasn't overhyped," says Patrick, in an interview with CIO Insight Executive Editor Marcia Stepanek. "It was underdelivered. Blogs can potentially deliver the grassroots discussions and knowledge-sharing that top-down, corporate-sponsored efforts never could."

So true. KM is like some cat-Lazarus who keeps arising from the dead over and over...

John Patrick: I think this blog phenomenon is one of those things that comes along every decade or so and gets completely underestimated by just about everybody. It's very much like what's going on with Wi-Fi now, and very much what happened with the Web ten years ago. Blogs are a whole new Internet channel, yet another example of how the Internet has made it possible for new ideas to come along and change the status quo. I think a lot of times people see something come along and they say, "What's the big deal? We had that in 1972,"—like knowledge management or artificial intelligence. When instant messaging started, a lot of people said, "oh, this is no biggie. We had this on the mainframe in the 1960s." It's true—we did. But what makes IM different is that now we have the Internet—the widespread sharing of information. That allows for collaboration, it allows for a global effort. So it spawns many more ideas, it allows a new thought to take off like wildfire.

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.

W4 k-collector

A very cool tool that aggregates RSS feeds and parses them into categories. Roland Tanglao explains:

Organisations do not only move thanks to the efforts of individuals working for them but also because they are acted upon by external forces. Most often markets, competitors, customers and government bodies. The better an organisation can understand and predict these external forces, the more chance it has of achieving it's goals.

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.

And an IMRC - Information Management Glossary

Berlin

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

MT Errors

A third of the time I post something, I get an error on the outgoing ping, for example:

Ping 'http://ping.blo.gs/' failed: HTTP error: 500 read timeout

Serendipitous learning

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.

Berkeley Dinner with Dave Winer

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.
	Mark & Chris contemplate the whole fish that arrived after we were stuffed.
	These are both Scobelizers.
Sylvia pulled the group together.	Paul writes for Wired, among others.
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?

Introducing the Workflow Learning Institute

Workflow Learning Institute

What is Workflow Learning™?

What is Workflow Learning Institute?

What do members receive?

To learn more:

1. Listen to Sam's presentation on Workflow Learning.

3. Download free reports.

4. Drop by and bookmark the Workflow Learning Institute.

Instructional Artistry

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:

But even with the explicit exhibits and the information cards, I would not have captured the entire essence of some exhibits if I did not happen to listen in to a doctor explaining the exhibits to his girlfriend. I found his explanations so interesting that I took his route and followed him till he became conscious of my omnipresence.

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:

• Be systematic in the assessment of the need or opportunity.
  
• Be systematic in the analysis of the work and workplace to identify the cause or factors that limit performance.
  
• Be systematic in the design of the solution or specification of the requirements of the solution.
  
• Be systematic in the development of all or some of the solution and its elements.
  
• Be systematic in the implementation of the solution.
  
• Be systematic in the evaluation of the process and the results.

In my intellectual adolescence, I always took systematic to be a good thing. Now I have my doubts. The dictionary defines systematic as

methodical; formed with regular connection and adaptation or subordination of parts to each other, and to the design of the whole; as, a systematic arrangement of plants or animals; a systematic course of study

marked by thoroughness and regularity

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.

Time runs

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.

Essential KM

Denham Grey has written a wonderful synopsis of lessons learned with knowledge management. He absolutely nails it. With no puffery. A must-read. Sample:

We need to focus here!, is a common cry so please take your pick:, customer insights, solutions to common problems, mapping what we know, building yellowpages, inventory [intellectual, human, structural, customer] capital, building relationships, capturing product knowledge, monitoring competitors, mining transactions, capturing web behavior.

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,

Favorites: Verna Allee has written the top book on knowledge management IMO called 'Knowledge Evolution', while Marc Demarest holds my best spot for an article titled "Understanding Knowledge Management". My best link for learning is: New Conversations About Learning

Incidentally, Denham's "About Me" is the first resume page I've seen that doesn't list its subject's name. Extreme modesty?

EdBlogger reflections

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:

Learning objects. (This is a sentence; read objects as a verb.)

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."

Patrick Delaney, host & ringmaster

My BOF (birds of a feather) session drifted into talk about Wikis:

The social context makes it or breaks it.

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.

Blog fodder -- ask five questions, show everyone's responses.

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.

Dan Mitchell & Will Richardson

Back at Galileo, memes from panels:

The Browser metaphor reinforces the concept of passive consumption.

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....

Will RIchardson

Tim Lauer

Karen Claxton

Chris Kelly & Paul Allison

Phil Wolf

Learning works

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:

• communities of practice
• active collaboration
• embedded support
• simulation
• informal learning
• story-telling
• dynamic portals
• expert locators
• social network analysis
• learning on demand
• give and take
• learner control
• co-creation
• workflow integration
• search
• help desks
• spontaneity, emergence
• outsourced mentoring
• games
• keeping up
• personal knowledge management

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?

LOL at EDS

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:

"I think "knowledge management" is a bullshit issue. Let me tell you why. I can give you perfect information, I can give you perfect knowledge and it won't change your behaviour one iota. People choose not to change their behaviour because the culture and the imperatives of the organisation make it too difficult to act upon the knowledge. Knowledge is not the power. Power is power. The ability to act on knowledge is power. Most people in most organisations do not have the ability to act on the knowledge they possess. End of story."

More of the same

Stolen but unfinished

Prodded by Maish's eLearningpost, this evening I re-read John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid's wonderful article, Stolen Knowledge. More than ten years old now, yet people are still absorbing the message. I gained new insights from my return visit.
... the best way to support learning is from the demand side rather than the supply side. That is, rather than deciding ahead of time what a learner needs to know and making this explicitly available to the exclusion of everything else, designers and instructors need to make available as much as possible of the whole rich web of practice-explicit and implicit-allowing the learner to call upon aspects of practice, latent in the periphery, as they are needed.

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.

Posted by Jay Cross at 11:27 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 2003 eLearning Forum

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.

• eLearning. What are the major trends in eLearning? What should be the scope of eLearning? We began wrapping our minds around the state of eLearning 18 months from now. Four members of the Forum led 15-minute, concurrent breakout sessions, which we repeated twice. Then we regrouped to discuss what had popped up on our radar.
• eLeanring Forum. What should we be? How much should we grapple with? Alison Armstrong highlighted strategic issues the Board has been discussing. We encouraged members to pass along their thoughts to eLearning Forum's directors to be addressed at the next session.
• Each of us. Where do each of us want to be 18 months out? What are our passions? Network with others to make connections to take us forward.

I'll continue this in the Continue... section for the benefit of the bandwidth-impaired.

Jay and World Internet Center CEO Susan Duggan

(Click for fullsize image)	Kevin Wheeler Global Learning Resources
	Clark Quinn Ottersuft Labs
	Soren Kaplan iCohere
	Michael Carter
	Jay Cross Internet Time Group What are the boundaries of what we seek to do?
	Alison Armstrong eLF Board	Should we drop "eLearning" from our name? Should we double in size? Provide more online activities? What do you think?
Richard Clark, Next Question	Issues: Simulation rules. Replicable processes. Informal learning. Network effects. Cost/benefit choices. Games/sims. In vino veritas.

eLearning in survival mode

Repositioning eLearning

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.

What to do with eLearning when the economy heads south

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.

Lessons Learned

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:

• Compulsory eLearning (Financial Services is heavily regulated) works but not without intervention -- so you have to create a lot more "instructional hooks" and a robust LMS.

• Open catalogs of generic courses will bomb, consistent with ASTD research; very few eligible employees sign up for open catalog offerings (the exception being technology employees)

• When eLearning courses are elective, drop-out rates are high.

• Workers ask for classes and don't always see online learning as a preferred learning medium (i.e. there's a gap between what learners want and what they get).  We have to help learners understand how they learn.

Ch-ch-changes

Many things have changed:

• Consolidation.  Business units can no longer afford to replicate corporate wide learning offerings -- it's too expensive, it's disconnected and ultimately confuses the learner when each business unit has its own brand.

• Blended learning is the way to go.  Standalone eLearning products are too risky.

• Even in a large company, one LMS should be sufficient -- it's rare that a business unit has a specific learning need that requires a LMS!  Many large companies have consolidated LMS's as the technology has matured.

• The Corporate University is not very effective for business learning in an eLearning world.  Adult learning requires a more robust paradigm.

• Learning needs to be transparen - i.e. not dependent on an organization or an activity, but a process built into many different systems and environments.

• LCMS technology is still primitive. RLOs require a really sophisticated training organization. Usually they don't work. Having purchased and installed an LCMS it's authoring rules proved way too complex to ever support rapid instructional design and development.

• Last year Damien went home from eLearning Guild event a zealot for Reusable Learning Objects. After two-three months, most of the zeal evaporated as the reality hit home: (1) RLO's is a difficult concept to sell (b) complex object models can really slow development and (c) the technology is not available to really support this work.  So, RLO's are simply not worth the time/effort.

• In development, less 'design' and more templates. Templates are the way to go--but may make creative design talent feel underutilized.

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.

A new vision

The learning/eLearning function must focus on:

• Facilitating learning
• Leveraging business connections
• Being strategic (transformational)
• Understanding the business and the appetite for different learning modalities
• Connecting eLearning and performance
• Working with HR
• Marrying eLearning to innovation
• Articulating the relationship between business drivers and learning products/offerings

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:

• Business analysis
• Relationship management
• Writing and information design
• Content development
• Managing high-profile business sponsors
• Outsourcing management
• Change management

 Recap of How/What to Reposition

• Involve senior business leaders
• Focus on strategic/transformational products
• Be clear about business drivers
• Focus on blended solutions
• Dump poor solutions (LCMS, catalogs, etc)
• Reinforce the link with performance
• Build your advocate network (e.g. HR, etc)
• Review and upgrade skillsets
• Forget about confusing ROI models
• Implement standards where they make sense

Digital library night

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.

• How much is there? 100 million titles (the Library of Congress has 26 million).
• How can we access it? No matter where Brewster finds himself, he's always a one-day walk or less from an Internet cafe.
• How to capture the info? It takes about 2 hours to scan a book. This doesn't cost much in India.
• How to distribute the books? Vans outfitted with computers, scanners, etc., are printing books on demand in India, Egypt, Uganda.... Kids have 100,000 books to choose from. Production cost is $1/book. These are often the first book a kid ever owns.

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.

No means no.

		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....

These categories are for Yahoo! services only.

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