Jackpot!

Concentrated wisdom from Serendip at Bryn Maur.

I believe that education must be conceived as a continuing reconstruction of experience, that the process and the goal of education are the same thing.

I believe that education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living.

-- John Dewey, My Pedagogic Creed

The teacher is not only a communicator but a model. To communicate knowledge and to provide a model of competence, the teacher must be free to teach and learn

-- Jerome Bruner, The Process of Education

We think we learn from teachers, and we sometimes do. But the teachers are not always to be found in school, or in great laboratories. Sometimes what we learn depends on our own powers of insight. Moreover, our teachers may be hidden, even the greatest teacher.

-- Loren Eiseley, "The Hidden Teacher" in The Star Thrower

A manual? Give me a break! Let me get in there and muck around and try various things and see what happens.

-- John Seely Brown, "Learning, Working, and Playing in the Digital Age"

SumTotal savings

Here's an answer for the critics who questioned how the Click2Learn/Docent combo was going to cut costs while moving forward.

SumTotal to invest $8 mn over 2 yrs

The company expects to move customer and technical support and engineering work fully to India.

SumTotal plans to increase headcount

HYDERABAD: SumTotal Systems Inc., the new entity created by the merger of Docent and Click2learn, plans to increase headcount in Hyderabad centre from 90 to 160, though at the global level it will go down from 470 to 400 (excluding Hyderabad additions) by the time restructuring is complete. Investment in Indian operations is also likely to be about $3 million in the next 12 months, according to Sudheer Koneru, Senior Vice-President, International Operations.

SumTotal Sets $3 M Aside For Hyderabad Development Centre

OUR EFE BUREAU
HYDERABAD: SumTotal Systems Inc, the newly-formed merged entity of Docent Inc and Click2learn, is planning to make its Indian development centre as the hub for products, services and research and development for its global operations. With a combined cash reserve of over $40 million in hand due to the merger, SumTotal has proposed an investment of $3 million in the Indian development centre over a period of 12 months, said Sudheer Koneru, senior vice-president, international operations of SumTotal Systems Inc.

Announcing the completion of merger of both the companies here, Mr Koneru said following the merger, SumTotal will end up saving $15 million annually, with a combined turnover of $60 million. The company, which has its largest manpower at the Hyderabad development centre, will add another 30 professionals basically for research and development and product engineering work, Mr Koneru said. He added, “We see the development centre emerging as a hub for our research and development, products engineering and solutions.”

Following this development, the R&D centre of Click2Learn, will now broaden its work and include the Docent product line. This will also increase the number of techies based in the Hyderabad centre from the current 130 to about 160 and expand the maintenance work for the two companies.

The investment of about $ 8 million would cover both the working expenses and capex in the company centre based in Hyderabad.

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Uncomfortable? Get used to it. Business is global. This is good business practice.

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Update

From ZDNet

Tech Update Software Infrastructure

Gartner CEO to CIOs: Embrace offshoring or else

By David Berlind
March 29, 2004

It's an open secret that Gartner reads Internet Time Blog, but this time they beat me to the punch by twelve hours.

Many of the IT jobs being outsourced today are destined to be wiped out by the efficiencies of Service Oriented Architecture in the next few years anyway. Gartner's Fleisher warns CIOs to take control of outsourcing rather than fight a losing battle against it. Otherwise they'll have to deal with the unruly consequences, much as they did when the obvious benefits of unauthrorized PCs forced centralized IT departments to adopt client/server architecture.

Fleisher identified four major factors that are going to reorganize the world of work:

• secure broadband wireless
• always-on/always-connected devices
• easy access to vast amounts of very reliable and very cheap computing power
• service-oriented architectures that make application development cheaper and faster.

The Workflow Institute was delighted to note that Fleisher did not mention worker empowerment, learning, culture, job enrichment, community, teamwork, or any other human factors, assuring us that we'll have plenty to do amid the evolution to the new way of doing business.

Training transfer to the job.

Have you heard -- or used -- these stats?

"Only 10% of training transfers to the job."

"Only 10% of the investment in training
actually transfers to the job."

"Although $100 billion is spent on
training each year, only 10%
of these expenditures
result in transfer to the job."

Rather than accept stuff like this, Will Thalheimer responds, "Says who?" You see, Will takes a scientific approach to learning. His workshops are fascinating because he describes experiments, not theory. (No, he doesn't pay me to say this.)

A Pennsylvanian named Robert Fitzpatrick nailed the source of the 10% bunkum above. Here's the story.

If you're a contrarian like me, you'll enjoy Will's site.

People, a good investment

Laurie Bassi is a rare individual. Research convinced her that companies that invest in their people just had to do better than penny-pinchers that cut training and payroll the moment the economy sours. She invested in a portfolio of stocks of companies that invest heavily in their people. The returns are "in line with a growing body of empirical research showing that organizations that make extraordinary investments in people often enjoy extraordinary performance on a variety of indicators, including shareholder return."

March 2004

How's Your Return on People?

Companies that invest in employee development can outperform the market. Just ask their shareholders.

by Laurie Bassi and Daniel McMurrer

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Every year for three years, Laurie and Daniel selected a portfolio of 20 to 40 companies that spent at least twice as much as their peers to develop their human resources. In 2003, these heavy investors in human resources outperformed the S&P by 17% to 35%.

Laurie Bassi (lbassi@knowledgeam.com) is the chairwoman and Daniel McMurrer (dmcmurrer@knowledgeam.com) is the chief research officer at Knowledge Asset Management, a money management firm in Bethesda, Maryland.

ISPI and Metrics

Measurement Counts! Metrics, ROI, and Accomplishments (the missing element)
by Carl Binder, CPT

A recent publication, Metrics, by Jay Cross of the Internet Time Group, presents an opportunity to comment on some current issues in measurement and evaluation. The author, who happens to be an old friend, is an entertaining and wide-ranging thinker (some might say Renaissance Man), and his book is noteworthy in part because of its unconventional form: a constantly updated eBook available for purchase online. Jay’s history in financial services, training, marketing, and a whole host of cerebral pursuits has left him most recently in the world of e-Learning, where he has become something of a pundit.

While I don’t agree with everything in Metrics, I recommend it because it’s a quick and enjoyable read, because it contains valuable references and links, and mostly because it challenges us to think outside many of the current ruts in measurement and evaluation.

Things I Like about Metrics
Here are some of Jay’s key points along with my comments:

• “Metrics are measurements that matter.” With this sentence, he challenges us to measure results that our clients agree are important and to look for large valuable improvements. He adds, “Don’t fritter away time on the small stuff.”

• “Start with business problems and work backwards.” He later adds that we should “focus on process not on behavior.” These comments point in the direction of our best strategy for measuring the right things, following Thomas F. Gilbert’s dictum to identify accomplishments, the outputs of processes or of individual jobs that contribute value toward business results. Behavior costs money while accomplishments have value. Following the path from business results back through measured accomplishments will lead to the behavior and improvement strategies that produce worthwhile organizational outcomes.

• “Forget measurement of value based on cost savings!” As an e-Learning strategy consultant, Jay has probably tired of cost justifications based on saving travel time and expenses. It is critically important that we find ways to use our technologies and interventions to improve outcomes, not simply reduce costs for the same (often mediocre) outcomes.

• “Time matters.” Whether we’re speaking of time to perform (fluency, productivity), time to achieve benchmark performance (ramp-up), or results over time (revenues, profits), we cannot ignore the time dimension in either our measurement of learning and performance during training or our measurement of desired business results.

• “Gather baseline data.” While it is easy to interpret this statement as simply that we need a “before” measure to evaluate the worth of our “after” results, the “line” in baseline is very important. To clearly understand the effects of our interventions, we must view current performance in the context of measured levels, trends, and bounce (or variability) over time. We need a series of counts (per minute, per day, per week, or per month) to establish a true baseline so that we can tell whether our interventions or ongoing efforts are changing trends, levels, and/or the “bounce” (variability) of measured outcomes.

• “You must be able to relate your decisions and choices to the profitability of your organization.” While much of Jay’s discussion focuses on what I call “validation data”—measurement to justify expenditures by showing that programs work—the best measurement systems support ongoing decision-making. This is why I recommend ongoing measurement as feedback to performers and decision-makers, and why I like Timm Esque’s book, Making An Impact, so much.

• Jay disagrees with much of the current thinking about ROI, suggesting that his book can save you the cost of an ROI workshop. Whether or not this is true, managers would certainly prefer to see how your program improves their specific outcomes beyond a general payback ratio or cost justification. And since some current-day ROI “methods” use subjective estimates of payback rather than direct results measures, we need to question in detail many ROI claims before we accept them.

Things I Don’t Like So Much About Metrics
Lest you think I’m giving my friend a free pass, let me make a few comments about shortcomings.

• The second half of the book is mostly a justification for e-Learning, something I would have preferred left to a few pages. I recognize that Jay makes his living in this field, but it would be more helpful if the book addressed the general case with a broader set of examples. Moreover, it is inconceivable that even the best e-Learning program will produce optimal results without efforts to improve other factors in a performance system, including expectations, feedback, tools, resources, consequences, and selection.

• Jay does not discuss what’s a good measure and what’s not. For example, he mentions the limitations of test results as metrics but does not explain that percentage correct is not a measure of performance because it is a dimensionless quantity from which we cannot determine either the count of behavior or accomplishments nor the time required to complete them. He does not point out that the best metrics count things in absolute units (dollars, widgets, gallons, etc.) rather than rating them on subjective scales. Careful application of all his recommendations can still yield meaningless measurement if we fail to adhere to this basic principle.

• Jay speaks of using both “subjective and objective” data. For me, the term “subjective” means open to wide interpretation or idiosyncratic. What I think he means by “subjective” is measurement of opinion or preference, which can be very objective if we refrain from applying “voodoo math” by summarizing numbers on rating scales of subjective impressions to produce “average” ratings. It is not subjective to say that “20 people out of 45 rated the program as very good and 10 said it was poor”—a quantitative measure of personal opinion that can be safely manipulated within the rules of arithmetic.

I suggest you read Metrics yourself, and discuss it vigorously with your colleagues and clients. I am sure you will find it both entertaining and illuminating.

Dr. Carl Binder is a Senior Partner at Binder Riha Associates, a consulting firm that helps clients improve processes, performance, and behavior to deliver measurable results. He may be reached at CarlBinder@aol.com. For additional articles, visit http://www.binder-riha.com/publications.htm.

my test page

Yesterday I followed a link from cogdogblog to a presentation in Breeze by Alan Levin, D'Arcy Norman, and Brian Lamb that showed the power of RSS in education. The presentation is worth watching simply as a model for rapid-fire, low-cost, yet compelling development. But in my case, the content was quite useful as well.

The Maricopa reference page, RSS Feeds via JavaScript, showed me enough to begin including RSS feeds in my webpages.

Check out my test page to see the most recent posts to a dozen favorite blogs.

Admittedly, I'm a newbie. (I think Stephen has been doing this since the beginning of time.) The page takes forever to load -- so I think I'll move the underlying scripts to my own server. Also, it doesn't look like the items automatically refresh.

If you're an RSS afficianado who owes me one or wants to top off her/his karma account, I wouldn't mind receiving some advice on this.

Ted Nelson, way out

Like the fish that is unaware of water, Ted Nelson says computer users are blind to the 2D tyranny of paper. Herewith, a few excerpts from his thought-provoking paper....

WAY OUT OF THE BOX
Theodor Holm Nelson
Keio University and University of Southampton

Computers aping paper, corporate learning aping school, popular songs aping wisdom:

Edubabble from Ontario

My co-conspirator at the Workflow Institute, Sam Adkins, sent me a delicious link to the Organization for Quality Education, a group of Ontario citizens up in arms over the poor quality of their public schools. Nothing is funnier than the truth.

Let's start with a few definitions of education buzzwords.

Buzzword: Research has shown...
What parents THINK it means: It's proven.
What it REALLY means: Other people say so, too.

Buzzword: Child-centered
What parents THINK it means: Your child is of greatest concern
What it REALLY means: Your child does what he wants to do

Buzzword: No memorization
What parents THINK it means: No boring stuff
What it REALLY means: We don't teach facts

Buzzword: High-order thinking
What parents THINK it means: Thinking
What it REALLY means: Lost in the fog

Buzzword: Brain-based learning
What parents THINK it means: Science teaches a lot about learning
What it REALLY means: I believe in feng-shui, too

Buzzword: Discovery learning
What parents THINK it means: It's fun to learn
What it REALLY means: Kids will spend a week learning what lively, engaged instruction could teach in a day

Buzzword: We don't "teach to the test"
What parents THINK it means: No drills just for the sake of passing some test
What it REALLY means: We don't like being told what to cover in class

Buzzword: Education theorists
What parents THINK it means: Deep thinkers about education issues
What it REALLY means: People who spout opinions without any supporting data

Buzzword: Education researchers
What parents THINK it means: People who analyze data about what actually works
What it REALLY means: People who summarize the view of the theorists

That was just a warm-up. What is a quality education? How can you judge? You look to your customers.

A quality education system produces students with the knowledge, skills, attitudes, values, and work habits needed to become productive, fulfilled citizens. It provides clear goals, high standards, good teachers and a well-organized curriculum.

Much of what is wrong with Ontario education today is the result of the system's clinging to an outdated concept of quality. Over the past 30 years, organizations in the private sector - and now increasingly in the public sector - have come to the realization that quality can no longer be patronizingly defined by the providers of goods and services. Today, quality means meeting or exceeding the expectations of customers. In other words, something isn't good quality unless the customer says it is.

So what are the customers of Ontario's schools saying? The employers and post-secondary educators, the school system's most obvious customers, are its most vocal and consistent critics. Meanwhile, parents line up overnight to enroll their children in academy schools where high academic and behavioural standards prevail, in stark contrast to the laissez-faire attitudes in most schools. Much like sixties Detroit automotive engineers who largely ignored the requests from motorists for smaller, fuel-efficient cars, the education system dismisses these criticisms as coming from people unqualified to determine what constitutes quality education.

Modern quality is about outputs, not inputs. Yet status quo educators define quality primarily in terms of inputs to the education system, such as funding levels, class size, and teacher certification. The effects of these inputs on learning outcomes, however, are anything but clear. Studies in some jurisdictions, for example, have found that the more school boards spend, the worse students learn!

Meanings are important. I maintain a glossary at Internet Time, one of about five edutech glossaries on the net that aren't simply copies of someone else's glossary. OQE offers a glossary for debunking edubabble. It's extremely thought-provoking. The definitions come from The Schools We Need & Why We Don’t Have Them by E.D. Hirsch.

metacognitive skills = A term that, like “constructivism,” has a legitimate technical but an illegitimate nontechnical meaning. The illegitimate, broader application of the term identifies it with “accessing skills,” “critical-thinking skills,” “problem-solving skills,” and other expressions of the anti-knowledge tool conception of education.

multiple intelligences = ...Despite the fact that schools are not competent to classify and rank children on these highly speculative psychological measures, the concept had become highly popular, probably because it fits in with the already popular notions of “individual differences,” “individual learning styles,” “self-paced learning,” and so on, not to mention its appeal to our benign hope for all children that that will be good at doing something and happy doing it. The distinguished psychologist George A. Miller has said that Gardner’s specific classifications are “almost certainly wrong.”

portfolio assessment = A phrase for a version of performance-based assessment. In portfolio assessment, students preserve in a portfolio all of some of their productions during the course of the semester or year. At the end of the time period, students are graded for the totality of their production. It is a device that has long been used for the teaching of writing and painting. But there its utility ceases. It has proven to be virtually useless for large-scale, high-stake testing.

I'm writing this as I explore the site. I was going along with Hirsch for the first few definitions but now I am beginning to suspect that he's an extremist. His message is that students need to master basic skills and learn facts with rigor. Only then will they be able to develop (Hirsch hates this term violently) "critical thinking skills." But Hirsch seems to win his arguments by setting up strawmen and then knocking them down.

Admittedly, my expertise is in adult performance, not childhood education, but I'm too big a fan of learning by doing to throw it out the window just because some teachers don't set it up right or some students don't join in. Hirsch says learning by doing is "a phrase once used to characterize the progressivist movement but little used today, possibly because the formulation has been the object of much criticism and even ridicule." He continues on, saying "The idea behind it resembles the real-life activities for which the particular learning is preparing the student. It is claimed that the best form of learning is that which best allows the student to learn in the natural, apprentice-like way in which humans have always learned."

So far, this sounds pretty good to me, but not to Hirsch, who writes, "By performing 'holistic' activities, the student, it is claimed, will reliably discover the needed learnings. This is an attractive doctrine, but it is also a highly theoretical one that has proved to be false. The value of such a method depends on its actual effectiveness. If by 'effective', one means that all students learn reliably and efficiently by this method, then the theory has been entirely discredited in comparative studies. Both recent history of American education and controlled observations have shown that learning by doing and its adaptations are among the least effective pedagogies available to the teacher."

I disagree. Situated learning -- doing the work rather than learning about the work -- is often the best way to learn. By "effective," I don't mean something works for all students, just that it's a winner for some of them. Of course learning by doing in the real world requires leaving the artificial reality inside the protective walls of schools.

I'd hoped to win one for the Republic of Berkeley, debunking public education, but I end up admitting that schooling is a supremely complicated area and that (Are you ready for this?) I don't have a clue as to how to fix it. It's late. I was looking for black and white; I found shades of gray. This is a provocative site, well worth visiting.

Speaking of timing...

I went to my DSL provider's site because they've imposed some limit on the number of recipients allowed per email, and I wanted to get some information. (The only inbound information I ever receive from these guys is a bill.) Their site appears to be five years out of date. Must be one of those artifacts from the phone monopogy culture of days gone by.

Windows 98 and your Pacific Bell Internet Services Account

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I'm in the midst of doing taxes. I once had a securities account with Bache, before they merged with Halsey Stuart Shields and were acquired by Prudential, becoming Prudential-Bache and then Prudential Securities before being acquired by Wachovia recently. Lord, but I detest banks. Here's one more reason:

Credibiliity

Chuck Fred is author of Breakaway. Here's my Amazon review:

Chuck and I talked this afternoon about the continuing lack of discipline in measuring the impact of corporate learning. That's the topic of my Metrics, my strongest statement yet that "training metrics" are a fantasy. The appropriate metrics for training are business metrics.

Chuck and I are both obsessed with time. Chuck's a former competitive runner and the "breakaway" of his book's title is that point when the winners pull ahead of the also-rans. It worked for Jesse Owens and it works for Wal*Mart. The name of this site is a reflection of my view of time. Time has become the prime business metric. How soon can our team reach proficiency? How can we get there faster? How can we stay ahead of the game? How can we speed things up? How soon will we be ready to execute?

The genesis of Chuck's book was interviews with 300 CEOs. He promised them absolute confidentiality in return for their candor. He maintains these relationships to this day.

Late last year, Chuck asked the CEOs about their levels of confidence in the ROI presentations made in suport of training expenditures. Specifically, he asked about purchases of off-the-shelf courseware, training technology & infrastructure, and training-related advisory services.

Nine out of ten CEOs said they had no confidence in the ROI of training as presented to them. You can reach Chuck at Breakaway Group.

Metrics

Jay: Thank you for Metrics. I read it immediately. (Most of what I needed anyway, which was a lot) I was able to compose a draft Revenue Model for E Learning Enterprise justification because your knowledge, references, links and other insights were there when I needed them. I will be discussing the metrics on Wednesday to determine the level of acceptance of my projections. The metrics included estimated comparative costs of conventional training to E learning, lost opportunity costs, profit loss, turnover savings, and increased revenue due to decrease in job analysis error rate. I don?t know where this is going, but the potential could be groundbreaking for solutions to problems in the industry under study. Your approach to ?get real? terminology regarding the important items to measure for training effect is refreshing and entertaining. I have been in the training, and performance change, business for more years than I would like to admit. However, these days are encouraging, because we are being invited to leave the laboratory of the ?fuzzy? and enter the arena of investments that matter. Regards, Frank Murphy EQUIFOCUS, LLC EQUIFOCUS offers training consultation, E Learning content development, and outsource services that improve performance for Equipment Manufacturers and supporting Service organizations.

Metrics is an eBook because it's continually updated. Buy a copy today. You can download the current version immediately. When the next edition is ready, I'll send you a copy of that as well.

Metrics shows you how to calculate ROI, but that's the tip of the iceberg. More important is understanding how business executives make decisions, how to describe "soft" benefits in monetary terms, how to sell your ideas, and how to perform a meaningful cost/benefit analysis. Here's a map of the topics covered:

"Can't imagine anything I'd add or change ... for anyone looking for a real understanding of ROI,as well as various ways to calculate their return, this is the best A-Z guide I have read. And you hit the nail on the head ... it's ultimately about performance and the cost of improving performance." David Grebow Chief Learning Officer Trinity Learning

Metrics, by Jay Cross.
100 pages, $250.