June 01, 2004
Lest ye forget
Bloom's Taxonomy
Benjamin Bloom created this taxonomy for categorizing level of abstraction of questions that commonly occur in educational settings. The taxonomy provides a useful structure in which to categorize test questions, since professors will characteristically ask questions within particular levels, and if you can determine the levels of questions that will appear on your exams, you will be able to study using appropriate strategies.
Competence |
Skills Demonstrated |
| Knowledge |
|
| Comprehension |
|
| Application |
|
| Analysis |
|
| Synthesis |
|
| Evaluation |
|
* Adapted from: Bloom, B.S. (Ed.) (1956) Taxonomy of educational objectives: The classification of educational goals: Handbook I, cognitive domain. New York ; Toronto: Longmans, Green, via University of Victoria.
May 31, 2004
Knowledge Tips
It's Memorial Day. I arrived back in California from ASTD a few minutes before midnight yesterday and am digging my way through hundreds of emails. Most of my inbox is filled with inane spam. I also received dozens of notices of obscene graffiti vandals had posted to my blogs. Animals, incest, and loose women promising to do anything imaginable. Yuck.
It's uplifting to receive something genuinely useful, and the Gurteen Knowledge-Letter hit the spot for me. Consider these links from the current issue:
- Peter Drucker, My Life as a Knowledge Worker
- Scott Peck, The Stages of Spiritual Growth
- Via a pointer from Ross McDonald, this awesome image of the "Metaweb" from Peter Drucker's grandson, Nova Spivak.
- Two sites dedicated to exploring conversation
- John Holt
- "The child is curious. He wants to make sense out of things, find out how things work, gain competence and control over himself and his environment, and do what he can see other people doing. He is open, perceptive, and experimental. He does not merely observe the world around him, He does not shut himself off from the strange, complicated world around him, but tastes it, touches it, hefts it, bends it, breaks it. To find out how reality works, he works on it.
He is bold. He is not afraid of making mistakes. And he is patient.
He can tolerate an extraordinary amount of uncertainty, confusion, ignorance, and suspense ... School is not a place that gives much time, or opportunity, or reward, for this kind of thinking and learning."
(This is "Copyright 2004, David Gurteen, All rights reserved.")
May 13, 2004
Windows fixes
Hints on making Windows work, from Dave Farber's Interesting People mail list.
Dave's list provides an awesome array of opinions. It's one fo the few daily mailings I pay attention to. To subscribe, go here.
May 11, 2004
Grab bag
The Gurteen Knowledge Website is a fascinating collection of books, articles, pointers, people, documents, blogs, and more on the topics of knowledge management, learning, creativity, innovation & personal development. David Gurteen has woven everything together to create a labyrinth I could wander around in for hours.
There's a newsletter, too. Handy tips from the April 6 edition:
- ************* RAY OZZIE ON COLLABORATIVE TECHNOLOGY *************
Ray Ozzie, the creator of Lotus Notes and founder of Groove Networks is always a guy whose thoughts and ideas are worth keeping in touch with ...
White paper from Ray and Peter O'Kelly on collaborative technology http://www.groove.net/contact/b2f-download/
Voice interview with Ray by Robin Good
http://www.kolabora.com/news/2004/03/17/robin_good_interviews_ray_ozzie.htm
Ray's weblog
http://www.ozzie.net/blog/
Ray Ozzie:
http://www.gurteen.com/gurteen/gurteen.nsf/ID/X000358FA?open&r=3&p=0
These are headed straight into my private links page:
- ********************** ONLINE DICTIONARIES **********************
I usually use the online Meriam-Webster dictionary when looking-up words on the web but increasingly I use Hyper Dictionary. I prefer the results and get a set of Thesaurus results as well without having to conduct a separate search.
http://www.hyperdictionary.com
Compare this:
http://www.hyperdictionary.com/search.aspx?define=knowledge
with this:
http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Dictionary&va=knowledge
which do you prefer?
Another fascinating dictionary is Urban Dictionary which is a slang dictionary where you can actually submit your own words and vote on words submitted by others:
http://www.urbandictionary.com
but I'll warn you now if you are easily offended don't look up 'knowledge' ... I thought I had come across most definitions but not this one - as they say in a footnote "Urban Dictionary is not appropriate for all audiences" :-)
A week ago today I was making final preparations for a trip to Kingston, Ontario, for a conference. Forwarding the phone to my cell was going to be one of the final steps. Five minutes before we were due to leave the house, I lifted the handset and heard nothing. No dial tone. Dead air. Zilch.
I scrambled around on the floor under my desk wiggling the connections to our four incoming phone lines. I tried other equipment. Nothing worked. Uta called Pacific Bell. They said they could come out to check on Friday morning, a mere three days away.
On Thursday, the dial tone magically appeared. Uta called. What had happened? PacBell said a line had been cut. Where? Telling that would involving violating somebody's privacy rights. When was service restored? They had no idea.
She said she'd like to cancel the Friday service appointment. Pacific Bell said there was no appointment to cancel. She said she'd talked with someone on Tuesday and set an appointment. Pacific Bell said she did not have an appointment. Never did.
Will wonders never cease?
I told you so.
What can I say, but "duh"?
March 22, 2004
80/20 or bust
Pareto RulesIn 1897, Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto noted that wealth was distributed unevenly. 20% of the people owned 80% of the assets. The Pareto Principle, also known as the 80/20 Rule, says that often, 80% of the results come from 20% of the effort.
20% of people have 80% of the wealth
20% of the sales force makes 80% of the sales
20% of criminals commit 80% of the crimes
20% of the carpet gets 80% of the wear and tear
20% of the products account for 80% of the profits
20% of the defects cause 80% of the problems
20% of the suppliers provide 80% of the stock
20% of the stock fills 80% of the warehouse
20% of the staff causes 80% of the problems
20% of the project takes 80% of the time & resources
(the first and last 10%)
On the web, Lou Rosenfeld says,
80% of your site's users belong to 20% of the site's audiences.
80% of users' information needs are served by 20% of the site's content.
80% of users' navigational needs are served by 20% of all possible architectural components.
80% of users' searches are represented by the 20% of unique searches that appear most frequently.
Do you see a pattern here?
The “80” and “20” aren’t precise. You can interpret the 80/20 as saying, “A small part of the overall effort produces most of the results.”
The results of many decisions are what the Department of Defense calls asymmetrical. Putting your chips on the high-impact people or activities provides more bang for your buck. If you’re selecting people for sales jobs, a 20% candidate is obviously a better choice than an 80%-er. Sixteen times as much! Here’s the math:
Top Performer 80% output/20% input
So-so Performer 20% output/80% input
Time is all we have
The Pareto Principle also applies to the investment of time in getting a job done.
Often, less than 3% of the elapsed time performing a process has anything to do with real work.[1]
Manufacturing companies spend anywhere from 5-10 percent total time actually adding value to the product.[2]
Mangers and supervisors spend less than 25% of their day doing what they were hired to do. Most of their time is spent putting out fires.
My original graphic said Fluff instead of Ancillary, but I decided that was misleading. A worker drinking a cup of coffee isn’t moving widgets down the assembly line, but it’s an ancillary activity without which the worker would quit.
Geoff Moore’s Living on the Fault Line says anything that raises one’s stock price is core; everything else is mere hygiene. Do you bathe? Good. If you didn't you'd lose your job. But don't expect to receive a promotion for bathing no matter how squeaky clean you are. Differentiating on things that aren’t core is the single biggest waste of resources in Fortune 500 operations. Without very careful management, the ancillary stuff always gets in the way of core because it absorbs time, talent and management attention.
The way to prosper as an organization or as an individual is to hand off ancillary activities and put more time into core. It’s called “working smarter, not harder.”
Faster is better
A business that can do more in less time will have happier customers, lower inventories, and higher profits, but how can a business speed up its people? What kind of training would that take?
The answer comes from engineering. You’ve heard the principle described as lean manufacturing, time-based competition, kaizen, and zero-latency. If you’re familiar with the discussions coming out of Workflow Institute, it’s the real-time enterprise. Practitioners of six sigma look at it as reducing cycle time. They’re all about optimizing systems to speed things up.
Automobile manufacturers figured out what increased throughput was worth to them. Visit a Toyota or Honda assembly plant. You’ll witness a smooth operation. “From aerospace assembly to chemical manufacturing to production enhancement in oil and gas, our customers are enjoying bottom-line results and easier operations,” touts an ad.[3] Managers in pharma, intelligence, minerals, the military, and other sectors of industry are boosting profits through optimizing their processes and accelerating how quickly they get things accomplished.
It’s time for eLearning to adopt the approaches of the industrial engineers.
Process
A process is a series of steps that bring about a result.
Cooking a meal is a process. Walking the dog is a process. Brushing your teeth is a process. Making a sale is a process, as are sending a fax, writing a brochure, delivering a package, inflating a tire, developing a business plan, and assembling a computer. Bringing a new product to market is a process. So is bringing a new employee up to speed.
In sum, processes occur everywhere. Knowledge workers perform processes, not just factory hands. And a process may range from tiny (a memory cycle in your PC) to immense (a merger or acquisition). Conceptualizing a group of activities as a process enables us to analyze and often improve upon it.
Cycle Time
A business is a collection of processes that create value for a customer.
A process is a series of steps that occurs over and over again. A process begins with an input and ends with an output. Each time that happens is called a cycle. Every cycle has a start, a middle, and an end. The elapsed time from the start of one cycle to start of the next is called cycle time.
Factories and offices are not very efficient. In fact, workers spend relatively little time performing processes, the real work. Processing time in factories is often only 5% to 10% of cycle time. Knowledge workers spend only 5% to
25% of their time doing the work in their job descriptions.
The remaining 75% to 95% is Slack Time – time spent waiting for materials, looking things up, dealing with interruptions, fixing what didn’t make it the
first time, straightening up the work area, going to the bathroom, putting out fires, taking a cigarette break, answering wrong numbers, eating lunch, reading junk email, and learning how to do a better job.
Use the 80/20 rule to select an important process. Cutting cycle time by 1/3 increase profitability ten times over.
Generally, the processing itself is already quite efficient. It has been under the efficiency expert’s microscope for a good while. Also, it’s the smaller component of cycle time.
To improve cycle time, cut the slack. There’s a more to cut from. The slack is often made up of departmental anachronisms, historical accidents, slow start-times, linear processes that could be done in parallel, and things at boundaries that nobody has taken responsibility for.
An Example
A high-tech company sent new recruits to a two-week sales boot camp before sending them into the field to learn on the job. On average, it took new hires eighteen months to be selling at quota level ($5 million/year).
The company re-structured the process to include online learning on the technology in preparation for the boot camp. Freed of technical training, the boot camp focused on selling strategies. Structured online activities, mentoring, and seminars replaced the catch-as-catch-can learning from experience in the field. Shortening the slack cut the development cycle to nine months.
Do the math. ¾ year x $5 million = $3.75 million incremental revenue/person. This company was adding more than a thousand new sales people annually. That’s more than $3 billion in new-found revenue.
[1] FedEx Center for Cycle Time Research at the University of Memphis
[2] http://rockfordconsulting.com/cyc.htm
[3] http://www.processoptimization.com/
July 16, 2003
Interesting stuff
Free clip art, sounds, templates, etc. from that company in Redmond.
Cascading Style Sheets 1 reference from W3C
CSS2 reference from W3C
How to build a web site without tables
Decisions: Making the right ones. Learning from the wrong ones
Ed Tech Dev, educational technology, learning sciences research, programming
Cmap free concept mapping tool
Engines for Education. I had lost track of this Roger Shank masterpiece when he departed Northwestern. If you haven't read it, do so.
CILT's Design Principles, from the school right down the hill from here
Chris Lydon's blog has interviews with Dave Winer, David Weinberger, and others about the blogosphere.
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/zhamurai/mindmap.htm
Using Weblogs In The Classroom: ECOO 2003 Session
Kevin Kruse's eLearning Glossary
Homepage of Ben Shneiderman
Finally, an alumni benefit of value, free HBR
David Bohm
UMd Human Computer Interaction Lab
post-autistic economics review
- or -
March 09, 2003
Simplicity
Edward De Bono on Simplicity
- Value simplicity highly.
- Strive for it.
- Understanding begets simplicity.
- Explore alternatives and possibilities.
- Challenge and discard vestiges.
- Always be ready to start over.
- Think conceptually.
- Break things into pieces.
- Trade off other values for simplicty.
- Know who you’re making it simple for.
January 24, 2003
Add this to your bookmarks
J. D. Lasica's awsome list of Research & reference tools covers current events, people, business finders, area and zip codes, search engines and directories, shopping comparison sites, map services, and more.
Tomalak's Calendar of web design events
November 04, 2002
Spam, spam, spam, spam
LockerGnome Windows Daily is such a handy, well-written newsletter that it's on my short list of push media worth reading. Usually it's chock full of hints and great links. Today Chris Perillo starts with a few words on SPAM that captured my feelings on the matter precisely:
March 08, 2002
Raspberry Jam, Law of
Formulated by consultant Gerald Weinberg, the Law of Raspberry Jam states, “The more you spread it, the thinner it gets.”
Few things scale forever.
Materiality
As Alan Watts titled a book, “Does it matter?”
Contrary to what you may think, accountants don’t strive to account for every penny. They strive to present a fair picture of an organization’s financial condition, not to balance its checkbook.
If your employer is auditing your expenses, a $300 discrepancy on your hotel bill is probably significant; it’s “material.” If Deloitte is auditing Exxon, a $5 million discrepancy in expense reimbursements is trivial — it’s a drop in the bucket that won’t even show up on Exxon’s financial statements.
I interpret the Principle of Materiality as “Don’t sweat the small stuff.” Don’t fixate on false accuracy. And if you’re unsure whether or not something’s material, change its value up or down to see if it makes a meaningful difference. Impress your friends by saying you’re performing a “sensitivity analysis.”
Sunk Cost
Don’t throw good money after bad.
Imagine you’ve sunk $100,000 into a project. Another $10,000 and it will be completed. But market conditions have changed and you’ll only recoup $25,000.
A colleague discovers an open-source code that will generate the same $25,000 return for an investment of only $8,000 total.
Do you go for the first option and complete the $110,000 project?
Or do you abandon the $100,000 and go for the cheaper new alternative?
The rational businessperson chooses the second option. The $100,000 is a “sunk cost.” It’s water over the dam. You need to make decisions based on incremental costs and incremental rewards. Paying $8,000 to get $25,000 beats paying $10,000 to get $25,000 any time, anywhere.
December 30, 2001
Selling your ideas
Selling the value of a project to management takes more than talking like a businessperson. It requires thinking like a businessperson. In essence, if you’re not there already, you must become a businessperson.
The overriding focus of business leaders is creating value for stakeholders. Stakeholders include owners, managers, workers, partners, and customers. The firm’s leaders are responsible for articulating a vision of how the organization will create value and specifying milestone objectives along the way there.
Any businessperson worthy of the name can relate how his or her activities support those objectives and help fulfill the vision. You should be able to articulate how what you're doing establishes value in these areas. This is your "elevator pitch" and you should be able to giive it in your sleep.
Analysis and Decision-making Techniques
Here are techniques for business analysis and decision-making that we rely on continually. We suggest you run through them when making major decisions until they become second nature.
- Trade-off. Every business decision is a trade-off. (If there’s no trade-off, it’s a no-brainer.) We find it useful to list the pro’s of doing something and the con’s of not doing it or doing something else. Try to be aware of what you’re trading off when making a decision.
- Risk. Every decision is made with less than perfect information, and every decision entails taking a risk. The way to make sound decisions is to judge when you have enough information to move ahead and when the level of risk is acceptable. A decision-maker who takes no risk receives no reward. A decision-maker who disregards risk is a fool, a pauper, or both.
Financial decisions trade off risk and reward. An important corollary: There is no free lunch.
- Empathy. To understand your customer, walk a mile in her shoes. Here’s how. Make up several representative customers (personas). Give them names, positions, likes, gripes, habits, intelligence and personalities. When you’re planning marketing campaigns and learning activities, stop every now and again to slip into these personas’ shoes. How does our proposal make them feel?
- The Pareto Principle, also known as the 80/20 rule, describes the common situation where 20% of the effort gets 80% of the results. It’s not uncommon for 20% of the sales force to make 80% of the sales. Or 20% of the customers to generate 80% of the profits. It’s likely that 20% of your effort produces 80% of your results.
The point is that input and output are not balanced. As marketers, we break the market into pieces (“segments”) in order to identify and focus our attention on the significant few who produce most of the results.
As designers of learning experiences, less is often more. Find the elusive 20% of the learner’s time that yields 80% of what is learned and put your energies there. - The bottom line. Earnings. Profit. Revenue minus costs. Over time, profit and shareholder value are the same thing. The total value of the shares is equivalent to the stream of expected future profits, discounted for the cost of capital. Forgive us if you find this obvious, but you must be able to relate your decisions and choices to the profitability of your organization. Otherwise, you will not be able to make sound decisions as conditions change.
Focus on core; outsource everything else. Shareholder value (AKA market cap) is a function of sustained competitive advantage, and organizations achieve it by leveraging their core competencies. Everything else is context (overhead), and context is a needless distraction. Without careful management, context always gets in the way of core because it absorbs time, talent and management attention.
- To get a different view, go up to the balcony. Look down from a higher level to gain a broader perspective. Try to discern what’s really going on. Back away from the trees to see the forest.
Business leaders present themselves to the world as confident, authoritative, conservative, results-oriented, deliberate, and a bit staid. It’s best to leave your clown suit in the closet when you’re selling a concept to executives. Be concise. Hit the concepts described above as they apply to your project. When you’ve said your piece, ask for questions and sit down.
Risk
Risk.
Every decision is made with less than perfect information, and every decision entails taking a risk. The way to make sound decisions is to judge when you have enough information to move ahead and when the level of risk is acceptable. A decision-maker who takes no risk receives no reward. A decision-maker who disregards risk is a fool, a pauper, or both.
Financial decisions trade off risk and reward. An important corollary: There is no free lunch.
Trade-off
Trade-off.
Every business decision is a trade-off. (If there’s no trade-off, it’s a no-brainer.) We find it useful to list the pro’s of doing something and the con’s of not doing it or doing something else. Try to be aware of what you’re trading off when making a decision.
Empathy
Empathy. To understand your customer, walk a mile in her shoes.
Here’s how. Make up several representative customers (personas). Give them names, positions, likes, gripes, habits, intelligence and personalities. When you’re planning marketing campaigns and learning activities, stop every now and again to slip into these personas’ shoes. How does our proposal make them feel?
Balcony
To get a different view, go up to the balcony.
Look at the big picture.
Look down from a higher level to gain a broader perspective. Try to discern what’s really going on. Back away from the trees to see the forest.
Focus on core
Focus on core; outsource everything else.
Shareholder value (AKA market cap) is a function of sustained competitive advantage, and organizations achieve it by leveraging their core competencies. Everything else is context (overhead), and context is a needless distraction. Without careful management, context always gets in the way of core because it absorbs time, talent and management attention.
The Bottom Line
The bottom line.
Earnings. Profit. Revenue minus costs.
Over time, profit and shareholder value are the same thing. The total value of the shares is equivalent to the stream of expected future profits, discounted for the cost of capital. Forgive us if you find this obvious, but you must be able to relate your decisions and choices to the profitability of your organization. Otherwise, you will not be able to make sound decisions as conditions change.
Do not confuse profit (the bottom line) with revenue (the top line).
The 80/20 Rule
The Pareto Principle, also known as the 80/20 rule, describes the common situation where 20% of the effort gets 80% of the results. That's where to invest your energy.
It’s not uncommon for 20% of the sales force to make 80% of the sales. Or 20% of the customers to generate 80% of the profits. It’s likely that 20% of your effort produces 80% of your results.
The point is that input and output are not balanced. As marketers, we break the market into pieces (“segments”) in order to identify and focus our attention on the significant few who produce most of the results.
As designers of learning experiences, less is often more. Find the elusive 20% of the learner’s time that yields 80% of what is learned and put your energies there.
July 12, 2001
Hot Stuff
Hot stuff I'd like to share with you. Updated freqeuntly. (Disregard the 2001 date.)Here...  | ...and there |
|
Workflow Learning Institute Another Look at Learning, (Is learning anything more than making good connections?) Template for Developing an eLearning Implementation Action Plan, free Center for Visual Learning |
Technorati and more Mark Oehlert's Future of eLearning Models QuickTopic, the free, instant-on, no-brainer conferencing tool. E-Learning Centre, UK |
June 21, 2001
Knowledge Management
Knowledge maps, knowledge architecture, taxonomies, and more from KAPS Group On the rebound? Peter Martin, writes in CLO: The Market Is Coming Back to Knowledge Management
In hindsight, knowledge management was a recklessly defined initiative. [See below.] Companies were going to be able to ?empower the intellectual capital of their enterprise? with ad hoc software purchases. Over time the initiative lost its cachet, very much like the ?portal??a key element of knowledge management. As the meaning and value of the portal has risen from the ashes, so has knowledge management. The comeback for knowledge management can be traced to the economy, consolidation of vendors, technological advancement and enterprise software vendor buy-in.
To Verna Allee, it's all a matter of making connections. I think she's got it. KM=BS? An abstract of T.D. Wilson's The Nonsense of Knowledge Management Life On The Internet: Could Blogging Assist KM? from Amy Wohl Knowledge Blogs Are Tough Denham Gray's amazing KM Wiki What's knowledge? Knowledge management is a high-fallutin' buzz phrase for creating and sharing know-how. A hot item circa 1998, overuse has watered down KM's popularity as a category. To vendors, KM became "whatever I want to sell you," be it document-tracking or warehousing good ideas or building web pages or reinforcing innovation or focusing on intellectual capital. Knowledge is like the sound of the tree that falls in the forest when no one is there: it doesn't exist unless people interact with it. Nurturing innovation and rewarding the sharing of ideas fertilizes seedling ideas. Setting up processes to highlight what's worthy and weed out useless undergrowth help grow heathly trees. While it may carry a different name in the future, knowledge management anchors one end of the eLearning continuum and is vital to improving organizational performance. "Knowledge is information that changes something or somebody -- either by becoming grounds for actions, or by making an individual (or an institution) capable of different or more effective action." -- Peter F. Drucker in The New Realities (The same might be said of learning.) Knowledge Management is a case of the blind men and the elephant. KM refers to one or more of these activities:
At a minimum, do these things: Databases:
Infrastructure:
Culture:
Come together Tom Barron, drawing on the ideas of GartnerGroup's Clark Aldrich and others, presents an astute view of the impending merger of e-Learning and Knowledge Management in A Smarter Frankenstein, lead article in the August 2000 issue of Learning Circuits. Take an eLearning course. Chunk it into discrete learning bites. Surround it with technology that assesses a learner's needs and delivers the appropriate learning nuggets. Add collaborative tools that allow learners to share information. What do you get? Something that looks a whole lot like knowledge management.
The training function is accustomed to limiting its scope -- offering a curriculum that provides grounds for assessment. KM is open-ended, encouraging participants to share whatever works without an intermediary to translate things into lessons. Oil and water? The accelerating pace of business is already obsoleting the authoring function -- there's not enough time for lengthy development cycles; intitutive authoring systems are replacing middleman authors by taking content directly from the expert's mouth. An obstacle I've personally never overcome to my satisfaction is countering the hoarding of knowledge by those who believe knowledge is power, or are perhaps too self-motivated to contribute to the good of their organizations. What to Blogs have to do with it? Weblogs (AKA Blogs) are important. If you're not familiar with Blogs, read Rebecca Blood's excellent Weblogs: A History and Perspective. 1. Blogs are a free authoring tool that enables anyone with a net connection to publish content on the web. The doors are open. 2. You cannot keep up with the raw flow of information being posted to the web without a lot of help. The Blogs of people you trust point the way to the good stuff. For example, I read Camworld because it has proven worthy of my time; I've grown to trust Cameron Barrett -- I know where he's coming from. 3. In time, organizations will encourage in-house Blogging.
Tacit & Explicit Knowledge
In an economy where the only certainty is uncertainty, the one sure source of lasting competitive advantage is knowledge. When markets shift, technologies proliferate, competitors multiply, and products become obsolete almost overnight, successful companies are those that consistently create new knowledge, disseminate it widely throughout the organization, and quickly embody it in new technologies and products. These activities define the knowledge-creating company, whose sole business is continuous innovation. (source: Ikujiro Nonaka, The Knowledge-Creating Company, Harvard Business Review, November-December 1991)
Other sources The Economics of Knowledge, Eric E. Vogt. "Knowledge is a perspective shared by a community which allows for some effective action. ...the economics of knowledge dictate that we think in terms of creating collection systems that allow for the instantaneous sharing of these new perspectives. Collection systems allow us to listen to the needs and concerns of customers. Collection systems allow us to tap into the global flow of creative ideas and fuel the imagination of our knowledge community." Journal of the Hyperlinked Organization (JOHO). David Weinberger has the most level-headed approach to knowledge management you'll find anywhere. He's also a laugh riot. JOHO is one of my favorite reads on the Web. Weinberger? He's a commentator on NPR, and co-author of The
Cluetrain Manifesto. Knowledge Management News, Brad Hoyt. Sporadic ever since Brad joined a start-up but worth the wait. Pointers, reflections, jobs, events. University of Denver: Organizational Learning and Knowledge Management Karl Erik Sveiby's impressive "library" of on-line resources ASTD on KM -- an overview of what's going on in the field E&Y Center for Business Innovation -- a great resource Scient sells KM as something that strengthens them and their customers The Knowledge Management Paradox: How to Manage Your Most Strategic Asset, CPT BRINT -- exhaustive and exhausting
links and essays. More is more? |
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| Leverage the Value-Hierarchy of Knowledge Different skills produce different levels of impact.
Often, the value added is the information subtracted. A hired hand is not a hired mind. Routine, low-skill work, even if it?s done manually, does not generate or emply human capital for the organization. Unleashing the human capital already resident in the organization requires minimizing mindless tasks, meaningless paperwork, unproductive infights. The Taylorized workplace squandered human assets in such activities. ?Informate? = change the work to add more value to customers. Outsourcing frees resources to continue developing high-return expertise. Capitalize means providing opportunities for learning. People need to feel they?re ?in the game,? and not ?being kicked around by it.? How to Capitalize on High-Value Knowledge Structural capital company property builds on corporate yellow pages, knowledge maps, speedy transfer. Do enough and no more; many overinvest. HP and others find that demand-driven approach is more effective than pushing information into people?s emailboxes. Avoid overinvesting by making it okay not to know everything ? leverage the expertise of specialists. When a manager brings in a problem, the experts teach her how to apply the lessons of a module to solve it. Customer capital, the relationships of the company with its customers, is measured by market share, customer retention and defection, and profit per customer. This is the most valuable capital of all it's where the money is but ironically, it's also the least well managed. Tom Stewart has a wonderful line, The customer today can call the tune because he knows the score. The goal is to maintain an increasingly intimate relationship. Empowered customers deal directly with companies' databases. Ten Principles for Managing Intellectual Capital
Source: Thomas Stewart, Intellectual Capital |
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Learning Standards
Standards
The Emerging Standards Effort in eLearning by Ed Cohen, eLearning Magazine, January 2002:
Torrents of tags
Much of what SCORM has assembled is preoccupied with the tracking, tagging, and storing of content objects. The standards dwell at length upon "metadata," specifying the identifying tags that all learning objects in a course should carry-be they graphics, text, animations, or simulations (see "A Primer on Metdata for Learning Objects," e-learning, October, p.26). For those who envision a future in which users wander through vast content repositories filled with such objects-plucked from various courses, each of them immaculately categorized and easy to use-SCORM is a dream.This focus on metadata labeling is understandable, given that we all believe reusing course content will be crucial in the near future. Oddly though, this standard may be both too demanding and not demanding enough. If SCORM is ultimately dominated by a giant catalog of tagging requirements, it would pose a daunting hurdle for companies with large amounts of legacy content for dubious gains. And it would ignore important principles of instructional design-which, if they were established as a uniform standard, would help trainers and teachers get the most out of their courseware.
Online Learning, November 2000:
"Web-based training standards entered a new era in June when the major developers agreed to make learning management systems (LMSs) and content from different vendors work together. The agreement between the Aviation Industry CBT Committee (AICC), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the Instructional Management Systems (IMS) Global Learning Consortium is not an official partnership ? yet. And because it is informal in nature the responsibilities of the respective parties haven?t been clearly defined. But it was determined that the Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) Initiative of the Department of Defense, which was the catalyst for the new spirit of cooperation, would act as a coordinating body."
Standards: The Vision and the Hype, Learning Circuits, by Tom Barron The drive to create industry-wide technology standards for e-learning is gaining momentum and adherents. But some see perils--and posturing--amid the promise.
All about Learning Technology Standards, LINEzine, Wayne Hodgins. Learnativity has the articles, presentations, and links of standards visionary Wayne Hodgins.
Achieving Interoperability in e-Learning, Learning Circuits, by Harvi Singh.
In today's Internet economy, achieving integration and interoperability in digital systems is increasingly important. Such integration is possible with open protocols, which allow an organization or system to exchange information with suppliers, partners, and customers in a format that accommodates each organization's system. The same approach is being applied in the e-learning arena, where a new breed of software application frameworks and approaches seek to enable true interoperability of separate systems. This article examines trends and enabling frameworks for making true interoperability a reality.
An Intro to Metadata Tagging, Learning Circuits, by Harvi Singh. Get ready for the Dewey Decimal Classification system of e-learning
The Instructional Use of Learning Objects, a book on the topic
Standards Groups
Advanced Learning Infrastructure Consortium (JAPAN) -- Objective is to establish an active society by reasonably and effectively providing a learning environment which enables anyone to learn anytime, anywhere, according to the goals, pace, interests and understanding of individuals and groups. Also, to foster experts who will be the origin of global competitiveness. Targets: Advanced learning infrastructure that are from Primary and secondary institution to high school, company training, and tertiary school; Technology and Service; Learning system and contents that use information technology, such as network. Examples: e-learning, Web-based training, technology-based training, computer-based training, long distance learning.
World Wide Web Consortium -- Develops interoperable technologies (specifications, guidelines, software, and tools) to lead the Web to its full potential, specifically XML.
Learning Technology Standards Committee (LTSC) of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) -- Formed in 1996. The mission is to develop technical standards, recommended practices, and guides for software components, tools, technologies and design methods that facilitate the development, deployment, maintenance, and interoperation of computer implementations of education and training components and systems.
Alliance of Remote Instructional Authoring and Distribution Networks for Europe (ARIADNE) -- Develops the results of the ARIADNE and ARIADNE II European Projects, which created tools and methodologies for producing, managing and reusing computer-based pedagogical elements and telematics supported training curricula.
IMS Global Learning Consortium, Inc. (IMS) -- Developing and promoting open specifications for facilitating online distributed learning activities, such as locating and using educational content, tracking learner progress, reporting learner performance, and exchanging student records between administrative systems. IMS -- Meta Tags and Knowledge Bits
Advanced Distributed Learning Network -- Purpose is to ensure access to high-quality education and training materials that can be tailored to individual learner needs and made available whenever and wherever they are required. This initiative is designed to accelerate large-scale development of dynamic and cost-effective learning software and to stimulate an efficient market for these products in order to meet the education and training needs of the military and the nation's workforce of the future. It will do this through the development of a common technical framework for computer and net-based learning that will foster the creation of reusable learning content as "instructional objects." Check out Plugfest 5.
The Aviation Industry CBT (Computer-Based Training) Committee (AICC) -- An international association of technology-based training professionals. The AICC develops guidelines for the aviation industry in the development, delivery, and evaluation of CBT and related training technologies.
The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative -- An open forum engaged in the development of interoperable online metadata standards that support a broad range of purposes and business models. DCMI's activities include consensus-driven working groups, global workshops, conferences, standards liaison, and educational efforts to promote widespread acceptance of metadata standards and practices. (If you're invited, don't get out your passport. That's Dublin, Ohio.)
BUILDING BLOCKS. HOW THE STANDARDS MOVEMENT PLANS TO REVOLUTIONIZE ELECTRONIC LEARNING, a good overview from University Business
Judy Brown's home page
SCORM is mil-spec. It will probably work in military apps where standards can be rigidly enforced, and where performance outweighs price much more than in the commercial sector. SCORM comes from the same place as $1000 hammers and $10,000 toilet seats.
Corporations may find it easier to standardize learning as part of the Semantic Web. It's XML, interoperable, flexible, and will soon be the underpinning of business transactions. What better way to integrate learning and work? The Semantic Web would enable us to build performance support directly into the job (rather than as an add-on.)
eLearning Information & FAQ
| Related pages: |
eLearningThese are the absolute best sources of the bunch: elearningpost
, from Maish Nichani LiNE Zine, LINE = Learning in the New Economy. Edited by chaord Marcia Conner. Provacative, high-quality, original. Big Dog's Bowl of Biscuits -- for instructional design reference TechLearn Trends from Elliott Masie. Once the pacesetter, this one's getting a little loose. TechLearn Trends is personal, another venue for Elliott to channel his outsize personality and prescient observations to his fans. Breezy. eLearn Magazine, from
ACM OnLine Learning
News from VNU Media/Bill Communications KM, computing, the future Rapidly Changing Face of Computing
(reborn!) Research sourcesEPSS Central |
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Magazines Learning Knowledge management |
In 2000, most magazines began
making past issues available online.
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| Education great list of online journals |
Oil and water, Jews and Arabs, education and training... | |
| eBusiness & strategy Strategy and Business (Booz) Mercer Management Journal Cap Gemini E&Y Center for Business Innovation Outstanding! McKinsey Quarterly Santa Fe Institute Update Technology Review -- MIT. Come on, push the envelope. |
These are fantastic catalysts for thinking out of the box. |
What is eLearning?eLearning
Says Cross, "Successful leaders inspire members of their organizations to work smarter. Collaboration, learning portals, and skill snacks have replaced Industrial-Age training. The Web is revitalizing personalized learning and meaningful apprenticeship. Learning is merging with work." Here's what lies ahead in our not-too-distant training future, according to Cross:
More info www.intemettime.com Training & Development, November 1999 SmartForce, Learn
Fast, Go Fast, pdf (11/99)
Get Smart Online, UpsideToday Special Report (4/00)
eLearning: Rhetoric vs Reality, Gautam Ghosh
Into the Future, a Vision Paper by Wayne Hodgins and Jay Cross (2/2000) for ASTD and NGA. In HTML, not pdf. Cisco
eLearning The Future of Online Learning by Stephen Downes (7/98), a classic Getting Started with Online Learning, Macromedia, "designed to help authors create learning applications that succeed." |
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Disclosure:
SmartForce was an Internet Time Group client..
The eLearning FAQ
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Caution:
I wrote this in March 2000, before the dot-com bubble burst, and it remains
somewhat overenthusiastic. Here's a more current take on what's going
on: 
Definitions |
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| eLearning is learning on Internet Time, the convergence of learning and networks and the New Economy. eLearning is a vision of what corporate training can become. We've only just begun. eLearning is to traditional training as eBusiness is to business as usual. Both use the net to augment tradiitonal means. This FAQ addresses corporate learning. In this context, effective eLearning dramatically cuts the time it takes for people to become and remain competent in their jobs. For context, check out the first eLearning White Paper ever written. |
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More definitions |
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| eLearning is the convergence of learning and the Internet. Howard Block
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eLearning is dynamic. Today's content, in real time, not old news or "shelfware." On-line experts, best sources, quick-and-dirty approaches for emergencies. eLearning operates in real time. You get what you need, when you need it. eLearning is collaborative. Because people learn from one another, eLearning connects learners with experts, colleagues, and professional peers, both in and outside your organization. eLearning is individual. Every e-learner selects activities from a personal menu of learning opportunities most relevant to her background, job, and career at that very moment. eLearning is comprehensive. Greg Priest, |
eLearning [is] the delivery of content via all electronic media, including the Internet, intranets, extranets, satellite broadcast, audio/video tape, interactive TV, and CD-ROM. Connie Weggen
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Best PracticesAccept no substitutes! Anyone with a web site can claim to provide eLearning. How does one separate the real stuff from the bogus? Legitimate eLearning is more likely to:
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eLearning? e-Learning? In the early days, way back in 1998, it was always e-learning, with the hyphen. SmartForce is the "e-Learning Company", and Cisco's John Chambers evangelizes e-learning. As eLearning matured, some of us are dropped the hyphen (and started "intercapping" the "L".) Microsoft uses eLearn, as do SRI and Internet Time Group. The Google search engine finds:
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Does it matter?
E-business.Change is rampant. It's the Knowledge Era, New Economy, Internet Age, Information Revolution, yadda, yadda, yadda. Brains have replaced brawn. Networked organizations demand rapid-fire, front-line decisions, and people must be in the know to make them. Everything's converging or already networked, cycle times are speeding up, and competition is coming from all directions. Are you ready? Staffing for eBusiness is a make/buy decision. Buying is pricey and shortsighted. (Techies with tongue-studs and purple hair command six-figure salaries, and there are too few of them to go around. We're short half a million high-tech workers, and business gets more techie every day.) Buying talent is not like buying tools. The shelf-life of knowledge has dwindled to the point that a four-year engineering degree is obsolete in, well, about four years. People once agonized over career decisions for fear of looking like "job hoppers." These days they hear about a new opportunity over lunch and go to work for a competitor that afternoon. Money doesn't necessarily talk to a young person who drives a Porsche. What keeps people on board these days is the opportunity to develop, to build valued skills, to achieve certifications, and to add to their store of intellectual capital. Learning has become a vital business function, but old-style training can't keep pace with Internet time. Traditional workshops cost a fortune in airplane tickets and time away from the job. In the eyes of many senior managers, off-site workshops have always been somewhere between a total waste of time and a boondoggle, the "great training robbery." Training has grown too important to be delegated to training departments. eLearning is attractive to corporations because it promises better use of time, accelerated learning, global reach, fast pace, and accountability. It's manageable. It cuts paperwork and administrative overhead. Sometimes it can be outsourced, providing more time for leveraging the organization's core competence. eLearners like it, too.
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Drivers |
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| As human capital becomes the chief source of economic value, education and training become lifelong endeavors for the vast majority of workers. Peter J. Stokes,
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Education is the next industrial era institution to go through a complete overhaul, starting in earnest in 2000. The driving force here is not so much concern with enlightening young minds as economics. In an information age, the age of the knowledge worker, nothing matters as much as the worker's brain. Peter Schwartz
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Human skills are subject to obsolescence at a rate perhaps unprecedented in American History. Alan GreenspanIt is estimated that we will need 1.3 million new computer scientists, systems analysts and computer programmers by 20006 in the United States. Yet, currently one out of every ten IT positions, or approximately 350,000 jobs, are open today. Merrill LynchWith the aging of the U.S. workforce (median age of US worker expected to increase from 35.3 to 40.6 in 2006) and technology automating a large percentage of unskilled jobs, training is necessary to remain relevant in today's knowledge-based economy. IbidKnowledge workers require greater flexibility in the workplace. Globalization, competition, and labor shortages cause employees to work longer, harder, and travel more than previous generations. A the same time, these workers require more independence and responsibility in their jobs and dislike close supervision. Today's knowledge workers have a nontraditional orientation to time and space, believing that as long as the job gets done on time, it is not important where or when it gets done. B the same token, they want the opportunity to allocate time for learning as needed. Modern training methods need to reflect these changes in lifestyle. WR Hambrecht + CoDiscreet training events held off-site in a hotel room that fulfills the "20 hours per year, "check the box" regimen will not suffice. Thomas Weisel Partners LLC |
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How does it work?
Different perspectiveseLearning is like a cubist painting. To make sense of it, you need to look at it from different perspectives. From the philosophical viewpoint, eLearning is framed by the principles and practices of the eLearning community -- a mix of social concern, instructional design, software savvy, entrepreneurial zeal, and extreme dissatisfaction with the status quo. Another view looks to the components of eLearning -- collaboration, simulation, databases, and so forth. The eBusiness perspective relates eLearning to ERP, supply chain optimization, and disintermediation. PhilosophyeLearning is revolutionary. As Nicholas Negroponte says, incrementalism is innovation's worst enemy. The Internet changes everything; education and training are about to be changed. Radically. It's time for a fresh approach. eLearning focuses on the individual learner. For years, training has organized itself for the convenience and needs of instructors, institutions, and bureaucracies. Bad attitude. Think of learners as customers. Compete for their time and interests. Provide them legendary service. Convert them into raving fans. Give them choices. Don't make them reinvent the wheel. From instructor-centric:
to learner-centric:
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If you have a fast connection to the net, here's a better explanation of the instructor-centric and learner-centric models. |
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Performance is the goal. The objective is to become competent in the least time and with the least amount of training. If people could take a smart pill instead of logging in to class, bravo! How long is this going to take? No more credit for seat-time. Most learning is social. The coffee room is a more effective place to learn than the classroom. Studies reveal that the majority of corporate learning is informal, i.e. outside of class. eLearning seeks to foster collaboration and peer interaction. A classic study at Standard found that Hewlett Packard engineers who watched videotaped lectures followed by informal discussion performed better than Stanford engineering students who attended the same lectures on campus. Instead of an on-campus lecturer pouring content into students' heads, the HP engineers were challenged to construct their own interpretation of the subject matter.
Most eLearning is personalized. The best eLearning system learns about its users and tailors its offerings to their learning style, job requirements, career goals, current knowledge, and personal preferences. <buzzword alert> Small chunks of learning (granules, objects) are labeled (metatagged within IMS standards) so systems can automatically mix and match them to assemble and deliver individualized learning experiences. At least that's the dream. Nobody's fully there quite yet. </buzzwords> Hierarchy of Learning Objects eLearning is delivered in the right-sized pieces. Why take a one-hour class for the five minutes' worth of content you're looking for? eLearners are responsible for their own learning. eLearning empowers them to manage and implement their own learning and development plans.
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ComponentseLearning is inevitably a mix of activities -- people learn better that way. An eLearning environment generally includes:
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Tour of Dell's EducateU
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learning management system which registers, tracks, and delivers content to learners; reports on learner progress, assessment results, and skill gaps for instructors; enrolls learners, provides security, and manages user access for administrators. |
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Important facets of eLearning |
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| The continuous evolution of the learning industry is hell-bent toward an experience totally personalized to the individual learner. Today, the vertical communities accessed by an individual learner provide a comfortable envinroment to learn skills required in the learner's industry. Tomorrow, access will be through a corporate-sponsored community completely tailored to the individual's needs, with content delivered on demand and technology that will continually monitor the learner's abilities as the learning takes place, adjusting content and pace seamlessly. Wade Baker |
Improved collaboration and interactivity among learners. In times when small instructor-led classes tend to be the exception, electronic learning solutions can offer more collaboration and interaction with experts and peers as well as a higher success rate than the live alternative. ...a study found that online students had more peer contact with others in the class, enjoyed it more, spent more time on class work, understood the material better, and performed, on average, 20% better than students who were taught in the traditional classroom. WR Hambrecht + Co |
The magic is in the mix! eLearning blends the best of:
Elliott Masie |
How well does it work?
| The cards aren't in yet. eLearning is too new to have produced hard evidence of learning gains. eLearning's top-line upside is speculative; its bottom-line savings are on more solid ground. Undeniably, eLearning cuts the costs of travel, facilities, administrative overhead, duplication of effort, and more importantly, the opportunity cost of people away from the job in times of great need. There's no doubt that eLearning can be rolled out fast. The time required to roll out a new product globally can shrink from months to hours.
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BetterSharing and managing knowledge throughout our company...was one of the keys to reducing our operating costs by more than $2 billion per year.... Kenneth T. Derr |
Faster...learners ...can better understand the material, leading to a 60% faster learning curve, compared to instructor-led training. ... Whereas the average content retention rate for an instructor-led class is only 58%, the more intensive e-learning experience enhances the retention rate by 25-60%. Higher retention of the material puts a higher value on every dollar spent on training. WR Hambrecht + Co
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CheaperMotorola calculates that every $1 it spends on training translates to $30 in productivity gains within three years. A recent study found that corporations that employed a workforce with a 10% higher-than-average educational attainment level enjoyed 8/6% higher-than-average productivity. Computer-based training and online training can reduce training costs over instructor-led training. A congressionally mandated review of 47 comparisons of multimedia instruction with more conventional approaches to instruction found time savings of 30% improved achievement and cost savings of 30-40%. Merrill Lynch,
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What are the pitfalls?
MotivationWhenever the topic of bandwidth comes up, the phone company yowls about ?the last mile,? the flimsy wire bottleneck between their switching station and your house. e-Learning providers also have a bottleneck, the last yard from the monitor into the learner?s brain. Without motivation, this final connection will never be made.
Professional training via CD-ROM flopped. Why? Because we took instructors and coaches out of the picture. The learning process breaks down when "untouched by human hands." A ringing phone interrupts a standalone learning exercise, and CD-ROM courses morph into shelfware. Companies that adopt eLearning as a cost-cutting measure and provides no human support will not be successful. eLearning is not training by robot. Learners will live up (or down) to expectations. Which of these two scenarios presents a better environment for learning? Assume your boss arranged for one of these two learning events for you:
It doesn?t have to be this way. Managers must go the extra mile to pat learners on the back, give them recognition, and encourage them to learn with their peers. eLearners are customers; they continually need to be sold. Finally, eLearning is not for everyone. Some people simply will not learn outside of a classroom. Learning to the desktopThis is one of those benefits that's better in theory than in practice. Learning complex subjects requires concentration. Most people's desks are less than optimal for learning (and often for working, too, but that's another matter). Buddha was right. "When you do something, do it as if it were all that mattered." Get away from the phone. Shelter yourself from colleagues. Go to a learning cubicle. Put up a "Do Not Disturb" sign. "Ah ha," Dilbert's pointy-haired boss would say. "I've got the solution -- take it all home." As if there aren't distractions aplenty at home. Feed the baby, watch the game, talk with the spouse, have a beer on the patio, or log in for learning? Besides, what message does the boss communicate about the value of learning if he expects people to do it on their own time? |
Educational psychologist William Glasser claims we learn:
Later today, I want you to teach someone all about eLearning, okay? |
Pitfalls |
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| Hurdles to eLearning!
Elliott Masie |
Certain content -- because of its nature, relative value, or importance -- is not suitable for technology-based delivery. While online training is especially well suited for the acquisition of IT skills, it has certain limitations in the arena of soft skills training. Other educational content that does not translate well into a virtual environment is material requiring significant hands-on application, with a strong emphasis on peer review and collaboration. WR Hambrecht + Co |
Update in mid-2002: A horrific pitfall has turned out to be cajolling workers to participate. One third to one half of workers never register to take part. Half to three-quarters of those who start a program drop out before completing it. I've just completed a book on how to improve employee participation. |
What are the trends?
Short termCorporations increasingly outsource training to Learning Service Providers (think Application Service Provider + Learning). Standards-based learning management systems assemble large-grain learning objects on the fly. (XML meets learning). Learner relationship management mirrors customer relationship management. ERP and CRM vendors replace learning management systems as learning is recognized as an enterprise application.
Longer term"Intelligent" interfaces learn about the eLearner over time. (Apple's Knowledge Navigator finally arrives, only twenty years late.) Learning becomes imbedded in work processes and equipment. Economies of scale will development of "cool" learning using rich media, popular entertainers, and game interfaces. |
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BibliographyBlock, Howard, Bank of America Securities, The e-Bang Report, mid-1999 Beer, Valorie, The Web Learning Fieldbook, 2000 Brown, John Seely, and Duguid, Paul, The Social Life of Information, 2000 Bucher, John, Private Investment Group, Online Learning Industry Overview, 1999 Clark, Don, Time Capsule of Training and Learning Clients of Internet Time Group, who've taught me more than they'll ever realize about real-life eLearning, particularly Community
The Learning HIstory Project is a combination of story telling and corporate culture. Very much in tune with the work we did at Oral History Associates.
Conferences
ArticlesEmergent Learning Chief Learning Officer (2004), Before the World Trade Center attack, the world was more predictable. Knowledge was power. Adaptability has now taken its place. Our requirements have changed. Corporations and government agencies are on permanent alert. Networks have taken the slack out of the system. Timing is the critical variable. The performance metrics for troops on a plane headed to a new hot spot and for systems engineers countering a new competitive threat are the same: How soon will they be ready to perform? Personal Intellectual Capital Management Chief Learning Officer (2004), Ultimately, you’re responsible for the life you lead. It’s up to you to learn what you need to succeed. That makes you responsible for your own knowledge management, learning architecture, instructional design and evaluation. Connections: The Impact of Schooling Chief Learning Officer (2003), "Your 16-year-old daughter says she’s going to take sex education at school and you’re relieved, but she tells you she plans to participate in sex training and you’re unnerved. Why? Because outside of education, you learn by doing things." Informal Learning: A Sound Investment Chief Learning Officer (2003). "Workers who know more get the most accomplished. People who are well connected make greater contributions. The workers who create the most value are those who know the right people, the right stuff, and the right things to do." Blogging for Business Learning Circuits (2003). "Four million people write blogs, and blogging is growing faster than the web at its high point. A customer blog enables a company to make announcements to its Web customers immediately. All customers can benefit from a question asked by only one. The intimacy in blog culture conversation enables customers to get to know workers-and vice-versa. Affiliation breeds loyalty. Customers begin to talk among themselves. A typo that would be an embarrassment in an advertisement becomes a sign of authenticity on a blog." Informal Learning -- The Other 80%. DRAFT. eLearning Forum (2003). This paper addresses how organizations, particularly business organizations, can get more done. The people who create the most value are those who know the right people, the right stuff, and the right things to do. People learn these things through informal learning that flies beneath the corporate radar. Because organizations are oblivious to informal learning, they fail to invest in it. How E-Learning Professionals Learn About E-Learning Most of the respondents said that they place a higher value on information from individuals: friends, fellow bloggers, authors, and people who send them email or that they meet at conference. As a group, they didn’t put much stock in information from organizations: suppliers, magazines, and conference sessions. eLearning: You Built It -- Now Promote It, eLearning Developers Journal (2003). "Your elevator pitch is what you say when your CEO steps onto your elevator and asks what you're doing. You'll probably include the three basic elements of marketing design: your brand, your position, and your target segments." eLearning: Apples and Oranges, Learning Circuits (2003). "Perhaps corporations should consider how small an e-learning application can be and still get the job done rather than try to create monster centralized e-learning systems. In doing so, would companies lose economies of scale? Maybe. But consider this: As many as half of all grandiose, enterprise software initiatives fail to live up to expectations. Many simply fail." See What I Mean, eLearning (2002). "In the 20th century, we confused reading words with learning. Learning is a multisensory, both-sides-of-the-brain experience. Pictures unlock the imagination. Yet, most books do not contain a single illustration." More legible jpg here. The Value of Learning About Learning, with Clark Quinn (2002). "If Olympic athletes approached running the marathon the way business people approach learning, they would show up for the race without having trained. Learning is a skill, not a hard-wired trait. The discipline of meta-learning seeks to re-invent learning as a self-correcting, ever improving process. Its measure of success is not effort, but business results."The DNA of eLearning, with Ian Hamilton (2002). "eLearning technologies, as platforms for business-critical training needs, simply don't do what companies need or envision them to do. The fact of the matter is that different companies need them to do different things. Lacking the ability to purchase an effective eLearning technology platform, companies certainly cannot be convinced to purchase third-party eLearning content to play on these platforms." Tomorrow's Too Late LiNEZine (2002). How would you describe an elementary school principal who didn?t conduct fire drills? Irresponsible. And how would you describe a chief operating officer who didn?t prepare for crises? Typical. Envisioning
Learning (2002). "It's right
before our eyes, but we're so habituated to it that we can't see it.
We've confused reading and writing with learning. What's the problem
with line after line of type? They're linear. This is not the way we
think. We think associatively. Thinking resembles freeform conversation,
hopping from one subject to another, changing in emphasis, delivered
with emotion, forever an engaging assortment of choices and surprise.
The written word conveys but one of the options." The SunTAN Story (2001). "Appropriately enough for a company whose motto is 'The network is the computer,' Sun Microsystems started using eLearning to train newly hired sales people long before the term eLearning was invented.... The time it takes sales people to achieve quota dropped from 15 months to 6 months. What's the value of 9 months of additional sales from 1,440 people? Given that the people have $5 million quotas, that's in the neighborhood of $5 billion in incremental revenue." A Fresh Look at ROI Learning Circuits (2000). "Where you stand on ROI depends on where you sit. Different levels of management make different sorts of decisions, so it's appropriate that they use different measures of ROI. In a nutshell, traditional accounting recognizes nothing but physical entities; intangibles are valued at zero. Vast areas of human productivity--ideas, abilities, experience, insight, esprit de corps, motivation--lie outside the accountant's field of vision. Accounting fails to recognize that people become more valuable over time." Frontline: eLearning Forum Learning Circuits (2001). "Cliff Stoll caught everyone's attention by loudly proclaiming, "E-learning is a fraud!' Unquestionably, Stoll took control of the floor. He asked the group, 'If you were hiring a plumber, which would you choose: one with an online degree in plumbing or one who learned firsthand?' Muttering that simulations were a great way to avoid the person sitting next to you, Stoll said that the designers of flight simulators spent more time making the clouds look right than getting to what the pilots really need...." Being Analog LiNEZine (2001). "Computers are bipolar. A bit is on or off. 1 or 0. Unless you're a digital processor, this binary thinking can trick you into oversimplifying what's going on. The human world is not yes or no; it's a sea of maybes. Most decisions aren't black or white; they're shades of gray. Are you liberal or conservative? Perhaps like me, you're a little of each. Treating the world as an open-or-shut case leads to thought crimes like "The Internet changes everything." In my work, I struggle with the knuckle-headed assumption that learning must be either instructor-led or computer-delivered rather than a blend of the two. Few things in life are really all or nothing." The Changing Nature of Leadership LiNEZine (2001). "Wide, ever-shifting boundaries change all the rules. We once rewarded compliance; today we reward innovation. We once praised obedience; today we praise ad hoc solutions. Yesterday?s subversive employee is today?s innovator. Leadership?creating value by hopping outside boundaries?used to be the province of a well-paid, well-educated few somewhere near the top of the pyramid. Turbulent times have converted leadership into a responsibility shared by all members of the organization." Food for Thought LiNEZine (2001). "Treat the learner as a customer. Make it easy for the learner to buy (learn). Use interactivity, relevance, wit, and excitement to keep the learner/customer engaged. If the customers aren?t buying, it?s your fault, not theirs. The learning revolution is over. The learners won. Take control by giving control. Problem formulation often counts for more than problem solution. School always gives you the formulated problem; life does not." eLearning (1999). "In the training jungle, corporate performance is the elephant. Training's only function is to hunt the elephant. Focusing solely on employees' needs does not bag elephants. The "e" in eLearning is not only for electronic; it's also there to remind you about the elephant. Remember, corporate performance is what you're hunting for." Vendors commission
us to write white papers and articles, for example: Leveraging the People Value Chain (for SmartForce, 2000). "Companies looking for workers who take orders, understand discipline, and put the welfare of the company above their own will be disappointed. Workers like this no longer exist. While some companies decry high turnover, others turn the mindset of the new recruit to their advantage. After all, they want innovators, not followers. They prefer self-starters who will do what's right rather than waiting for instructions. They need people more concerned with getting the job done than punching the clock. For too long, we've looked at investing in people through the wrong end of the telescope. Instead of trying to keep the cost of training and development down, what if we were to try to keep it up?" Converting Intellectual Capital into Competitive Advantage (for Avaltus, 2001). "Success in the knowledge age requires new tools. This paper describes a unified approach to creating, maintaining, and exploiting intellectual capital, the knowledge platform. The objective is to deliver the right information at the right time to the right person, simply, economically, and immediately." Learn Fast, Go Fast. (for SmartForce, 1999). "eBusiness needs an eBusiness approach to learning itself, something we call eLearning. eLearning is to traditional training as eBusiness is to the five-and-dime. eLearning puts the learner in the center of the equation instead of the trainer." Presentations
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Well,
duh.
Don't
leave out the fun. 
From
Clock of the Long Now
