At DevLearn 09, Michael Allen gave us a peek at a new authoring system under development at Allen Interactions. (In case you didn’t know, Michael was chief architect of Authorware, the precursor to Macromedia and granddaddy of digital authoring systems.)

His latest project, code-named Zebra, is a powerful, drag-and-drop authoring environment. I’m impressed. I expect Zebra to own the market when it becomes available. I’ll let Michael tell you what he’s got:

The inaugural issue of Impact, the Journal of Applied Research in Workplace E-learning just appeared on the web. You can read this first issue on the web for free. (Disclosure: I am on Impact’s Editorial Board.)

I’ve read a little over half of the 14 articles. Richard Straub writes cogently about the lay of the eLearning land. Andrew Whitworth presents a fascinating thought piece on context. Stewart Hase explains heutagogy (a new term for me, I’m going to have to re-read this one.) Kay Strong and Holly Hutchins contribute a great overview of connectivism. The case study of eLearning at St George Bank is enlightening; I was intrigued because I’ve talked with these guys and know they’re thoughtful.

Two articles on literature searches puzzled me. The first found a paucity of information about the results of corporate eLearning. The second decried the lack of studies on eLearning in small/medium enterprise. Here’s the rub: both articles were looking in the wrong places. The first looks primarily at academic journals. Why not include CLO magazine and Training? Their readership is corporate; they relate case studies. Neither piece looks at information in the blogosphere. That’s where I find information on what’s happening; often it’s some place I’ve been directed to by Twitter.

Related:
Top 99 Workplace Learning Blogs
OED list of top 100 education blogs
Jay’s learning research page

Work Smarter: Informal Learning in the Cloud

by Jay Cross and Friends
August 2009 Edition, 184 pp. $19.98

Blurb: Informal learning has entered the cloud. Smart companies prosper. Clueless companies die. Brains make the difference. Organizations that continuously exercise and improve their collective brainpower come out on top. This book aims to show you ways to increase your organization’s intelligence. Until recently, the collaboration and learning that fuel the growth of individual and group braininess took place under the radar. My goal is to bring this activity into the sunlight and suggest how to exploit it. This is the August 2009 edition of this unbook.

New since the last edition: essays and latest thinking from the brain trust at togetherLearn.

You won’t find this on Amazon yet.

Last month, immigration officials began hassling me because every square inch of my passport was filled up with stamps and visas. I mailed it to Washington to have extra visa pages inserted. Now I’m sweating bullets because I’m supposed to fly to London on Sunday and my passport is in transit and may not make it on time.

Public speaking, like writing, forces me to sharpen my thinking, and that, in turn, improves my coaching and workshop sessions with corporate clients. In London, I’ll be talking about how to evaluate informal social learning and learning infrastructure, things that are tougher to get your arms around than individual courses. In my keynote address in Faro, I plan to discuss post-industrial learning and new approaches to instructional design. The next week in Madrid, my workshop will focus on informal learning: what it is, how to take advantage of it, and who’s been doing a good job thus far.

People invariably ask for slides and recordings, so from now on I will be posting follow-up information on my primary website, jaycross.com

If you’re in London, Faro, Seville, or Madrid, ping me if you’d like to get together.

Evaluating formal and informal learning
London. June 9, 2009

IADIS International Conference  e-Learning 2009
International Association for Development of the Information Society
Faro, Portugal. June 17, 2009

Informal Learning en la Práctica: Cómo diseñar su Proyecto de Aprendizaje Informal
Madrid. June 23, 2009

On April Fool’s Day of this year, I wrote the following page in the Learnscaping un-book. I meant to be serious.

Coincidence happens. Isaac Newton (1643–1727) and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz (1646–1716) invented calculus at the same time but independently of one another! (wikipedia)

When Newton and Leibniz first published their results, there was great controversy over which mathematician (and therefore which country) deserved credit. Newton derived his results first, but Leibniz published first. Newton claimed Leibniz stole ideas from his unpublished notes, which Newton had shared with a few members of the Royal Society. This controversy divided English-speaking mathematicians from continental mathematicians for many years, to the detriment of English mathematics. A careful examination of the papers of Leibniz and Newton shows that they arrived at their results independently, with Leibniz starting first with integration and Newton with differentiation.

To be sure, both inventors were standing on the shoulders of mathematicians who had been piecing calculus together since 1800 BCE, but the primary factor in calculus coming about when it did was that the time was right.

The term eLearning also enjoyed simultaneous discovery. In the late nineties two trends converged to make that timing right.

• e was in the air. In 1997, Pierre Omidyar had founded eBay; he chose the name because his first choice, Echo Bay, had already been taken. eCommerce, which was mainly about buying things online, was morphing into eBusiness, which involved doing things online. E-mail was becoming email. E-loan announced e-track. People read e-zines and e-books. Before the web, we had EDI (electronic data interchange) and EFT (electronic funds transfer).
• The meme of learning was replacing training. Training is something trainers push to trainees. Learning is whatever gets past their personal firewalls (AKA skulls) and lodges in the brain. I can learn something; you can’t learn me something. A big part of the sales pitch for early versions of web-supported learning was the elimination of costly trainers. You couldn’t very well call this training.

e + learning. No wonder eLearning sprouted up in many places. I awoke one morning in 1998 with the term in my head. I was not the only one.

Elliott Masie’s bio says he is “acknowledged as the first analyst to use the term e-Learning.” Elliott told me he first heard it at IBM. I have been credited with the first use of eLearning on the web. Six months after CBT Systems announced its transformation into SmartForce, the eLearning company, in late 1999, every training company with a dial-up connection and a web page claimed to have eLearning. The term was misappropriated at warp speed and was soon FUBAR.

2002

Update: I just came upon an article on the web that talks of eLearning in 1997. That pre-dates my earliest eLearning articles. From now on, when asked if I invented the term eLearning, I’m going to point the questioner here and say, no, it wasn’t me, it was that guy.

Frankly, I prefer to be known as the Johnny Appleseed of informal learning than for naming something, in the company of others, more than ten years ago.

Effectiveness Column in June 2008 CLO magazine

Malleability, multimedia, and more

CLOs know that extracting meaning from growing mountains of information is tougher than ever before. The walls between disciplines are falling. Specialization, knowing more and more about less and less, is no longer an option. Everything is connected to everything else.

Reality is an endless stream of knowledge, culture and ideas that flows faster and faster. Traditional books are snapshots of that stream. The swifter the stream, the shorter the life of the book. A book is an event. We need a process that outlasts the moment — a movie in place of a photograph.

“I AM OUT OF TIME. You bought the beta edition of this book. Things change so fast that all books are dated by the time they are published. The world is moving too fast for closure. Our lives are in beta.”

So began my 2006 book, Informal Learning: Rediscovering the Natural Pathways That Inspire Innovation and Performance. The day it was published, my ideas were frozen in time, inert and unyielding to change. My author journey from outline to printed book took the better part of a year.

Something’s wrong here.

Books have been a mainstay of self-directed learning for centuries. CLOs may not break out the cost of books in the budget, but they assuredly invest heavily in them.

Books are not the ideal way to present subjects that change rapidly. Before I’m accused of calling for the death of books, permit me to say that works of art are timeless. Books such as Moby Dick, The Little Engine That Could, Catcher in the Rye, and David Copperfield are unbeatable. These novels and stories are whole unto themselves. That’s not the case for most nonfiction.

Wake-up call to the publishing industry: Why don’t you produce books that are current? Where are the pictures and maps? Why is the text all one size and color? Why don’t you provide updates on the Web? Why does it take a year to turn out a book? Why do most books come out as if one size fits all? Why don’t you encourage conversation with authors? How long do you expect to remain in business if you continue to act like fossils?

The publishing industry hardly has changed at all since the first paperback was printed in Venice. A page from the 1493 edition of Virgil’s Aeneid looks very similar to a page from The Social Life of Information printed 500 years later: rectangles of monochromatic text, no illustrations, page numbers in the corner and 1-inch margins all around.

A study by the Jenkins Group, a custom book publishing firm, found that:

• One-third of high school graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives.

• 42 percent of college graduates never read another book after college.

• 80 percent of U.S. families did not buy or read a book last year.

• 70 percent of U.S. adults have not been in a bookstore in the past five years.

• 57 percent of new books are not read to completion.

Increasingly, people hunt and gather what they want to read. Today’s activist readers pluck information from the blogosphere and YouTube and their friends on Facebook and MySpace.

To prosper in times ahead, we need to re-conceptualize our relationship with books, the role of authors and how to make books better. The shorthand for what I have in mind is the “un-book.” Here are some of the characteristics of un-books:

• Un-books are guidebooks for knowledge explorers navigating the flow of the news, information, sound bites, observations, debate, hacks, diatribes and memes that are the Web. Un-books invite participation. Participants choose how deeply they want to explore a topic and can remix content to create the learning experience they seek. Un-books link to the flow of knowledge, not sanctified facts. Treat that knowledge as community property, and the community will maintain and improve it. Many authors may write guidebooks to the same stream of knowledge, and a single author may create many un-books from a single stream.

• Un-books are inherently multimedia. One of those media is paper. Paper is portable, familiar and easy to annotate. A hard-copy book conveys authority.

A spokesman for Alpo dog food long ago said the product was so good that he fed it to his own dogs. Using one’s own products is known as “eating the dog food.” In lieu of writing a book, I am going on the dog-food diet. Any CLOs want to join me?

Internet Time Group celebrates its tenth birthday this month. Artifacts from the early days of eLearning keep appearing as I reflect on the long, strange trip it’s been.

At the turn of the century, investors agreed that for eLearning, the sky was the limit. Or maybe it was more: shoot for the moon. As a reminder to never drink the Kool-Aid without sober reflection, here is the advice investment houses were putting out before the dot-bomb implosion:

Corporate eLearning: Exploring A New Frontier, 3/2000 (WR Hambrecht & Co.) The first report to focus exclusively on corporate eLearning and still one of the best out there. “At the beginning of the new millenium, corporations view learning increasingly as a competitive weapon rather than an annoying cost factor. Corporate executives are beginning to understand that enhancing employee skills is key to creating sustainable competitive advantage.”

The Knowledge Web, 5/2000 (Merrill Lynch) “Technology is the driver of the New Economy, and human capital is its fuel. Finding, attracting, and retaining knowledge workers will be mission-critical.
Companies providing online human capital solutions have the potential to bring together both richness and reach, creating a powerful and revolutionary user experience.” Corporate eLearning: Feeding Hungry Minds.

eLearning, the Engine of the Knowledge Economy, 7/2000 (Morgan Keegan) “The critical and distinguishing strength of countries, organizations, and individuals lies in their intelligence and knowledge in this new economy.” “Virtually no emerging industry has ever experienced dramatic growth without a set of common standards…. eLearning standards will allow eLearning content to be easily accessed and reused in various formats and will enable the inteoperability of learning technologies from difference vendors.”

eLearning: The birth of a vibrant industry, 7/2000 (Goldman Sachs) “Why corporate eLearning? Sustainable competitive advantage: More for less. It’s scalable. Customizable. Consistent. Assessible. Relevant. Convenient. Less costly.”

Riding the Big Waves, A White Paper on the B2B e*Learning Industry, 3/2000 (Thomas Weisel Partners) “Today, corporate learning and the corporate learning organization have ascended to a position of strategic prominence in the context of managing and growing the extended enterprise. Bearing this out, the number of corporate universities has grown four-fold to 1600 in the last ten years. Even more telling is corporate learning’s move to the executive suite. The result — an emerging $11.4 billion opportunity for companies providing B2B e*Learning solutions.”

Helping Investors Ride the eLearning Curve, 11/99. (US Bancorp Piper Jaffray) “We liken the evolution of eLearning to the evolution of ERP software, which is going through a very similar metamorphsis.” Go Web! Go ASP!

The e-Bang Theory, 9/99. (Bank of America Securities.) Howard Block was the first analyst of eLearning to “get it.” This report set the agenda for all that came later. Astute and entertaining.

Intellectual Capital for the Knowledge Economy, Proprietary Higher Education, 1/2000, Sun Trust

E-Knowledge, New Ways to Build the New Economy, 8/99, Wit Capital

Trace Urdan is an astute voice of reason among education industry analysts. When something’s bunk, Trace is not afraid to tell you. His free Signal Hill Education Signals newsletter is the only investment advice in our sector that I trust. Of course, it doesn’t have much company these days.

I test-drove a BMW 128 this afternoon. Costs about $30,000. I think I’ll buy the coupe. Any car-enthusiast readers have an opinion on this one?

Sales pitch video
Vrrooom

What is the scope of our responsibility as learning professionals?

Most of us work for someone else, a corporation, school, client, or government. Our first responsibility is to apply our expertise to help our employers accomplish what they are trying to do.

Like doctors, we must take care never to harm the patient (or client).

When a superior asks us to do something unprofessional, we take a stand. You don’t tell your doctor how to take our tonsils. You don’t tell your accountant how to account to off-shore slush funds. (Let me take that back, for that’s what happened at Enron and WorldCom.) Your EVP should not be asking you to buy a thousands of CD titles from this nice guy he met on the golf course, let it be known that from a learning perspective, there are sounder choices.

Scope depends on the scope of the professional. If you’re down in the trenches, your responsibility might extend to preparing the coffee or mentoring someone after a workshop.

A CLO is responsible for developing the talent required for organizational success. This might involve installing better lighting, putting wi-fi in the cafeteria, or reinforcing a change of corporate culture.

I’ve asked a number of people if a CLO is responsible for helping employees with learning disorders. Assuming there’s a decent cost/benefit ratio, I’d say they should take it on. Everyone I interviewed shifted the responsibility to another department. Most frequently, they didn’t want to invade the individual’s privacy. Should we begin treating the infirm and the blind the same way? “It’s not my department” under these circumstances sounds unprofessional to me.

Tom Stewart, Don Tapscott, John Seely Brown, John Hagel, Stan Davis, Baruch Lev, Verna Allee, Ted Levitt, Bob Kaplan & David Norton, Kevin Kelly, Fritjof Kapra, Shoshana Zuboff, Geary Rummler, Ross Dawson, and Tom Malone say that what you can’t see (intangibles) is more valuable than what you can see (tangibles).

Relationships are worth more than buildings. Intellectual capital, social capital, customer capital, whatever you call it: this is what’s important in the age of networks.

I am growing weary of explaing why old-style numeric ROI that does not take intangibles into account is a bean-counting exercise from yesteryear. Here’s nine minutes of my thoughts on the subject.

By the way, You Tube is a fantastic resource. To my amazement, 1,800 people have watched my 10-minute YouTube video on informal learning.

The video above is the first take. Editing was minimal. Start-to-finish, this You Tube video took me about an hour and a half. (Of course, the ideas were already in my head.)