TechLearn
2000
November 11-15, 2000. DisneyWorld, Orlando, Florida
The Saturday before TechLearn, I shot some Photographs
of retro Florida.
Gatorland first erected
a corral around a gator-infested swamp in 1950! It's just north of the international
headquarters of Tupperware.
TechLearn is probably the best-documented conference there is. What follows
are Jay's notes, opinions, and photos. If you want to get the official read
on all this, go to the TechLearn
site. Here's the TechLearn
Guide (It's a 5+ MB pdf) and here's the Session
at a Glance summary. And here are the vendors
(Oops, I mean "sponsors.")
This year 3,200 people registered to attend Elliott Masie's annual TechLearn
Conference in Orlando. At TechLearn ’98, the question was "What is eLearning?"
Last year,
lots of people were asking, "How do I sell this to management?"
Now management wants eLearning and this year’s issue is "How do I do
this?"
From the
TechLearn site, themes for TechLearn 2000 include:
- e-Learning: The Dynamics of Dramatic
Change in the World of Learning and Training
- e-Learning: The Reality and Hype of
the e-Learning Craze
- e-Learning: Developing a Corporate Strategy
- e-Learning: Blending e-Learning and
Classroom Training
- Learning Management Systems: Do You
Need One?
- Digital Collaboration: Developing Synchronous
Learning Capabilities
- Staffing the Learning Function in the Digital
Age
- Extending e-Learning to Supply Chain Learning
and Customer Learning
- Learner Acceptance: If We Build It...Will
They Come?
Opening Night
Thousands of Masie Center wheelies chock-full
of brochures, CDs, and vendor tschokes.
Mariachis welcomed us to TechLearn. Music will turn out to be another theme.
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Gimme an "e."
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Sixteen months ago you’d only find "eLearning" on
the Web a couple of times a month. (Oldtimers: You probably saw it here first.")
The term has extended beyond training and technology to include people, performance,
and supporting business models.
Elliott recounted leading a "tour" through the Expo
at Online Learning 2000 in Denver. He and his 40 cohorts asked the CEO of
a start-up "eLearning Company" what they did. The CEO's reply was
that they were a "B2B, proactive, interactive, best of breed, blah, blah,
blah, yadda, yadda." This buzzword-laden gobbledygook threaded its way
through numerous presentations and songs over the next three days.
Why
adopt eLearning?
- Shift time and space
- Quicker cycle time
- Global and widespred
- Continuous
- Dynamic & personal
Coming soon: eDesign -- digital experience designers
The classroom is just another node.
Learning is the result of the curiosity to want to know something and the
availability of someone to talk with about it.
The SoundBytes, the TechLearn a cappella group, provided
wonderful, funny songs
written by Diane Hessan before major sessions. There were send-ups on Elliott,
Tom Peters, Kevin, and others. People who didn’t know the singers as training
industry veterans mistook them for a professional singing group.
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Smaller sessions
Jerry Jasinowski, CEO of NAM, asked Bob Galvin
how Motorola could afford to spend 5% of payroll on training. Bob said he couldn’t
afford not to. * * * Twenty workers were offered a choice of $1000 or more training.
18 chose training. * * * An investment in training pays for itself three times
over in productivity gains.
Oracle announced iLearning,
The goal was to accelerate time to market – they cut the development cycle from
4 months to 2 weeks by putting content developers into Oracle's product development
teams. Oracle claims that costs are down 40%, enrollments are up 36%, 43,000
employees are participating. (Of course, these are the people who claim that
us9ing their own software has saved them $1 billion. Where’s the auditor for
that one?)
Marshal Goldsmith described the Financial Times coaching network. 200 top consultants/experts
coach executives individually over two-way video. The usual process is to have
one personal coach who pulls in experts as required. They use tops guys on the
theory that it’s more effective to talk with the guy who wrote the book than
the guy who wrote the book. Our sample expert coach was Tom Crane, author of
The Heart of Coaching. Tom’s thesis is that coaching keeps behavior and results
on an upward path after training; absent coaching, both rapidly drop back to
original levels.
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This one's for Wayne Hodgins. This little
guy is made of objects. Unfortunately, like many an online course, the
objects are all glued together. It's like making a beach out of sandpaper.
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Jay: We need continuous unlearning. Organizational
electroshock. Structured forgetting.
Main tent, Monday
Elliott: Building an eLearning Strategy
This is the year of decision. Organizations can no longer afford the luxury
of small pilots.
- When millions of dollars are at stake, management asks
where this is all headed. What’s the strategy?
- Enterprise eLearning is infrastructure, a capital investment,
and that mandates plans and analysis.
Last
year 3% were charting out an eLearning Strategy. Now 25% have one and 50% are
working on one.
September Learning Decisions has complete list of
steps and concerns. Interestingly, Internet Time Group has the resources to
assist organizations with any or all of these steps.
Start where it hurts the most.
Hints for building an organization’s strategy
- Conduct an eLearning scan
- Probe for eLearning aspirations
- Create a (small) task force
- Borrow or buy a strategy
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Don’t:
- Plan more than 36 months ahead
- Be overly technical
- Do it without a business sponsor
- Focus on training only
- Duck tough questions
- Simply write another white paper
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The CEO Panel gathered senior officers of SmartForce, Click2Learn, WBT,
Oracle, Saba, Harvard B-School Publishing, KnowledgeSoft, & Global Learning
Elliott Masie and SmartForce's Greg Priest |
What’s coming down the road?
- eLearning instead of training
- ecosystems of vendors
- robust business models
- more sophisticated buyers
- industry consolidation
- platform independence/granularity
- business units, not training, identify needs and control
budgets
- customer training
- convergence of online learning and knowledge management
How should we make evaluations?
Greg Priest: Talk to a user. Some of these B2B vendors don’t have any customers
yet.
White House panelist: What’s the low-hanging fruit?
Reply: e-enable our teachers.
Cisco’s Tom Kelly
:"We have 15,000,000 webpages. Telling someone to "Go find it on the
Web," is like saying "It’s on the surface of the planet; take a walk
outside." Intelligent networking, now bandwidth increases, will be coming
on strong. Prioritize the packets.
Moon over the Coronado Springs |
Nightfall and time for the TechLearn Café,
a party with the "duelling pianos."
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What's up? Every executive team I talk with is redefining its mandate
in e-Business terms. Speed is the defining metric. You operate at Internet
Time or you are toast.
Most American corporations know they need to make major eLearning decisions.
Now. eBusiness requires eLearning to recruit talent, keep them sharp,
and innovate ever more rapidly. But most are confused. Europe and Asia
are feeling the same pain.
Two years ago at TechLearn, I made a presentation
on what learning would look like in 2004. Many of those predictions
are coming true, and it's getting a little boring writing about, rather
than creating, the future. I returned to TechLearn this year with the
personal objective of plotting a new course for Internet
Time Group in 2001.
Conversations with old friends and new convinced me to begin helping
corporations make enterprise eLearning decisons. Since I certainly
don't have all the answers, I'm forming a guild of experienced advisors
and executive coaches. As with eLearning, we will offer right-sized services.
If all you need is fifteen minutes on the phone to raise your confidence
in a major decision, to check out a vendor's reputation, or to test an
idea, that's all we'll do. On the other hand, if you need a partner to
help implement an enterprise eLearning initiative from the ground up,
we will be at your side as long as it takes to make it happen.
Personally, I also plan to continue maintaining the eLearning
Jump Page and the Internet Time Group site.
I hope to continue helping the eLearningForum
grow into a community fo eLearning practice that spans the globe. And
I'll continue to polish my craft of writing and presenting information.
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"Upstarts with a T1 line and buckets of cash are humbling
companies that once seemed impregnable."
About Internet
Time Group
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Main tent, Tuesday
  
The Soundbytes goof on Tom Peters. And Tom seems to enjoy
it. |
The period 2000-2002 will bring the single greatest change in worldwide economic
conditions since we came down from the trees.
Drucker: The corporation as we know it, now 120 years old, is unlikely to survive
the next 25 years. (Business 2.0 (08.00)
Dee Hock: The problem is getting the old ideas out. (the e-Forgetting network?)
Learning is less important than forgetting. Kevin Kelly and Ben Zander echo
this thought later on in the conference.
Mergers don’t work. It’s like mating two dinosaurs, expecting a gazelle.
There’s a white
collar revolution underway. Most white collar jobs are history. Why?
How do you pronounce
Daimler-Chrysler in German? Answer: The Chrysler is silent.
"Blow up the corporation now." In the future, management is not going
to pay two overweight guys as talking heads to yell at you for three days.
Award excellent failures; punish mediocre successes.
Epitaph: He would have done some really cool stuff but his boss wouldn’t let
him.
"Mixing trumps isolation."
"Extreme language is rational in extreme times."
Jay: For a dozen years, Tom Peters has gotten his jollies being outrageous.
Now that his call to blow up the corporation as we know it is taken seriously,
he needed a bigger target. What’s the biggest, most heavyweight group to poke
in the eye with the old sharp stick? Tom chose established people ("Hire
freaks"), experienced people ("Hire the young"), and males ("Fire
the men.") Hire all female salespeople. They’re intuitive, relationship-oriented,
and don’t fight.
Matt DiMiceli and the ubiquitous Beth Thomas |
Daryl Conner
and Andy Snider
gave a one-hour summary of their 12-hour workshop on eLearning and change management,
sort of a USA Today version. Daryl walked us through a bell curve of performance
over time. The cycle is buildà harvestà
decay. You invent on the way up; defend what’s worked on the downslope, and
hopefully bail out before decay sets in. It’s like floating a balloon. You build
it and start to go up. In time, holes appear and you cover them with bandaids.
Time passes and you’ve got more bandaids than balloon.
Lance Dublin says "Hey!" |
Dell's Darin Hartley addressed Learning On-Demand, Strategies
for a Self-Service Society. What lessons can we learn from the world outside
of eLearning?
- My ATM recognizes me immediately and knows what language
to speak with me. It's ready to go instantly because of cached files. It provides
simple transactions. Quick. Better than the bank teller model.
- Trading stocks is real time and real convenient. I do
it in my boxer shorts. It keeps great records.
- Consider "gas stations." Pumping your own
is faster than the way we used to do it. You can eat there.
- If I'm watching the big game on my tv running TiVO in
the background and am called away, TiVO continues watching (copying the video
feed to its internal hard disk). When I return, it's ready to continue where
I left off.
- With Urban Fetch, I can buy a DVD player over the Web
and have it delivered within an hour!
Learners accustomed to services like these will expect no
less from eLearning.
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TechLearn is always a safe place to experiment. One’s
encouraged to think outside of the box.
In an early session, I noticed myself becoming extremely irritated because
there was no interaction. Insulting. Didn’t the presenters have a clue?
Didn’t they know they were dominating this one-sided conversation?
It occurred to me that I’ve been so close to eLearning for the last couple
of years that my online belief-set is creeping into my offline behavior.
It’s my learning that’s at stake and I’m responsible for my own choices.
Convention is not as important as my reaching my goals. I always sit in
the front row because it’s easier to see and hear – and you meet the most
interesting people there. Nonetheless, I’ll
walk out of a presentation with no hesitation. It’s just like clicking
out of a dull website.
I create my own learning path, sometimes blowing
off the formal sessions for informal meetings in the hallways. I write
to learn. I’m always taking notes, knowing that I’ll process them (e.g.
right now), refining the concepts and going back over what I heard.
eLearning is an attitude, not a technology.
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Ben
Zander is conductor of the Boston Philharmonic and a truly moving speaker.
He taught all 3,000 of us to sing Happy Birthday to a young lady with gusto
and feeling, giving it our all. By the end of his presentation, our chorus of
3,000 was singing Beethoven’s Ode to Joy exuberantly. (He distributed a phonetic
version.)
If
you ever have an opportunity to hear this man, take it. He is uplifting.
Three things to remember:
- 1. Rule #6, Don’t take yourself so
seriously.
- 2. It’s all invented.
- 3. Radiate possibility.
TommorowLand
Tuesday evening, the group partied at TomorrowLand.
Some people envy Elliott’s success and put him down. Let
me tell you: he and Cathy have earned it. After three full days of being onstage
almost non-stop, he and Cathy stood at the gates of TomorrowLand, personally
welcoming each of us to the party.
A couple of hours later, everyone headed over
to Main Street for a spectacular show of fireworks over Disney’s version of
Mad King Ludwig’s Neuschwanstein castle.
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Dixieland Band
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Main tent, Wednesday
It's the last day, but most of the crowd are still here:
Kevin Kelly
"The computer age is over. This is the era of communications."
The web is less than 2,000 days old and yet
there are 50000 web sites, a billion web pages, and probably 500 billion deep
web pages. And this is doubling every year. We're still at the beginning.
The future is peer to peer. Content must be
created by users (Like this?). Learning
will be amplified by other learners. A learning company must be a teaching company.
Don’t solve problems (which are tied to negatives); seek opportunities. (Drucker)
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Successful organizations
get stuck at the top.
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The only way to recoup is to devolve,
to let go of success. This is painful but
necessary. Past success is the worst enemy of future success.
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There is no shortcut.
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Masie Center
The Masie Center is growing. Here are the staff. 
and services 
Mickey's
everywhere!
The TechLearn Choir. Diane Hessan explains they learned all this in 30 minutes
this morning. Patrick Littlefield conducting.
Kevin Kelly: People are the killer app.
Send a DisneyWorld
postcard to the family
Zander's Ode to Joy Lyrics
Froy-der, sher-ner getter-foon ken,
Toch.ter ‘ouse e-lyse-ium,
Veer be-tray-ten foyer-er troon-ken,
Himm-lee-she, dine high-list-tomb!
Diner-er tsow-ber binn-den vee—der,
Voss dee mo-der shtreng ge-tile’t;
Allah menschen vear-den brood-aire,
Vo dine zanf-taire floo-gel vile’t.
A SoundBytes Song
B2B
And End-to-end bug free
Pro-active
Inter-active
eLearning is attractive.
Oh my portal has
Best of Breed
It’s service guaranteed
Bionic
Electronic
It’s almost Amazonic.
My virtual classroom
Media rich
Engaging nuggets
Broadband & open source.
And now I have community
Synchronous and asynchronous chat.
I believe if I built it then they all will really come.
It’s distributed and functional online
It’s enterprise wide and reusable & multitasking.
My WBT
My ERP
My IT training
It’s all in XML
And I have simulations
I build intellectual capital
I believe I have built a robust infrastructure play
I do knowledge management I’m digital
IP telephony & streaming videoooooo
Intranet
Has made me teacher’s pet
Performer
A transformer
No longer a benchwarmer
And you all know that
Well, I’m glad that I have 3 days to chill out in this nice hotel
I mean find out what a learning object is
This week before we adjourn
Get rid of our heartburn
Welcome esteemed colleagues to TechLearn.
Links:
Internet Time Group's eLearning
Jump Page
The Masie Center
& TechLearn
Gatorland
Live
webcam
This big guy was eating neighborhood dogs until he was captured
three months ago. |
Here, gator, gator, gator. Grab this chicken out of my hand.
Oops. This is actually a croc, not a gator. |
Gator-rastlin' is like riding a bicycle. Once you get the
hang of it, you never forget. |
All good things must end. Alamo gets back my Mitsubishi
Spyder. |
TechLearn
Internet
Time Group