eel-learning

Are competencies competent? (off-topic)

My employer is suffering a restructure (sorry, a 'transformation'), with the result that everyone's having to demonstrate evidence of competencies. The heart sinks. You not only have competencies, you have sub-competencies under them and, tucked under them suckling away for all they're worth, behaviours. In other words pages upon pages of nested bullet points. So the question for me is 'Was that project three years ago a good example of this competence? Well, I seem to remember a lot of that behaviour, which fits under that competence over there. But then I don't have anything for the first competence, although if I stretch the definition a bit I suppose that ....'  It becomes a game, wherein you waste a couple of hours knowing that across the organisation hundreds of others are doing the same thing with the same degree of scepticism. The prize, however, is a job and yes please, I'd like one of those.

Having a coffee

Tony Karrer commented:

I'm at DevLearn right ... and your post makes me wonder ... if you were here, having coffee with me right now, what would we be talking about?  And who else would you want to sit with to have those conversations?

Interesting question. I suppose one thing is a current job I'm working on: a lot of standalone multimedia PCs in my company are being decommissioned, and expensive CD ROMs training modules are being trashed. My team has been given the task of creating web-based 'versions' of these in a desperately short time. Sponsors and subject experts aren't delighted at this turn of events and don't want to put time into creating something new out of it. They want the 'content' (whatever that means) online and available asap and the paradigm they're thinking of is 'copy and paste'. We've developed our own quick and easy templates for short page turners with a limited number of interactivity types - what some writers call, perhaps disparagingly perhaps not, Power Point Plus. Several of us have been pretty much pasting the text content of these courses into these templates, trying to chunk them better and sneakily reword them into less pompous language as we go.

Confession

I started this blog as a learning tool. Inspired by Karyn and some of the others I read - that by writing about what I was doing and how I was doing it, I'd clarify for myself what I understood and didn't understand, and some of it might be of use to others.

I now find I don't write here very often. Why? Because I don't feel I have anything in the way of 'answers' and  that to write an intelligent question takes time and effort. When it comes up against the deadlines of work due, I think that half an hour should go towards my employer's demands rather than speculation on the blogosphere. How I envy elearning bloggers who seem able in (and I'm guessing here) half an hour or less to write something that seems to put a new slant on an old idea or introduce a new combination of ideas.

This is indeed part of my learning: learning that I have a lot more to think through before I become a 'writer' on elearning. That I feel my previous posts have asked enough questions and now I shouldn't write until I can deliver something. 

I also notice from time to time that bloggers write in fits and starts - daily posts for some time then weeks go by. Perhaps it's the same combination of work demands, self-censorship and and simply being 'dry' of the juice.

But at the same time here I am with a job description and a daily task list that reflect the title 'elearning'; so even if what I'm doing seems compromised, unoriginal or small fry, it's still likely that others are doing that kind of thing and I may have done something they haven't. So my resolve is to make the effort and just describe what I'm doing and any associated thoughts that may be helpful to someone desperate or idle enough to read them! 

Jeff Oliver remembered

My first post started a train of thinking about how I got here, and made me think of Jeff. Anyone who attended TACT (The Association for Computer Based Training) in the 80s and 90s knew Jeff as the Big Man, often abrasive in his criticism, always knowledgeable and authoritative. He was a bit of a mentor for me, from the first training session he ran in TenCore (still going) for the building society who employed me around 87. From that time on we often worked together on projects and met at seminars. He was unfailingly supportive and encouraging, even when I would come out with things which, if some academic presenter had voiced them at TACT, would have earned a concise but telling put-down or, worse, caused him to remove his large frame summarily from the auditorium - a very powerful and conspicuous piece of feedback. Jeff died suddenly in, I think, 1996, from complications after a minor piece of surgery. I miss him today.

The aspect of learning technology that Jeff represented to me was the idea that one person could do it all - needs analysis, script, coding, delivery, implementation. In the days of 4-colour CGA displays and floppy disks that was possible. Then came multimedia and you had to either pick your role among the many - script, instructional design, storyboard, media, assets, editing - or project manage the lot.  When Jeff introduced me to this new thing called the internet - I fondly remember following his directions to the Cyberia internet cafe near Tottenham Court Road - the palette was again restricted and some form of small, mobile, intelligent unit (to use Robert Fripp's term) was again possible.

A final memory of Jeff which brings us bang up to date with the current elearning paradigms was when someone at TACT was promoting hyperlinked browsing CBT (pre-web, so probably using HyperCard or the like) which also had alternatives for different learning styles. The user wouldn't go along a linear path, they'd explore, discover, uncover and be surprised. Jeff piped up that what managers wanted was for the learner to get in, get what they needed and get out again in the shortest possible time, not to go around the houses discovering things!

Looking up Jeff's name today I found (only) this, from his response to a lecture in 1996:

Finally, Plenty-of-Time versus Just-in-Time learning. Just-in-Time training and its illegitimate sibling EPSS are fine when (1) learners don't need much practice to be proficient and (2) only small numbers of learning points have to be acquired to complete the task. Airline pilots and surgeons are not high on my priority list for these types of learning. I have a pragmatic approach here. With most types of teaching we do not expect students to learn everything that is in the lessons (or all post-tests would require 100% to pass). In particular, most job-related training offers an opportunity to learn, but we must expect trainees to return to the job incompletely trained. Usually a colleague or supervisor fills in the gaps. That's what really happens, and it has many advantages. Just-in-Time learning bypasses the settling-in and learning-completion phases which are arguably essential. Plenty-of-Time Incomplete Learning is a more accurate description, with people-based performance support the norm.

(review of Steve Alessi's Dean Lecture Feb 1996)

OK I'm out there ...

Stung by Tony Karrer's Top Ten Reasons to Blog and Not to Blog, I've boldly gone forth.

Particularly

9. Because it forces you to do your homework (Rodolpho Arruda)

8. Because this is how you are going to learn in the future.

“This is the difference represented in the shift from traditional classroom based learning and network learning. The idea of the latter is that learning occurs when the learner immerses him or herself in a community of practice, learning by performing authentic tasks, learning by interacting with and becoming a member of the community.” (Stephen Downes)

7. Because if you don’t we’ll think you’re lame and don’t know how to do your job.

“What can you know about a professional who doesn't blog his or her work? How do you know they are competent, that they have the respect of their peers, that they understand the issues, that they practice sound methodology, that they show consideration for their clients? You cannot know any of this without the openness blogging (or equivalent) provides. Which means, once a substantial number begin to share, there will be increasing pressure on all to share.” (Stephen Downes)

Of course the reasons for NOT blogging were almost equally persuasive, but I've learned so much by reading others' blogs on the subject that I feel I'm allowed to step up here without knowing all the answers, just to add some little questions from my corner of the world..

(I'm not a stranger to blogging, though - in my other life as a musician on normanlamont.com)