eel-learning

Reflections on Learning Technologies 2011

I enjoyed this year's conference, perhaps more than previous. In previous years I've listened to the suggestions of the Brave and the Bold with the familiar sinking feeling of ' I'd never be able to do that at my work '.  The reasons would range, depending on the speaker, from bandwidth to management inertia to lack of skills. This year, however, I went empowered by fact that we have a new management team in place who want to push new ideas, have been given a mandate to do so, and have given me a mandate to bring in new thinking and proposals for them to consider. So my feeling at the conference was different.

One session that I particularly enjoyed was that of Itiel Dror and Chris Atherton on 'Learning and the Mind'. I had a minor shock during Chris's talk when I realised this is my territory. I'm not claiming I know much about it, but my realisation was that this is where my interest lies in the whole field of online learning - memory, motivation, learning load, attention and so on. If you like, the interaction between an individual and the material presented. Or as Chris put it when I approached her in a rather burbling enthusiastic way at the end, user experience. Since I first learned about instructional design in the 80s that's what's got me reading and thinking, and that's what I am most critical of in the elearning I see at work.

Which led me to consider why it's rarely discussed at my work. I saw that all the vast majority of the effort in our team and the L&D team in general goes into efficiency - delivery, LMS, management information, portals etc - and not much into effectiveness - what actually works?  And when you ask that question it's usually thought to be the realm of 'evaluation' and 'ROI' and all the conundrums and cliches that brings with it.

I've been given a remit to pull together a community of practice of all the people involved across our Group involved in some way with elearning - developing it or commissioning it - and that's where my enthusiasm can find its place.  I want to share ideas and debate with these people the quality and effectiveness of the material and experiences we offer people, rather than getting bogged down in the mechanics of how we get it to them. I feel more at home in work than I have for ages and thanks to those talks by Itiel and Chris I understand why.

 

Catechism of cliché (2)

What does this Learning Management System offer me?

- a solution

What kind of solution is that then?

- a total solution

That sounds rather grand. Does that make it expensive?

- Of course not, it's a totally scaleable total solution

Which of my many problems is it a solution to?

- all your learning, knowledge management and compliance needs

Deliverables, dear boy. What does it deliver?

- content

Content in the sense of a calm and untroubled mind, free from the worries of the working environment?

- yes, that. And rich media content

What can I do with this rich media content?

- easily upload and brand it

And what else, were I of a power orientation?

- you will have full control of your content and your learners

And how will I bring this rich media content into being?

- rapidly

In sartorial terms, how might this content be described?

- tailor made

What highly valued and pricey prerequisite is unnecessary for this solution?

- any technical ability

With what acronym is this system compatible to the point of intimacy?

- SCORM

To what level of proportionality is it compatible with said SCORM?

- 100%

What warm and fuzzy enhancements have you now made?

- a full suite of social learning features

What engineering operation of a force-magnifying nature will this apply to knowledge across my organisation?

- it will leverage it

What will this leveraging result in?

- a fully engaged workforce

So what does it cost?

- call this number - our solutions team are waiting to help you

Yes, but what does it cost?

- call this number  - our solutions team are waiting to help you

Twitter, skitters and 'Do I really need this?'

Shamed into action by the excellent quality of elearning blogs in my Google Reader, I want to reflect on some conversations at the recent Learning and Skills Group.

Round a table in a Social Learning discussion went the question 'who here uses Twitter?'. Fewer hands than I expected. I said I was an ex-Twitterer, having taken a deliberate decision to stop using it.

Around the same time as Clive Shepherd said he'd start using it as an experiment and see if it helped his learning and his professional life, I did the same. After some mishaps with Twitter-related software I settled on a side column in my browser. I tweeted daily, never more than one a day, and received interesting and friendly responses on occasion. Sometimes work-related, sometimes related to what I laughingly call my music 'career'. So what went wrong? The first uneasy feeling was a threat to my loyalty to Google Reader. My first 30-45m in a working day will often be reading commentary by people I respect. They would often say in their blogs 'Look at this' and take me off somewhere else. In no time, an hour has passed. I was already experiencing some tension about this, but Twitter blew the top off. It multiplied the 'Look at this' calls tenfold. All these TinyURLs leading to lengthy digressions. And some people I'd chosen to follow seemed to post one every ten minutes. One day I closed the sidebar in order to see something full-screen, and forgot to re-open it. Did I miss it? No. Going back after a day or two, a catastrophic flood of 'Look at this'.

The answer to compliance training

I’m breaking  my blogging silence to bring you a startling new announcement in compliance training.

Compliance Booster

View more presentations from normanlamont.

Catechism of cliche (1)

(With apologies to the spirit of Flann O’Brien)

How will your new rapid authoring product have me producing courses?

Quickly

And in addition to that?

Easily

That is certainly an agreeable vision. Anything else?

Affordably

What kind of quality content will I find myself producing?

High

With what frequency will I achieve this?

Every time

What epithet usually applied to female film stars will be awarded to this content?

Stunning

What section of my workforce will produce this content?

Those with no technical knowledge or skills

What other group, presumably not to be confused with this group?

Subject matter experts

How will you draw these results from such unlikely candidates?

By empowering them

What is the aerodynamic quality of the systems that will empower them?

Streamlined

Will they need to marshall knowledge and training to master these systems?

No, they are intuitive

What unit of ascension will this bring about in the capability of my team?

A step change.

And if this is unambitious?

A quantum leap

What are we guaranteed to see within months or even weeks?

Results

What shall we do with these results?

Deliver them

Upon what horizontal geometrical construct will these results have an impact?

The bottom line

Thank you. That will be all.

A virtual conversation overheard

This is by Gary Platt. It's funny and makes a good argument, but do you think the robot voice helps or hinders the case? Do you listen despite it, because you like the dialogue, or does it make you want to switch off?I've played with this Xtranormal software and while I really like it I can't see it being taken seriously in the workplace. Or maybe I'm underestimating our corporate culture.

The Rehabilitation of Nellie

Curious. When I made my first steps into Computer Based Training, we learned to parrot the benefits. One was ‘no more learning by sitting next to Nellie’ – misinformation would no longer passed on informally , there would be a standardised, approved version of the truth promulgated to everyone. ‘Nellie-learning’ was cited again and again as a Bad Thing.

If there was an unseen presence hovering throughout last week’s Learning Technologies 2010 conference it was Nellie. Informal learning means Nellie can pass on her tips, her wisdom and her experience; Nellies can be found Just In Time across the enterprise; Nellie can even create learning material specific to whatever audience she wishes to address – no corporate standardisation.

I guess the big differences are that in a good social learning scheme Nellie may not be right next to you in the office – she may be in Hong Kong, and, for compliance and audit purposes, every word she says carries ‘Nellie said this’ on it somewhere!

Simplify, simplify!

I was asked to help out a colleague who’d got mired in an unsatisfactory project. A new system is being launched – new for some users, updated for others, and he’d been tasked with updating the online reference (called a ‘quick start guide’) from the old version of the system. That was essentially a help system created in HTML – screen shots with procedural instructions below.

He worked with one SME, produced 90-odd pages using the old format, and at the end, the project manager reviewed it, and passed it to a half dozen business training reps to review. He got a half dozen versions of ‘it needs to look more professional, it needs to look more wizzy, it should be more engaging’, plus ‘can we have a PDF version in addition?’  After a couple of attempts at doing what they wanted, but receiving no thumbs-up, he asked our manager to speak to the project manager.  This person said ‘I don’t know exactly what I want, but this isn’t it.’ I was called in to support him and see if we could reach an agreement on a way forward, with only a week or so till the deadline.

Blended Learning - more

I wrote a post on blended learning a month or so ago. Clive Shepherd invited me to speak at last Friday's Elearning Network meeting on blended learning, which I did. As a personal challenge it was quite a step forward as I've never spoken at an elearning conference before, so I proved to myself I could do that.

The gist was much like my previous post - the traditional 'front-loading' of self-study before a face to face event is one way to do it, and the 'traditional' way to many trainers, but it's not the only way. Seeing the face to face event as the launch pad for work using different media is another way (familiar to, for example, OU students) with much to recommend it, but it requires a different role for the trainer.

On the way to the event, however, I was reading a book about the early 20th century shaman Gurdjieff talking about attention, and it prompted me to realise that the asynchronous part of any programme makes a very substantial demand on a person's intention (to follow through over a period of time) and attention (not to be distracted), in ways that are less of a threat in a face to face session. All the more so nowadays, when there seems to be a wide acceptance of the idea of multitasking, despite recent rebuttals, and where we are actively encouraged to have bits of information flying at us all the time from RSS, Twitter, SMS, email etc etc.

So while we can use the online domain in new and creative ways, the competition for the learner's attention is fiercer by virtue of it being online, and the learner may have little idea of the personal discipline needed to manage all this and sustain an aim or good intention over time. It may fall to the trainer to keep it all going with regular prompts, reminders, challenges and tasks, and to the line manager also, with whatever carrots and sticks they can deploy.  It was simpler when you just went on a course and that was that, wasn't it?

My thanks to Clive and the Network for the opportunity to speak and to learn from the other speakers.

My original post
Mark Barthelemy's followup post
Presentations (including mine) from the Elearning Network day

I’m a rebel through and through

Every morning when I put on my locked-down, work-given laptop, I have a little bit of civil disobedience.  I click away the health and safety message that pops up on every bootup saying ‘Do not ignore this message!’.  I ignore it! 

I recently saw a piece of elearning that had an 8-screen ‘how to use this elearning’.  I felt like ignoring that. They need to put ‘Do not ignore these instructions’, then it’ll only be rock ‘n’ roll rebels like me who ignore them.