Month: July 2004

From Classroom to Boardroom

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Jay Bahlis, President of BNH Expert Software in Montreal, has produced a free, online booklet, From Classroom to Boardroom, that will be a good job aid for performance improvement professionals. It covers step-by-step actions and six strategies for aligning training with business goals. Though not new in its concepts, this booklet is an additional resource that may be helpful, especially for internal initiatives. Some of Jay’s cited references may be of use as well:

  • Ford and Weissbein estimated that less than 10% of training expenditures actually result in transfer
    to the job. By focusing on the most important initiatives, you can reduce waste and maximize the
    impact of training.
  • Broad and Newstrom observed that most of the knowledge and skills gained in training (well over
    80% by some estimates) is not fully applied by employees on the job. And more recently, Robinson
    reported that on average, less than 30% of what people learn (in training) actually gets used on the
    job. By focusing on solutions that resolve clearly identified performance deficiencies you can
    minimize waste and maximize performance.
  • Lance Dublin observed that over 90% of training is conducted through informal means such as web
    searches, chats, reference materials and mentoring. Providing the right information to the right
    individuals at the right time “learning at the speed of work” can significantly increase the competitive
    advantage of the organization – allowing individuals to do things they have not been able to before.

Many thanks to Jay for making this available to the community.

ChangeThis

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ChangeThis has been created as a distribution medium of rational, logical "manifestos" that encourage thought and debate. The ChangeThis Manifesto is in the same vein as The Cluetrain Manifesto, but the former reads less like a rant.

We?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢re betting that a significant portion of the population wants to hear thoughtful, rational, constructive
arguments about important issues. We?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢re certain that the best of these manifestos will
spread, hand to hand, person to person, until these manifestos have reached a critical mass and
actually changed the tone and substance of our debate.

The site includes a blog and there are a number of manifestos in the mill from authors like Malcolm Gladwell, Tom Peters and Seth Godin. It seems that the new medium is "retrieving" the pamphleteer of old, and I look forward to reading, and commenting on, future manifestos.

Cycling and KM

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Denham Grey has the perfect presentation for my tastes, but I won’t be able to get to Cincinnati to see it. Denham is using cycling as the metaphor for knowledge management (The only sport I love more than cycling is cross-country skiing) .

Having cycled across France & Belgium, as well as climbing three passes in the Alps in the same day, I must admit that cycling is a passion, and Denham is going to link it to my business – great!

Ever had that sinking feeling you are being dropped from the peleton as new technology decends?, looking for new ways to collaborate on a strategy or coordinating to chase down a break-away?, is your team self-organizing or do you rely on command and control?, do you have the agility and the shared mindset to react to a sudden event?

I hope he posts his notes. Allez-y!

Networks Replace Hierarchies

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Jay Cross has synthesized many of the same themes discussed in my previous post on the The Dummies Guide to Change. There are also some good links on his post, which covers some previous material because Jay has been having problems with comment Spammers.

I am certain that we are about to experience a tipping point in business organisations as well as organisational learning. Observations made in The Cluetrain Manifesto are becoming obvious to the Early Majority. Informal learning is the huge growth area (not online courses), and will prove John Chambers (who said that e-learning will make e-mail look like a rounding error) correct. We are also seeing the rise of connected natural enterprises, as Jay says:

Networks are the next step in computing, business organizations, and more. As internodal communication costs drop, networks replace hierarchies.

The world is a different place because [almost] everyone can talk to everyone else. That changes business as well as learning.

 

Sakai 1.0 to be Released Today

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The Sakai Project will be releasing the first version of its open source learning management system today:

The University of Michigan, Indiana University, MIT, Stanford, and the uPortal consortium are joining forces to integrate and synchronize their considerable educational software into a pre-integrated collection of open source tools. This will yield three big wins for sustainable economics and innovation in higher education:


* A framework that builds on the recently ratified JSR 168 portlet standard and the OKI open service interface definitions to create a services-based, enterprise portal for tool delivery

* A re-factored set of educational software tools that blends the best of features from the participants?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢ disparate software (e.g., course management systems, assessment tools, workflow, etc.)

* A synchronization of the institutional clocks of these schools in developing, adopting and using a common set of open source software.

It will be interesting to see if this changes the balance in the higher education marketplace.

Update: More information and related links are available at ICTlogy.

Furl helps to create the personal web

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Via Weblogg-ed is a good overview of Furl, and how it differs from the usual bookmark managers. Greg Ritter goes into detail on how you can use Furl. It seems especially useful for students and researchers. I use Furl (see Home Page) when I’m too lazy to blog or if a want to share a series of web pages on a single topic. It’s a great tool for collaborative web research. I think that the use of tools like Furl may surpass blogs in the near future – they’re too easy.

The LMS Industry

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Scott Leslie discussed the increase in LMS vendors in the marketplace in a recent newsletter, something that most analysts did not predict:

While it’s definitely true that a few of the 50 seemed to have slowed down their release cycles (no bad thing in a sector that at one point seemed to be averaging close to 2 major releases a year), none of them have actually closed shop. Add to these all of the small open source projects popping up (and some of the bigger ones too), as well as a seemingly neverending supply of elearning startups from India, and one could get the impression that this marketplace is somehow expanding, not consolidating.

Scott goes on to say that organisations should ensure that any system they purchase have the ability to export content in a standards-compliant format, and that this should be proven prior to purchase. This is good advice, as there are numerous purchasers who are locked-in to their sub-optimal systems because they cannot export their content to any other system.

The Utility of Learning Objects

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Stephen Downe’s post about the value of LO’s reflects my own consternation – are they of any utility? (My emphasis added)

In the world of e-learning, meanwhile, the systems and protocols look more and more like jibberish each passing day as every possible requirement from every possible system – whether it makes sense or not – is piled into that tangle of 24-character variable names called Java (none of which will work at all unless you have exactly the right configuration, somewhat like my database). Again, maybe it’s just me, but it seems to me that if you need an advanced degree to make this stuff work (and of course it have to be exactly the right kind of degree) then it’s just not going to work. It won’t, it can’t. Because learning, above all, must be a populist enterprise. Now I’m not proposing that we go back to the world of stone tools and chalk. But the last time I looked people weren’t using learning objects in any great number, either in the classroom or (even more so) to support home learning. Gosh, make sure you can float before building a battleship.

I see a lot more day-to-day value for learning in the use of simple technologies like blogs, RSS and trackbacks. Not all of the blog systems are compatible and you will find technical hurdles, but my blog is becoming a valuable learning tool, and it is very learner-centric. It’s also standards compliant, cheap and easy to use.

Dummies Guide to Change

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In the Dummies Guide to Change … Rob Paterson synthesizes concepts like “tipping points” and the “law of the few”. In a recent paper from HP, Wu and Huberman indicate that their data confirms the law of the few:

Our theory further predicts that a relatively small number of individuals with high social ranks can have a larger effect on opinion formation than individuals with low rank. By high rank we mean people with a large number of social connections. [Connectors?]

but does not support the concept of a tipping point:

Our findings also cast doubt on the applicability of tipping models to a number of consumer behaviors.

The math in this paper is beyond me, but I am assuming that it is valid.

Below is an image that shows my interpretation of these concepts. I was wondering about the parallels between Rogers and Gladwell, and created this image to organise my thoughts. What I’m thinking is that if you want to create an epidemic, then would you first

  1. connect the right Mavens with the potential innovators,
  2. target the early adopters via the Connectors and then
  3. find the salespeople who will influence the Early Majority?

This gives you a potential 50% of the population, which should get you to the tipping point. As you move along the process, you constantly try to increase stickiness.

Might be too simple, or a good start. Not sure yet.
diffusion.jpg