Harold Jarche

Jay on Workflow

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Jay Cross has posted his recent article, co-authored with Tony O’Driscoll, in Training Magazine – Workflow Learning Gets Real. Workflow learning is the next step in the transition from apprenticeship to instructor-led training and now to workflow learning, which incorporates many of the principles of performance-centred design, but now within a networked environment. If you’re in the business of training, consider this:

If the training organization in every company evaporated into thin air or disappeared through a wormhole to teaching heaven, individuals would continue to learn.

Incorporating the current reality, where anyone can be connected with almost everyone, at any time, Jay says:

As we enter an age of informal and workflow learning, authority is less centralized than ever before. "Learning is best understood as an interaction among practitioners, rather than a process in which a producer provides knowledge to a consumer," says Etienne Wenger, a social researcher and champion of communities of practice.

So if you’re still in the "training" business, you had better get focused on the "performance" business very quickly. The workflow approach incorporates learning directly into work, not as a separate activity. I see this as the intersection of process & system design, cognition and especially social behaviour. In other words, how people work, learn and interact – all at the same time and in a messy and very human way.

 

Portals – Lessons Learnt

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In the paper, A False Dawn Over the Field of Dreams? [full-text no longer available], Stephen James Musgrave looks at the UK experience with community portals, including educational ones. He refers to a study of portals that divided them into a four-layer scale of interactivity:

  1. Promotional: sites providing information but little interaction.
  2. Content: sites providing more sophisticated information and some interaction.
  3. Content Plus: sites providing very useful content and more advanced on-line self-service features.
  4. Transactional: sites which are accessible, complete, thoughtful, and coherent; and with more than one type of on-line interaction (e.g. payment, application, consultation, bookings).

Only 2% of sites were considered Transactional – pity.

In concluding how to blend people and technology, Musgrave states:

The People and Technology improvements addressed in this narrative are required so as to enhance a portal based delivery of citizen-centric services through the adoption of common standards, and the development of common components. Technology improvement through systems integration is required to achieve the interactivity demanded by users; giving services that will be valued by users. The use of open source software – with vendor support – is likely to become a "middle way" that gives ownership of core elements to the portal developer community; minimising problems with vendor lock-in, whilst enabling industrial strength portal products to be deployed.

Though not a portal, Scott Wilson’s graphical description of a Virtual Learning Environment shows some of the same principles as those espoused by Musgrave. It is a series of smaller pieces (many open source) loosely joined, and focused on the needs of the individual, not the institution. This approach could avoid the hopelessly optimistic "if you build it, they will come" syndrome alluded to in the title.

Where the jobs are

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As I said earlier this week:

I would infer that as cheap and easy Internet tools proliferate, those with specialised skills in coding, etc, may begin to lose their market worth – unless they also have the skills of inventiveness, empathy and meaning that Daniel Pink believes will be necessary for future employability.

It seems that this is already happening, according to this post from Daniel Lemire, on the lack of jobs for computer science graduates:

The message is quite clear, I believe. If you want to train yourself or students to produce software (programming or software engineering), you better be damn good because the job market is not there anymore. Will jobs come back? Automobile workers in North America are still waiting for the jobs sent to Mexico or elsewhere to come back. Now, programming or software engineering are not useless skills, far from it, but it might be a better strategy to aim for a business jobs where your programming or computer networking skills can be put to good use, for example. It seems that the job market is moving toward information technology (security, networking, using the right technology at the right time, understanding the implication of a given technology for business).


Action Research

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Robert Paterson offers some good advice to federal Social Development Minister Ken Dryden, in the spirit of action research, to stop trying to be all things to all people and get on with creating an effective child care programme:

Instead of trying to do a deal with everyone – why not put out the DNA of what you want. Not just baby sitting but development. Development that most can access. Attach say 2 Billion to this and say that the first 3 provinces that agree will get the deal as offered. You will then monitor the deal for 3 years and we will all learn what works.

Often when we try to address complex problems that involve multiple parties and perspectives, we can get analysis paralysis, because we will never have all of the answers. Sometimes it’s best to just get on with it – by starting small, being open to learn from our experiences and adjusting as we go. Rob’s advice makes sense to me.

 

More eLearning Jobs

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Following up on last week’s post on PulseLearning, it seems than another Fredericton company is hiring – Isomni Solutions. The word is that they’re looking for an instructional designer, two business analysts (with over 10 years experience) as well as a passel of .NET programmers. From their website, Isomni states that they are focused on eHealth and portal development, amongst other areas.

Analysing Performance at Work

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I listened to a report on the radio this morning about presenteeism, defined as “the practice of always being present at the workplace, often working longer hours even when there is nothing to do.” Once again, there seemed to be a focus on how to deal with the individual who has a problem, or the manager who cannot manage his or her workers. Little was said about systemic issues, such as the hierarchy that exists in most workplaces that forces many people to comply and park their brains at the door.

I previously quoted a fellow performance improvement practitoner, Klaus Wittkuhn, on the importance of initial work system design:

It is not an intelligent strategy to train people to overcome system deficiencies. Instead, we should design the system properly to make sure that the performers can leverage all their capabilities.

One of the models that I use is based on Mager & Pipe’s classic reference book, Analysing Performance Problems, which provides a step by step approach to finding out what the real work performance issue is, and how to deal with it. Based on this book, I have developed my own graphic, which shows some of the basic steps that you can take before jumping to conclusions on how to deal with problems like presenteeism.

PA2

Real Benefits of Blogs

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Starting a blog can be a daunting task, as this tongue-in-cheek Kuro5hin article shows. Dave Pollard says that business is not embracing blogs because they don’t address immediate needs (e.g. in this fiscal quarter). Dave provides good pointers on how and why blogs should be used in business, and he describes his own adoption journey. His is similar to my own experience – heard about blogs, tested out some free stuff, started using a feed reader, and then added blogging to my static website. I don’t like to talk about blogging for blogging’s sake [too many instances of the "b" word in this post], but let’s face it; once you’ve tried it, you’re hooked. You don’t have to write a blog, as there is a heck of a lot just to read.

After an intensive year online, these are the tangible benefits to my business:

  • Using a feed reader (via RSS), saves a lot of time and bookmarking.
  • The information I get from bloggers is usually weeks ahead of the mainstream press. Call this competitive intelligence.
  • By blogging, I have raised my profile on the web and increased visits to my site by a factor of 1000 in less than one year. This is cheap marketing.
  • I use my database of posts when preparing reports, proposals and presentations. It helps to have a searchable system like Drupal.
  • Blogging forces me to think and reflect in order to write, so that what was just an idea in my mind becomes more concrete.
  • The underlying technology of easy posting and RSS to keep track of things, makes a lot of sense for collaborative learning and collaborative work – two areas of interest for my business.
  • Through blogging, I have met a number of business partners.
  • Blogging keeps me in touch with a lot of interesting people and expands my view of the world, providing new ideas for my business.
  • When I have a problem, especially a technical one, I post it on my site or someone else’s and usually get an informed answer within 24 hours. It’s like a large performance support system.
  • It allows people to get to know my opinions before they engage me as a consultant; saving time and potential frustrations.

Like e-mail, blogs are practical tools for everyday business. There are abuses of both (spam) but I think that blogs are one more tool that give the small business operator a real competitive advantage.

“This Internet Thing”

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Seth Godin marketing and branding guru, and author of Purple Cow, latest post is on how the importance of the Internet is only beginning to be felt. For instance:

Penetration. There are 50 times as many people using the Net as there were then [ten years ago]. 50x is a multiple you don’t see every day.

For those in the elearning or social networking business, this is a very important fact. It may mean that business models that failed 5-10 years ago, could work now. Time to clean out that closet of ideas.

Tools. You can launch most any online service with almost no custom programming. Changethis.com demonstrated to me how straightforward this has become. It also means that finding the world’s greatest programmer is no longer a critical component for most services.

I would infer that as cheap and easy Internet tools proliferate, those with specialised skills in coding, etc, may begin to lose their market worth – unless they also have the skills of inventiveness, empathy and meaning that Daniel Pink believes will be necessary for future employability.

 

Market Diversification

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Godfrey Parkin has an excellent post on what is really happening in the global economy; namely that multinationals will follow the money. The next century is looking like it will be the Chinese century.

Corporate America apparently no longer values having brain-power or talent on the domestic payroll – the notion of human capital as an investment is being replaced with the notion of human ingenuity as an expense. If our money, our designers, our R&D, our manufacturing, our management, our business partners, our suppliers, and our major markets are all in Asia, where does that leave the USA?

In Canada, we continue to focus almost exclusively on exporting to the US. As Godfrey puts it, Wal*Mart does more business with China than all of Canada does. The business development strategies that I see presented at every “innovation” forum in the region have the same old story presented by analysts, bureaucrats and government. That story is about exporting our products and services to the US. The talk about diversified global markets is negligible. Given the warning signals on the state of the US economy, it would make sense not to put all of our economic eggs in one basket, n’est-ce pas?

ATutor 1.4.3

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ATutor, a Canadian Open Source Web-based Learning Content Management System (LCMS), has just released its latest version 1.4.3. ATutor’s trademark function is that it is designed with accessibility and adaptability in mind.

New in this release:

Forum Upgrades: System wide and shared forums for communication across courses. Create communities around groups of course forums, or around an entire ATutor course server. Alumni participation in course forums.
Subscribe to general forums or course forums, or subscribe to specific topic threads to receive messages by email. Quickly access current forum messages through the Forum Posts menu module.



Enrollment Manager Overhaul: Create, import, and export course enrollment lists, and manage enrolled students and alumni. New tabbed display for managing student information, managing course lists, managing roles and privileges, as well as creating and managing groups.



Language Overhaul: Language management has been completely re-designed. Translate, import, and export language from within your own ATutor installation. Support for the UTF-8 character set. ATutor is available in more than 30 languages.



Question Database: Create tests by adding questions to, and retrieving questions from, a test item repository.



Test/Survey Manager Upgrade: Create image based test items, arrange multiple choice questions vertically or horizontally, assign tests to a class, to groups, or to individual students, analyse test data and generate statistics.



Theme Manager: Easily copy, import, and export ATutor themes.



RSS Feeds: Syndicate ATutor course announcements to display them on remote Web sites.



Embed ACollab: Embed ACollab [collaborative workspace] into ATutor, or open it in a new window to participate in course group activities.

Easy Enrollment: Students can now enroll in courses through the Browse Courses screen.

Open source learning systems, like this SCORM compliant LCMS, are steadily improving and becoming viable options for any organization, public or private.