Centre for Learning Technologies – Lessons Learnt

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As I was going through some old reports I came across an article I had written about the CLT. My first job out of the military was as Project Manager (Learning & Performance Systems) at the CLT. This was probably the best job I ever had and much of what we did has formed the basis of my current consulting practice.

Today, many higher education institutions are creating innovation centres that are outwardly focused and revenue-generating, so in the spirit of learning from our experiences, I’m posting the article here.

Overview

The Centre for Learning Technologies (CLT) was an applied research, consulting and resource centre for the use of new media in learning, knowledge management, and workplace performance support. Bridging the gap between research and practice, the CLT aimed to link learning theory, business practices and research to real-world, organizational challenges and applications. Clients included private corporations, public organizations and higher education institutions. The specialized consultants and researchers were located at Mount Allison University in Sackville, NB.

The Centre offered an objective source of resources and services through four market offerings, each with projects focused on learning, knowledge management, and performance support. The four market offerings were:

  1. Innovation Practices
  2. Professional Services
  3. The Learning Community
  4. Usability, Human Factors Specialty Center

These areas had been identified as gaps during an industry assessment conducted by the CLT with the support of the New Brunswick Government’s department of economic development. The four areas above were identified as niche areas, with no other organizations in the region offering these services at the time. The project areas: learning, knowledge management and performance support were identified as growth areas in the Organizational and Performance Improvement fields and corresponded to the expertise available at the CLT.

History

The Centre for Learning Technologies was established in 1996 at Mount Allison University. The Centre was created through the support of several private and public organizations, with the majority of the funding coming from ACOA. Assistance came in many forms including start-up operational funding, capital financing and business guidance. Funding for capital costs, such as the new building, was in the range of $3.5M while operating capital was approximately $200K.

Contributing partners included:

  • NBTel (now Bell Aliant)
  • Digital Equipment Corporation (later Compaq – HP)
  • Andersen Consulting (now Accenture)
  • Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency (ACOA)
  • Federal Government Infrastructure Program
  • Royal Bank of Canada
  • Bragg Communications
  • Mount Allison University
  • Weston Foundation

One of these contributions, the secondment of a business development officer, spanned a period of two years. The original concept for the CLT was as a multimedia Centre of Excellence with a mandate to help the university and organizations across Canada in the area of new media learning. The mandate and focus of the CLT changed as it developed, moving to a focus on bridging the gap between applied research and practice in workplace performance. The main rationale for this move was the requirement to become revenue-generating and self-sustaining after its first year.

During its five years in operation (1996-2001) the CLT generated about 85% of its costs. The remaining 15% was covered by the university. By its last year, the CLT was closing this gap. The university’s administration decided to close the CLT in the Spring of 2001, citing lack of profit and little alignment with the university’s main business of undergraduate education as reasons for closure.

Observations and Lessons Learnt

  • The lack of operating capital (barely enough for Year 1) forced the CLT into a business model that pushed it away from the university’s core mission, thus alienating the Centre from any potential internal supporters.
  • The CLT was not aligned with a specific academic department. The original intent was to have the CLT work with the Education Faculty, but this department was closed just as the CLT was created.
  • The revenue-generation mandate forced the CLT to focus on external clients and strong relationships with internal university departments did not develop. There were few internal champions of the CLT at Mount Allison University.
  • The original proposal for the CLT spoke of considerable potential revenues and profits. These unrealistic expectations did not help in seeking funds to offset revenue shortfalls.
  • It took five years for the CLT to develop a professional reputation and a client base. By 2001, clients were approaching the Center directly.

Communities of Practice – Patented

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I see that Jay Cross has been having a conversation about the term Community of Practice (CoP) and in response to Nick’s question, wrote:

>Why do you want to change the term ‘communities of practice’?

Nick, in Denver this October, quizzical faces peered at me when I used the term Communities of Practice. There were only thirty to forty people in my audience. I asked “How many of you are familiar with the term Community of Practice?” No one raised a hand.

I don’t buy your argument that ‘any really useful concept should be initially opaque’. Instead, a new concept should at least relate to its origins. Horseless carriage, wireless phone.

Writing ‘your wish to change the name: dynamic guild misconstrues what I meant. I wrote that “we didn’t find what we were looking for”. The best we could do was not good enough. I’m still searching.

CoP are too important to be stuck with a label that takes time to understand. Let’s not permit semantic conservatism to block progress. This is not the first time this has come up nor will it be the last. See “How about an Order of Slimehead?” at http://internettime.com/?p=693

Well, it may be that we’ll have to pay to use the term CoP anyway. From Dave Pollard, I’ve learned that one more ridiculous patent (#7127440) has been issued by the US Patent & Trademark Office:

A method is provided for establishing a community of practice including a plurality of users, one or more experts, and one or more community of practice managers. A need for a community of practice is identified. The roles and responsibilities of participants in the community of practice are identified. One or more goals are identified for the community of practice based on the identified need. A plurality of the participants in the community of practice collaborate to achieve the identified goals.

Inventors: Jeanblanc; Anne H. (Galva, IL), Coffey; James M. (Peoria, IL)
Assignee: Caterpillar Inc. (Peoria, IL)
Appl. No.: 09/995,822
Filed: November 29, 2001

I remember a sign that was posted in the Officers’ Mess in Wainwright, Alberta. It said, “Let not common sense become so rare that it is mistaken for genius”. Perhaps this sign should be shipped to the USPTO.

Informal economy; informal learning

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I’ve read most of the Toffler’s books over the years, including Future Shock, The Third Wave and Powershift; and have yet to read Revolutionary Wealth. I agree with Lawrence Fisher (S+B) that the value in their work is not crystal ball gazing but making sense of various patterns:

In retrospect, Mr. Toffler was less a reliable prophet than a brilliant synthesist. Future Shock and its successors, The Third Wave (Morrow, 1980) and Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth, and Violence at the Edge of the 21st Century (Bantam, 1990) were at their best not when predicting what would happen, but when drawing from a vast array of disciplines – science, technology, sociology, and religion – to explain the circumstances of the world at large.

Their latest book says that we are seeing huge growth in the informal economy, “According to the Tofflers, countless other industries and institutions face waves of “prosumers”, who produce and consume products and services outside the monetary economy. This is a historic change in the way wealth is created, the Tofflers write, spearheaded (for now, at least) by the United States.”

Here are some thoughts on education from the interview:

S+B: In the book, you write of education’s failure to move from the industrial age to the knowledge economy. Is homeschooling a prosumer response to this crisis?
TOFFLER: Yes, now that you mention it. It is an important and growing form of prosuming. The parents do it themselves, because the market does not supply what they want or need, or for that matter what the market needs.

Think about how we learned to use personal computers. PC use went from zero to hundreds of millions of people who know and use PCs routinely, and nobody went to school to learn how.

Instead, chances are you found a guru, and a guru was anyone who bought his PC a week before you bought yours. And there were user groups – volunteers passing valuable knowledge back and forth. If you agree that the PC has had an impact on productivity in the money economy, then the fact that people taught each other how to use this thing without money changing hands is another example of what a big impact prosumers can have on the money economy. Add these things together — homeschooling, teaching how to use PCs, Linux, etc. – and you begin to understand this big invisible economic force. People have written about each of these pieces, but haven’t seen them as part of a huge nonmoney economy interacting with the money economy.

It’s not just parents, but knowledge workers inside and outside of organisations, who are taking learning into their own hands. As the non-money economy is affecting the measured economy, informal learning is affecting education. More and more, we can do it ourselves, whether it be printing our own photographs or learning a new skill. Homeschooling is getting easier with the Internet and so is learning for yourself. Formal training and education (one size fits nobody) can’t react quick enough to our changing needs and expanding fields knowledge.

That’s where I see the importance of understanding informal learning within organisations. It’s happening anyway, and at an accelerating rate. Organisations should look at tapping informal learning, not controlling it. The more free-thinkers and independent learners that an organisation has, the more resilient it will be in times of change. This of course is subversive thinking for any command and control organisation, so perhaps we really need new organisational models. The film crew is an example.

Formal education exploded as we moved into the industrial age one hundred years ago, with larger organisations demanding Taylorist job functions. As the industrial age gives way to a networked age, there is less need for well-defined, cookie-cutter jobs. With fewer standardized jobs, why do we need standardized education, or even standardized training? [I know that there are exceptions to this statement, but they are becoming fewer]

Copyright not good for learning

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Canadian documentaries are better known, and have won more awards, than our feature films have. Documentaries, like education, need relevant artifacts to get their message across. If every image is copyright protected it’s difficult to tell a story without paying off all of the commercial interests first. Michael Geist reports on the Documentary Organization of Canada’s recent letter to the federal government:

The letter notes the growing concern with the effect of copyright on documentary film makers, citing the survey results which found that 85 percent of film makers find copyright more harmful than beneficial and 82 percent find that the law is more likely to discourage them from making new films. The letter notes that copyright reform could be used to address these concerns, yet there are fears that it will actually make things worse. The film makers chief concerns include modifying fair dealing by expanding the current list of enumerated categories, providing film makers with the right to circumvent DRM systems if anti-circumvention legislation is introduced, avoiding a ban on devices that can be used to circumvent DRM systems, reform of the orphan works regime, simplification of copyright clearance, and providing stable funding to Canada’s archives. The letter is signed by 130 of Canada’s most prominent documentary film makers including Oscar winner Denys Arcand (indeed, Quebec film makers represent the largest group of signatories).

The same situation exists for students and teachers putting together educational media. Tools like Creative Commons Search help to find that small percentage of CC licensed work, but orphan works are a huge untapped mine for learning. Let’s see a similar letter from representatives of the educational field.

Saving Winter

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The first walk in the snow is a yearly ritual for many Canadians. For me it marks the end of a season, swapping cycling shoes for ski boots, and brings back memories of sliding for hours after school until supper.

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Last night we watched An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore’s excellent documentary on the incontestable fact of global warming. I had been avoiding it for a while because I did not want to get too depressed. I found that the film was uplifting, even with its extremely serious message, because we can do something about global warming – now. Please watch this film.

I also purchased the book World Changing, and look forward to reading about and implementing better ways of living with our only planet. Personally, I want our children to continue to enjoy many more Winters, but we are in grave danger of severe climate change. Now is the time to act and we intend to do our part.

The Six Nations Model

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I’ve mentioned the Six Nations governance model before, as described in the book, Systems Thinking: Managing Chaos and Complexity, and am trying to align this with industrial-age corporations. Basically, I’m wondering how this pre-industrial governance structure could be used today. The author describes how it recently worked for the Oneida Nation. Could it be used elsewhere, or does it need a certain culture?

The Six Nations culture had given specific roles to its member tribes, namely Wolves (Pathfinders); Turtles (Problem Formulators); Bears (Problem Solvers). Solving problems (AKA governance) went like this:

  1. Wolves – Set direction, and identify relevant issues
  2. Turtles – Define the problems
  3. Bears – Generate alternatives and recommend solutions
  4. Turtles – Check on the potency of the recommended solutions
  5. Wolves – Integrate the solutions, keep the records, communicate the decisions

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Could this be incorporated into a legal corporate structure (for profit or non-profit) and if so, would it differ from a governance structure with a Board of Directors, CEO and various executives?

The advantages I see with this governance model is that power is distributed but the roles are clear. It also builds in peer reflection through the process.

Proximity

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Graham Watt and I get together for coffee fairly regularly and discuss almost everything, ranging from kids to education to communications theory. Graham has posted several comments on this blog and recently I took one of his comments and made it a post, The Communication of Bias. I thought that it might be a neat idea to have Graham as a guest blogger, so here is a post that has more humour than any of my straight-laced, and always trying to be balanced, blog posts. They may even a become a regular feature.

We don’t have a productivity problem. We have a proximity problem.

by Graham Watt

We’re just too damn close to the U.S. Not politically. Physically. It’s turned us into American junkies. We’ve faced south so long now our asses are frozen solid. We don’t even bother inventing anything any more because they’ll do it sooner or later down there and we can just copy or borrow. Business learned this ages ago.

But it’s not just business. It’s us too. Look at television shows and movies. We’ll take their mediocre lives over our mediocre lives even if they don’t ring exactly true. We can compensate for that. Let them make them down there. We’ll just watch them.

All these problems with our low productivity relative to the U.S. can’t be solved only in economic terms. They have to be solved by addressing our proximity problems.

We have to get a handle on where we are, not who we are.

That’s snow out there, not rose petals. And that tingling feeling in your fingers isn’t stroke onset, it’s frostbite. I once saw a piece in the Montreal Gazette during a cold spell which showed us how to put plastic bags in our shoes to keep warm on cold days (an article taken from a Fort Lauderdale newspaper). I read that and I swear I could hear a whirring sound as all those fur traders buried on Mount Royal started spinning in their tombs. We haven’t got a clue where we are. It’s like we’re ducktaped to the side of a manic rhino lumbering through a swamp (Boy, I hope he knows where he’s going!).

Yes, proximity is a problem, isn’t it?

Who needs research when you can just let those other folks do it. Yet, there was a time when we actually did some neat innovative stuff. That was back in the days when pawsta was pronounced pasta. and Viet Nom was Viet Nam.

We were a big physical country then with very few people and airports, so deHavilland Canada designed Short Take-Off and Landing aircraft (STOL). The Beaver, the Otter, the Caribou, the Buffalo, (Gee, they even had Canadian type names too).They could land on little airstrips and lakes throughout the country. We sold tonnes of them. Most of them are still flying around, because they’re simple and you can fix them easily.

Remember the DeHavilland Dash-7? With the world’s most advanced STOL technology; a 55-passenger pressurized aircraft as quiet as a school bus, that could land in 1000 feet. When they tried to let it fly into Toronto Island airport there was an incredible outburst of indignation. All about noise and danger. You would have thought it was the Hindenburg with a load of plastique in it. The real problem was the Dash 7 was designed and built right in Toronto. Had it been designed and built in, say, California, the Toronto city fathers and those environmentally sensitve mothers in the Beaches would have been clambering over themselves to buy this thoughtful, sensitive and passive technology. Would have reflected well on the city. But hey, all the good stuff is down south isn’t it?

So it isn’t just business, it’s us. We don’t screw up because we try. We screw up because we don’t have to try. And it’s all of us.

That’s the proximity curse.

So forget about productivity. Our problem is proximity. We have great copyability because of it. We’re actually quite nice people, given that we look at the U.S. as if it was the J Crew catalogue.

But does anyone else actually believe proximity’s the problem? Not on your life. A new study from the Conference Board of Canada recommends that we hunker down even closer to the U.S. to get our productivity up. What’s that mean, exactly?

Copy more stuff?

Assemble more of their cars here?

Watch more of their TV programs?

Speak more like they do?

There was a time when we had clearer heads. Must have been a zillion years ago. We liked the squeak of snow on leather. An old fur trade doctor named John Rae once snowshoed from Hamilton to Toronto just for a cocktail party. No big deal. And I’m certain he wasn’t wearing a “hoodie”. In those days, another guy invented a motorized contraption that could go like crazy on all kinds of snow. sold a slew of them. Ended up making planes, trains and boats, and got so big and successful we started hating the whole idea. It wasn’t normal doing that stuff in Canada.

A long time ago another bunch of guys used to get in canoes and go from Montreal all the way to Alberta and back again. All without Vibram soles on their boots or Gore-Tex jackets, GPS’s or Tony Robbins CD’s. And they did it while singing songs. They had nature-tech canoes made of bark and if one sprung a leak they stopped, got some spruce gum from a nearby tree and some bark, patched it up, and got going again.

What was their secret? Well, they did stuff relative to where they were, not some place 500 miles south. And they weren’t doing this because they heard other guys were doing it in the U.S.. They did it for money and adventure. Ahh, you say, but that was then and this is now. Well, I have news for you. It’s only now in the U.S.

The day we understand that the problem is proximity, and we turn around and let our asses thaw, is the day our productivity will begin to grow.

Shake your cognitive tree

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It’s good to come across something that really makes you question things that you probably don’t even think much about consciously. I save up podcasts for long drives and yesterday I spent about six hours in the car, catching up on a long list of archived podcasts. Two of these were absolutely fascinating, and I would suggest listening to both, in this order:

1. Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith, with The Future of Ideas:

Sam Harris debates many points relating to religion, particularly the dangers that can be brought about by religious extremists — in any faith — around the world, and in our own country. Even religious moderates play a role by allowing the intolerance of extremists to grow.

2. Sue Blackmore on Memes:

Memetics is an intellectually rich but controversial field which seeks to explain how our minds and cultures are designed by natural selection acting on replicating information, just as organisms evolve by natural selection acting on genes. Sue Blackmore, one of the field’s leading thinkers, skillfully unfolds the major arguments for a meme’s-eye view of the world, and explores the implications for humanity. Are our brains best seen as machines invented by and for propagation of selfish memes?

Much food for thought and further conversations (or meme spreading).

Getting to Maybe – Review

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I’ve just finished reading Getting to Maybe. This is a book about social innovation in complex environments (our world). It covers the stories of many social innovators and discusses the various parts of a common path that many take. This is a path with no map and no destination. Getting to maybe, or “if only …”, starts with the first step of realising that here and now is the best and only place to start. A chapter is dedicated to each identified step, but these are more like checkpoints than actual steps in a process.

Next is standing still, which is the requirement to reflect and listen, now that you’ve got the fire burning for some decisive action. The tension between reflection and action is a major theme of the book. Powerful strangers are those who can suddenly help you and your cause, now that you have started the journey and have opened your mind. Some time during the journey you get into the groove and “let it find you”, playing part of a cast, as in a jazz ensemble. The worst point is cold heaven, when you feel hopeless, as the authors say:

“Those who struggle to make a difference have to face two paradoxes. The first is that success is not a fixed address. The second is that failure can open the way to success.”

From cold heaven may come a chance to have hope as well as a pragmatic understanding of the realities of the world, or to “catch the moment when hope and history rhyme”. This is the time to ensure that whatever has been created does not stagnate and may even call for creative destruction as the environmental landscape changes. Finally, the door opens and the end of one social innovation can lead to the beginning of another.

There are no answers in this book but I think that it may be an inspiration for many who are on the journey of social innovation and need to know that they are not alone.

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Cappuccino U

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I love those serendipitous moments on the Web. I happened across Helge Scherlund’s blog via Technorati and noticed a post recommending the e-book, Cappuccino U, available from Spotted Cow Press. This short, CC-licensed book is by Jerome Martin, of Edmonton, Alberta and it is a pleasant flow of a read that discusses formal education, personal learning and the role of third-spaces. It’s a great introduction to learning for the 21st century:

This e-book is about a new style of learning in which innovative people have combined new information technology with traditional ways of learning to develop a new, personally-driven approach to learning. It happens predominantly in “the third place”, a location that is neither home nor office. The third place is usually a coffee house, one which is designed to serve this particular audience.

People gather in their favourite third places to work, relax, visit and learn. They work independently and in groups. Some of them use computers which may or may not be linked to the web. Some are taking courses online; others are writing books like this one.

This is Cappuccino U.

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