Learning

Learning

Learn@Work Week

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I’m a bit late, but I guess I should underline the fact that it’s Learn@Work Week in Canada; an event kicked-off by CSTD. Our Premier of New Brunswick is the honourary chair. For me, and many of my colleagues & associates, every week is learn at work week.

In reviewing my own learning, I see that t it has been a very long time since I took any formal instruction. I find that much of what interests me is expensive and for the high price I feel that it’s not focused enough on my personal learning needs. That’s the dilemma with training & education programs. To be able to make any money you have to find an audience that’s willing to pay for the offering. However, in order to attract more people you have to make it less personal. I would love a personalised training program, but I couldn’t afford it and conversely, I find that the more general offerings aren’t worth my time and money. That’s the learner’s dilemma.

Currently, all of my learning is informal.

Masie on Learning Trends

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Elliott Masie spoke via video-conference to the LearnNB – CSTD gathering in Fredericton yesterday. There was not much new for anyone who is closely following the learning field, but that’s not Elliott’s audience anyway. I see Elliott as someone who is there just as new methods and technologies cross the chasm, explaining them for the majority, not the innovators. Here are some of the points that I noted from his presentation on extreme learning:

  • Velocity is increasing in the learning field. This means that production (such as e-learning development) has to get quicker as the pace of technology, business and cultural change increase due to our interconnectivity.
  • Personalisation is being demanded for just-in-time learning (even staggered over time instead of a one-time intervention) that is aligned with learner motivation (just-for-me).
  • The mobile device is becoming the learning platform of choice, especially outside of North America.
  • Content is becoming democratised, as evidenced by the growth of blogs and wikis.

Being absorbed in this field, you sometimes forget that not everyone is a blogger or uses wikis for collaborative work and learning. Listening to Elliott is a good indicator of where customers/clients/users are in terms of willingness to try something new. I enjoyed Elliott’s anecdotes the most, as he’s a great storyteller.

Two other points that he made, which are not new but worth repeating, are that we need to create “sandboxes” for people to experiment and fail in a safe environment and that “War Games” can be good practice environments for the real world. Few work environments seem to have sandboxes to fool around with. At Mancomm, we have always created a sandbox (bac à sable) for ourselves and clients, before and during the implementation of a learning or collaboration environment. They work well, and with open source software, they’re cheap.

During my +20 years in the military I was involved in many war games, from ones inside a building with only a map, papers and a few radios to large scale operations with thousands of soldiers. A lot can learned from these “simulations”, which can be quite low-tech. We even had a popular technique called an “in-box exercise”, where you pretended to be in your office and were given an in-box of notes and memos that you had to sort and deal with. The instructors played the roles of various people whom you needed to talk to. Such an exercise could take all day but was a much better learning environment than sitting in a lecture.

The main lesson for me is that we have a lot of techniques and methodologies that can enhance learning. The trick is in matching the right one for the context.

SCORM 2004 Enhancement for Moodle

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Ohio-based DigiLore has released enhancements to make the Moodle open source & free learning management system compliant with the defence sector’s SCORM (sharable content  object reference model). This combination of private sector development with an open source community platform should be a winning combination and I think that we will see more of this model in the LMS/LCMS field. Basically, it’s cheaper and more effective to only develop the specific modules that you cannot do without, and then use open source modules to handle the more generic tasks.

Learning Circuits Blog

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The Learning Circuits Blog (part of ASTD and Learning Circuits) went on to the Blogger platform a while back and a few regular contributers have started some interesting conversations. The number of comments attest to the level of reader interest.  The latest post on the need for a Spanish language LCMS is generating some controversy, as is a commentary on Elliott Masie’s comparison of CNN and education.
If you’re in the training & education field then this blog is definitely worth checking out.

Performative Ties

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An article on Performative Ties from Knowledge@Wharton (requires free membership) describes how professional services companies use informal transfer methods to leverage their knowledge. In a study conducted by Prof. Sheen Levine, it was found that:

…what gives firms competitive advantage isn’t just their repository of sheer knowledge, but their use and encouragement of so-called “performative ties” — those impromptu communications made by colleagues who are strangers in which critical knowledge is transferred with no expectation of a quid pro quo.

Performative ties, as described in this article, seem to be similar to the weak ties that could help you get a job much easier than strong, familial ties can. The research on performative ties for knowledge-sharing inside corporations shows that loose peer-to-peer networks are effective ways to transfer implicit knowledge.

I think that those same performative ties exist outside these professional services companies, especially amongst bloggers. Reading or commenting on a blog creates a weak tie that can be used to ask a more pointed question via e-mail. I have done this on a several occasions, and have received similar requests. The responses are always quick and candid.

According to Levine, “What they [professional services firms] do well, is move knowledge around effectively, taking the company’s entire accumulated know-how and gathering it quickly to a single point to create a solution for a client.” If that is their prime competitive advantage then looser groups of independent consultants, who share through their blogs, may be just as effective at providing professional services as these more structured companies that currently rule the market. That’s positive news for me and my associates :-)

Learning Design as Gardening

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Jay’s recent post on Another way of Looking at Instructional Design connects well with Rob’s post on Small Pieces Loosely Joined. Jay moves from the traditional ADDIE model of instructional design to a garden metaphor:

Gardeners don’t control plants, and managers don’t control people. The most that either can do is nurture growth by supplying nutrients and pulling weeds. Gardeners and managers have influence but not absolute authority. They can’t make a plant fit into the landscape or a person fit into a team.

Learning is a continuous process, not a fill-er-up course and you’re on your way. The garden metaphor could go a long way in changing attitudes about learning and our approach to training and educational design.

Small (Learning) Pieces Loosely Joined

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Rob Wall talks about what he learnt after his DIY Learning presentation. In his OPML presentation (click on the page to continue the 8 page slide show) on eLearning Processes Using Small Technologies Loosely Joined, Rob quickly goes over the argument against monolithic systems that purport to do everything. The major components of small pieces for learning are – blogs, wikis and RSS. The key message here, which I agree with, is that "The components of the DIY eLearning System are the Learning Objects".

Remember – Any digital resource that can be reused to support learning
A blog is a reusable digital portfolio
  • easy content entry
  • comments and reflections by peers
  • student work is published to the world
A wiki is a reusable digital whiteboard
  • Monitor students work on reports as they are working
  • Give feedback instantaneously
  • Publish knowledge to the world

This is still a difficult message to get past many educational institutions and training organisations. You don’t have to spend a lot on the technology. You need to focus on getting the people and processes aligned so that learning happens. Save the money that you would spend on an LCMS and put it into the time to let people develop processes that work for their unique contexts.

Un nouveau blog

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Voici un nouveau blog en français, de Geoffroi Garron, à Montréal: BIOTOPE:

Un blog sur la communication organisationnelle, la communautique, le travail collaboratif, les communautés de pratique virtuelle, le e-learning, la gestion des connaissances, les technologies de l’information et la cybersanté.

New Role for Instructional Designers?

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Elliott Masie in his latest Trends newsletter asks this question:

What is the next role for Instructional Design?

My experiences in instructional design over the past ten years is that it hasn’t changed too much. In the military I learned how to apply the systems approach to training as well as how to create computer-based training, instructor-led training, etc. My conversations with e-learning companies, instructional designers and academics shows that instructional design is still wedded to the course as the basic unit of instruction (I use instruction instead of learning because the former is usually the focus). I believe that there is still a huge gap that instructional design could fill, given the right tools and perspective.

Let me start by saying that my most memorable projects in the learning field have been those that created non-instructional solutions, specifically performance support. These have included online job aids and just-in-time tools to do some specific task. The tools are not that fancy but the analysis required to find the right tool for the context can be quite time-consuming. The cost savings are usually evident and rather significant.

However, you will be hard-pressed to find a program that focuses on ‘how-to’ develop performance support solutions, because developing courses is so much easier. Don Clark has a good graphic on Performance, Learning, Leadership & Knowledge. This is a good place to start to look at the non-instructional side of performance design. My own experience shows that non-instructional interventions (EPSS, KM, CoP) are very intensive at the front end (analysis) but require fewer resources in the middle (design).

In traditional instructional design you may spend up to 20% of your project costs on analysis, but for performance support this amount could go up to 80%. Once the solution is clearly specified, it doesn’t require a factory floor of instructional designers and can be developed by a small team of programmers, graphic artists, etc.

The next role for instructional design should be to get out of the course in a box metaphor. The web as a medium is better suited for non-linear, non-instructional learning programs than for ADDIE-developed courses. Just as the printed book changed academia, so too the web is changing training and education. Get used to it.