Learning

Learning

Performance Technology – the missing piece

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This week at the LearnNB quarterly meeting the key area of focus was gaming, especially Serious Gaming. The interest in gaming reminds me of the interest in online learning around 1997. I think that e-learning, however you define it, and serious gaming, however you define that too, each have their place – as possible interventions for improved performance.

However, there is still a lack of pertinent discussion around the essential component in this whole business – analysis, or figuring out what solution is best. We have to better understand how we get from perceived problem to viable solution when dealing with human performance. How do we go from, “Our sales staff aren’t producing” to “let’s use the sales simulation game”. ISPI provides a venue for those discussions, but sometimes it’s a voice in the wilderness.

Another source of information is Jay Cross, with workflow learning, based on some of the principals and theories of HPT. Jay recently highlighted some excellent presentations from Training 2005, and Harold Stolovitch’s handout is a great aide-memoire for any HPT practitioner. You have to have some background in the field to decipher these notes, as the detailed explanation is lacking, but just the section on feedback is well worth reading. Feedback is often misunderstood, and frequently misused. Jay also refers to a Rummler-Brache white paper on business defragmentation (neat term), in this post. As anyone in the field knows, Geary Rummler has advanced much of our praxis.

Until we extend performance analysis into the everyday business workplace, we will continue to chase after each new performance tool. Every tool has its place, but good diagnostics, based on validated theory & practice, will help to make real progress in improving performance.

CSTD Learning Innovations Symposium

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For the first time, the Canadian Society for Training & Development (CSTD) will be holding its Symposium outside of Ontario. The 2005 Learning Innovations Symposium will be held in Fredericton on 16 & 17 May. We expect an intimate gathering of about 200 attendees and another 200 or so for the live webcasts. The event will be digitally archived. The host agency is LearnNB, of which I’m a member and I will be presenting, with my colleague Albert Lejeune, two sessions, one French & one English, on a case study of a healthcare project that we did with my partner company, Mancomm Performance.

Apprentissage et communautique en services de santé
En 2003-2004, l’équipe Mancomm Performance a collaboré avec le Centre hospitalier Pierre-Le Gardeur (Lachenaie, QC), à  la mise en place d’un cours en ligne pour les infirmières portant sur l’approche McGill, ainsi qu’à  la création de communautés de praticiens. Depuis l’analyse de la performance au travail jusqu’à  la livraison sur des plateformes MOODLE et MAMBO (logiciels libres), l’équipe a travaillé étroitement avec le personnel hospitalier au moyen d’ontologies de domaine. Dans cette séance, vous allez :

  • Apprendre comment faire une analyse de performance avant de recommander l’apprentissage en ligne
  • Comprendre l’importance des ontologies dans la création des bases de connaissances.
  • Comprendre les bénéfices des logiciels libres pour le support à  la performance.
  • Comprendre la méthodologie, DECLICK, utilisée par l’équipe.


eLearning and Communities of Practice in Healthcare

During 2003 to 2004, Mancomm Performance Inc worked with the Pierre LeGardeur Hospital in the Montreal area to implement online learning for nurses as they adopted the new McGill nursing care methodology, as well as the creation of virtual communities of practice for social workers. From the initial performance analyses conducted on the hospital wards, to the implementation of the open source Moodle and Mambo technology systems, the consultants worked closely with the hospital staff in the development of their knowledge base, using domain ontologies.

  • Learn about the need to conduct a performance analysis prior to recommending any e-learning intervention
  • Learn how ontologies can help with the creation of shared professional knowledge bases
  • Learn about the benefits of using open source software for workplace performance support
  • Learn about the DECLICK methodology developed by the Mancomm team

Other guests include Clark Aldrich, Jay Cross and Stephen Downes. The price is very reasonable [as low as $(CA) 299 or $(US)247] and you can get a discount on CSTD membership as well. Hope to see you there.

OS Portals in Education

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I came across this reference from Linux du-Québec to a study (in French) on the comparitive costs of proprietary and open source portals in education. The study was conducted by Michael Wybo, a visiting professor at the Montreal business school, HEC, who specialises in open source. According to Wybo:

Les coûts d’acquisition de la solution logicielle libre sont approximativement la moitié des coûts d’acquisition de la solution propriétaire le moins chère, et cela en tenant compte des coûts de migration d’une technologie à un autre.
[My translation: Acquisition costs for open source are about half the costs of the cheapest proprietary solution, even when taking into account any system migration costs]

The OS system in question is based on the MILLE project (an open source framework for education). According to the comments on the extract, the complete report is available from CRIM, but is not readily available to the public, even though it appears that public money was used to fund this study.

Does anyone have any more information on this study?

Questioning our Models

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Elliott Masie reports from Hong Kong that e-learning in Asia may have some advantages due to its later start than in North America.

Many Asian countries have skipped the first phase of e-Learning. They didn’t have the model of porting CBT (Computer Based Training) to the web. Instead, they started using e-Learning more recently, avoiding a number of growing pains. For example, we see fewer organizations in the midst of LMS remorse and more sophisticated use of “Google” like search modes rather than long portal lists on learning offering pages.

This got me thinking about my recent conversations with Jon Husband :

… at the same time I keep being surprised by how deeply anchored in existing structures and the dynamics they generate are most peoples’ consciousness and daily work/life habits.
Our comfortable, established mental models slow us from accepting new ones. I guess that’s why it’s so much fun to work with the young.

One challenge in this business of designing learning systems is to constantly question our models and assumptions — a very McLuhanesque perspective: The specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving toward the grand fallacy.

A saying we had in the Army was that the only thing harder than getting a new idea into an officer’s mind was getting the old one out [yes, I was an officer].

Eric McLuhan, “The new media won’t fit into the classroom”

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I had the pleasure of sitting down and reading the Walrus Magazine this evening. There was a rather unflattering article on The McLuhan International Festival of the Future held recently in Toronto. This piece at the end of the article really caught my attention:

“As the last few intellectual thrusts of ‘Probing McLuhan’ wound down, a figure rose from the crowd and said a few words. The voice was eerily reminiscent of the Master, as was the rhetoric. It was Eric McLuhan. ‘The new media won’t fit into the classroom”, he told the audience. “It already surrounds it. Perhaps that is the challenge of the counterculture. The problem is to know what questions to ask.’

For the first time that afternoon there was silence, and it spoke volumes.”

All of the action is outside the classroom — blogs, wikis, IM, podcasting — you name it. Soon, the only place to get away from media will be inside the classroom. Hey, they don’t even have a telephone (c. 1876) in every classroom yet.

The Long Tail

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The long tail has been getting a lot of press lately. The basic premise seems to be that there is a larger market of those willing to buy unpopular items (or services) than all of those people who buy the “hot” items. It puts aside the traditional wisdom to only focus on items that can be sold many times because you may be missing an even larger opportunity. Instead, the long tail theory is to sell a few things to a few people at a time, but many times over. According to Joe Kraus, the same is true for software:

These three facts
  • every business has multiple processes
  • processes that are similar in name between businesses are actually often highly customized
  • there exist a large number of processes unique to millions of small clusters of industries.
means that there is a combinatorial explosion of process problems to solve and, it turns out, little software to actually support them.
Said another way, there is a long tail of very custom process problems that software is supposed to help businesses solve.

It’s like being a specialty bookstore, but with the right software development processes you could create niche software products and be able to sell just one at a profit. Look at his slide presentation for more details on this.

Seth Godin also talks about the long tail and how to approach it as a budding entrepreneur:

So, what I would say to the struggling entrepreneur or pundit or expert or consultant or musician or person spreading that important idea is this:
  1. it’s okay if it doesn’t happen fast
  2. don’t worry so much about getting the approval of those who came before and are farther along the curve
  3. keep costs as low as possible so you can do this without panicking when it doesn’t work so fast
  4. surround yourself with friends and colleagues who “get it” and root for you, even when it’s not going so fast
    (variant: fire the friends and mothers-in-law who aren’t supporting you so much!)
  5. realize that it’s not about you or the way you look or what you wear. It’s about the tail.

His advice is to be patient, persistent and keep your costs low – pretty good advice for any business.

and continuing on this theme …

You can also see the effects of the long tail in academic course blogging, and how the moderator can work with it to support the learning goals in The Learning Blogosphere(2): The Long Tail.

Tagback

Open Source in Education: A European Perspective

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Just perused this 91 page PDF (now available as HTML) produced by Teemu Arina and Timo Tervo of the FLOSSE Posse. This is an excellent overview of many trends affecting online learning. It covers everything from the long tail, power law, connectivism, small world networks, blogs and wikis. It’s a bit short on detail, but if you’re familiar with these concepts, then it’s a fast read. If you’re not familiar with these concepts, then read the references.

The second part of the presentation covers the results of a workshop on open source in education and discusses a number of future scenarios that were ranked by the participants, for instance:

100% [of workshop participants] agreed:


Rip, Mix and Learn is the new metaphor for constructing learning objects

Amateur audio and video enters learning
Connectiveness a core competency
ePortfolios focusing on capturing informal learning appear

These will give you an idea of what has traction on the other side of the pond in the OS world. Most of the paper is CC licensed and there are a lot of interesting diagrams. Definitely a keeper for your digital archives.

Learning Networks – The New Framework

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Stephen Downes presented a work in progress in Palermo this week, Learning Networks – Theory & Practice. In order to better understand it myself, I have put my notes up here, but please listen to Stephen’s audio file and look at his slide presentation. This presentation begs for a lot more discussion. What follows is my summary and any errors or omissions are my own:

First of all, traditional online learning has been institution-based, consisting of online courses, learning management systems, and closed networks of licensed content. Content is seen in terms of course packs and learning design linearly sequencing.

On the other hand, learning networks are not institution-based but resource-based within an open network. On the Web, content is not packaged but aggregated. E-learning is more of an
engagement and a conversation than an event.

From these premises, Stephen has developed several learning network design principles (works in progress he says) that specify how networks differ from traditional learning. These can be used as a means of evaluating new technology, to determine whether it is network-centric (see the slides for details).

  1. Decentralization
  2. Distribution
  3. Disintermediation
  4. Disaggregation
  5. Dis-integration
  6. Democratization
  7. Dynamism

These principles are based on Connectivism (see George Siemens’ post) and Stephen also links these principles to what Robert Paterson has written in Going Home: Our Reformation:

E-Learning has been based on centralized systems

But these centralized systems, such as the LMS, are like a dysfunctional crutch –
There’s so much going on out there – you have to leave the cocoon and experience the web.
Stop trying to do online what you do in the classoom – it’s a different world online.

My own opinion is that the Web offered a lot of options for learner control, but this was co-opted by technology vendors and institutions. For instance, there are still “web-based learning program” that disable your browser’s navigation functions.

The fact is that the genie is out of the bottle, and we are in the metaphorical process of casting off the horseless carriage and adopting the automobile. Stephen’s framework, Rob’s vision and George’s pedagogy provide some of the foundation and now there are new tools, such as DrupalED, coming out of the artisans’ workshops to help us implement this framework. Allons-y!

DrupalED Now Available

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Boris and Will are two of the founding members of a new site called DrupalED with an aggregated edtech feed.

DrupalED is a distribution that combines core Drupal.org with a selection of modules optimized for use in educational settings. These range from K-12 to university, as well as per-class, per-department, and per-institution scenarios.

It is free, open source, libre, and available for you.

I think that this one is going to grow :)

Update: Please read Will’s comment to this post.

Architecture for a better future

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Dave Pollard produces more thought-provoking articles than almost anyone else on the Web. I have used his Natural Enterprise model to inform my own work in developing better business models for small businesses, and now Dave has started to put many of his ideas together in his latest post, Creating a Post-Civilization Culture. His framework consists of four components – Principles, Learning, Enablers & Infrastructure. The premise is that,

With the right principles that can guide our decisions, the learnings to build the new culture properly, and the enabling building blocks, we can create the infrastructure that embodies the new culture.


This framework, coupled with Robert Paterson‘s narrative on the next Reformation, could sow the seeds for some grassroots action. It may be just what we need at the local level to address our own community’s sustainabilty issues.