Learning

Learning

Wake up and smell the coffee

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An interesting post made by Rob Wilkins, is a confirmatory data point of what I’m seeing in the corporate learning sector:

This morning the CLC (Corporate Leadership Council) released the results of a survey that asked CEOs which areas were to suffer the most in response to the crisis. L&D [learning & development] came out on top at 38%. So this means, globally, that a third of organisations surveyed will stop investing in development of employees. Recruiting was second and IT infrastructure was third.

As I said in Opportunities in Difficult Times, there may be a silver lining, but not for everyone in our business. When your department is number one on the CEO chop list, you should be thinking about your reason for being. Training is seen by this group of CEO’s (and I would wager many others) as superfluous to the company’s bottom line. Obviously all of those initiatives like blended learning, competency-based training and learning style inventories haven’t convinced the boss that L&D is important. Neither have all the ROI calculations that get discussed during training conferences. The CEO and the CLO must be using different calculators.

The reason that these companies will stop investing in the development of employees is that they don’t see a direct correlation to their business. People go on a course and come back no better prepared for work. A successful course is where you learned perhaps 10% of what was covered. The rest of the stuff is interesting and might be useful – some day.

At the risk of repeating myself, the following message doesn’t get through to many training departments, and now they will pay the price.

Too many people in the training department make the leap from a performance issue (lack of skills, abilities, knowledge; lack of access to appropriate data and resources; etc) directly to training as the only solution. This is the wrong approach and the most costly. Even the CEO may play into this, with statements like “We have a training problem” and no one challenges that statement. There is no such thing as a training problem.

Here are some “training problems” that are not solved through training:

  • Unclear expectations (such as policies & guidelines)
  • Inadequate resources
  • Unclear performance measures
  • Rewards and consequences are not directly linked to the desired performance

These barriers can be addressed without training. Only when there is a genuine lack of skills and knowledge, is training required [repeat as necessary]. Training should only be delivered in cases where the other barriers to performance have been addressed. A trained worker, without the right resources and with unclear expectations, will still not perform up to the desired standard.

Training departments have allowed themselves to be lulled into a comfortable spot while times have been good. Everyone feels better after a little training, so that is what was prescribed – for all that ails you. I have met too few L&D professionals who can actually analyze work performance and come up with something other than training as the solution. Well, it seems that the days of the one trick pony are over.

I, for one, do not regret the demise of the L&D function. Perhaps our profession will wake up and start helping the organisations we serve.

For a follow-up on this post, read Tom Gram on What’s a self-respecting learning function to do in an economic crisis?

On the Edge

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Yesterday we presented our session at Corporate Learning Trends and everything that could go wrong, did. Plan A failed so we switched to Plan B which didn’t work so we made up Plan C that limped along for the hour. Jane was stuck in traffic, the technology did not work the way it did the day before and the three of us were multi-tasking so much that we were not as focused as we should have been. So much for life in perpetual Beta. But that’s the whole point — we went out on the edge, practising what we advocate, and failed in so doing. We learned a lot.

www.gapingvoid.com

Sometimes it’s cool to live on the edges but for the most part it’s hard work. Things keep breaking. The business model isn’t proven. The procedures aren’t fixed. The models and metaphors are not understood by everyone. Our new business venture, TogetherLearn, is an edge model, and it will have its challenges, as does my own work based in rural Canada.

When we ran our informl unlearning workshops a couple of years ago we had constant failures with our technology. Some participants did not appreciate this. We could have gone with a bomb-proof solution yesterday but decided to push the technology, and ourselves, to the limit. You only find out if it really works when you do that. Yesterday’s experience reinforced that to be a good teacher you need to be a good learner, so it’s back to the drawing board for me.

Learning Together

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Today, at 8:00 PM GMT we’ll be introducing our new venture, TogetherLearn. Details are on the LearnTrends collaborative site.

This venture is a natural progression of my work over the past decade, after retiring as a military training development officer in 1998, with a freshly minted MEd in hand. At that time, I was reading Jay’s blog and making comments. Jay and I finally met in Moncton about the same time that I ventured out on my own as free agent (and started my own blog) and since then we’ve collaborated on several projects. Much of our work has been around informal learning and performance improvement in the workplace. Through Jay I met Clark and Jane. My work with Drupal, as an early adopter, introduced me to Bill who is now providing our platform of choice for TogetherLearn. The Drupal community is large and dynamic and as an open source advocate, I could not be happier than to support its development.

I see myself as a bridge between theory and practice, or between early adopters and the early majority,  as this picture shows. For me, technology is the application of organised and scientific knowledge to solve practical problems. Some of the methods I’ve developed are in my performance  Toolbox, so that I can share and also learn from others.

Our group is much like what I picture wirearchy to be, which is the clearest view of what I would like all workplaces to become:

a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on information, knowledge, trust and credibility, enabled by interconnected people and technology

AcademicInfo

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I’ve been blogging at AcademicInfo for the past month writing posts more focused on higher education or the issues that I think may be of interest to this audience. Karyn Romeis is also writing a series of book reviews. Drop by if you’re interested and feel free to suggest topics of interest. I intend to address some subjects that I may not have done on this blog. Subjects so far have been about business models for universities, social networks, blogging and literacy.

Corporate Learning Trends & Innovations

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Sessions start tomorrow (Monday):

Come to Corporate Learning Trends and Innovations 2008 if you want to:

  • participate in a stridently unaffiliated event (no Platinum sponsors here)
  • discuss things you don’t find at commercial conferences (we’re indie)
  • take part in an event that’s 100% free (because the web scales)
  • join sessions  anywhere with net access (this is entirely online)
  • track emerging opportunities in learning (if it’s not at the forefront, it’s not allowed in)
  • socialize online with peers and other participants (schmoozing encouraged!)

Don’t forget to join the community on the LearnTrends social networking site.

Toward a Read-Write Society

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With the election over and Bill C-61 dying with the last Parliament, the government is once again looking at making changes to copyright law. In A Copyright Call to Arms published in the Globe and Mail this week, the authors call for consultation from all sides of this complex issue:

Ministers Clement and Moore have a singular opportunity to consult with Canadians to develop reforms that will be fair for both consumers and rightsholders and position Canada for success in the 21st century.

I’ve just finished reading Remix: Making art and commerce thrive in the hybrid economy by Lawrence Lessig and it should be required reading for all politicians involved in re-making copyright policy.

Lessig shows the differences between Read-Only (RO) and Read-Write (RW) cultures and how RO came to dominate in the 20th Century, while RW has been around for as long as humans have communicated with each other. An RW culture emphasizes learning. Lessig’s view is balanced and he does not call for the abolition of copyright but mostly for the removal of copyright protection from non-commercial uses. He uses US law to make his points, but much of what he says is applicable to other Common Law jurisdictions.

Perhaps the most damning indictment of current copyright laws is that they are making criminals out of an entire generation:

But the real failure of this war [on copyright violation] is the effect that this massive regulation has had on the basic integrity of our kids. Our kids are “pirates”. We tell them this. They come to believe it. Like any human, they adjust the way they think in response to this charge. They come to like life as a “pirate”. That way of thinking then bleeds. Like the black marketers in Soviet Russia, our kids increasingly adjust their behavior to answer a simple question: How can I escape the law?

It’s time to stop this madness and help our children become better citizens, not line the pockets of a few multinational corporations. Non-commercial copyright infringement should not exist and our educators should be leading on this issue. We don’t need special rights just for educational institutions, we need to encourage RW creativity for lifelong learning.

For further reading, see my bookmarks on copyright.

Post Work Literacy

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The Work Literacy online learning event is over and many of the participants are now at DevLearn08 and I might surmise that they’re connecting with some folks they met during the course.

Our learning community event spanned six weeks and had 766 registered users at the end. When Michele, Tony and I initially discussed the program, we expected perhaps sixty participants. However, the large size did not detract from the learning and was not a burden for the facilitators. First of all, we developed all activities for three levels of participation: Spectator, Joiner, and Creator. The majority fell into the first category and the Creators took on the role of facilitating where necessary. For me, a highlight was Paul Lowe’s live web presentation on his use of blogs for a Photo Journalism Master’s programme. It was good to see some early initiatives taken by the members, such as French language forum started by Stéphane Wattier. The Creators made it easier for all of us.

We decided to use Ning as the main course site because it gave us several tools in one application and it’s free, which fit in with our non-existent budget. The only missing application was a wiki, but we were able to add in a link on one of the main Tabs and connect with PBWiki. Interestingly, the wiki, which was supposed to be used to synthesize the previous weeks, was taken up by only a few people.

Participation ebbed and flowed, with 198 discussions on the Introduction forum. The first three weeks (Social Networks; Social Bookmarks; Blogs) also saw more activity on the Forums. A drop in participation may have been due to the length of the course. In my own case, I was much busier with work demands in the later weeks of the course.

So what did I learn or what was reinforced?

  • A loose-knit online learning community can scale to many participants and remain effective.
  • Only a small percentage ~10% of members will be active.
  • Wikis need to be extremely focused on real tasks/projects in order to be adopted.
  • If facilitators can seed good questions and provide feedback, then conversations can flourish.
  • Use a very gentle hand in controlling the learners and some will become highly participative.
  • Design for after the course, using tools like social bookmarks, so that artifacts can be used for reference or performance support.
  • Create the role of “synthesizer”. I found it quite helpful when Tony and Michele summarized the previous week’s activities.
  • Keep the structure loose enough so that it can grow or change according to the needs of the community.

To find out what others thought about the course, read the comments on, Was this course successful. How do we know? [Dead link, as we didn’t take up Ning on their paid service option. See more post course notes here: Tools – Social Networking – Social Media & Learning]

Portlets and widgits

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My keynote at SkillSoft’s Canadian Perspectives conference yesterday gave some advice to the training department and how it may need to change to meet the demands of a complex environment. Several people said that they found the talk interesting and I will take the notes and feedback to write a paper on the topic which I should publish in a couple of weeks. All references to this presentation are on my Delicious bookmarks.

During the day I attended some breakout sessions, mostly focused on advancements in SkillSoft’s product and service lines as well as a few customer case studies. The first presentation of the day covered three market shifts that the company sees as having an impact on its business: mobile devices; ubiquity of content; and talent shortages.

I also noticed a theme that learning content has to move outside the LMS. The LMS is perceived as an appropriate tool for tracking objects but learning activities are being pushed outside the LMS box. SkillSoft’s strategy is to use an open (not open source) architecture to plug into other systems with “portlets”, which are similar to the web widgits that you see on most blogs today. It all reminded me of a discussion I had with Mark Dowds at the Brandon-Hall conference last year. Mark knows information technology but was new to e-learning. After a few days of presentations, Mark told me he had finally figured out what an LMS is, “It’s just another widgit”. It looks like that’s the way this technology is going.

Advice for the Training Department

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Last week I wrote about The Training Department in the 21st Century, part of a presentation I will be giving in Toronto on Thursday. This new model that I propose, which has its roots in knowledge management and wirearchy, is an attempt to take the theory and make some practical recommendations for those who have to do the day to day work.

The model is centered on Connecting and Communicating to enable knowledge flow in the organisation and is based on three processes:

  1. Facilitating collaborative work and learning amongst workers (esp. as peers).
  2. Sensing patterns and helping to develop emergent work and learning practices.
  3. Working with management to develop appropriate tools and methods for the workplace.

Here are some specific recommendations that I’m putting forward for the “new” training department:

  • Be an active & continuous learner and engage in activities that take you out of your comfort zone, so that you know what it’s like to be a learner.
  • Be a lurker or a passive participant in relevant work-related communities (could be the lunch room) and LISTEN to what is being said.
  • Communicate what you observe to people around you, solicit their feedback and engage in meaningful conversations.
  • Continuously collect feedback from the workplace, not just after courses.
  • Make it easy to share information by simplifying & synthesizing issues that are important and relevant to fellow workers.

None of these require Web tools or techniques but they can all be enhanced by the Internet.

NB Learning Industry

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I was recently asked by a consultant to help develop an asset map for the local learning  industry:

NRC-IIT [National research Council, Institute for Information Technology] and the Province of New Brunswick, via Business New Brunswick, are partnering to conduct two asset mapping projects. These asset maps will identify strengths, resources, and opportunities that exist within two key sectors in New Brunswick: Health/Life Sciences and Advanced Learning Technologies.

The goal is to develop a sound base of information to support the development of new strategic plans for both sectors. Additionally, the asset mapping projects will help to further forge connections between individuals, organizations, and institutions within these sectors and to provide a catalyst for investment and the formation of new collaborations.

I declined, stating that I had been involved in two such reports (1999, 2004) and that I didn’t feel like going through the process a third time. I had also put forth some recommendation on this blog in Rx for NB Learning in 2006.

The major recommendation made in 1999, while I was at the CLT, was that the Industry should move away from off-the-shelf content development and increase services such as performance improvement consulting and performance support solutions. This was ignored. In April 2002 the provincial government even purchased shares in Content Alive Inc. This company later became Vitesse Learning which closed in bankruptcy in 2007.

In 2004, I recommended to focus more on European markets and less on US ones. Instead, the government sponsored more US trade missions. I specifically recommended starting a new focus on a selected field such as open source for learning; performance technology or simulation & gaming. Open source would have been a good niche. Imagine if the province was now a centre of excellence for Moodle.

I have always seen the key to innovation being about people, especially educated, motivated and creative knowledge workers, who come from a wide variety of cultures and experiences. A diverse industry could capitalize on opportunities and markets throughout the world. Our province has home-grown, entry level skills in abundance but a major gap is  business leadership.  Generally speaking, the higher level business, technical and learning skills are in short supply, and these skills are necessary to create and grow companies. By focusing on making the province attractive for experienced individuals, the industry would be able to grow.

Finally, I think that a non-profit chaordic organisation (PDF), as recommended by Rob Paterson on the Fast Forward Blog, might be a better structure than the some of the models tried already. I hope that the asset map that is being developed will be published and that it will be made freely available for open discussion and even for remix.