In the Middle of the Curve

The Last of the Geriatric Pets

2011-06-22T19:56:00.000-04:00

Had to put Spike down this evening.

16+ years.

Rest in peace, buddy.
Tell Kaia and Chainsaw I said hello.

#iel11 New Blog Link

2011-06-10T09:01:00.000-04:00

Hi Guys! I have added a link to the blog so you can read all of the posts I created for Innovations in eLearning 2011.

Or you can just go to the address below.
http://in-the-middle-of-the-curve.blogspot.com/search/label/iel11

Thank you all for your support, encouragement and awesome ideas during the conference.

Who knows, maybe I'll start blogging in this space more frequently.

#iel11 Blended Models for Learning

2011-06-10T08:39:00.000-04:00

Presentation: Blended Models for Learning - Applications of Augmented Reality
Presenter: Kris Rockwell

Augmented Reality - "A live direct or indirect view of a physical, real-world environment whose elements are augmented by virtual computer-generated sensory input, such as sound or graphics."

Layers - looking through device w/ image of physical space overlay with a physical layer."
- Like heads-up display in airplane

Augmenting view of what is out in real world.

Roku's Reward (shown again)
- typically what think of with augmented reality

Augmented reality - also 1st down lines in football broadcasts
- 1st big implementation Boeing 777, augmented reality performance support

Folks still looking at handhelds with camera on other side.

Augmented - look at the codes and may get image / play pieces.

If you want to see what is going on in the industry - look at games
- iToy Sony and Sony Pets

Markers used to be pieces of paper - starting to be able to do more complex markers.
- Still need markers physically somewhere.

Nintendo 3DS demo (don't bother with sound)

Sony has fighting game that you can do anywhere. (?)

Limitation with markers - have to be somewhere. Can't take camera off it.

On-the-job performance support tools.

BMW Augmented Reality Glasses - performance support with all of the needed steps
- All of this is prototype
- Focus on performance support and steps. (I could use this for my car...)

Maintenance of Armored Personnel Carrier Turret - working system

We can also look forward to voice recognition.
- Can tie back to technical docs and drill down so all reference here.
- Recognizing shapes / pattern recognition

You know a technology is getting popular when marketers are using it.

Topps 3D live baseball cards

Augmented reality does NOT have to be 3d
- Doesn't have to be high end and fancy

User has phone, uses camera and looking at point of reference.
- ie look at building and get information about that area.
- When look at education - new step. We have the education available
+ the devices have geolocation
+ I can get info on that item. Useful info

Frequency 1550
- This was demoed on a feature phone.
- Students learning about medieval Amsterdam though GPS in phone
- Communicating back in classroom
- Made into game - could set up competition to disorganize the other group
- done by 7scenes.

Information relevant to where you are.

Layer (free app for iPhone)
- uses location if use Maps.
- There is actually a twitter feed and see who tweeting around you.

The Nokia 1100 - most popular cell phone in the world
- Inexpensive
- Not a ton of features
- Good battery life

Don't think necessarily look at expensive devices.
- Remember the folks without iPhones and Android
- They can still access augmented reality pieces
+ Ex. Public Record Pittsburgh - can get info through text message , SMS.
+ SMS, voice etc. Audio-pieces available.
+ Plan - get other locations and put up QR codes (this is also simple. Remember when this wasn't)

Content should be separate from devices. (separate discussion).

QR Codes - still pretty new in US. In Japan for years. We still have to remember to download a QR Code reader.
- You can do this with a QR Code and a web link. Not as fancy, but accessibility and gets the job done

Use geolocation on phone - ex. powerlines. Each power line location has GPS coordinate. Then can create overlay with impt information about that node.

AR Development tools
- Metaio Unify SDK

- Layar SDK - xml-based and free. On web. Will publish through app itself.

- QCAR SDK - also bridge with Unity engine (3d game engine) so can publish very complicated stuff.
+ Unity publishes on many platforms.
+ Ac

A Useful Conference Game

2011-06-10T08:22:00.000-04:00

Stephen Martin (@smartinx) and I came up with this during the Innovations in eLearning Conference. Not necessarily because they did a bad job supplying power (they didn't) but because I have been to too many technology conferences where folks are fighting for the few power outlets in the ballrooms and meeting rooms.

How many technology conferences have you been to where you can't find an outlet and your battery is close to dead?

Conferences in older hotels or where they rented a very large ballroom cut into small rooms are notorious for this. Especially with the ever-increasing AV needs of presenters.

So what if you turned the hunt for electricity into a game?

As soon as I thought about this - I thought of my blogging mentor, Brent Schlenker. He's in the throes of final prep for mLearnCon, a conference I am sorry I won't be attending this year.
--------------

The Game: Find the power outlet! (I'm sure we can come up with a snazzier name)

Basic rules
- Limited to the conference area
- Can include hallways
- Must be a live functional outlet (as in - can you actually use it to charge your computer)
- Outlets used by the hotel AV staff = 0 points
- More esoteric the outlet location - the more points :)

Ideas
- Hashtag
- Allow them to use cameras
- Maybe add clues to the power outlets ;)

---------------
Brent thought this was hilarious.

I do too - but I also see this as a serious (and seriously useful) game.

At least there is a built in reward :)

I knew my events background would come in handy one day.

#iel11 Mobile Learning for the Acquisition Workforce

2011-06-09T16:02:00.000-04:00

Presentation: Mobile Learning for the Acquisition Workforce
Presenters: Rebecca Clark, Mark Oehlert, Roy Stiles

(came in 1/2 way through)

Not just mobile device - think about mobile people.

Took a step back - what are we trying to accomplish?
- What do we need to design to?
- When look at mobile - went back to web sites
- setup for app development gave them a chance to really look at strategy and tactics for mobile learning

You will have a hard time making your content perfect for all devices.

Existing Asserts and Systems
- Asked the workforce - what do you REALLY want to see

Leave aside device discussion entirely - what do you want the user to get out of it?
- How will they interact?

Phone - ability to do audio
- But we think about - how do we get more text on the screen?
- How are they already using the device?

What tools are your users using?
- Is there standardization? Probably not.
- Where are they accessing the information?
- You may need to set requirements, especially initially

Can create content downloaded to device - get info to user where they do not necessarily need to be online - why HTML5 can be very powerful.

Lessons learned - just get in the game / get started.
- Don't discount the free and very small projects.
+ Example - Wordpress. Esp. mobile templates which are automatic.
+ You can use Wordpress as a website.

Sometimes - your org does not NEED best in class tools. What fits best in your environment?

Don't underestimate Camtasia and other cheap applications that can work in your device.
- YouTube - successful in any device. Leverage that. Also good for leading edge.
- Facebook - take advantage of that mobile interface (groups and can use as portal)

(audience) But what about the demand?
- YouTube now has record now button. (hmm...may need to try this)
- Mark O doing a survey - what technologies are you using? How many want to access DAU content on mobile device? 70% no - but could see that 75% with smartphones DID.
+ Now can ask workforce, how many have smartphones?

(oooh - found the record from webcam button under Upload in YouTube)

We don't want to underestimate the change of mobile.
- Put content out there in anticipation of demand
- We are within a year or two of desktop becoming less important and mobile dominating.

We KNOW the demand is coming. Shifting to a mobile devices.

Please do not put entire courses with next buttons in mobile environment

Allow people to discover along the way.

Focus on systems, learning products and tools.
- eventually will be coming up with standards, processes and checklists. But still in experimentation stage.

Existing Systems - how do we approach them?
- Did complete inventory of resources (back end, front end and infrastructure) available.
- What has been distributed to the environment
- Talked to vendors - when are you developing mobile interface?
+ Let the vendors do the work.
+ Of course, lots talking "next spring"

Not every part of every system needs to have content pushed to mobile.

Came up with developing mobile portal. Auto redirect from phone.
- Content from original site + add to push content depending on category
- Under design now
- Goal: don't have to remember 15 different URLs.

User interface (and all aspects) incredibly important
- Mobile Web Guidelines
+ If have mobile site - users come. Don't like, will leave and NEVER return.
+ Has to be functional.

Developing Assets
- DAU tends to create long monster courses (30-40 hour courses)
+ 40 hours of mobile delivery not going to work.
- Focusing on performance support, job aids, lessons learned etc

Everyone learning it's not smart to re-create the same thing for a mobile device.

When people learning with devices - they are NOT necessarily at their desks.
- Can do straight audio so may not need to look at device

Focus on smaller projects

Get with folks - what content do you want to put up and will be useful.

Think about - is it appropriate for mobile? Useful? Help at point of need?

Storyboard and look on screen. If it doesn't work - then re-evaluate.
- May be a lot of redesign and changing assumptions as you work. Finding whether it should be native vs. web? How does it look? Can you shrink it?

Performance support tools - what tools can we use to augment a classroom that they can also use in the field.
- "Train the way you fight"

If the tool changes - change the process.
Looking for synergies between training and real life.
Require some predictive ability and determining bang for buck.

Great thing about mobile - cheaper than some other products
- Can create more little products
- Can discard rapidly when out of date
- Opens door to reduce cost of courseware maintenance
- This is how things are working out in real world

ISD / SME - wanted pre-work
- Created podcast with other key stakeholders
- Deliver to students - but too long and in audio and say acronym once, won't remember it. Need to spell out the acronyms
- The students retained a lot more when use pre-mobile work seemed to retain more
- Remember - all audio podcasts

Tools and Applications
- Koala and Foursquare - location-based apps
+ Can create locations and attach notes.
+ With the notes - can send important information
- Cinch - audio-tweet. Long enough to get point across. To web page then twitter.
+ Reminders to people
- Apps for video and pictures

Mobile phones to loop in sales teams - take pictures of it and post. Within minutes, everyone can see displays.
- Get info, reconfigure how go forward.

When looking at applications for deployment - do NOT confuse value with activity

We defined the course as activity AND value.
- What is going to be valuable at the point of performance?
- Go ask them!!!!

Metric - what impacts your end user
- Esp mobile device is PERSONAL to user.
- You are working in their personal space. Honor that.

Look at existing space.
- Think as capability.
- Think as ways of delivering value.

#iel11 Sustaining Quality in Faculty Training

2011-06-09T15:18:00.000-04:00

(Sessions started with discussion of why they are still using paper surveys. Didn't think that was particularly fair to the presenter. Just saying....)
------------------------

Presentation: Sustaining Quality in Faculty Training
Presenter: Dr. Judith Bayless

What is quality anyway? How a customer experiences a result of a service or product.
- Risk exchange between provider and customer / constituent
- Risk measured by perception of value of spending energy on the service or product

Struggling with communicating the value of faculty training exercise back to the organization.
- Ecosystem may be the metaphor going for.

There is a different philosophical way of looking at quality - not straight financial.

Ecosystem- interchange of energy among inter-related parts
- Quality - willingness to exchange energy

The ULTIMATE constituent of the faculty training is the student
- What are the unintended consequences of the training
- How are we tracking the consequences - intended and unintended

IN ecosystem - we survive by sensorial input.
- touch, sight, etc

Their program - they teach SMEs how to become trainers / teachers.
- Need to show competency alignments
- Have 100-400 series courses (like Universities), but it is mapped to different competencies vs. novice to expert
- First couple of years - tend to be teaching. THEN curriculum development.

(lots of talk about faculty hiring and how DAU Faculty Training structured - moving to another session)

#iel11 Mobile Technology's Impact on Learning

2011-06-09T14:43:00.000-04:00

Public service announcement: Below is the link to Karl Kapp's presentation resources. Enjoy.
http://www.kaplaneduneering.com/kappnotes/index.php/2011/06/resource-for-my-presentation-at-innovations-in-e-learning-symposium/

----------------------
Presentation: Mobile Technology's Impact on Learning
Presenter: Tim Bajarin

Technology in Learning - have to dedicate 20 hours per week to keep up in just mobile space.
- Pace of change tough for a technologist.

Jobs understood - his job is to simplify technology

Kids adapt to technology very fast.
- It's part of who they are and what do. Apply to day
- Mobility key component to that

Evolution of the computer (seen in mainframe/server, same cycle mini, same cycle desktops
- Golden Age
- Standard Platform
- Buildup of compatible hw
- Value shift to sw
- Value shift to services

We are at golden age with mobile.
- but currently no standard platform, compatible hw, sw, or services
- Unique opportunities

If you look across devices - multiple op system, multiple applications, no consistency
- Fight between the major platforms
- Right now - Apple will be dominant (iOS), Google (android/Chrome) will be important 2nd
- MS and Nokia - warning: Windows 8 mobile not as well done as Apple's but will be competitive
+ Can take touch API and put on education sw to make work better. Why high in the horse race

Normally - will see with ONE sw standard. MOst likely will have to live with 3 in mobile environment

Enabling next generation mobility
- Increasing CPU power
- Cloud-based apps and services
- Advances in batteries and miniaturization

Movement towards low-voltage is driving improvements in mobility.
- Power devices that run at 2 GHz, but getting close to using sub 1 watt power.
- Major implications for battery life

Tablets - greatest interest in education
- Creating new learning possibilities
- Think about the slate tablets. iPad kinda evolved from that.
+ iPad will (is) be the definer in the market

Tablets - content consumption vs. content creation
- Lean back = content consumption
+ 80% of all computer usage content consumption (browsing, reading, video, music, researching, etc)
- Lean forward = content creation

Can go to mobility device - emphasize content consumption
- In context of learning experience. Before - kid to college, laptop.
- Now - kids buying all in 1 PC OR large laptop that never leaves room and netbook or tablet for class.

iPad in Education

(OK - then I thought about the Lean Back song. Maybe I shouldn't drink so much caffeine at a conference)

Did not find similar example for Android.

Apple side has a huge lead in education (they did in early education too. Remember when it was Macs in the classroom?)

In 2014, Apple will still dominate tablets
- Apple has 2 year lead over competition
- $60 billion in competition
- Volume pre-purchase of component
- World-class supply chain
- Best SW Developer kit
- Attention to detail
- iCloud
+ This is going to cause a level of stickiness to products that we don't understand yet.
+ This will make the user experience far superior to what is out there right now (ie - google should be afraid)

iPads strongest platform for seeing results - as reported by educators

On Android side, lots of diversity

Windows - some devices in 2012 with Windows 8
- Windows on ARM processor will be a big deal. Will force price points of Windows laptops and tablets down.

Mobile eLearning - eventually device independent?
- Student uses own preferred digital device. Use on or off line
- In web-based side of world (HTML5 / HTML6) - able to run locally an app.
+ Video encoder/decoder built in (no separate Flash install)
+ Why Jobs made such a stink about Adobe Flash.
- Right now, we still don't have ubiquitous connectivity.
+ Why we still need to install locally on device

Most SW developers moving to HTML 5 (I think forced by lack of iPad / iPod Flash capabilities)

We need to get tablets.
- Have to use one to understand impact on market
- This is the first footprint where see the breakthroughs
- Tablets are a mobile screen.
- Why important? There is nothing magic in the hardware. Everything is in the software.
- These tools are a vehicle to deliver - apps and web
- Like bigger screen - eyes getting older. Easier to read and view.
+ Your screen to information

We are eventually going to have a bunch of screens in our digital lifestyle.
- Off = blanks.
- We already have screens in cars, refrigerator (some have velcro on ipad, then on cabinets, fridge etc. to post places.)

Your hardware is almost meaningless!

The value is in software and services.

We have to get through these days of "big boom" and device variety.

Eventually - value to the cloud.

The tablet will be how we define the next 20 years of computing.

Apple has such a jump on software and services, others having a hard time matching / leading

Also - this is what the kids are looking at.
(computer died mid way through)

Now beginning to see hybrid slider with keyboards (Bluestacks - Android on Win 8)
- Still want keyboard for content creation

Future of screen technology 2014 (similar to what we saw with Corning. Just another version of our dystopian future. The question - do I really want to be that distracted brushing my teeth?)

Biggest nut to crack in short term
- eRead screen (like Kindle) to LED screen
- Prototypes on market, but not ready yet

2nd biggest nut - sharing data

The technology doesn't sit still.

There is a sea change.
- Mobility + wireless = change in how people use technology to learn, work and play

Who will be the biggest winners and losers?

Secure SMS architecture between devices - ramifications for RIM enormous.
- No pushback from carriers, but wiped out carriers charge for SMS.
- iOS device - guess what, can't charge for SMS anymore for those devices

Steve took shot at hard drive and SMS industries in way we haven't seen in ages.

New category - ultrabooks (last week)
- 50% of laptops will look like Macbook Air
- Whole new level of mobility
- Further dependence on cloud and web

Think of significant movement in voice interfaces in a few years.
- More voice navigation and voice to text.
- Also have some safety issues

Future for desktops
- 1.5 years ago - laptops outsell desktops and declining.
- All in one desktop now stabilize desktop sales (families)
- What finding in homes, parents buying all in ones or large laptops. Becomes home information center.
- Netbooks - parents buy netbooks for kids to keep them from dominating time on desktop. Netbooks now decreasing because being replaced by tablets.

Desktops viable in corporate due to applications.

-----------
They see stuff very far in advanced. Easy to predict if you have seen the very early prototypes.

Surprises in consumer adoption cycles
- No one saw netbooks. They are/were horrible. (please see me trying to type on this thing that I'm using and how my stupid mouse keeps moving on me)

The next big user interface - voice.
- Nuance (Dragon Naturally Speaking), Intel

#iel11 The brief Cover-It-Live experiment

2011-06-09T13:02:00.000-04:00

Hiding out in a vacant conference room again to collect my thoughts and re-charge the batteries (on my laptop and myself)

-------------

My thoughts on the Cover It Live experiment for conference notes:
- This will work best with a twitter session-level hash tag. (This tool during Robert Scoble's widely-reviled presentation 2 years ago would have been priceless.)

- When I write up conference notes, I tend to go back and forth depending on the presentation. I don't tackle these posts in a linear fashion.

- It would be super-cool for aggregating multiple feeds as a live conference event. Kinda like a #lrnchat. Particularly if there is no widely-agreed upon hash tag (or as Dave Ferguson calls them - multiple hashedtags ("n. an incorrectly remembered hash tag")

I do need to play with the video and upload functions. This could be a real powerful tool.

But for this conference, going back to the regularly scheduled workflow :)

Thanks Mark O for the recommendation.

#iel11 Social Media for Trainers

2011-06-09T12:22:00.000-04:00

Gave up on the last session and the experiment.
Cover It Live - not bad, but doesn't fit this particular purpose (notetaking)

---------------
Presentation: Social Media for Trainers
Presenter: Jane Bozarth

Handouts

Example - teaching English in Japan
- Everyone use blogger. Reflection in blogs. Use anonymous names
- Have them reflect on strengths and weaknesses as teachers. In English.
- Using free technologies.

Nothing sophisticated and expensive.

Things you can do with a blog
- Provoke thought.
- Can also do this on facebook or twitter.

Why is writing a blog a concern?
- Literacy concerns?
- How much of your work force not very english-literate. Be mindful of this.

Doesn't have to be writing or essays.
- Can use for other media - pictures, video etc.
- Think as a web site

Often - folks worry more about blog post than facebook or twitter update

Can set up controls - parents have passwords. Anonymity. No pictures of kids.

(spent some time catching up with Koreen during the interactive portion)

One of our problems - we want them to talk about what WE want them to talk about.
- May want to adapt to what they are already talking about.
- We are still trying to push.

Things to do with blog
- Photoblog
- Videoblog (intersession, post work, pre-work, etc)
+ Would be nice to have them apply work.

How is wiki different from blog?
- Everyone with access has access to edit (advantage and disadvantage)
+ Will still needs some policing
- Blog more reflective. Wiki more collaborative (generally)

No control - twitter.

Older participant gets - more hesitant they are to edit someone's work online.
- Including people who are not hesitant to edit on paper

Wiki - use as design tool, community of practice.

Another problem - attracting people to technologies when the tool is not part of their regular workflow.
- (Does it solve a problem?)
- ex. a doc where 17 people collaborating. Google Docs one option. Wiki another.

Find opportunities to put the tools in the workflow day to day.
- Day-to-day problem solving.

One of the things changing in workplace and school - people want to create their own stuff.
- Especially kids.
- Living public documents not a stretch anymore.

ALA Wiki on best practices (will need to ask for access)
- ex. homeschooling children, becoming huge customer base.
- How to raise awareness

Think of a wiki - everyone edit, everyone access (best way to think about it)
- Invite course participants (then rest of org) to contribute tips and tricks
- Give workers create a map of existing process, then work together to create better process.
- Connect remote employees

Facebook - only thing like facebook
- Can mimic social profiles and communities
- More people play farmville than the population of France (just scary)
- this is the extreme.
- How many people ask about how to upload something in Facebook? (very few). What about Moodle? Blackboard?
- Facebook is in their daily life flow.

Remember: What do you want to use the tool for?

Throw it back to the community - they know stuff you don't
- Let them do stuff themselves.
- We can't curate everything

Also - facebook, can make groups private or secret.
- All users have to have account. Do NOT have to be their friends. It was a group.
- Remember, if you don't friend them, don't feed.

If you are worried about your stuff on the internet...uh, internet.

Think about where people are.
- 600 mil people on Facebook
- There are quick apps for Moodle and Blackboard
- But want to be front of consiousness

Facebook is a nice place to create post-class community
- Use as group. Let them talk as they implement new learning

Facebook makes it easy for people to participate.
- Groups, discussions, livechat, quizzes.

Feeding new grads into the course (for Jane's items)
- People voluntarily taking themselves out
- Community of people who took the training and need the info.

Easy Win
- Help maintain learning and community after training
- Start or ask for volunteers regularly scheduled discussion.

Twitter - Jane's favorite tool
- Quick unstructured sharing of ideas, comments, links
- Not for deep thought
- Meant to be used from phone (why have 140 char)

Terence Wing - using Twitter for instructional design

#lrnchat - community of practice.

You have to learn to drink from the firehose. Gets easier as you do it.

All of this can happen on the phone.
- Facebook ap - strips out things on sides

Collaboration activities unique to the virtual world?
- Can bring in people you wouldn't normally have access to. Distant experts.
- realistic practice

Remember: The things you tout as 'benefits' are what people find scary.

Yeah - Facebook blocked, but I have an iPhone.

People would rather spend own money to be able to do what want on device, then company issued.

Social media disaster - usually Organizations!
- Um...maybe spend time fixing work conditions vs. worrying about social media

Trust is cheaper than control - Seth Godin

Next?
- How do you invite interaction (vs. pushing content)?

Try to leave with one sound idea for using ONE of these technologies to replace or extend an existing program.

Read outside of learning and development
- Anthropology
- Sociology
- Psychology

Goal for tomorrow
- Grads of a particular course
- All learners in your org
0 Natural communities (job class, type work)

Everything doesn't have to be in the training department.

#iel11 Gaming Applications for Institutional Instruction

2011-06-09T11:19:00.000-04:00

Gaming Applications for Institutional Instruction

Trying Cover It Live for the blog.
Mark O - I will let you know how this goes.

#iel11 Social Media Bootcamp

2011-06-09T11:18:00.000-04:00

If we don't train people how to do it at work - not like they are not doing it at home.
- WE can help them understand appropriate use.

(Mark never thought he'd see the day)
- DoD Social Media Hub
- Army Social Media handbook

They also put together a really nice app.
----------------
Had a nice conversation with KC, a new social media user.

I wrote this when I first started. It's been 5 years (OMG - has it been THAT LONG?!?!) The feelings still apply.

We are starting to see late adopters with these technologies. Never discount the fear of putting yourself out there.
-------------
Mark Oehlert showed me CoveritLive. I've seen it used. Need to play with it.

------------
Incentivizing social media
- People embrace change when understand positive benefits.

3 hurdles
- fear
- control
- trust

Social Media is about HUMANS
Fear - exposing selves.
Fear - what if people say something bad/stupid/secret? Do you have a phone?

---------------

#iel11 Thursday Morning Keynonte

2011-06-09T10:06:00.000-04:00

Ran into Clark Quinn, then Dave Ferguson and Joan.

Joan noticed that it didn't seem like stuff had "changed" all that much. I would argue that acceptance of the bleeding edge that we have been discussing since at least 2007 is getting greater. We still have to sell these ideas to our clients - who have the notion that "training" = a day in a classroom and multiple choice assessments.

Unlike a few years ago, I now have at least a few clients who are interested in more robust scenario-based training and game-style instructional design.

I see that as a win.

(Oh yeah - small win - found the floor outlet. 50 points!!!!)
-------------------
Presentation: Optimizing Your Return on Social Learning Capital
Presenters: Mr. Cedric Coco and Dr. Tammara Combs

What hearing and seeing C-suite
- Social / secular activities and tactics bleeding into workforce.
- Shift from authority-managed to community-managed content

How do you optimize your investments?

Business Perspectives - preparing the organization for "social"
- Push in investments in technology past 5-6, next 10-15
- How do you convince technology-based investments are good ones
- CEOs and CIOs not agree.
+ Measurement?
+ Finances?
+ Knowledge Transfer?
- Majority agreed - HR (esp Learning function) has been spending $$ on tech. No idea what the return is on these investments.
- Measure effectiveness - tough to measure Learning and Development space.

Performance Inhibitors - what might you be doing to cause your workforce to fail?
- Monitor - don't police
+ Play a facilitation role
+ Community will NOT respond to being policed
- Provide feedback - don't criticize
+ When start criticizing and quantifying feedback, the community will stop providing feedback to you.
+ Communicate in a collaborative trade
-Exert GENTLE control - how do you go about building trust?

Knowledge moving from organization-owned to community-owned.
- More respect knowledge generated from peers than knowledge demonstrated from org.
- ADDIE, ISD etc all based on authoritative source and this knowledge is inflicted on the "unknowing"

Are we prepared to make the shift?

Whenever deploy something now - handbook of rules.
- Usually more rules than content
- Be very selective and gentle in "guardrails" you set
- Allow workforce to evolve and optimize
- Be clear and communicate the "guardrails" (and why)

Build trust and inclusiveness.

What technology has done = make whatever is going to happen happen faster.

Align to the Role
- Job Description
- Incentive Comp/Rewards
- (Hiring Profiles)

Lots of things we do - getting workforce to be / behave different
- We don't often look at the overall design of the actual job
- When didn't get what they wanted, you are training someone how to work that conflicts with the way the job is actually executed.

We put in technology tools to serve and help customer.
- We train them how to use.
- But training may only be 40 hours vs. the other 2040 hours of the year, which is when behaviors actually set.

Originally - eLearning driven by scale and cost. Now - scale and effectiveness.
- This is a big shift.

At end of day - technology way to deploy something

Looking at the job itself is really important
- Activites, governance, incentives, etc
- Gotta make sure all aligned
- When peers not successful - because training and/or tools not align to the job. Job not aligned to reality.

(Importance of the systems AROUND the training. Major major important point. Something that continues to be neglected in our rush to "check the box")

Understand what motivates people to act the way they do - Behavior, NOT technology
- Organizational Design / Effectiveness
- Technology has always been around / changing / evolve.

The constant - changing behavior. Support or radically change.
- Sometimes we forget this.
- Technology has to be applicable to workforce and the jobs (physical role) exists.
+ there could be a YEARS lag between the technology and actually being able to use it.

The intersection - business + social.
- Change of CLO role. Internal fight in organization (esp C-suite) - who is responsible for Knowledge Management / Transfer?
+ CIOs - many feel that since tech-based, they are responsible for it. Noticeable over past 3-5 years.
+ Over 90% CLO - Org Psych, Org Design, etc. By 2006 - less than 20%. Most now 50% engineering and tech or 50% line of business leaders.
-- Exec mgmt, largest set of unmanaged assets are people.
-- No real reports on return on productivity.
+ Marketing - can measure media impression (butts in seats). But exec level, no one actually cares. What actually happens in the field? Did you increase productivity?

- Big phenomenon - measurement and showing ROI on productivity.

Start and Epidemic (Malcom Gladwell 2000 - Tipping Point)
- Learning Strategy + Social Tactics = Realization
- Best to combine solid learning model/strategy (adopt ONE) and social tactics. The tactics need to support strategy.

Marketers always trying to train us to change our behavior.

Gladwell - 3 rules
- Law of the few - just give me a few cool people who share through their social connections
- Stickiness Factor - message making an impact
- Power of Context - humans more sensitive to their environment than they seem

Word of mouth - a piece of extraordinary news travels a long distance in a short amount of time.
- Esp important with social

Promote social roles - can't assign these roles but exist in every community. These are the few.
- Connector - connects people to each other

- Maven - connects people through sharing knowledge. They are the ones that validate your training programs. They are doing it only doing it to keep people "safe"

- Salesman - Uses knowledge to engage and persuade.

We have been social since the beginning of time. We just now have the technologies to be social across time and space.
- Our cycle times have gotten shorter.

Trends in Social Marketing - learn from those who teach in small snippets
- Learn from those who change our behavior.
- Why video works so well - Can show a lot of info in a short period of time.
+ 60% of volume online video
- People in organization are consuming lots of video
- Most 3 minutes or less.
- Leverage technologies they are already using.

Requirements (guardrails) important.
- Also define the outcomes

By the end of 2009, Dell had generated 6.5 mil in sales from Twitter alone.
- Why is your organization blocking social media again?

(Had to stop to deal with a work emergency. Love multitasking)

Content is critical
- Decide on content strategy for company (buy or create)
- Will live somewhere
- Need relevant results in search. Build search mechanism
- Where they are getting to it.
- Good model: Community generates, the content team edits

Invite Critical Mass / Create scale
- Get the "right" people to the thing you are deploying.
- Sometimes, want everybody.
- Right people to right content
- Groupon / Living Social - bringing online back to offline (focus on local commerce)
+ Living Social - invite others, get the deal for change. Generating lots of $$ using peer pressure

Bloomburg - The Online Reviewing Mafia

What is the right mix of online > offline > online

Questions to consider
- How do you create training programs?
+ Why not start with the community first?
- Would you consider designing a course where part of the content is up to the community to design?
- What % of your content is community derived?
- Think about how trainnig would be run if it were done through the "social marketing" perspective? What would you do differently?
- If you gave your training budget to the community, what would they do with it?

Lowes asked this to their people. What would you do with the training budget?
- Came back with - would use the training budget to fix the SYSTEM. T
- (A good way to determine whether training is the thing really needed. Would love to see folks do THIS more often since our clients keep wanting to do "training" for an issue that is systemic)

Remember
- Monitor; don't police
- Provide feedback; don't criticize
- Exert gentle control
- Align to role

Learning strategy + social tactics = ROSLC (return on social learning capital)

--------
Training has to align with what people are doing day-to-day.
- Need to go backwards to organizational design.
- Those day-to-day are HUGE. Redesign the job from an employee perspective.

Marketing is a training function
- Should report to training department since training = change behavior. So is marketing.
- $1 training: $9 marketing

"In times of change, learners inherit the Earth...while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists" - Eric Hoffer

Most orgs trying to readjust business plans for wave of growth next 10-15 years.
- Downturn forcing people to readjust business strategy, even the successful ones

70% now L&D on Leadership training right now (vs. 30% before)

We have generated and created a pool of leaders who have managed in growth economy (last 70 years with minor cycles)
- Where do we find all the leaders who need to manage over next 40 years in flat or down cycle?

---------------
Balanced Measurement
- Show sponsors and contributors what their interaction looks like
- Sponsors ROI
- Community - enable them to learn from the analytics of the crowd.

Cluster programs - given what I am deploying, I need to see X effect on organization.
- What do we need to see in the indicators.

Take the business intelligence engines and add variable for people interventions.
- Put together the correlation between programs and financials etc.

Training groups - don't be afraid to STOP stuff. Every program has a shelf life.
- Strongly monitor
- They (Lowes) monitor customer satisfaction and sales. (Again - what do you want to measure.)

Important for community to see how THEY are behaving.

#iel11 Encouraging Client Self-Sufficiency

2011-06-08T16:38:00.000-04:00

Presentation: Encouraging Client Self-Sufficiency
Presenter: Peter Berking

(not getting into the details of the case study here. Running out of typing energy.)

Case study - 30 minute seat time.
Timeline: Project start 9/1/10. Due date 12/3/10

1 50% time author/developer
Required extensive content collection effort (little time for development)

The eLearning more like an infomercial. Major goal to pump up motivation.

Program itself very new.

Requirements - asynchronous, stand-alone, easily maintained, option for assessments later, no LMS, 508 compliant, high-level with links to detailed info.
- No branching or sequencing needed
- Want to use it for reference later
- Want to scale later
tool.

Main content need to be maintainable.

Requirements not so maintainable below.
- Want level 1 eval
- Capture who use training
- Certificate of completion needed

PowerPoint on steroids. Only used PowerPoint as development
- Using advanced interactive features
- Uses .ppsx files (opens in Slide Show mode)
- Web pages for navigation (powerpoints in a wrapper)
- PDF job aids and links for additional info.

Big limitation to PowerPoint - no variables or conditional interactions.

Navigation files use ASP to externalize content in XML file for maintainability.
- Open them in text editor.

After all topics completed, ASP script activates
- Survey
- Student identity capture
- Certificate of completion
- Minor training to show how client can maintain themselves

Demo is here
Used PowerPoint 2007

Using external XML very common practice
- See Flash coding.

Once open all of them,certificate of completion button activates.

Has instructions on how to get powerpoint in slideshow mode
- Has to be in SlideShow mode to get interactivity to work

Future SCORM options
- Need HTML SCORM wrapper file
- Whether PowerPoint launches within HTML pages or outside of them depends on :
+ Configuration of user's system
+ Version and type of PowerPoint
+ MIME settings on the server
+ Version of PowerPoint

You may want to use tool to convert to Flash or HTML
- Use tool
- Save as XML, Havascript, HTML (only really works in IE)
- Will need to go back to source files and republish as SCORM
- Each slide is separate image. Won't retain interactivity

May also be able to sae as .wmv or .mov, but no interactivity

May also save as jpg or png (but delete pop-ups before saving.

The solution depends on the tool use have.

Advantages of using PowerPoint
- Slides ultimate in reusable content object architecture (can remove, drag around etc)
- Quick and easy to produce (most folks know how to use PowerPoint)
- Does not require DHTML programmer
- Revision tracking in PowerPoint for reviews
- Enables storyboard while authoring (I do this in Captivate)
- Facilitates rapid prototyping
- Files self-contained
- Ubiquitous desktop software (most have MS Office
- Good compression of graphics
- Internal draw tools produce bandwidth-efficient vector graphics
- Robust media handling
- Simplifies file management. Graphics embedded in files.
- Options for printing all screens (PowerPoint. PDF but must parse out popups), different layouts
- Options of downloading files for offline viewing.
- Section 508 compliant, screen reader compatible
- Can alt tag within PowerPoint
- Speaker notes field for scripts for video and audio
- Local users / orgs can edit for their needs.
- Has basic interactive functionality (links, show/hide, rollover not very functional)
- Flexible distribution options (push via email attachment vs pull from web page.
- No browser plugins needed.
- Can model this to organization - (may be less threatening)
- Can use auto-slide timing
- Robust animation features
- Can use ILT course or briefing slides as starting point.

Big caveat
- This is NOT an eLearning format out of the gate. Still need to design.
- Many LMSs have assessment authoring built in.

Use PowerPoint as content core, then build out more robust interactive pieces.

PowerPoint is awesome baseline.

#iel11 Why 3D, Games and Simulations Matter

2011-06-08T16:02:00.000-04:00

Had a chance to catch up with Dr. Kapp before the afternoon keynote.

Talked a bit about how much energy blogging requires. Especially when you are the throes of other creative projects. He has book writing as an excuse. My excuse...not so good ;)

--------------
Presentation: Why 3D, Games and Simulations Matter for Learning and Collaboration
Presenter: Karl Kapp

Often - we use technology. Think the shiny object solve our problem.

Right tool for right time makes sense.

Learning in 3d
Kapp Notes

Identity - no deep learning that takes place without identity
- We always wanted characters
- Research indicates that human social models influence behavior, believe and attitudes (Bandura, 1986 - Social foundations of thought and action)
- Learners perceive and are influenced by 3d representations of ourselves, help us learn - even when adapability limited

Can experience as avatar change a person's real life perceptions?
- (Audience) Yes.
- Yee & Bailenson (2006) - Walk a mile in digital shoes
+ Age person in digital time. Watching yourself age a way that influences behavior
+ Take negative stereotypes of aged people and made YOU an aged avatar. Found they had more empathy towards aged.

Are 2 avatar better than one?
- Motivator / Expert vs. Mentor
- Yes - 2 avatars better than one. Have a motivator avatar and an expert avatar.
- Single avatar, people would approach as only motivator or only expert

3 groups
- 1) Avatar looks like you lounging
- 2) Avatar that does not look like you exercising
- 3) Avatar that looks like you exercising
- Avatar that looks like you exercising - more likely to exercise 24 hours later.

Starting to see the more an avatar looks like you, more vested you are, more likely to demonstrate behavior change in real life.

Learners more influenced by an avatar of same gender and ethnicity/race with some interesting exceptions
- Middle school kids with avatar representing engineer. Female engineer more influential about making both male and female kids think about having a career as an engineer than a male engineer avatar.
+ Most role models for middle school children female teacher. Result: more female influence
+ Male avatar may be more intimidating.
+ Not sure. Research doesn't know yet.

- In Games - males who chose female avatars, behaved with male behaviors. Females with male avatars still showed female behavior (study done with 5th graders)
- Found same that racial bias also persistent in virtual world.
- (audience)Some men choose to be women in virtual worlds because more support.
- (audience) If avatar presented realistically (overweight) - more motivated to lose weight in world, which then transfers to real world.

If you think of technology timespan - we are only day 4 on birth of virtual world.
- Still have learning curve, how to move avatar around.
- Not too long ago - showing people how to navigate hyperlinks

Virtual environment - More efficient and effective learning environment for higher order skills.
- Not so good at lower order.

But think about it - we don't really need to memorize anymore. We can look stuff up.
- Still need to know declarative knowledge.

People learn facts better when embedded in story vs. lists.

Can we take a virtual world, tell a story related to our job, embed the declarative knowledge within.
- Design issue.

People tend to conform to how their avatar appears regardless of how it is perceived by others.
- Taller avatars more aggressive negotiators than shorter avatars
- Took people out of world - the folks who were taller avatars negotiated more aggressively in real life 15 min later.

People project attributes they would like to have on avatar - but on superficial level
- Different point of view impacts how you think about yourself and avatar
- Still have conflicting research in terms of relationship between avatar and person

Which builds more confidence classroom or simulation?
- Simulation - 20% higher.
- Situated cognition, we can immerse person in environment
- Recall better closer we are to our real environment.
+ We don't apply information learned in classroom in classroom in real life.
- We have to do performance. NOT multiple choice.

Training environment
- We make instruction too easy
- We leave out important negatives (ie - does the patient die in real life? Um...yeah....)

In class - give them the most difficult scenario. But they are applying the knowledge.
- Does work give you trick questions? Um...yeah....

Want to put them in a situation where they are looking at the meaning behind the steps. Not just the steps.

Do simulations have to be entertaining to be educational? No.
- Don't have to be fun to be instructional
- Remember your tough teachers? BUt the ones you learned the most from?

Gotta change the expectation. Apply skills need at work.
- At work, you will also be sweating and unhappy. Go with it.
- Sitzman (in press) - A meta-analytic examination of the instructional effectiveness of computer-based simulation games. Personnel Psychology

More emotionally tied we are to an event, more we can recall.
- If not emotionally invested, probably won't remember

(audience) In simulation - in safe environment. Can do more what if.
- 3d environment should not automatically = fun.
- People expect game looking things to be fun.

US Dept of Ed - online learning marginally more effective than classroom instruction BECAUSE people spend more time on task.
- Measure, how long does the learner stay on task.

Neuroscience - important to fail since releases endorphins therefore more likely to remember.

Flow in a 3D virtual world is impacted by 3 factors
- Frustration ----Bored
+ Flow state - performing at level that matches your skills perfectly and lose track of time.
+ Can do this with hobby, cooking, video games etc.
1) Degree of presence sensation perceived by students. How "there" do students feel.
2) Skills must be up to challenge. Too hard, no flow state.
+ Ideal - 1 level above your skill.
+ Getting incrementally better over time. Progressively more difficult as getting incrementally better.
+ Madden 2008 - team you were playing as you got better. Players found too frustrating.
+ Don't want to get to the point where learner feels they can never be successful.
3) Perception of interactivity in the virtual learning experience.
+ Please no more virtual powerpoint.

Ex. if teaching about safety in a factory, maybe build a virtual factory. Be in that environment. More powerful.

eLearning - consistent interface
Does world of warcraft have consistent user interface? No.
- There is something we are not getting. Not sure what it is.
- Right now, can't tell by the research.

First person view vs 3rd person - Ohio State (2004)
- Who was more likely to vote? 3rd person view. (interesting)
- Then asked people who felt socially awkward in high school - imagine socially awkward situation 1st person v. 3rd person. 3rd person people felt themselved more changed.

3rd person more effective because what we do with our memory - we change it to suit our situation.
- Often so favorable to us.

3rd person better way to change behavior.

Second Life - doesn't feel like us in 3rd person because missing peripherals.

Could people learn pro-social behavior by watching pro-social behavior.
Lemmings (pro-social behavior)
Leimers (blow away the lemmings)
Control - Tetris

Pro-social game more likely to pick up pencils vs. the Leimers and the Tetris folks

Learning between traditional instruction and 3d virtual world - the same.
- But when asked competency level of trainees - lower in virtual environment.
- Was HAPPY with this result. Wanted people to come in with some trepidation. Worked better in real life

What kind of learning can this new technology enable.
- Use it as an opportunity to do things in a safe environment.

Interactivity + Immersion = Sustained engagement
Results in meaningful learning.

Information transferrable from virtual to actual.

Learners prefer instructions (let them go do it) than instruction.

Simulation makes sense beyond just where lives at stake.
- Factories, call centers, retail stores, other work environments.

We need to have students experience 3d virtual world for themselves.
- Also need to teach elements of storytelling.
- How do you expand scenario-based learning / k-space / problem-based learning into instructional design so more mainstream.

Game developers - first thing you do so easy. Then building the scaffolding instead of telling them all at once.
- Immediate feedback
- Often, we try to dump into the simulator all at once.
- Small incremental goals.
- Play games to see how this works.

Cathy Moore - Making Change. Searching for Hajai Kamal.

#iel11 Technology-enabled Learning for the 21st Century

2011-06-08T14:29:00.000-04:00

Caught up with some co-workers. Ate quickly, then spent some time in a dark conference room to re-charge my batteries (both laptop and my own).

It is so nice to see the tribe again. It is great to see some of these ideas congealing. To confirm that I am still on the right path in spirit, even though my work may not necessarily go as far as I would like. It's that dance between what you know you should do and what the client wants.

Got some great ideas from Koreen and Clark's presentations (no surprise there).
Very excited by the research Chris Dede presented. (Look folks! Research! From Harvard! SEE?!?!?!)

Only frustration - maybe its just me, but Twitter (or my phone) do not want to load my pictures. Or my blog posts. Maybe I will get them up sometime before the conference ends.
----------------
Presentation: Technology-enabled learning for the 21st century
Presenter: Nancy Knowlton, CEO SMARTTechnologies

Challenge - creativity, innovation and invention
- Gets to problem solving and critical thinking

Important that we use the right tools and right pedagogy as think about things
- By creating tools, understanding that it is not the ONLY tool.

SMART - moving from paper-based command center to all digital center.
- Trying to be mindful of world outside classroom
- Multiple displays of information

Today - information explosion.
- Helping students sort and sift impt part of education process.
- Part of development of 21st century skills.
+ Critical thinking
+ Problem-solving
+ Communication
+ Collaboration

More focus on visual element

What is the information explosion doing to our brains?
- Many overloaded.
- Company - creating "point space" so time to ponder strategic items
- Place technologies in proper context
- What is your time between interruptions?
+ How do you deploy the technology appropriately

SMART - near-term objective, whole-class (as in classroom)
- Focused on ILT. Minor step from traditional classroom to interactive whiteboard classroom. From individual computer to "group" computer.

Small group, in person
- collaboration, in person, sharing.
- Tables you can work around and interact with (still classroom furniture based)

Thinking about user interfaces and design of this furniture.
- (I fear my biases regarding classrooms are going to show in my notes. I guess interactive classroom tables are cool....)

Looking at how to create device like iPad and seeing how can be integrated with the large display setup in classroom.
- (Thinking there are ways to do this that are cheaper with existing tools at your disposal. Collaborative technologies you have lying around, an inexpensive projector, personal laptops or iPads, etc......)

Trying to support Blended / Distributed learning
- Combining synchronous / asynchronous
- Personalized
- Virtual collaborations
- Multi-user virtual environments (not directly)
- Videoconferencing
- Dataconferencing (voice + data)

(still looking for the gee whiz..... Maybe I am too jaded.)

Near term possibilities
- Frenzy around touch interfaces. (Thanks iPad)
+ No clear articulation regarding what the iPad will actually do (esp in the K-12 space)

- Multi- monitor as a possibility with interactive table (basically a setup I already see my colleagues using on their own.)

- Experimenting separation of group-shared vs. stuff you just see.

(Very focused on meeting rooms, classrooms etc. Makes sense for this individual's company. This is currently feeling like an extended sales pitch for supporting old models. Again, jaded.)

(Question comes to mind - where is the point where we have inadvertently over-complicated our environment? Teaching is stressful enough. For example, I and some of my colleagues still find ourselves fighting with the SmartBoard occasionally. Often due to need for re-calibration.)

(So I'm guessing the new products from SMART Technologies - display + installed web conferencing capabilities).

Can possibly use these isolated environments (with enough high def fancy monitors) to create interesting immersive rooms.

Going towards "smart appliance".
- Who "owns" a meeting room or training room
- Trying to make room "foolproof" (for when you absolutely have to have in person sessions)

The Rule of 3
- Settled on 3 connected displays in their meeting and class rooms
- Strong incremental results from multiple displays (esp in K-12)

What do you do with multiple displays (for remote folks)?
- Should be able to choose which image share (again, have to be careful about how do this and not make it too complicated for the moderator / instructor. Finding best laid ideas tend to get very squirrelly in practice during the actual class. Too many moderators have a tough time switching slides, much less applications)

Future of interactive displays - People's expectations are rising
- (I think the "wow that's cool" factor is disappearing when I touch a smartboard.)

(Sees a future of really big and ubiquitous touchscreens everywhere.)

Tools and technologies seamlessly available and unexpected workspaces.
(Welcome to your dystopian future)

Think sharing in group environment and groupwork will be accentuated and emphasized in the in-person classroom environment.

(True - this is the only reason why we still have 2 staff-designated training rooms. The collaboration needed when implementing new applications and developing the workflows necessary to have these things be at least functional.)

Odenplan Stair Piano

#iel11 Designing Mobile Learning

2011-06-08T12:05:00.000-04:00

Presentation: Designing Mobile Learning
Presenter: Clark Quinn

The limits are no longer in technology - it is in our imaginations.

How do we leverage technology for the way we really learn?

Internet Time Alliance

Not about "learning"
- We learn to be able to do things we can't do now.
- new performance

From the ability to have information at hand when need it.

Much of our formal learning - designed for novices.
- lets meet the needs of the folks beyond the novice.
- Experts need the info. May not need the package. May need other experts to CREATE the new knowledge
- Support throughout the trajectory

Develop performance eLearning
- NOT just content on the web. NOT just webinar.
- What about performance support? Tools?
- Community????
- From learner's perspective - aim for integrated whole.

Content - for broader distribution
- MObile - deliver whenever and wherever are
- Mobile layer on top of our social media systems

Goal - support path from novice > practitioner > expert where at

Why mobile?
- In developing world, we've reached saturation. Everyone has mobile phone. For many - only access to internet.
- Will overtake PCs for connection to internet.
- Feature phones being replaced by smartphones

72% of the workforce is mobile. (Do you go on site visits? Conferences? Still need to stay in touch? Meetings? Guess what - you are mobile)

(Amazing - EVERYONE recognizes QR code. Last year - very few)

So much conversion. Devices are going / have all these features.
- new ways of input and varied (keyboard, touch, trackwheel)
- Varied output - vibration, audio, text, video
- All have way of connecting to the world
- Increasing way to sense world around them (mics, GPS, Camera, Sensors etc)
- Document editing, games, communication, time, data collection, media play, games, content display

You are accessorizing your brain.

These capabilities not unique to mobile. How you use them unique.
- Handheld, use frequently but not for long
- PC - use a long time but not frequently

This has implications for design.
- NOT about courses on phone.
- Very short and sweet.

We are tool users. Adapt environment to us vs. adapt us to environment
- We want to extend our mental capabilities as well.

Our brains - great at pattern matching. Suck at rote stuff.

If we augment ourselves with rote processing capability - we can do a much better job of problem-solving.
- This is not unique to mobile.
- Mobile provides anywhere / anytime.

4 cs of mobile
- Content (stuff to consume)
- Compute (calculators, interactive decision support)
- Capture (voice, camera, video - unique to mobile. Can capture local context)
- Communication (texting, voice)

Mobile learning about augmentation
- Solve problems
- Augment formal learning (not replacement). Extend

What about text messaging?
- Flood management simulation - all text messages.

Gotta stop thinking EVERYTHING is a course.

What should I do differently that I can now take advantage of.
- Low hanging fruit ok, but the interesting area is in thinking differently.

Real opportunity in extending the learning experience
- Formal learning is generally event based model.
- But if we can find a way to space it out - more likely to learn
- Retention over time, not achieved through event

Thalheimer - Spacing Learning Events Over Time

We have an opportunity to make learning that sticks!

Mobile also speaks to online learning in general
- Learn at our own pace and best time
- We can reactivate chunks as needed

We err too much on rote knowledge test. Sometimes needed, but only if you need to know something cold.

Prefer scenarios - how do things go weird.

Mobile (and eLearning in general) - don't need full sentences.

Performance Support - break it down. Top level steps, sub steps. What questions do you ask yourself?
- Also reminders.

Model of informal learning. Act in the world where you can, break down, repair, reflect, act again.

Stage 1 - Pull answer off shelf (google or whatever)
Stage 2 - active problem solving. May want to populate the space and share.
+ Don't forget the share step
Stage 3 - information update (reflection)

(currently envying those who doesn't have slow twitter camera pic load. Ugh.)

How do we use tools to meet new needs, not just existing needs.

GPS - as needed performance support. Monitors performance every step of the way. If off course, adapts and gives you new solution. Has audiory channel.
- Why don't we do more of this?
- Does this help you learn? (debate - are you motivated to learn? May impact how you process and pay attention to the performance support.)

Don't forget about social
- Jane Bozarth goes to twitter before google because your twitterati know you and what you are looking for better.
- Also Skype (can keep this open all the time if you have developed thinking)

Augmented reality - can do scavengers hunt. Can layer information on top of the world.
- (Hey boss - what about the Tech Corridor as augmented reality game)

Opportunities limitless
- How we REALLY learn in real world
- How we PERFORM in the real world

We have to understand the technology we have.
- What are we going to do with them?

#iel11 Leveraging ARGs for Learning

2011-06-08T11:15:00.000-04:00

Presentation: Leveraging ARGs for Learning
Presenter: Koreen Olbrish

ARG: ALternate Reality Games (pervasive games / metagames / transmedia games)
- Mix of real world play and interaction with online components
- Collect clues to solve a mystery/puzzle
- Played individually or in teams
- Also called pervasive games

Storyline-based

Remember - think of objective and design and model.

Alternate reality games - storyline based, can be low tech

Augmented reality games - overlay of info on real life. Can be used to create alternate reality games.

Gamification - looking at what people do anyway and putting game on top (Metagame)

Terms
- Puppetmaster - person behind scenes monitoring game play
+ Never know what people are going to do.
+ Help to guide. Adjust to accommodate OR squash
+ Scoring modified
- Curtain - separation between puppetmaster and players. Don't want to know who is actually controlling the game.
- Rabbithole - First entry piece into game. Where introduce characters, directions, etc.
+ If designing ARG for learning - don't make it a big mystery. Entertainment - can be mystery.
+ Don't want people in learning environment "wasting time" in tasks that aren't directed at learning goals.
- This is not a game (TINAG) - people doing things normally be doing. Modelling real life activities as part of game
+ ie - supervisor giving information to move storyline forward.
+ Recreate environment
+ "This is me practicing."

ARGs for Entertainment
Example: I love bees
- No one player could solve puzzle or accomplish tasks without working with others.
- It has been solved.

Example: Chain Factor (Numb3rs)
- Information in the TV show Numb3rs. And poster (clue) in NY subway.
- Getting people involved in show.

People invest a ton of time and energy figuring out puzzles.

New one out for Game of Thrones. Also -Tony Hawk on Twitter, scavenger hunt.

Serious ARGs
- Traces of Hope (red Cross, Tsunami)
+ How communication disseminated during disaster
- World without Oil
+ How do you live life without Oil? Journal and document entire day.
+ Single player, reflective journey
- Evoke
+ Connection between children in Africa and business people in other parts of world to solve business problems.
+ Lots of barriers to interaction
-- Time zone differences, time requirements for participants, too many differences to overcome.
-- Very high drop-off rate

ARGs for corporate learning
- Model real behaviors in game environment. Make it easy to transfer later.

Case Study: DevLearn 2009, Zombie Apocalypse
- Goals
+ Introduce/practice using different social media technologies for communication, collaboration and learning
+ Encourage networking and provide opportunities for relationship building
- Game structure
+ Team play
+ Collecting clues
- Tweets and clue codes. Also used YouTube, Flicker, Facebook, game portal.
- Launched 3 weeks before conference
+ Leaderboard
+ Avatars etc

- Lessons learned
+ Thought no one would play. Surprised at so much participation. Over 200 people. Some really hyper-competitive
+ Teams competing against each other. But 1st person from team to find the clue, made points. Accidentally set up internal competition between team dynamic.
+ Didn't set up where teams could talk privately. Teams wound up setting up private facebook pages. Outside game structure.
+ Team members - 15, probably too big and too fluid. Also "joined team but no clues" peer pressure.
+ No incentive to play the game. No prizes, no nothing. People participating to participate. Happy with outcome, but definitely needs tweaks

Didn't incorporate much game play into conference

Does it have to be zombies? (um. no)

Conference ARGs v Learning ARGs
- Conferences event based. Very focused on getting folks to interact.
- Conferences - get info and socialize. But not a lot of incentives to do extra work.

- Learning ARG - expectation part of training / part of day
+ People have time, though in bits and pieces
+ connect in various ways (PC, mobile)
+ context VERY important

Case Study: Constellation Wine
- Goals
+ Reinforce product knowledge and messaging
+ Practice selling skills
+ Encourage networking and provide opportunities for relationship building
- Game structure
+ Team play
+ Collecting "clues"
+ Online and onsite game play
- Launched 2 weeks before (maybe 4-5 hours)
- Game at conference
- Created virtual territory - which of your products make most sense?
+ Facebook page to communicate info
+ Unintended consequence - character posting information. But sales rep talking back. Puppetmaster forced to interact.
-- Trainers use it still to interact
+ Gates - needed to complete tasks before move forward
+ Prize - a vacation (had an incentive, big one)
+ 600 reps playing
+ The actual sales reps and sales management supported
+ all of the gameplay in portal. Also mobile - everyone has standard mobile devices. Scenarios handled through game engine.
+ Can spend a lot of time or a little depending on the person. People on both extremes. Hope, more thought you put in it - better you do.
+ They were using their own products and resources and materials expected to use during the course of their job with their customers (live company website).
+ For every day delay getting clue, fewer points. INcentivized to keep up with game (to prevent people from doing stuff at last minute)

- Lessons learned
+ Not easy sell to get the game implemented. Never done game before, much less during sales meeting. Big change culturally. 40-60 year old. Afraid sales reps wouldn't do it. Not mandatory. Still had 83% participation (was surprised).
+ Sales leadership thought "too hard" initially. A little pushback. Interestingly, once start playing - players wanted it to be harder.
+ They wanted it to be as complex as real work environment.
+ (Audience comment) - no one wants to be the non-participant. This could be motivator.
+ Reality - the inside sales reps who sat at desks all day, huge discrepancy between team with lots of inside sales reps vs. outside sales reps who don't sit at computers all day. Changed scoring mechanism going into live meeting. Allowed teams who were far behind to catch up unless the front-runners kept up.
-- Outside sales reps - competition levels shifted
-- Wouldn't have happened unless evaluating in the middle.

Development time for Constellation Wine - 6-8 weeks
- 2-3 day pilot test week before launch
- Tracked everything could track. How much time people spent, clues, conversations
- Used Kris Rockwells' portal

Post-game performance
- Wanted to look at sales data. Not given by client.
- REception of style of learning - tremendous. Wanted to do more of this for new hire
- Wanted to keep storyline for future training initiatives.
- Client saw as huge win (engagement and learner perception), plus excitement over looking at the old documents. (teach how to use the website with all of the information)
+ Visibility of resources HUGE benefit.

Examples of what not to do
- Siegecon.net. Main goal was to get people to talk to each other.
+ Wanted it to be subversive. So didn't market the game.
+ Piece of paper with clue to check something out. Everyone threw away.
+ Played video that was 4 security cameras. But no context or explanation.
+ Video ends, no comment. No one cared. Figured it was a glitch.
+ Made it so secret no one knew about it.

ARG for corporate learning - gotta be obvious.
- Why doing it, what doing, etc.
- Marketing key. How are you going to message, market.

Don't make it additional work!
- Don't add on top of training.

Watch your timing - what do people have to do in their real job.
- Do they actually have time?

Make sure the people have the technologies and the capabilities to play.

DevLearn 2010 - Dr. Strangelearn

Corporate learning opportunities

- New hire training
- Coaching
- Leadership development (teamwork, problem-based learning)
- Feedback mechanisms
- Action learning

#iel11 Wednesday Morning Keynote

2011-06-08T10:01:00.000-04:00

Found Mark Oehlert, Clark Quinn and Stephen Martin. And thus the tribe begins to gather.

So there is something called a "mingle stick" - so I have to figure out where this is and how this works. Will report back.

Will also be trying to tweet some pics. I haven't been very successful at this in the past - but maybe I'll get this right this time. Maybe.
------------------
Keynote: How Immersion in Virtual Worlds Helps Learners in the Real World
Presenter: Chris Dede

3 things at once
- Shifts in knowledge and skills society values
+ Remember FORTRAN? (I do)
+ Many of us are wearing shoes for which our academic training did not prepare us.
+ Many careers for our kids do not yet exist
- Development of new methods of teaching and learning
- Changes in the characteristics of learners

We teach differently than we did 5 years ago because of what the students now do outside the classroom.
- Different strengths and preferences.

The trends are inter-related.
- Huge problem we have - what happens in classroom looks less like 21st c work than rest of people's lives outside the classroom.

Don't start with the technology - no solution looking for problem.

Civilization focusing on wicked problems
- Internested suites of problems that interact systemically. Unexpected consequences
+ Financial meltdown, global warming, terrorism
- We tackle these problems with teams with complementary expertise
+ But each person has different jargon, data, evidence etc
+ Teams have to negotiate putting together the elephant

How far can we get with teaching this skill in middle school?
- Gotta start as early as possible.
- Kindergarten - may be too early because of level of abstraction.

To teach this - will need to use Situated Learning
- common in life, but uncommon in formal ed
- Medical training - nothing looks like the nice multiple choice questions and elegant essays when in residency.
+ Thankfully - you are doing really simple things. There is the opportunity to have a series of apprenticeships - learn by watching people who know what they are doing.
+ Move from fringes to center as you get more skilled in real life.

We have probably learned our jobs by situated learning.

Classrooms and conference rooms very barren places that lack rich context.

Immersive Learning
- Immersion - you psychologically feel that you are located someplace different than you really are. (Please see Harry Potter Experience Universal)
- Movies can be weak form of immersion.
- Interactivity - allows you to shape the environment you are situated in.
+ Multi-User Virtual Environments - immersion in virtual contexts with digital artifacts and avatar-based identities
+ Virtual Reality - Full sensory immersion (Wii controllers, head-mounted displays etc)

EcoMUVE
- How to teach this complicated skill of solving complex problems.
- Middle school science curriculum (Dept of Ed)
+ Ecosystem science
+ Process of scientific inquiry
+ Complex causality (this underlies wicked problems)

What makes complex causality hard
- spatial scales involving action at a distance
- time delays
- invisible factors / non-obvious
- sudden things (seemingly) but oricess and steady states in contrast to event-based reasoning.

Can be deceived on all 4 levels

How immersive tech helps
- Realistic simulation / model of challenge facing
- Can do "magic" to control variables
+ Time, macro/micro view, distance, etc

So what does this virtual world look like?
- In EcoMUVE - preditor/prey. (Deer island - only deer. Wolf island - Deer and wolves)
+ Help understand relationship, flow of energy
+ Can help kids find salient things

- Ex. Digital pond - modeled after Black's Nook Pond in Cambridge, MA. (demo)
+ Virtual pond - you can walk under water and not drown (bonus!)
+ Can do scavenger hunt
+ Used gaming engine for graphics
+ Can take water quality measures, weather, etc.
+ Jigsaw pedagogy - each person has a different role so they can collect different data as a team. Then team puts pieces together.
+ Remember: there are also things that are not "seen". Uses "magic submarine" to see things that are tough to see at macroscopic level (the invisible stuff in the pond)
+ Also "adopt an atom" - track the atom.
+ And a housing development - starting a complex causal chain.
+ Can do stuff across time. Distinctive scenario - what killed the fish? Why does the water look different?

- The digital pond is a tool. Not just throwing kids into the ecosystem.

Elements
- "Magic"
- "Unintentional Problem"
- Trace flow of energy

Ultimately - did the students learn the 3 things?
- Very pleased at findings
- Large scale study this spring.

Imagine other content being put into this immersive interface and used to teach other skills.

Students also learning new literacies - Jenkins
- We think of this as fundamental skill for life.
- Intellectual and psycho-social literacies that depend on technology.
- ie: doing your taxes using tax tool.

The problem is an assessment problem.
- If give 2 sets of students item based pencil and paper test - both types will do the same.
- Paper and pencil tests are incapable of measuring complex performances.
+ We have been stalled on assessment for a century

NSES Model of Inquiry - Virtual Performance Assessment
- Also a virtual world for assessment
- Example - virtual world, student takes on ID of scientist. Students complete quests in 90 minutes.
+ THIS IS NOT A CONTENT TEST
- 4 phases
+ Orientation
+ Problem Identification
+ Experimentation
+ Competing Explanation
- Demonstrating whether student understood how to perform scientific inquiry.

Have various performance palattes.

Big breakthrough - Collecting rich audit trail
- Logfiles with timestamps
+ Where students went
+ Who did they communicate with & what said
+ What artifacts activated
+ Databases viewed
+ What data gathered using virtual scientific instruments
+ Hints accessed

Teacher then looks for patterns!

Virtualassessment.org

Can even automate this process. Ultimately, a more valid test because can evoke and capture complex intellectual performances.

Biggest single problem in effective ed - measurement strategies inadequate for capturing the richness of what we need to teach.

Currently building summative assessment. But want to build FORMATIVE assessments for diagnostics.
- If we get down how to do FORMATIVE assessments embedded in the learning, we won't need the summative assessments.
- Summative a first step.
- Formative richer and more accurate.
- Formative, diagnostic assessment provides more leverage for improvement than summative measures

Ubiquitous computing / Overlay devices / "alice in wonderland interface" / Augmented reality
- Preferred interface - the handheld mobile device. NOT laptop or PC.
- Games that rely on large screen immersion - not work so well.
- Entertainment focusing on strengths of mobile device.
+ Ex. Roku's Reward
(Goes into a lot of stuff Jane McGonagal is doing)

Now working on EcoMobile - people go into REAL ecosystems and use camera on mobile device with overlays on real life.
- Videos, people, etc.
- INteresting to study fully immersive vs. blended and where.
- Using jigsaw pedagogy, independent of modality.

IN next decade, we will gain as much power as last 35 years on our mobile devices.
- No idea what this will look like.

Smartbooks- scaled-up cell phone. Always on, location aware, light (Qualcomm)
- May be game changer
- Heavy lifting done in the cloud.

What if your device had a 6th sense?
- Who you are, how you like to learn? Who you like to learn with?
- Past - isolate. Now - as part of real world and life, true situated learning.
+ When is it best for which situation?

2010 US Educational Tech Plan
- Take a look at the LEARNING section of this plan.

Why Immersion for Training?
- many capabilities / affordances that are very powerful for education and training
- Just learning how to design and measure results + develop infrastructure for delivery anywhere

****Begin with complicated problem. Team to figure it out.***
- VERY different from traditional model.
- Much more powerful.

We have to find new ways of teaching.

Biggest challenge - professional development of ourselves.
- We need to UNLEARN what we know.
- When we think about learning, we are PROGRAMMED to think about classrooms etc. (Way too true).
+ These conferences allow us to unlearn together.

3 things - Beyond McLuhan
- Media shape their messages
- Media shape their participants - being altered unobtrusively, we are ignoring this at our peril.
- Infrastructures shape civilizations.

---------------------
Effective learning requires many different forms of exposure.
- Remember, Immersive is a part of the repetoire. Can be used in front and back end to demonstrate relevance and application.
- There are also lots of things in between.

This will complement, not displace.

Still fear of things that look playful.
- Engaging and serious is just as rewarding as engaging and frivolous.

We don't have good models for what collaboration should look like.
- Teamwork in one context may not work in another.

Eventually, we will be able to embed advice at time of need vs. afterwards.
- Look at the audit trails.
- But this is still pretty new.

Remember: collaboration also requires scaffolding.

Strategies for helping the teachers (the gatekeepers)
- We and others have to unlearn things that we have made central to professional identities.
- DO NOT EMPHASIZE THE TECHNOLOGIES
- If we can show immersive experiences help them fulfill dream of teaching the subject they love (those teaching subject love)
- Some teach because of love of students - focus on formative assessment and how can help the students.
- Use as way for reason for WHY someone went into teaching and training.

#iel11 Managing App Development

2011-06-07T12:01:00.000-04:00

Came in (just barely) on time. Thought I had the place scoped better than I did. Nice new facility. Coffee is OK too.
Twitter feed is at #iel11

Sorry this is so long. The guy did not take a break.
---------------
www.richardharringtonblog.com - where the slide deck will be posted.

Goals:
- Learn how to identify your distribution options and register as a developer
- Target audience and refine functional goal of app
- Lear practical approaches for marketing your application to your target audience.

Latest statistics
- Assumption that we have ubiquitous internet now.
- Study from Edison Research - Infinite Dial

iCloud - everything now backed up in cloud vs. synching to computer. No charge.
- Really moving from local on device to "constant availability" esp with smart-cacheing.
- Personal: consumption 80% now on iPad.

Don't let your personal tendencies skew perspective
- People want quick content, easily accessible, entertaining + intuitive.
- Remember - only 1 of 3 people have smart phones, but growing.
- Other trends - Pandora widespread (25%).
- Twitter is about to explode (again) - apple just made it a default install (hooray - more fail whale)
+ Social media platform for mobile devices.

Global perspective - US does not crack top 10 in terms of availability. The other countries make it a public service.
- LOTS more people using SMS than internet to communicate (global)
- Travel apps - SMS, cached map, live GPS

Rise of Mobile computing
- Smartphone ownership growing very quickly.
- Driven from middle of market (young, emerging, mid-range professionals). Goes downhill past 25-34 age range.

Levels - Android 1, iOS 2, RIM/Blackberry 3.
- 1 out of 3 own an apple product
- 50% are carrying portable media player of some sort.
- All racing towards the middle. Apple now #1 gaming platform in the world.

iPhone /iPad - over 50% love for each. Android - only 49%
- "My next phone will be...
- iPhone nemesis - the network, not the OK

What are people doing on smartphones
- Most make phone calls. Smartphone users make phonecalls more often than regular phone users.
- Texting 2nd most common activity
- 1/3 people have actually used an ap that they download. But starting to download and use more apps. Becoming a regular part of what people do.

"Internet is most essential delivery vehicle" - 45%. Under 35 - 62%

Online video - one of the most engaging ways of communicating content. (...depends....)
- Under 35 - prefer to learn via video.

Bigger the screen gets - more folks want to sit back and entertain vs. interact.

Growth of YouTube. 41% over last month have watched a YouTube video.

More inclined to give up TV or SmartPhone?
- 58% - get rid of TV. 40% give up Smart Phone. 2% don't know

Screencasts should be part of app development.

Rise of people wanting to use social media to connect.

Distribution options
- Apple App Store (iTunes)
- Android Marketplace (http://market.android.com - FREE)
- Amazon Appstore for Android (free app every day - $99/yr)
- BlackBerry AppWorld (http://us.blackberry.com/developers - need to pass exam, pricing variable)
- Windows Marketplace (http://marketplace.windowsphone.com - $99/yr)

Get registered as a developer for the platforms you want (usually about $99 per year for most) - the advantage is early access to SW, documentation and training videos.

What is happening in the AppStore
- iOS - Almost 400k active apps. Over 100k inactive. 87k+ active publishers
- Games most popular paid category (esp with subscription category games).
+ Opportunities for visibility very limited.
+ You will need to do own promotion.
- Books 2nd most popular. Education 4th most popular.

App Store Approval Process (article from techcrunch)
- 95% approved within 14 days
- 40 full time reviewers
- 20% rejected, but sent back for tweaks and changes
+ If you want new content added - must be sold through THEIR store. Taking 30% (not necessarily a bad thing in comparison to old-school publishing. Will take care of infrastructure).
- App Store executive review board.
+ Determines procedures
+ Set policy for the review process
+ Reviews apps that are escalated to the board.

Very difficult to get past the $0.99 ap price. Avg price - $3.49

By Jan 2011 - 15 billion apps sold.

148Apps.biz - US app market
Appannie.com - can see trends if targeting international market

If you are going to develop an app - will be spending $$
If you don't understand the market and trends - wasting money.

Make sure you check the most recent information. This stuff moves very quickly. Looking at info older than a month - may be making bad decisions about planning.
----------------------

Inspiration > Need > Context (how consume) > Strategy (devices targeted) > Design > Prototype > Develop > Test > Optimize (no extraneous code) > Port to devices

- 70% of effort on design phase. Make or break.
+ Prototype after design, but also merged with as refine.

Good ideas that are hard to use do not succeed in this economy

Exploring Context
- Who are the users?
- How will users best absorb content?
- When will they interact?
- WHere are the users>
- Why use app
- How using mobile device (portrait, landscape, held)

Features > Meaning
-GPS > Location-aware
-Touch > Intimate and Interactive
-Sensors (A/V) > Physical Intelligence
-Contacts > Personal and Social
-Portability > Relevant at point of consideration

MObile Website - enhances / streamlined (m.____.com) - for older web-enabled phones

Mobile Web Apps - can tie into phone itself. This is the growing. Also best experience and designed for one platform.
- Wordpress now turning sites into mobile web apps. Example Social Media Guide

3 styles of learning
- Auditory 20% connect with others verbally.
+ Pay attention to audio in App
- 35% visual.
- 45% kinesthetic - interacting with content. Using gestures, manipulating. Strongest group for app experience.

What do you want it to do?
- Utility - a simple at-a-glance tool
- Locale - application based on the physical context
+ See disney apps for ride info
- Informative - application meant to inform
- Productivity - increase available time (like a to-do list)
- Immersive - distract or entertain (like a zen garden app)

When is building an app the right choice?
- Charging money (most important reason). People used to paying money (though less than $5)
- Game
- Location-based services
- Cameras
- Accelerometers
- Device Filesystem - getting easier with cloud computing
- Offline access

There is an app - turns your camera into a Super 8 camera with editor.
Instagram - to take pictures and share.

Class participation - can upload audio, video and plugins during class.
- Can do self-reporting, logs and journals
- Voice logs

Wordpress app - can publish video and pictures directly from Android / iPhone

Hot trends in App Development
- Sensoring
- Biometrics
- Transactions
- Lifestreaming
- Recommendation
- Image recognition
- Augmented Reality
- Mobile Connected Games
- Location-based social media
- Retail proximity consumption

People want to get real - allow you to interact with people based on current location
- Meetup.com
- FourSquare
- Texas A&M Scavenger Hunt (why fight what is already working. Tie services that pre-exist that people use into app.

Join them or use them. Don't fight them

GroupOn - more popular. Urbanspoon.

Social Media Growth
- Use blogs for testing and marketing. Mainstream media now
- Be very transparent during development.
- Let people test and feedback (rapid prototyping)

GSA recommendations (NASA as example of use)
- Use technologies in your life
- Start where you can
- Use examples to show it can be done
- Develop and borrow interim policies. Keep flexible
- Proceed

Live Video Streaming
- Device to Device (not just phone to phone). Facetime
- Skype - impt for the live video chat.

People moving from pictures to video with phone.

Warning - avg. price is going to be about $2.00. You won't be making tons of coin.

Most profitable model - get paid up front by sponsor.
- If you plan to self fund off of consumers, not going to work so well unless you somehow create angry birds.

Android paid app rate is lower, but avg sell price is higher. Not as controlled. People experimenting with price.
- Games fastest growing category
- Books and education way down list for Android.
- android.appstorehq.com
+ Top apps and what selling for with marketing.

---------------------
Project Management

Project Management works for app development too.

Triple constraint - scope, schedule, budget
- Cut features to get launched. What is the small list - minimums needed (37signals)
- What are the time constraints for the project?
+ No guarantee will show up "on time". Leave lots of time if trying to hit a timeline.
- What are the financial constraints of the project?

Process
- Develop concept
- ID PM
- Resources
- Define goals
- Match people
- Try to get schedule, time, budget
- etc etc etc (basic project management)

Project Management is NOT using MS Project. About breaking the steps of the project down to manageable chunks that you can communicate.

At each stage - fill out what needs to be done with info and what needs to happen

Work breakdown structure
- Major tasks and to small enough pieces to hand off to another.

Good project management - basically being able to say "let's break down further" and get the resources to focus on their piece.

Scoping / COntracts - put it ALL in writing
- Always do a scoping document
+ 2-16 hours
+ Objectives and deliverables
+ Get the sign off for EVERYTHING, including what to call the project.

- Get right people at meeting and buy in from employees.

- Internal - scoping document is the internal document between departments.
+ Minimize conflict, identify risk.
+ If not on the piece of paper, need time, money or both.
+ More than 3 days - full scoping document

Look for apps you like, then look in credits for development team or developer to find people.
- Get the roles of folks in writing. Also establish reporting frequency, esp for contractors.

Basecamp - use it for managing projects online. Widely used in public space.
- Can put up lots of media.
- Scalable. Single project for free. 15 projects for $24/mo.

Video and audio feedback - put in counters for feedback

------------------------
Development process

MObile Design and Development - Brian Fling

Look at positive and negative reviews

How does the app solve a particular problem?
- Gotta turn the need into context. Have the need lead to action. This adds value.
+ Which features of the device are you going to engage?

Strategy (how is this going to be packaged to the end-user)
- What makes you different?
- How do you want to be perceived?
- What design approach will you undertake?

Getting Real - 37 signals (free online read)
- Build stuff YOU will use. Will be more invested.

First couple of projects - something you care about.

Determine devices you wish to target (check the market)
- Most either Android or iOS, then port to the other later.
- Keep list narrow and look for simularities

Adobe Device Central - database of various devices (have it - very useful, esp for mobile development when getting screensizes for Captivate)
- Will support virtual testing

Design - this is where most of us have influence
- Overall look and feel you are trying to create.
- www.fromideatoapp.com
- www.buildingiphoneapps.com

Ask people what they DON'T want.
- apps streamline the experience.

Remember - look at other apps for ideas.
- The interface.
- Download 5 or 6 apps. How are they different? Where do they rank?

Start with the user interface.
- You can do mock-ups on paper or tool.
- Prototyping is cheap.
- Slide presentation or wireframe that works out all navigation before start programming.

The interface is your product!
- The information you are selling is usually available elsewhere.

Prototyping tools
- Mobile GUI - mobilegui.net
- UI Stencils - uistencils.com
- Mobile Sketchbook - mobilesketchbook.com
- Pocket Sketches - pocketsketches.com
- App Cooker ($20.00)- appcooker.com
- OmniGraffle - www.omnigroup.com

iOS - Human Interface Guidelines
- Much of the information also useful for other apps
- Use the features of the phone
- Display is paramount (remember - you don't have a very big canvas)
- Remember how the user interfaces with the tool (navigation) and apps seen as tactile.

Remember to focus on the primary task of the app.
- Think top of screen down
- Give people logical task
- Minimize effort to enter table
- Tap button and see stuff.
- Start instantly, save automatically
- No quit button on app.

People are used to updates to apps every week. Start small and roll out incrementally.

Have folks prototype - include target audience, kids, mom

There are 3rd party tools for development.
- Adobe digital publishing suite (Adobe InDesign)
- LiveCode
- Appcelerator Titanium
- PhoneGap
- Whoop (WYSIWIG Design)

AppMakr - through web interface (presenting later today)
- Can use self-publishing option (cost effective)
- Can use as protyper
May want to run feeds through feedburner.
- Can update rss feed without having to republish the app.
- Also get reports through feedburner.

New content comes in whenever app is launched if use RSS feeds.

Test, test, test
- run in emulator from manufacturer
- test on multiple devices and versions (very tricky on Android)

Optimize
- compress, compress, compress
- Keep file sizes as small as possible
- What can you get rid of
- Download time makes a big difference in usage and sales.

Compression tools
- QuickTime Pro
- Procoder
- Adobe Media Encoder
- MPEG Streamclip
- Cinematize
- Episode and Episode Pro
- Sorenson Squeeze

iOS - MPEG-4, H.264

If no video into app itself - YouTube compatibility.
- Warning - if you upload to YouTube, you are giving it to them.

Port - getting it to other devices.
-Some tools allow you to port different versions.
- May need to reformat graphics and other assets
- Target most relevant devices.

Best solution - use the actual development tool.
- Most feature rich - native app
- Lower cost - 3rd party developer with multi-port function.

Twitter - embracing idea as "headline news" service.
- More likely to follow brand on twitter vs. elsewhere
- Trying to put out information that entices people.
- more opportunities to engage app using twitter
- Built into app.
- Twitter - real time. Stuff gone. Can back up tweets, but old news.
- Reduces the skeletons in closet
- Better for searches. Can favorite
- Becoming system-level communication tool
- You have control over what shows up

Benefit of twitter followers - about total number of "real" followers. Highest educated, most social people.
- Most likely to resent your info.

8% usage, but 93% awareness for Twitter.

51% of Americans use facebook.

Just let people connect to their facebook and twitter accounts vs. creating a new one (again)

2 best places for interactivity
- Twitter - quality of participation
- Facebook - more people / volume

Both apps integrate to device
(I have mixed feelings about the auto contacts. I wind up with a ton of garbage in my phone.)

Brand throughout the application
- Consistent look and feel that matches your brand
+ Colors
+ Fonts etc
+ Artwork / logos

Icons - Glyphish ($25 / user interface icons and fonts)
- Free version requiring citation
Kuler - interactive color picker and community

Starting to see more touch interface in PC interfaces.

Video - used to be expensive
- All of it - editing sw, hardware, cameras etc
- As put together web video, give thought to content
+ Strong relevant videos
+ Engaging on-camera presence
- Screencasts - live host, because people more likely to pay attention.
+ 2 minutes
+ Cut away to just what is good. Minimize
- Make sure the video adds value. Don't force-fit

Getting discovered
- Search - based on popularity and relevance (relevance, apps description and keywords. Write accurate description. Also use keywords to address misspellings and additional search criteria.

- Featured Content - based on quality of app (good idea, great design, use OS feature well) and by attractive artwork

- Top Lists - top apps in each category. Coordinate efforts to create spike. Earn it or lose it.

Can use social media as promotion strategy
- Sharing (facebook and twitter)
- Blogging
- Use twitter (Amex - individuals initialing tweets)
- 36% think more positively about companies who blog.

Writing and posting
- Start soliciting early. Generate buzz early.
- Get domain name early and let people sign up. Notification as soon as approve.
- promo codes / giveaway
- People scan - look for things that jump out
- Headlines, bullets and boldface
- Links and images. More visuals.

Keep it short (less than 250 words for blogs - 7th grade audience)
- (ignore this blog)

1 topic per post. No jargon etc

Press Coverage - photos of screenshots and artworks easily accessable
- Links + phone number
- Maintain the relationship with press. Call them, exclusives, etc.
- Tie content into bigger picture.

Teaser > Preview > Launch
Hints and development cycle > preview features and ad hoc builds, beta test, trailer > emails out, notify, get blogs to link to you, launch full marketing site.

Extra technologies
- feedburner
- Feed Validator www.feedvalidator.org (tell you what wrong with them)

Search - iTunes Podcasts Tech specs

Lijit - seeing where people searching and what searching on.

Animoto - combine photos and music into animated slide show / music video.

Another Way of Looking at Learning Metrics

2011-05-19T09:06:00.001-04:00

This is part 3 – the rest of my notes. I just wanted to separate out the calculations so that they were easier to find.
----------------------
After jumping through the usual higher education fiery hoops to get a room, my university hosted a seminar on eLearning Impact by SkillSoft and Knowledge Advisors.

Key topic: How to get and present metrics the senior execs understand.

There were a number of ideas that I thought could help the community at large. Or at least spark some discussion

Thank you Kevin Duffer (SkillSoft) for giving me permission to blog these notes. Please comment on what you think of these models and I will forward them on to Kevin.

--------------------------------
General trend: more pressure than last year to report. Expect more pressure next year.
- 47.4% - I can report on L&D
- 31.6% Don’t know that I can report

What folks want to report on
- ROI
- Business Impact
- Relevance
- Certification
- Hours / “Pants in seats”
- What was actually used?
- Compliance regulations
- Tracking demographics
- Why employees don’t take/complete
- More efficient data collection

Performance.gov
- Government trying to get standards and consistency

Bersin – 4 dynamics in gov’t sector
- Budget cuts – need to demonstrate value and articulate impact
- Aging workforce – knowledge management to maintain institutional memory
- Low retention of new hires
- Federal mandates / shifting politics

During this turning point, learning investments have been proven to accelerate performance.

Learning fuels adaptability and innovation, improves engagement and retention.
- Needs transparency and accountability
----------
6 Disciplines of Breakthrough Learning (Wick, Pollock, Jefferson and Flanagan) – link

No metrics + no value evidence = Risks
- Sustainability
- Budget
- Resources
- Credibility

If you don’t have a value story – that program is at risk.
Demonstrate IMPACT
Doesn’t matter how many actually run to the program
CFO – why should we retain this?

What gets measured improves.
----------
eLearning does lots of things classroom can’t scale to
- Efficient
- Adaptable
- Available
- Scalable
- Effective
- Economic

Department of Education – Evaluation of evidence-based practices (link)

No significant difference phenomenon (link)

If you use Google, you are eLearning
- eLearning = using technology to answer a question or build knowledge

Organizations must embrace this
- Blended and classroom really don’t scale
-----------
FAQs
- Did the program make a difference?
- Recover costs?
- ROI?
- Do we need measurement expertise in-house?
- How do we standardize measurement?
- How do we benchmark?

Findings – Moving the Needle [SkillSoft sponsored, but I think it can apply to any well-designed library of content]
- SkillSoft has increased effect on performance
- Learners feel SkillSoft has impact on critical areas of org performance
- SkillSoft help close skill gap and build confidence
- Highly valued
“I would rather go to Books 24x7 than Google
- Faster and more relevant
- Comments “ was worst, now best” [peer marketing]

Alignment (to org) / Adoption (visible! Easy access!) / Value (measurement strategy)

Focus on the following levels (though most questions will still be level 1 or 2)
- 3 Application – is this put into practice on the job?
- 4 Impact (organizational results)
+ Productivity
+ Revenue
+ Quality
+ Time Efficiency
+ Customer Satisfaction
+ Employee Engagement
- 5 Value
+ ROI
+ Benefit / Cost ratio
----------
CLO April

Calculating 2 main Level 5 metrics (put this in a separate post)

Monetizing Program Effect (also put this in a separate post, because I thought it was that important)
------------
CLO December 2010 – Patty and Jack Philips
How Execs View Learning Metrics

Executives want to use more about impact.
- If has impact, ROI is naturally there

The learning industry lacks framework
- measures
- definitions
- principles

Mistakes to avoid
- Assuming ALL eLearning participation has offset classroom
- Measuring all learning programs
+ Focus on the most strategic 5% of programs
- Not being conservative in business outcome claims
- Inconsistent reporting approaches
- Measuring the wrong things
- Only communicating usage metrics
- Not establishing expectations for learning
+ What did they expect they were getting out of it?

To evaluate
- Demonstrate effectiveness
- Improve curriculum
+ Get rid of underperforming courses
+ Improve others
+ Also better with strategy

Talent Development Reporting Principles (TDR)
- Still in Development
- 5 of 7 CLOs of the year help to create and adopt this model
-----------
3 Key Learning Report Statements
- Start with the end in mind

Efficiency
- Cost, # of people
- Activity and investment

Effectiveness – how well learning contributes

Business Outcomes
- Desired business results
- Learning Impact
- Quality improvement, cost reduction
- Examples
+ Time to proficiency – new hires
+ Lost mail
+ Dress code compliance
----------
Multiple data systems should be used
- Data Mining systems to make relevant
- Process to pull and/or calculate data
+ What is relevant to you? Determine this with stakeholders.
- Find location to pool calculated measures
+ reference easily
+ compare periods
+ can even be an Excel spreadsheet if necessary
- Turn into a scorecard / dashboard

Give reports targeted to each audience
- Quarterly, Business Execs – efficiency, effectiveness, outcome
- Monthly, Learning Execs – outcomes, learning effect
- Weekly, Learning execs – efficiency

It will be a long haul to get everything compiled
- Build consensus around it
- What info do you want?

This is a way of valuing human capital with CFO [basically making human capital more quantitiative]
--------------
Standardize your evaluation forms
- Smart Sheet with at least 1 metric for levels 2-5.
- Roll out to every course in curriculum
- Ask same questions across every course

1) Business Outcome Statement
- In terms of level 4 measure
- Can be qualitative and quantitative
- [What are we measuring currently?]

2) Effectiveness Statement
- Measure at all 5 levels
- At least 1 question each for level 4 and level 5 with several level 1 questions

3) Efficiency statements – primarily out of LMS (usage, completion etc)

Metrics that Matter – impact analysis from Knowledge Advisors available through Skillsoft. Service that will help develop these evaluations and compile data for you.
---------
Remember to communicate in a way the leaders understand

When reporting upward – consider your audience

Organizational execs
- Quarterly
- Synopsis of L&D (total)
- How does learning contribute to the executive strategic initiative?
- Think long term
- Get prior year results if you can
- Scope and build what you need

Remember to get others involved

Can do dashboard – but limit it to keys for stakeholders. Don’t clutter with a bunch of pictures.

-----------
Skillsoft users – there is apparently a Business Impact calculator available in SkillSoft that is complementary. Work with the Learning consultant / SkillSoft team.

Monetizing Program Effect

2011-05-18T09:01:00.001-04:00

The university hosted a session by SkillSoft and Knowledge Advisors on learning metrics.

This is part 2.

Here – they are trying to put a hard number towards skill gains.

Comments highly welcome and will be forwarded to Kevin at SkillSoft. I think there will be lots to discuss here.

Below is an example calculation
--------
Factors
Cost = eLearning cost per license: 50$
[The debate on what costs to include continued. My current thinking – WWAD (what would Accounting do?)]

Salary = average salary across learner population: $50,000/yr

Survey
Knowledge Advisors recommended surveying this in 10% increments from 0 to 100%. Then use the average.

Lsi = Learner’s estimation of Skill Improvement: 30%
Ltc = Learner’s estimation of Training Contribution: 60%
ST = How much of the job uses that skill? : 20%

Hawthorne Effect
Bias = 100 – Hawthorne Effect (est 35%) = 65%
--------
Lsi x Ltc x ST x Bias = Training’s impact on skill adjusted for self-reporting (TI)
30% x 60% x 20% x 65% = 2.34%

Salary x TI = Calculated Monetized Benefit (CMB)
$50,000 x 2.34% = $1170

CMB – Cost = Calculated Net Benefit (NetB)
$1170 - $50 = $1120
------------
(NetB / Cost) x 100 = ROI per participant
($1120 / $50) x 100 = $2240

CMB / Cost = Benefit / Cost Ratio
$1170 / $50 = 23.4:1
For every $1 spent - $23.40 returned
------------
Further notes

You can change the bias. Sit with your stakeholder to help determine the bias.

Hawthorne effect – almost every organization will demonstrate this when you begin to measure. Natural gravity.

Cost – you will need to use the actual cost number.
- The team recommended using license cost as a solid number and divide by the number of active users.
+ Stress for people who access the content – this is what we see.
+ May want to measure what happens if people DON’T use the content
- Again the argument went up that we need to consider other costs and not just the license. [see a trend?]

Calculating Return on Investment and Benefit / Cost Ratio

2011-05-17T10:58:00.001-04:00

The university hosted a session by SkillSoft and Knowledge Advisors on learning metrics.

I am going to post this in 3 parts.
The first 2 will be calculations.
The final post will be the explanatory notes.

This is part 1.
---------------------------

ROI = (Program Benefits – Program Costs) / Program Costs x $100

-----------------

Benefit / Cost Ratio = Benefits / Cost

---------------------
All of this is in $$$$$

In the example from the SkillSoft / Knowledge Advisor lesson, they just used the cost of the license per user. There was quite a bit of debate over what to include under costs.
- Do you use license cost per active user? Or license cost per all users in the system?
- Do you include the hourly cost of administration of the system?

I’m sure there are other considerations.

What do you think should be included in costs?

Closest thing to an action shot that will ever exist

2011-05-16T17:42:00.032-04:00

This was the final week of CrossFit Sectionals. 6+ weeks of competition.
Different workout every week.
Didn't come in last ;)
Part of what I've been up to over the past 7 months.

Very educational.

I learned about:

- Performance under pressure

- Choking (I performed better at the gym, I think, than I did in the competition most weeks)

- The many colors of performance anxiety
+ Never done this before anxiety (Week 1)
+ I don't know if I can do this anxiety (Week 3)
+ Why are all these strangers watching me? anxiety (all weeks)
+ I can do this but I suck at it anxiety (all weeks)
+ I can barely DO this move, and you expect me to JUDGE it?!? anxiety(weeks 2 and 5)

- The importance of just doing it - nevermind how WELL you do it

- The importance of a solid support system (the folks at Potomac CrossFit and Patriot CrossFit ROCK)

- The importance of continuing - even when you really really really want to quit (Week 5, 20 minutes of power cleans, toes to bar and heavy wallball = sucky)

- Pacing (It kept me from getting too beat up or seeing white elephants)

- Taking each day and each event as it comes.

- Focusing on process vs. end goal.

My goal for this competition was to be able to do everything they asked of me. Except for the 110# jerk (ie - getting that barbell overhead and locked out by any means necessary), I did everything that was asked of me.

For this 40 year old former couch potato and kinesthetic moron - this was a victory.
--------------------------
It was also the first time I embarked on something where I had nothing to lean on.
And something so "out of my league".

Book learning for me is easy.
I trust that I can figure things out eventually with the right resources.

Get me to perform physically, however, and it is a whole different ball game.

I have a lot more empathy now for those who are scared of the classroom or feel that they can never learn or do something. Because prior experience has taught them that the chance of failure is high.

Failure is painful.

Yet if you manage to pass through the failure point, amazing things happen.

You come out of the experience a different person.
--------------
Thanks Nicole for the picture.

And if you want to see the crazy stuff I'm still doing - this video at 1:08. I'm in the grey shirt. And that is 30 reps of power snatch at 75#.

I need to start with my hips lower.....

#skillsoftp11 SkillSoft Mobile Strategy

2011-05-11T15:37:00.000-04:00

Presentation: What Comes Next: Mobile
Presenter: Pam Boiros, Tim Hildreth, SkillSoft

Mobile Challenges
- Multiple platforms –
- Speed of technology change / no standardization
- Speed – lack of bandwidth
- Security - variable
- Economics – can assume access to PC. Can’t assume access to mobile device.

2009-2014 Radical changes
- Usability improvements
+ Full-screen phones
- Data intensive devices
- Increasing broadband availability
- Rise of the tablets

More companies deploying phones to more people

Some companies figuring out how to incorporate employee own phones

Mobile as subset of learning portability
- Another dimension of getting stuff to people
- Can mean courses on the laptop (downloads) and synch
- Chapters and videos are portable (Books 24x7)
+ Chapters as PDFs
+ Leadership development channel
- Books 24x7 – mobile browser interface
+ Native iPad support
+ Kindle and eReader compatability

Mobile learning is not a one size fits all solution
- Pure learning and assessment
- Reinforcement / Refreshers (Learning Nuggets)
- Performance support / job aids (no more than 5 min long)
- Data collection / surveys and analysis

Mobile learning framework
- Supplements but does not replace traditional eLearning
- Component of corporate “learning ecosystem”
- Tracking and reporting remain key
- Appropriate content, appropriate device, appropriate time
- Must be simple

Device support
- iPhone (3 or 4), iPad, iPod
- Blackberry’s newest phones + Playbook
- Android phones and tablets (2.3 or higher)

2 pronged
- Server-based solution for broad support
- If needed, light-weight apps for select devices to support download, notifications, and seamless login
+ Mostly browser-based, html 5 solution. Moving away from apps. Want to be more OS independent
+ Big challenges for app – have to go through the specific “market” (like iTunes)
+ Want them to hit standard SkillPort URL

Supported Content
- PowerPoint
- Audio
- Video
- Mult choice and short answer questions

Focused on getting customer content that can be pushed out vs. SkillPort content
- Product updates
- Podcasts
- Assessments

SkillSoft content that they are focusing on making mobile (phase 1)
- Books 24x7
- LDC
- SkillBriefs

Dialog Design (6.0, Aug / Sept) – to be mobile tool
- Will support audio and video
- Remember: Flash won’t play on Apple devices
- Direct publish capability being put in
- Can assign just like any other content in system

SkillPort 7.3 – main mobile enabled SkillPort
+ optimized for smartphones – can get view based on how access SkillPort
+ Phase 2 update release – optimized for tablets
+ Assign msparks to learners like any other content
+ Search, MyPlan, MyProgress [won’t see most of the SkillPort tutorial library. Can find and put in MyPlan for later]

3rd party LMSs – still tricky space. Mobile accessibility dependent upon which one you are using.

Future thoughts
- SkillSoft content – not viable until tablets hit the market. Phones too small for courses.
- many hurdles
+ Limited flash support
+ Limited support for Java applets
- Research projects focused on Business Skills library
- What will it take to get library of content and tweak? No dates, but pursuing.

Can see new ways to re-engage learners with the touch screen vs. mouse interaction

Stuff to think about
- Do you have an active initiative around mobile? In organization? In training?
- Are you thinking about phones? Tablets? Both?
- Have you standardized on any particular devices?
- Have you thought about the kinds of resources you think make sense for mobile delivery? Learning? Performance support? Assessments?
- Are you plugged into your IT department? What are THEY thinking (since they will have to support you)

Skillport#p11 The 2020 Workplace

2011-05-11T10:34:00.000-04:00

Presentation: The 2020 Workplace
Presenter: Jeanne Meister

[Left briefly at the beginning of the presentation]
What is life going to be like in 2020?

25% of workday – looking for answers to questions

For a 1000 workers – inability to quickly find answers is millions of dollars of lost productivity

Want to have their work life look a lot like their home like
- Same productivity tools as personal life (Wikipedia, facebook, google, etc)
- Same tools (mac, iPhone, etc) Stressing IT policy and security.

2020
- “Training department” – not resonate. Training is part of the job.
- Work/life balance is dated. Work is PART of life.
- REAL issue – work/life flexibility
- LEARNING IS PART OF WORK

2020 – Participation revolution
- Revolutions are happening faster
- From 100s of years to 10s of years to a few years
- Consumer experience will have tremendous impact on learning
- We are creating experiences to change attitudes and behaviors

Author used twitter for research with hash tags

What is interesting is not QUANTITY of YouTube
- Young adults using YouTube for How To videos.
+ Learning to DRIVE in YouTube video
- Can learn ANYTHING on YouTube
- Some companies – for each course in curriculum, looking at what is out there on YouTube that can be vetted and brought in as pre-work

Use what is already available

What is the impact on learning of all this participation
- IT concept – Consumerization of IT. We bring our needs to the IT dept. and uses and saying “This is what I want to do.”
- Will see the same thing with learning. We want our LMS, Intranet etc to work like Google Search engine

Focus on the experience
- Build an engaging experience
- Should be at HEART of what we are doing

Gamification (points, badges etc) – help us ALL get engaged and motivated
- Didn’t this start with frequent flyer programs? How did our behavior change as a result?

Flipping the classroom – Khan Academy
- Started by tutoring cousins in math on YouTube
- Attracted math teachers around the world. Students see video first and discuss in class.
- 2200 videos.
- He has already GIVEN the lecture. The classroom now the discussion and collaboration zone.

Salman Khan TED talk

3 trends

Globalization – global access to markets and talent
- Everyone spread out, maybe all over world.
- Companies identifying global mindset as a core competency
+ corporate responsibility programs now embedded globally
+ IBM – can compete to bring skills to another country
+ Join resources and budgets – learning and IBM foundation

Demographics – 5 generations working side-by-side
- 2020 Millenials will be 50% of workforce (North America data)
- Attitudes of millennial generation (1977-1997) global

- PEW research survey – How Millenial Are You?
+ How do you read the paper?
+ Each of us is adopting a millennial mindset. We are engaged and using tools in both personal and work life.

Social Media inside the organizations
- Likely to use Web 2.0 in learning function
- 2008 – only 8%. In 2011 – will be up to 87%
+ Text, Web, Twitter

[Used Poll Everywhere to get poll using cell phones – very cool presentation tactic]

Productivity seen as both a benefit and a barrier
- Good that they can find experts and collaborate
- Bad because it decreases productivity – checking out own facebook page and for personal stuff
- Same fears as email really

To address barriers
- www.socialmediagovernance.com
- Make sure working on cross-functional way with Er, Legal, HR to create guidelines and policies to use social media inside org

Some predictions coming true in 2011
- Intel Digital IQ online course – for handful of Intel Spokespeople
+ Media training
+ Eventually expanded to everyone
- Social Media training will be as common as ethics and other compliance training
+ How to be respectful and responsible using social media

World’s Most Interesting Intern – Greg Justice
[nothing like watching corporate white boys rapping about ergonomic desk chairs]
- Found Greg through Twitter
- “When they told me to share my experience, it never occurred to me to write it.”
- So did you get the job at Cisco? “Nah, interviewing to be a Hollywood Screenwriter.”

When you think about learning in 2020 - what comes to mind?
- Social
- Apps
- Gamification – more achievement-oriented learning

Social and participatory now a REQUIREMENT to get a job.
- One company – Twitter ad contest. Send 13 tweets about why should they get a job as a paid intern.
+ Develop blog, YouTube channel
+ WHY should you get this job?

How do we as an organization reduce time between discovery and adoption of new products and services?
- Thrown question to the network – internal and customers

How do we create content and make it easy to
- Contribute
- Comment
- Access from anywhere (incl mobile)

IBM Survey OF 707 CHROs
- Financial performers – 57% more likely than underperformers to use networking and collaborative tools inside org

We will see more studies proving the value of this.

What can you do?
- Be on top of demographic issue. What will next decade look like?
- Are you a personal user of these technologies? Esp social networking tools
- Practice Vuja De – look at something you may have been in before, but with a fresh set of eyes
+ My job, my role, what I deliver
+ Don’t repeat same things over and over

What can Organizations do?
+ Telecommuting Policies and Training
+ New skills for the 2020 workplace
-- Social Media Literacy training tip of the iceburg
-- Develop a global mindset
+ Reverse Mentoring
-- I want to grow and develop through mentor and coach
-- Reach out to younger members of org. Often powered by tech platform
-- Listen to the younger members

Skillport#p11 Wednesday Keynote Pt 1

2011-05-11T10:27:00.000-04:00

Presentation: The Future of Learning
Presenter: John Ambrose

What works now, what comes next

The best way to predict the future is to create it – Peter Drucker
- This is why we are here

Participating in the process – key to what we do as learning professionals and technologiest
- Learning becomes a contact sport
- More participatory with our learners

2010 – Year of the user
- Taking user experience with systems and making them better
- Why do we have to deal with user unfriendly enterprise apps at work, but at home our tools are intuitive
- 2008-2010 – users have to be at center of experience (SaaS)
- Web 2.0 technologies weaving into our lives and into user expectations
- Just 26% of US orgs have expert discovery system
+ Easier to find someone outside org [very true]
- We have to bring users and social technologies together in a smart way

2011 – Year of the team
- Learning used to be a solitary experience
- Learning has to adapt to being more interactive/human/social to reflect the way we work (in groups/teams)
- inGenius – social layer. Over 225 companies have adopted.
- review and comment on content
- foster exchange of knowledge
- In highly regulated industry – look as extension of Books 24x7 and SkillPort
- Champion of social technology – encourage purchase [sales pitch]
- Cognizant – 65% under 30
- Have a knowledge platform. Can share knowledge among each other
- Twice rate of adoption of inGenius of most

2012 – Year of the stream
- Learning had to become a more active/dynamic environment vs. static repository of content
- Easy destination to get learning
- Push to other places
- Learning Content powering talent initiatives and applications
+ John Deere – look at requirements / competencies for job and see learning assets connecting to it
+ Cable and Wireless – development plans with relevant books/ plans / etc
- Lots of linkages between learning and career paths
- USAA – core value – customer service
+ Train employees (call centers) – stream bite size learning during lulls in calls (3-8 minutes)

Not as simple as these 3 targets.
- We all have very complex technical environments (Oracle, SAP, Teleos, etc)
- Total seamless integration – the holy grail
- We should be able to aid in that curation process as learning professionals.

What was missed
- iPad adoption – thought was stupid. But bought one 1st day anyway.
+ Completely missed how quickly it would be adopted
+ Companies using iPads as part of training programs
+ Some security issues with them.
+ Entirely new class of computing device. Very popular
+ Still only 20 million total units worldwide. Still small relatively
+ We will probably see convergence between tablets and laptops
+ Companies seeking to leverage tablets
- Take 8 core competency and linked videos to competencies. Access through iPad

SkillPort on iPad 2
- SkillPort working on issues to get around the “not supporting Flash” issue
- Full catalog available.
- Can do search
- Can admin
- Can go through videos (LDC) and launch [did not show actual course launch]
- [Will probably work best with Books 24x7 and LDC right now]

Was thinking about SkillPort on Smartphone a couple of years ago.

Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it – Alan Perlis

It SHOULD get simpler. It shouldn’t be so complex.

It’s not good enough to get information into people’s heads. We want to trigger their cognition at the right time and the right situation – Will Thalheimer

Thalheimer’s Learning Landscape Model
- Learning orgs have most influence in the learning and prompting activities
- On the job learning and performance – where we have the least impact but has GREATEST impact on bottom line.

Today – we are still in Learning 1.0 . We have content etc

Learning 2.0 – blend and curate assets incl. user-generated content and make more participatory

Curation of content – not about stacking content anymore. How do you blend it in new ways.
- Customize with proprietary

Trigger zone – 1.0. emails, skill briefs etc
2.0 Smarter search – solution is to get better about finding and sifting. Tag and use community. Let cream rise to top.

Performance zone – 1.0. High impact/limited influence. Technology has opportunity to revolutionize this.
2.0 – Sharepoint, some cool stuff around this. Can integrate SkillPort to Sharepoint

Results zone- today, usage. Maybe ROI
2.0 – smarter about learning analytics. More business prediction and performance/focus. Return on expectations (not just investments). Collaboration maps.

If we get good at sponsoring collaboration in enterprise from learning perspective, we will have new insight in how org works and performs.

Role of the LMS in all of this
- Focus has been administrative, managing transaction
- We are moving towards curation and linkages vs just admin
- SkillPort – being able to do basics but also support on demand and blended learning.

Don’t get bogged down by legacy complexity.

Look at stand-alone knowledge centers and SLAs

Gotta make the whole total experience as user-friendly as possible.
- Immersive, highly interactive
- Destination – interact and inter-play

At end of day
- people, content , community together

Skate to where the puck is going
- Social
- Curation

#skillportp11 Wednesday Thoughts

2011-05-11T10:23:00.000-04:00

Managed to get a bit more sleep last night. Yay NyQuil. Am now doing a 2-pronged attack with Claritin D (Thanks Karen!) and DayQuil. This with Halls Cough Drops seems to be knocking down the coughing.

I will be skipping some sessions again today to get some rest. I am desperately trying to do the Harry Potter thing organized by the conference. That and I want to spend some quality time with my cousin.

Like yesterday – posting will occur in chunks.

To all of you reading this in the hospitality industry – puhleeze retrofit your expanding walls so there is more electric outlets available in these ballrooms. And better wifi while you are at it. My netbook hates your public WiFi. A lot. Thanks much.

#skillsoftp11 Hogwarts Gaming Competition

2011-05-11T08:07:00.001-04:00

Gaming is an effective way of training people

- Out of reach for most organizations – costs of programming etc

Example: PacMan

- No one explained how it worked.

- Learn about boundaries of environment

- How characters behave and consequences of actions

Multiple choice – lose the intangibles

Identify the elements of the workplace

- Learners not necessarily TOLD, but experiencing and learning skills that can’t be taught in traditional manner

Characteristics of games

- Strong narrative – fits in nicely with adult learning principals, esp. relevancy

+ Consequences

+ Storytelling

- Strong characters – you learn about how orgs run by how people interact with you

- Exploration of a world – something learners can relate to

- Learn through Challenges (Decision-making)

+ PacMan – making decisions on the fly and through re-playability, apply what learn

- Risk / Reward

+ Run or go for the pill?

+ Life like that – could be dangerous, but the payoff could be huge

- Scoring – people like to be competitive

+ Folks want best score

- Gotta be FUN!

+ Even simplest game

+ Can you get people to crowd around and try again?

Day-in-a-life game

- Building out a framework that models the workplace

- Give learner ability to perform daily task

- Multiple levels of challenges

- Interactions with customers/ co-workers etc

- Complex scoring

Example day-in-a-life game: Office Galaxy (demo game)

- 2 dimensional avatar cartoon – consistent graphic mood (comic book in this case)

- goofy retro gaming music

- allowed personalization

- Narrative: give background, focused narrative

- Character: Shift leader serves as helper through game

- Character: Manager – will give feedback

- Set your objectives based on the behaviors you want to demonstrate

+ [What is your time scale? 8 hour shift? Weeks? Months?]

- Satisfaction / consequences checks for instantaneous feedback

+ Both graphic and explanation

Think about your job on a daily basis

- 3 or 4 high priority

- 3 or 4 medium

- 3 or 4 optional, but random

How are you going to accomplish more in that amount of time?

Interactive activities

Also have people wanting help (optional challenges)

Intersperse narrative throughout game

[Didn't stick around for the contest. Decided to rest and medicate for this evening's Harry Potter event. Because dangit I am going to get out of this hotel even if it kills me.]

#skillsoftp11 The SkillPort Roadmap

2011-05-10T17:17:00.000-04:00

I asked permission to blog this one on the off chance they are giving away company secrets. Thank you Stephanie.

My cousin was kind enough to come to my room and provide medication and a bit of moral support. Will be hiding in my room for the rest of the evening. Just me, some NyQuil, 2 cell phones, the laptop, the 2nd half of my sandwich from lunch and lots of tea and water.

A rockin' evening is on tap tonight.
------------

Presentation: The SkillPort Roadmap
Presenter: Stephanie Pyle, SkillSoft
----

Over 2000 customers and 7 million end users
- Now in Market Leader bracket
- One of largest deployments of LMS in world

A focus on building highly requested functionality while focusing on simplicity of implementation

SaaS Platform – hosted and managed for you.
- Maybe 15 who have on own servers
o Multi-tenant architecture – at any point you can upgrade, but don’t have to
o Update one, updates all
o New releases immediately available
o Customer data isolation – no data comingled. 2 customers – ea with separate database
Configured, not customized
- Standard operating procedures
- Simplified software upgrades
- Automated business process

Dedicated Technical Expertise
- In depth domain and tech

[showed off SkillPort 7 interface]
- let users drill down using file/folder structure
- improved search [big fan of this]
- resources within search results

Can configure in terms of language and terminology (if don’t like it)
My Plan – add item easily
My Progress – easy view and print reports

Focus on continuous improvement (start in 2000
- Base is content delivery system
- Build out what customers say they need

Learning Trends
- Social learning and collaboration
- Mobile – smartphones and tablets
- Continued eed for ILT, but more integrated with and supported by online resources
- More compliance needs at all levels of the org
- More personalized experience for the learners
- Focus on customer content [yay]
o Integrate and use with off-the-shelf content
o Created and publish by many people – formal instruction, Expert-created resources, end-user submissions

Reporting – start to rollout in SkillPort 7.1
ILT updates also starting to rollout

SkillPort 7.1 – Still in Controlled Release (including my university)
- Early feedback on new reporting being addressed
- Main: new reporting engine
- More complex, but more flexible [personally a fan of the changes]

SkillPort 7.1 – Deep Linking [unfortunately still does not work very well with LDAP]
- Designed to go to SkillPort user screen

ILT 4.0 released March 2011 [also fond of these changes, though I wish I got more warning about the UI change]
- Focus on customer pain points
Conflict alerts – ILT checks to see if a classroom or instructor booked
Enroll at top of page
Course and sessions now collapsible
Better control over enrollment and session roster
Email improvem,ents
Event journals
Skillport company admin can configure 25 ILT settings
- September 2011 – ILT support will be folded into core SkillPort Platform

SkillPort 7.2 – Probably next couple of months. In final testing stage
- Admin UI redesign
o Task-based vs area based
o Drop-down tabs
o Focus on consistent user patterns across all
- Granular object support
o Can assign topic vs. entire course [YAY]
- Ability for admins to assign books to My Plan (also videos and course topics)
- Development Plan Support – collaborative folder
o Shared control folder allow manager and employee to build plan together
o Approval state – approve plan and report against. User can view against development plan
o Learners request Waivers for resources in the folder
o Different from learning program – very specific program. Completion. More permanent
o Development plan is a grouping of resources, but may change
o Company can hide development plan (enabled/disabled)
- External Learning events
o Can now assign to User or Group. Admin can create OR user can create.
o Can create in My Plan or in My Progress
o Learning Events have a completion status and show up in My Progress and Reporting
o Both end user and administrative side
o External learning object – sits in catalog. External learning event – ad hoc [no news on whether reporting on external learning objects has improved]
- New area for Manage Approvals (if using Approval Manager workflow) (in 7.1)
- Course topics and book sections now in Learning Programs. Do not need to add entire course or book/chapter
o Shorter and more focused learning
o Assign course TOPICS to My Plan [yay yay yay!!!!]
o Works in newer architecture. Older arch not supported (like Office 2003).
o If use SkillStudio – will also be supported
o Can also deep link to topic
- inGenius – social learning layer incl wikis and blogs
o Same engine SkillPort and Books 24x7. Single profile.
o Has activity stream that you can make public (also comments etc)
o Community activity in search results.
o Can recommend and like. Report most recommended.
o Moderation features for admin (passive). No anonymous posting.
o Can report comment as abusive
o Basic reporting (most active courses and people)
- Blogs and Wikis in 7.2
o 1st version
o Simple link on left. Can turn on and off.
o Can set up who the authors are in both
o Treating blogs and wikis as content
o Most valuable when use as part of learning programs (not there yet). Want people to start playing with them.

Easier integration of customer content
- Next 3-6 months
o Direct publish to SkillPort from SkillStudio / Dialog Design
o Add support to SCT for new media types
o Integrate SCT functionality into SkillSoft Publisher
o Add support to Publisher for simple publish of passive content (no completion)
- 6-12 months
o Provide seamless login from SkillPort Admin UI to publisher
o Integrate Publisher into SkillPort
o Support custom previews via main SkillPort site (eliminate separate preview site
o Add simple assessment creation functionality to SkillPort Admin UI
-
- Emerging Mobile Learning Framework
o Supplements, but does not replace traditional eLearning
o Component of corporate learning ecosystem
o Tracking and reporting key
o Appropriate content, appropriate device, appropriate time
o Must be simple
o Targeting most popular platforms (iPhone, Pad, Andriod, BlackBerry new phones + playbook
o Customer created content
o 2 pronged

SkillPort 7.3 – Q3/Q4
- Integration of ILT to core SkillPort
o Enhanced workflows & User experience
- Additional reporting templates
o Enhancement to support SARM customer upgrades
- 1st phase of compliance support
o Enhance course recurrence and retake
o Central repository for emails + email editing
- Mobile support and access to My Plan and My Progress
- Streamlined process for self-publishing Custom Content
- Customer Keyword Support
o Keywords against content so highlighted in search results.
o You can customize terminology in system

Mid next year
- Focus on user experience
- Continued reporting improvements
- Increased focus on collaboration and social learning
- Increased focus on Mobile
- Full Compliance support

#skillsoftp11 Hands On Lab: SkillStudio

2011-05-10T17:13:00.000-04:00

Thankfully for all participants I have both Purelled myself sterile and refused to actually put my hands on the machine. Left before the actual hands-on portion of the program.

A few notes:

SkillStudio will allow you to edit SkillSoft-generated content [which would be the ONLY reason why we would consider purchase]

Based on SkillSoft ID model.

If building from scratch in this tool, they recommend that the developer have the following skills:
- Strong understanding of Instructional Design and SkillSoft’s Instructional Design model
- Graphics editing and audio creation experience
o Audio and graphics must be final before adding to SkillStudio
- Proficiency in Windows
- Course authoring experience (the interface can be a bit overwhelming for first time developers)

The tool requires desktop install from a source CD.
- Mandatory training with purchase for up to 4 developers
o Virtual – 2 half-day sessions.

#skillsoftp11 Engineered Engagement

2011-05-10T17:09:00.000-04:00

Post to blog. Catch up on emails. Eat lunch. 30 minute nap. Purchase more cold meds and tea. Pray I can keep the coughing to a minimum.

BTW – this was a VERY popular session
---------
Presentation: Leadership Development: Engineered Engagement
Presenter: Patti Blasingame, GC Services

From 2 programs into 1 structured program
- Blended eLearning with ILT

SkillPort implemented by this company 2005. 500 licenses / 300 courses.
- Company of 5000+ employees
- Used as pilot

First leadership program instructor led 2001
- Time-intensive
- Time away from operations is extra work for them

October 2009 – Goals
- Increase SkillPort Utilization
- Create a process to engage centers / learners
- Improve business performance
- Improve team performance
- Improve manager performance
- Reduce front-end employee turnover
- Increase client satisfaction

Between 2009-2010
- Increase course access 82.08%
- Increase total users 67.6% (topped out their licenses – waiting list to get into SkillPort)
o They will be revisiting licenses
- Increase completions 88%

Reengineered Leadership Dev process to
- Gain better ROI
- Get more engagement
- Offer more flexibility
- Provide more job relevance
- Reduce time off production floor (if in training class, the audience is very distracted because thinking of operations)

Audience
- Front line managers
- Most have NEVER managed in their life
- Needed to connect lessons in SkillPort to their own day-to-day existence. Context

Old solution – Workshops
- Classes either 1 or 2 day (4-8 managers off production floor for entire day)
- Costly (materials and time off floor)
- Inflexible

New Solution – Leadership Learning Series
- Example – Coaching for Top Performance ILT time reduced from 16 hours to 4 hours
- Benefits
o GC certifies facilitators
o Workshops 90 minutes max.. In-person time. Split into chunks
o Class size 1-20
o Courses accessed anytime – Can do in own environment on company time or outside
o Lower direct costs

SkillPort courses generally done outside production areas so not distracting

Coaching for Top Performance (example)
- 60 minute Intro workshop
- Creating your own leadership Development Plan (1hr) SkillPort course
- Giving Feedback: A managers Guide (4 hr) SkillPort course
- 90 minute checkpoint workshop
- Managing as coach and counselor (3.5 hours) SkillPort course
- Leadership essential for motivating employees (1hr) SkillPort course
- 90 minute wrap-up workshop
o Workshops ongoing
- Assignments from the SkillPort courses done in Context
o example. Managers create OWN Leadership Development Plan for Checkpoint workshop
o They created their own supplemental materials
 Word, Dreamweaver and PowerPoint
- Workshops all about of what they learned / discussion around the SkillPort assignment
o Many workshops virtual
- Total duration of sequence –
o This was mandated. Gave them 90 days to complete the process
o Each center started process at different times (based on workload and culture of that particular center). Managed own timelines within the deadline.
o Current avg time to completion – 60 days

Implementation
- Oct 2009: More licenses
o Develop shorter workshops
- Nov 2009
o Communicate change from Instructor Led workshops to Leadership Learning
o Attend SkillSoft Admin training for ILT module
o Schedule training
o Develop 1st Leadership Development Program
- Dec 2009
o Finalize program
o Load into SkillPort
o Build ILT structure
- Jan 2010
o Publish workshop materials to intranet
o Conduct field administrator virtual training Dialog Live
o Conduct facilitator workshop virtual training Dialog Live
o Ongoing Maintenance
 Setup User IDs
 Reset passwords
 Coach admins and facilitators – at least 2-3 days (HR and some ops)
 Ongoing coaching / support

Mandate to change the workshops – CEO level.
- He likes saving money. They showed how they can save 100k per year by going blended.
- Also liked the reduction in time off floor.

Find she is much more engaged now with her end users.

Pre-Implementation Experience
- Get the word out
- Identify Center Admins
- Add 900 Users
- Conduct Admin/Facilitator Training
- Coaching sessions
- Develop and publish LLS workshops
- Communicate

This program is starting to be done as pre-requisite for management
- Management trainees being encouraged to take this course.
- Remember: they have limited licenses, so needed to prioritize participation
- Once trained in how to use system, engagement easier

The Benefits
- Flexible implementation – can customize to environment and issues.
o Even more engagement from managers and HR
- Workshop roster fits ops schedule
- Certify facilitators internally
- Nearly 75% less time off production floor
- Streamlined methods for building bench strength
- No wasted materials
- More engagement

ROI – Training hours and turnover comparison
- Generally as increase training hours, decrease turnover.
- Is keeping in mind that there are numerous variables [like collections call center being thankless] that also impact turnover
- Looked at all centers individually to also see if there is something else going on with that center
- Used MayTab to create graphs for presentation

Training metrics used in business case
- Turnover (CEO’s number 1 priority)

[Couldn’t hear the answer to whether they measured the managers who took the class and their turnover. The presenter started mumbling when she was answering questions.]

$93,000 saved in 3 centers (attrition costs)
- Development costs: 4 week dev cycle.

Future outlook
- Business impact series
- Challenge series

Key Success Factors = Engagement
- Relevant
- Flexible
- Dynamic

#skillsoftp11 Tuesday Keynote

2011-05-10T11:45:00.000-04:00

Truncated - because I couldn't stop coughing and the thing was being filmed live.
Stupid #$*(#$ cold.
-------------
Satellite interactive teleconference event – will be produced in the conference and broadcast out

Will be part of the Leadership Development Channel in SkillPort.

[BTW – the book is free on Kindle today]
---------------
(Shawn – Exec Producer)
We can sometimes get pre-occupied with “the killer app” when we are really trying to connect people with ideas

Connect people to ideas as seamlessly as possible to create behavioral change.

Passion might be what you love to do / your purpose is why the world loves you.

--------------------
Tim Sanders

- Mothers make incredible influence in business world through example.
- Sales and Marketing – fat budgets, well liked by CFOs.

For the training and development folks
I am not a cost center
I am a profit center

A company that stops all training and development – LOSER

I sell business performance
- Breakthrough product development
- Sales – sells bottom line revenue.

Training and development is the CORE performance driver of the company

Build real case studies. All c-levels respond to case studies.
- How did you take individuals from A to B (before/after)
- Singular case studies around different ideas

Tip for HR generalists – to have a positive culture
- Stop hiring unhappy negative people.
- Don’t hire high-performance bad attitude person
- The high performance jerk will poison environment – everyone else will leave
o The manager seduced by the performance.
- Refer him to a competitor

---------------
Leadership Development Channel
[Nothing like being a live audience. Sucking on lots of mints and water to try to keep the coughing down. Good thing I am way in the back.]

The only reason to give a speech is to change the world.
- Challenge the way you see the world
- Combine call to adventure with call to action

Idea: Success is NOT a destination. It is a direction. The direction is forward.
- Remember the mind is a goal-striving mechanism
- #SkillSoftP11

Mark Cuban saw objections as opportunities to shine.
- Not stopped by things that phase others

Grandma – you are either the phoenix or the fire
- Troubles separate the strong from the weak

When something in the economy goes wrong – initially we blame others. As go on – we start to take it personally.
- People get addicted to watching bad news.
- Can’t be paranoid enough during bad times.
- For every minute work, worry for 10.
- Will get into head
- Change work behavior. Go from balanced to workaholic
- Language change – from builder to beater. From rainmaker to downer.
- Life begins to fall apart
- The annual review – so terrible, woke up.

Are you going sideways?
- Easy to spin out of control and wait passively for the next boom time
- What are you NOT doing today that you did back in the day? What are you NOT giving?
- [answer that for yourself]

Principles from Grandma
- There is enough to go around – change the way you behave and acted.

The leader’s role is to define reality – and then give hope.

If we don’t go back to what worked in 2005-2006, we will ALL experience personal recessions.
- We stopped growing.
- A personal recession – when you stop growing for a year personally, professionally. “Just getting by” This is NOT the way to live.

If we don’t start moving forward, we can’t take advantage of the next upswing

Hanging Tough – New Yorker
- Phoenix companies before recession actually officially over. (all recessions)
- They continue to invest in the future,
- Stop thinking short as soon as feel the technicals are sound

We are not pointing the mechanism forward.

Question 1: How do you see the world?
- Perspective determine everything. Language, actions
- Are you scarcity thinker or abundance thinker?
- ALL times.
- Success exclusive or contagious?
- Should information be kept in silo since info = power>
- Perspective trigged by environment.
- If don’t manage it – scarcity thinking is default.

We have to cultivate abundance thinking as the way we see the world – thick OR thin
- Scarcity thinking will eat at your head.
- Focus on what OTHERs getting.
- HR – notice leaders start to hoard resources. Hire too many people.
- Greed is just fear during good times.
- Start to compete. People start to go to war with each other.
- Focus on lack.
- Focus on lack – will repel high performance people

You use fear because it works on you. But it also makes you unhappy.

2 kinds of rich - $$$ rich and meaning rich

Where does abundance mentality come from?
- Deep self of confidence and self worth

[At this point, I had to leave. Could not stop coughing. This is going to be a long conference day at this rate.]

#skillsoftp11 Tuesday

2011-05-10T11:38:00.003-04:00

Wound up with a full blown dose of the crud by the end of yesterday. Spent most of the night hacking and coughing. Apparently, the DayQuil I consumed as a mid-day snack didn’t work. Maybe I should bag the pills and just go liquid.

Attempt at hot shower to clear the junk out was also a fail – managed no better than lukewarm. Apparently, one of the main hot water towers failed, impacting the rooms in my section of the hotel. I noticed that the “hot” water when I tried to take a bath was a tad cool. The front desk swears that I should be able to take a hot shower or bath this afternoon. It would suck if it doesn’t work – the shower in my room is large enough for a 5 person orgy. Hate to waste that level of luxury on lukewarm showers.

On a positive note – discovered that one of my fraternity brothers (hi Shaggy!) worked for one of my SkillPort contacts (hi Kevin). I think Kevin was really surprised that not only did I know one of his former employees, I had also known him for 20-some-odd years.

2nd positive note – ran into my cousin Karen. And I was bummed that I wasn’t going to get a chance to see her due to my battle with the creepy crud. At least I got to talk with her briefly. Hope I didn't give her the creepy crud.

Small world.

---------------
Today’s notes may be truncated. I skipped all of the large ballroom stuff until the keynote. Figured the extra rest would do me a LOT of good. I also figured that the other attendees would appreciate me NOT hacking and coughing in the back the entire time.

My netbook is not connecting to the WiFi in the lobby areas. Thankfully, the hotel room has really good wired internet. As a result, I will be loading in bulk. Not optimal, but it beats rewriting my handwritten notes.

#skillsoft Marketing Strategies Part 4

2011-05-10T07:54:00.000-04:00

Pascale Winnick, Symantec

Marketing Resources
- Career Circuit - each month focus on a new resource / skill topic
+ Done as blended learning
- Learning Excellence Credits (CEO-driven)
+ Target # of credits per year
+ Approximately 1 hr = 1 credit with some flux depending on complexity
+ Credits also given for training performed outside of HR training
- LED Intranet Site
+ Multiple occurances
+ Direct links (again with some reprogramming by their IT folks)
- Learning paths - tied to competencies
- Marketing emails - upcoming training

Career Circuit
- Skill Fitness for peak performance
- Online pre-work, then interactive 90 minute webinar
- Wide variety of professional skills topic (focus on soft skills)
- Earn learning excellence credits - 1 per webinar

PowerPoint Ad Deck during 15 minutes before webinar
- Gives ad and information for program WHILE waiting for webinar to start
[genius idea]

Marketing emails
- 2-3 weeks before offering programs'
- Templated. Only things change are the 1st paragraph and the link

They use SumTotal as LMS with registration and schedule

Delivery team helps with development
- they want to be involved in creating the training
- this team also in trenches so hear questions and can help drive the topics

All webinars
- Within 3-5 minutes have people do SOMETHING (interact)
+ check/x or smileys or raise hands
+ whiteboards
+ breakout rooms
- Using mostly Live Meeting with some WebEx

Program Newsletter - towards top 15% of employees
- Director / Manager / Individual Contributor tracks
- Also a next level newsletter for that employee's immediate supervisor with talking points.
- Direct links to tools / resources within and outside of SkillPort

Faithful following only happened when blended
- Webinar, books, learning

Marketing emails
- Short subject, call to action
- Clear call to action early in message
- Concise - 25 words or less per paragraph, 4 lines per paragraph
- Peer pressure marketing with quotes on how program improved life

India - not like Books 24x7
- One cafeteria in the office
- Table tents - 1 side ad, 2nd side instructions
- cards disappear, usage increase

In offices where ILT held, have posters advertising tools and courses

Proofing
- Remember the benefit to the learner
- Active voice
- Concise/Impactful
- Positive language (no don'ts or can'ts)
-------------
The solutions here were very similar to Chrissie's for Deloitte. I left a bit early because I could no longer control my hacking and coughing.

#skillsoft Marketing Strategies Part 3

2011-05-10T07:41:00.000-04:00

Chrissie Gale - Deloitte

I didn't know we had access to this!!!

People only have so much mind space
- Gotta hit at the right time

Problem with launch-only marketing
- Content gets old fast
- Lose audience
- Message lost

Keep constant flow with different media
- cross-sell marketing and repackaging content
- Target messages

SkillSoft Learning Growth Model
- Marketing must progress through growth model as well.

This team branded the training department.

Studied the audience and what people needed (done by staff of 60 on Global team + 1000+ learning professionals in local offices)
- Newsletter: to learning professionals
- Touchpoint calls - learning leadership in each country
- Email to learners - opt-in
- Face to face visits with member firms
- Live on conference calls and webinars
+ Webinars targeted specifically to audience

Make it consistent
- Look and feel like Deloitte
- Images
- Tone

Cross-sell -tell them again and again in a different way
- Embed in other publications
- Extend reach of learning

Make use of provided content
- Package content into Learning Solutions - ease of access and context
- Created a mini-portal
+ Need to know
+ Secondary site linked to main page
+ Content linked from SkillPort (Deloitte had people program an interface to make up for the broken deep-linking with LDAP. Symantec did the same)
+ Goal: quick and easy for end user

Timely messages, email and Intranet delivery
- opt in subscription to newsletter
- Newsletter 1x per week
- Templated

Inside Learning newsletter for learning professionals
- Was monthly with 5-6 articles. Too long and folks not reading
- Now weekly with 1 article
- Assistance on how to use things
+ Can TELL me there is an event, but what do I do with it?
- Ask learning teams how can help

Created Marketing Resource center for the local learning professionals
- Branding info
- Toolkits
- Flash ads
- Tips and best practices
---------------
This was my favorite presentation of the 4.

Shame they had to get their local IT folks to create a linking interface to get the direct links in SkillPort 7.1 to work. Bah.

#skillsoft Marketing Strategies Part 2

2011-05-09T19:12:00.000-04:00

Travis Marker - Chesapeake Energy

We need to pay closer attention to our culture
- Learn from your audience

The need for a roadmap. Don't tell them when to end.
- Define the culture
- Develop a Brand
- Integrate SkillSoft [this justifies this portion of the presentation]
- Transfer the Knowledge

Define the culture - what is important to your audience?
- If you don't define the culture 1st, you are just handing them off-the-shelf training

Develop a Brand
- Market your training department! Market YOU
+ Logos on everything (once you develop one)
+ Templates for all emails
+ National Learning Week - get yourself out there (in December, check ASTD)
+ Technology give-aways
+ Swag
+ Table tents, cookies, posters, etc
- Remember: training is easily cut
- The more your employees come to you - the stronger your case
- Gen X and Y crave to learn. Have them come to YOU.

Audience ideas
- "Foursquare" location - your training rooms
- Tweet content with launcher
- Shoot short video of your SMEs (3-5 minutes)
+ Mobile
+ Knowledge management
+ Focus on short tips

Integrate SkillSoft - meets requirement for flexibility
- Rebrand and make SkillSoft / SkillPort invisible
- Support
+ Executive summaries
+ Online courses / video
- Research (the training dept can help with that too!)
+ Books 24/7
+ Knowledge Centers
- Certify
+ Knowledge Centers

Transfer the knowledge
- Still working on ways to transfer organizational knowledge from the traditionalists / boomers to the Gen X/Y folks

Chesapeake uses a SharePoint Portal page as their front end, masked so it doesn't look like SharePoint. Integrated with SkillPort.
-------------
Sorry all - this presentation left me cold. Wasn't certain where he was headed with this. Particularly discussions around his company's fabulous wellness program and what our own companies are doing.

Maybe I'm just cranky.

#skillsoft Marketing Strategies Part 1

2011-05-09T18:58:00.000-04:00

I should be at the welcome reception right now. Networking, schmoozing, etc. What I had hoped was allergies has turned into a full blown head cold.

Since I seriously doubt my employers will allow me to expense NyQuil and hard candies as a meal, I am eating some soup, some Corn Nuts and some Arizona Green tea.

The brunette in the ponytail and glasses coughing near the power outlets. That's me. Hopefully some rest and lots of chicken soup will knock this thing out.
-------------------
Brecken Pitts, Victoria Shelves - SkillSoft

1) Effective marketing depends on what happens BEFORE the creative work begins
- Talk to your learning consultant for help planning

2) Think of your audience
- Who is your target audience?
- Why would they be interested?
- Use language they would use
- Create "Personas"
+ What is that audience's greatest issue? Time to do the tutorials? Technology barrier? "I learn better in a classroom?"

3) Focus on a SINGLE message
- One strong value proposition can have a tremendous impact
- Put message in headline
- Make sure elements (graphics etc) support value proposition

4) Keep visual design clean and simple
- Learn to love white space
- Use proven layout (borrow stuff)
- Think about production
+ The simpler the design = cheaper and less prone to problems
- For web - keep the important stuff above the scroll

5) Make copy easy to read
- Avoid white print on dark background
- Avoid print on patterns
- Don't center justify long blocks. Use left justified
- Use bubbles and captions
- No funny fonts. Arial is still the most readable.

6) Don't forget the call to action
- Make it prominent
- URL or Clickable graphic
- Reward for action NOW
- Action words

7) Choose your media carefully
- Reach in office
- Remind on desk ("desk drop")
- Email - timing is everything
+ Afternoons - Tues, Wed or Thursday best
+ [How can we implement this outside of that pesky Infomail spam?]

8) Start a conversation
- Invite participation / interaction
- Remember the Publisher's Clearinghouse Stickers? More buy-in if they interact.
- Ask a question
- Contest / Quiz
+ Most courses completed? Hours per month? 1st 10 to finish x?
- Newsletter
+ What's new, tips, suggested searches
+ Quarterly or monthly (at most)
- Blogs and forums (if have established social media presence)

9) Design for measurability
- Set measurable goals!
+ Increase usage of ___ by ____ in ____ time period
- Remember: direct mail only sees 2% jump in sales. Set realistic goals
- Test efforts - A/B test
+ Create one thing (like an email)
+ Send out 2 types - changing one minor thing (like the subject)
+ What gives best return?
- Advertising only a PART of your marketing
+ Add online courses to ILT for blended learning
+ Incorporate online courses into Performance Mgmt program
+ Mention in meetings

10) Optimize over time (lather, rinse and repeat)
- Results fade over time
- Continually market
+ Always new stuff (implementations, feature topics, etc)
- Remember: not all problems solved by marketing

Hello World (again)

2011-05-09T17:51:00.000-04:00

Hello. Long time no blog (since November 2010).

If you want to know what I have been up to (at least personally) in the interim,
look here.

Let's just say Wendy is focusing on her own learning in a different realm.

I'll summarize what I've learned in the past 7 months in the near future.
Maybe.
------------------
Professionally - I've been focused on work projects. All of my creativity has pretty much gone towards the following activities:

- Creating a mess of new tutorials on topics ranging from new email systems to compliance training + lots and lots of conversions for other groups.

- A major LMS upgrade (that I decided to not write about because it looked like all of the other upgrades I've done. Nothing new there).

- With a lot of help, attempting to fix a couple features broken by the major LMS upgrade.

- Other projects (that I also decided not to write about because it looked like all of the other projects I've done. Nothing new there either.)

- Getting ITIL certified. I can now certifiably destroy an IT department! Hooray!

- The beginning stages of designing a reporting system using the LMS, some of our enterprise systems and anything else that might seem useful. As in very beginning stages. I may write about this once I get a bit more traction.

- The usual operational emergencies. There seemed to be an unusual number of them over the past 7 months.

I also didn't feel like I had all that much to contribute to the conversation that I hadn't said before.

--------------
Thank goodness for conferences!

I am currently in Orlando for SkillSoft Perspectives 2011. I've decided to blog this conference.

Also blogging Innovations in eLearning 2011 again this year.

I hope, between these 2 events, I will finally get some of my professional blogging mojo back.

Open Letter to Adobe

2010-11-15T14:57:00.000-05:00

Dear Adobe:

I am very disappointed.

I just spent 5 hours this weekend republishing and reposting Captivate 5 tutorials broken by your latest Flash Player upgrade.

I was lucky. I only had 3 aggregate projects to recreate and nothing on my LMS. If I had to repost those tutorials to my LMS, I would have had to add another 10-30 minutes per tutorial.

I appreciate the effort made by your Captivate 5 team to release a bug fix within a day of discovering the issue. However, the fix really needed to come from the Flash Player team that broke it.

I am now going to spend my day contact other Captivate 5 users at my institution to assist them through this process and evaluating the carnage.

MAKING YOUR CLIENT REPUBLISH ALL OF THEIR TUTORIALS IS NOT AN ACCEPTABLE SOLUTION!

From the comments on this Adobe Captivate Blog post, it appears Adobe is going to re-evaluate their testing protocols for updates.

I look forward to your organization applying the lessons learned from this episode.

Sincerely,
A long term and loyal Adobe product user.

Lessons in Marketing an LMS

2010-11-12T09:02:00.000-05:00

The upgrade of our LMS provided a fantastic opportunity to finally "market" this bugger.

Before the upgrade, or any marketing, we had 2500 active users. This was all word of mouth.

Sally, Sid and I came up with a plan.

Before the upgrade - we did the obligatory warnings and added
- an introductory movie (thank you employers for letting me share this piece of epicness)
- quick references that we included with the warning emails
- a customized "the system is out" page that included the above movie and the quick reference

Directly after the upgrade we did
- In-person workshops. I wound up training 15 people.
- a big, apparently popular, presentation on SkillPort in our Service Excellence conference. I say apparently because my session wound up being only 1/2 full

I have some monthly online sessions scheduled for the next 3 months. The first one is next week. I currently have 0 people.

Funny how the seemingly high demand vanishes when you actually give them the opportunity to DO something.

Here are the conclusions I have come to as a result

1) I am a lousy marketer

2) Maybe the quick references and movies were so good that people felt no need to avail themselves of the instructor-led, in-person training

3) Maybe the system itself is so well designed folks don't need training (personally - I am digging the SkillPort 7.0 re-design)

----------------------------------------------
Any ideas on how to better market this thing are welcome.
Thanks.

Notes from an LMS upgrade

2010-11-11T09:44:00.002-05:00

I am sharing the note I sent to my management chain regarding the upgrade. Names have been changed ...because.....

I did NOT change the name of the LMS vendor, because I thought they did a bang-up job with this new version and with the upgrade.

---------------------------
The SkillPort upgrade that occurred on October 15th was successful.

Time scheduled: 12:01am October 15th - 8:00am October 16th (32 hours)
Actual time: 12:01am October 15th -7:30pm October 15th (19.5 hours with end user testing)

General Comments

I was impressed by the teamwork demonstrated by the IT department during this process. These teams were kind enough to help without requiring a project manager or a lot of browbeating.

- The (Portal Team) did a great job testing the LDAP. The code for LDAP worked without a hitch. M also called me to make sure everything was working correctly once SkillSoft notified us that the update was complete.

- P set up the redirect page we provided and took it down as requested. He also did a fantastic job of following up with me to make sure everything was in place for the upgrade day.

Lessons learned

- This is the second time the search function in our SkillSoft installation was missing some features (instructor-led training, custom content, learning programs) after upgrade. B caught this Monday morning when he went looking for instructor-led classes. SkillSoft fixed it 24 hours later. There was a workaround using Catalog that we could use in the meantime. I need to incorporate a fuller search test into my post-upgrade test scripts.

- Now that I know there is a change board approving outages, I will start that process much earlier. Especially since SkillPort upgrades require downtime during normal business hours.

-The batch add templates changed unexpectedly. This was a detail I missed when preparing for the upgrade. LC and the enterprise development team are working to revise the report so the resulting .csv file meets the new template. Thankfully, the batch add process did not break altogether and I can quickly make the conversion to the new format with the previous report. I will need to take a closer look at our batch add processes and current reporting needs during the next upgrade.

Feedback on SkillPort 7.0 so far

- Overwhelmingly positive. General feedback - it is easier to find things, especially in the Search and Learn section.

- Also receiving positive feedback on the new My Progress section of the site. Especially when I show them the printable reports and how to view ALL of the items done since SkillPort went live.

I will be receiving a LOT more feedback during today's SkillPort session during Service Excellence and will forward any specific feedback to the team.

Update: Feedback during the Service Excellence session was also positive. This tells me that the vendor did a great job making the interface more user-friendly.

------------------------------------------

It feels good to be able to send a positive email regarding an upgrade to management. Particularly when the potential for disaster on both the vendor AND client end was high.

After working with the new system for a bit, I am finding some odds and ends quirks. Often, those quirks fall under the "That's NEAT!" category rather than the "Ugh, gotta work around this" category. Pretty rare for software upgrades.

The biggest process that broke is the ability to directly link specific tutorials to things like emails and external web sites.

Unfortunately, we could not accurately test this with the sandbox environment before the upgrade. I'm afraid this is a result of the re-design / re-code and how SkillPort 7.0 brings up tutorial information.

The initial process was jury-rigged anyway, but that jury-rigged process has become an important part of our operations.

Thankfully, SkillSoft has proven to be incredibly responsive. I think this will be an issue that is resolved in short-order. Fingers crossed.

#DL10 - Reflections on DevLearn and other stuff

2010-11-10T14:45:00.004-05:00

As those who talked to me at DevLearn found out - I haven't had much blogging or eLearning mojo lately. I've been so busy that times I would normally use to reflect - I just couldn't.

I couldn't decide whether DevLearn came at a perfect time or at the worst time.

On the one hand, it came at the perfect time. I got an opportunity to briefly catch up with my eLearning buddies, get away from the office (something I DESPERATELY needed), think a little, and make sure that my plans meshed with where the industry is heading. I am also thrilled that I FINALLY got a chance to meet Harold Jarche (@hjarche) in person. Albeit way too briefly.

On the other hand, it came at the worst time. I had my SO and a friend with me and couldn't focus the way I normally do during conferences. Some of the sessions seemed too familiar - only because I followed the ideas as they were fermenting in the blogosphere. And because I had been so busy and so silent on the interwebz, I didn't feel like I had very much to contribute to the party this time.

I think I needed the time away from the office more than the fantastic information DevLearn provides. I was

To the relief of my employers, I did manage to walk away with two things of value from the week (besides a reduction in burnout).

1) Biggest takeaway - as a profession, we need to be focused more on creating learning environments and systems and less on building courses or creating content. Courses, training programs and the like are just a very small piece of what needs to be a larger support system for our organizations.

As trainers - we are the voice of the end-user. We can leverage this to our advantage and expand our role to be organizational engineers, not just "trainers".

I've started arguing for a consideration of support systems in a couple of my projects. Not just wikis, online tutorials etc - but the human systems surrounding assisting the end-user at the time of need. Who is responsible for what? Who can people talk to? When? How? What tools will we need to help the end user as they perform x task? Is this process sustainable or will we need to come up with a new process / design for later stages as the product / project matures?

Interestingly, my clients are often still stuck on "training"

And I keep asking them "So what happens after that?"

Maybe if I keep asking, I will see a glimmer of light behind the blank stares.

2) Josh Little and Nemo Chu's workshop on Building High Impact Learning Communities gave me an opportunity to at least start the strategic planning for aspects of a support system for a couple of projects that I am working on. One for a very mature product, one for a fairly new implementation.

A major weakness of mine is marketing. I keep hoping that people would magically start taking advantage of the resources we have available at the University. The workshop helped provide some direction in the creation of strategy.

This, I hope, will prove to be invaluable.

--------------------------------------------------

BTW - New DevLearn 2010 link on the blog and this post.

DevLearn 10

Click it to see all of my DevLearn 2010 notes.

Next conference: Educause Mid-Atlantic in Baltimore, MD.
I am actually PRESENTING at this one.
Poster session currently scheduled around 1pm on Thursday, January 13. If this goes well, you may see variations on this theme at other conferences.

Part of that pesky personal growth thing.....

#DL10 Random Thursday Thoughts

2010-11-04T17:17:00.002-04:00

Had a chance to talk to BJ (who happens to work for QualComm). The example Lance Dublin gave is still more of a "push" technology than he let on. Still a good solution - used to help onboard employees through their first 52 weeks. It's all about culture sharing.

----------------------------------

The biggest takeaway for me so far - we (as eLearning specialists) are in a fantastic position to help create learning / sharing environments. Let the subject matter expert create the content.

These environments are not necessarily technological.

Many of us work in a space in our organization where we get to touch all corners. We are in a prime position to help facilitate and cultivate these environments / cultures in our orgs. Even just the simple "hey you should talk to...." improves value to the organization.

----------------------------------

The other takeaway - my focus on support vs. "traditional" training / course development is a sound strategy. A course is only a very very small part of what we need to be doing.

I think as educators we are in a position where we should be inserting ourselves much earlier into project processes. Sometimes, we are the only voice of the end-user when systems (whether technological, organizational or other) are being designed and developed.

I've seen too many systems developed recently where the end-user was forgotten during the development process - despite the end user being CRITICAL to the success of that system. Then they want to blame the problem on "training" when really the system is missing a consistent model, has too many exceptions and too many complicated inputs. No wonder change fails.

-----------------------------------

I hear it is very pretty outside.......

#DL10 Thursday Afternoon Keynote

2010-11-04T17:14:00.002-04:00

Presenter: Brent Schlenker
We are at a point of turmoil and flux (same point of turmoil and flux we've been in)
We are starting to see stuff coming to fruition (true)

-----------------------------------
Presenter: Marcia Conner

Social Media isn’t a fad, it’s a fundamental shift in the way we communicate
- 5 billion mobile phone subscribers
- 96% of folks under 30 are n a social network
- $650 billion in productivity is lost from unnecessary business process interruptions
- People aren’t connecting as they need to be.
- 9 in 10 trust strangers for recommendations

The demand for progress is clear…just not in your organization

Remember - we are together and not alone.

Focusing on the user - becomes a message that carries through in all the work that you are doing. "I am loved" - from the Learning and Development org in Helzberg diamonds. Thoughtout the org - top / down to customers.

find pearls amid sand easier than ever before.
Also learned that change grows in unlikely corners

They went from being the org focused on education to being the org focused on how people learned.
- Connected and connecting people

Social media not always social - we are looking at a little screen in an empty room.

But this time we are connecting people.

We have always been connecting - but not necessarily in the same way.

LMS - moving to collaborative technologies
- managing educational content similar to sharing

Not the same as informal learning.
- When reading a book and not talking - not social, but informal
- When in a classroom having discussion - social and formal.
- #lrnchat - formal and social

Social media is technology used to engage 3 or more people.
- 3 people: new dynamic. Different perspective and new ears.

Social learning - participating with others to make sense of new ideas
- Social learning theory has been around for close to 50 years.
- Now a small version of the larger idea that we talk about today

Today - more participating and engaging, not just modeling behavior.

What is new is how powerfully social media and social learning work together.

Social media often viewed as a channel. For marketing.
- But much for effective when connecting people together.
- Help people make better decisions

Alone isn't lonely or remote.

Telus - uses flip cams to demonstrate what is going on and upload. Helps folks in the field. In one instance - 1 minute, 40 responses. Includes customers.

Technology changes - humans don't

If your org isn't moving into the space because it is afraid of the technology - remind them people will always connect.

The technologies are not core to the message. It is what the technologies can DO

Social Media Categories
- Social Networks / Online communities (we have them inside the firewall)
+ Many have consumer-facing + employee to employee options
- Media Sharing - video, podcasts, etc
- Microsharing - twitter
+ People who don't blog, don't like "micro-blogging" any better
+ Little pieces of info conveyed across the miles between the big blocks of work we do.
- Living content - Google Docs, Wikis
+ Can contribute, add etc.
+ perpetual beta
- Personal / Virtual immersive environments

There are actually 125 different social media categories - bookmarking, tagging etc

But this is all a continuation of how people naturally work and learn together.

the network makes us safer
Who has best stories?

Who is not using social media because what you do is "too secret".
- Mayo Clinic - where we will end up when all else fails.
- Using social media technologies to manage the flow of info ON THEIR OWN TIME.
+ Not like the beepers
+ Can filter as needed
- Can use the microsharing to ask quickly without meeting in person

Social media can be used to improve knowledge sharing
- foster learning
- provide more informal learning opportunities
- Improve communications
- Finding resources more easily
- Boosting collaboration
- Build organizational relationships

Social media allows people to learn even if they don't think about the work they do as being "educational"

What are you doing? By answering that question - you are educating people around you.

What do you need to know NOW?

We had better be asking what the workplace of the future will be doing.
- Workplace: more women, less likely to have someone take care of details at home for them.
- Deloitte - found that people were interested in changing jobs. Allowed people to find parts of the org they were not aware of and KEEP THE PEOPLE.

Rogers Diffusion Curve of Innovation
- We are still in the Innovator stage
- Not too late to get started.

(and my computer is about to die...... sigh.....)

#DL10 Focus on Research

2010-11-04T15:57:00.003-04:00

Focus on Research
Presenters: Brent Schlenker, Ellen Wagner, David Mallon, Melissa(?)Lombardi

When you think of research, do any of you have a research org that you already turn to?
- Some do: includes Ambien Insights, some have research division

Research place where the rubber hits the road
- Challenge to figure out what is being said
- We get squeezed. When we look at it - making it happen is hard.

Questions from audience
- Emerging user interface for mobile devices? mLearning?
+ Wagner - one interface?
- LMS red-head step-child. How will this evolve?
- Low-hanging fruit - creating a learning organization
- What is the latest stuff on transfer of learning?
- Most common things folks think are great but don't work?
- Where does performance fit in?
- Best evaluation strategies
- Games in courses and do adults find this insulting? Does it work?
- Thought leaders - who do you follow? (Dead and alive)

In tech circles - performance = speed + feeds

Women over 40 biggest gaming demographic.
- Adoption of games.
- Solitaire. Casual games. Facebook.
- Research from web use firm NPR.

We borrow a lot of the research and cool stuff that doesn't seem related from other groups.
- Wireless connections? How many wireless connections in the world. 5 billion. Why mobile learning becoming so important.
- Look at related fields and sources. NOT just eLearning.

mLearning
- No shortage of sources of adoption data
- Public source: UN, technology data. Figuring out digital divide questions.
- In terms of mobile learning in corporations - very small
+ Stumbling - who gets the mobile device
+ What does the mobile device mean if you are hourly?
- Data tells us that there is more energy / more successes now than 2 years ago.
+ Bank of America - 44K mobile learning users going live now.
- Still doing boring things - replicating powerpoints (again)
- What's the REALLY useful stuff
+ Geolocation
+ Finding friends
+ decision support
- Health Care - major jump in mobile learning.
+ Frightening free apps. Like emergency room triage
- Intersection between consumer use of mobile devices and use in applications around learning / performance.
+ Mobile learning is a complicated space for an enterprise
+ First - have to get enterprise mobility period
+ Is there real learning going on?
- Learning and Training depts the hole in the donut. We use mobile devices
+ Do we really want to take a course on a phone.
+ Can do web conferences on the phone
+ But I think we are looking for less clunky, more seamless experiences
- If you are out of the office more than 20% - you are a mobile worker.
- What is going on in the consumer world?
+ CTIA
+ UTC
+ comScore
+ Silicon Alley Insider Chart of the Day

What are the industries saying about what we are doing?!?

Performance - a lot of the data for mobile really more focused on performance.
- When you are out of the office, you need customer contact. Documentation.
- Not just a small mobile app.
- What about getting the context while you are travelling.
- Mobile Learning is evolving. Mobile Performance Support here and now.

Real time when needed.

We use these devices because they are convenient.

2 distinct things happening
1) user experience
2) management of learning (like the admin pieces + efficiency)
+ Class approvals
+ Scheduling etc

LMS evolution
- As we understand it - on its way out
- Highly mature market
- 50-60 LMS companies. None of them want to BE an LMS company
+ Talent management suite (we are headed this direction)
+ or Continuous Learning Environment / Social Learning Platform etc
+ or specialist providers
-- Health Care (audiences or a particular vertical)
- Lots of high profile consolidation
+ Talent companies buying learning companies
- Growth in 1K-10K employees. Global.
- Why people buy LMS
+ eLearning delivery
+ Better administration (always will have compliance training + onboarding)

Seeing convergence - orgs are viewing learning
- Reduction in view of learning as formal event
- We "get" the formal part. What about the "after the fact"?

Organizational performance - content management
- How do I make the right info accessible through different ways
- Delivery channels always changing.
- What is core to us? What will have a longer shelf life? Questions org will have to ask.

Publishers are buying LMS companies - more content managment.
- From that - predictive analytics.

We will all be dealing with pattern strategies
- Help with predictions
- Looking at all that data and the patterns. Look at what is really going on in an organization

Predictive analytics (not seeing it so much in eLearning)
- K-12 - predicting points where students will fail and succeed. Policy around it.
- By this time next year, we will be embracing this.

In corporate world, will show up in guise of workforce planning.
- Single system that does this in integrated way.
- How many of x do you have in place. All in the HR systems.
- Not necessarily the learning org anymore. Resource management on human capital.

Learning and Development does more than talent management. Could get squirrely.
- Start seeing the ground up.
- Learning (formal or informal) need mechanism for serving the person.

Until you start creating agreement on "learning" and how to prove "learning", may be tough to determine whether learning happened.
- Community of inquiry - Phil Ice, Karen Swan, Sebastian Dias
- Transfer of training

Business audiences don't care. Do your salesguys sell more?

We need to understand whether what we do is effective?
Are we picking the most efficient way to do it?
Are we aligned with the business?

Frankly - our sr execs don't care about transfer of learning.

Most important metric - moving business metrics forward.
- They don't care. We have to prove we have business' back

What is the low hanging fruit?
- Individual development planning process. 2x the revenue if you have a development planning process per employee.
- Org with a strong learning culture 40-60% better at innovation
- Set a goal that every person in company have 1 thing attached to job that they will get better at next year.
- Most effective way to build learning org - reflection. ex. after project reviews
- We can help business do better at this.

More effective than learning as intervention.

Learning needs to be about helping people be teachers.

Where orgs held managers accountable for personnel development - more successful.

Also look at aspirations of workers
- how can you harness that.
- Intrinsic learning and motivation, seeking relationships,

Organizations that take a strategic view towards career management = less turnover

We find people who WANT to do something.

Career Lattice - the distinction between work and home being rapidly obliterated.
- What does success look like?
- Some of the personalization of learning - separate lives is artifice

Pew Center for Internet in American Life

Massive undercurrent and shift in culture
- the technologies, how we live work lives, merger of the various parts of our lives
- As learning professionals - our old world required "training org" and butts in seats.
- Shift is not just generational. But we are all experiencing it in different ways.

What do we become now?

Where does our value lie within the organization?

Let's use it to empower us.

We are so US centric. Look at chinese example. Because other cultures are much better at channeling intrinsic motivation.

#dl10 Better Live News

2010-11-04T14:50:00.003-04:00

Because I have been slack this year. For various reasons.

Shawn Rosler The Gordon Ramsay of eLearning

The DevLearn 10 Twitter Feed Search #dl10

#DL10 Social Learning in Practice

2010-11-04T13:37:00.002-04:00

Presentation: Social Learning in Practice: Separating Truth from Myth, Reality from Hype
Presenter: Lance Dublin

Using the concept to solve a business problem.

Questions
- How to do it
- Reasonable expectations - return on investment
- Benefits v pitfalls
- Risk, reward and revenue
- Examples
- Practical application

Context - environment, framework, everything around us
- sets up our expectations

Social learning - have you ever asked question of someone else? Not in a classroom.

Mental models get in the way. How things make sense to you. Perceptions.
- preconceived expectations

Learning hasn't changed.
- Cave baby and modern american baby - both learn to walk just fine. Cave baby just didn't have the technology and still get same result.
- Tools different. Learning itself the same

Learning taxonomy hasn't changed.
- Blooms taxonomy. Change from nouns to verbs.
- Albert Bandura (1977)- social learning theorist
+ One person alone, you have no idea what you learned
+ Most human behavior learned through observation and modeling.
- Innovations come together through tribes. Very seldom does innovation happen through an individual.

We have used social learning. We just may not have used the social media technologies.

Most of the traffic is the younger generation
- the natives are social
- The more social the technology, the faster it is integrated into our culture

We can still do the same things (talk to people across space ), just now better, faster, cheaper.
- Still struggle with time and place - but we are now more social. Now any time, any place.

We are dependent on others to work.
- We have found ways to work together across time and place.

We need to differentiate between the technology and the learning

Social learning has been around for a long time.
Social software has been around almost 50 years
The new social learning is enabled by easy-to-use, socially focused and commercially available tools.

We are able to learn socially - but we can enhance and extend through the new tools.

There will be more of it.

Plus - workplace has changed. new tools

We have been really good with the formal - classes, courses, web conferencing etc
But the informal channel has been around long before - just different tools.

The opportunity is in the space in between
- Mentoring, Knowledge cases, immersive games, podcasts etc

Move towards more intentional informal
- Reading and searching
- Coaching and mentoring
- blogs and wikis
- Podcasts and video

Have you ever done a search with the intention of doing something?

The technologies are allowing us to work in the intentional/informal space.

Groups of people are doing this together. Not just one person.

Case studies
- Qualcomm
+ Business problem - communicate and reinforce corporate culture and values, disseminate info, ID trends, share attitudes and behaviors and onboard new employees.
+ Capturing employee stories - 52 weeks.
+ Emails sending out cultural value every week. All you had in 2005.
+ Moved to website. eMails push. Website pull.
+ The website - allow folks to contribute pictures, video etc.
+ From company controlling content to employees providing content.
+ L&D group serving as the hub and steering the conversation. In initial version - was driving and defining the change.
+ Organic and generating own energy at this point.
+ Driving people to stories.

Social media - about social groups coming together and sharing.

Pictures powerful because they allow you to tell a story.
- Video same way
- Family groups, tribes, cultures communicate through stories.

Social media allows us to tell stories on a scale we never could before.

Qualcomm's problem right now - too many stories.
- Ask them about incentivising (may need to talk to BJ about this case study)

Success about the authenticity of the culture.

In any of these implementations about 20%. If you move 20% of the population - you eventually move everyone else.

Google
- Business problem: how do you grow and innovate by growing and innovating by attracting and nurturing the best and brightest engineers around the world.
- How do you train them? Mentoring? "Training?"
- Solution: iEngEdu - Google's engineering learning platform
+ The engineering community ITSELF with minimal guidance and some direct support (3 ISD people) design, develops and delivers consistent quality learning.
+ Smart search engine to learning
+ ISD provides all the templates. Engineers who have the info provides the info. Engineers who need the info can get it.
+ They are spending all of the time putting together the tools. Vs. the content.
- THey track usage. These metrics are going up.

We don't do social learning. We solve business problems.

Genentech
- Business Problem: Better ways to share ideas and build ideas. Help them self-organize. Push the results out.
- Solution:
+ 4-6 full time people
+ Community platform combining interactive learning methodologies and techniques
+ Using Google Docs along with social networks, microblogging tools, alumni and mentoring communities etc
+ Offloaded the technology. Use the staff to link people into the technology.
+ The L&D people are prodding the communities and helping people talk.
+ L&D setting up the infrastructure - allow THEM to create the content.
+ Also measuring usage and participation. Increasing and successfully pulling people in.

Building an ecosystem to solve the problem.

Notice it is NOT managing the content. (trend across all 3 solutions)

Toshiba
- Business Problem: Lots of competition, need to innovate and respond quickly
- Solution
+ 2 people left in L&D to help support sales folks.
+ Toshiba exchange - People (the community), Content, Tools to access and use
+ Exchange info, build relationships, share sales success
+ built so that it doesn't require training
+ Using NO proprietary technologies (you tube, facebook, wikipedia). All off the shelf.
+ "Has the potential to change the way we do business" - President of Toshiba

Lessons Learned.
- Speed - prepare to accelerate. Just start somewhere.
- Action learning - nothing's certain. Your end product will look different from what you are designing.
- Integration - must be part of a system
- Pragmatism - leverage opportunities
- Work from right to left - keep the eye on the problem you are trying to solve in mind
- Focus on people - demonstrate value TO THEM

People are social
We have new tools
Learning better together
Context is king. If the context is right, they go there.

Learning is not on a continuum.
- The 3rd dimension is contextual

#DL10 Morning Keynote

2010-11-04T11:30:00.002-04:00

Presenter: Brent Schlenker

What is the new face of learning?
- Customized learner experiences
- social

You will start to see this theme throughout. Being social - across media, space, time. In person and virtual.

It is NOT about the technology. At the end of the day - about you and the people.

How do you get your learners to connect with you and other professionals.

Technology to help people connect.

-----------------------------
The New Know
Presenter: Thorton May

"The challenges you face are real. They are serious and many. They will not be met easily or in a short span of time." - President Obama

We are the most important element of society - the teachers.

We are in a unique moment in economic history. (not necessarily unprecedented)

(Dude, this guy talks fast.....hopefully, someone gets video)
(This video may give some idea)

He is a futurist.
- "Not like this is a real job...."
- or demand and demo

He is an empirical futurist. Well-connected. Travel. Brutally hones. Pathologically observant.
- Goes through 1000 business cards a week
- Takes the business cards and type into a word document

"Your network will keep you safe." your human network.

This is an opportunity to create a keep you safe network.

3 questions
- What do you know?
- What do you need to know?
- How do you come to know?

Catherine Schulz - Be Wrong, Adventures in the Margins of Error

Because we live in a Web 2.0 world

Exercises
- Which historical moment most closely resembles the situation we find ourselves in today?

(we came up with the Printing Press)

We as educators will have to be extraordinary pattern recognizers.
- When the mic to you - the energy level went UP
- We are working on behavioral change as a result of knowledge

Most of the enterprises we are trying to implement change into - they are EXHAUSTED.

Add up the multitasking - we are working a 43 hour day.

we need to give the mic up.

Ever since Socrates - professors have known
- Sitting in the back of the room somehow protects you - not!

Other ideas for similar times
- beginnings of eLearning
- More folks got Printing press (way of sharing info). From the cheers, lots had a similar idea
- Horses to motorcars
- Space race
- Plastics
- Hunter gatherer to agriculture.
- Writing

History doesn't repeat itself - but it rhymes....

What patterns / trends do you see in the responses?
- Technological catalyst
- How do you make a spike?

Thorton May - we ARE the spike

Differences - catalyst could be from any aspect of existence (audience)
- clarify, not instantaneous. Eventually affects everyone

Trap in question like this, by looking at the past we try to use the past as a framework for prediction. This never works (audience). This could be futile.

Thorton May - history can inform. But not six sigma. Let's make new mistakes, not old mistakes.

Power change - all of these technologies and spikes are about power change (audience)

Responses from other groups / audiences
- FDR, the day after Pearl Harbor
- We are criminally unprepared.

Civil War
- illustration of what we are facing. We turn the corner having no idea what is around.
- (please see Pickett's Charge)

We are at a major inflection point.
- The TEACHERS are.

Liminal point - the most awkward point in time when the stable was empty but was rebuilt into a garage

When the C level hears eLearning - what is the first thing that comes to mind?

Cisco - eLearning will make email look like a rounding error

Real trend is - there are these tribes and they think differently
- How are you thinking?

As educators - we need to look at mental models
- Our mental models can be dysfunctional. Should be monitored, managed and upgraded
- Who looks at this in their educational environment?

With regard to learning
- agree / high resources = champions
- agree / low resources = allies
- disagree / low resources = don't care
- disagree / high resources = blockers (gotta figure out who they are and what to do with them)

For us - our impulse is to "educate" the blockers.
- How are you going to "move" them?

Many disciplines advance one funeral at a time.

Have you ever put that blocker's resume on Monster? (hm.......)

The thing about blockers, many of them have children.
- Many as "dim" as they are......
- Hire the kid as admin assistant. Will change the relationship. Took hostages.

How does the rest of the enterprise think about eLearning?
Are we of one mind?
What are we going to do about that?

CEOs think about - competition, revenues, changing landscape, franchisees, execution and risk.

What 3 ways the world we be different 3 years from now?
(We didn't come up with much - audience)
- Intersection between games and learning
- Information will be free. Remember: information itself is NOT learning.
+ the cost point may be in the learning
- More telecommuting / remote
- More global
- Removal of command and control
- We are exfoliating the folks at the top of the enterprise
- mobile device will replace the computer
- ecommerce and communication tighter. Conversion of languages at point of need.
- large population that will still need to be successful without the technology.
- students: more self-reliant. Learning more self-propelled. We need to facilitate.
- we need to share our stuff more

Generational issue is a pattern
- Use of social media is a learning technology. But they see it as a living technology

Change is happening - the monster pattern

Technologies don't last forever.
- Technologies become non-strategic
- We need to manage the entire lifecycle

One way things are going to be different - acceleration

Alvin Toffler - Future Shock.
- We are going to have problems keeping up
- As things change, the power relationship changes

Hinges of history swinging now every 5 years.
- Major reboot. Technolgy, social, cultural

New world, new game, new rules, new behaviors
- Who is going to teach this?
- We are

The pace of change is NOT UNIFORM
- Highest opportunity is to understand where the disconnects are with the pace of change
- Desynchronization
- We can help the organization re-synchronize

Currently have disconnect between storage and processing of info

Every day NSA stores 4x all the info in the Library of Congress.
- they can only put Eyes on 50%. Never mind processing it.

15 years - every molecule on this plannet will be IP addressable.
- Oracle..."That's a license!" (yikes)

In the next 4 year - 2x as much data as today!

Information overload is a feature! What does all that info mean?
- There is nothing we cannot know!!!!
- We are the path to that knowledge

What is going to be obsolete next? (Charlie Rose)
Ignorance (CEO Intel)

It is no longer acceptable not to know.
- You will be SHUNNED by society

Teachers will be the only affordable path out of ignorance.

We are going to have instant replay for any managerial decision that happens.

Is eLearning under-Caesared?
- The amount you are asking for my ransom is not enough - ask double.
- What part of value happens without what we do.

We need to increase our self-worth.
- We are insanely valuable.

Did the people in the Middle Ages KNOW they were living in the Middle ages?
- No concept of progress

We are the progress!

Do the men and women in our organization KNOW we are at a hinge in history.

When you light the rocket - will you have a happy puppy?

#DL10 Early Morning Thoughts

2010-11-04T11:18:00.003-04:00

I find that I am needing this time to get away and just think.

A conversation with Cammy Bean clarified what I have been doing over the last year.

The instructor-led training I have been designing has been focused on making the project teams feel better and giving the end-user help and support resources.

The important part of these instructional design is the support resources - NOT the classroom training. This despite the project team's focus on the classroom training being the "true" deliverable. You know....check the box.

When I think about the objectives for the 4-5 courses I have created this year, the first objective is always along the lines of "find and use help resources."

With the reduction of classroom space, the first question I find myself asking anyone who is insisting on classroom training is - do you need the conversation? If not - there are other options.

One of the action items I am taking away from this conference is to get more people at our university comfortable with Elluminate, Captivate and not always thinking classroom first.

#dl10 The Power of Pull

2010-11-03T11:07:00.003-04:00

So far, it's been nice to see old friends again. Ran into BJ this morning and chatted briefly about LMSs and courses.

All Brent is now missing is disco lights.

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DevLearn Twitter feed - all the cool kids are here.

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Emergence of new culture of learning
- We know how to do learning and training when stable. Know nothing when world constantly changing.

Our old institutions aren't hacking it very well. Nor are our schools, etc.

20th century - Push economy. Scalable efficiency the goal.
- predictable, hierarchy, control, organizational routines, minimize variances
- S-curve, stable over decades (few real changes in 60 years)
- More you do something, better you get at it.
- Diminishing returns curve
+ Why we are trying to move faster / harder for same amount of progress
- Carries over to education
+ Predictable curriculum
+ Standards based
+ Authority focused

The 21st c infrastructure is driven by the continual exponential advances in computation, storage and bandwidth.

No stability in sight!

From S curve to rapid set of punctuated moves.
- Never ending.
- unrelenting, exponential.

Change is accelerating. Tiny blips that change the game every year.

Have to re-think everything
Change the way you do everything on a regular basis.
The change often very fundamental / base.

Our challenge - how do we take the tools and this new reality and thrive.

The half-life of a given skill is now 3-5 years.
Ability to predict the future getting worse

How do we move from thinking about stocks of knowledge / knowledge assets and protecting those assets to participating in knowledge flows and creating new knowledge.

From sharing knowledge (explicit) to creating new knowledge (strong tacit component)

Whole purpose of this gathering - participating at the edges.

Big shift
From push to pull
From stocks to flow

(My thought: those who can't figure out how to pull knowledge will be left behind)

Crisis of imagination - embracing change, not fearing it.
- how do you begin to ask "What could I do now?"
- How do we add imagination to our workforce?

2nd shift - the explosion of data.
- Every 2 days, we now create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003. - Eric Schmidt, CEO Google.

Preparing students/workforce for this world of constant change.
- We need to think how we learn, esp the tacit
- What we need to learn
- how new media has changed the game fundamentally

Creating a resilient mindset - ability to change, adapt, re-conceptualize and engage in deep listening with humility.
- Can't run from change anymore.

Gaming - if you are not learning, it ain't fun.
- An environment where people thrive on change.

How kids became champion surfers
- Fail fail fail and fail some more
- Took videos and deconstructed frame by frame
- Used video to deconstruct own performance
- Pulled best ideas from adjacencies (wind surfing, skateboarding, motocross.....)
- Accessing spikes of capability around the world, leveraging networks of practice in an ecosystem
- Attracting others to help them around the world
- Deeply collaborating with each other.

A passionate pursuit of extreme performance with a deep questing disposition and a commitment to indwelling.
- Always looking around for new ideas to pull into their space.
- Indwelling - Marinate in the complex phenomena until you can absorb it.

World of Warcraft - what is happening here?
- First domain we have been able to measure exponential learning

MMOGs are
- Virtual spaces which both define and are defined by the players who inhabit them
- Pay close attention to the 'social life' on the edge of the game.
- The edge is often referred to as a knowledge economy

2 kinds of learning spaces
- in game learning - tinkering/experimentation. Get a feel for the 'system'
- knowledge economy around the edge of the game

Dashboards - WoW way too complicated to figure out what is going on without complex analysis tools and dashboards
- Dashboards always handcrafted by each player and key to masterful play
- Allows players to reflect on own performance

Why do managers get dashboards and we don't?

How do we empower each of us with tools for self-reflection

After-action reviews - key is the replay and analyze the metrics. Discuss what they could have done better.

WoW - blending the tacit and the cognitive
- Collective indwelling and reglection. Marinating together in a problem space with joint action.

Study of chess champions
- Way 1 - study moves and rules. Play in cognitive ways. Think through everything. Constant competition and reflection.
- Way 2 - (the really good people and make it to the next level) play speed chess. 30 seconds or faster per move.That experience leads to extreme champion behavior.
+ What is going on at THAT level?
- Indwelling complements / transcends cognition.

What is happening outside of the game?
- rich knowledge economy around the game.
- forums, blogs, wikis, videos.
- Sheer AMOUNT of activity. 10-15K new ideas posted every night on WoW. How do you process this?
+ Answer: self-organized guilds/knowledge refining community. Folks organize and extract ideas that they feed into the teams.

Are there upper bounds to how much people learn and how fast?

How do you access info / attract info / achieve performance acceleration?

Access - ability to find, learn about and connect with people, products and knowledge to address unanticipated needs.
- Individuals: Social networks that can scale.

How do you find something that you don't even know you need to know?
- Attract people to us who may be able to help one day when we may need it.

How often do you get out of your comfort zone?
- This is amazingly important
- People become too dependent on one facet of their lives.
- Folks tend to isolate themselves from the flows of new knowledge and the people creating them

Achieve - pulling out our full potential by harnessing network effects.

Breaking free of the red queen effect
- Experience curves to collaboration curves
- harnessing networks effects where the more people that participate, the greater the potential returns.

Purpose of the 21st century firm is to achieve scalable capability building (building talent)
- Learning from others as they learn from you
- Accelerate bootstrapping in an ecosystem

Do your organizational routines allow you to experiment? build groups? try things out?

The challenge we have - how do we create contexts? remixable dashboards for us? right kinds of social learning communities? permit rapid learning?

If we want to compete in the 21st century - training and HR has to be at the table
And we have to think about how we are going to transform the organization (not just putting courses on the table)

#DL10 High Impact Learning Communities Pt 4

2010-11-02T17:53:00.003-04:00

This particular section is more hands-on / thought time. Creating your own strategy.
My initial thoughts on what I want to do (at least the partials) is at the link below

Wendy's Learning Community Plan

I will probably update the link later as we get more groups submit their ideas or when I find a better link.

--------------------------------------
Bonus with launch - you have a new toy folks want to play with.
Growth - the hardest.

Technologies most likely to be adopted when conveniently placed.

You can design a learning community with the understanding that there will be peaks and valleys in participation. Depends on the type of community.

Also - how do you define success?

------------------------------------
For maintaining engagement, some ideas include opportunities to meet with special executives, special training opportunities, events and games within the community.

Seed questions.

Encourage immediate contributions from the new folks.
- What was the one tip you found most useful when learning.....

--------------------------------
Sustain
- super-users can schedule, moderate, approve/deny content, etc
- you ultimately want the value of the community to be intrinsic to the community
- Chair / gardener - and maybe have it change every year
- Make sure that you are innovating to continue to make sharing etc easier.
- Keep funneling new members

-----------------------------------

You control the rate at which people learn.
And none of this is impossible.

#DL10 High Impact Learning Communities Pt 3

2010-11-02T16:08:00.008-04:00

(distracted trying to get work stuff done)

Keep the learner (needs + context of the learner) in mind when designing a social learning solution.

Some tools being considered by the audience
- Jive, Sharepoint, Online forums, Saba, Jambok, Salesforce, Webex Connect, Cubetree, Ning, Moodle, Wordpress, Documentum, Google Apps, Listserv

Remember to create purpose
- Who, what and why of community.

Marketing your learning community
- creating buy-in is similar to internal marketing.
- Goal: get your learner to CRAVE knowledge
- Internal marketing mission critical.

Marketing - remarkable posters - worth remarking about.
+ not about DPI, color schemes and pictures
+ gotta make the poster stick out.
+ think outside the box - quantity or location (bathrooms are a great place to advertise)
+ look for places where folks aren't competing with their time.
+ use area around
+ look at "marketing" to get an idea for how best to communicate your project
+ Don't need large budgets.
+ you are either remarkable or invisible. NOTHING in between.

How to
- Where does a person generally walk by / look at during the course of a day?
- Communication methods available?
- Size, quantity, color contrast, placement, attachment
- Connect all 3
+ Massive poster on the side of your conference room
+ Post-it notes in kitchen - lots and placed by everything you touch

Err on the side of humor / good nature

- effective headlines
- powerful logos

Marketing - effective headline
- vs. catchy headline. 8 people read the headline. 2 people read the rest of the poster
- The headline will need to sell itself (see books)

Principles for creating ultra-effective headlines
- Promise something
+ Value - better, faster, cheaper
- Practical
+ change behavior
+ moving your body rather than just moving your mind

What does almost every employee need?
- job security
- productivity
- best friend at work / support / sense of belonging and community
- empowerment
- satisfaction / meaning in work
- pay
- recognition / self-worth

How to [verb] (noun+descriptor) with/via/in # (noun+descriptor)
How to [beat] your (closest competition) with these #3 (social media tactics)
How to [engage] your (students) via #two (timeless motivational stories).

This may take many more drafts to get something just right.
Will allow you to brainstorm using the formula.

Marketing - Powerful logos
- communicate credibility
- remember - lots of things vying for attention. Depending on past experience, you may or may not have reputation
- some companies see the training org as a "this will be a distraction" or not important
- Sometimes shaking the reputation through marketing can be useful, allow you to start fresh.

If this training program suddenly evaporates, will learners cry out for a replacement?
- goal answer is "yes"

For your champions / initial seeders - want 10% of final audience number
- 15 minimum

One idea: Instead of next step - "rest of you come in", invite group but don't invite the rest.
Let THEM invite the rest - nomination
- create scarcity
- Not everyone can be part of the "elites"

#DL10 High Impact Learning Communities Pt 2

2010-11-02T13:17:00.003-04:00

For my example (and goals) I am trying to develop a community of Banner users.

I'll provide the link when everything is finished.

One thought about participation
- remove anonymity and attach value to participation
- 90/9/1 rule

Make sure you gain support and buy in from the beginning. Especially from leadership and key stakeholders.

Key objections
1) I (or my people) don't have time
2) Someone might put up the wrong information
3) Our team already has a wiki
4) Who is going to monitor it?
5) Die on the vine - no one will visit
6) Not secure
7) We already have another tool (LMS, etc)
8) We could get sued (discoverable)
9) Insufficiently transparent or TOO transparent
10) costs too much
11) Not enough controls
12) Unintended use of information
13) My folks won't use this medium
14) Folks will be afraid to post / make mistakes
15) won't meet the tech specs
16) They are going to need yet another login / tool fatigue
17) but we have email!
18) How are you going to prove this works? can't measure this works. Can't quantify in dollars
19)people will be twittering all day
20) Have to get IT involved
21) Not fitting IT roadmap
22) What are the other divisions doing? Duplicating effort?

Most successful communities when looking at cost/benefit use the top-line revenue growth argument vs. saving benefit (employee time/salary etc)

Oh yes - and make friends with the IT department.

#DL10 Building High Impact Learning Communities

2010-11-02T11:31:00.009-04:00

Presenters: Josh Little and Nemo Chu
Bloomfire
----------------------------
Goal: How to become an internal marketer to your learners. Ongoing engagement.

(interesting - 2 people in the room looking to learn more about "community learning" but it struck me that they are still thinking of learning as a one-shot event deal.)

Objectives
- Identify the pain
- talk the talk
- overcome objections
- make a business case
- launch a community

Reason to launch a community - to make the business (and people) better

What is collaborative learning?
- 2 or more people attempt to learn something together. (Wikipedia)

Wikipedia as accurate as Britannica (even more so since errors fixed in minutes rather than years)

Who wants to be a millionaire
50/50 - 50% right
phone a friend - 65% right
ask the audience - 91% right

Crowdsourcing - use wisdom of crowd to find right answer. Folks who don't know will cancel each other out. Because the folks who know will be louder and together.
- Outsourcing of tasks, traditionally performed by a single person performed by a group
- Benefits
+ Do more with less
+ Wisdom of crowd
+ Expand the talent pool
- Wikipedia
- Examples: Digg, Netflix - crowdsourcing the development of a decision engine.

None of us is as smart as all of us.

Can you crowdsource your training?
- Yes

The Pain
- Corporate Trainers
+ Lots to do. No budget.
- Small Businesses
+ Pass on tribal knowledge. Very inconsistent. No training infrastructure.
- Thought Leaders
+ On the road a lot. Need to "duplicate self."
- Brand Marketers
+ Products very technical. Novices need to learn from experts.

Need to move from traditions - top down. Things not trickling down fast enough (or at all)

Move to collaborative - leadership at center.

This is a big step. NOT re-doing the org chart. Redoing the learning map.
- How you get and archive knowledge.

Long Tail - niche content, something for everyone. Often applied to markets.
- Think about frequency of use.
- Most organizations don't create the specific information that may be needed down the road.
- Just in case v. Just in time.
+ 80-90% of what you need to do your job is in the long tail (specifics)
- Also helps to convince clients to slim down the course if the specifics are still being addressed. Not want to dump everything in the course.
- Amazon an example of the long tail. Can find anything no matter how esoteric.

Your training program - why can't you have it all?
- For most, the long tail doesn't exist. More because they can't get to it.

Principles of Collaborative Learning
- Learn or Die
- We all learn and teach every day
- Great teachers rule the universe
+ truly great managers, leaders etc also great teachers
+ Help people recognize that they can actually share too!
- Learning is about sharing and collaboration
+ Everything we learn is afforded or created by someone else
- People learn best from their peers
- Great learning experiences
+ Has nothing to do with the bells and whistles of elearning
+ Everything to do with creativity, humor, diversity, timing, passion, individualization
- good enough is good enough
+ Great learning experiences REAL and in the trenches
- people learn when they are ready to learn
+ not when WE are ready to teach them (please see comment in my prior post as a reminder)
+learning does not have to be about time and place.
- empower, not enroll
- There is energy and potential in the crowd.
+they have expertise you need
+ got to agree on "good enough is good enough"
+ think about the alternative (usually nothing)

Trying to move towards community.
- If it is OK in a training room to say something wrong, why is it not ok in a learning community?
+ we could use it as a teachable moment.
+ part of it is framework
+ part of it is rewarding pro-activity,
+ good gardening to help mitigate the fear of "documenting my stupidity"

Trying to build a community for the ENTIRE org - next to impossible.
- Unless really trying to flatten communication

Think in term of communities of practice
- group of like-minded, like-tasked professional.
- Content related
- Job role, team, project (GW examples: help desk, Banner (tool)

Business Case - 3 questions
- What would my organization gain if we made 1 momre sale.
- What would my organization save by avoiding one adverse event
- Is the sum of #1 or #2 greater than the cost of launching a learning community (cost + human cost)

Case studies
- Spinweb, Michael Reynolds
+learning center - help augment support center
+ Goal: Better customer service to clients
+ Org roadblocks - "sounds hard", populate with lots of content.
+ resolve - populate as you go.
+ to launch - put content in, tell clients and promote. Gradually build following.
+ launch received - positive feedback.
+ challenges - sometimes people not familiar with how to interact. Find a specific question, send link, encourage folks to register and explore with the initial link as an intro
+ successful practices - mention to EVERYONE. When help desk call, meet people, during training, etc

DO NOT OVERANALYZE
- eLearning - 2 minute tutorials help
- Just post content. Make the knowledge available as quickly as possible.

Overstock.com
- learning community for software developers of front end.
- Wanting to document and preserve institutional knowledge. make it available to those who need it.
- need to have incentives to contribute. Otherwise, get the 85 watch / 15 post.
- learning curve for new hires dramatically reduced. Get them up to speed fast because can just give them one link.
- don't make your community TOO specific and closed. Learn from others outside the team too.

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Made it to #DL10

2010-11-02T10:45:00.003-04:00

My goal for this conference: to get my eLearning mojo back.

Life and work since Innovations in eLearning have conspired to make me utterly burned out on everything related to eLearning, education, etc.

I have become increasingly convinced that the existance of training departments is solely to check the "training" box during a project or for "compliance."

My bitter self has come to the conclusion that folks in the workplace don't actually want to learn. They want to prove to their boss they are making an "effort". Or escape their cubicle. Or check the box marked "training".

I am hoping that my colleagues at this conference will talk me off this particular ledge.

Please.

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The most successful thing I have done recently is to develop support materials for various projects. The simple documents seem to be the most successful. Go figure.

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Oh yes - also developed an introductory movie for our LMS upgrade to entertain people during the required outage. That went over very well. Particularly the epic goth orchestral soundtrack. I am going to try to get permission to share the movie from my employers.

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Hope to see you all at DevLearn 2010!

Just Doing It

2010-09-13T13:08:00.000-04:00

FYI - I am doing a fundraiser for Wounded Warriors and Livestrong called Fight Gone Bad.

My fundraising page is here, if you are willing to help.

The 2 charities:
Livestrong is Lance Armstrong's foundation to eradicate cancer.

Wounded Warriors is for wounded US soldiers.

I personally consider myself very lucky to have friends who have or are voluntarily serving our country and who, to date, have not needed the service of the Wounded Warrior Foundation.

To my friends currently overseas - come home safe and soon.

---------------

Dan S is one of the gentlemen I work out with at 5:30am most mornings. I've known him for about a year. Sometime in April, he got it in his head that he was going to compete in CrossFit.

He ratcheted his diet down. Lost 35# in 3 months.
He worked very hard towards getting a pullup - I watched him do 3 in a row, easily, last week.
He managed to get a handstand pushup within a couple of weeks of putting his mind to it.

I'm watching him work his tail off most mornings as he trains for the CrossFit sectionals in March.

He'll be 50 soon. Dan started in January 2009.

I decided in April I wanted to compete in the Masters.

Next year will be the 2nd year CrossFit has a Masters section.

Dan and I talked after a workout one morning. I had watched him finish a workout that challenged him to the core. Part of his training.

I have no idea if I can even finish the workout. The least I can do is try. Figured I'd just do it. Who knows, maybe I'll get lucky with what comes out of the hopper.

I had been coming up with a list of reasons why I couldn't compete.
- I suck at pullups
- I suck at double-unders
- I don't have a muscle up
- I don't have a handstand pushup
- I just barely do some workouts at 65#
- I suck at running (and flat out hate doing it)
- I suck at rowing
...ad nauseum

"....figured I'd just do it....."

Dan's words haunted me for a couple of days.

In the 14 months since I started this CrossFit thing, I have never competed. Never done a major "group" workout.

"...figured I'd just do it...."

Dan's the reason I am doing Fight Gone Bad.

"...figured I'd just do it..."

Thanks Dan. For everything.

Do This and Feel Better

2010-09-01T08:03:00.002-04:00

Kelly Starrett, a physical therapist and owner of San Francisco CrossFit, is putting together one of the best online courses I've seen.

Mobility WOD

What makes this brilliant:

- Each workout is only 10 minutes.
- The information builds on itself
- ANYONE can do it - though the audience is CrossFitters
- You do 1 per day. I enjoy the surprise factor
- The videos + brief post explain the exercise and why it will help
- Starting in post 3 - he's got a physical test and retest to prove that the exercise helps.

The objectives of the course are simple
1) Get more flexible
2) Don't get injured
3) Learn anatomy to help achieve objectives 1 and 2

It's on the student to do the work.

This Mobility WOD post demonstrates what I am talking about.

A New Strategy for Reporting

2010-08-24T11:48:00.001-04:00

I've been working with Sally to create a new implementation plan. She and the director have been working on a strategic plan for this LMS.

During this entire process, we've learned that trying to administer reporting groups in SkillPort is awkward. Particularly with some of the challenges we have with our enterprise system, ever-changing organizational structure, and conflicting projects.

I had a chance to talk to JoAnne and Nancy at Cornell University. They abandoned their groups within SkillPort and are working to incorporate the information from SkillPort into another LMS. Right now, they are limiting their reporting to the university level. We would like to release reporting to the managers..eventually. Thank you JoAnne and Nancy for your help and information.

From the above information, and from looking at our requirements, we may be better off exporting the information available SkillPort into a DataMart and allowing the managers to report from there. It appears that this may take care of some issues that popped up:

- Security was none too keen that ANYTHING went over into SkillPort beyond an ID and an encrypted password (what we currently have now). Especially since it is hosted rather than owned by us.

- The group administration was too awkward and too manual.

- The I.... M.... project (drink!)is going to take YEARS. We just don't have that long.

Advantages to this new approach:

- Since the information from the enterprise system we wanted put into SkillPort (such as position codes, group structure, etc) is ALREADY in our DataMart - we wouldn't have to figure out how to put our enterprise information into a system we have no control over.

- The DataMart already contains some systems that will allow us to run reports on the actual BUSINESS impact of our training. Something SkillPort just isn't designed to do (and I'm not entirely convinced it should be).

- We would only have to train the managers once on a system some of them are already familiar with.

- The initial research regarding what needs to happen to create the DataMart has already been done.

The challenges:
- Getting the SkillPort information into our DataMart. The head of DataMarts and I have already started the preliminary investigation. His initial impression... "Shouldn't be too hard."

- Creating the "right" reports to start with. This is going to require the same level of collaboration that our attempt at group creation in SkillPort has created.

- Making sure we have a good support infrastructure. There is already some training available, but the Data team is understaffed. And we would probably want to put together some reports and specific training for the management. The training and support will require some political discussions regarding who will be responsible for what and making sure everything stays coordinated. Thankfully, I currently have a decent working relationship with the DataMarts trainer. I'd like to keep it that way.

- We are not sure whether we are going to be able to limit manager access to their individual teams. This is where I need to go back and investigate more closely how the DataMart actually works. I've been trained on it before, but only needed the information to refer students to the class. I've never actually needed to use the tool. Revisiting basic training when your needs change is always a good thing.

The more I look at this and talk to people, the more this strategy makes sense. DataMarts is designed for reporting. And it has a lot of information we already need in the system. The trick will be getting on the schedule and putting it all together.

Wish us luck, we may need it.

Scope Shrinkage

2010-08-23T10:26:00.000-04:00

Monday morning, I put in the final batch add of our staff in our SkillPort LMS.

No groups.
No increase in reporting capabilities.
Very little that actually met the requirements we so painfully gathered.

At least it is progress.

It is also incredibly disappointing.

So how did we get here?

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Throughout the entire project, the senior business analyst has been struggling to create an accurate organizational chart from our enterprise system.

We were running short on time. The senior business analyst was not only struggling to automate the process, she was also pulled into a politically sensitive project that wound up taking all of the time she needed to work with us.

I called the Senior HRIS administrator to figure out how to get the information I needed to create the organizational structure manually. Mostly - position names.

I had the rough structure from the error report from our last test. My planned process - pick through the error report, find the errored position code in our enterprise system, create the new batch add group file. Once I have enough - add the groups and affected users. Pull a new error report. Repeat until I have all the groups in and the error report comes up clean. Figured it would be about 16 hours of monotonous administrative and spreadsheet tasks.

Right before I asked the HRIS administrator how to find the information I needed, I found it. And an unpleasant surprise....

We had 2 position codes for the University President.

Essentially - our "accurate" enterprise system had 2 parallel organizational structures. One for the old president and one for the new one.

The HRIS administrator heard me groan on the other end of the line.

Wendy - if it makes you feel any better...there is another project.

Please don't say "I.... M....." (No, I will not name the project. Some of us have turned it into a "drinking game" and I don't want to ruin the fun.)

Nope - this is for salary planning and merit pay. We have to have an accurate organizational structure for this to work. It all has to be done by Open Enrollment.

So if I can convince the primary stakeholder that waiting for this project to end will help us in the long run, we'll be OK.

She's involved in this salary planning project.

I GUESS that's good news.....

--------------------------------

Thankfully, that primary stakeholder is Sally. I am convinced she is a saint - because anyone else in her position would have completely flipped. Especially as she has spent the past few months watching this project slowly shrink into nothingness.

I laid out the issues.
- We don't have a way to get an accurate organizational structure out of our enterprise system.

- Our top level has 2 position codes - the base of our organizational structure. If the top level has 2 codes (one of which is deactivated), how can we expect our organizational structure to be correct?

- The other project she is on is going to correct this issue.

- That other project is due about the time we do the upgrade in October.

- We are getting more sandbox time around then. (Such is the joy of hosted solutions - our access to a testing environment is at the whim of the vendor).

- If we put the users in, at least we can do assignments on the university-level to individuals, including course registration. So we at least gain a small something.

We took a look at our current timeline for all of the pieces of our project.

I think we can do this Wendy.

-----------------------------------------------------

I'm very fortunate to be working with an understanding stakeholder.
However, I can't help but feel I have "failed" in some way.
Such is the risk you take when retrofitting a solution around pre-existing resources.

Creating Magic

2010-08-22T09:08:00.002-04:00

Jon Matzner, one of the coaches at my gym, reminded me of Derek Siver's story of his encounter with a great teacher.

Sometimes, it takes another set of eyes from an unexpected direction to revisit an idea.

Jon looked at Kimo as the type of teacher he wants to be. One with high expectations that inspires high performance in his pupils. I see that in Jon's coaching. I try to do the same thing in my classroom. Lots of focus, little fluff.

What made Derek's interaction with Kimo so magical wasn't just a motivated teacher with high expectations - it was a motivated student who craved the challenge.

I realized, upon reading this essay more carefully, that I want to be the type of STUDENT that can take the pace. That expects that much more from myself. That can be fully present in that moment.

It also forced me to ask myself if there is really any "goal" that will motivate me like that? And upon reflection, I have realized that I am very lazy. It's been OK to move at the standard pace. My excuse has been "well - it's more likely to stick that way."

But what if....

What if I could be that student? The one who craves challenge? The one who needs the adrenaline rush? What would that feel like? What needs to happen to get there? What needs to be sacrificed?

Figuring out how to be that student can only help me be that teacher.

QuoteGarden - Learning

Update on Life and Stuff and Things

2010-08-18T17:19:00.000-04:00

I had the Captivate 5 post hanging out for the past month. Partially to really put the product through its paces. Partially because I just haven't had time to write much.

Work Things

Been extra-special busy at work this past year. There will be a write-up of the SkillPort LMS project in the near future.

I've had a number of online tutorials out for review for 6-12 months that are finally coming back to me. One of the bonuses working for a university - they move slooooooow. Managed to get one set up and should have the 2nd (larger and more complicated) set completed by the end of September. Good times.

My audio recording tools + Windows 7 = bad juju. I think I may finally have the gremlins trained.

Michael, the web guy, has been freed from my clutches. After working together through an amazingly complicated project, he's taken that project and his other assignments and run with them. I tell him every day how thankful I am to have real help.

Personal Stuff

Shelving the going back to school thing for now.
1) As much as I tried to talk myself into it, my heart just wasn't in it.
2) Life got a little crazy

My significant other and I are purchasing a house. We will be moving in early September. I learned some things about house-buying.
1) There are a LOT of people who want their fingers in your money

2) The process is amazingly complicated

3) It takes just one crazy person (in our case, the listing agent for the house we are buying) to make the process even less pleasant than buying a car or getting teeth pulled. That's saying something.

4) It is very important to have a great buyers agent to smooth things over when the crazy person attacks. I sense that for 95% of real estate transactions, there is at least one crazy person in the mix.

5) I hope to not do this again anytime soon.

What little spare time I have had left has been spent at the gym. More as a sanity check than anything else.

I'd like to thank the more consistent bloggers and tweeters for keeping me informed and up-to-date with doings in the eLearning space. I've been taking much more than I have been giving recently. You have no idea how much I appreciate the input and ideas.

Attempting Big Goals with Others

2010-08-18T11:39:00.009-04:00

Hugh MacLeod - of course

This week, our team had a sit-down with our new deputy muck.

He asked if there was anything he could do to help.

My colleagues had already voiced everything I could think of, but since he expected an answer - I told him about my big hairy audacious goal for the next 5 years.

To build a system where an employee can easily find any information and/or training he or she needs to get better at his or her job.

--------------------------------------------

The difference between this big hairy audacious goal and most of the big goals I have is the need for others to perform particular tasks to help achieve the goal.

Many of my goals have used others for information and mentorship, but I am the one who ultimately has to perform the work.
- Building a useful tutorial library and support system for a particular application
- Losing 25 pounds and increasing strength
- Finishing my Masters degrees

Occasionally, I will have one partner-in-crime who helps with the heavy lifting
- Creating a Moodle site
- Creating a mobile synchronous online meeting system (in the days before cheap webcams and WebEx)

This time - I need many others to perform the work too.

Learning to play well with others has been a long-time challenge of mine. Simply learning to ask for help has been a challenge.

It has dawned on me that I am now starting the advanced class in collaboration. Adding others to the big hairy audacious goal technical team and trusting them to do their piece has been the theme for the past year or so.

When it is just me, or me and one other person, the politics are easy. Communication and division of labor is easy. The more players - the more complicated.

- Does everyone you need to work with see the value of the big hairy goal? Sometimes, the resource you need the most has the least need for your little project and couldn't care less whether you succeed or not. Doesn't even matter if the mucky mucks SAY it is valuable and "prioritizes" it (whatever that looks like).

- Who does what? Often - with more people, there is some skill overlap. Or, skill overlap with other parties saying the other person should do it. Or, no one with the skill set and pointing fingers at the person for whom the big hairy goal is most important and telling them they should figure it out - even if they are miserably ill-equipped to do so.

- What is the timeline? Do we all agree? Can we all meet it? What other priorities are on each team-member's plate? Does everyone share the same work-ethic? Do they all see the timeline in the same way (a suggestion or a drop-dead, no-flex deadline)?

- Do all of our managers agree about the level of prioritization? Because with more people, the more likelihood the management gets involved. The higher the likelihood of your project being hijacked for the purposes of political posturing.

The more people you need to do the heavy lifting for the big hairy audacious goal - the higher the likelihood of failure. The greater the need for diplomacy, tact and salesmanship.

Basically, all of the skills required for "leadership."

Right now, I'm being tested. And this time, I can't just throw up my hands and either run away or do the damn thing myself.

Looks like I'm "leveling up" whether I want to or not. Wish me luck.....

Thoughts on Captivate 5

2010-08-17T13:17:00.000-04:00

I had hoped to stall the upgrade a bit longer. Unfortunately, our purchasing arm ixnayed those plans - forcing all new users to purchase Captivate 5.

This is a major UI change, so I had to get up to speed pronto. I have 2 groups purchasing Captivate 5 and starting the eLearning conversion process.

Below are my thoughts.

-------------------------------

- Digging the new tabs and the ability to see properties on the same screen. Took some getting used to, but now that I know where to look - I'm a fan.

- The lack of a storyboard view really threw me. Finally figured out that I needed to expand the Filmstrip to see all of the slides and move things around.

- Big change in my personal workflow - I need to remember to set the Object Styles for each of the standard objects first thing - BEFORE I start filming. It will make the filming process much easier.

- Took awhile to figure out the Master Slide concept. I can see how this will work great if I am using different backgrounds throughout my presentation. I need to experiment more to see how this is going to work most effectively and why you would create multiple Master Slides.

- No more saving separate Captivate Template files. Now I need to create a baseline project. Makes sense. Especially since most of the people I work with tend to copy/paste items from old projects anyway rather than work from set templates.

- Once I took care of the Windows 7 audio problems, Captivate 5 seems to have a much better audio processor.

- Adore the copy/paste slide feature and the ability to have multiple projects open at once. Hooray!!!!

As with any UI change, this one is taking me a while to get used to its quirks. Right now, I am slower with my development and editing. Thankfully, I had a much easier time wrapping my head around the UI logic than I did with Office 2007.

Overall - liking the new Captivate. Haven't tried the Mac version yet since my MacBook Pro is in the process of melting (don't ask). If anyone has any further feedback on Captivate 5 - please comment.

EDUCAUSE Mid-Atlantic Submission

2010-07-28T08:14:00.003-04:00

I hinted yesterday in my twitter and facebook feeds that I was working on a conference submission.

Below is approximately what I sent.

If this goes well, I may submit another version of this session elsewhere.

--------------------------
Title:Converting to eLearning: A Support and Training Structure

Session Format and Resources:
- Poster session (multiple presentations, same room. One on one format)
- Resources needed
o Standard slide deck
o Multimedia
o Software demo
o Participant access to explore online tools and resources
o Electronic handouts
- Rationale: To provide an opportunity to demonstrate our live setup and provide aids and resources to participants. Also to gain feedback from other experienced eLearning specialists and higher education institutions who are also going down this path.

Suggested Audience: Frontline Practictioners
The session I am proposing will most benefit people who: are new to the content area.

Session Tracks: Supporting the Enterprise through Innovative and Effective IT solutions, Teaching, Learning and Research

Abstract (100 word limit):George Washington University faces a reduction of physical classroom spaces for staff training. As a result, staff trainers and subject matter experts are turning to eLearning to support instructor-led learning or entirely replace instructor-led classes. This poster session will provide a model for helping clients convert their instructor-led materials to eLearning materials. The model includes: eLearning development tools, supportive training, file-sharing solutions, instructional design assistance and LMS scoring and tracking of the resulting solution.

Statement of Problem or Issue (250 word limit): This presentation will directly address how you assist educators and subject-matter experts unfamiliar with eLearning, and wanting to convert material into an eLearning-friendly format, in the conversion of their instructor-led courses. This session will also provide techniques for avoiding the production of click-to-death tutorials.

Description of Activity, Project or Solution(500 word limit):
We designed our eLearning conversion support structure to take advantage of tools and resources already available to the staff trainers at George Washington University. Since the 2 staff eLearning specialists cannot perform all of the eLearning development that needs to take place, we had to come up with a system that allowed other staff trainers and subject matter experts to create their own eLearning materials.

Training and support currently happens as needed by the clients. This allows the eLearning specialist to discuss the specific needs of the client groups as they convert their materials.

Our support structure for elearning conversion contains the following pieces:
- eLearning Blueprint (Instructional Design). Most of our clients are intimidated by the conversion of their materials into eLearning. Often, we are asked to convert huge PowerPoint slide decks. A third-party instructional design tool provides a template for helping clients design and organize their eLearning projects so the result is more effective and engaging.

- eLearning Matrix (Design Tool). This tool assists clients as they determine the appropriate method of delivery.

- Adobe Captivate (Development Tool). We use this as our baseline eLearning development tool. We provide training on Captivate for new users and specific considerations for George Washington University’s environment. We also provide pre-designed templates with the appropriate size settings, university-approved graphics and consistent behavior and appearance across the objects.

- eRooms (File Sharing) . We use this to permit sharing of the base Captivate file. This helps us troubleshoot the file directly and fix potential issues as needed. We also use this as notification for when the tutorial is ready to be ported into SkillPort, our LMS.

- Elluminate (Remote Access). We use this as a real-time troubleshooting and support tool if the client has a quick question or issue.

- SkillPort (LMS). This tool will be the primary content library and reporting mechanism for staff training at the University. Subject Matter Experts, Trainers and Management are provided with reports through this system. A future project will connect the output from SkillPort to a Data Warehouse, allowing reporting on the business impact of our educational initiatives.

Human resources:
- A staff eLearning specialist serves as the primary support person and Captivate expert. She performs the initial training on all of the resources available for eLearning conversion and ongoing support through their design and development processes.

- Each client group has at least one eLearning developer who serves as the primary point of contact between the staff eLearning specialist and the client group

- The Division of IT Help Desk assists with technical issues surrounding installation of any needed software, access to the various resources and PC issues.
Future plans

- A steering committee has been put together to discuss governance and quality assurance for tutorials posted on SkillPort. There are plans for a QA and approval process for all tutorials created for the LMS.

- There are discussions surrounding the creation of a more formal and regularly-scheduled series of classes on eLearning development as the demand for eLearning conversion increases.

Impact (250 word limit):
The Staff Leadership and Development team piloted our model. With their feedback, we have rolled out this support system to Financial Systems and Services, Payroll, Data Warehousing, University Compliance and Medical Center Research Compliance.

Importance or Relevance to Other Institutions (250 word limit)
This presentation will address some common challenges facing universities as they move towards blended and online staff learning solutions.

- Convincing clients that converting a PowerPoint used in their instructor-led class will not result in effective eLearning

- Keeping up with the increasing demand for eLearning creation, particularly at institutions where real estate is scarce.

- Supporting staff trainers and subject matter experts who are in the process of converting their classes to eLearning – either by choice or by circumstance (lack of availability of classroom space, executive initiatives, reduction in training staff, etc)

Session Interaction (250 word limit):
This poster session is specifically designed to accommodate questions and conversations. The presentation of the model, will only take 15-20 minutes at most. The presenter will be encouraging questions and comments at any time throughout the poster session. Demonstrations of any and all tools we use to help support our staff trainers and subject matter experts, will occur as requested by the attendees.
Job aids for implementing the model will be available during the session.

Session Outcomes (250 word limit):

At the end of this session, the attendee will be able to:
- Design and plan their own support and training system for converting instructor led training into a blended learning or eLearning solution

- Identify and assess tools they can use for implementing the model at their own institution

- Utilize various techniques for facilitating the creation of robust, interactive eLearning rather than click-to-death tutorials.

Working with the Deaf

2010-07-23T14:41:00.006-04:00

The manager was tasked to train an individual who has been given a new task. This individual is profoundly deaf.

The deaf student had attempted to take an eLearning course on the task. The thought was that he would be able to work the tutorial at his own pace. That, apparently, didn't work. (I haven't seen the tutorial, so I am not certain whether it was an instructional design flaw, lack of 508 compliance or some other issue that is the culprit.)

As a result, the deaf student's managers reached out to my manager for some one-on-one instructor-led training on this new task.

My manager had worried about this session. She asked me to step in and observe once I had completed my own class. I walked in at the 45 minute mark.

It wasn't going well.

As I watched, my manager tried everything in the book to help him understand and perform his new task.
- Screen pointing
- Model and repeat
- Repetition
- Writing and drawing

She would talk slowly and wait for the interpreters to provide translation. She worked very hard to keep her frustration levels down and her tone level (I was behind her, so I couldn't see her face).

No matter what she tried...He just wasn't getting it.

The student used two sign-language interpreters (I've personally never seen that before). The interpreters switched off as the manager delivered the training. At first, the interpreters switched off every 30 minutes, then every 15, then as often as they could convince the other to take over. They cut off the session at 2 hours. The class was only supposed to take one.

The sign language interpreters I've met tend to be incredibly careful with body language and facial expressions. I could tell this was out of the norm. One started displaying the "This guy's a moron" facial expression. The other performed the universal slow breath exhalation of frustration. It appeared that at least one of them had worked with this individual before - and seemed none-too-happy about having to translate for him again.

Something is not right here.

I also got the sincere feeling that I was witnessing the "Willful Stupidity Act." I had seen the "willful stupidity act" before among the hearing population. The willful stupidity act is usually demonstrated by folks who are only interested in their job for the paycheck. They want nothing to do with learning new skills or taking on new responsibilities. No amount of persuasion, motivation or training is going to help this person. If anything, training just gives the individual one more thing to blame his or her "lack of performance" on. The trainer becomes a new scapegoat.

Before the student left, he threw up his hands and complained about how he was expected to do all this work.

We've heard this before.

"You need to have a conversation with your manager."

When everyone had left, my manager turned to me - "I don't think he got a thing out of it."

I didn't think he did either.

We both wondered whether trying to pay attention to the screen AND trying to pay attention to the translator caused the issue. Maybe.

I inquired about any online training he had been exposed to. Maybe he just needed to have something that offers a slower pace and text. Already tried - with resources for questions while he worked through the tutorial.

My manager demonstrated all of the strategies I knew about for working with the hearing impaired, so I couldn't think of any new ideas.

Are there other things we could have tried?

How I Use Facebook

2010-07-14T09:14:00.003-04:00

My use of Facebook, as well as the types of friends on it, has evolved over the past couple of years.

Current friend makeup - part professional, part co-workers, part current friends / acquaintances / family, part folks from high-school / college.

I am finding that this has been the best way to keep up with folks that I actually want to talk to from 20+ years back. Better than trying to write letters / xmas cards. Better than trying to dig up some outdated phone number / e-mail / physical address. I catch up with them. They catch up with me. We can see what interests each of us currently have. And, thankfully, most of my friends update with cool links / video etc. Not just "FML! I hate my job!" That would make reading my feed depressing.

----------------------------------

I've been playing a couple of Facebook games. Unfortunately, I find they quickly devolve into the "doing chores" variety. My Tribe is starting to feel like that. Gave up on Social City pretty quickly. Lots of friends on Frontierville - so I may join them to see if the social thing improves the experience or just makes me feel obligated to do chores.

----------------------------------

Best use of Facebook - library of links and videos that I find interesting that I do not necessarily want to organize. Sadly, many of these videos seem to feature Muppets. I guess that is not a bad thing.

Test Scripts

2010-07-12T08:52:00.002-04:00

Right now, we are testing our Batch add and update process for our LMS. Unfortunately, this process is going to be manual - as in, the senior Business Analyst creates a .csv file and I upload it to the LMS. Why manual? Because we are waiting for a particular, just-launched project that is supposedly going to solve all of our identity ills.

To test this project, I created a test script in Google Docs.
Here is an open example script with comments.

I broke the testing down into 2 sections:
- Testing the actual batch add and edit process.
+ make sure the .csv files organized the groups the way we expected them to
+ determine any hazard points (like inadvertently erasing everything for a user)

- Functional testing of the group
+ Is the LMS going to do what we thought it was going to do now that we have our users organized in groups.

I gave edit permissions to all of the testers.
We added things to test as we worked.

For testing - we managed ~~(after some begging and pleading)~~ to get some sandbox time so that we didn't inadvertently mess up live data.

Recommendations we will be sending to the Steering Committee are in yellow.

There are pros and cons to working in a system that we have no control over.

My next step is to figure out a way to sell some solutions that don't particularly come close to meeting the requirements. This oughta be good.....

Soul Searching

2010-06-28T14:35:00.004-04:00

On Friday, I attended one of those thought-provoking meetings with mentors - current and potential.

You know Wendy, you really should go back to school.
I know the perfect program for you!
This would be perfect! I can see the glint in your eye.

These types of conversations have gotten more frequent of late.

Every time I have these conversations, I think of the lunch in the small Chinatown noodle shop with Clark Quinn - who asked why I didn't go back and get the doctorate.

I gave him a pretty lengthy list of excuses at the time.

My career trajectory is fine.

I'm perfectly happy where I am at and where things seem to be headed.

I'm not interested in becoming a professor.

I don't know if I want to put the time/effort/money into this.

I can't see what the benefit / return on investment is to me.

I've got the best committee on the internet - there is no WAY I could put together the same brain trust at one institution.

I probably make more money without the doctorate.

...I'm certain there were others....

---------------------------------------

I don't know why Friday's breakfast got me thinking about going back to school more seriously than I have since I finished my 2nd Masters in 2003.

Maybe it was the sheer number of voices - my director, a highly regarded mentor, a soon-to-be-minted Ed.D.

Maybe it's the directionless rut that I'm feeling at work. Busy - but not entirely sure I am accomplishing anything.

Maybe it's the realization that the skills I am being forced to develop this year (project management, people management, leadership) takes me closer to a leadership position rather than a senior technical position. And that I am feeling singularly ill-equipped to handle the change.

Maybe I am finally coming to grips with the fear of repeat failure that has dogged me since I failed my qualifying exams at Kentucky 15 years ago.

Maybe it's recognizing that I've become intellectually lazy.

--------------------------------------------

I have some more research to do.
This is the program I am considering.

---------------------------------------------

I got my Masters in Instructional Technology by sheer accident.

I was bored at work. Found a program that matched what I was doing at the time. I worked at Towson - so classes were free. I was able to make my school work match my job tasks. Next thing I knew - I was one semester away from graduating.

The Wonk (a golf buddy and one of my best friends) put this in perspective.

Shoot Wendy, if nothing else, take advantage of the free classes!

-----------------------------------------------

I'm looking at the best way to tackle this. Especially since I am not entirely familiar with the field (or maybe I am, and am just confused by the jargon and range of research).

Take a couple of classes to see if my BS monitor goes up.
Take the Miller Analogy Test - just to have something current.
One semester at a time, with no "goal" in mind.
One semester at a time to see how this stacks up with my current workload.

I'm taking any and all advice / encouragement / warnings.

ISO - Requirements Training

2010-06-21T13:08:00.004-04:00

Over the past couple of months, I have been attempting to collect requirements for our LMS project. Should be simple, right?

The stakeholders put together a document listing what they needed the system to do.

It was a pretty straightforward list.
- Managers should be able to report on their teams
- HR should be able to report by job type.

That sort of thing.

Apparently, not what the technicians were looking for.

So the primary stakeholders and I went back to the drawing board in an attempt to clarify our needs.

I got so mad at one point - I created a PowerPoint presentation with happy smiley faces. (Oh yeah - THAT was productive).

Meanwhile - I went to the practitioners that I thought would know about requirements collection.

We're not trained to do that.

WTF!?! Not even to facilitate?!?!? (I am hoping that I said something a little more tactful than this. I probably didn't)

No - it's actually not part of our discipline

So who actually collects the requirements?

Well, it just kinda happens. We think it's the business analysts. But it varies. We don't get involved until after the requirements are collected.

Isn't there a preferred format? Some standard document you all use?

No - but we have a pilot document. Try this out.

So I stick the requirements the stakeholders and I collected (again) into the pilot document. Three drafts later, I submit the new requirements document to all parties.

Stakeholders: This doesn't make any sense

Technicians: This doesn't make any sense

Me (to the group at large...)All I want is ONE set of requirements that everyone understands so that we are all on the same page. I don't care if I have to show up to meetings in feathers performing interpretive dance.

ANYTHING so that we are all on the same page.

At this point, my manager slipped me a note telling me to not act so frustrated.
Grrrrrr.......

------------------------------------------
Thankfully - one of the senior business analysts for our enterprise system took me under wing; before I showed up to work looking like a Vegas showgirl for our next requirements meeting.

After chatting with her, I realized my difficulty collecting and communicating requirements was a result of never having collected requirements for this type of project.

I know how to collect requirements and do a needs assessment for a training project. I know the questions to ask. I know how to guide the client. I am ultimately the one doing the work, so I know what I am looking for. I know when I need to go back for clarification.

This time, I am collecting requirements for implementing a feature of a pre-existing system.
- I am only doing a very small part of the work, not all of it.

- The system has already been purchased, so we are working within a much tighter set of restrictions than is optimal. Especially since we have no control of the code.

- And this has been out of my realm of expertise. I've always been the stakeholder, not the business analyst (at least, not formally). As a result, I am not entirely certain of the questions to ask.

After much back and forth (and probably fearing the spectre of a crazed trainer dancing and shrieking on the conference room table), everyone went back to the initial document. The one without the bells, whistles and complicated formatting. Just a list. "Here's what we need it to do."

The final is with the steering committee now.

I am stitching up my costume and brushing up on my Fosse.... just in case.....

So.....uh.....

2010-06-15T15:39:00.005-04:00

Watching yourself teach on video is always educational.

Jon PCF, one of the coaches at my gym, recently filmed himself teaching olympic lifting.

I say 'right' a lot. So every time I say 'right', I have to do a burpee.

We counted 27 - not including the 3 that he did earlier in the class.

Personally, I would be happy if 'right' was my only verbal tic. I've found over the years that I replace one verbal tic with another (or 2 or 3).

Thankfully, half of my training these days is through online tutorials. Hooray for audio editing software!

I am in the process of creating a temporary video series for a project. This is an emergency stop-gap until I get the tidy interactive tutorials completed. Usually, I would do documentation and be done with it. This group wanted video.

Below is a demonstration of why I normally do not try to narrate while filming. (30 seconds should be enough to get the point across)

I be an edukayshen perfeshunul.
Do not try this at home.
And kudos to those who can film and talk at the same time.

#IeL2010 Through the Eyes of a Newcomer

2010-06-15T07:15:00.001-04:00

Michael is brand new to eLearning. He’s a web developer by background and took the job as a way to apply his web skills. I was curious to get his take on the conference, since he doesn’t have the baggage many of us do when attending these things. His writeup is below:

As a newbie to the eLearning field and someone who comes from a web design/web development background, I enjoyed the 6th annual symposium overall. On Day 1, I attended the all day Game Design Workshop where I thoroughly enjoyed Brenda Brathwait as the speaker. Although I'm sure my team's game submission for the game jam came in last place, it did give me a glimpse into the difficulty of creating a good game design.

Day 2 & 3 were filled with key note and session speakers, some who referenced names of authors and researchers which I would scribble in my notes because I'd never hear of them before. Others focused on distilling down complex topics or key insights on current trends in eLearning which were provided in an engaging presentation with real world examples(I found these the most valuable sessions).

On a personal level and as a avid gamer in the early 90s, I really enjoyed John Romero's key note.

Like a new kid at a new school, I sat and observed a bit more than those who have been in the field for years. I look forward to next year's 7th annual symposium and hope to engage more people, especially those speakers whose presentations resonated with me.

A few further observations ~~since I cornered him in the office and asked a whole bunch of questions~~

- The sessions generally assumed a certain level of Instructional Design knowledge and background. He tried to steer clear of sessions that seemed “advanced”.

- His favorite session: Brent Schlenker’s Content is Queen / Context is King.
+ He loved his presentation and approach. Michael also admitted he is a sucker for multimedia in presentations, especially Brent’s use of music.
+ Lots of philosophical food for thought – since he has always heard Content is king.
+ Michael also found Brent’s message very simple, elegant and effective.

- Michael also got a lot out of Mark Oehlert’s Social Media Bootcamp. These sessions connected to his prior experience as a web developer in ways that the other sessions didn’t. Especially the discussion of Kongregate and user interfaces.
+ The next week, we dug around Kongregate and found Toss the Turtle. If your favorite part of Circus Atari was when the little stick figures fell off the seesaw, this game is for you.

- In comparison to Mark and Brent’s sessions, a few of the sessions he attended seemed unfocussed. Interestingly, to Michael, the more unfocused sessions correlated with the amount of text on the slides. Hmmmm…..

- During John Romano’s keynote, someone asked “How does your talk link to education?” John mentioned a Learning Project and asked back “Why aren’t there more cool educational games?” Michael wondered the same thing. With the last 3 game developer keynotes, I am hearing “the education space is really exciting right now”. I am personally curious to see how this plays out over the next few years.

Michael tells me he got a lot out of the conference. From his obvious excitement talking about it, I know he’s not blowing smoke when he says that. Thanks to my eLearning network for making him feel so welcome. Now let’s not scare him off ;)

Playing Facebook Games

2010-06-05T18:31:00.004-04:00

We won the Build a Facebook Game challenge. Yet the only one I ever played was Scrabulous (back in the day).

Why the bias?

Because I hated all of the notifications and invites and gifts of virtual things.

The Hide button, in my mind, is one of the best Facebook features ever.

Since Sid and I won the Build a Facebook game challenge, however, I figured I needed to play at least some of the newer games to see what is going on in the environment these days. And I wanted to do it in a way where I wasn't cluttering up my friends' news feeds.

I chose three:

Fish Wrangler - I like fishing. I was attracted by the animation on the Fan page. Seemed like a good fit.
- Gameplay: Click the Fish Now button. Get a fish (or not). You can change your fishing pole and chum and add skills. As you get more skilled, the gap between when you can cast gets larger.

- Thoughts: I can easily see this as a multitasking distractor to run in the background. As I type, I click on the Fish Wrangler tab to see if I can cast my pole yet. Bonus that I don't have to pay constant attention to it. And it is really mindless....

- Monetization Strategy - Purchase unstealable Red Love Chum. Catch a fish 95% of the time. Essentially helps you level up faster. Meets the "Let them pay to play faster" rule.

Social City - This is one of the games mentioned during the conference. Build a city.
- Gameplay: Add houses, factories etc and build a city. You can send gifts to friends as well and go visit their city.

- Thoughts: An urban Farmville. Harvest people and money. Something you can play once a day and leave alone or go in more regularly. Like Fish Wrangler - a lot of waiting. Requires a little strategy - house placement, recreation, factory utilization.

- Monetization Strategy: Purchasing City Bucks allows you to purchase more land, purchase specific city buck items or convert those bucks to gold. Build faster. Again - "Let them pay to play faster."

My Tribe - LBY3 pointed me to this game. He worked for Blizzard in a past life, so I trust his judgement when he recommends games. This is essentially a simple island Sim game.

- Gameplay: Make your island people do stuff. Pick up shells (spending a LOT of time doing that) and finish quests / tasks.

- Thoughts: Has the "I can play this while watching baseball" quality to it. Spent lots of time completing quests, picking up shells and waiting for stuff to fall from the sky. If you leave it alone - the sims take care of themselves. What makes this addictive is the 2 minute event timer. Every 2 minutes, you can pick up stardust, moondust, crates of goodies. All of these items become important later.

- Monetization Strategy: None that I can see.

So which one do I enjoy most? Doesn't really matter - all serve their purposes. My Tribe will be the most distracting. Fish Wrangler can run in the background.

Now to hope I don't get too distracted when I go back to work on Monday :)

#IEL2010 My Personal Takeaways

2010-06-04T11:08:00.000-04:00

24/7/365/when needed
Context gives content meaning
Resources include people
---------------------------

Mobile learning isn't really ABOUT the mobile phone. (please see 24/7/365/when needed/in the WAY needed)

---------------------------

I had a chance to talk with Brent Schlenker during lunch yesterday. 2 takeaways from that conversation

- This conference may not have been as much about "cutting edge" so much as it has been about "crystallization". I think we are finally beginning to recognize WHAT the shift is.

- Despite all of the talk about how in-person conferences aren't entirely necessary, being face-to-face with someone allows you to focus in a way that tweeting / skypeing / IMing etc doesn't. Brent noticed that we have been almost trained (by practice) to multitask when we are on a computer. Even when we really should be more focused.

---------------------------

Innovations in eLearning, for me, is a 3 day-long summer camp with my tribe.

And though I talk to them through facebook / twitter / email - there is something special about being able to share physical space, break bread, and hold focused conversations.

It's been a year since I've seen them and, as always, I walk away much richer for the experience.

See you next year.

#IeL2010 Game Jam Conclusion

2010-06-04T10:17:00.000-04:00

My amazingly blurry blackberry picture of the Game Jam Judges' Choice winner...Writers Block.
Created by (drumroll) - Sid and I!

No...the competition wasn't rigged.

----------------------------

BTW - For those of you not at the conference, I am keeping Sid anonymous. She is an integral player in the upcoming LMS implementation. I don't want to blow her cover ;)

-------------------------------

Before Aaron's session yesterday, Sid cornered me.

You know Wendy - you made it sound like I bossed you around. I hope you don't feel that way.

Didn't mean to give that impression in my writing. I wanted to give credit where credit was due.

Sid really did the heavy lifting.

Upon further reflection on the experience, it made me realize exactly why the two of us work so well together in our day jobs.

We both respect the way each other thinks and processes information.

I'm a more linear / text person. She's more hyperlink / visual.
To successfully implement a new system - it helps to have both.

---------------------------------

To give an idea of our "project" process for this challenge.

1) Identify what makes a successful facebook game.

Sid has played a few of these. My homework assignment from this conference is to play one. We also looked over our notes from Brenda Brathwaite's session.

2) Brainstorm the main core

We kinda started this process before lunch. During lunch - we talked about other things and let stuff simmer. After lunch - Sid and I got back together. Thankfully - our a-ha moment came almost instantaneously.

3) Brainstorm the design

This is where I let Sid go nuts. I would have never thought of the "wander around and capture things with a magic book" idea.

4) Stop and map it out.

This is where I came in - only because I was starting to see lots of ideas and wasn't entirely certain how they all came together.

Mapping out how we think things are supposed to work (the workflow) also helps us see gaps and issues with our ideas.

At some point - usually when things start to get confusing - it's good to map out what you have. It's also good not to stay wedded to any idea created during the brainstorming sessions.

This could also be called the "planning" stage.

5) Act.

We had to create 3 panels for display by 4pm.

Around 2pm - we had to make a semi-conscious decision to start putting together our 3 panels.

The brainstorming part is fun. Planning can even be fun. Act is the real work.

Sid and I seemed to start our panels long before the other teams. A good thing, because that gave Sid time to create 1 panel and fix 1 of my panels (because my artistic ability consists of 3rd grade scrawl and stick figures).

--------------------------------------
What we wound up with - the game idea that won John Romero's and Brenda Brathwaite's approval

Title: Writers Block

Core: Collect inspiration for your novels by wandering around an expansive and ever-changing environment

Gameplay:
- Walk around the environment and collect inspiration using your magic book.
- You can house your inspiration in your writer's area
- Create bestsellers using your inspiration
- As you climb the bestseller list - you gain money to purchase better transportation, allowing you to explore more areas and gain more unique inspiration (bikes, cars, planes, teleporters)
- Trade inspiration with your friends and help them climb the bestseller list too so you can explore new areas together
- Special environments and events daily to allow you to gather limited edition inspiration (and keep you coming back for more - World of Warcraft - style)

We are pretty proud of our work.

What excited me the most was overhearing folks staring at our panels and saying "That's really cool!" I didn't even have to pay them off ;)

Sid has the panels - with John Romero's signature. I hope to get better pictures soon.

----------------------------------------

Oh yeah - I am so jealous of the Opus Scriptor team for having access to a printer.
They got People's Choice for their idea of using friends and their profiles to write a novel and allowing these friends to edit your work Mad Lib style. Well earned.

#IEL2010 The Architecture of Actualization

2010-06-03T14:55:00.002-04:00

Presenter: Aaron Silver, ADL

His notes!

---------------------------

We are stuck on metaphors older than millenials

The problem is the Internet - 30 years (active)
- Structure based on files and folders

As we become more into the digital / online environment - our interactions carry over offline.
- Affect how we interact with each other in the real world
- How we think about learning / social issues is changing

Our metaphors aren't cuddly
We are becoming less cuddly as a result

We should connect with each other online the way we WANT to connect with each other offline
- We don't think in file systems and folders or see each other as a folder
- We are in places, we participate in shared experiences

The challenges we face as augmented people in an as-yet crudely augmented world are great.

We are augmented with persistent access to information
- Cell phones near ubiquitous
- But our virtual information sources are good, not great

Google - good, but not great
- ERIC - quality of information curated / vetted
- At Google - mixed with everything

Automated, at-hand knowledge isn't always and/or exactly what we need.

Google is convenient, but not necessarily good for us (like McDonalds)

We have opportunities to do better because / in spite of technology

He uses his network to help others with people's biggest learning tech challenges
- The network took YEARS to build (as did mine)

SCORM (ADL)
- Enable reuse of learning objects
- Solving the problem of interoperability
- In 90s - problem of custom-portals to track learners. If 1 part of gov't had great course, another needed to use it - couldn't move it from one system to another.
+ Essentially had to rebuild the course.
- Took proprietary and open standards. Figure out how to work together. Create framework. Became a de-facto standard
- Drove adoption - US Government. Then adopted by others.

SCORM is a product of the 90s.
- Google was an upstart
- No facebook, My Space
- No smartphones
- GPS not ubuquitous
- No iphone, ipad, etc
- The world today is different.

What will be useful for the NEXT 10-20 years?
- Game theory
- Computational linguistics
- General semantics
- Modeling and Simulation
- Narrative Environments
- Knowledge Space
- Organizational change

These are things that will help with the bigger thing that is converging
- How do they all fit together?

Game Theory
- Unified Field Theory - your success/experience is dependent on other people's successes/experiences
- Before - viewed as scarcity
- Last several years - shift to abundance-thinking.
- How you interact with others or NPCs (non-player characters)

Computational Linguistics
- Teach computers to communicate with people.
- Friendly software should listen and speak
- Mathematical side (the implementation and programming) and psychological side (cognitive process that constitutes human language)
- If it understands what I am saying, and get what I MEAN - then it can give me the information I want in the way I understand it.

General Semantics - "The map is not the field"
- Building an awareness of abstractions
- A map of something is an abstraction of the actual field.
- We become more focused on the language we are using over the actual thing we are describing
- The more we interact with each other and the more we focus on the method, words etc , the less we focus on the actual issue.

Modeling and Simulation
- Models are simplified representations of actual systems intended to promote understanding
- How things work
- Can be tricky - the model itself has to be understood first.
- Too many details - model becomes overwhelming and precludes understanding.
- Too few - may miss something important
- Simulations - how we test our assertions about the interactions

Narrative Environments
- Tell stories that engage all senses of an audience
- Use experience to build better narratives
- Use them to better improve their storytelling
+ The feedback from those working with the narrative helps the creators improve the environment for better engagement and understanding

Knowledge Space
- The possible states of what a learner knows
- Sub-discipline of mathematical psychology
- Asking SMEs how they solve a particular problem that they are expert in.
+ Ask many
+ Map out answers
+ Can later use the information to build an intelligent service to help OTHERS figure out how to solve a problem
+ Will both deliver AND ask questions to evaluate where the person is in that particular knowledge space

Organizational Change
- Harness change to create, innovate and grow.
- Balance organizational strategy and social responsibility
- Cross-section between Business and Education
- Change is constant. Gotta learn how to roll.
- The challenge for change agents - if you are really going to do change, as you changing the environment, the sand under the environment is changing with you.
+ Gotta learn how to rapidly re-focus and re-assess

Cultural Anthropology
- Useful tools for inquiry and evaluation around knowledge, beliefs, are, morals, law, custom, habits
- Try to understand people within their own social context
- Way cultural anthropologists ask questions is a way to drive reflection
+ Great for raising awareness of your cultural context
- We form Heuristics
+ Things we do by rote - algorithms
+ Heuristics - how we figure out those algorithms
- We can't separate ourselves from the cultural context
- When we learn something new, we apply old things to help understand it.

Our tools for understanding the offline and online world have been different
- Files / folders - online
- places / context / experience - offline
- But we are now starting to change our understanding of the offline world with the same metaphors as the ONLINE world.
- We probably need to reverse that so that our online metaphors match our OFFLINE metaphors.

People are not organizational structures.

"Architecture of Actualization"
- The list of fields is a nudge.
- The journey doesn't have a destination yet

Architecture - discipline. Structures and environments with consideration for aesthetic effect

Actualization - full realization of one's potential

"He...possesses the ability to ...judge people correctly"

Self-actualized people
- embrace reality and facts
- spontaneous
- solve problems
- accept and evaluate others, lacking prejudice

Doing stuff? Or getting stuff done?
- We all work with people who do stuff.
- But a few people get things done.
- the people who get things done are actualized / actualizing

Plentiful research on self-actualization.
(I won't link to it)

No one will talk about group actualization
- Hasn't found sources yet.

For all the talk about social networking and learning - why are we talking about THAT?
- Why are we not talking about developing people? We are at the supplying info level. Supplying info does not equal development
- Army - "Be all you can be". Very singular. Me. No talk about "Be all you ALL can be"

Social learning - learning evidenced from vicarious activity shared through near-peer relationships

There are dynamic groupings. Not sure we are becoming and individual collective.
- Still connecting dots
(Jay Allen: some buzz about distributed cognition - sum of the individual collectiveness. All must act in a concerted manner. The group level of cognition that makes things happen in that environment. Not one person can do it.)
- Still trying to identify the changes.
(Jay: OUr knowledge melding...)
- Not trying to build the hive mind

(Audience: cognitive synergy - if throw into facebook, becomes a reality which becomes a fact. Literature is out there)

As classroom teacher - goal was to earn a paycheck
- Mentor teacher - too ambitious to be in the classroom
- Hard to hear, took advice.
- Degree in Educational Technology - changed perspective.
+ Who's REALLY writing the text?
+ What are the questions behind the question?
- Listening to things to try, experiences, failures to have

The realization that the metaphors are WRONG - things started to make sense

People who are at rest stay at rest until acted on by others.

GPS for learning (an idea)
- Push vs. Pull
- You could research every direction with a map.
- But we use the tool to figure out where we are, where want to go. Computer figures out how to get there.
- Why can't we learn that way

Metadata - breaks like peanut brittle, not as tasty and a lot harder
- Find stuff on Google / LMS etc
+ Popularity
+ Get list - you decide
- Just because everyone is linking to it doesn't mean that it is right for you (or even correct!)
- Metadata works in the time you are capturing
- Hard to capture
- When do capture - if look at later, your takeaway / perspective has changed
- Hard to modify

Paradata - how something is experienced by you
- ex. Like button, Digg
- ex. Twitter geolocation - where you were when you read it
- What was your feeling etc.
- When you have all of these different pieces of paradata - you have context

Context = aggregation of paradata
- We can mine contextual information

Metaparadata
- link between you and what you are looking for
- You look for something. Decide what is right and choose it. The link between the 2 is metaparadata

Facebook / Google "Privacy"
- They don't necessarily want to know everything about you.
- They want to aggregate who you are, what you look for, what you decide is correct / what you want
- More they can figure out metaparadata about you - better they can rank and result the search / information
- What you think you are looking for may not be what you ultimately decide is correct

Next 10-20 years is full of this stuff.

"Context" is broad term.

GPS for learning
- Without direction, we learn without purpose
- If you are not going to APPLY what you learn - what is the purpose?
- People and tools will help nudge us

Live tweeting is feedback that makes one pervasively aware of their performance
- Presenter could adjust the perfomance to give you more or less
- To do that - must trust what you are reading
- It needs to be in a context he can work with (no trolls not even here)

Trusted Brokers - in order to have this pervasive awareness / feedback, may need to be fed through trusted brokers.
- Connect the connectors
- The trusted broker can connect the anonymous to the other
- Brokering the information exchange
- Like peer evaluations / 360 feedback. It all goes to 1 person. That person is brokering the information

Near-peers - folks who know a little more or a little less in a given Knowledge Space.
- If everyone the same - you have an echo changes
- More advanced - get advice, you learn.
- Experts don't want to exchange with those just learning.
- Less advanced - you give advice, they learn, you may learn too.

To do this - everyone has to own their own data
- Not by google, gov't, facebook
- The interfaces for systems that will work like this are protocols. Not platforms or applications

To do this - needs to be distributed by everyone
- Could be VW, mobile, things we haven't even designed yet.

#IEL2010 Thursday Afternoon Keynote

2010-06-03T13:45:00.002-04:00

Bridging the Digital Divide
Presenter: Steve Haber, President Sony's Digital Reading Business Division

Digital reading has a lot in common with consumer electronics
- Lot in common with the LP / CD / MP3 evolution
- Lot in common with film / digital imaging

In all cases - this paradigm shift did not slow down the content or experience.
- Caused an EXPLOSION.
- More enthusiasts (LP to CD - get rid of skips, higher quality)
- The new technology solved problems, made things easier to do things (in many cases)

Publishing hasn't had a paradigm shift in generations
- But there is an opportunity to have reading explode

Reading - a complex cognitive process of decoding symbols for the intention of deriving meaning
- Some read to connect / escape / learn
- Develop intellectually / emotionally.
- Self-improvement

Different cultures (generalities)
- Try to research the reading habits of different cultures
- US: readers that read because we need to
+ Yes, some avid readers.
+ Less nostalgic about past authors.
- UK: reading important means of communication
+ Identify with their literary tradition
- Netherlands: For imagination and escape
- Germany: Poets, thinkers, vital to cultural life
- France: Reading expression of intellect
+ Very serious
+ Goal to acquire knowledge

Reading of how we connect to one another, ideas, across time and space.

What dictionaries you want?
- Why would you want a dictionary? We want translations!

2 years ago - 10 minutes why eBooks important
- Technology available
- People used to downloads and wireless
- Heard from avid readers - "Never go digital - I like the smell of books."
+ Heard the same thing about LPs to CD.
+ But mass market about ease and experience.

Launched eReader 6 years ago. Now at tipping point.
- 5mil+. Will top 12mil (how are they defining eReader? include iPad?)

Large market growth across cultures

Reading / Writing
- Simplistic drawings the precursor
- Not until the Guttenburg Press - now more widely available.

With advent of digital readers
- Device shipped, books not
- Wireless
- No returns....Publishers print, anything unsold by retailers taken back to publishers
- Better inventory management - right book at right time on demand

(Idea we can consider: Right content at right time on demand)

Digital - can now hyperlink words to dictionary, more information that before you would have to go grab another book....

Digital Revolution - critical component of exchange of ideas, broader and wider than ever

No one perfect education eReader device

Instant access to content.
Note-taking ability
Form / Technology so that it is easy to read for HOURS at a time.
+ Trying to match the experience of paper

Each organization / environment has own needs
- Easier to distribute white papers etc

(as I listen to Mr. Haber....I get the feeling that the iPad is more of a game-changer, with its multimedia capabilities, than he thinks.

Also thought his focus on courses and the "push" interesting)

eReaders help education with the learning process (as it currently stands)

Link to webcast

eReaders - better access to literature and information.

Digital Divide
- Those with access to computers vs. those who do not
- Access for those with access to digital content
- Also issues with Proprietary Format and Proprietary Digital Rights + some governments part of that divide

Call to action
- Purchasing process for eBooks must be simple
- Ownership needs to be permanent (no taking stuff back)
- File standards should be universal
- Devices should support public libraries

Access to public libraries worst kept secret
- Book checkout - expires on the reader
- Make sure you have access to public libraries (digital)
- Can do "queue" if a book becomes available

Defining and RE-Defining Access
- Paper books + digital advantages
- Different price points
- You should forget you have an eReader / electronic device in your hand
- You should be able to choose between wired / wireless
- Access to content
+ What is the best format? Work towards openness.

Lack of access to content
- limits what educators can do
- Limits access to information
- eReader becomes a toll both vs. a learning platform

Wireless
- Wireless access via eReader = instant access
- Control of content available on reader
- Wired devices - increased security, less distraction

#IEL2010 - Conversations and Observations

2010-06-03T12:48:00.003-04:00

I have had a series of interesting conversations during this conference.

------------------------
Jim Rich cornered me after Brent Schlenker's session. I sat down and wrote some notes. I trust he will add to them in the comment area ;)

mLearning Media Agility
- make the original item agile enough for different devices.

Idea from color-printing. 1 image, standard master. Multiple / different kinds of color inks.

Master file / then make pdf, mlearning, html, print. Documentation. Generally – how do you make your content more agile?

Think about the eBook process. Make your own book sites.
How do you get there?

Content is content.

Do you re-do it every time? Was problem in print until 15 years ago. Now easier to adjust with the new technologies.
- Depending on the media – may have different design elements (font sizes, layout etc)
- Smart agents to guide to right output.

Skill – how do you re-package? How do you design so that it works across all media?
- Search and reuse?

Think beyond the single use.

----------------------------------------

Did I mention that Sid and I won the GameJam Judges choice award?

Hope to post on the Game Jam contestants later......

--------------------------------------

The usual suspects (Aaron, Rovy, Brent, Clark, Stephen Martin....) are doing the conference with the iPad vs. a laptop. Feedback is positive from all corners.

---------------------------------------

We are still talking about user-centered. Have been for at least 5 years.
The notion of anytime/anywhere training and support is not entirely new.

Yet when we get back to our desks - we are still designing teacher-centered (to varying degrees).

Why?

Are we making this harder than we need it to be?

#IEL2010 mLearning: Content is Queen! God Save the Queen!

2010-06-03T11:15:00.004-04:00

Presenter: Brent Schlenker

Context is King
Content is Queen
People are Aces
------------------------
Dr. Alison Rossett's session - risk averse nature. Things we need to do is to engage. (thanks Craig!)

Brent's takeaway - things have changed so much. Technology has forced us to change so much. The traditional ISD models just don't take those changes into consideration.
-------------------------

Context v. Content keeps popping up over and over.

We focus a lot on content. But mobile devices change the direction of what we need to design for.
- We need to look at a broader ecosystem
- The media selection is different

There needs to be multiple MODELS of the content
Multiple solutions (not just 1 media)
Multiple contexts

Design in a format / method that supports ALL of it as best as we can.
How do we do that? Don't know.

We are chasing the technology.....

We need to take risks - design is the value add that we bring to it.
- NOT what we have been doing

Our solutions cannot be packages

Think channels - persistent over a period of time

Constant conversations

This is a very different model vs. event.

What is the conversation that needs to be taking place?
What tools do the folks need to have that conversation?

-------------------------

It's about the people, not the technology.

Our first responsibility
- Who the people are
- What context do they work in
- What content do they need to support the people and their context.

If you think technology first - you will lose every time

----------------------

Mobile devices are extremely important
- smaller, faster, cheaper
- getting in more hands

In other countries - even more popular than
- Many places - folks may not have car, tv, etc but do have cell phone
- Very telling about future of where we are going

Traditionally: how do we take these courses and shove into mobile device....
- Screen too small etc.

We have to re-think design.
- The content must fit the context of use!!!!

The device really doesn't matter - because it will need to fit multiple (just in time, as needed, where needed)

Is new media what you think it is?

YouTube - video sharing to Talent Acquisition System
- The new lead singer for Journey found through YouTube
- The technology is a tool

Technology allows us to do things that used to take a really long time much less.
- From bands looking for players in the newspaper, talent agencies, etc with auditions and more auditions to...
- "Hey....look at this link! He sound amazing and already knows our tunes!"

Don't fight the good fight about getting Twitter.... (forget the brand)
- Look at new tools and functionality
- What is the USEFULNESS of these tools?
- How can we utilize this functionality behind the firewalls?
- How will this functionality solve X business problem?

YouTube - can get on all sorts of platform (PC, Desktop, iPad, iPhone ,etc)
- If I have connectivity - I can get YouTube
- Across all platforms

We can no longer assume location and context stability

In traditional models - people, how and where work.
- but today, they need the information OUTSIDE of where they work
- You can actually choose not to deal with it (again, at least ask the question)

Brent looks at people outside our industry
- Marketing - get latest tools and play with first.
- eLearning - we are a lagging indicator of technology.
+ we try to push the envelope - users aren't ready

Fred Wilson - Venture capitalist
- Golden Triangle - Social / Real Time / Mobile
- These are the movers in high-tech
- iPhone / Mobile, Facebook / Social, Real Time / Twitter

He sees the next play in the tools that combine all 3 sides of the golden triangle
- Looking for solutions that bridge Social/Real-time/Mobile
- Can lean more to 1 side than other
- "The cloud" may be part

Wherever you are at - you can access your information in real time.

Evernote - note-taking tool with mobile ap (I use it)
- iPhone, iPad, cloud space (I use web)
- Can share pictures, audio, etc

How do we design and create content as eLearning designers / developers so that it can be consumed any way.
- How does my other device know I've looked at that content?

Goal: Make the user's life easier

Content is not dead.

Not sure if context is MORE important because of mobile.
We just need to pay more attention to it now.

Twitter
- how many people got it the first time
- What was your "a-ha" moment?
- The power for many was context + real-time. News....
- The people following feeds and hash tags.
- Power in the retweets.

Chase Jarvis - The best cameTra is the one that's with you
- Pictures with his iPhone camera
- You are capturing a moment / experience

Our version - what is the best learning tool?
- The one you've got with you

The iPhone is with you!

People have great learning tools in their pockets / purse / "murse" (man-purse)
Why don't we take advantage of it?!?

Overall - it is still not a natural thought to think about all of the different contexts when we create.

Why isn't there a way for us to easily create content across platforms?
- ...yes, we know about the technical issues.

Think about things a little differently. Not worry so much about "implement right now"

You will have to ask yourself this soon, if not now.

Conversion will be an issue soon.

Ask - is it still the right thing...whatever you "convert" to.

(Audience: video wasn't posted in siloed system / talent acquisition system. Posted in a system focused on a function. Labeling something and stashing in a certain place reduces its value. What is stopping us from putting things in multiple places)

We create content for one specific purpose. Why can't we open the content up for more uses?
- Does everything have to be packaged within a course?

(Audience: Maybe we should think more in terms of mashups and the ability to leverage)

Structured content - how perfect.
- Problem - it's harder to do than to whip out a Captivate or Articulate movie.
- We have lots of pressure to create!
- Not a lot of time to create an engine that will pull the materials as needed and organize with context.

ISD Models and Media Selection
- Our current models ask us to select media (laserdisc, video, etc).
- Pick 1.

Where we are going - we need to be designing for multiple channels of delivery
- continued discussions (blogs, chat, etc)

Worst implementation of Web 2.0 technologies - a one-off
- Management and leadership training course.
- Folks forced to blog. Turn on blog for course. End of every day - had to write a blog post. End of course - blog went away.
- Blogs are conversation devices around a TOPIC, not the course.
+ Need the persistence.

Context of how content is being created / shared is changing significantly.
- What is being learned real-time without us?

How do you integrate that in what you are doing?
- Do you need to stand anything up if everything is already out there?

Get to know someone in the IT department
- (How do so many people still NOT know an IT person!!!!)
- Can't have E without IT

Get to know the IT roadmap (Wendy's next homework assignment)

We think Training is a very powerful department - but we really don't have that much.
- What do you have right now in the organization
- Use what you have! What tools are already available. If not turned on - ask them to turn it on!
+ and if you are real nice - they may even turn it on for you!

There is a free module to make your Sharepoint module look like YouTube.
- Very little technical mojo needed

Be creative! Take a risk!
Don't keep trying to buy something new!

Google Aps as LMS.

Needs analysis list - lots of this you can do on Google.

Is security important? If so - what pieces need security.
- If security is an issue - this is where you need to really love your IT department.
- As ISD - all we need to know is that it is a requirement for x.

Outside LMS - still not ubiquitous.
- Still siloed.
- Sometimes, best solution for now.

Getting things added - figure out what it is that the IT department needs
- May not be a security issue or technical issue. Often a Support issue.
- "How are we going to support this"

"If the government can do it - anyone can do it!"
- Examples everywhere in all industries of internal social networking.
- The nut has been cracked. There are ways we can do this.

We need to start taking a look at what we need to do to make our stuff
- Effective pedagogically
- Accessable across contexts

Who knows what it is going to be next?

If you keep your media structured right
- can get complicated... (this is where I need to talk to Aaron....)

Search-able, edit-able, link-able, tag-able, feed-able
- Keep design and display elements (package) simple
- secure-able also added

If send them all of the raw files - can put in way that works best for them vs. packaging (Flash)
- XML can help
- It is harder than just whipping out captivate.
- Long-term, being able to share the raw bits easily will be very powerful.

Let OTHERS create the meaning of the content!!!

Challenge (Audience): balance controllable/traceable/trackable with flexibility
- Aaron: has to be business need as to WHY you are tracking. Tracking is worthless if you don't know why. What are you doing with that information? We need to push back.
- the conversation has to happen.