Post-training Blues

The eLearning Guild posted a tremendous article by Marc Rosenberg about the value of performance support after a training event. His point is neatly summed up by thisparagraph.

Training no longer works in isolation. The transition from classroom (or an online experience) to the workplace must be seamless. This adds design decisions that transcend instruction. What will learners do after training? How will their new knowledge and skill be supported on the job? No training program should be developed without also answering questions like these.

His point is that for training to work it must be “reinforced and supported in the workplace.” This support he says can take the form of coaching, knowledge bases, and actual redesign of either work to align with “the processes and practices taught in training” or the training to align with how work is actually performed.

Marc My Words: The Training to Competence Myth

Learning 2013: Breakout Session 581: Curation in Collaborative Learning

The first session of the 2nd day of Learning 2013 focused on curating learning content to ensure that it was current and what was needed at the time of need. The discussion centered around what “curation” meant in today’s social world. The question arose whether curation is the same as knowledge management and whether both are the same as learning. It was suggested that curation is a native brain function.

We then discussed the basic tasks involved in curation and we determined that it was sequentially:

1. Collection
2. Saving/Bookmarking
3. Add content
4. Sharing

The presenters – Allison Anderson and Armando Torres of Intel – presented a couple of tools used for curation in collaborative learning:

• Pintarest
• Scoop.it

Both are social bookmarking sites with a graphical interface, which led me to wonder what is the usage of Delicious and its text based format?

Scoop.it works as follows: once you log-in it prompts you to create a category and then makes recommendations for you based on key words. You can use the “scoop it!” button next to the suggestion to add it to your collection. You can also use a bookmarklet placed on your bookmark bar to capture items for Scoop.it.

Pinterest works as follows, enter a searh – in this example “epub” and the results are shown in picture format.:

Compared to Delicious’ text based interface which is text based and relies on users to enter descriptive text of the link, which, as shown below, seems to rarely occur.

Learning 2013: Breakout Session 371: Come Joinng the Crowd! Using Crowdsourcing to Design Learning Activities

This was one of the sessions hosted by a cadre from the 30 Under 30 Program. The way to crowd source to build a learning solution is a three-step process.

1. Brainstorm the items requiring performance support of some fashion.
2. Ask questions about what issues might arise or be encountered.
3. Provide answers to those questions.

Typically, the process is done virtually over the course of days or weeks. The presenters recommended the use of a cloud application such as Hackpad or Google Docs in which people can view real time edits can return at other times for asynchronous edits.

Learning 2013 - Breakout Session 274 - Is Bite Size the Right Size? Smaller Learning, a Closer Look

This session focused on how to respond  to corporate pressure to reduce training times. The presenters -Camille Price, of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu and Cary Harlow, of Hewlett Packard - said the conversation should not just be about compressing training, but challenging the assumption that compression is possible at all.

Once participant in the audience suggested that one way to reduce training time is to shift to prework, but in my own mind the question arises as to whether the company will expect the student to do the prework on his or her own time rather than on corporate time since the push to compress training time is the predicated on the desire to reduce the time the student is away from his primary tasks.

The suggestion from the presenters was to guide an evaluation of existing traing to break it up into primary, secondary, and tertiary training and to formulate it in a lattice framework for everyone to see so they ca decide where and when to take it.

Terms/topics to look up:

• Elaborative Learning Theory

Learning 2013 - Breakout Session 101 - Living Online: The Internet's Impact on Human Memory, Decision Making, Creativity & Communication

The first session I attended at Learning 2013 was a Q&A session by Betsy Sparrow regarding living online. Sparrow is an assistant professor at Columbia University's Psychology Department. She initially was not my first choice for the 8:00 am, Monday session. I chose at the last minute to attend her session was due to her comments at the Sunday night opening session when she was interviewed by Elliott Masie and she commented that we are now focusing on where to find information online rather than remember the knowledge itself.

At her Monday morning session her question to the participants was "Should simple tasks be delegated to look-up learning?" And, as a result of this delegation are we losing our memory of simple things. Trans-active memory gives away control of remembering things to our appliances and the internet. That memory then assumes a belief and a trust that the sites we are turning to are reputable and not willing to mislead us. These sites may be moderated by experts or crowd-sourced.

Belief is the key and if trust in a site or organization is squandered the people looking for information will go elsewhere. So sites cannot stagnate, they must constantly review their content to ensure it is valid and relevant.

Key term learned: Agency: You have control over your learning.

M-Learning or just Learning?

Call me a contrarian (people in my family do), but I think a statement like the following as the lead in to ASTD's Mobile Learning Certificate program does a great disservice.

The growing presence of mobile devices worldwide has resulted in a dramatic change in the way people learn.

The problem I have with this statement is that it's hyperbole at its best. Are they suggesting that people are:

• Turning more often to tablets and smartphones rather than other sources for learning?
• Deciding to learn just at the moment they need to know something?
• Opting not to follow the more traditional routes of gaining knowledge?

People have not changed the way they learn over night. What they may be doing with their tablets and smartphones they did in the past by asking people for information or picking up tablets. By making this dramatic statement, ASTD - like others in the industry - are doing the devices and the learning that can be obtained by review content on them.

There are new rules that have to be understood for developing content and interactions for these devices, but I think these rules can and have been applied to other learning environments. The plethora of short You Tube videos demonstrating how people can perform tasks ranging from how to bake a souffle to how to change a tire demonstrate that learning can be quick once you strip away the window dressing.

Similarly, the oldest form of m-learning - should we consider m-learning as something obtained at the time needed in a succint fashion - would be the first caveman to ask another caveman to explain how to make a tool. 

Bottom line: I think knowing how to use mobile devices to transact learning (both deliver content and provide a link with others to discuss the topic and ask questions) is important, but lets not oversell it like we did with e-learning.

It's all about the chunking

I've been thinking about mobile learning a lot lately. More specifically, how learning will occur on tablets and smartphones. (Ironically I initially wrote "will be delivered" where "will occur" in the previous line - many proponents do not think learning in this environment will fully be a "push" effort, but a combined "push-pull" effort.

I do believe that video will be a major ingredient, with links to other resources. I recently completed a Google three-week on-line training program called Power searching with Google. It consisted of six classes, a midterm exam, a final exam and two opportunities to "hang out" with the instructors.

Each of the classes consisted of a series of videos between 4 and 9 minutes in length followed by a series of questions or exercises that allowed you to test your understanding of the materials presented. Some of these activities required posting to a forum where others taking the class could review your work.

This, I think, is the model of training going forward with topics chunked to be no more than 10 to 15 minutes, including activities, in length that learners can take in increments with an understanding that they must complete all increments within a specified time period to receive credit.

Other things I think Google did right with this class was to provide not only the video, which was closed captioned so you could view it with the sound muted, but also links to a text version of the presentation as well as a link to the slides used by the instructor. They also maintained a forum for asynchronous discussions and three live "hang-outs" where Google experts answered learners questions.

The old model of "delivering" training needs to be reconsidered, and Google is demonstrating the approach that needs to be followed.

Just in Time Performance Support

It occurs to me that performance support, or what is really electronic performance support, is applicable for skills that are not frequently exercised by a person. Another way of referring to this is just-in-time learning.

As I think about bubbles

As I think about economic bubbles (housing, higher education, etc.) it started me thinking about how businesses go about buying and delivering training. As the economy tumbles it would seem that it would make sense for industries to pull their resources and develop training and communities or practice (think trade guilds) to assist their employees to develop their skills.

But as I consider the topic and the commercial world's increasing focus on protecting "intellectual property" it puts me in mind of mideavel feifdoms where every little duke, lord, or baron kept each other at arms length and did not cooperate unless there was a serious threat to all of them.

Second screens in Life and Learning

I have not thought of it before, but Elliot Masie's description of "second screens" defines what I find myself and my family doeing already, albiet I don't have access to an Ipad or a tablet PC, but his description does meet the bill.

I have a Second Screen in my life.  Well, actually I have several of them:

* My iPad is often on my lap as I watch TV at home. I’ll look up a reference in the news, locate an actor in a movie or read something different during the boring bits.
* My SmartPhone comes out during a webinar, serving as a back channel - either by text or IM - to someone across the world.  And, once or twice, I have used it when leading a webinar to get some background on the person asking a question in a session.
* My Tablet computer, with a 3G connection, gets me to places where a firewalled connection would not let me go, connecting on my own personal network rather than within the gated community of the host network.

And I have seen this in my workplace especially with our production folks. And I have to concur that it definitely has a place in the learning environment especially within corporate entities that lock down their computers to ensure that their networks are not compromised due to the use of third-party unapproved software.

To a certain extent this concept of second screens began before the advent of tablets, especially in the academic world where students bring laptop computers to the classroom to aid in taking notes.

He notes that there are great possibility for leveraging the use of these elements in the learning environment, but they are countered by the issues of bandwidth and firewall issues. I think another issue that still needs addressing is functionality and usability across all major brands of portable devices.

The one advantage paper-based books have over ebooks is that except for the language used to publish the book, they are pretty much universally functional for the bulk of society. The same cannot be said just yet for electronic formats.

No one uses the phone anymore

I have to wonder if this is a result of enforced socialization in our school systems…

They text, they email, they IM, but increasingly the phone call is too intrusive of a communication option for many.

"I literally never use the phone," Jonathan Adler, the interior designer, told me. (Alas, by phone, but it had to be.) "Sometimes I call my mother on the way to work because she'll be happy to chitty chat. But I just can't think of anyone else who'd want to talk to me." Then again, he doesn't want to be called, either. "I've learned not to press 'ignore' on my cellphone because then people know that you're there."

"I remember when I was growing up, the rule was, 'Don't call anyone after 10 p.m.,'" Mr. Adler said. "Now the rule is, 'Don't call anyone. Ever.'"

As a long-time hater of the phone call, this is good news.

Kids who want to be left alone are considered outsiders and suspected of being potential Columbine kids. What worries me is the increased risk of miscommunication due to the lack of personal contact. As a society we don’t seem to understand the desire for alone time.

Face-to-face communication transmits both verbal and non-verbal clues as to an individual’s message. A facial expression and body language can convey more information about the speaker’s mood and intent.

Voice communication over a telephone fails to transmit the non-verbal clues, but the tone of voice may still provide additional information.

Impersonal text messages and emails carry none of the non-verbal clues unless the writer is one of those people who use all upper case letters to SHOUT THEIR MESSAGE!!!!

One final thought is the move to ignore phone calls a growing response to the expectation that we be available 24-7. In a period of about 135 years we have developed a unspoken social response to a ringing telephone that it must be answered. This social response is now more than ever exploited by for-profit and non-profit organizations seeking to sell or collect money by the former and raise funds by the latter.

We are placed in a position of fighting an ingrained social response to answer the ringing telephone and are now rebelling and saying “No more, this is my time and you will not invade it.”

No one uses the phone anymore

Beware Social Media's Surprising Dark Side, Scholars Warn CEO's - Technology - The Chronicle of Higher Education

This article is intriguing for two reasons.

• The presenters seemed to be trying to bait arguments by presenting blatantly broad-brush assumptions  based on scant details.
• Commentators to the article saw through this misdirection to recognize the presenters positions for what they were.

Beware Social Media's Surprising Dark Side, Scholars Warn CEO's - Technology - The Chronicle of Higher Education

Reading in the Dark Ages -- Campus Technology

Fascinating essay, but as commenters note it may not be the professor’s fault. There is something about paper-based reading that ebooks still cannot touch.

Plus there is still the issue of standardizing ebook file types. My local library offers ebook loans, but they don’t support my Amazon Kindle. It will support my Windows phone with Mobipocket reader.

Of course it is also disconcerting to see concerns over copyright and intellectual property spring up. It seems profits still trump pursuit of knowledge.

Reading in the Dark Ages -- Campus Technology

In the “info” age, everything gets a little shorter | Mercatus

No truer words are spoken.

That doesn’t mean that we’re all growing stupid, or losing our ability to think, or losing our appreciation of books, albums or other types of “long-form” content.  It just means we just don’t spend as much time with them as we used to.

What does this say about our current overall educational approach. Should we reconsider the one size fits all approach for learning. In academia, do all subjects warrant semester-long treatments? Should we break up content in shorter, one-week or two-week elements?

In the government and commercial world where training sessions equate to one- to five-day classroom sessions or one- to three-hour elearning page turners, should we look at more discreet methods of training sessions?

I could foresee one hour virtual presentations or brown-bag lunch roundtables if person-to-person training is required. And for elearning I would not venture beyond a half-hour and shoot for more like a maximum of 15 minutes. If elearning is running longer than that it has to be broken up. And maybe that is too long.

The big fear is the loss of continuity, if the broader picture is drawn out over a long period and presented in discreet elements. This is where educators would be forced out of their comfort zones and learn a new way of presenting their materials.

In the “info” age, everything gets a little shorter | Mercatus

Five Trends in Learning Delivery in 2011 - Chief Learning Officer, Solutions for Enterprise Productivity

Chief Learing Officer publishes Five Trends in Learning Delivery in 2011 - Chief Learning Officer, Solutions for Enterprise Productivity by Caroline Avey of ACS Learning Services. Of her five trends the ones I find most compelling are:

• The concept of developing systems for data mining.
• Her vision of beefing up learning management systems to include access to informal learning opportunities.

You’ll Stick With Your Crappy School, and You’ll Like It | The Agitator

Shakespeare could not have written a better tragedy. A mother trying to get a better education for her child uses the child's grandfathers address to send him to another school.

You’ll Stick With Your Crappy School, and You’ll Like It | The Agitator: "Williams-Bolar was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison earlier this month, although Judge Patricia Cosgrove suspended all but ten days of the sentence."

Is it fraud? Definitely, but like most crime its a gray area because the grandfather is paying school taxes and is otherwise not getting any direct benefit from his taxes. Because of an over-zealous prosecutor the mother not only has a criminal record, but is also facing the loss of a career because of that record. All because she wanted something better for her child.

The Student Loans Scheme: a Gateway Drug to Debt Slavery

The Student Loans Scheme: a Gateway Drug to Debt Slavery: "

Infographic by College Scholarships.org

"

So that's what it is...

I've never really wondered about why my stomach growls, at least not to the point where I went out to research it, but this entry from Indiana Public Media's Moment of Science explains a lot about what is going on when my stomach generates what Winnie the Pooh called a rumbly in my tumbly.

Rumbles From The Deep | A Moment of Science - Indiana Public Media

When the GI tract has finished digesting a meal, it continues to process the liquids and gasses remaining in the intestines. This process often causes your stomach to rumble when you’re hungry. Stomach growling is caused by intestinal contractions squeezing and popping intestinal gasses. Actually, stomach rumbles are simply flatulence that stays inside the body.

The same contractions that cause your stomach to growl also clean out the GI tract. To see how this cleaning movement works, picture a long hose made of a pliable material. If there were an object, say an egg, at one end of the hose, you could push it from that end to the other by squeezing all along the length of the hose.

hattip to Boing Boing

Final Reflections on the Campus Technology 2010 Conference

Today was only a half of a day, so, first of all no free lunch was served. Drats! As a result, as I start to write this I’m sitting in Boston’s South Station mezzanine eating Cajun fast food (go figure, I travel to Boston, the heart of Yankee sensibility – although I challenge you to tell a diehard Sox fan that) and I’m eating a quintessential southern meal of chicken, jambalaya rice, and corn.

On the other hand, the half day was packed with wonderful information, anecdotes, and demonstrations of how technology is changing the face of education that it was a perfect capstone for the whole four day event.

Most of this new technology resides in the cloud, which is what I think both awes and scares the corporate world. It requires a great deal of courage to expose yourself in this way and to play in the clouds requires forfeiture of a great deal of privacy. Of course there is also a great deal of courage needed to bet on any cloud application. I spoke with Jeff Riman, an instructional designer from FIT-SUNY after he and his teammates finished presenting how their school implements the use of social and collaborative media. I was curious about what the time it took for their faculty and students to get use to Videothread, their collaborative cloud app that allows audio and video multimedia to be seamlessly meshed with forum discussions.

Anyone familiar with forums knows that they are text heavy and requires a bit of scrolling to read long threads and intuitively figure out where branches occur. Adding audio and video makes it a great deal more interactive. He acknowledged that there is a level of risk in buying into cloud apps.

You don’t know if it is being run by one lone guy from his basement with his lone server sitting next to his furnace.

And that vision is what will inhibit the corporate world from proceeding down this avenue…at least for a short while longer. I suspect the corporate world will want to continue to figuratively whistle while walking by the graveyard until the voices force them to stop and listen. The voices will not only be that of learners passed who they failed in their adherence to the LMS universe, but also those of the learners present and future who have been exposed to the new collaborative learning world and will not be happy with stale classroom events measured in hours of seat time and page-turning elearning with its mandatory final assessment filled with multiple choice and true/false questions.

As I write this I see a young man sitting in front of me eating his lunch while checking his Facebook account using his Smartphone while down below me, standing next to a row of pay telephones is a young lady who is chatting away on her cell phone. Sitting at a table is a 30something professional lady studying her Smartphone, I can’t tell if she is reading email or texting. In fact as I scan the floor of South Station I see a host of mp3 players, Smartphones, laptop computers, and netbooks in use. These devices have become ubiquitous and to deny their applicability as learning devices is a mistake. And the people who are using them will most likely need to be exposed to our training, or more likely not.

But does this mean that every teacher, training facilitator and instructional designer needs to acquire a Facebook or Twitter presence and then send out friend requests or follow invitations to every learner they may interact with? No, in fact this is one message that rang throughout the conference; students do not want that form of engagement. Just as we want a wall between our work lives and our family lives, so students want a wall between their social lives and their academic lives. So to move forward educators of all stripes will want to become the learners once again and learn to use these new collaborative tools in a way that they can reach and engage their students.

It can be as simple as learning the details of how to manage these tools themselves. We actually got into a somewhat heated discussion about this in the middle session of the day when we discussed how educational professionals can use social media to develop themselves. In that session, the debate was about the ratio of noise to sound on Twitter feeds. One participant argued that a lot of what is posted on Twitter is narcissistic. “Why should I care where Clay Shirky is eating dinner?” the participant said. And he has a point a person can quickly get overrun trying to follow all of the twitter feeds they have, but as others pointed out there are means to filter out the noise either by limiting who you are following or using specific codes within messages so that the feeds are more direct.

The other method is to employ technology to bridge the divide just as Dr Grant Warner of Howard University demonstrated with the use of ConnectYard. This tool, and I’m sure others like it soon to come will serve as a courier to carry simple email or text messages from the faculty member and deliver it to the students’ Facebook or Twitter accounts or straight to their text messenger service.

Note that earlier I used the words “want to” and “can” instead of  “have to” or “need” or “must.” I almost used both of these words, but I fortunately caught myself. I nor anyone else that argues for the use of social and collaborative media should insist that others adopt their views and this is for two main reasons.

1. To insist on adaptation of your concept of learning crosses the line from educating and sponsoring new tools and applications for teaching to preaching and the creation of new dogma. Once a topic moves from education to holy writ it too become rigid and unwilling to change. As technology grows and improves the Facebooks and Twitters of today will become as archaic as the list servs and forums of the 1990s.
2. To continue to insist that the educators and the administration that pays their salaries while they continue to resist means you have adapted their approach of lecturing, which, ironically, is the system you wish to displace and your resistors are trying to preserve.

Of course privacy is also an issue. I am now writing onboard an Amtrak train hurtling south toward my home. The seat behind me is inhabited by a businessman, apparently a hedge fund salesperson. I got this information from overhearing him conducting business over his cell phone while we travel. I now know from listening to him (I couldn’t help it, he has a loud voice) that he is staying in a hotel on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston and I know his cell phone number which I will not give out here. All of this I gathered while listening to him call and leave messages with clients and prospects over his cell phone. Could I use this information to my advantage, I don’t know, but I bet a more unscrupulous, but tech savvy person could.

As we move into this brave new world we need to be mindful that we are giving out a lot of information we think should be private when we use these devices. If we are to integrate cloud apps with training we must be equally careful. The closing keynote speaker, Josh Baron of Marist College spoke of this and he thinks that in the near future there will be the capability to mash up collaborative apps with LMSs’ so that student personal and private information will be safe behind a firewall while the collaborative elements will reside in the clouds.

In the end I keep going back to day 1 and John Kuglin’s demonstration of how interactivity can be built into even a two-hour presentation. It’s not rocket science, but it does involve a certain familiarity with the technology. And that’s my goal to learn more about these social tools so that I can speak with greater authority regarding them.

Campus Technology – Day 4 – Part 3

The final act of the conference in which the closing keynote address in which Josh Baron, the director of academic technology and elearning at Marist College talks about The Ed Tech Journey and a Future Driven by Disruptive Change.

He began by defining what disruptive change is. He also encouraged people to tweet any comments and questions that he will respond to the next date.

He asked what was important about the dates of 4/28/03 and 4/3/08? – on 4/28/08 – Apple launched itTunes and on 4/3/08 it has become the largest music retailer in the US with 50 million customers.

So how will education look like in the future due to this change. He quickly looked at the past impact of digital revolution, which has been minimal. Data transfer speeds have expanded exponentially from the telegraph operator transmitted at 28 bits per second while the internet transfers at 48 billion bits per second.

Processing speeds and storage capacity  for computers have grown rapidly from the 1970s to the present.

In the classroom, he shows a picture of what he calls  the high-tech hall of the 1960s had two televisions.

In the 1996 high-tech lecture hall has an overhead projection system with a computer, a camcorder, VCR and television, but the teacher is still lecturing like in the 1960s.

So he asks why there is no disruption? He answers that we ae trying to just automate instruction, i.e. switch from transparencies to PowerPoint. There was some disruption from distance education and entry of for-profits. Currently 1 in 4 students take at least one online course per semester.

Present

Emerging technologies are in two buckets. The first is Open eduction trends:

1. Open course content – high quality university-level course materials are free to access, share, and remix without cost. Example MIT’s OpenCourseWare (OCW) project – 2000 courses online.
2. Open Access Journals – to make scholarly journals free to the public. Jorunals can be found at Directory of Open Access Journals. The material goes through the typical vetting process.
3. Open Textbooks – similar to open access journals – a leader is Connexions based at Rice University. Another example is a commercial ecosystem in Flat World Knowledge. Flat World Knowledge allows her to customize books for her needs (Ed Note: does this create a problem in which two students with two different teachers use the same Flat World Knowledge textbook, but have modified them. Can they have a fair debate over a topic if they have two different sources of information.
4. Open Instructional Software. Carnegie Mellon is spearheading. It focuses on cognitive learning and the software has embedded cognitive tutor to assist.

Future

His predictions for the future disruptions in education are:

• The cost of educational content dramatically reduced that will lead in the collapse of the traditional publishing industry.
• Also see trends toward “best of breed” content, materials will be constantly improved. This will allow faculty to focus on teaching, not content creation.
• It will empower “self-directed learners” and they will ask questions about the cost of their education.

Many people think we are heading into a post-LMS era with a focus instead on personal learning environment which is highly personal. But LMS will not go away because of privacy issues around grades and other personal data found on LMS. He thinks their will be a mashup of LMS and PLE.

Next he focused on electronic portfolios. They have been around almost as long as LMS, but it was not until 2003 that their use has started to take over. Growth drivers is the value of “reflection” in student-centered learning. Other drivers are Accountability (Spellings Commission), and a means to capture all facets of learning such as curricular, cocurricular, and extracurricular. Unfortunately there is no credentialing module to give credit or extracurricular work.

Final disruption is the Semantic Web in which the machine can interpret the data in your system. Wolfram Alpha is an early attempt to address this issue. This will allow learners to ask computers deeper questions and learn from their answers.

The disruptions are:

• Empowering of self-directed and informal learning
• Enable documenting and credentialing of outcomes from self-directed and informal learning
• Self-directed competes with higher education
• The internet becomes  a powerful learning tool for knowledge generation

He finished by envisioning what the future holds for education.

Learning will not be held hostage by large, professional educational organizations in which you pay for the right to education.