eLearning Technology

Expedia Service - Horrible - Don't Use Them

2008-07-16T06:19:00.001-07:00

The title really says it all, but here was my experience ...

I booked tickets for several one-way hops through different cities in a long week of travel on several airlines through Expedia. I needed to make a change to one of the legs and there's no way to do that online, so I called Expedia customer service. For a dual fee - both Expedia and the airline charge a fee for changing the ticket they changed the leg. What I didn't realize is that the customer disservice representative also change the other flights in my itinerary. She read the flight times over the phone very quickly to me (at the time I was wondering why she was bothering to mention the other flights) and I stopped her on the one that had changed and asked her what it was - and yes, she got that one right. The rest she changed from evening flights to early morning flights.

Unfortunately, I didn't catch that she had made that change until I was looking at what time my flight left in the morning of my second day - whoops - I missed the flight already. So I call Expedia. I'm on hold forever and then the rep tells me that, yes, they can see what happened, but that there's nothing they can do about it. I should talk to the airline. I asked repeatedly to talk to the supervisor or someone who would have authority to do something about this (note: the whole time I'm at a client site with them waiting for me to resolve this). The rep absolutely refused to put the supervisor on the phone. Literally refused. They kept refusing and saying there's nothing we can do until I was actually pretty mad and expressing that to the rep.

I finally asked, "So what you are telling me right now is 'screw you mr. customer' and 'you cannot speak to anyone else'." And he said, "Sorry for the situation."

Yikes! I'm still somewhat shocked.

Delta (the airline involved) did handle the situation at a cost of $150 per leg of the journey in order to yank the reservations back from Expedia.

By the way - total time - 90 minutes - 60 minutes with Expedia being put on hold while the rep talked to people. And 30 minutes with Delta waiting for them to answer and then to make changes. My client was understanding about the situation - but that made things uncomfortable to say the least.

From now on, it's go direct with the airline for me. And make sure I tell everyone that Expedia should absolutely, under no circumstances be paid anything. Go ahead and look up travel arrangements, but book direct.

I'm also struggling a bit to figure out what I can and should do here.

By the way - I'm not alone. I did a quick search for Expedia Service and found lots of examples - actually - I didn't see anything that indicates a good experience:

Expedia: Customer Service Shortcomings - Associated Content
Expedia Bad Customer Service

Links for 2008-07-15 [del.icio.us]

2008-07-16T00:00:00-05:00

Social learning theory

Free Textbooks

2008-07-14T05:43:00.000-07:00

Normally when a PR person approaches me with a story, I'm not all that interested, but this one struck me as a pretty interesting development, so I thought I'd put out the information with a bit of commentary.

Flat World Knowledge, a publisher of free and open college textbooks, today announced it will soon begin the nation’s largest in-classroom test of open college textbooks. The nationwide beta test of its books involves hundreds of students from 15 colleges and universities across the United States. Flat World Knowledge’s free and open textbooks will replace traditional textbooks in a single class or class section at each participating institution. The beta test begins this August and will run through the completion of the Fall 2008 semester.

Flat World Knowledge has built a business model around offering free textbooks to college students. Through their open platform, students will have access to complete textbooks free of charge, with the option to purchase affordable alternate formats of the content (i.e. print & audio versions of the text, podcast study guides, mobile phone flash cards, etc.).

Flat World Knowledge’s mission is to take the best characteristics of traditional textbook publishing - such as expert-written, peer-reviewed and professionally edited texts -- and then flip the old model on its head. Flat World’s books will be open for faculty to customize, and free to students online. Flat World and its authors earn compensation by offering affordable choices to students beyond the free online book, from printed textbooks for under $30 (printed-on-demand), to audio books for under $20, to downloadable and printable files by the chapter, and more. The company supplements its texts with low-priced study aids like DRM-free podcast study guides, digital flash cards, interactive practice quizzes, and more.

Free textbooks. Pretty cool. I wonder if they can make money with the alternative models. If you look at companies like Cramster that provide community and answers to text book problems - often oriented around particular college texts without the direct involvement of the publisher, then you have to believe that there will be communities around text books emerging and likely you can monetize off of that. Just not sure if it will be the publishers.

Eric Frank, Flat World Knowledge co-founder and chief marketing officer. “This new model of textbook publishing will result in increased choices and dramatically lower costs for students. It can enhance learning by giving instructors more control over content, and by leveraging the power of social learning networks around content. Between the oligopolistic practices of the big publishers on one end of the spectrum, and piracy on the other, lies a better solution – open textbooks.”

There's quite a few things in between - and there's also social text books. But this would seem to be a good approach for publishers to stay relevant in a Wiki world. It will be interesting to see what happens.

Links for 2008-07-12 [del.icio.us]

2008-07-13T00:00:00-05:00

Learning in the Webiverse: How Do You Grade a Conversation?

25 Million Hits Per Day

2008-07-10T11:15:00.001-07:00

Fortune Magazine interview with GE's CIO:

Does social networking have a role within General Electric?
We've gone out of our way to call it professional networking rather than social networking. We've been building a professional-networking capability that allows everybody to put in the organization directory the skills that they bring to bear. It's very searchable, so if someone is looking for a particular skill, they can go to that site. That gets about 25 million hits a day, so it really is becoming sort of a heartbeat of the company.

25 million hits a day - wow, that's quite a bit. Not sure what's included there, but wow!

Objections

2008-07-10T10:54:00.000-07:00

This post is intended to capture a few of the common objections that I hear at various sessions as well as ways that people suggest you overcome those objections. I will update this over time.

Kevin Jones recently went through and captured 15 Objections to Social Learning and some thoughts on responses to these objections:

There's another good post on a related topic - Ten Common Objections to Social Media and How to Respond - includes:

1. I suffer from information overload already.
2. So much of what's discussed online is meaningless. These forms of communication are shallow and make us dumber. We have real work to do!
3. I don't have the time to contribute and moderate, it looks like it takes a lot of time and energy.
4. Our customers don't use this stuff, the learning curve limits its usefulness to geeks.
7. Upper management won't support it/dedicate resources for it.
8. These startups can't offer meaningful security, they may not even be around in a year - I'll wait until Google or our enterprise software vendor starts offering this kind of functionality.
9. There are so many tools that are similar, I can't tell where to invest my time so I don't use any of it at all.

I would also look at establishing policies: Corporate Policies on Web 2.0

Good Questions Identify eLearning 2.0 Opportunities

2008-07-03T08:18:00.000-07:00

I'm a big fan of questions (see Better Questions for Learning Professionals) and as I'm preparing a workshop (Revolution in Workplace Learning) one of the things I stumbled upon is what seems to be a great new question:

Given that eLearning 2.0 (web 2.0, wikis, blogs, social networking, etc.) represents new ways of supporting learning and work ... as a learning professional, what are the new questions that I need to ask as part of analysis?

There must be new questions that we need to ask in order to figure out if and how eLearning 2.0 approaches apply to given performance improvement needs.

In this post, I want to focus on questions that will help identify if there are opportunities for using eLearning 2.0 approaches as part of your performance intervention.

I would very much like to hear your thoughts on this. Some of the questions that come to mind that I would use to:

Identify eLearning 2.0 Opportunities:

Content -

What content is already shared through other means? Ex. are lessons learned discussed, or work-arounds.
Is there information that can be created and shared coming from either a 3rd party (e.g., a help desk, experts, etc.) or from the audience itself?
What content gets updated more frequently?
What reference material is already being created that might be a target?

Audiences -

Who has the pain?
Who's going through an experience that they would want to share?
Who is able and active enough to use the tools to create content?
Does it align with their motivation or can it be aligned with their motivation?
Are there natural content creators that we could leverage?

•

So, what questions do you ask to identify eLearning 2.0 opportunities?

Learning Professionals Leaders

2008-07-02T12:05:00.000-07:00

On this month's Big Question - Lead the Charge - we are already seeing some interesting responses.

The Learning Revolution: Where have all the leaders gone?

It's difficult to not agree with everything that's in Tony's post an my short answer would be: yes they should, and the good ones already are.

So, of course, I say, great post. :) There are some interesting thoughts in the post, but also

Most learning professionals can only do so much. There's a vacuum of leadership in the adoption of enterprise/web/learning 2.0 tools from learning professionals in senior positions and too many barriers put up by over-zealous HR and IT departments. Over 50% or organisations in the UK are still on Internet Explorer 6 and I've come across some that restrict javascript and all cookie. This makes using something like google docs or pbwiki as an experiment somewhat difficult for the poor, lonely learning professional.

I'm not sure I buy this. Is it okay for a learning professional to be unaware at this point of social media and its impact on learning and work? I can understand barriers to being able to put it into practice (and there are many barriers), but not barriers to being aware. My experience at ASTD recently was that most people were completely unaware of all of this. They have their head in the sand.

Harold Jarche in Skills 2.0:

Today, active involvement in informal learning, particularly through web-based communities, is key to remaining professional and creative in a field. Being a learning professional in a Web 2.0 world is becoming more about your network than your current knowledge.

Gina Minks: Adventures in Corporate Education What Competencies do Knowledge Workers Need?

How can you design with these new tools if you don’t understand them? How can you apply them to your existing systematic learning system if you don’t know what the heck wiki even means? So, yes, learning professionals must learn and use these tools, and then apply the tools to there existing framework.

She lists the tools and what you should know as:

Wikis: How to edit, how to read, how to link to
RSS Feeds: What are they, how do I read one, once I have a reader set up how do I scan info collecetd, how do I share info using one
Blogs: How do I write one. Why SHOULD I write one. How do I evaluate info from one. How do I scan, collect keywords, and rescan to crystallize ideas and information?
Information Creation tools: Exps: Youtube, SlideShare, Flickr. How do I use. Why/When do I use.
Tagging: What is this? Why is it important? How do I use with content I create? How do I use to search for info I need?

Great stuff Gina. And there are some good comments in her post including:

A lot of “us” learned these technologies organically, as we needed to. Trying to come up with ways to teach people them all at once is going to be challenging.

If you can come up with ways to show the results of the tools, that people who are attracted to the technology will find ways to learn the tools. Nobody cared about wikis until wikipedia came along. Nobody cared about RSS readers until information overload made them a necessity.

I think the thing we have to be careful of is teaching the tools outside of the benefits.

Clark Quinn - Learnlets: Lead the Charge? talks about how learning organizations must transition from

the perspective from a training group being an expendable cost-center to a learning capability that’s central to organizational effectiveness and performance.

Video Ratings

2008-07-02T11:04:00.000-07:00

I received a question today and thought I'd ask blog readers if they can help with answers. The question comes from a blog reader who captures a lot of different videos within their organization. They have "over a couple of thousand of video and audio clips that new hires and tenured employees are currently using for on-boarding and training."

What they want to do is to help employees better access the video content. They've seen viddler which allows people to tag specific sections within the video. They are interested in that capability, but also in rating the videos, and especially rating portions of the videos.

That makes me wonder ...

To me it seems that having video rating and/or video tagging for the video as a whole would make sense, but I'm not convinced that it makes sense for portions of the video. Do you think it makes sense to rate / tag specific sections of video? Will it distract learners?

What tools or solutions would you recommend they consider as part of their solution?

Any other thoughts on video ratings or video tagging?

Links for 2008-07-01 [del.icio.us]

2008-07-02T00:00:00-05:00

12 kinds of Knowledge Workers

Free Flash Quiz Tools?

2008-06-30T09:24:00.000-07:00

I received a question on my post - Flash Quiz Tools - asking about any tools that were free that allowed you to create a Flash Quiz. The only free Flash Quiz Tool that I know anything about is

Class Marker - a free flash quiz tool. Create multiple choice, true false, free text, short answer, fill in the blank and punctuation quizzes.

So I added this back into my post, but it got me wondering if there aren't a lot of other solutions out there that I don't know about. Certainly you could do this as poll questions. So are there other free flash quiz tools that I'm missing?

Firewall Problems and Solutions

2008-06-27T06:31:00.000-07:00

I would love to hear back from people on this as I received a question around firewall problems and solutions that I've not heard as much in the past couple of years. This blog reader provides eLearning content to a variety of customers from their hosted solution. Their solution uses a variety of technologies including: .wma files, JavaScript, Flash, HTML and downloadable PPT.

Their issue is that they are running into customers who are tightening their firewall settings and it causes some of their content to not work.

My sense is that the days when IT was doing things like stripping JavaScript, disallowing Flash, etc. are gone. So my first question is ...

Are you finding issues with firewalls these days? If so, what are you seeing?

Anyone having issues with Windows Media and firewalls? How about other media playback?

I couldn't tell from the message, but it could be the case that they are using some kind of custom player. My sense is that using a custom Player is still a really bad idea in most cases. Creating a Flash shell or a JavaScript based shell is fine. Anything else, especially ActiveX or Java is likely going to be a big problem. Even if you try to do everything over port 80, it's still an issue to get something down and run. But that's my bias. So my second question is ...

Are people still using custom players in anything other than Flash? If so, how do they avoid problems with firewalls and other security systems designed to strip out potentially malicious code? Do Flash players cause any problems with firewalls?

Finally, the reader asked about requesting clients to change their firewall settings. My experience is "good luck." There have been a couple of occasions when we could get changes made to the firewall. But unless you have a lot of influence, you should not be creating solutions that generally require changes. Thus, stick with standard ports, protocols, file formats, etc. Does anyone disagree?

What about getting changes made to firewall settings?

Links for 2008-06-26 [del.icio.us]

2008-06-27T00:00:00-05:00

Chatzy - Create your own private chat rooms
It's Not What You Know, It's Who You Know: Work in the Information Age
discuss the emergence of personal social networks as the main form of social organization in the workplace. A dazzling new battery of communication technologies enables workers to connect to diverse, far-flung social networks.

Workshop Scenario - Help Please

2008-06-26T09:41:00.000-07:00

I've posted Work Task - Workshop Exercise and would very much appreciate any thoughts, input, help you can give.

Instruction eLearning 2.0 and Quality

2008-06-25T09:56:00.000-07:00

On my post Quick Wins, I received some questions around use of Web 2.0 in the workplace (really they relate to eLearning 2.0). My quick example of one strategy that I've seen repeated successfully in several organizations:

implement a small Wiki that has performance support materials that goes along with your eLearning on that new software application
at first have it only editable by the authors
then open it up to edit the FAQ and Common Issue pages by your help desk
and then open up editing to end-users
and to more pages.

The comments are interesting to see and discuss:

Can anyone tell me where QUALITY comes into play with these collaborative enterprise 2.0 technologies? Or does anyone even care about that anymore?

Later they say:

Invariably, quality will mean very different things to different elearning providers. Also, different needs will necessitate different solutions.

My quality concerns: Is it instructionally sound? What about the user experience? Above all, what are the learning outcomes? At what point do lowered standards become the standard?

This is partly the same instruction vs. support question we've had all along? If we provide information in the form of performance support, reference material, etc., then how do you know if the instruction was successful? The answer has always been:

Is the person able to perform?

Force marching someone through something that is high quality "instruction" - something deemed to be instructionally sound - doesn't make it any better and could be far worse since they probably won't actually go through it, will forget, etc. This will be highly variable on a case-by-case basis and really on a learner/performer basis. This hasn't changed. But our desire to move stuff to performance support has definitely increased and is more and more often the appropriate approach.

What has changed in my example is that the learner / performer or people who support the performance (e.g., the help desk) are able to change content in the support materials.

I'm not sure, but it seems that the commenter is making an assumption that this lowers quality. It theoretically could. Someone could add total garbage. But what's their incentive to do that. This is certainly something being discussed with revenge of the experts being pitted against the wisdom of crowds. I personally look at it in each case and consider what quality issues we are really talking about. Is it contributions by end-users that may be wrong? Do you have people monitoring? Maybe that gives us a great opportunity to intercept information that otherwise is being transmitted today in channels that aren't monitored. To me, it's often better to have it visible and discussed. In fact, I would claim that

Worries over quality is not something that should hold you back.

What really got me to post about this is the last question - "lowered standards" ... What? How does this equate to lower standards? The person who left the comment is expressing something I hear a lot at presentations and in client organizations. It's not at all the reality that goes along with most eLearning 2.0 implementations.

If you are going to worry about something, worry about lack of participation. Worry about lack of skills. The quality issue is a lot of hot air.

Links for 2008-06-24 [del.icio.us]

2008-06-25T00:00:00-05:00

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media: Effective Online Networking: Nurturing Relationships
use Web 2.0 tools and other ICTs to effectively develop and advance their work. Participants are learning how to use these tools to initiate and manage projects; as well as identify networking opportunities with others.
» Some Thoughts About Effective Networking Online The Networking for Success Project: A W.TEC project, teaching Nigerian women to use Web 2.0 tools and other ICTs effectively to develop and advance their work.

Links for 2008-06-23 [del.icio.us]

2008-06-24T00:00:00-05:00

Knowledge work as craft work
Knowledge work takes us back to a world of craft work practices. The "symbolic analysis" that Robert Reich identifies as the essence of knowledge work is designed to create the one-of-a-kind results that characterize craft products.
Micro Persuasion: Turn Gmail Into Your Personal Nerve Center

Quick Wins

2008-06-23T12:00:00.000-07:00

Just saw a post by Mark Oehlert - Danger of Quick Wins. I had to post because, I think that Mark missed the mark (sorry couldn't resist). Here's the gist of his thinking:

As I become more and more convinced that implementing next-gen/Web 2.0 is soooo much less about technology than about culture (Duh Mark, I know)...
I think the idea of 'quick wins' can be not only distracting but wasteful. I think that often 'quick wins' are used to cover up the lack of an over-arching strategy against which actions can be measured and be found either to support an long-range plan or not to support it or to support it in some measure. That strategy is the long pole in the tent - it is the metric that we can measure our actions against.

So 'quick wins' are fine as long as they take place within the context of a long-range plan and are executed in such a manner as to continue progress toward that vision.

I agree with Mark that there are fairly sizable organizational culture aspects to enterprise adoption of enterprise 2.0 / web 2.0 / eLearning 2.0. And I think it's easy to underestimate that impact. I think Mark missed the bigger barriers of Changing Knowledge Worker Attitudes and the work literacy gap.

But what forced me to write this post is that I couldn't disagree more about whether to do Quick Wins. His suggestion to hold up on implementing quick wins until we can figure out all the big picture strategy, OD, etc. answers is bad advice.

My suggested strategy is almost completely opposite. I think you should go ahead and:

implement a small Wiki that has performance support materials that goes along with your eLearning on that new software application
at first have it only editable by the authors
then open it up to edit the FAQ and Common Issue pages by your help desk
and then open up editing to end-users
and to more pages.

How does this fit into the grand strategy? You don't know? Who cares? It's the right thing to do! I'd argue that it's a good quick-win.

And, when you look at adoption patterns - a lot of what makes adoption of Web 2.0 tools likely is that they are easy to adopt and have immediate value for the individual and work group. They are designed for quick wins.

Mark - there's a reason that Andrew McAfee talks about these things being emergent (Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration) - quick-wins are going to be how this is adopted.

Links for 2008-06-21 [del.icio.us]

2008-06-22T00:00:00-05:00

No Straight Lines / A conversation on the nature of knowledge work
Discuss various arguments on why the term knowledge worker is outdated.
Ten Ways to Turbocharge Your E-Mails
Here are ten things you can do today to begin refining the way you communicate in email.

PowerPoint to Teach Composition

2008-06-18T18:20:00.000-07:00

Rachel just posted a question via a comment on the post Background Reading - Use of PowerPoint:

I need help with a Powerpoint possible use. I teach freshman composition at a university to non-native speakers of English. They often come to me for extra help in their other classes. However, they ALWAYS need help creating PowerPoint presentations for their other classes of subjects such as economics, nutrition, statistics, travel & Tourism...etc. I spend time teaching and explaining "transitions", custom animations"...etc. I thought, as I am helping them so much, is there any information as to using Powerpoint as an actual tool to teach composition writing? It would be great to impart knowledge just in the structure of a composition....any thoughts or resources out there? Thanks

I always say, I love questions. However, I'm a bit at a loss on how to answer this question.

It seems wrong to be teaching about transitions and custom animations to this audience, right?

I don't know much about using PowerPoint as a tool to teach composition.

Any help for Rachel?

Workshop Exercise Design - Help Needed

2008-06-18T08:35:00.001-07:00

I've just posted Identify Knowledge Work Tasks - Workshop Exercise which describes a workshop exercise that I'm considering using in several different workshops. I feel like it makes a lot of the discussion more concrete.

I'm really hoping that folks will help me out by:

a. telling me what they would say if they were in the workshop and
b. giving me thoughts on the exercise itself.

The last time I posted something like this it was a HUGE help and I significantly redesigned the exercise which probably saved me a lot of grief. See comments in Conference Session Breakout - which convinced me not to do it as a breakout activity. Actually, I probably never will do session breakouts unless there's a REALLY compelling reason... but I digress.

Please help: Identify Knowledge Work Tasks - Workshop Exercise

What are the Odds?

2008-06-16T14:59:00.000-07:00

At lunch today, I had a funny experience that I just had to share. The person I met for lunch (a CEO at a client company) today is his birthday. And, it's my birthday. And it's today.

So, if I'm right, then it's a 1 in 365.25 chance that we share a birthday. And maybe a 20 in 365.25 chance that it would be on our birthdays that we get together. So, that's roughly a:

1 in 6,700 chance

and even the chance of that happening in a lifetime is pretty remote.

It just struck me as a pretty cool occurrence.

The only disappointing part is that when we told the waitress that it was both our birthdays, she seemed completely unimpressed. (But she did give us each free dessert.)

Revolution in Workplace Learning

2008-06-16T14:50:00.000-07:00

Just wanted to announce that I'll be doing a full-day workshop in Cincinnati (actually in nearby Kentucky) for the Greater Cincinnati ASTD on July 15. I think this is going to be an interesting and fun workshop. I'm hoping that a few folks who read this blog will go.

You can go to their site: http://gcastd.org to find out more about specific place, time, cost, etc.

Likely I (and others in Work Literacy) will be doing similar workshops over the next few months. If you are interested, but can't attend this workshop, then you might want to go to Work Literacy and go to Services to state your interest.

Hope to see some of you there. If you are going, please drop a comment.

The workshop description is:

A Revolution in Workplace Learning

Tools such as blogs, wikis, social networks, social bookmarking, and RSS readers are revolutionizing formal and informal workplace learning.

GCASTD is bringing nationally-known expert Dr. Tony Karrer to Greater Cincinnati to present a fun, engaging, fast-paced workshop that will allow you to use these "eLearning 2.0" methods and tools for yourself and your organization.

You will:

Learn specific methods you can use to accelerate your own knowledge work and learning
Define strategies for eLearning 2.0 for your organization
Make a plan for getting an eLearning 2.0 toolset for yourself and your organization

Leaders responsible for organizational learning and development
Individuals seeking to improve their own skill and knowledge

Dr. Tony Karrer is CEO/CTO of TechEmpower, a software, web and eLearning development firm based in Los Angeles. A expert on using technology to improve human performance, he is a sought-after presenter on eLearning 2.0 and it’s implications on workplace learning. He is author of the award-winning eLearning Technology blog.

Dr. Karrer earned both his M.S. and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of South California. He attended USC as a Tau Beta Fellow, awarded to the top 30 engineers in the United States, and was valedictorian for his class.

Clients include: Credit Suisse, Citibank, Lexus, Microsoft, Nissan, Universal, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Sun, Symbol Technologies and many others.

Second Life Learning Videos

2008-06-16T06:04:00.000-07:00

If you want to get a sense of what Second Life is like and particularly what it is like as part of learning, here are some videos that help describe this.

| View | Upload your own

What videos did I miss?

Knowledge Worker Take Ownership

2008-06-13T12:22:00.000-07:00

Must read post by Michele Martin - Changing Knowledge Worker Attitudes. I had chills as I read it.

I believe that we have to start with making people conscious of the fact that they own the most precious resource in just about any organization today–the power of their ideas, social connections and thought processes.

That's it - knowledge workers must take ownership. And it's the responsibility of learning professionals to lead that charge. Join this discussion on Work Literacy.

Skimming Strategy

2008-06-11T05:11:00.000-07:00

Fantastic article by Nicholas Carr in Atlantic Monthly - Is Google Making Us Stupid? What the Internet is doing to our brains.

I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

I know what he's talking about. In the past, I've discussed this as Stop Reading - Skim Dive Skim. He cites a recent study by University College London that looked at behavior of visitors to two research sites. Carr states:

They found that people using the sites exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited. They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would “bounce” out to another site. Sometimes they’d save a long article, but there’s no evidence that they ever went back and actually read it.

The authors of the study report:

It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.

While Carr expresses concern about the impact that this has, I'm not quite so sure. Yes, we need opportunities to reflect, but for me that's blogging. I'm reflecting on his article as I write. But, indeed, I skimmed through passages.

Virtual Language Immersion

2008-06-10T11:30:00.000-07:00

Great post by Karl Kapp -Immerse Yourself in Another Language. As someone who's always felt that immersion is the best way (possibly the only way) to really learn languages. While I like the new tutoring systems such as EduFire, the idea of putting someone in a virtual environment to learn the language is fantastic.

I've mentioned before that I also think Second Life as a Learning Tool can be fantastic if you set up an environment like Plymoth Plantation - a recreation of Plymouth where actors playing the part of Native Americans and Colonists told stories and answered questions about life, religion, history, etc. It was a fantastic learning experience where you learned things in such a great way. And there were quite a few surprises, that I didn't remember ever hearing in all my different history classes. (We have a rather idealistic view of the colonists.)

I came home from the trip thinking that the California Missions should really do something similar. I've had to take my kids to a Mission several times as part of their school work and it's frankly boring to walk around reading as compared to the experience at the Plantation. Maybe one of the tribes that has casinos could sponsor putting this together?

This is good timing given the LCB Big Question is: Second Life Training.

Social Media and Experimental Innovation

2008-06-09T06:07:00.000-07:00

Interesting post by Clark Quinn - Innovating by Conversation - where he refers to the idea of the Experimental Innovator - an innovator who iterates through lots of ideas before arriving at something that works. Clark tells us ...

Surowiecki’s Wisdom of the Crowds, Tapscott’s Wikinomics, and Libert & Spector’s We Are Smarter Than Me, are telling us to tap into the wisdom of crowds, and with lots of examples of how creating conversations with folks can spark new insights.

The thought this sparks is that experimental innovation can be accelerated through broader conversations. This is interesting. Much of Gladwell's discussion of experimental innovation discussed innovation occurring over very long periods of time (10 years). But one of the promises of social media is that we can arrive at innovation more quickly and test it more quickly.

In many ways, this is exactly how we are approaching Work Literacy. It's a big, hard problem. Get lot's of people together to foster discussion, innovation, experimentation.

Learning Organizations, eLearning 2.0 and Edupunk

2008-06-07T10:08:00.000-07:00

Janet Clarey wrote an interesting blog post in response to the relatively recent edupunk meme which is basically an ideology that DIY learning and repurposing content is the way to go (and somewhat the ONLY way to go). Janet juxtaposes the recent inclusion of eLearning 2.0 type tools in Learning Management Systems against the philosophy that corporate and commercial is evil of the edupunkers. The questions she raises are:

Is the edupunk ideology saying that the use of social media in commercial learning management systems is an assault on the very philosophy of learning 2.0?

Ideologies shouldn’t be rigid should they? Rather they should be adapted and used in pragmatic ways don’t you think? If you’re a trainer embracing learning 2.0, who gives a rats ass where it lives.

These are fair questions that are also central to the issues of the Enterprise 2.0 Adoption. Corporate IT is interested in rolling out systems that they can control for security, auditing, back-up and a host of other control reasons. This is counter to the very being of a person like Stephen Downes. They would argue that the individual chooses what makes sense in their personal work and learning environment.

As a trainer, you are going to get stuck in the middle of this. If you have a population of learners who have already adopted tools (such as blogging and social bookmarking) for themselves that are different than the corporate tool (the LMS) do you ask them to move? It will depend on the content, but it certainly won't be good for the learner. If your population has not adopted a tool yet, do you have a responsibility to the individual to show them tools that can live beyond their engagement at the company? Do you show them the internal blogging tool only?

The answers are going to depend on the particular situation, but in a few cases I think the answers are fairly well known.

For Wiki-like capabilities, it likely is fine for an LMS to provide these and for learning organizations to use them. Most knowledge workers are used to thinking about that type of content being created for internal use only. It makes sense in many of these cases to keep it inside the firewall. So no problem if their Wiki is tied to the LMS. Just don't make me login to get to it. Allow it to be easily searched. Etc.

But I would claim that if you are talking about blogging as an ongoing learning and networking tool, then you are doing a disservice to learners if you show them only internal tools bundled with the LMS or any tool that is locked inside the walls of the corporation.

These are going to be real challenges for learning organizations and trainers moving forward.

Hopefully, we'll begin to see ways to allow a better handling of inside and outside the firewall solutions. For example, having social bookmarking that allows links to be kept private to a group. Interestingly when Yahoo create MyWeb as a competitor to del.icio.us before acquiring del.icious - they had features that did this. I'm expecting them at some point to put this into del.icio.us so that you can control visibility of bookmarks.

Final thought - I would claim that a bad reaction to this debate is to do nothing because we aren't sure. We need to be building work literacy. This will benefit the corporation and the individual.

Topic Diversity

2008-06-07T06:52:00.000-07:00

Through the post on Conference Balance an in thinking about the keynotes at ASTD that I attended (ASTD Keynote - Malcolm Gladwell, Dysfunctional Teams), I realized that one of the reasons that I like going to conferences is it forces me (sometimes slowly and painfully) to get exposed to a diversity of topics. Through my PWLE methods (reading blogs, etc.) I would not have run across the concepts in Dysfunctional Teams. This was a good topic to go through and think about - and to have captured in my blog.

But, if I'm suggesting that conferences should head towards participation and F2F because more people are going to effectively get information through their PWLEs, then am I going to miss good topics like that talk. The closest equivalent are things like TED videos (which are always short and to the point). But more recently those videos have become more and more theoretical. I ran across a video on the topic of making a good presentation that was great. But, I still have this nagging worry that I would miss out if you didn't have keynotes on random, related topics.

Am I just being an Infovore and shouldn't worry about it?

Should I be seeking new information sources that will bring in random but related topics?

Where do you get this kind of information? How do you know to get it?

tag: workliteracy

Conference Balance

2008-06-06T06:32:00.000-07:00

Just read a great post by Clive Shepherd - Cutting the Pie - where he discusses what the appropriate balance is at conferences. As you know creating Better Conferences is something that very much interests me. Check out that post, the poll results and the discussion for lots of ideas on how to make conferences better. But Clive's major point is that at today's conferences the mix is:

His definitions are:

ideas - presentations from gurus, experts and thought leaders, primarily abstract in nature.
examples - case studies from users, sharing successes and lessons learned.
participation - opportunities for attendees to interact with each other to explore the ideas, share their own experiences and make contacts that can take follow-up after the event.

He'd like to see a balance:

This is interesting timing for me having just returned from the ASTD Conference. That conference was certainly the old model - mostly ideas and examples. Very little participation. But in fairness to ASTD - it seems like it's hard to get participation when 70% of attendees are relatively new to the industry and are first time attendees.

I personally tried (a little) to create my own participation ahead of the event through getting together at conferences. But I wasn't very successful.

I've always highly encourage participation, but my general sense is that people aren't really that interested in doing the Conference Preparation that might be required to Be an Insanely Great Professional Conference Attendee or using Social Conference Tools

So while I agree, my basic question:

When can you get effective participation at conferences?

It seems like the eLearningGuild is doing a better job at this recently. There were morning discussion groups last time that I thought were great. They are starting to do more with online tools. I think that conferences really need to adopt a mentality of having unconferences within a conference structure to allow for participation of all kinds intermixed with ideas and examples.

I'd be curious to hear thoughts on this as I always struggle with whether going to a conference is worth the investment of time.

ASTD Handouts

2008-06-03T14:45:00.000-07:00

Lance Dublin mentioned a couple of handouts today from sessions I was not able to attend. It took me a little while to find this link to the ASTD 2008 Session Handouts. My session (yesterday) can be found: M313 - E-Learning 2.0 for Personal and Group Learning (PDF).