Leading by Example

The Big Question

The Learning Circuits Big Question this month is about learning professionals, leadership, and literacies. Tony breaks it down as several questions, but the Learning Revolutionary summed all the questions up nicely:

Should learning professionals be leading the charge around new work literacies such as social media and informal learning?

Because I’m outside the corporate world, I’m going to look at this from the perspective of 21st century literacy skills rather than “work literacy.” Granted, I think there’s a lot of overlap between the work literacy ideas and the Framework for 21st Century Skills. I see this as similar goals but different contexts.

Let’s start with the idea that K-12 students should be supported in learning 21st century literacy skills. This should not be a controversial starting point; after all, 80% of American voters agree that the skills students need now aren’t the same as the skills needed in the past.

If students need to learn these skills, then their teachers need to have them too, right? Granted, some students will learn the skills outside the system, in spite of whatever the schools teach. But we’re looking at what we want to happen, and I want these skills to be supported by the schools. That means teachers need to have the skills. They have to be able to model the skills for students.

Where will the teachers learn the skills? I don’t think there’s a single answer here: professional learning communities, workshops, conferences, university courses, and mentoring all play a part. Since I work in the higher ed realm though, that’s where I’m going to focus. I think our instructors should have 21st century skills. These are the people who are teaching the teachers, who pride themselves on being the “best of the best” in the field of education. They’re the next group of people who need the skills.

But where are they going to learn? From me and the other people on our team. We have to lead by example for these skills. Our team is leading the charge, and we are making progress. It isn’t nearly as fast as I’d like, but when I look at how far we’ve come in our little corner of the world, it does give me hope.

I want the K-12 students to learn those 21st century skills, but I don’t have access to them directly. Therefore, my responsibility is to work on my own sphere of influence, starting with our online course development team leading by example for our facilitators. When the facilitators have strong 21st century skills, they’ll pass those skills on to the teachers, who in turn will be leaders for their students. If I want others to lead in these skills, I have to do my part to lead by example too. It would be hypocritical to ask them to teach technology skills without practicing what I preach (that is, after all, why I started this blog in the first place).

If I had to focus on one single skill, it would be lifelong learning. Perhaps this isn’t a skill so much as an attitude. It drives me crazy to see educators who think they’ve learned all they need to learn and aren’t willing to even try to learn anything new anymore. Cultivating a culture of learning, where people expect and enjoy continuous learning, is the underlying solution for everything else. We’re never going to get teachers to use technology if they’re determined they don’t need to learn anything anymore. Until they accept their role as learner as well as teacher, we won’t get the changes to happen. Creating a culture that supports lifelong learning needs to start with the professionals who lead by example.

If you had to focus on one skill for this leading by example, what would it be? What’s the underlying skill that supports all the rest, the one where you will concentrate your efforts first?

Technorati Tags: workliteracy, learning+circuits, leadership, changemanagement

Wikis for Improving Productivity

I’m liveblogging the webinar Growing in a Down Market with PBwiki. My comments are in italics.

Presenter: Teo Mayes, CTO RMC Vanguard

They used UStream for the audio, in addition to the typical phone line. I know I’m a little late to the party, but this is actually the first time I’ve used UStream. So far, so good!

RMC Vanguard is a mortgage company–able to do major increases in their business even with the economy not good for mortgage companies right now. Significant increases in productivity with a wiki.

The productivity increases are really what interests me in this webinar. We use the wiki for our team, but I wonder what we can do to be more effective with it, as well as how we can help other departments in the company.

Templates

Use templates on the wiki to make it easier to structure pages so people can be familiar with it. Without some structure, it’s harder for people to contribute.

Created a specific template structure for contact info

Search: Search function is really important–used heavily

Document Repository: Use wiki to hold templates and documents. Used color coding to show current/prior versions of documents

Security: They have passwords visible on the wiki, but that’s OK b/c the security of the wiki is OK–must log in to view the confidential content.

Getting People to Use the Wiki

They used to keep contact info for vendors in Outlook, but had problems keeping consistent across multiple contact cards. Then used spreadsheet on a central server, but people working from home couldn’t access it. Wiki solves the problem of creating one central location with easy access.

Problem: Industry has high turnover rate, plus experienced loan officers don’t want to take time to mentor newbies b/c they work on commission only.

Solution:

• Detailed how to pages for common problems (like accessing outlook from home)
• FAQ–constantly growing–lets people work rather than answering the same questions all the time

Productivity

How do you quantify this? Hard to tell–how do you determine time saved by questions going to the FAQ instead of answering by a person? How do you quantify value of people having accurate and current information rather than just what you hear from another person? Helps keep current information b/c things change so fast.

Improves customer service b/c people have the right information–you aren’t working on a mortgage and discover halfway through that the rules have changed. Clients say the process is very smooth; he attributes this to the technology.

Won national BBB award for excellence

Questions & Answers

Q: How do you feel about this critical company intellectual property being hosted by someone else?
A: They did a lot of research. No information about clients like SSN stored on the wiki. Security levels of PBwiki are sufficient for the financial industry.

Q: Who helped you set it up?
A: Change is hard in organizations; it took time for it to meet everyone’s needs. He took several months by himself to create a basic structure, but he would recommend having a team plan the initial structure. Because basic structure was there already, people were more likely to add and update; they wouldn’t have done this with blank pages and no templates.

Q: Was there support at the executive level?
A: Yes, there was. They already have people working virtually, so this was an easy sell. It has already paid for itself in increased productivity in less than a year.

Q: Did you have a wiki before?
A: No, they just used central file sharing. He had never done anything with a wiki before. This is a good case study of a leader trying something new for him too.

Q: Do you backup the wiki? Do you have version tracking for revisions?
A: PBwiki has revision tracking built in; they don’t do any other backups on their own. PBwiki does backups on 3 servers plus offsite backups, so businesses don’t need to do it. OK, this is a sales pitch, but it’s an important question. You can download a zip file to your own servers if you want, but they don’t feel it’s necessary.

Q: Do your employees pay to use the wiki, or does the company cover the cost?
A: Company covers it That would be required to get people to use it

Q: How big is the wiki? Any technical issues related to size?
A: 350 pages, no technical issues. They’ve made feature requests but no problems.

Q: How do you handle administration?
A: Company restraint keeps it from being a free-for-all. Changes are documented so you can see who made it, so people never make inappropriate comments. He monitors all changes so he can revert if there’s an issue.

Q: Set up?
A: Search feature takes care of a lot of organization–you don’t need as tight a structure when search is so good. Provide links for most used pages. Folder structure helps for security; different departments have different access. Otherwise they don’t force much structure.

Q: When first implementing, did any early adopters resist it? How do you deal?
A: Yes, there’s always people who resist change.

1. Made sure that the information they needed on a day-to-day basis was already on the wiki before giving access.
2. Provided training
3. Removed info from old location after a short grace period–forced to use the wiki

Q: How much training did users need?
A: Minimal training. Small groups, no more than 10 people at a time to manage questions. 10-15 minute sessions: showed email invite, how to log in, home page, navigation & search, edit, create page. Creating pages wasn’t emphasized in early training; has done more training later as needed.

Q: I have administrators who don’t like to get the constant updates via email. Do you by chance send a digest notice of changes out to folks who don’t want the constant notices?
A: Yes, PBwiki has options for individual users to set preferences for notifications

Q: Fee structure for PBwiki
A: For business, $8/user/month. Read-only users are 80 cents/month though.

Q: Does Teo maintain the wiki by himself?
A: It really isn’t a highly maintained wiki; he doesn’t need to go in to check it regularly. He watches the notifications. Operations manager goes in each day to update info needed by multiple people, but it takes 30 seconds. Big collaborative effort to maintain it; it’s not necessary for him to do it by himself.

Q: What advantage do you see to this environment rather than a structured document management?
A: He had an idea of what he wanted to do. PBwiki was easy, especially for accessibility for multiple people to help keep it updated. Also likes using widgets; they have pictures from company events hosted on Bubble but viewable through the wiki.

Q: How did you set up the template page?
A: PBwiki provides some base structure. They customized and saved their own templates. Document repository is one example

Someone in the audience commented that in their small business, they have banned email attachments since implementing a wiki. Someone else noted that email volume is down 30% with the wiki

Q: Why PBwiki and not a free wiki?
A: Security levels are necessary for their industry. Backups also important. PBwiki was also responsive as a vendor.

Q: How did you make PBwiki known to your partners?
A: At this point, it’s just internal, not shared with vendors.

Q: Do you look at metrics for activity on the wiki?
A: Right now, just a page counter on the home page. Not something that is tracked much now. B/c it’s an information source, they don’t need to require people to use the wiki–they may not have any questions. The culture has changed so when people are asked questions, the response is “Have you checked the wiki?” Internally reinforces use of wiki informally.

Q: Can you upload videos & audio?
A: They do photos. Other multimedia is possible, but they aren’t really using that yet. Drawback for video presentations is time limit of video on YouTube. Suggestion was to use Blip.tv instead.

Q: Do you see this as a knowledge management tool? Did you set out to use it for that?
A: That wasn’t exactly the main problem they were trying to solve when they started, but it has turned out that way. Most important was single location that could be accessed by remote loan officers; it met that need and grew.

Q: Have you posted a code of conduct for the wiki?
A: No, they haven’t had a need. It’s a tight-knit company, about 100 employees. As they continue to grow, they may need to.

Q: What is the number one feature that has helped you in this down market?
A: Down market has pushed them to do this; better to make changes like this during a slow time. Key thing is being able to access up-to-date, specific information for each loan scenario even though it changes on a daily basis. Being able to find out guideline changes for loans. Needs to be fast enough to do the research while you’re on the phone with a client so they can answer customer questions immediately.

Technorati Tags: PBwiki, productivity, changemanagement

Social Media in Plain English

The folks at Common Craft have another great video, this time about social media. What I especially like about this one is that it doesn’t talk about technology until near the end. The video focuses on the metaphor of ice cream: it can be mass-produced in a factory that focuses only on flavors with mass appeal, or individuals can create their own flavors at home. This really is about the change in the business & media environment at a high level rather than the specifics of how to use any one technology.

This makes me think about ways I can use metaphor and narrative in the courses I develop, or maybe for facilitator training. We’ve run into resistance from some instructors against using blogs, wikis, and chat, even when they’re integrated within the LMS (removing the “I don’t want to create another log in” argument). A number of our facilitators don’t see why we’d bother with all these new-fangled tools when they can just use the discussion forums for everything. I wonder if an explanation with more of a story, like this video, would be more effective.

Technorati Tags: Common+Craft, social+media, web20, changemanagement

TCC08 Keynote: Why Do We Need A Second Life?

Presenter: Dr. Barbara P. McLain, Professor, Music Education and Secondary Instrumental, University of Hawai’i at Manoa

In Second Life: Professor Lilliehook

“Change ahead requires vision now”

Visions for change

• Touch screen computers
• Holographic displays
• 3D TV
• Merged technologies

What would you do as an educator if you had a holographic display?

Trends

• Social networking
• Visual communication
• Diminishing attention spans
• Multitasking
• Game-based learning
• Improved bandwidth & access
• High def screens
• Touch screen interfaces
• Merged technologies
• Open source software
• Internet subscription software

Overview of Second Life

• Wants to explain why people are so excited about it
• She thinks its a little ahead of its time–we’re catching up, but it’s slow
• Free software, but land costs
• Grid: how land is laid out
• Archipelagos for land
• In-world economy of Linden Dollars
• Avatar Creation
• Tools available

Says better help from other people than the in-game help

Everyone has art ability–everyone can build

Library of Congress has a Second Life

• New Media Consortium Getting Started info: http://sl.nmc.org/wiki/Getting_Started
• NMC’s own orientation island: http://sl.nmc.org/join/

Educational growth in SL–nearly anything can be taught in SL. Growth is like previous growth of online education

Second Life & virtual worlds are a new movement, but SL isn’t the first world and won’t be the last

Minimum Needs for Teaching

• Space (Borrow, buy, or rent)
• Skills
• Time–she calls it “wonderful time” but there is a learning curve

Why Second Life Education

• No subject left behind!
• Many classroom limitations gone–size, space
• Engaging–banish lectures
• Address more learning styles
• Research opportunities

Research from Intellagirl:

• 91% of students see the internet as a place for answers
• There are more online gamers than golfers in the world

Schools are not the only places to go for learning

How Second Life Education

• Active, student-centered learning. If you’re just going to do a lecture, don’t do it in SL–there are better avenues for that.
• Peer groups

Selling Second Life Education to Administrators

• Match to institutional goals
• Collaborate with prior successful projects
• Look for unique opportunities

4 Types of School Administrators

• Sherman Tank: always has to be in control, has to be their idea. Give them the credit so you can get your stuff.
• Social Butterfly: include pictures in your proposal
• Teddy Bear: 75% of administrators–they are worried about porn, access for all–they are the nesters of the world, want to protect us.
• Picky Picky: their avatars will look exactly like they do in real life. They will check all the details

In the chat: “But almost every major technology has been propelled forward by pornography! See, all we’re doing is leveraging the most recent porn delivery platform for instructional purposes. We did it with the web, we can do it with SL. ^_^”

Responding to Naysayers

• It’s more than just a game
• There’s porn online and in the convenience store down the street too, not just in SL. It’s a matter of choice.
• It’s cheaper than Blackboard.
• “It’s too complicated”: So is web design, but we have online courses
• “The avatars are too sexy”: So are some of the profs (at least in Hawaii where she teaches)

Q: Community college environment is more concrete and don’t see this as part of their academic environment
A: She provided a zip file with a sample proposal, research, etc. Just like when online learning started, you share the quality examples. Sometimes you have to wait for those administrators to retire though.

Read the other liveblogged posts from this conference.

Image: ‘The Teach‘
http://www.flickr.com/photos/18839217@N02/2381606521

Technorati Tags: tcc08, tcc2008, secondlife, education

TCC08: Wikis and Blogs and Tags: Oh Why?

Presenters:

• Alice Bedard-Voorhees, Colorado Mountain College, Glenwood Springs, Colorado, USA
• Lisa Cheney-Steen, Colorado Community College System, Denver, Colorado, USA

Starting with an intro to Web 2.0

New tools pop up all the time

Why not just use the features in your LMS?

• Information or Presentation
• Social Connection
• Collaboration

Categories overlap & aren’t clean distinctions

Information & Presentation

• Blogs
• Podcasts
• Voicethread
• Slideshare

“Information is not always text” This is a really important point

If it is text, a blog is good

In chat, Alan Selig pointed out that using tools outside the LMS is important b/c they’ll have them after they graduate.

• Life is not a closed situation like an LMS
• Show students what you are reading–demonstrate importance of material outside the classroom
• Add “real world” content by bringing things in from outside (podcasts, blogs, etc.)

Audience is important!

Question about FERPA (student privacy law in the US)

• Important to protect feedback and grades
• They checked that moving student writing outside was OK
• May have students use pseudonyms
• Cynthia Calongne said for game-based rubrics she adds NPCs to disguise the real scores

Social Connection Tools

“Increased engagement = Opportunity for Increased Learning”

Engagement is the why for these tools

Information Literacy & Sharing Discoveries

• delicious
• Diigo
• Twitter

Annotations on sites helps information literacy.

Diigo = “delicious on steroids” with more annotations or conversations, sticky notes. More social community.

Cynthia uses Twitter for keeping track of bookmarks–lets her tag it with who shared it with her and when to give her context

Collaboration Tools

• Wikipedia
• Kaltura–collaborative video editing
• Google Docs
• Diigo

Create a sharing community

Important to teach students collaborative skills to prepare for work

Teams are goal-directed

Wikis as classic example of collaborative tool

• Gave an example of faculty handbook created with wiki (using MediaWiki)
• Wikis make it very clear who did what–always a problem with group work for grading

Students learn how to judge the stability of information & collective intelligence through using a wiki

They get complaints that their website information is out of date but that the wiki information keeps changing.

Wikis have more work application for students too

Diigo

• Set up a group
• Have everyone in the group highlight and add sticky notes to discuss the content
• Diigo’s dashboard has forums for discussion
• Automatic notification available so instructors can keep track of discussion
• Help connect learning in class to learning outside

How do you pronounce Diigo? Is it DEE-Go?

LMS is nice to have as a launching point so students have a home base

They have had good support from their administration.

If students are really uncomfortable sharing online, you need to make accomodations–one participant said he dropped a class b/c it required Blogger and he doesn’t like Google’s privacy policies

You need to set expectations for writing style–if you grade on grammar and tell them what is acceptable, they will write with an appropriate level of communication for that level. Ask students what they want to be remembered for–is it l33t speak?

Privacy issues: Edublogs may be better than Blogger, or do it on your own servers to control information.

Image: ‘Ruby Slippers by Peter Alexander‘
www.flickr.com/photos/14351900@N00/2128542926

Update: I switched the image for this–I didn’t realize that my original choice had graffiti over the picture; I was just seeing Dorothy and Toto.

Read the other liveblogged posts from this conference.

Technorati Tags: tcc08, tcc2008, wiki, blog, diigo, privacy, education, writing

TCC08 Keynote: Social Networking, the “Third Place,” and the Evolution of Communication

Liveblogged during the keynote presentation by Larry Johnson, Chief Executive Officer, New Media Consortium (NMC). My comments in italics.

Premise: Technology has not only mediated communication but that the very ways we communicate, including how we talk and think about communication, are changing.

Patterns of writing now aren’t the same as they were in the past. We communicate in small bursts of writing.

Constant communication across the globe–often having multiple levels of communication at the same time (chat + twitter + listening to Larry)

Communication is multimodal–images, text, avatars

Email is still essentially one-way prompt, then response. IM is much more conversational. But because of the lag in IM, you can have multiple conversations simultaneously.

Twitter is more like little news programs or channel surfing–tune in when you want to for those short bursts

When you send a handwritten letter, you expect a response within a week or so. With email, the response is expected within hours. With IM, it’s minutes. But we expect a little bit of “chat lag” because we know people may be doing multiple things at once.

With most of the technologies, you still never lose the sensation that you’re not really there. Virtual worlds change that there–you extend your physical presence into the 3D world. If you walk up to the camera in a video conference, no one else will back up, but if you avatar invades another avatar’s personal space, they will back up like they would in person.

Possibilities for bridging time, culture, and difference as communication evolves

Twitter is another paradigm changer because it’s a different kind of immediacy than virtual worlds

“Social proprioception”

Still important to know the cultural context of where people are physically.

It’s hard to detect nuance online, so we do things to add context like smileys–we create conventions to show that nuance

Concept of a Third Place

• First place: Home
• Second Place: Work
• Third Place: where you unwind, hang out with friends, express yourself–increasingly, the Third Place is online

Twitter is controversial because it doesn’t really have an analog in traditional communication

An important aspect is how you represent yourself–profiles, avatars, etc.

Online spaces draw people online and keep people there because you can keep in touch with people you might not others stay in contact with. Someone in the chat said that’s like the modern town square

NMC survey showed that people made time for online tools by cutting their TV time–replacing a passive media with an active one

Evolution of Communication

Instant communication across the globe

Facebook & LinkedIn make it easy to keep in touch with people, including keeping a record of when we last had contact

Evolution is so rapid that is raises questions about nature of interaction and who we are as people

Questions

Is the nature of communication actually changing?

Why are people interested in online communication? Why do people spend time there instead of elsewhere?

Slides were basically a live photostream–almost no text. Very cool images.

The network increasingly organizes itself around people and less so around files and folders–connections are social, not just content

That sounds a lot like Siemens and Downes–connectivism

It’s not just that we have more opportunities for communication, but that it changes how we make connections. This affects how we think about teaching and learning too.

People who work in distributed fashions are already there; students learning online are there. But it’s not a bad thing that not everyone is there yet–we should understand it.

Continued with a lot of chat and questions–I participated in the backchannel conversation rather than blogging

Cynthia Calongne made a good comment about the richness of her online relationships. They are richer than the face-to-face relationships because these are people who share their thoughts and open their minds.

Larry said that virtual worlds have been very helpful for autistic individuals–can help to have different sensory experience than the ones that may cause problems in physical relationships

Read the other liveblogged posts from this conference.

Technorati Tags: tcc08, socialnetworking, third+place, communication, web20, twitter, second+life, network, connections

TCC08: Transitioning from WebCT to Sakai

The full title of the presentation I’m liveblogging is “Help! I Need Somebody: Faculty Perspectives on Transitioning from WebCT to a Sakai-based Learning Management System,” by Ariana Eichelberger, Educational Technology, University of Hawaii at Manoa.

(Missed the beginning of the presentation due to my computer’s inability to start Elluminate in under 9 minutes)

Open-ended interview questions for faculty

• Hopes and expectations for LMS
• Will you use new features in Sakai?
• (2 more questions that I missed)

Faculty responses

• Approaches to Change
  • All felt some resistance to tech
  • Comfortable with WebCT and hesitant to switch
  • Changes felt imposed on them and not in control of it themselves
  • Technology changes especially disruptive
• Importance of Support
  • Institutional support, especially one-on-one mentoring
  • Mentoring will reduce anxiety (I like this idea–wonder if we could do something like this)
• Expectations
  • Could see benefits even if hesitant
  • Saw benefits of new features–collaboration, easier to learn, sharing resources between courses
  • Resistance didn’t prevent them from feeling optimistic

She had expected that because these people had been through a lot of technology change in the past that they would be more tolerant of it, but there was still a lot of hesitation. The positive attitudes were directly related to their feelings of support available.

Attitude matters. Participants who were successful saw benefits early and were optimistic.

Title of “Help! I need somebody” due to the recurring theme in the responses about the mentoring. She didn’t ask about that, but the responses repeatedly mentioned it.

Pressure on faculty to be self-sufficient, but successful participants relied on assistance from others.

They are currently in transition, but WebCT will be going away soon

Questions:

She mentioned how Sakai can be changed when the universities want it to happen rather than when WebCT decides it will happen. Changes will happen at the system level there (although theoretically you could have different versions of Sakai running from different servers).

Q: What do you wish had been done differently?
A: Many faculty felt that they hadn’t really been involved in the process. If she had been able to influence it more, she would have tried to make more people in the system feel “heard” in the process. People accept the change more easily if they have participated.

Q: Are the students ready for the change?
A: This is probably harder for the faculty than the students. Faculty have more growing pains.

Q: Is the mentoring face-to-face or online?
A: In the past has been mostly face-to-face, but are doing some mentoring through Elluminate too. The mentoring programs have become so popular that they have to assign priorities to the mentoring.

Q: What training was available for faculty during the transition?
A: Workshops at basic to advanced levels for faculty, continue to offer training throughout the transition. College of Education did better internal training than other departments.

Q: How would you do one-on-one mentoring at the community college level where you don’t have grad students to use?
A: They did a pilot for that previously with a grant to help instructors integrate technology. Once the grant finished, they did look for ways to continue the mentoring

Q: Who made the decision to move to Sakai?
A: Leadership, with input from the university community. Collected information from variety of users. Specifically looked for a system that allowed better collaboration between faculty. Sakai has a proven track record with a large number of people.

Q: Who will do the fixes? At the community college resources may not be available to do the fixes for open source.
A: It will be at the system level through IT when enough people ask for changes

Technorati Tags: WebCT, Sakai, LMS, faculty, changemanagement

Update: I’m collecting all of my posts from TCC08 on a single page, so check there for more from the conference.

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Collaborative Learning Trends

These are my live-blogged notes from the webinar Emerging Trends in Collaborative Learning from the WebEx/eLearning Guild Online eLearning Summit. My comments are in italics.

Speakers

• Heidi Fisk, Co-Founder, The eLearning Guild
• Brent Schlenker, the Emerging Technologies Analyst, The eLearning Guild

How do you define “collaborative learning”?

Brent showed his online profile in different places

I’m impressed that he’s a level 40 orc in WOW. The fact that I’m impressed by that probably makes me a g33k…

Heidi Fisk noted that she isn’t involved with so many new technologies b/c she has difficulty typing. Good example of why mobility is part of the accessibility considerations and why we should think about that more.

New technologies are all about connecting people-that’s the underlying theme of all these new innovations

The focus on “You” (Time magazine, personal branding)

YOUniverse-what does your digital presence look like?

• Consume
• Connect/Collaborate
• Create

Maybe the “editable” from Brent’s earlier list should be “collaboratable”-not that it’s a real word…Hmmm…I still am not quite happy with that.

Looked at generational trends for technology

eLearning Guild technology usage

• Synchronous e-Learning: 65%
• Wikis: 31%
• Blogs: 22%
• Chat rooms: 24%
• Mobile Learning: 19%
• Podcasts: 17%

eLearning Guild is an example of collaborative data sharing, pulled dynamically

Synchronous Learning trends (although new engine in 2005, so data isn’t directly comparable)

• 2001: 13%
• 2002: 18%
• 2004: 25%
• 2005: 38%
• 2007: 65%

Learning 0.1: Physical classroom in 1941, chalkboard, no

Learning 1.0: standard info (expert content, one direction, static, centralized). Few content creators, many content consumers

Learning 2.0: Dynamic, decentralized, loosely joined networks, learners create & enhance content; rip, mix, feed

“Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy”

Five Ables from before:

• Searchable
• Editable
• Linkable
• Tagable
• Feedable

First 3 “ables” are from the Cluetrain Manifesto

Informal Learning

New hires need more formal, structured courses, less informal

Company gurus use more informal support & conversations, less formal classrooms

Brent is showing this as very low informal at the beginning, but I’m not sure I agree with that. I think there is a lot of informal learning for new hires too

Google Trends shows searches for “instructional design” dropping over time

What does that mean? Are there fewer learning professionals using instructional design? Perhaps the old ideas of what instructional design is aren’t working anymore. We need to find new ways to be of value.

Blogs, Wikis, RSS

Got a phone call-darn, I missed what Brent said about blogs, wikis, and RSS. I’ll have to catch it in the recording. (Unless Brent would be so nice as to summarize what he said here in the comments…)

Internal Wikis: Intel as the example

• 6000+ articles
• Intel Acronyms to help people
• Intel History created by the employees-better than what any single group of people could have done

Blogs let you share ideas and get feedback from all over the world

Text messaging took off much faster in other countries where the infrastructure was better for that than in the US.

Where to start using new technology? Feed reader/aggregator, start learning RSS

Feed readers are a good way to get a high level scan of a lot of the information

Showed iGoogle, Netvibes, etc.-learning dashboards

“Nobody can tell you what the matrix is. You have to experience it for yourself.” Morpheus, The Matrix

You have to go out and experience it, engage with others, create and share

Several questions in the chat about accuracy in wikis-people seem to be very worried about that. The moderator suggests lots of self-policing

Find the grassroots people to start trying something and encourage them to share what they are doing. You can’t just tell people “this is what we’re doing” like a new accounting system-you have to build from the bottom, not from the top down. Even if it fails, what have you lost if the tool is free?

Collaborative Immersive 3-D Environments

Games vs. Virtual Spaces

“You can learn more about a man in one hour of play than in one year of conversation.” Plato

Immersive 3-D environments require you to work together, be engaged, solve problems

Most kids play games, lots of adults do too

MMORPG is a virtual team

Screenshot of 40 people in a WOW raiding party-this is 40 people from around the world with different skills working to accomplish something. Lots of logistics even though it’s a game.

Second Life is a virtual space without specific game objectives like WOW. Watched NASA shuttle launch video within virtual world–a “matrix” moment for Brent

Example of Second Life training: Crowd control training where there’s no danger of people getting hurt. It’s easy for learners to figure out how to “game the system” if it’s non-player characters. If real people are the ones playing the role of disrupters in the crowd, it’s harder to game the system.

Technorati Tags: elearning+guild, Brent+Schlenker, collaboration, MMORPG, web2.0, elearning2.0

The Next Evolution in eLearning

Expert Panel: The Next Evolution in eLearning - 2008 and Beyond

These are my liveblogged notes from the opening presentation of the WebEx/eLearning Guild Online eLearning Summit. My comments are in italics.

Speakers:

• Brent Schlenker, the Emerging Technologies Analyst, The eLearning Guild
• Dr. Michael Allen, Chairman and CEO, Allen Interactions Inc.
• Jennifer Hofmann, President, InSync Training

Michael Allen

Q: Where do creative ideas for e-learning come from? How do they develop and why?

A (MA): He tries to collect the best examples because we need better models for what we do. There are exciting things being done out there. You can use the ID models to collect information, but then you have to ask what you do with it. Too often, e-learning just ends up being putting content on the screen.

We used to say “Knowledge is power.” Now he feels that knowledge is nice, but skills are power. Knowledge alone isn’t enough unless you can do something with it.

CCAF: 4 components of Interactivity

• Context
• Challenge
• Activity
• Feedback

Start at the end–what skills do you want learners to apply right after the training. That leads you to the activities you will create as the performance practice. Practice is often underrated. Just recognizing good performance isn’t the same as doing it; you can recognize a great violinist without ever picking up a bow. I like this metaphor for learning by doing.

What kind of challenges are people really up against? What kind of messy problems do they really have? It isn’t interesting to solve boring problems, so give them a meaningful context. Feedback should let students see what the effects of their actions are. Don’t just tell them it’s nice; show them the impact of their choices. Some delay in feedback can also be good; in the real world feedback isn’t always immediate. The effects of our actions take longer to appear.

Work backwards, and keep working backwards. Start with the final piece, then create the enabling piece, then keep going backwards doing this cycle each time.

He thinks that many people can do this, but they have trouble coming up with the idea to start.

Similar to the Stephen Covey “begin with the end in mind”; you have to know where you’re going. Learning too often starts with the boring facts and background that you have to trudge through before getting to the good stuff.

Is there risk to putting students in a situation without having all the background info? Yes, there is, but he’s a believer in that. Giving them some risk makes it engaging so they appreciate the guidance and learning.

Jennifer Hofmann

Q: If you had a magic wand to make e-learning more effective what would it be?

A (JH): She wishes she did have a magic wand. She wants to move things from just presentations to true learning. If you want quality online learning, go back to what works. Meet the same learning objectives that you meet face-to-face.

About 30% of learners are auditory–not a majority–yet we do auditory lectures rather than hands on training. Too much talking at people.

What about using breakout rooms to do small groups? That lets the participants help create the content and learn from one another than just listen to experts talk. They can listen to recordings of experts; let them use synchronous time to work together.

Instructors are afraid of losing control. Try sending students out online to search or research and bring content back to share with the class.

Leader materials: InSync has full-blown leader materials with activities rather than just slides. Most people just do slides, and slides make experts talk more rather than encouraging participation.

Participant guides: Not just the slides, or people won’t interact during the session.

Collaborative tools are underutilized in synchronous classrooms. Training is mostly an interactive and human event. Make sure people get the training to know how to use the software–companies spend lots of money buying software that people don’t even know how to get the most out of it. Teach people the etiquette of being participants–how to ask questions, how to raise their hands, how to participate.

How do you judge the “body language in the bandwidth”? You can’t see whether people are paying attention or not by body language, so you have to use other methods.

Rehearse for online presentations and design for learning just like you would for face-to-face. If you don’t rehearse and design, it isn’t the technology’s fault if it doesn’t go well.

Train manager too; they need to know how to be coaches for online learners. Give them the tools to support learners.

Watching someone else create something isn’t the same as doing it yourself. Creative design may be needed to get hands-on practice.

Online classrooms aren’t about putting content online so people can see it and read it; it’s about the interaction between people.

This webinar is informative, not really training because it isn’t really interactive. In real training, keep students active every 3-5 minutes so they do something–even if it’s just clicking a green checkmark.

Lots of people don’t use the full capability and value of online training, but blame the technology for any problems.

Brent Schlenker

Q: What do you see as the emerging technologies that can really bring e-learning to life? Where are we headed?

A: One answer is that all of the technologies help empower our learners. This is a human process; we’re talking about connecting people so they can learn together. Whatever technology you’re talking about, it’s about connecting people for learning.

Blogs, wikis, RSS have been talked about before, but they will become more mainstream. Organizations have struggled with what this means to them, but the technology has taken a stronger foothold and innovative companies have proved they can work.

Social networking gives learners and employees a voice and empowers them. Every company orientation says employees will be empowered, but most of the time there aren’t really channels to do that. The technology can provide those channels and change the organizations. Who is allowed to speak out? Now, everyone can go out and talk. How much do you allow employees to talk publicly? Learners are taking more control in general.

Two personalities: the ones who understand how to go out and get their own needs met, and the ones who still want to have their hands held and be shown what to do. Technology can help both.

We can design so learners can eventually take responsibility for themselves; ultimately they have to engage themselves.

Mobile devices will have a strong sense of location with them (GPS, bar code scanning). As you walk around in the environment, mobile devices will detect where you are and decide what you might need to know. Instead of just-in-time learning, this is almost just-in-place learning.

There have been failures with these technologies. We’re trying to use radically different technologies without changing the organizational structure, and that won’t work. These technologies have major changes.

We create these online artifacts–they should have all of these features to be powerful:

• Searchable
• Editable
• Linkable
• Tagable
• Feedable

He includes commenting as “editable”; maybe there’s a better word for this. Comments and interactions are included in that editing. Hmmm…. I like these 5 characteristics as a whole though. It’s a nice summary of what makes the Web 2.0.

Someone in your organization has seen the power of these technologies and can convince others. This technology doesn’t work well from the top down as a mandate. Having some champions for the technology is good.

Don’t use the technology because it’s cool; use it because it’s the right solution for your organization. (Moderator)

Many of these technologies are fairly inexpensive, so you can get a lot of value out of a technology even if it changes quickly. If you wait too long to try things, you’ll miss getting that value. Let your employees experiment and see what they can do; you don’t lose as much by investing in trying new stuff as you would have with older software.

Final Questions

Q for Michael Allen: What guide do you recommend for starting with the end result?

A: Happy to throw out the crutches we’ve used in the past, like starting every unit with objectives that make sense to designers. You can write objectives in a different way so they fit with a context of why you want to learn something. There are better ways to do some of the things we’ve been doing. You can just throw some of that out though. Think like a learner. Give them a challenge at the beginning so they experience what they have to learn instead of just telling them what they need to learn.

Q for Michael Allen: What types of learning does this apply to?

A: Procedural is a good fit. He uses it for soft skills and problem solving; he’s had success teaching sales skills. This type of approach isn’t aligned to just one type of learning, but works for many types of learning.

Technorati Tags: webex, Michael+Allen, Jennifer+Hofmann, Brent+Schlenker, , interactivity, creativity, training

What Today’s Students Look Like

Michael Wesch and 200 of his students have created another great video, specifically about the disconnect between traditional education methods and current students’ lives.

One of the interesting points for me was how much students are reading. Much of that reading is online, of course. In a semester, these college students said they read:

• 8 books
• 2300 webpages
• 1281 Facebook profiles

The amount of online reading being done points to the need for digital literacy skills. Students need to learn how to synthesize what they find online, as well as to find and evaluate sources. Communication skills should including writing for online and using multiple forms of media, not just text.

Technorati Tags: highered, education, digital+literacy, communication, michael+wesch