First Thoughts After ASTD Sessions

I’m on the flight back from ASTD TechKnowledge and thought I should try to capture some initial thoughts from the conference and sessions while it was still fresh and before life clouds my memory…

I did two sessions and face time at the conference. I also had some really good lunch conversations. I found that one-on-one and small group is a fantastic way to have meaningful discussions. It’s too bad that there aren’t ways to do more of this at a conference.Are there models for this that people have seen work at different kinds of conferences?

I need to go back and look at Better Conferences, Be an Insanely Great Professional Conference Attendee to see if there were suggestions.

I read the evaluations from both sessions before I left. I always appreciate written comments thanks to the people who spent the time to write something. By in large I got very favorable evaluations on the first session and a mixed bag on the second.

The first session was an Introduction to eLearning 2.0. The slides were similar to eLearning 2.0 Presentation - ISPI Los Angeles.

I felt this session when pretty well. The audience had diverse experiences, backgrounds which always makes it challenging. Generally people were familiar with what a Wiki was, but few had ever edited a Wiki page or seen it done. At least I showed that in my session.

About 15 out of 130 were bloggers – likely on personal topics – one was politics. Only 2 people said they read my blog. Yikes.

Almost no one was familiar with social bookmarking.

How much ground can you really cover in an hour? I tried to go all the way from the overall landscape to individual tools back to the new landscape that is eLearning 2.0. That was a big challenge.

I’m going to do a similar presentation in June at ASTD ICE in San Diego. I’m going to try to work on improving the flow a bit. Otherwise, I’m not sure what I’ll change.

The Second Session was intended to be a discussion session that was eLearning 2.0 - Applications and Implications - a follow-up to the first session. I used suggestions from Conference Breakout Sessions to help me design this session.

As I said, the second session was not rated as high. I’m going to write a follow-up post around the discussion in the session and some other more detailed thoughts. But some high level thoughts... Oh, and I just saw that Kevin Jones posted his thoughts around the session: TK08 - Tony Karrer and Implementation of Social Learning.

Challenges / Mistakes

1. Needed a better session description. It was not clear that this was a discussion, Q&A with relatively little presentation.
2. I was planning for 30 and instead had more than 100 – not even sure how many more. I have not been successful getting into small group discussions at large conferences.
3. Room was way too big and hard to hear some contributions. And with that size, people were not able to get their questions asked and answered. I’m sure it was probably somewhat frustrating. However, some people said upfront that they wanted to be lurkers, so maybe it was okay for them.
4. I needed to seed the audience with more people who had hands on experience. We had about 7-10 people with real experience of different kinds.
5. People did not offer up as many examples of where they’d like to use Blogs, Wikis, Social Bookmarking as I anticipated. I thought they would be just rolling out. Especially with the survey to prompt some ideas. It would have made the session a lot more energetic. Again, seeding would have worked much better. Once I started asking for examples, that worked well. Of course, it was hard to hear.

Things that went okay / well

1. I’m really glad I didn’t do small group discussions Conference Breakout Sessions - thanks everyone for steering me away from that. It would not have been good.
2. Good examples from the audiences. Intuit – Wiki for customers to discuss tax issues. Worried about quality. In the end, updates happen in about 5 minutes if someone posts something wrong. Good adoption.
3. People were able to voice challenges that they faced and I feel we had good discussion / sharing around these challenges. Kevin said he was frustrated that he couldn't jump in and dismiss some of these more quickly. I think I should have attacked it that way instead of getting the list all at once.
   

Overall, I might try to do this again, but I’m going to have to figure out how to overcome some of this. Clearly 75 minutes is not enough to discuss eLearning 2.0, but having a discussion of eLearning 2.0 for the next 75 minutes is not quite right either. More guidance and structure would have probably been better. Hmmm … okay, I’ve got some ideas. That makes me feel a bit better.

Free eBook - Visualizing Information

Found via Nancy White - Visualizing Information for Advocacy: An Introduction to Information Design from the Tactical Technology Collective - a free, beautiful overview book around visual information design.

Long Tail Learning - Size and Shape

Beth Griese - posted a response Is Learning 2.0 a long tail? to my post Corporate Learning Long Tail and Attention Crisis. In it, Beth shows a graphic:



This caused us to have a good exchange. Beth tells us:

I'm thinking of "topics" as anything that an organization's people would want to learn about for their jobs. I'm not limiting that to the "traditional means" training topics, but I do limit that to things that are job-related, which is why I think the tail has a limit.

I'm thinking that the scope of the demands from our learners are finite and still within the means of a training department (with the help blending training programs and of the social knowledge of the company properly harnessed), rather than requiring the power of an Amazon-sized retailer to meet a near-infinite long tail of interests.

If I think about myself and my current and future information needs that relate to all aspects of my job, these are continually changing and growing. So, even if there was a way to define my current tail, tomorrow there's more. And when you talk about all people within an organization, well it seems clear that it's very, very large - effectively infinite. So, I'd want to make sure that we don't delude ourselves:

1. Long tail learning is effectively infinite
2. There is no way for an individual to keep up (see Kathy Sierra's The Myth of Keeping Up) much less learning and development.
3. Trying to "keep up" and putting ourselves in the producer role is not going to work.

Instead, I truly believe that the information needs are tracking the shift shown in the following graph (and Beth's graph seems to agree with this except that she cuts it off):



We have to face up to the reality that information needs are shifting and our role can either only focus on the shrinking tall end of the long tail or we can look at how we can play in the long tail where smaller audience sizes, rapidly changing content, etc. makes it such that traditional "topics" kind of approach doesn't really fit.

There's quite a bit more on the size and shape of the long tail through my post on Long Tail SEO - 60+ Articles.

Learning Object Tools

A reader from another country has asked me about Learning Object Tools. I asked him to clarify what they meant and the response was:

Learning Object Tools are those that allow you to create, edit and manage learning objects.

There is also a bit of language barrier. I pointed them at the Wikipedia article - Learning Object. It cites quite a few repositories and briefly mentions "Burrokeet is an Open Source Software tool that assists in the creation of Learning Objects from existing content. " This is something I'm not familiar with. I also suggested looking at LCMS products. And looking at SCORM / SCOs.

But it got me to thinking that I've really not looked at Learning Objects in quite a while - and I've not really kept up on Learning Object Tools.

So, I was hoping that someone could help me and him:

1. What are good general discussions of learning objects and learning object tools?
2. My impression is that these were a big topic about 4-5 years ago, and a lot is happening in academia, but not much is happening in corporate spaces. Is that the right impressions?
3. What are the categories of tools that represent this space?
4. What are some specific tools within those categories?
   

Any help would be appreciated.

Work Learning - Same Thing

Mohamed Amine Chatti (a fellow Eddie eLearning nominee) last two posts The LaaN Perspective, and Requirements of a PLE Framework are both interesting posts and worth reading.

His requirements for a PLE Framework include:

• Personalization
• Social features
• Social filtering
• Incorporate various Web 2.0 concepts and technologies (mashups, widgets, aggregation, OpenID, RSS, etc.)
• Flexibility and extensibility
• Web browser platform
• Aggregation/Mashups
• Ease of use

Several thoughts jumped out at me:

• The concept of a Personal Learning Environment (PLE) exists, but actual PLEs only exist as theoretical combinations of skills, methods and tools. The concept of a Personal Learning Environment Framework gets it even farther from some actual system. There will be Social Network Operating Systems that will allow us to pull together our highly personal environment. But, too much structure is not going to work.
  

• I mentioned quite a while ago (in Personal Work and Learning Environments (PWLE) - More Discussion and Personal Work and Learning Environments) that:

Knowledge work is not separate from learning.

Yes, there are times that Knowledge Workers will step away from day-to-day activities to go do developmental learning activities that may not be directly related to their day-to-day knowledge work. But that's the exception. In almost all cases work and learning is inseparable.

To me, it does not make sense to look at using one environment (an LMS or PLE) as part of learning and another environment as part of knowledge work.

That's the reason I call these:

Personal Work and Learning Environment (PWLE - pronounce p-whale)

And there's only one for me. It's the set of methods, skills, tools that I use to perform my day-to-day knowledge work activities where I acquire information, knowledge, etc.

Luckily all of the requirements that Mohamed cites apply equally well to a PWLE.

I'm curious if anyone actually sees this different? Do we gain something by separating them?

If we are going to make progress with Corporate Learning Long Tail and Attention Crisis, I think we have to think about these things in an integrated fashion.

Corporate Learning Long Tail and Attention Crisis

John Seely Brown and Richard P. Adler’s recent article - Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0 talks about the implications of the Long Tail on Education. The article is definitely worth a read, and it got me to finally write about what I see as a crisis in corporate learning.

Background

If you are not familiar with the concept of the Long Tail, head over to take a look at the Long Tail article on Wikipedia. It's a pretty good introduction to the main concepts around a very important concept. You can also look at getAbstract's - Abstract on Anderson's The Long Tail.
The core idea is that for retailers like Amazon, they sell very large volumes of titles that cannot even be carried in a bricks-and-mortar store.


Typical Long Tail

Carried further, when distribution, storage and production get lower, it becomes viable to sell relatively less popular products.

Thus, markets in Long Tail situations shift towards larger volumes of increasingly broader products with smaller volumes at the top.

This is happening in many situations: major publishers (CNN, Yahoo, Cnet) competing with niches publishers, competing with blogs; TV production facing a widely distributed audience across 500 cable channels and YouTube. There's quite a bit more on this in Long Tail SEO - 60+ Articles.

Since everyone still has the same amount of time to spend consuming all of these products or information, they are naturally going to spread their time over broader and broader range. This gives rise to the Attention Economy where the scarce resource is not distribution channels or information, the scarce resource is attention. Each person only has a certain amount of time. Where we choose to spend that time is important. And even if we are successful in getting someone’s attention, we often get Shorter Attention Spans and only getting partial attention - Stop Reading - Skim Dive Skim.

If you think about the Long Tail graph, it works just as well when we substitute Attention instead of Sales.

Impact

How does this impact the world of learning organizations and corporate learning functions (training organizations)? Consider the following:

• Corporate learning functions today act like a publisher / distributor.

• The average knowledge worker has access to an increasingly large set of information resources and corporate learning is an ever smaller part of this set.

• Cost is most often not a factor in a knowledge workers decision about the use of information. Time (attention) is much more important. Factored in is expectation of quality (how much time I need to spend filtering the content to determine if it’s of value). As a quick example, we choose our preferred search engine in large part because we feel it will be the best investment of time to find the best quality information.

• Information sources will continue to grow exponentially, so Corporate Learning as a traditional publisher will be able to focus on an ever smaller portion of the knowledge worker’s needs.

• John Hagel – in a post Paying Attention tells us:

If we do not receive attention, we risk becoming progressively marginalized. Receiving attention becomes far more important than it ever was and will require far more effort than in the past. Corporate learning is in the midst of an attention crisis.

• Corporate learning functions are seeking to find ways to lower production costs so they can attack broader markets – go farther into the long tail. They look to eLearning approaches to lower distribution costs. They look to rapid authoring tools to lower production costs.
  
  
• For corporate learning functions to really impact the long tail, they will be forced to look at eLearning 2.0.

• John Hagel – in the same post Paying Attention tells us:

What we know at any point in time has diminishing value.

• Corporate learning is also facing the fact that anything they create and publish becomes out of date that much faster so effective production costs are increasing.

Challenges

The list of issues above represent what can truly be considered a crisis for corporate learning organizations. It's a crisis born of the Long Tail and the Attention Economy. A whole range of challenges result. I believe our first challenge is to really recognize our current world and the Disruptive Changes in Learning and realistically that we are facing an Innovators' Dilemma in Learning/eLearning.

Corporate learning functions will either continue to focus on the front of the tail and an ever smaller portion of the total information needs of knowledge workers or will look to expand into the long tail. To play in the long tail, corporate learning functions will need to:

• Find approaches that have dramatically lower production costs, near zero

• Look for opportunities to get out of the publisher, distributor role such as becoming an aggregator

• Focus on knowledge worker learning skills

• Help knowledge workers rethink what information they consume, how and why.

• Focus on maximizing the “return of attention” for knowledge workers rather than common measures today such as cost per learner hour.

Focus on Personal Work and Learning Environments (PWLE) - More Discussion and Personal Work and Learning Environments.

These challenges represent some pretty dramatic questions for us:

• How do we get into the attention economy business?
• How do we dramatically lower production and delivery costs?
• How do we support self-service learning and user generated content?
• How do we foster knowledge worker skills?
• What are the new metrics?
• What does this mean for our current learning systems?
• How do we aggregate content?
• What are the legal and compliance issues?
• What are the new roles that must be created to go after this?
• Where do our skills fit? What new skills do we need?
  

This is going to be interesting!

SCORM Test

There have been lots of good comments and discussion on the post Test SCORM Courses with an LMS : eLearning Technology. Well worth looking at some of them.

The basic issue covered in the post was how to test SCORM courses prior to loading on a given LMS (e.g., Docent, SumTotal, Saba, Learn.com, etc.).

We talked about the SCORM test suite, SCORM test wrappers, and various test tools such as Trident, Reload player (http://www.reload.ac.uk/scormplayer.html), SCORM Test Track, remote debugging using tools like WebEx, HTTP traffic tracking with tools like Firebug, and some other things. Quite a great bit of discussion and useful information. If you are interested in testing your scorm courses, probably worth a read.

But recently someone (anonymous) left comments challenging a few of my base assumptions and I'd be curious to get thoughts. They asked:

"Why is testing courseware different? Why assume that the client or someone else is supposed to provide systems for testing for courseware vendors but not say accounting systems?"

"Perhaps you can rent or lease the software? Most major LMS vendors have their own test labs, support, and professional services."

"All of them sell their LMSs."

"There are third-party companies which you can hire to test courseware against LMSs."

"Have you ever tried contacting SumTotal about what options they have available for third-party courseware testing? What did they say? How many other LMS vendors have you spoken to?"

All of these challenge the base assumption that I made which is - the LMS vendor really is not looking to work with people who are creating small amounts of courses that need to be tested on their LMS. That's my general sense having working with a variety of different LMS vendors, but maybe that's not true?

Also, I wonder how much it would take to get the LMS setup for scorm testing? Cost? Hours?

Any comments from the LMS vendors ?

Any experience out there in working with LMS vendors to do scorm tests?

Or is it pretty much that you are using scorm testing tools and then getting on the actual installation to test and debug issues?