e e learning

happy new y....no, wait it's only 11

for the past four new years i've found myself in exactly the position i'm in right now.  limbo.

after forty years of living in the eastern time zone, my idea of new years celebration is tied to the dropping of that ball above times square in new york.  to me, that moment is when the new year begins.  but it happened two hours ago and people here in california are still waiting to pour the champagne and find their date for the big kiss at midnight.  56 minutes from now.

the second year i was here i decided to celebrate when new york did.  boy did i get some strange reactions when I was being all gushy and happy at 9 in the evening! 

by this time of the evening on new years eve (50 minutes from midnight), i'm over it.  time square is almost empty by now, except all that confetti and noisemakers and plastic champagne glasses.

but here people are rushing down the sidewalk to get to where ever they want to be in 48 minutes when they are going so celebrate the year being 3 hours old.    LOL

i've made most of the adjustments to west coast living.  i never wake my parents up at 1:00 in the morning by calling at 10pm any more.  i get that the business day is in the morning here.  the afternoon is just for us west coasters.  but after four new year's eves, i still don't get why new years starts three hours after the ball has dropped.

whether you've been to bed and are awake again in the new year or waiting it out like all these people around here, i want to thank all of you who have shared so much of yourselves with me in 2006.  once again i've learned more this past year than i'll ever remember, but i wouldn't change anything about the year that has been.

2007 is full of new opportunities, new friends and new ideas.  if only the last 40 minutes of this wait would just disappear!

HAPPY NEW YEAR, EVERYONE!!!!

well jay did it!

sometimes i feel compelled to do whatever jay is doing.  so here are my results from the superhero personality quiz.  well it is new year's eve.  what the heck!

Your results:
You are Spider-Man

Spider-Man 75% The Flash 60% Superman 55% Robin 50% Green Lantern 50% Hulk 45% Wonder Woman 43% Catwoman 40% Batman 40% Supergirl 38% Iron Man 35%

Click here to take the Superhero Personality Quiz

tweaked on twitter?

while kathy sierra, does refer to twitter as "the new crackberry" in her post the asymptomatic twitter curve. here target for blame in our information overload struggles is clearly time magazine's person of the year.

you!

twitter is just another indication of our continuing, if not growing, inability  to manage the information we confront and create at any time.  she squarely lays the responsibility for this mismanagement on the individual - versus external actors.  of course it's the external actors that we'd like to blame for overloading us.

kathy discusses linda stone's concept of continuous partial attention.  stone says on her wiki:

To pay continuous partial attention is to pay partial attention -- CONTINUOUSLY. It is motivated by a desire to be a LIVE node on the network. Another way of saying this is that we want to connect and be connected. We want to effectively scan for opportunity and optimize for the best opportunities, activities, and contacts, in any given moment. To be busy, to be connected, is to be alive, to be recognized, and to matter.

kathy links this to mihaly csikszentmihalyi's flow theory by showing how our continuous partial attention never gives us the chance to focus and spend time with ideas th us making it near to impossible for us to achieve any resemblance of flow.

i can say that this is definitely true in my case.  in fact stone's thoughts were chilling to me.  it felt like she was inside my cluttered mind taking inventory.  while I have been able to keep myself from getting sucked into some applications (second life being front and center for me.  I just know myself and the day I create an sl avatar could very well be the last day I see real sunlight!), I have my weak points. monitoring the continuous launching of new and better (and worse) web 2.0 applications has been nearly a daily obsession for me.  i'm sure i have several hundred user accounts set up.  several times recently i've tried to create an account and found that someone has already registered my favored user name (dcleesfo).  indignant i would check out who it was, only to find that it was me.

another place where i lose myself to continuous partial attention is all the darned community sites.  let's see, i have memberships/user accounts at:

• zimbio
• my yahoo
• yahoo groups
  
  • trdev
  • communities of practice
  • evaluating elearning
  • roi.net
  • linkedin bloggers
  • salt
• google
• google groups
  
  • learning circuits blog author team
  • blogger help
• flicker
• msn
• pbwiki forums
• learning flow
• myspace
• elgg.net
• elggspaces
• linkedin
• ilearnium.com

and that's only the the CoP's I can remember that relate to my work!!!  there are easily another handful of sites i am a member of related to my personal life. 

on top of all of this pile on the fact that I'm a gemini.  we have a reputation for having very powerful curiosities and a "need to know" that finds us jumping from topic to topic a the slightest provocation. i've said for a long time that giving a gemini internet access is once again proof that, if she does exist, god definitely has a sense of humor.  i thought this was  going to be a quickly post and then i'd grab some dinner.  but when i went to kathy's site to grab the permalink for  the link to her post i saw two other posts i just had to read.  then i lost an hour getting the link and quote from linda stone's wiki!!!  we  wont even discuss tracking down this picture of alanis morisette!!!!!  yes, my mental image of god these days tends to be morisette's portrayal of god in kevin smith's dogma.

(i hear you laughing up there!)

so what am i to do?  stone's right.  i have a tremendous need to be connected.  afterall, isn't that what we keep talking about?  but sierra's right too, flow definitely seems a far away dream.  while there are plenty of self-help books, tapes, websites, and, yes, even a few good web 2.0 applications out there to help me, they will never help unless i let go of one major error in my working ways.

with web 2.0 we trumpet the shift from the read-only web to the read/write web.  in our enthusiasm i've come to realize that many of us have fallen into the trap of focusing on the new aspect of  a technological innovation and forgetting about the strengths of the old.  I have to remember that it's ok to just read occasionally.  if you don't think focusing too strongly on the new can be dangerous take a look at graham watt's comment regarding the race to the south pole on harold jarche's blog.

finally, it's my rudimentary understanding of networks that if every node in a network were firing at once no communication would occur.  worse yet,  in the case of  electrical  networks, like our brain for instance, it can lead to explosion or meltdown.

a bangladeshi student on social networking

               

in this video, atif sattar, a 16-year-old 11th grader in dakar, bangladesh makes a case why social network software like elgg.net is valuable to him. do we really need to worry about "fixing" the schools worldwide? or should we enable students to follow atif's example? (found via elgg.net news via Julie Lindsey's blog)

hold your horses, tom

my newest blog buddy has been tom haskins.  we met via a dialogue regarding november's the big question on learning circuits blog.   since then we've been commenting back and forth on each other's blogs and had a bit of backchannel conversation as well by email.  a prime example of the network effect impacting learning.  i find tom's ideas to be intelligent, stimulating and challenging.  i love that!

his posts in response to lcb's december big question(s) are no exception.  in two posts, version 3 in 2007 and challenges posed by my forecast he predicts that web 3.0 will emerge in 2007 and the next logical step from what we call web 2.0.  briefly, he sees a vision of content being learner/user centric in not only it's focus but also in its creation and aggregation.  this will be accomplished in an environment free of the confines of software, websites, hardware, and mobile boundaries.

(before i get into the substance, let me be one of the first to say, that we will not be able to refer to this vision as web 3.0.  as tom predicts, the web, software, hardware, and mobile devices will be blurred together to the point that me might not even view it as the web anymore.  i'm not sure what to call it, but web 3.0 doesn't work.)

while i pretty much agree with tom's vision of the future, i do have reservations about the timing.  with the ieee 802.11n standard for wireless broadband not expected to be finalized until 2nd or 3rd quarter of 2007, it is unlikely that the vendors of the mobile devices will be able to gain much traction before the end of the year.  add to this that someone, instructional designers or others, will have to step up and create the paradigms and best practices that will inform the next revolution in learning and we'll more likely see beta testing and leading edge adoption of tom's vision nearer to the end of 2008 at best.   i also believe that microsoft vista will have a great impact on "what we end up doing" versus "what we could be doing" in the near future.

finally, while tom raises some very soul searching questions that every learning professional would benefit by answering for themselves, there are other factors which impact the type of change that tom is suggesting.   ulises mejias speaks of his in his short but stimulating article "a nomad's guide to learning and social software" which appeared on the knowledge tree in 2005.  he says:

these complex tensions include, among other things, issues of access and knowledge diffusion: what factors determine who has access to the technology, and what mechanisms are in place to facilitate or obstruct the diffusion of knowledge from technologized to non-technologized realms of social life.

these non-learning factors will have a major impact on the advancement and adoption of the next paradigm in learning.  as has been the case with web 2.0, learning professionals will not only have to learn and prepare to help learners succeed with the new paradigm. but at the same time we will need to be the cheerleaders and champions of the new approach to our companies, institutions, and the public in general.

surely the beginning efforts of tom's web 3.0 will appear before this time next year, but it will be a while before we reach the tipping point for these changes. 

so once again, tom.  we agree in the end, but disagree on some of the details.  but isn't that what this is all about?

Blogged with Flock

blogs and communities

nancy white has republished her article "blogs and community – launching a new paradigm for online community?" on her own website.  (it was originally published on the knowledge tree in september.) in the light of my last post, let me say that nancy is one of the researchers who i think serves our field well. 

"blogs and community" is a must read article for anyone interested in communities of practice and/or blogging.  if you are a community leader for a cop, particularly if you are using blog(s) as your primary vehicle in your community, nancy's thoughts are indispensible.  i've been carrying a copy around with me constantly since september.  it's covered with also sorts of notes and ideas related to my work as community leader of learning circuits blog.  tony karrer and i have discussed the article which was a major impetus behind our starting the big question on lcb.

not surprisingly, nancy reports that she just found out that this article has been nominated for an edublog award.  congrats to nancy and thanks for the leadership.

can we get a bit more precise?

recently i've been seeing a lot of talk about professionalism amongst our ranks.  i don't know if there really is more talk about it or i'm just more attuned to it than normal, but in either case, it's on my radar screen and i think it's a topic that's important to our future within the enterprise.

for me it began when the "e" in elearning was raised as an issue with albert ip's move to remove the "e" from the name of his blog.  does the "e" change who we are or how we are characterized by others?  does the "e" somehow limit us?  at about the same time i was taken to task for the use of an in appropriate word in the title of one of my posts.  the use of a movie character name made me look unprofessional and at risk of being shunned by the internet censor robots because the name might be offensive to some.

it continued as a theme in both of the first two the big question features we conducted on learning circuits blog.  in the october question we used the phrase "learning professionals."   while most participants used the phrase freely, a number of bloggers questioned what the term meant or whether or not calling ourselves professional is appropriate.  their sentiments were most strongly summarized in a statement clive shepard made in response to a comment on his post. 

"...is this [being unaware of key tools and concepts] true of other professionals? somehow i doubt it.  the phrase 'learning professional' is a complete misnomer..."

in the november question we used the acronyms ADDIE, HPT, and ISD.  several participants gave us a yellow card for the use of jargon. 

when we discuss concepts we are often not very accurate in what we are putting forwar.  recently i ran across a diagram presenting different types of learning content which included "training," "generic elearning" and "coaching" as content.  perhaps if you're teaching a course on delivery methodologies, they would be considered content.  every where else, they would most likely represent delivery mechanisms to deliver content.   or we seem to be happy with lose definitions like "informal learning is the other 80% that formal learning isn't." 

please understand that my concerns and commentary is not from a position of superiority or some other higher ground.  just a few weeks ago stephen downes correctly took me to task for using the phrase "making meaning."  i fall in to the same semantic traps.  while i can't think of a better alternative, i'm getting a bit over the semantic contortions necessary to talk about what we do using the word learning (which used to simply be a verb).

in our november big question discussion of design models, karl kapp shared this nugget:

I often tell my students that when the ADDIE model is applied in business, it becomes the DI model (Develop and Implement). We really need to, as an industry, work on restoring the lost letters or we will not be aligned with the business units we are supposed to support.

as a field, we are not very rigorous in challenging the little real research that is done.  for example, in their recent survey of their membership on issues regarding informal learning, elearning guild reported that email was the #1 tool for informal learning.  but there is no evidence that the costs of maintaining the email system were included or a portion allocated when the respondent was asked about the amount of their training budget that went to promoting informal learning.  in fact, they were asked for an estimate of the percentage of their budget that goes to informal learning.  with no indication of what the respondent conceives of as informal learning, no indication of the actual breakdown and allocations of  the training budget, no definition of what "the training budget" includes, and no indication of whether all learning - formal and informal - is captured in the training budget or not; the data collected on this question has zero validity.

why is this all a concern?  

recently i read in an article regarding presentations to executives that not only do you need to quantify your arguments.  but that those arguments need to be well researched and documented.  strategic planning and budgeting at the top level of an organization is highly competitive and often cut-throat.  if i can point to such a glaring error in data like the elearning guild's study, imagine what a well seasoned cfo could expose while she's looking for programs to cut or to outsource in order to make the budget work.

any of the issues i've raised here can effect whether our peers across the organization respect us and trust that we've done our homework, or not.

so what can be done?

defining standards is a messy matter.  committee meetings, public soundings, drafts, reviews, re-drafts...bah humbug.   In this day and age of collaborative writing and open source software development, why would we cling to the idea of a centralized fount for direction.  can we develop the wikipedia of professional standards for learning professionals?  who needs to be involved as sponsors to grab peoples' attention?  what needs to happen to gain participation?  to gain adoption of the concepts industry wide?  is astd's cplp program the answer or at least a part of the answer?

are we professionals?  if not can we become professionals?  or does it really matter?  i think it does.  and so does mike b, a self-professed programmer who has worked on elearning projects, in a comment to the home post of november's the big question:

I feel that although it may be simple for others to create content, that the more effective training will be designed by people who understand learning styles and who can follow a process that identifies the best way to present information to the learners.  Mike B.

let's continue...present challenges. future predictions

so in that long post below, i describe 2006 for me as a workplace learning professional and for workplace learning in general.  where does that leave me and the field?

what are the challenges we face heading into 2007?

personal

personally, as i said at the beginning of my first post, i could be down.  this ti me around, looking for a job has been an exhausting, frustrating, sometimes demeaning process. Keeping a positive attitude and having faith that all will workout for the best in the end have kept me moving forward one day at a time.

learning circuits blog

learning circuits blog has been a blessing.  it's enabled me to get to know some of the best people in our field and it has been a positive focus for me in between sending out resumes.  we've built a solid, foundational readership in the past year and a half, but lcb has struggled a bit to find the way to the next level.  the challenge is to morph into the next generation of resource when no one is really clear what those resources will be.  taking a leadership role in that definition of the next thing is the challenge for lcb.

workplace learning

it seems that the workplace learning field is out of sorts today.  we know our past practices and attitudes just aren't going to cut it in the work environment of the future, but we're not certain of where we need to be headed.  part of this is natural due to the huge amount of change society in general is going through today.  part of this is due to a deep down feeling that we might not be totally prepared to  deliver what is expected of us in the near future.  the challenge is to find a way or ways that will allow us to meet expectation with quality and efficiency.  we also need to assure that these new ways help build both our understanding of ourselves and each other and others' perception of us as professionals

dealing with the  incredibly exciting, mind boggling changes in technology has been a struggle for everyone in every walk of life.  many of our colleagues in learning have chosen thus far to bury their heads in the sand and hope that it will all be easier to grasp in the future.  in some sense, that's exactly the mission for those of us who are at the front edge of learning technologies - to help our colleagues by finding easy ways to understand the new technology.  on the other hand, technology is not likely to become a one size fits all, no directions required, you already know how to do this environment any time soon.

at the same time, many of us are wading in, shifting paradigms, experimenting with new processes and ideas,  openly questioning our assumptions, challenging each other to change our ways of being.  this is where the hope and challenge lies.  the hope is in that we have people who are stepping foward to take the risk of questioning the status quo, to declare that the emperor has no clothes, to send the sacred cows out to pasture.  the challenge is to find the new way for learning professionals to add value to the enterprise before other equally capable professionals end up meeting the same goals without us.

predictions for 2007

for workplace learning

the storm isn't over - 2007 will be a year full of tectonic shifts and changing expectations. 

talent managment rules the house - by the end of 2007 the talent management approach to recruiting, learning and development, performance management, leadership development, organizational development and succession management will be the norm in all but smallest organizations and the most recalcitrant among large organizations.

web office tools take the lead - a stumble by microsoft in the area of document compatibility will open the door for one or more of the web office suites to stun everyone by shooting to #1.  placing the cornerstone for ubiquitous online workflows and processes in the near future.

mobile learning goes mainstream - thus far, mobile learning has been a novelty.  but the combination of the introduction of the wireless broadband standard, the emergence of new, powerful and inexpensive handheld devices, and continued acceptance of short, mini-learning events will drive mobile to the forefront of delivery of learning.

rapid leadership development will be mission critical - the retirement of the baby boomers and  management ranks that are not sufficiently prepared for leadership roles leads to a generalized crisis regarding leadership skills.  learning will be expected to solve this problem asap.

"simple" simulations arrive - this is a pure guess, but someone will introduce a line of simulations that are inexpensive, easily distributed to desktop, laptop and mobile devices, and instructionally compelling.  their market penetration will look like the emergence of podcasts in late 2005/early 2006.

outsourcing/offshoring slows - already there are signs that outsourcing/offshoring's honeymoon is coming to an end.  business models and longer range strategic and budgetary considerations are called into question.  resulting in a slowdown of companies shifting competencies outside of the enterprise.

web 2.0 tool makers find their long tails - venture capital investment in web 2.0 slows and business models are changed to reflect the fact that most web 2.0 applications can't support a staff of more than 10-15 employees.  but the great majority of the tools can support 1-5 in a mom and pop set up.

 learning circuits blog

5th anniversary brings new image - our 5th anniversary in April will be marked with a new look and direction that reflects the new understandings about learning and when and how it happens.

personal

working for money - i'll find work just in time.....

past experiences. and more to come...

over on learning circuits blog, we've got our third installment of the big question going.  actually this month it's three questions.

what will you remember most about 2006?
what are the biggest challenges for you/us as we head into 2007?
what are your predictions for 2007?

so here's my bit of self-reflection before the blogosphere.

what will i remember about 2006?

it would be quite easy for me to simply label 2006 a disaster area and walk away from it  wondering what the number was on that bus that hit me.  (no not  literally.)   instead i've taken my struggle to find meaningful work as an indicator that i had other more important work to do first.  so using the crutch that i was going through what dotlich/noe/walker describe as a leadership passage in their book with that name and my savings slowly dwindling with every resume sent out and never responded to, i embarked on a mission to see what others around me do, how they handle situations, what do they do to handle all the information and seemingly unlimited number of opportunities to try something new.

but, i believe as a direct result of having to do the soul searching work i've had to do, i've had the chance to do some very positive things for myself this year.  one truly positive experience was working with jay cross on the beta test of his unworkshop.  the opportunity to help build a course that was seeking to truly practice what we preach was a awesome.  while there were times we struggled and there were times when we were both exasperated with each other, what we began cobbling together back in february has evolved into an experience that now seems to be transformational to those who go through it. 

there were two other benefits that came through working with jay on the unworkshop.  one was to have the chance to be so close to a master, watch his world literally crumble under his feet (no one who was there the first week of the beta would want to relive the experience!), and then witness as he righted himself, reoriented himself and completed the three week beta in a blaze of glory with a brilliant "final exam."  jay's performance and, in my role as the course coach, my chance to be sole witness to all of it was my lesson in the power of informal learning through apprenticeship. 

the other positive that came directly from the unworkshop beta was my first two professional publications.  camille jenson asked several of us from the unworkshop to submit articles for a special edition of the alberta distance educaton newsletter she was editing.  then this august, loretta donovan, one of my coaching victims from the unworkshop, invited me to pen the article i mentioned here last week. 

the last two personal highlights were watching george siemen's very open process in conceptualizing his new book, knowing knowledge.  i ended up being one of the last to review the manuscript for george before he published.  to read such powerful thought, and have an  impact on it's published work is why i loved working in textbook publishing years ago.  check out knowing knowledge, it's free to download and it could well change the way you think and learn.  finally i've had the tremendous opportunity to work with tony karrer, one of the real up and comers in learning, as we've worked together to start the big question feature of which this post is a part.  the distributed conversations have been dynamite and lcb has never seen this level of participation. 

but my 2006 wasn't all about me.  it was a year that saw web 2.0 explode onto the learning scene mimicking the general population.  lms's and lcms's are almost only spoken of in conversations about things that aren't working.  wikis, podcasts, rss feeds, social networking tools joined blogs as power tools of the forward looking.  in a move that only surprised me in that it took so long to happen, corporate intranets were "discovered" by the learning world.  informal learning gained more urgency throughout the year.  half the time, i couldn't figure out if jay cross was riding that wave masterfully or if he was the wave machine causing the wave.  second life took on a life of it's own.  including spillover from it's fictional economy into the real world economy and visa versa (starwood hotels, nike, and reuters are just a few dual world vendors) making the singularity seem all the more real. 

it also seemed that the corporate learning world took some time to gather itself after several years of incredible effort to gain credibility and position in the enterprise.  but foundational questions about evaluation and assessment, the substance of the arguments and cornerstone beliefs we cling to, and the continued  worry that we're not ready for that office in the corporate suite seemed to have much of the industry on  edge by the end of the year.  but that may also be explained by what seems to be a bi-annual cycle of doubt and hand wringing that our field seems particularly inclined toward.

whew!  that was exhausting.  if you followed me this far, thank you.  i think i'm going to give both of us a break and break this assignment into at least two parts.   so, one down, two to go.

next:  present  challenges.   and  future predictions.

blog dimensions

lilia effimova is developing a tool to help characterize work-related blogs along a scale of personal to business in regard to who controls, contributes and reads a blog.  she's invited anyone to contribute to here efforts by completing the scale for their blog.  sounded fun, so here's mine.

we were asked to fill out several scales based on criteria that lilia provides on how personal or how business driven that item was for our blog.

from that input, the following chart is derived.  the more  toward the center the array is, the more personally focused the blog. 

overall, i think this is a great tool.  There are few things that need to be considered in revision.

1. the tool assumes that the blogger works for an organization (company, university, etc) that they don't own or control.  thus affiliation with company doesn't really apply to an independent contractor, someone "between jobs" or a graduate student. 
2. process decision making and content decision making really have a third or even 4th dimension.  i know alot of bloggers watch what their readership seems to be reading and then publish more in that area.  another would be the blogosphere itself as an influencer.  this post is more a reaction to the fact that a number of the bloggers i read regularly had analyzed their blogs with lilia's tool.
3. i'm not sure that the individual scales all have the same weight or value.  what i mean is that for a personal blog like mine, an answer of fully personal (the left most box) on the "content control" is a positive.  but because my intent is to help myself and my readers understand business issues the same answer to "blog uses" would be horrible.  so is it better to have a circle closely bundled around the center of the array or one that follows the outward edges?
4. i will be interested to see what the "norm" is for the array chart.  especially if it were to be analyzed along the lines of company blogs, employee blogs, and consultants' blogs.

but like i say, this is a great tool.  my callouts are merely refinements.  Thanks Lilia.