e e learning

there they go with the powerpoint thing, again!

i will admit that when i first saw tony's choice for the may big question, i was a bit surprised.  after all, it feels like we've discussed and argued the pros and cons of powerpoint as a presentation aide over and over in the past few years. 

but given the reaction to the big question, it seems to be, as tony suggests, a still hot topic. i'm in the camp of  those who say blame the user not the tool.  powerpoint allows you to create fantastic presentation support materials, but it also allows you to create really bad presentation support materials. in a comment to the home post,  tj taylor points to dick hardt's identity 2.0 presentation as great use of powerpoint and i agree (although I'm not 100% sure that it's identified that dick used powerpoint versus one of the other quality presentation tools available).

in another comment to the home post, donald clark points to the slideshare best presentations in the world contest winners.  from his comment, it's not clear if donald is just presenting information or whether he's endorsing the winners.  but in my book, the winners are fabulous visual content ebooks.  the difference between dick hardt's identity 2.0 presentation and the slidepoint contest winners is simple. dick. in fact, without dick, the identity 2.0 presentation wouldn't make any sense at all.  and thus, by slideshare's perspective, the identity 2.0 presentation is atrocious.

karen romeis points to an old post of hers on this topic for her response to the big question and she lays out great guidelines for presentations.  the theme of her guidelines is it's about the speaker, not the slides. 

clark quinn makes a statement that i think plays into our perception that we need a crutch like powerpoint to make a successful presentation.  in his post he says:

I also understand the realities of most presentation situations: that people’s attention can be distracted by someone coming in the room, by an email or text message, by a colleague’s wry comment, whatever. Having the structure of the handout and the slides helps them reconnect.

my feeling that if the audience is more interested in who's coming into the room or their email, then i'm not doing my job as a presenter.  the most memorable presentation/speech i ever saw, was when i was 16 and participating in a statewide youth-in-government program back in ohio.  on a sweltering june afternoon 30 years ago, 1200 15- and 16-year-old boys were crammed into the gymnasium at bowling green state university to listen to c. william o'neill, then chief justice of the ohio supreme court, speak on leadership.  within minutes of starting, chief justice o'neill had us so riveted to his speech, that you could have heard a pin drop in that gym.  his soft spoken, genuine words about our futures were spoken directly to each individual in that gym. he cared about me. about my future. so i listened.  i listened with every cell in my body.  i've never quite experienced anything like it sense.  and done years before powerpoint was even a twinkle in bill gates' eye.

on the other end of the spectrum, a company i worked at had a simple, yet ultimately destructive (in my mind), policy regarding presentations and powerpoint.  first, you were required to have a powerpoint "deck" (as they called it) which you would not only use in the presentation, but would send to remote participants in advance.  you also would then send the presentation to all invited participants and, if you were lucky, a list of higher ups who should be informed of your ideas.  this meant that 1) anything you were going to say had to be included in the text or the diagrams of the powerpoint deck so that everyone would get the same content and 2) you were forbidden from using transitions, animations, video, or anything else that would not be presented clearly when paper copies were made.  this meant your :"presentation" was simply you standing before the group that was unfortunately enough to not have another commitment and reading your slides to them. 

now how could anyone blame powerpoint for being the cause of that silliness.  powerpoint wasn't meant to be used as a word processor.  going back to slideshare and all the tools available to turn your powerpoint presentations into elearning the misuse and misunderstanding of presentation tools is multiplied by these tools which, for the most part are no better than the "shovel ware" that would convert textbooks or "your handouts" into a electronic course on cd or the web.  while we have successfully placed that shovelware in its rightful place in the trash, there are thousands of us who praise these new tools for converting powerpoint.  shovelware is shovelware no matter how flashy it is.

today i use some simple guidelines for my presentations:

1. if i can hand you a copy of my powerpoint slides and you can accurately tell me what i'm going to say and present, then they're not ready yet.  a good powerpoint presentation should border on being meaningless prior to its use in my presentations.
2. if i'm using text, is it there for me or for my audience?  text is there to remind me of what i want to say and then secondarily as an organizer of what i've said for my audience.
3. is there something that will emotionally move my audience?  make them laugh, remind them of something from their past, excite them about the future, surprise them to the point of being startled, something that boggles their mind, etc.  look at dick hardt's presentation again with this guideline in mind and you'll quickly understand why you were so engaged by it.
4. remember, in any given presentation, each member of my audience is capable of walking away remember three, maybe five, if i'm really good, ideas and concepts.  focus on the effective delivery of these key concepts and I'll succeed.
5. and, personally for me, i need to be able to have fun.  if i'm having fun, the it's likely my audience will walk away with a good feeling for what i had to share with them. and there's a better chance they'll retain it.

as karen romeis says in her post, it's about the speaker, not the powerpoint slides. there is no such thing as death by powerpoint.  death by a boring presenter - now that's a real problem.

if you're still puzzled about all this, give me a jingle, i'd be glad to coach you on your next presenation - at my usual hourly rate.

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are motivation and drive innate or learned?

on his blog, david maister has sparked a nice dialogue regarding how some people seem to be driven and others are more satisfied to put in their 9-to-5 and pick up their paycheck.  while a number of his readers picked the question about motivation - what is it and who has it, david re-focused the group on a second question of where it comes from:

Do you think there are any generalizations we can make about why some people have the will, determination and drive to excel, while others do not? Genes? Parenting? Social Background? Paranoia and Neuroses?

And what does you explanation / hypothesis say about building an organization (of any kind, commercial, governmentall, not-for profit)? What kind of selection processes should organizations use to identify such people?

this was my comment in response.  what do you think?  i've included some links at this end of this post to previous posts of mine that are relevant to this discussion:

fair enough to call us back to the original question, david.  i guess i skipped it because it's really a question that no longer fits the answer.  the nature vs. nuture question is a relic because brain science, child learning, biology, and cognitive science have all come to similar discoveries.

it's both and.....

we are born with rudimentary knowledge and skills and a very curious disposition.  this initial base of knowledge and skills is added to and molded by experience.  the process of adding to our knowledge, reflecting on what we know, what we've forgotten and what we need to learn (or relearn) continues on throughout our lifetime.

perhaps, if all environmental inputs were identical for all of us, we'd all end up in the same place.  but life presents us each with a unique set of experiences.  some experiences move us ahead, some hold us back. some of us are born with a silver spoon in our mouths with every advantage and end up holding up banks at gun point.  while some of us are born into the direst socio-economic conditions, denied education, imprisoned yet end up a freely elected leader of a country and a world recognized humanitarian.

it seems we have an innate motivation to learn and grow that is either encouraged or discouraged by the events of our lives.  this would mean that managers do have a role in increasing (or decreasing) employee motivation.  what is encouraging to me about this understanding is that we don't have to create the core motivation - it's in us from birth.

throughout life, we amass "cognitive rubble."  this might include major issues like prejudice or resentments.  but it also includes minor issues like blindspots in our network,  biases in work processes, fear of change, unidimensional styles, bad habits, lack of knowledge or skills, lack of experience, unclear goals, misunderstandings, etc. helping to clear the rubble from the mess created by our individual pasts and then keeping things clear so that employees can find and nurture their innate drive to grow and learn is definitely part of manager's role.

certainly, if I'm a hiring manager, i will try to find an employee who has the smallest rubble pile.  it just makes sense.  but i hope i would have also identified those key factors of the job and what character traits fit and don't fit the position.  if the job calls for 75% travel, i better probe to see what the candidate thinks about being away from home.

but no hiring process is going to find out every character quirk of each employee.  So organizations need to be built in a manner that fosters diversity of style and character.  that draws strength from differences.   the goal is to enable individual employees to bring the best that they are to the table for the benefit of the organization.

related posts on e e learning:

brain and learning principles

how team leaders show support

tearing down strawmen

e-pologia? nah.

harold jarche discusses albert ip's decision to drop the "e" from the name of his blog which is now entitled "random walk in learning."  (though don't change your rss feed aggregator, the url remains as it was.)  ip maintains that having the "e" in front of learning commits us to only talking about learning when technology is involved.  jarche concludes:

Perhaps the creation of the “learning technologies” field has done us a disservice in spawning a separate discipline from learning (or education or training). As tool builders and tool users for millennia, we cannot escape our technologies, nor should we give them over to a small priesthood of experts.

obviously i have some interest in this issue with two "e's" hanging off the front of my blog's name. you can check out my comment that i made on harold's blog over in the green cocomments box in the left sidebar.

i may be weird, but i've always considered myself to be in the learning profession. to me the "e" in elearning doesn't mean i seen technology as being a higher calling to learning.  the chalkboard and textbooks are both forms of technology used in learning situations.  a good counselor or manager knows to get out from behind the desk when seeking to create an environment of openness when they are seeking to understand what an employee is saying.  i'd maintain that thats a good use of the technology in a learning situation.

for me the "e" does indeed stand for a particular subset of technologies that include computers and other electronic devices used to send or receive data.  it also includes the internet/worldwide web and other video and audio transmission and retrieval systems to which these devices are connected.  it also represents the human interface between learner, facilitator and these tools.   blogs, wikis,  rss, metadata tags, high definition digital video, voip, spread-spectrum technologies,  wireless broadband, mobile communication devices, other world environments, massive multi-player online games and others are affording new opportunities for learning to be accelerated and to reach learners who have previously been under- served either by access to education and educational resources or by instructional biases and limitations.

i've never seen myself as some sort of expert here to guide a congregation of followers to a promise land that only i and a few others truly understand.  i'm more the nutball daredevil jumping off a ledge into an unknown pool of water who screams back up to his friends, 'see!  the water's just fine.'  in one of the very first posts to this blog, my bonnie lies over the ocean - mixing metaphors part 2,   i talked  about  elearning  in the  workplace  being a vast ocean of knowledge as we pushed the limits in the areas of education, technology and business.  this vast ocean was, and in many respects still is, terrifying to educators and business people. (techies by nature aren't terrified of open water.)

to me, being a learning professional who specializes in elearning means i'm willing to test the waters.  check out that new technology and figure out if it might help improve learning.  if it does, then it's my duty to make it make sense to other learning professionals.  it boils down to the same things no matter what technology you use or don't use.  i'm here to help improve the following process:

• determine if there is something that someone must, should or wants to learn
• find the motivational lever that will help them through the learning process
• help them find or present to them the content they need
• guide them in understanding, learning or mastering the information or behavior
• finding a way to re-enforce what they have learned over time to assure that it sticks
• assessing or helping them self-assess whether or not they have learned what they set out to learn.

that i happen to do this via new and emerging technologies means putting an e before learning is warranted.  i won't apologize for that.   if  i'm too focused on the technology and forget that above process is what's important then you have permission to change the name of my blog to "e e."

how innovators think

george siemens points to an article on 10 ways that youthful technologists think about innovation from technology review by Jason Pontin.  here are the ten ways:

1. successful innovators are famously untroubled by the prospect of failure.
   
2. many innovators appreciate failure.
3. innovators commonly recognize that "problems and questions are the limiting resource in innovation."
4. innovators find inspiration in disparate disciplines.
5. Innovation flourishes when organizations allow third-party experimentation with their products.
   
6.  Fra­gility is the enemy of innovation: systems should boast broad applications and be unbreakable.
   
7. Real innovators delight in giving us what we want: solutions to our difficulties and expansive alternatives to our established ways.
   
8. They are, it is true, sometimes perplexed by our ignorance of our own needs.
   
9. Innovators can divine needs by applying a utilitarian imperative: they ask, Would the innovation help someone now?
   
10. Many innovators become technologists because they want to better the world.

Now that doesn't seem so difficult, does it? ­

technorati tags:innovation, technology, failure, experimentation

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i thought the "e" was going away

not surprisingly when doing an ego search on "eelearning," i was delighted to see jim forde's post eelearning <-- (that's not a typo) on his edtechnot.com blog. i was surprised to see it wasn't talking about this blog but about a call for papers by jim morrison in his newsletter for innovate.

we have become familiar with “e-learning” or (e)lectronic learning,which uses communication technologies to connect students andinstructors separated by distance and/or by time, and to providestudents with access to learning resources and interaction. and thereis a long history of (e)xperiential education, where learning takesplace in the “real world” of work and service and governing and theother institutions we create to organize our encounters and interests.

historically, electronic and experiential learning have been unique and separatedomains of study and practice. the joining of the two e’s in“ee-learning” provides an opportunity to define and organize anemerging pedagogy that brings together these two domains.

seems as many are trying to get the "e" out of elearning, mr. morrison wants to add another. it seems to me that eelearning is no more that a form of just-in-time learning or workflow learning. his questions toward the end of the excerpt forde includes are provocative nonetheless. what does become of the university if all learning were to become embedded in workplace settings?

(PS - I was also surprised that this was the first time this post had appeared in my searches, maybe google has a glitch! oh, my!)

technorati tags:eelearning, elearning, higher education, workflow learning, just-in-time learning

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yet another wake up call

in his blog e-clippings mark oehlert mentions an article by david maister entitled why (most) training is useless  in which maister says that most training is poorly planned, irrrelevant to employee's current work, and seldom tied to corporate startegy.  mark is right in his assessment that it's sad that the blackboard patent issue over shadowed this honest and confrontational article.  please read the article in it entirety.  i'll summarize the three of is major points.

0 of 3 isn't good, is it?

Maister shares three questions he asks potential clients to determine whether he'll take on the challenge.>

a good example of ill-conceived (and premature) training approaches is seen in the many calls i get to put on training programs to help people become better managers. i put my callers through a standard set of questions:

• did you choose people for managerial roles because they were the type of people who could get their fulfillment and satisfaction out of helping other people shine rather than having the ego-need to shine themselves? (no!)
• did you select them because they had a prior history of being able to give a critique to someone in such a way that the other person says: “wow, that was really helpful, I’m glad you helped me see all that.” (No!)
• do you reward these people for how well their group has done, or do you reward them for their own personal accomplishments in generating business and serving clients? (both, with an emphasis on their personal numbers!)

so, let’s summarize, i say. you’ve chosen people who don’t want to do the job, who haven’t demonstrated any prior aptitude for the job, and you are rewarding them for things other than doing the job?

thanks, but I’ll pass on the wonderful privilege of training them.

to me, this so clearly points to the need for the learning/training function and the performance management function within a company working in a very coordinated fashion if not merged into one business process.  learning is the means by which an employee, guided by their managers, can understand the performance changes specified in the performance evaluations and goal setting of performance management.

well i was only following you

after all, with learning interventions, we are seeking a change in behavior, attitude or skills in the targeted members of our workforce.  the second key point that maister makes is regarding the role of the manager.  he says there are four key areas that managers must attend to if they are going to affect change in an organization:

systems: does the company actually monitor, encourage, and reward this (new) behavior?
attitude: do people want to do this? Do they buy in to its importance?
knowledge: do they know how to do it?
skills: are they any good at implementing and executing what they know?

...the importance of the attitude questions is often underestimated. It is management’s job to make people want to learn things by managing the “why” — helping them understand why this is important, why it is exciting and fulfilling, why people should sacrifice their time and attention

i like that he includes systems as the first variable in this list.  so often the systems effects are ignored because they are either too daunting in magnitude or because they are outside the scope and/or capabilities of those involved in learning to effect change.  This is why active and continuing executive sponsorship must be maintained for any key projects.  inevitably there will be a cultural or system resistor to the change involved in a project.  the executive sponsor's job is to anticipate and clear the way for the project team.

finally, maister's point regarding the role of the manager is dead on.  in fact, it may be the most important role in any change effort.  research has shown that employees depend on their manager to provide them with direction and insight into what they are to do.  without the active participation of the managers in the organization, you'll have a hard time directing the employees'  learning every step of the way.  it's essential that every learning department build a campaign to win over the managers within their organization.   because you may think you are leading the parade, but that's only the case when the manager is right beside you.  It's the manager they are all following.

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brain and learning principles

in exploring the new horizons for learning site, i came across an interesting set of articles by renate nummela caine and geoffrey caine.  in their research on the human brain and learning, they established twelve principles regarding how we learn and what prevents us from learning.  their twelve principles are:

1. All learning is physiological.
2. The Brain-Mind is social.
3. The search for meaning is innate.
4. The search for meaning occurs through patterning.
5. Emotions are critical to patterning.
6. The Brain-Mind processes parts and wholes simultaneously.
7. Learning involves both focused attention and peripheral perception.
8. Learning always involves conscious and unconscious processes.
9. There are at least two approaches to memory: archiving individual facts or skills or making sense of experience.
10. Learning is developmental.
11. Complex learning is enhanced by challenge and inhibited by threat associated with helplessness.
12. Each brain is uniquely organized

quoted from 12 Brain/Mind Learning Principles in Action – One Author’s Personal Journey.

i particularly found it interesting that they included #3 (search for meaning in innate) and #5 (the role of emotions).  in my mind, these are two critical aspects of learning that have too often been left out of the mix in workplace learning. 

it's been my experience that there's a believe that employees are lazy and avoid training at all costs because they don't want to learn.  this is an arrogant dismissal of negative feedback.  we've blamed the learners rather than face the fact that we've offered up irrelevant, boring learning experiences.  employees learn every day.  they have to, it's in our nature as human beings.  it's just a matter of what they choose to learn and whether that jives with what the company needs them to learn.

the workplace is generally considred a place where emotions are supposed to be held in check.  even the expression of happiness is often expected to be muted and controlled.  let alone emotions like anger and sadness.  that learning has traditionally ignored the emotions is not surprising.

there are some breakthrough programs which have begun to explore using emotions as a way to stimulate learning.  one such program was regarding for sexual harassment training which began with the learner receiving an email asking them to gather up their files on one of their employees and reporting to their managers' office immediately because of a personnel issue.  imagine how your heart would be racing and your mind would be sorting through all of your interactions with that employee.  your attention would be laser beam as you sat down with your manager.  now granted, poorly conducted, such an approach would be dangerous, so training of the manager in this case would be paramount.  but if done well, the learner would never forget the lesson taught.

all 12 of these principles are thought provoking and have much to say about how the facilitation of learning can and should be approached.  i curious about what the LCB community has to say about them.

technorati tags:brain sciences, learning theory, neuroscience, new horizons for learning

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tearing down strawmen

i believe that one of the key factors in when and how workers' attitude and motivation regarding workplace learning will shift from ambivalence to enthusiasm will occur when both learning and development professionals and line busines managers both change their paradigm of how adult learners learn.  this includes understanding informal learning, social networks, and performance development.  this post will look at a major concept in education that i believe must be overthrown before this paradigmic change can occur.

the concept that adults learn radically different from children must torn down!

in his book, the modern practice of adult education (the current edition is entitled the adult learner), malcolm knowles sets adult learning up as dichotomous with child learning.  charts like the one below can be found in websites from around the globe (a google search on "pedagogy vs. andragogy" and variants produced 1254 results). it's easily one of the best know models in education.

the following chart is typical of these charts.  knowles even went as far as to characterize the andragogic side of the pairings as "good" versus the "bad" pedagogical attributes.  he backed away from the good/bad characterization in the book's second edition, but the damage was already done.  this characterization of the radically different ways of learning is among the most accepted tenents in education.

attributes of children's learning (pedagogy) versus adult learning (andragogy)

pedagogy	vs	andragogy
mandatory attendance	vs	voluntary attendance
subject centered	vs	problem centered
dependant learner	vs	independent learners
inexperienced learner	vs	experienced learner
teacher prescribed content	vs	learner prescribed content
learners grouped by age/ability	vs	learners grouped by interest/need
learning for the future	vs	learning for the now
learners subordinate to teacher	vs	learners equal to the teacher
rigid, traditional structure	vs	flexible, alternative structure
passive learners	vs	active learners

 

with these dichotomies intrenched in our thinking, we continually fall in to the same old habits when it comes to instructional design and facilitation.  Instead assuming that  "adults won't play games in class"; we should be determining what types of "games" are stimulating to adults and when would they be considered relevant and worthwhile.  Many consider simulations to be quite game like, yet well crafted simulations have been wildly successful with adults.

you might argue that knowles actually was talking about instructional methodologies and that these tenets should be read only with regard to instructional design for formal settings.  there are two arguments against this position.

1. the vast majority of the current presentation of these attributes is as children’s learning versus adult learning.  i did not find one example of this dichotomy being presented as “methods for teaching children in a school setting vs. methods for teaching adults in a formal educational setting.”  no matter what knowles’ intent was, the current interpretation should be debunked.
2. some of these tenets are false even in light of the methodology argument. this is the argument that knowles acquiesced to in the second edition of the modern practice of adult education and has been borne out in new evidence uncovered in brain sciences, evolutionary psychology, genetic studies and the cognitive science research.

one method for invalidating a theory is to demonstrate examples in which the theory does not hold to be true.  this is the method i'll use to bring this misconceived theory of adult learning to it's knees.  let's run through each of the pairings one at a time.
 

mandatory attendance vs. voluntary attendance

this is clearly not the case even at the methodology level of the argument. adults are regularly required to attend legal compliance training (sexual harassment, violence in the workplace, etc.), adults are often required to attend remedial education programs by the courts, and professionals in a wide variety of fields are required to attend continuing education courses to maintain their licenses and certifications.  clearly pre-school aged children are not compelled by an external authority to learn each day - but they do.  and to believe that the only learning that happens in a school is what is taught between the opening and closing bells is simply being naive.

conclusion: obviously, attendance policies have very little to do with how humans learn at any age.   

 
dependant learners vs. independent learners

this pairing regards children as dependent upon their instructor to structure their learning experiences and maintains that adults structure their own learning. clearly, children in the most dynamic stages of human learning are seldom guided in their learning.  play and exploration are the means by which they rapidly gather and assimilate information into knowledge. when they get confused, they will defer to an "expert" - usually a parent, a caregiver, or any kid who is older than they are.  on the other side of the pair, in this time of too much to do in too little time, our learners and their managers are demanding that we stop wasting their time and deliver the content they need.  or better yet, let them connect with the "expert" directly.  then they'll have a resource they can turn to when it's needed.

the shared experiences of parent and child, tradesperson and novice, teacher and student are all examples of learning through collaborative activities. such collaboration is invaluable by making accessible to learners what they might not be able to learn alone. (billett, 2001, p. 19)

conclusion: the reality is that all learners are at times dependent in their learning and at other times independent. the variable is not  age but  rather a factor of experience  and expertise.

 
 

web2.0/teaching2.0/learning2.0

there is a great discussion over at the connectivism blog about the terms  web 2.0, teaching 2.0, and learning 2.0.  in my mind, george siemens is one of the true though leaders in education today.  check connectivism out.  here is my two cents in the 2.0 discussion.

as a label and a concept web2.0 makes good sense to me.  one, it's technology.  technology uses a versioning approach.  two, it's a huge shift in technology that is happening and not just in the learning arena.

teaching 2.0 makes some sense, but i worry that too many instructors will cling to the old ways and methods til the bitter end.  some of those will give mouth service to web2.0 technologies (use a wiki to write your term paper, but make sure it's no more than 20 pages long and double spaced when you turn it in.  doh!)  to me teaching 2.0 would include the abolition of linear term papers, team learning (including transuniversity even transnational teams) becoming superior to individual knowledge aggregation, plagerism disappearing as a concept (because citations would be in the metadata of the concepts), and student won't gain admission to a school but will be awarded an apprenticeship with a department.  then you're talking something equivalent to web2.0.

as for learning 2.0  i just think the term is so limiting in concept to what truly in happening.  are "new ways" of learning

whew! what we take for granted

i've spent the last few days helping my mother bring my father home from the hospital where he had been for he past two months after his last heart attack.  in addition to the physical problems caused by the heart attack and then two months of relative inactivity, he's coping with near blindness caused by his lifelong diabetes.

i've never truly comprehended exactly how much we depend upon the perceptions we know and use on a minute by minute basis.  balance, direction, perspective, and distance are all concepts which don't mean much to him without the visual cues he's depended upon all of his life.   the home he's lived in for almost 40 years is alien and confusing to him.