Learning Rocks

"Listen, Observe" - the sound of chances squandered

2012-01-08T22:46:00.002Z

Day three of my PTLLS and, and after a whistlestop tour of TNA (training needs analysis, for the uninitiated; "straightforward" apparently) and teaching methods (PowerPoint isn't, but reading is, and so is "e-learning"* - best suited only to reflective/theorist learning styles though), we had gotten as far as lesson planning.

Building on earlier work on SMART objectives we were required to plan a lesson to meet the objective we had written. I, like a couple of others, had taken the easy route by writing my example objective to meet the first of the proffered suggestions - making a cup of tea.

Working on to a blank copy of our lesson plan template and in homage to the training we were burying that week, I thought that the requisite for any such training would be at least a good 45 minutes on the history of tea drinking and production, perhaps best taught by some videos, maybe starring Jonny Vegas and Monkey, and summarised by drawing a timeline on flipchart paper (learning objective, where tea comes from) and a solid hour long facilitated discussion on tea drinking habits of the English (learning objective, how different tea drinkers might ask for their tea - milk, sugar or lemon - fancy "foreign" teas were out of scope for this project).

I may have been facetious, but my point had been an important one - as a "tea making expert" or "tea-sommelier" I may well have thought all these elements important in gaining a deeper understanding of the perfect cup of tea, but from the point of view of a manager wanting to get a member of staff up to speed on making passable tea as quickly as possible, I was way off the mark. But it went unchallenged - not a question was asked. Fair enough; perhaps my irreverent tone had the effect of making my whole plan a joke, not worthy of comment.

But another learner in our group had make a clear stab at doing things by the book and at least making a reasonable attempt to create a lesson plan on tea drinking. Over six separate sessions learners would learn distinct but related topics, culminating in a practical exercise that drew things together.

The sheet we were using included several columns, central of which were two headed "Tutor activity" and "Learner activity". In the first column my colleague had stated that the tutor would carry out a variation on presenting to the class, while in each of the boxes in the second column learners would "listen, observe". After a day spent discussing teaching methods (albeit somewhat confusingly), the first chance to put these in to practice was met with the same old response.

But the trainer did not pick up on that. For reasons of politeness and decorum I wouldn't have expected him to call anyone out by name, but I might reasonably have expected the summary for the session to draw attention to the value of a column listing at a glance all the learner activity for just checking that you are using different, appropriate techniques to support each learning point. At the very least, I thought the trainer might use it as an opportunity to tie these two elements of the course together - to show how element A fitted with B to produce a better outcome. But he didn't.

I'm not highlighting this particularly to shame my co-participant on the course - I'm not naming them after all. I am however using this one instance to highlight the parlous state of educator training in the post-16, or "lifelong learning" sector.

This course was being taught by an experienced independent consultant who has taught PTLLS course in many places. Besides the way this day was covered, we have been subjected to learning styles (my rebuttal of which by means of reference to an excellent summary article by Guy Wallace was dismissed as "another point of view"), murky exercises that seem only to aim to get us to list some words and call that learning the topic; course notes that comprise dozens of unnumbered pages of content often copied verbatim from Businessballs.com; an implicit assumption that training can and will only take place in person, in the classroom or during one-to-ones in the workplace; I could go on.

And it's not only this one trainer - they themselves recounted their own experience of having been "taught" during their own PTLLS course about learning objectives by a duo at a local college who espouse a uniquely dogmatic approach: every session, no matter what the duration or overall goal, must include around five learning objectives that must be covered plus one or two "nice-to-haves" (and I think by extension, so must every session have a slide that gives the same). This peculiarly unique take on things seems to combine the usual "rules" with some half-remembered suggestions on the prioritisation of content (the "musts, shoulds and coulds" as I was told; but for private use only as a tool for time-managing engaged groups, not explicitly sharing with learners) and perhaps the "rule of seven" for remembering things.

That experience for our trainer had been some 8 or so years ago, but I distinctly recall puzzling at this same approach when another colleague undertook the same course at the same college only a couple of years ago. That means at least 5 years' worth of new entrants to the sector have been taught the same strange take on objectives; quite apart from a mandated curriculum that includes unproven theories, like learning styles, being taught as "holy writ".

How can the post-16 sector ever hope to aspire to anything other than punishing mediocrity if it not only allows this kind of thing to persist, but actively enshrines these approaches in the indoctrination of new disciples? At a time when state schooling seems to be failing the national need for adequately trained young people (not to mention failing those young people themselves), and the powers-that-be seem to be pinning their hopes on apprenticeships and other forms of post-16 vocational learning to remedy that failure, it is surely negligent of all concerned that those tasked to help are being so poorly served by the systems designed to prepare them.

Educators for those failed by education being themselves failed by education? Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised.

* Interestingly, my point that "e-learning" is simply a delivery channel - online learners can watch or experience lectures, read, engage in simulations, discuss topics with others, be tested and so on through nearly all of the other, somewhat arbitrary list of "teaching methods" - was not really appreciated.

** There was no double asterisk, but one might appear in that final paragraph. I don't mean to suggest that vocational education is only for those failed by school - that would be a silly thing to say and completely untrue as members of my own family would attest - but I didn't want to ruin that pithy final sound bite by hedging my statement or garnishing it with hard-to-pronounce typographical symbols.

Preparing for preparing to teach in the life-long learning sector

2011-12-22T11:11:00.000Z

Another season, another department shuffle, another new manager. It's been a turbulent couple of years here at EP Towers. My job has morphed and changed and for several months I haven't had a clear job title, much less a job description.However, there's a very positive flow under way now that I am interested to be a part of.

For the first time since I've been here there is to be a genuine focus on teaching and learning in our short course training provision - the most obvious manifestation of which is a decision to require our trainers in future to hold the creatively accronymed PTTLS (aka "petals"), CTTLS ("kettles") and DTTLS ("dettols"), more formally: "Preparing to..", "Certificate in..." and "Diploma in..." Teaching in the Lifelong Learning Sector.

This suit of courses is obligatory for people wishing to teach national qualifications for which there may be funding - for example "professional" courses in colleges or NVQs. Coming from the corporate e-learning sector, which to my experience tends to think of itself as something apart from (possibly even "anti-") mainstream "education" in many respects, I've never really looked at these qualifications very closely. I've assumed that they will be focused on classroom delivery. Given that I am largely in a training design-not-delivery role - and some time spent "delivering" training is required - I've not given it a second thought.

However, as part of the new way of thinking the company is running this course for some colleagues and out of curiosity I've gotten myself on the attendee list. The course can be run in all manners of ways - since this was set up by a classroom fixated colleague it's not going to be making much (any?) use of online tools, and helpfully crams the learning components in to two info-dump sessions since this is the cheaper way of doing it. The first is this week, three days in the empty classrooms at work.

I do have some reservations. A former colleague completed it a couple of years ago. Looking at the work she did, it looked very similar to the CIPD's Certificate in Training Practice, which I did as a new trainer back in 2003 - which is to say it was full of the sorts of things that Will Thalheimer rails against: learning styles, that what we say makes up only 8% of how messages are communicated, Dale's Cone of Experience etc. But it need not be the case as this sort of detail depends on the tutor delivering the course, so I will reserve judgement until later in the week. I do intend to blog my experience as part of my reflective learning so let's see how it gets on.

If you have experience of PTTLs then I'd be interested to hear what you made of it.

Gamification by example - my slides

2011-11-07T16:45:00.000Z

After a suitable delay, here are my slides from my talk at the eLearning Network's October Converting Classroom Courses event in London. I've added a summary of what I said on each slide in the notes.

Gamification by example

View more presentations from Dan Roddy

This was the "winning" talk on the day. Not sure I agree with the idea of it being a competitive event, however, I certainly felt better prepared for having used my audio tool, so if you are working on a talk for Ignite or PK, give it a go.

In defence of jargon

2011-10-28T10:14:00.000+01:00

"Every science requires a special language because every science has its own ideas."

Ettiene Bonnot de Condillac (circa 1780)

"Jargon" has been a fairly persistent meme on Twitter lately. I seem to be in a minority amongst a group of learning tech people which I feel is well meaning, but misplaced in its desire to obliterate "in" language.

I'm all for clear, open and inclusive language in business - it's a workplace activity I could count as a hobby; discouraging the odd, clunky "institutional" language of passive sentences and misused pronouns. I've even tried unsuccessfully to convince organisations to pursue Plain English Campaign accreditation, though so far to no avail. I am a fully paid up swatter of jargon when it is used to obfuscate and bamboozle.

So, it's not that I defend the use of "jargon" in all instances - far from it; I agree completely that "our" jargon has no place in discussions with learners or with our customers until they are ready for it, should they ever need to be - but it is important to recognise that blanket assertions to the effect "jargon must be avoided in all circumstances" aren't helpful and are, I believe, misguided.

Jargon is exclusionary
One argument against jargon, perhaps even the argument against jargon is that it is exclusionary.

I recently joined the board of governors at my son's school - part of a comparatively large contingent of new faces. Halfway through the first full AGM the Chair apologised for lapsing in to "jargon". The subsequent explanation and referral to a handy glossary was welcome, but the apology, in my view at least, was entirely unnecessary - schools are a place quite unlike any other environment and they are part of a complex environment of funding, scrutiny and measurement that necessarily creates a language all of its own. However, once you understand it, it all makes perfect sense. More importantly it speeds things up. Had the Head to speak all the acronyms out in full and explain every last word to us newbies we would not have covered as much ground. This "jargon" was technical language; precise and concise.

That was entirely proper in its environment. What would be wrong would be for the school to use much of that jargon with parents. And in most cases it doesn't. But arguably education generally does. My son had reached Key Stage 2 before I even really understood what KS1 meant...

The sales person who stands in front of a new client and starts talking about LMSs, Scorm, client-server, protocols, ADDIE, terminal learning objectives blah, blah, blah is doing so to gain a position of authority and strength in negotiations with the client. This is not helpful and they should avoid it unless they are confident they will be understood. Any of these words could well be useful at a later date as they relate to specific ideas that the client may want to discuss in greater depth, and as experts in these fields then it our job to guide and educate the them, if they so wish. But it would be hard for us on the "inside" to get by without many of these words. LMS perhaps, protocol probably. But Scorm or ADDIE? These aren't jargon; they're our technical language.

Just as I don't think surgeons would be quite as able to carry out their work anything like as successfully if they set out to "cut through the skin, pull aside the white blubbery bits, poke about to find the brown nobbly bit on the pinky squigey thing and cut it off with a hot burny knife"; nor would theoretical physicists, er, be able to exist at all if they didn't have "exclusionary" technical terms to describe their ideas, neither can we really discuss what it is we are able to help people achieve if we don't have some technical language of our own.

The key is to recognising that this language can be exclusionary, and making allowances or creating ways of dealing with it if and when it occurs. Embrace it among those that can understand it and make the most of its power to be precise and concise; make allowances for those that aren't up to speed and help them learn; avoid it completely when it is inappropriate and likely to confuse.

#madeupwords
Of course, there are clear examples of daft "made up words" - it goes with the territory of L&D, full of faddy made up concepts that require exotic, self-important lexicons - think MBTI, learning styles in all their flavours, NLP and so on. The tweet-child of the #madeupword meme, "leaderment" is not so much a genuine attempt to add a new word to the vocabulary as it is a misguided attempt to create a "catchy" label for an entirely new concept of dubious worth. The word is problematic because the idea is problematic.

Another recent bete-noir is "gamification", coincidentally the subject of my talk at the recent eLNConvert event. The great irony here is that before I picked gamification as my topic for the PK, I had intended to present a talk entitled "20 words L&D should stop using now". Gamification was on that list. Indeed, as my talk said, gamification is a tricky word since its definition is so broad as to stray close to meaningless and it is favoured by people who speak in hyperbole. This, for me, makes it problematic. However, it does describe something - the application of game-derived concepts and characteristics in to things that aren't themselves games - that is actually happening; and it does so in a handy word that is less clunky than that phrase that I just used. You might dislike the concept, but it is something concrete(-ish).

What's more, gamification is following an established construction - the "-ify" ending turns nouns in to verbs with the meaning "to imbue with the qualities of" or to "extend the reach of". Think personify or mystify. The -ication ending turns that verb back to a noun to label the activity. In this sense, the coiner of the word gamification is behaving just like a child who says "I eated jelly" - using the rules that they know exist to describe something that has happened, in the absence of an alternative "correct" label.

I'm not labouring this point to justify my using gamification - "leaderment is bad because I don't like it but gamification is okay because I do" - but to show that some new words are natural developments to accommodate new things, but others are specifically manufactured to create and propagate new concepts. I'm not saying that the latter is wrong either - after all, that's exactly what brand names are. However, that I think hits one of the significant objections to "made up" words - they smack of an attempt to slip in someone else's idea in to the conversation. I don't feel comfortable using a word that is in effect selling someone else's idea. We don't wish to be co-opted as anyone's mouthpiece.

Life imitates the art of language
Language shapes our perception of the world. Give something a label and the label can define that thing. It's the trick that's being played in the coinage of "leaderment", but it's the problem that keeps "e-learning" in a box for some organisations. There's "learning" and there's its other, "e-learning". The "e" keeps it different somehow, rather than just another mode of delivery that could sit alongside b-learning, v-learning and a-learning in the trainer's toolbox* (book, video and audio, if you're wondering).

But it is language's ability to shape reality that makes me wary of striving to remove all jargon from our vocabularies. Appropriate, meaningful jargon enables to us to think of things that are not otherwise labelled - allows us to use ideas we would have no handle on otherwise. Take away the sales pitches, the babbling, the dead metaphors and downright daft ideas - no, really, please do! - but leave me my jargon. It's the tools with which I turn my craft!

* actually, it's more complicated than that as it can also mean a channel for delivering all of those other types of learning as well, but you know that. I just wanted to be clear.

The informal learning plugin, on an LMS near you soon

2011-10-21T21:08:00.001+01:00

I just read a tweet from Jay Cross that took me to a post from a representative of Blackboard, makers of the dreadful LMS, purporting to dispel "myths" about informal learning. Given that I take informal learning to be a conceptual notion of knowledge acquisition and sharing rather than a defined and fairly uncontroversial body of knowledge like, say, climate science or evolution, I was intrigued and felt I needed to know more about these "myths".

I had to respond but not sure that my contribution will be welcome, so thought, like Jay, worth reposting. I can't set quotes on the Android Blogger app, sorry...

"Hang on a moment, doesn't this post fundamentally miss the point about informal learning as it was originally presented, by you Jay, that it is happening anyway? That 70-80% of the learning in an organisation is NOT taking place in the allocated space but at the water cooler or cafe. This seems to suggest that informal learning is something newly invented and available now for you to rollout in your organisation or institution.

Point 1 says "too unstructured", but too unstructured compared to what? To a planned taught course? Doesn't informal happen alongside it anyway? It may not be on Twitter, it may be in the bar or students union afterwards, but it is happening now irrespective of what learning professionals might think.

Point 2 includes the nonsequitor concept that ubiquitous computing somehow negates knowledge growth. I don't see the connection here.

When you consider the line "when informal learning comes with clear instructions and desired outcomes are explained ahead of time, learners will be more likely to stay on task and work towards the goals set out during training sessions" you have to wonder what it is that is informal about it. That to me is pretty formal, or perhaps "homework" might be another phrase to use.

Point 3 further suggests that the author believes that informal learning is a new phenomena by suggesting its impact can be measured. This can only be the case if informal learning is a new factor, but if it is something that is there to begin with, how do you measure the impact of an already present thing. How could you account for the impact unless by seeing what happens if you remove the structured, formal component altogether?

Points 4 & 5 reveal the authors underlying assumption that informal learning means using social media, but surely the concept is more sophisticated than that?

The final paragraph reveals the killer punch. You too can have informal learning on your LMS if you just buy a Blackboard product. "informal learning" on an LMS!? Isn't that paradoxical? Jay, you do your worthy concept a disservice by even dignifying this ludicrous post with your comment."

Prepare better for lightning talks

2011-10-20T21:01:00.001+01:00

I'm heading to London tomorrow to take part in another eLearning Network event, this time speaking as part of their Pecha Kucha programme - a great way to get to events for a more affordable price.

Pecha Kucha is a form of lightning presentation (one that is less than 10 minutes) very like Ignite, which I'm closely involved with. However, although I watch lots of talks, I don't often give them. One reason I don't is it is quite time consuming to sit down and thrash the idea out. Another is that once you've actually settled on your concept, practising can be hard.

I think I've come up with an idea to overcome both these barriers, my audio templates. I've created a sound track that is simply timed to match the timings for Ignite and PK, 15 seconds or 20 seconds a slide respectively. No longer am I tied to my PC to work on the ideas or practice my talk - I can listen to it anywhere. I've found it helpful in two ways.

If you have a rough idea for a talk then "riffing" over the track helps to give form to a rough idea.
Once you have an idea you can practice it while doing something else. I have a 30 minute drive to work each day. That's 3-4 run throughs on the way in and again on the way home.

So here they are, feel free to take them. They are first drafts really - I want to add something as a backing track to cover the silence, and perhaps revoice them with someone better sounding than me. But they work.

>> Download 5 minute Ignite audio template (mp3)
>> Download 6 min 40 second PK audio template (mp3)

For the record, they were produced with the ever helpful Audacity.

Badgification

2011-10-14T22:18:00.002+01:00

Rule 1: use symbols your users
will relate to

In keeping with the craze for following crazes, I've decided to add "badges" to our company wiki, Wisdom. I built Wisdom first as a personal note-taking tool on our development server, but then it has grown in to a fairly healthy internal resource for my colleagues.

I've usually managed to get contributors by cozying up to new starters and giving them the erroneous impression that everyone always uses the wiki for everything. Those first few weeks are wonderful time, because new starters are ideally suited to notice what it is that everyone simply assumes everyone else knows. New starters ask all the right questions to turn this tacit knowledge in to something tangible, then Wisdom is there to hold it.

Rule 2: use animals. That's
got to work.

Wisdom is built using Dokuwiki, a lightweight, database-free wiki engine that I really like, but which I would acknowledge is possibly not the best for our non-technical user profile - for an elearning development team or a group of programmers it would be perfect. However, we are building up a useful body of knowledge and placing my how-to videos and process walk throughs on Wisdom is certainly preferable to using the next alternative which is a Moodle instance. I'd never get anyone to look at anything if I had to use that.

However, while I have a couple of consistent contributors - L* using it to store minutes of meetings and J** steadily building up our equipment requirements for on-site training and so on - it has met with some stubborn resistance. Some team members admit to using it to look stuff up, but kinda laugh at the suggestion they might actually contribute to it.

So I'm turning to a gamification layer to sort this one out. Okay, so my badges are simple and have to be manually added by me, but nonetheless, they are something a bit different to the way we do things, and based on the feedback so far, the novelty may achieve what I'm after - some limited specific engagement, at least long enough to get people over their reluctance to making edits. A couple are specifically targeted at getting people to think wiki, rather than mechanically go through the steps of an edit.

Rule 3: Add an element of wonder
by using symbols that leave
them scratching their
heads - this is for "wiki
gardening".

I'm making the set of badges available here , so if you want some to add to whatever you are doing, help yourself. I have also included the text that I cut and paste on to people's profiles on Dokuwiki. For that to work I simply copied all the images in to the wiki:user media folder (if you don't know what that means you aren't a Dokuwiki user).

I'll let you know how I get on.

* not her real name, obviously
** not his either ***
*** but you probably guessed that

Compliance in health estates training

2011-10-03T12:46:00.000+01:00

I was required to speak to a group of estates managers at a recent training event organised by IHEEM, the Institute of Healthcare Engineering and Estates Management, on the topic of compliance. Naturally enough, we fielded a presentation on just how that topic applied to training. I've never stuck anything on Slideshare before, but thought I'd give it a try.

Let me warn you now: unless you are in health estates management, and ideally unless you were actually there, this won't be very interesting or all that meaningful.

Competence and compliance in health estates training

UPDATE: Having used Slideshare now I can report it is every bit as easy as one might expect uploading a presentation to the Internet might be. Ridiculously so.

Testing a new method of access

2011-09-20T07:05:00.001+01:00

I spend a lot of time drafting posts in my head but rather less time writing them down. So now I'm seeing if it's bearable trying to post from my phone.
It's a HTC Sensation which runs Android 2.3, so it has the wipe text input - you simply run your finger across the screen touching each key in turn, without lifting, creating a snail-like trail that loops and twists. Android then gives you its best guess as to what you were after. It's of course Blogger nowhere near as fast as touch typing, but it is a whole lot quicker than stabbing out each letter like normal. You wouldn't want to write a novel like this, but a couple of hundred reflective words on something you've seen or done is quite fair.
Which changes the game somewhat, as instead of reading the paper or catching up on the Twitter when snatching a quiet coffee or beer, I can now get round to jotting down those thoughts, which for me right now means thinking about becoming a school governor, a change in my focus at work, what accreditation means for learners, mobile learning for difficult to reach learner groups and a lot more.
Twitter is great for learning and getting exposed to new things, but to close the loop you need the kind of space a blog excels at. Viva la RSS!

Failed by VISA

2011-07-05T12:52:00.006+01:00

Just when I thought the "Verified by VISA" experience couldn't get any worse, the usually reliable eBuyer manages to pull off a real doozy:

See the problem?

WHAT THE HELL DO I CLICK ON NOW!?

After a moment's consideration I tried hitting tab and thankfully it scrolled the frame you can't see and skipped to the next, unseen box. I'm not entirely sure this was the envisaged user experience at First Direct or eBuyer. I'm not convinced that it wasn't what VISA were intending though as the whole VbV nightmare has form...

For example, this screen follows the incredible workflow where it asks for your DoB in DDMMYY format and in the very next box asks for your card's expiry date in MMYYYY format* - two date related questions; both require six characters; right next to each other. It's going to catch some people out. It's a small thing but plays like a sleight of hand card trick in my book.

My great concern is that the whole experience behaves at all times for all the world like a scam site designed to con users like my parents (concealing this activity inside a frame on what could be any website looks and feels like early 00s online scams).

For more like this try this search: "verified by visa sucks". I like most that it even has its own fb group.

(If anyone at eBuyer sees this, I carried out the transaction in FF5.0 if that explains what happened )
* okay, may be the other way round, but it's certainly two consecutive boxes.

Why I don't like Twitter

2011-06-27T23:47:00.002+01:00

Let me start by making one thing really clear. I like Twitter very much. I find it very useful and it has probably become my number one personal learning tool over the last year*.

However, I am becoming increasingly sceptical about its use as a social learning tool in any organised sense and in particular, there are some characteristics of how it is being used that frankly I'm not altogether comfortable with.

Backchannel
I follow a lot of people from different arenas, but the only ones who consistently use Twitter to amplify what they are hearing in a conference are those in the learning technology industry. Perhaps this is because there are lots more conferences in the learning tech arena, perhaps not.

The concept is familiar enough. If you have ever participated in a webinar then you will hopefully have seen how the text discussion of the talk can be used as an excellent supplement to the main show. The slides are on the screen and in the absence of all the online delegates being able to speak at the same time the onscreen text channel provides a really good way of allowing for feedback - especially if the presenter is aided by a "producer" who can watch the channel and respond, or post relevant links and so on. Some systems even allow whispering" between delegates which are another, quieter channel opportunity.

Twitter, with it's low barrier to entry and ability to work on all manner of devices, makes an ideal platform for taking this notion of the "backchannel" anywhere. And it works okay. For Ignite Bristol, where venues allow we throw up a twitter wall so that anyone tagging with our #ignbrzl hashtag can see their contribution to the debate, albeit after about 20 minutes wait, in the interval.

"Look mum, I'm on telly!"
Which kind of leads me on to another peculiarity of the Twitter-as-part-of-live-event mentality. Just like a bare wall in an alleyway exerts a magnetism for a cretin with a can of paint and a flowery autograph, or a virgin powder field will pull in sideslipping snowboarders from the safety of the piste (or learner slopes) where they belong, so a Twitter wall frequetly encourages less than entirely worthwhile contributions, or the me-too sensibility of the RT. Any 140-character friendly pronouncement will be pounced on as an opportunity to be the first to get that point out the the non-attending participants. Not fast enough on the last one? No worries, seize the next succinct and snappy phrase and tweet that instead.

Of course, playing the game in this way does rather depend on being able to read the Twitter channel at the same time as playing to it, however it has often been my experience that wi-fi provision at events is mediocre at best. The idea of being able to get a consistent connection so you can follow the backchannel in a timely manner is restricted, which reduces many contributions to a one-way broadcast model as you can post and let your client shift the tweet in its own good time, next time your device gets a sniff of the router.

Netiquette
If I worked in a large open plan office I am accepting that I will get aural overspill from the work going on around me. A little spill is acceptable, indeed desirable, as I am able to keep up with what is going on around me and drop my own points in to the conversation to test them or seek advice. This is good, this is right. This is Twitter 90% of the time.

However, if, once a week, a proportion of my colleagues gathered in the middle of the room and started a raucous discussion, while at first it may seem novel, it would quickly begin to grate. This is Twitter as a backchannel.

My daily dose of useful titbits and sound bites is occasionally washed out by the enthusiastic twitterings of one or more conference delegates, and amplified by a few keen twitter echoes. It's a shame because I really only follow people who use it wisely - I stick to the "tell-me-about-your-coffee-and-you're-unfollowed" credo - but occasionally I find myself flirting with the unfollow button because the torrent of decontextualised sound bites.

Present, only not present
The edu-learning crowd like to bust myths - our ILT forebears are prone to latching on to every snakeoil salesman to cross their path or submit an article to their journals so there are plenty floating about in need of deflation. Great stuff. Myths are worse than useless as they actively misguide the, er, mythees - a false model is less helpful than no model at all.

One myth that has been rubbished time and again is that of multi-tasking. We can't do it. As John Medina says, "The brain is not capable of multi-tasking. We can talk and breathe, but when it comes to higher level tasks, we just can’t do it." I'd include in this category of higher level tasks, assimilating a useful and/or complex new concept and interacting with your smartphone/tablet user interface. Somehow this point is jettisoned when it comes to "socialising" the learning experience.

Okay, I'll concede that not every nugget that comes out of a presenter's mouth is gold, but the fact is that you never know when what they say will be relevant to you. And if you are struggling to type on your poxy little smartphone screen, or rather, waking up your phone, unlocking it, switching to Tweetdeck*2, typing in the pithy point (précising it for 140 characters and remembering to include the hashtag and perhaps the Twitter account name of your source of course), sending, waiting, getting frustrated at the crappy event wi-fi, etc, then you are by definition NOT paying attention. And all this lost attention is only worthwhile if the summarised point you have made is received with understanding by your crowd of followers, and worthwhile. Which it frequently isn't, taken out of context and without reference.

The best conference I've been to in terms of me getting something out of it was one organised in a venue with no wi-fi and very thick walls. No internet meant I bust out my notebook - actual paper notebook, £5.99 in Staples - and scrawled 24 sides of notes. Okay, there were more good speakers than I usually encounter and fewer people trying to sell their services in the guise of an informative talk but the fact remains that I still look back on speakers that day and think positively of them (and can remember more of what they said). Now, we might argue whether or not I was fully present with my head in my notebook, but since I have plenty of notes and could, at a push, reconstruct some of the speakers' arguments from them (which I did, partially, with this post about Bettr), I'd argue I was sufficiently in the room to benefit. I can't say the same of the tweets I issued from the floor of Learning Technologies this year.

A simple solution?
This is not to say that I don't believe Twitter is bad, or that it doesn't have a place in the workplace learnosphere, but I think we need to remember that in learning technology we are in the vanguard of professional users of Twitter, alongside perhaps politicians and salespeople. The professions we serve - finance, engineering, oil and so on - may not be as ready for this as we are.

Furthermore, could not more traditional channels - ie "classic" chatrooms or forums - not provide more appropriate, secure locations for activities that lead to the same outcome? After all, #lrnchat transcripts bare an uncanny resemblance to a chatroom chat history*3.

Perhaps someone has already thought of this, but a simple "block tweets with this hashtag" would mean I could zone out of at least that portion of the chatter that is correctly marked. If it had a timespan, for example "until 3pm" or what have you, then I wouldn't have to worry about then leaving potentially useful.

Ultimately though, my solution is not to tweet from talks. I'm more than happy to tweet about events before they happen, and use the channel for conversations about what is happening, but as a courtesy to speakers, I think I'm going to stay "in the room" next time.

Follow-ups:

@craigtaylor recommended Plume as an Android app that does exactly what I was looking for, namely blocking #tags. I'm hoping Tweetdeck for Chrome plunders that innovation soon.
@kategraham23 pointed out that Donald Clark wrote a piece touching on the same topic a week before me - I hadn't read it, I swear.
I spotted Mark @barthelemy had spied something useful from the often useful Norman Lamont, that also hit the same topic. Another worthwhile read, but proving we're of the Zeitgeist, published the same day as me.

* If we count only work-relevant learning. Otherwise it's Wikipedia. This week's it's not been battleships I've looked up, but I did learn that in addition to the R22 and R44, Robinson Helicopters have now added an R66. Ladbrokes will not accept bets on the name of their next model.

*2 Other Twitter clients are available. Though of course, if you have an iOS device you won't be "switching" to it exactly, for although humans and iOS can't multitask, Android can.

*3 Except that every comment has been truncated to 140 characters...

Revisiting old useful ideas - learnscapes

2011-06-24T09:28:00.003+01:00

For whatever reason, this diagram by Clark Quinn has stuck in my head, and for the fourth time of calling I found myself scrabbling to find it, including tweeting the man himself to see if he could identify it from my patchy description.

Taken from "eLEarning Tools" 17 April 2007 at Learnlets

Clark's original post came in to being around the time of the big PLE debate if I remember correctly* and heck, it mentions social in the era "BT", or "Before Twitter". What I like is that it shows asynchronous elearning as an anti-social, low-level approach, really only suited to the start of a larger programme of development (assuming the goal is to take people on a journey from novice to something greater).

I have cause to dig this out as I try to make the case for expanding our conceptualisation of training material here from simply asynch courseware and physical classroom work to something a little more involved and lasting. Our mindset can sometimes be a bit "classical" I fear, as befits a former public sector training organisation/venue in its fifth decade...

I should have looked at this for my talk last week at the eLN too - see wikis nestled up there at the top? I was right to include it in the social arena, but in the sense I was promoting their use them I'd downgrade them to scaffolding and support perhaps.

Have you seen anything similar to this that brings us up to date? Please let me know.

Why I'm still at Blogger

2011-06-01T20:43:00.000+01:00

Started off here. Always been here. Love the backdrop on this one. Can't be bothered to move. End of.

(I love Wordpress and I am happy to self-host these things, but Blogger is fine for what I need it to do).

Hopefully that will answer that question now and in the future...

Usability FAIL

2011-03-16T17:35:00.002Z

What on earth have I done wrong?

Things I'm fed up of doing in the 2010s

2011-03-15T10:30:00.001Z

These are some productivity (for which read "Windows/Office") activities for which the case against was clear and present 5 years ago, or longer, and yet which persist. They're a mixture of training related and general points.

Dealing with email. Need I go on? Irritating inbox limits, lost communications, spam, single line throw away comments, documents mailed to a dozen people on the same network. I despise email.
Responding to people setting up meetings via internal email to tell them to send a freakin' invite. I've noticed a shift recently but honestly, this feature has been in Outlook for a decade or more. Does anyone stop to think when writing that meeting request email that if it's an invite, it saves company time if it is going straight to the calendar instead of each recipient who uses it having to add the same thing themselves?
Fixing PowerPoint slides. I can't recall when I heard the phrase "death by PowerPoint". I think it was within a month of getting a training job. Messages about the stultifying powers of marching armies of bulletpointed "factoids" or, worse still, dense paragraphs of 14 point text lifted verbatim off the pages of notes in front of training or meeting delegates abound. I still regularly come across slide decks with logos inserted on every slide instead of being on the master, or even where each line of text on a slide is in its own text box (but not the default body text box from the template).
Explaining to people that they should NOT hoard all "their" files on their local drives but store them on the shared drive. If we are going to use a 20th century files and folder paradigm, lets at least throw away the lock and key unless we really need it. In each case someone has left us in the last year we have had to trawl through slushy drives riddled with file soup to locate critical missing files. Grrr.
Demonstrating the basics of spreadsheet automation. Excel is magic. For me, it is the gateway to understanding how computers can be used by anyone to liberate themselves from pointless, repetitive tasks. It leads the way to programming even - each cell that reacts on its own to a change is a task saved. Yet still I see people sifting through tables of data and manually changing the colour of text to indicate something that a simple conditional formatting command would do for them. Or I see tables created that mix data types in cells that prevent anything useful ever being done to bring the data to life. Or are laid out in such a way that filtering can't be done. In short, which reduce spreadsheets to simple tables.

While the frustration felt in all these is entirely mine, as is the raised blood pressure, the lost productivity is across the board. Everyone is penalised for these failures. And they are all a result of the misconception that office productivity is not a thing for which training is required. Windows and Office look largely the same as they did 10 years ago and they are used in the same way. Thing is, a lot of the complaints I have here were being said 10 years ago too.

In larger organisations I have witnessed ad-hoc attempts to overcome these shortfailings - individuals lucky enough to work in an enlightened company, or perhaps one that has signed up to IiP, might be able to self-select to go on "Intermediate Excel" or something equally scattergun, but where are the systemic, root/branch attempts to modernise working practices with these basic tools?

In smaller companies, are managers even aware how they might be able to realise improvements but for someone to simply say "we need to change up how we use our computers". How much is small business in this country squandering through a lack of understanding the art of the possible? The number of times I have heard "we must work smarter" as a call to arms, yet small, smart changes at the micro level can't be taken because people don't know what they don't know.

Overcoming these sorts of things demand a campaign, not a course. But for a successful campaign those who would commission it need to understand what they are missing out on.

Are there things that make you wince when you think about the time that is lost? Are you an active advocate for improvement or simply a cog in a "course factory"?

Postscript: This rant came out of frustration I feel most days, sparked off by the farewell editorial of Tim Danton, departing editor of my favourite IT magazine, PC Pro (sadly the article doesn't seem to be on the website, only in print). If his co-workers can't get their head around progressive change in the workplace you have to wonder if anyone ever will.

Fresh Look at Learning Design by Patrick Dunn

2011-02-03T15:29:00.001Z

Following the usual twisted thread of discovery I stumbled upon an interesting video by Patrick Dunn of a webinar that I suspect I had intended to join, but missed. Not having a stumbleupon account, and in the spirit of blog-based sharing I have rekindled recently, here it is for your delectation.

"A fresh look at Instructional Design" - eLN webinar presentation from patrick dunn on Vimeo.

Good old Vimeo. Far better than other video sites I could mention.

I really like in this:

Patrick points out that ADDIE is appropriate in some contexts. A more nuanced approach than some. Reflects realities of the job.
The formal approach favoured in the States is not the same as is the predominant model here (UK). I had my suspicions that the term "instructional design" had regional differences.
The "experience, not content" model reminds me of Cathy Moore's action mapping approach, but focused on behavioural change. A nice counterpoint.
I like the idea of throwing the spec away and just speaking to learners first. In all my paid time as an ID I was never invited to do this - or costed the time to be able to. I'd argue for it now mind you.
The before/now slide early on is good too.

Letter to my MP on selling off the woodland

2011-02-03T00:36:00.002Z

Okay, so I appreciate that this blog is supposed to be about learning, but it might be argued I learnt something about how I feel about this while penning a missive to Stephen Williams, my local LibDem member of Parliament. I was inspired by an article on what the forest sell off might mean to Bristol MTBers.

Throughout my life I've had opportunities to spend lots of time in forests - hiking, barbecuing, playing in streams, bird watching and mountain biking - though a son of this city I grew up in the Shropshire Marches and spent many weekends and evenings in the local woods with my friends and family. They are a playground I have returned to time and again.

And I can hardly think of a time when I haven't done so on land managed by the Forestry Commission. So it causes me great anguish to know that this government, that I in part voted for, and encouraged people to vote for - to vote for you - is now suggesting that it sell off the trees and neuter an organisation I have immense respect for.

I'm not some dumb-ass hippy tree hugger who would care more about what happens to a tree than a person. But it is this action more than any other that causes me to feel aggrieved by what I voted for.

What annoys me is that by deigning to flog off this land, and special entity that lives upon it, this government appears to indicate that it believes it owns this land. No, the government holds it in trust for the people that legitimise it. Sure, keep people off the nuclear base at Faslane, or away from motorway construction sites - there are greater needs in the public interest at work - I accept that - but don't sell off the trees.

In particular, these days I go mountain biking locally near Ashton Court and at locations around Wales. These places are graded amongst the best locations for the sport anywhere in the world - mile after mile of wonderful man made trails that develop riders' skills and test them again and again. Each week thousands of riders make the same trips to these places, spending money in local shops and cafes, staying in local hotels and pubs. In the afternoons, as they stream off the hill, they share the same broad grin and look of satisfaction at a day on earth well spent.

But none of these centres would be feasible if private landowners had to meet the costs of insuring for the sport. Only the FC is able to do this. Without the FC these trail centres would close, and the tourism they attract, month in, month out, would die out. Taking precious money from already poor regions (like the valleys of South Wales) and robbing people of a fun and healthy past time.

It's easy to see now that Beeching's solution to the size of the rail network was woeful and short-sighted. Stephen, don't let your parliamentary colleagues make a similar terrible mistake - one that will live in infamy far beyond your time in the Palace of Westminster.

Hmm, will try not to be too political again for a while. I'll leave that to Twitter.

Why video is your cheap option

2011-02-02T14:46:00.000Z

Video was once both a dream and a nightmare.

A dream because only in your wildest dreams would you ever get funding to put together training videos. And a nightmare because there was no easy route to do it - you needed expensive cameras, editing suites and reproduction facilities.

Since it is now possible to shoot, edit and upload video all from a mobile phone, it is time to revisit video again.

And to show how easy it can be, here's a good example that I really like. Just a good expert with a nice line on her subject, a hand held video, one scene and YouTube. Couldn't be simpler.

For a far better, more thoughtful take on using video as your budget option, check out Rob Hubbard's tip from 24Tips 2010.

Learning research to action - from Jakob Nielsen

2011-02-02T13:38:00.001Z

I never tire of going on about Jakob Nielsen and the usefulness of his Alertbox. Nielsen is one of the pre-eminent figures in web usability, but in this post he is looking at information recall/learning as it relates to online content.

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/learning-recall.html

How can we use this? I sent the following suggestion out to my colleagues on our Foundation Degree programme. Thought I'd share it here.

The activity may be a relevant approach to adopt for review activities. The issue is how to incorporate it, as it is difficult to mark an “all points” review, and unmarked review activities will, in most cases, be outright ignored (I know I tend to – falsely believing in my fallible memory), so the old “Now write a summary of what you have learnt in this module” gambit is likely fail.

So, what’s the alternative? Setting the idea in a brief scenario context might work. “Imagine you had to relay the content from this section to a working group and your presentation needed to fit a five minute slot between two other activities. Summarize the learning from this section as fully, but concisely as you can.” Arguably this adds sufficient constraint that it might be easy to feedback on, but also it should give the target learner sufficient cause to read and review the section in enough detail to attain that full 145% effect. And let’s not forget that 145% better means nearly two and a half times more effective. A very big boost indeed.

There. A much better way of demonstrating my renewed love for blogging than writing a blog post about how I enjoy blogging once more and should do more of it again.

A BETTr type of conference?

2011-01-24T22:51:00.000Z

It's an interesting time to be involved with education in the UK. The government is hacking wildly at the structures that have been familiar for so long; results from UK schools seem to be slipping sharply; the industrial education model looks to be broken.

And where can we find solutions to these problems, to bring education in this country back on track? Matt Jukes thinks it's in the hacker mindset that we'll find answers so he put together Be BETTr, a sideshow conference running on the third day of BETT, across town in Holborn. Sold as "a conference about 'hacking education'" I couldn't say no - especially as tickets to the day long event were only £20 - and that only if you missed the early bird and discount prices (psst, Matt, you should have charged more!)

So, nearly a fortnight on, here's what I remember of the event - excuse the excessive bulleting, a lot of this is from my copious note taking (quite unlike me) and I haven't the time to write it back in to a coherent narrative. I'll stick up the first bunch of speakers and add the others later.

Paul Miller - School of Everything

we find it hard to think of a different model to the one we grew up with (applies to lots of things, not just education) - this explains the persistence of the industrial learning-factory school model.
Groundbreaking research in the East End of London in 50s documented the importance of communities - captured in the book Family & Kinship in East London by Michael Young* (founder of OU, later Baron Young)
The information layer of the internet is only now becoming interesting - precisely because it is becoming boring and mundane - now we are at the point where we can start to do interesting things with it.
School of Everything (SoE) links people with something they can teach with people who want to learn for face-to-face learning sessions - the Internet can only take you so far and getting contact time with an expert can be really beneficial.
Not only 1-to-1, but also used to create study circles - peer groups self tutoring.
In Sweden some 300,000 people are thought to be in regular study circles - and that's in a country with a much smaller population than the UK.
What are universities? Yes, there are some features like libraries, but at their heart they are communities with a common set of rules focused on a campus - SoE want to become a "code campus".
Accreditation - SoE appeals to adults not too fussed about accreditation (music, languages are top subjects) - perhaps there could be room for micro-accreditation in this?

The SoE website wasn't responding when I wrote this, so here are links: Paul was interviewed by the Grauniad in 2009 and blogs here.

David Jennings - Agile learning
Immediately David came on to the introduction of "agile learning" I had an inkling that I knew where this would be coming from...

The book DIY U lists three groups in the learning area: artisans - changing the academy from within; merchants - changing it for money; monk - learning nerds who simply love knowledge.
LMSs (VLEs, virtual acadamies, call them what you will) hamper learner access. Google beats the LMS every time.
Google empowers "feral learning" where people "forage" for the knowledge they need.
Concept of foraging explored in Jennings' book Net, Blogs and Rock 'n Roll.
(DR - feral learning looks and sounds a lot like informal learning, but less corporate-friendly, less amenable to vendor take-over and more learner centric).
(David mentioned something that sounded like "carn-academy" which I mistook to be some meat-eating variant on knowledge foraging, but actually might be Khan Academy which looks like something in the open learning field - like a not-for-profit iTunes U or OU LearnSpace. Worth a look)

Mohit Midha - Manga High

Manga High is a games based learning tool for maths, originally aimed at UK nat. curriculum but now expanding in other markets - big in US.
e-learning for K-12 needs to be effective, relevant, engaging - all three, you can't pick any two.
Manga High has maths at the centre of the design philosophy - the maths MUST be relevant to the game play, not a tatty add on or window dressing.
Uses an adaptive quiz engine that adjusts level to learners (like any video game does)
Demos showed that the games actually require use of maths as a function of game play; maths essential for play, rather than getting in way of the game (rather than my experience of "games" in elearning as a tawdry, embarrassing thin visual layer over MCQs - like the "answer games to move your car in the race" type nonsense)
nomenclature important: teachers set "challenges" not homework.
Sophisticated LMS inside the website provides lots of statistics for teachers - to the learner the experience is no different to logging in to any other website (DR - LMSy CMS origins are NOT on display here!)
Gaminess extends at a higher level - badges for completion of work, first to complete, high scores and so on (think Kongregate rather than Moodle) this social layer allows for competition between classes and even schools/regions etc.
Arguments for in schools are that the system frees teacher up for other things, rather than simply marking. Good metrics enable the teacher to see the feedback they need to help students who need help. Multiple representations of the data make it clear.
Meets with some resistance - parents/schools can't accept that such pretty games can be educational - but soon won over.

Aral Balkan - Teaching programming to kids

Man, if teachers had half the enthusiasm for teaching that Aral Balkan has, ICT education would not be in the parlous state it is now.

Do we want to teach programmers or secretaries? (Hint: it's the former)
School IT basically teaches Microsoft Office. That's secretarial skill. That's why there is an IT skills gap (DR - I'd heard about this but didn't really believe it - later stats scared/disappointed me)
There is no career path in education for IT. IT support in schools is amongst the lowest paid in IT industry, goes nowhere - so get very low skilled or inexperienced people.
Cyber-stalking pedo scares mean schools do not even grasp the great ability of IT to put things on the web for people to see.
Kids are immersed in technology - phones, iPads, tablets, consoles - but they are basically told computers are dull - they don't have to be.

Aral managed to fit in to his talk a demonstration of some BASIC, a great visual programming tool Scratch and also the beauty in simple code with some lovely effects in HTML and CSS. So simple, and something that could easily fire the imagination of people not inclined to think of themselves as potential programmers.

Interestingly, Aral also eschewed Key Note and just presented from whatever the OSX equivalent of file manager is, popping up images with his ideas on. Very neat, very engaging. Helps that it's on a Mac mind you...

---

So I'll add speakers 5-12 later, when I get a chance. Worth it though as I am enjoying revisiting my notes from the day.

* There's alot to be said about this guy - founded OU, the Consumers' Association, coined "meritocracy" - all offset by inflicting Toby Young upon the rest of us...

A good BETT

2011-01-16T09:09:00.001Z

Each year I go to Learning Technologies and see the posters for BETT and curse that I've missed what is billed as "Europe's biggest educational technology event". Given what drags me to Olympia every January, I've always suspected that something at BETT would interest me too, so I swear to myself that I will go and renew that vow a year later, as I walk to LT20xx and respy the next round of forgotten posters...

But this year, reminded of BETT by the somewhat smaller BETTr conference being run by Bristol's Matt Jukes (more on this to follow), I actually got my act together and managed to attend. And wow! Glad I did.

Though the terms learning technology and educational technology may sound like synonyms, the difference is that educational technology means all the technology in schools, so the remit is very much larger. Adobe is the big ticket brand at LT; at BETT it's the likes of Dell and Microsoft. Around this nucleus of very large companies aiming to sell their hardware and software to heads and education chiefs are hundreds of companies competing with their software aimed at K12 and schools management; science education and ABCs; projectors and milling machines - simply if it's got wires or needs wires and it might end in a school, it'll be there.

So this of course means that the vast majority of what is there is of little interest to corporate L&D types. But a fraction of something that big still constitutes a fair amount and in my position, working for a company with a primary focus in ILT, the classroom presentation hardware was a primary draw.

Based on what I saw, here are a couple of observations:

Visualizers - the overblown and fancy brothers of the humble webcam - have dropped in price substantially in the last couple of year - basic models are now comfortably under £300 and even top featured ones are in the region of a grand. This is a lot less than the few I saw a couple of years ago at WOLCE. Interestingly, a lot of the competition seems to be from Chinese companies now looking to sell direct under their own names rather than regionless rebrands as you find with consumer electronics in supermarkets.

If you want to add live product demos to your online seminar or VoIP conference, or to shoot clear video of items for elearning, you'd do a lot worse than to look in to this technology.

Example - ELMO helpful bods, established model range and good usability.

Projectors - you might hate the presentation, but I'm sure your company colleagues still love 'em. There has been development here too. "Ultra short throw" projectors are more common, so no more straying in front of the screen only to have your retinas scorched by the 800W bulb shining directly at you. Fixed projectors now need be no more than a foot or two away from the wall, directly above the screen so that there is no risk of your shadow ruining the view - a whole lot easier than having to organise back projection.

Example - Hitachi seemed to the one recommended

Interactive whiteboards - still not sold on these. I've seen two or three of these at companies but never seen them actually used. The principle innovation here is that there are now a couple such devices that do not require an expensive hardware whiteboard - advances with some projectors can use light pens and do what whiteboards do on any old surface. Actually, you can even do this yourself with a regular projector if you are more creatively minded, as this 2008 TED story demonstrates (details here).

Audience participation devices AKA the ask-the-audience gadget have been around for a few years now. Not sure that I saw much development here but I still would like to see these used more often. Never had a chance to develop a course to take advantage, but I do feel that they could offer some of our tutors a boost when trying to gauge understanding on some of our intense courses, especially when dealing with mixed-cultural groups who may not all get stuck in with pushier British students, or where language barriers mean reading a question might be easier than simply hearing it.

Example - Quizdom have been doing this longer than most.

Classroom furniture may not be a big issue to you, but we at my company have been thinking about how to make computers available in our learning labs in a way that would not take up space for other activities, and sure enough, BETT threw up a couple in interesting solutions I hadn't seen before. Where, in my experience at least, corporate training often seems to go for a clear elearning or ILT distinction, K-12 education is far more likely to use PCs in an ILT setting for moments of self directed learning, so little PC islands that squeeze a lot of computers in to a small space, or desks that conceal IT equipment within are potentially very useful. We've identified a definite case for something like this when we rebuild our training centre in the next couple of years.

Okay, so probably not a great revelation to you if you are still regularly engaged in ILT, but these were new to me, and I suspect that I would struggle to see anything like the range on display at a purely L&D event as they simply aren't what the majority of the market are interested in.

Yo, Edi, I'mma let you finish...

2010-12-21T00:36:00.000Z

Yeah, you know it...

Help wanted - virtualize me!

2010-09-27T21:02:00.001+01:00

Due to an unfortunate confluence of events it looks like I won't be able to make it to WOLCE this year. Fact is, I wasn't intending to go. I was a little disappointed by it last year, and now that Learning Technologies has Learning & Skills to run alongside, I really couldn't see the point in going. Not to say that it is bad, only for my needs right now, WOLCE isn't really right.

However, at my company we've been experiencing a spot of trouble with our software systems and it's quite likely that WOLCE is the sort of place that someone with a solution might show up. Unfortunately, at short notice I'm not really able to make it either day that the show is running, so if you are going, take a look at our needs and if you spot someone selling anything like this, ask them to get in touch with me via learningrocks.co.uk or @danroddy on Twitter.

Our need
My employer runs residential training courses at our training centre, and on-site training if clients have enough of a need. We need to be able to plan and schedule face-to-face courses, sell them, share data with partner organisations and reconcile everything with our finance team. We also need to be able to store learner data so that we can answer their queries in the months and years after they attend - some of our courses ensure that they are able to get on registers for certified personnel so our training is important to them - they just sometimes misplace the certificates...

It would be cool too, but not vital, if there was the option to tie up to an LMS (we run Moodle) and if the student record system was capable of tracking other training types, like vocational courses. If it were capable of managing resources like rooms and hardware, then we would be scrabbling for a chequebook. And we'll offer the hand in marriage of any unmarried member of the team if it also can run a conference venue.

In short, we are looking for a student management information system for short course providers, with all the trimmings. The emphasis has to be on supporting face-to-face training.

But we can compromise.

There are only two products that seem to match our need*. CourseBooker, which pretty much does what it says on the tin, but which we abandoned a few years ago, and a newish product called onCourse, which looks very exciting, but which doesn't have a UK supplier just yet. Any attempt to search online for this kind of thing unfortunately seems to hit every keyword for an LMS, no matter how you try to cut it, and frankly I'm skeptical of LMSs' ability to do what we are after - they are nearly always elearning first, anything else as an add on (since the developers can't make much from it).

So, if you are at WOLCE, or frankly just reading about this and think you know of a suitable product, PLEASE let me or them know and try to get in touch. I'll buy you a beer at the Learning Techologies after party** in 2011...

* There is also the product that we have, but just because we have it, it doesn't follow that it matches our needs. Seriously, we used to be public sector and the procurement mess on the current system shows how far we've come in some ways***

** First I need to get invited. Or arrange it. Let's say the pub across the road from Olympia, about 5pm on the Tuesday? Brilliant, see you there.

*** Not very.

Meta-learning: educational fungus

2010-09-27T17:42:00.003+01:00

When I was at school we showed up, we were told a bunch of stuff and we went home. This model pretty much continued throughout my education - A levels and degree were all completed in a bubble of self-ignorance. Work-place learning similarly was usually fairly direct: "here's a bunch of stuff you need to know. We've told you. You know it. Now carry on"*

Not so any longer it seems.

It appears that all learning these days needs to be presaged by a lengthy study of what it means to be a learner. I first noticed this in my first job as a trainer with a government agency - we ran a course that simply focused on how to develop your skills as learner, but this was optional thing. My colleagues in the "soft-skills" team were switched on to getting their delegates (always "learners" in their parlance - never "trainees") to reflect on their development, and mandated by things like Investors in People, we encouraged everyone to discover their learning style, keep a CPD folder, start a journal of reflective practice and so on.

This was something that was at the heart of the Certificate in Training Practice too - my first formal step in qualification as a workplace learning "professional".

And now it seems it is a primary part of ANY learning opportunity. The foundation degree we offer has extensive opportunities to reflect on the experience of being a learner - indeed the first module our students undertake asks them to think about nothing else!

Now I am looking at a variety of off the shelf NVQ type qualifications aimed at lower level learners - Levels 2 & 3 in the UK structure - and as much as a quarter of a qualification can be taken up by learning about the process of learning.

I am wondering just how useful all this is in some cases. In knowledge based work, characterised by variety and difference in activity, reflective learning might pose a great help in considering how to approach similar but different material in future. In in the type of repetitive, process driven work I am looking at in these qualifications the opportunities for reflective learning are surely somewhat limited. Often there is not a great deal of variety in activity and the focus is more on following guidelines quite closely for compliance issues as much as anything. Even if there is any variety, the nature of the work means that time for reflection in the workplace is somewhat limited - the emphasis has to be on simply getting the job done.

While I'm all for the reflective ideals of continuous professional development, surely at the point at which thinking about yourself is 25% of a qualification - ostensibly aimed at getting you up and running as an entry-level technician - things have gotten out of hand. It's too much and misses the imperative to focus on the needs of the business in producing effective training interventions that will be valued by managers?

My feeling is that this is self-aggrandisement by the learning/education/training people responsible for developing these qualifications. By playing up the knowledge of learning they are keen to show that learning has to be held in some kind of complex structure; almost as if they are building some kind of arcane lore about it all. I'm not sure, but my instinct is that for many learners this is a turn off. For lots of people the goal is to show up at work, do it right, then go home, and hopefully not have to think about it. Perhaps I wouldn't be so worried, were it not for the fact that from what I have seen and what I have experienced, this part of their learning experience is going to be occupied with thoughts of learning styles, Maslow, "10% of what you read", left and right brain and other elements with a hint of "truthiness" about them.

Which may not really be to the advantage of someone who simply wants a decent qualification so they can earn more money.

* This wasn't THAT long ago, I'm only 34.

Verifiable CPD? Really? What do you mean?

2010-09-09T16:57:00.002+01:00

Now, when I learnt about CPD way back in the day I got the sense that it should be an intrinsic thing - something that I recorded and to some extent defined. CPD could come from anything - reflections on activity; useful blog discussions I had been part of, books read, talks attended, and of course training courses. Then from time to time I would show what I had recorded to someone and they would approve some or all of what I had done.

But it would seem that for some professions there is a wholly different notion - that of "verifiable CPD". Here's what the British Dental Association have to say on their CPD site:

In partnership with Eastman Continuing Professional Development, the British Dental Journal offers a CPD programme to enable all UK dental practitioners registered with the General Dental Council to collect a maximum of 48 hours of verifiable CPD per annum.

Each issue of the Journal contains two papers that have been selected for verifiable CPD and four multiple choice questions will be linked to each article.

Practitioners will receive one verifiable CPD hour per paper, giving a potential total of two CPD hours per BDJ issue. A record of CPD credits will be maintained by Eastman Continuing Professional Development and certification will be forwarded to the participants. Answers to the questions will also appear in the Journal a month later.

Now I find this kind of thing bizarre, but it's rather telling that it is attached to the BDA Journal.

From a cursory search for "verifiable CPD" it seems that most of the references here in the UK are related to dentistry (to the extent that @verifiablecpd on Twitter is dentally themed), but that's not the only profession that calls on it. Here's an interesting definition from the Institute of Certified Public Accountants of Cyprus (!?):

Non-verifiable CPD Non-verifiable CPD is a learning activity which has taken place, but doesn't have a defined or specific learning outcome. This would include, for example, general reading of professional magazines; following financial and business matters in print and media; and discussions with colleagues in an informal setting (for example, learning about developments in business or finance at a social event, or informally through networking at a business event, etc). ICPAC requires you to provide a summary of this activity each year.

Verifiable CPD Verifiable CPD is activity where you can provide evidence that the learning was relevant to your current or future career needs, and you can prove that it took place. You will need to be able to explain why you chose the activity and how it is relevant to you, when the activity took place, what you learned and how you will apply your learning. Verifiable CPD does not have to be about attending courses - an example of verifiable CPD is outlined below:

Well, so far so good. The crux of the argument appears to be that CPD only really counts if it is planned in some way. But the example, to my eyes, seems to cross over the non-verifiable side:

In order to write a business paper, you might need to undertake 4 hours of research on the internet, learning in a subject area that is new to you, or where regulation has changed. You would then write the report. The report is the evidence of your verifiable CPD. It shows that you have applied the learning you acquired. The research you undertook is the learning activity. You will therefore have completed 4 units of verifiable CPD.

Such verification as there is exists solely on what you say you did in order to do something else. I'm not sure that I would say that this is an entirely legitimate model. But that's not to say that I don't believe the learning that has taken place is entirely legitimate - it's simply the notion of quantifiable CPD that I struggle with. One person's hour of research might be 30 minutes to someone else with better Google skills. And that's just one hole I might pick with the concept. Feel free pick more in the comments.

Gaminess in learning

2010-09-06T11:03:00.000+01:00

Just wanted to catch an important point about what constitutes gaminess - can't remember where it comes from, but I'm fairly sure that Simon Bostock would have been involved in bringing it in to my field of vision:

Five points that mean gamey:

Collecting (ie badges)
Points and levels
Feedback to lead to improvement
Exchange (for P2P activity)
Customisation (for an individual experience)

So, gaminess is not a quiz dressed up as hangman or a car race - this is the gaminess that creates re-playability and the desire to improve.

Who knows, one day I might think about how you might develop say an induction programme around these principles - or maybe you know where someone else has already done that.

How to create a lightbox in Moodle

2010-07-20T15:31:00.006+01:00

A lightbox effect is a great way to improve how pictures are displayed within Moodle, especially in fixed width themes where the space may be at a premium. I use it to zoom in on thumbnail images, but you can also use it to display images from a link on a word too if you like. It uses a nice "modal zoom" look and feel that fades the background and will be familiar to anyone who uses the web more than infrequently.

This hack requires a small change to some HTML, but this is only to insert new code - there aren't any actual changes - so it should be considered an intermediate level tweak. As this is a hack, I add it to my own folder of hacks that I create in Moodle for just such a circumstance.

The lightbox effect is a Javascript feature adopted from Dynamic Drive.

The process of adding this effect is quite simple.

Download the lightbox.zip from the Dynamic Drive website. This contains the 5 files you need.
Create a folder in the Moodle folder called “hacks” and copy the unzipped lightbox folder in to it, so:
```
{yourlocation}/moodle/hacks/lightbox
```
Paste the code for the javascript in to the header.html file for each theme that will use the effect, in the header section, directly before the closing header tag.
Tweak the inserted code slightly to give the correct path to the files. You need to change the file location from:
```
"lightbox.css"
```
to
```
"../../hacks/lightbox/lightbox.css"
```
You'll also need to repeat this link change for the lightbox.js file in the second line of that javascript snippet.

Save your changes to the file and now you are nearly ready to go. This should ensure that a) the javascript is enabled across the site b) is in one location for working with.

You simply choose what you want to link from, either text or image, then turn it in to a link, linking to the fullsize image you want. In my case, I insert a large image, but use the Moodle "Insert picture" dialogue to restrain its size as it appears within the img tag, then create the link pointing to the same picture on its own.

So far, so good. The magic happens when you add the following attribute to your link element:

rel="lightbox"

Then save all the changes and have a look at your webpage. Click on the image and you get the lightbox appear. Click it again to remove it. Sweet

In summary: add files, tweak theme's header code, add a link to your big image, include rel attribute in link.

Now, I'm sure that someone else somewhere else has already done this for Moodle, or something very similar, but I couldn't find it. I'm also sure that it can be done in such a way that it can be inserted to the course just once, instead of in each theme, but I'm new to tweaking Moodle in such a way, so I'll explore that later and let you know how I get on.

Bandwidth issues - why they're a problem

2010-06-21T23:53:00.000+01:00

As ever, a brilliant article on website usability from Nielsen that has ramifications for elearning.

In the post simply entitled Website Response Times Jakob Nielsen points out that although increased bandwidth has largely eliminated the old drag of image sizes, responses times should still be given thought in the design of websites in the era of ubiquitous broadband.

The article cites common problems as being "complex data processing", eg lots of server-side activity, be it script or database activity, and slow "widgets" or too many of them.

With LMSs, especially those adopting more "web 2.0" features, the temptation to load up on widgets to provide the rich opportunities for social interaction that learners may be looking for is a risk. Especially if the server setup it is delivered from is less than optimal. Of course, the far greater hazard from the point of view of elearning is poorly produced Flash content. In a post from last year, Gavin Hess muses on the fact that many "rapid" tools actually save time only for the producer - the product they produce not always being the fastest.

Still, what is the impact of a delay? Nielsen summarises the impact of increasingly longer delays:

0.1 seconds gives the feeling of instantaneous response — that is, the outcome feels like it was caused by the user, not the computer.
1 second keeps the user's flow of thought seamless. Users can sense a delay, and thus know the computer is generating the outcome, but they still feel in control of the overall experience and that they're moving freely rather than waiting on the computer.
10 seconds keeps the user's attention. From 1–10 seconds, users definitely feel at the mercy of the computer and wish it was faster, but they can handle it. After 10 seconds, they start thinking about other things, making it harder to get their brains back on track once the computer finally does respond.

What will happen if this covenant is broken? Well, Nielsen is worried about lost sales and conversions. From an elearning point of view we can assume lost attention will result in poorer retention, less chance of completion (if that's an important statistic for you) and a generally less positive reception to your courses.

How much "design" for the instructional designer?

2010-06-03T17:36:00.001+01:00

When it comes to the instructional design in the context of traditional elearning development, how much of the concept design should the ID be suggesting, or to put it another way, how much of the visual design should be left entirely to the graphic designers and developers?

As an instructional designer I often have thoughts on how to present the information I am trying to arrange and I usually try to communicate these by means of rough sketches and crude diagrams - either as pen sketches captured on my phone camera or as crude diagrams cobbled in PowerPoint if I want to play around with layouts. My reason for doing so is that, as the old saying goes, a picture tells a thousand words, and frankly I can't be fagged writing out an idea when I can far more easily summarise the suggestion in a couple of lines. I'm always as pains to make clear that these are ideas to try to get across a concept.

However, sometimes the results from these suggestions are returned to me in far too literal interpretations of my diagram. If this was a one off, then I'd write it off as an individual response, but it's happened with a couple of designers. So what am I doing wrong?

Do designers and developers prefer to work from the raw data, so I give them the content and outcome and say "do your best", or do I have to give more detailed ideas about how to get a fancier finish? Does my attempt to be helpful in providing ideas actually have the counter-productive result of hemming in the thought processes of the developers? How do I encourage designers/developers to pick up the phone/fire up Skype and just run an idea past me before they commit it to the screen? Should I accept that there is something intrinsically wrong in my development approach or write it off as desperately bad luck that I encounter the same problem with different developers? Am I actually just expecting too much to get a whole course back without any significant problems at all?

I'd dearly love to know what other people do to manage this.

Formality, just go away and die won't you?

2010-04-22T13:06:00.001+01:00

How informal a learning experience is seems to matter a great deal to many people. Whether someone has been set a "course" of learning or whether they navigate their own path seems to have taken on a life of its own, akin to whether or not you accept the views of climate scientists or Sarah Palin.

What confuses me is the vehemence that seems to be part of the debate.The tone from the informal side has always been fairly militant, set by Jay Cross's calls to get ride of training departments. It gives me visions of a baying pack of line managers and consultants marching on HR brandishing pitchforks and flaming torches.

It's always struck me that informal learning is any learning that happens outside the classroom - the idea that informal learning doesn't get a fair share of the attention of those who should be encouraging it is a fair one. But in an environment where commentators ruthlessly hunt down and expose the various neat model myths (like Dale's Cone for example) the off-stated "80 percent of learning is informal" seems to go unchallenged (okay, perhaps it was intended as a rule of thumb, but it seemed to take on a life of it's own).

The latest development seems to be tool-sellers stepping in and trying to offer ways to formalise informal training, and once again you get virulent protests that this is absolutely the wrong thing to do.

I absolutely disagree.

Perhaps I'm missing something here, but "tools" that help create an environment where staff are empowered to collect information and share it to the common good is part of the cultural shift to a "very different workplace".

Okay, perhaps it is a different point of view, but time and time again I have worked in or with organisations where some staff are simply not that engaged with the tools at their disposal to be able to self-educate - these are not necessarily people who don't want to improve, but simply aren't that motivated to spend their lunchtime playing with apps, or who know enough about computing (and it's usually computing where I see this) to sense they could improve the way they work. I'm thinking about people who use PowerPoint on a daily basis but aren't able to use master slides properly (wasting huge amounts of time on basic formatting) or who can't sort or filter data on a spreadsheet when half their time is spent collating information for which a spreadsheet would be ideal.

Such people need help and encouragement to get to the first rung, and most likely will need help and reassurance even after then. And what's more will need stimulating later on to move on again, because there is always improvement to be had.

Sure, we could leave it to chance, and hope that somehow they will get the support they need, but it's true that without a map it can be very difficult to know where you are going. It's all the more difficult if you don't even know what the available destinations might be.

For me, this is the role of the future learning department - as tour guides to improvement who can set people off on their own journeys, or create appealing advertisements for why someone might want to improve and either provide them their own itinerary or if necessary the whole package deal to take the effort out.

For me and pretty much most people I read and communicate with online, learning is the pleasure, it "rocks" in and of itself, in just the same way that the journey for me is as much a part of the holiday. But there are plenty of people for whom learning is a chore and who just want to get to their destination as quickly as possible.

Entirely free learning will never suit all portion of a community, so tools that help provide access to quality, relevant information that their peers produce.

Set fazer to Ignite

2010-02-28T15:35:00.000Z

On Friday I put together a quick talk for our new intake foundation degree students. I put together about 90 minutes worth of material in a morning. Easy. Nothing special there.

Since then I have been hard at work, once again, on my talk for Ignite London this week. Couched in modern parlance - O. M. G.

Who would have thought that thinking of 5 minutes' worth of material would be sooo damn difficult?

When I went to Ignite London last year I immediately thought of a topic on which I wanted to speak - dying towns. From various resouces I wanted to piece something together about Japan, the North West of England, Detroit, Russia and fill it with great photos that I've seen on my tours of the Interweb - sadly I don't have much in the way of primary source material.This was a doozy though, and I had a rough idea of where I wanted to take it.

What with the pressure of organising Ignite Bristol this week too, and a whole bunch of things going on at work. I decided at the last moment to change to something that, theoretically at least, should be a lot easier - something L&D related.

I called up Craig on the Ignite London team and gave my reasons and he was very shilled about it - do whatever was his reply. He had a stab at summing up my point in this entry which is probably the source of some of my resulting concern.

I mean, seriously - check out some of those other talks! They sound great. And that list doesn't include the two "star" speakers. What's more, my cousin's near namesake, Tristan Roddis*, sounds like he is going to do something not a million miles away from the photo show I was thinking of, so there's no backing up.

So I'm now terrified of how this is going to go. And I'm prevaricating even by writing this damn post.

So far, my talk looks like it'll take in: sleep, checklists, exercise, spaced repetition, gaming/competition. Allowing for about a minute on each, that is far more than I can fit in, but do you think I can get this down on slide format? Can I hell! If you can think of anything that I could add on this topic, or a great way to spin any of the points I'm making, please drop me a line...

* both Tristans live in Brighton too - what are the chances?**

** yeah, I know, not as low as I think they are.

5 Things I love about my Android

2010-01-23T09:22:00.002Z

Last October I signed up for an HTC Magic with Vodafone. It's been one of the best tech decisions of my life.

There are still many folks out there who doubt the case for mobile learning, simply not sure how it can be done. These are probably folks who don't have a smartphone, because once you do it's instantly apparent how it can be done. I know this process because it's what happened to me.

But this post isn't about that so much, I'll save that for after Learning Technologies when there will doubtless be much more to say. Instead, here a some reasons why I love my Android:

1. THINKING SPACE a neat, very usable mindmapping app which can export my ideas for reuse elsewhere

2. TWIDROID PRO I probably read my Twitter accounts more on my phone than by any other method. It's the perfect way to fill a spare 5 minutes. It makes easy work of managing multiple accounts too - I have @danroddy and @IgniteBristol.

3. GMAIL you have to have an account to make the phone work. I did, but didn't really use it. What was I thinking? And the mobile experience with it is great.

4. BEACON if you use 37signals' Basecamp at all, this is the app for you. Sync, follow messages and comments, check To-do lists, review milestones. Easy, great.

5. ASTRID a powerful to do list organiser that embeds with Google Calendar and has a great way of reminding you.

6. NOTE EVERYTHING from the Ronseal school of product naming, this was the first app I paid for. The persistent list tool is brilliant - there are real serious applications for this idea as mobile performance support. I use this for my project context lists.

7. BLOGLINES a neat Blogger app for mobile blogging. I'm using it now. Not too shabby.

Okay, so that was more than 5, and I could add others yet (I've said nothing about having usable search in my pocket or gps enabled mapping), so let's leave it there and say it's a draw, eh?

Actually, looking at what I've described here, I'm struck by the similarity between what I've written and the whole 'personal learning environment' discussion we participated in a few years back. I have turned my phone in to a mobile PLE - that's a real powerful tool, right?

So, how does your smartphone experience change up the way you work?

Excuse me

2010-01-14T00:44:00.001Z

I've been a bit busy lately, putting together Ignite Bristol. It's all set for 4 March now, and we're sold out already! But that's not really the point of this post - this really just to test a blogging app on my Magic. Excuse me.

My 10 Ten Tools for Learning

2009-10-13T22:34:00.005+01:00

I've been giving this some consideration lately as I've found myself populating and repopulating a couple of machines at home and work with all that I require to keep me happy. So, here they are:

1. Google Search
(Personal) Despite the never ending torrent of brilliantly useful stuff that the Big G churns out, it still is barely necessary to append "search" to their name to be clear what you mean when you say Google is a vital tool. It's not just the basic search, but all the other options like calling up definitions, or doing maths, or conversions, or that when all else fails, most of the time the relevant entry for Wikipedia is there on the first page...

I have Google on almost permanent standby, especially so now (see 10).

2. Microsoft PowerPoint
(Creating) The much maligned app is probably where I do most of my design work, either for scripts, demos or indeed, using Articulate, developing finished products. I also use it for cobbling together graphics in a hurry (2007's much improved graphical power doing much of the heavy lifting that I don't have time to learn in GIMP).

I'm also a fan of it's capabilities for laying out eBooks for publishing to PDF. Most of the time people read eBooks on PC screens, mostly on screens in portrait format, and PowerPoint is set up to do this well. Because of the ease of adding and handling hyperlinks it trumps Word for such activities.

Occasionally I also use it for {gasp} knocking together presentations though, ironically, I think it rather sucks at that.

3. iGoogle
(Personal) This is my blog reader of choice. I prefer the way this organises content compared to Google Reader (apparently there are other readers, but they aren't made by Google). There is so much good stuff written on the blogs that I can't possibly keep abreast of it all - lordy, it's a day a week simply to keep up with Scoble and Tim O'Reilly's spottings alone. iGoogle gives me a manageable selection of my favourites.

4. Twitter
(Personal) I'll admit I was a late early adopter. I at first went through the same denial that the rest of the population of the UK (outside of edu-nerds as far as I can tell) is still going through. Then, around the end of last year I 'Got It'. Truly a great resource, if it is used well (ie not for mixed pro/personal purposes). My client of choice is Echofon, nee Twitterfox, simply because for all the fact that the alternatives seem all to be written in Silverlight or Air, they don't seem to add a great deal of actual factual functionality over this tiny plug-in for the 'Fox.

5. Audacity
(Creating) Easy to use. Great results. Nothing more to say.

I have a Samson CO1u USB microphone. Bloody marvellous bit of kit which I can't recommend highly enough. Since it is USB it bypasses any sub-standard laptop audio circuitry so giving you a great portable studio, even on a netbook.

6. Jing
(Creating) I've done some horrendous jobs where I have been tasked to sit down and shoot, then edit, hundreds of screens of system sim, in Captivate and Camtasia, and other far less handy tools. Personally, I've only been subjected to the same as a learning experience a couple of times and it wasn't pleasant. When I want to learn something generic, instead I look at the thousands of walk-throughs available on YouTube or their professional equivalents at Lynda.com and get just what I need, when I need it. Jing makes it easy to create these for what you need and, more importantly, gets them online in moments. It is the best IT support tool I have found to help me as the "IT guy" supporting learners on a two year online programme we run.

7. Wordpress
(Personal/Creating) I love Wordpress. If it weren't for the fact that what few blogrolls I've made are pointing here to Blogger, I'd jump ship in an instant. It is a GREAT CMS. I use it for my own website, a couple of other blogs that I update even more infrequently than this one, and our still fairly new 'official' workplace blog (actually only there to create links in to our website to improve the Google rating as WP works so well with search engines too, but I still try to make it informative and fun). It is the yardstick for power, control and usability by which all other CMSs should be measured (are you listening LMSs developers?)

Blogs are obviously great ways to consolidate personal learning, but as it is such a great CMS I think that it lends itself exceptionally well to broadcasting content of a non-blog nature, or with multiple authors, as the centrepiece of an informal learning network.

8. Anki
(Personal) Most of my own personal learning is done in aid of expanding my grasp of Japanese, the other tongue in my multi-lingual household (there are only 2, but I avoid using bi-lingual lest anyone should think I can do much more than order a beer or congratulate the chef). To that end, Anki, a spaced repetition app is a vital part of my toolkit. It draws on the work of Ebbinghaus, as interpreted by the guys behind Memosyne, the granddaddy SRS tool, but puts it in to a great looking package that just works really well.

9. 5-clicks
(Creating) There are lots of little apps that I use for special specific tasks when developing, mostly around colour and screengrabs. A great guy I worked with, Rory Peterson, put me on to this extraordinarily simple tool which I'm loving right now, which takes only, surprise surprise, 5 clicks to complete taking a screen grab. Then you have a great shot ready for GIMP to do its magic.

10. Android
(Personal) I just got a new phone, an HTC Magic, which is a smartphone powered by the Android operating system. Or, an easier way to say it is, "I gotta Googlephone". This amazing beast rolls together several of the items above in to one extremely portable package. I'm really excited by the opportunities that this tech embodies. I sleep with it. I stroke its screen at night. I whisper sweet nothings into its mouthpiece as it lies in standby. Delightful.

Some omissions:
Articulate - I use it a lot, but it is so odd in the way some of the tools behave, and the default output interface so horrible, that I can't include it here. I suspect it'll do really well as most users are fanboys rather than objective users.
Moodle - Again, I spend much of my time using this, and now that I am finally using it to run a higher level educational course, it starts to make sense. But again, the user experience is so awful that I cannot bring myself to say that I like it particularly.
Firefox - It's a browser. A great, extensible cuddly browser, but a browser nonetheless. It's slow, a resource hog and really is only there to open the web to me. Chrome does that too. And neither of them is IE. However, much as I like it, picking it would be like saying that I rate "paper" as a tool for learning, or water as a medium for boating in.
XAMPP - I'd love to include this actually - it's a web server that takes about 15 minutes to set up - 10 if you exclude the download time. It's the digital equivalent of a training ground as you can set up all sorts of fun things in it, like your own version of every FOSS LMS you care to mention, all at the same time, or a CMS or wiki, and bugger around until you break it, without fear of annoying anyone or having to pay a web host for the privilege.
SurveyMonkey - great way of doing research, getting feedback, surveying needs, finding out what everyone wants at the pub on friday so you can preorder. Just not using it quite enough to think of it until now. Maybe one for my list in 2010...

Flash - when and where?

2009-09-07T09:39:00.006+01:00

The cleverest part of this site's page is that it embeds an Articulate interaction directly on the page. Not thought of that before, but I can think of instances when that may be quite appealing.

However, I'm struggling to see why you would want to do this. Sure, it moves nicely enough and has pretty colours, and it 'chunks' thing up a bit. However, taking the content out of the HTML around it and embedding it in Flash means placing on it a couple of constraints:

you can't resize the text
you need to use a scroll bar to see all the text for a single entry
the learner can't cut and paste the content for their own use easily

This seems like an imposition of a gratuitous interaction where the learner's 'reward' for interacting with it is simply to batter them with more text. Perhaps if the entries were thinned out and had audio (beyond the irritating mouseover click sounds) appended I could see a point.

Surely this kind of thing would instead make more sense just being flat on the wiki page, or am I being unreasonable? Missing a crucial learning element that it brings?

These kinds of things are the missing part of my non-education in ID...

Virtual Respectability

2009-07-06T22:45:00.003+01:00

The global recession has given air travel a good seeing to, and in this time of greater fiscal prudence at hitherto carefree organisations, web conferencing is showing that it is coming of age.

And it's easy to see why. At the bottom end of the market there are now a suffusion of free tools offering the kind of functionality that only a year or two ago commanded serious fees. For us as elearning bods this offers a great new way to help people interact and share ideas, as the crew of Onlignment have recognised.

At the top end of the market the technology is getting so good that the effect is truly remarkable.

So it is no surprise to see that TED, an organisation that is all about staying ahead of the curve, is now giving virtual presence the full stamp of respectability. For the first time, those that fancy it can attend TED online, with "a virtual front-row seat at the conference via a private, live web stream". This means you get to see all the bits cut out of the TEDtalks, like the introductions by Chris Anderson, the tech guys setting up the laptop/hacked Wii/brain-in-a-jar, Seth Godin getting up halfway through a talk to go use the toilet* and so on.

While this might seem the solution to the scarcity of tickets (as I'm given to understand it, $2000 a pop, by invitation only, or at least a compelling reason as to why you should get in), before you go reaching for your credit card, even this 2D rendering of the TED experience will cost you $995, without the chance to head to the bar afterwards to chat up Qi Zhang, spill your pint on Bill Gates** or ask Phillip Zimbardo if the SPE wasn't actually a hoax***.

If they are asking that much for the experience then they know that they can - web conferencing becomes aspirational. Cool.

* Seth Godin has never done this at TED and is very well mannered - he won't even walk out of a Michael Bay movie early out of respect for other ticket purchasing members of the public.
** Not that I would suggest that you do this on purpose. He's just quite unassuming and it would be easy to inadvertently bump into him as you struggle to get away from Al Gore doing an impromptu rendition of The Inconvenient Truth on a Samsung Pico mobile phone projector next to the fag machine, egged on by Susan Greenfield and Robert Scoble.
*** I mean, doesn't it sound just a little too amazing? In six days you recreate Nazi Germany in a Californian basement, just because of a couple of a few uniforms?

Free, now with added capitalisation

2009-07-02T22:28:00.002+01:00

I've just trawled through the working and reworking of ideas spawned by Chris Anderson's book Free. It got a big response from the likes of Malcolm Gladwell and Seth Godin and on it went. I lost quite a bit of time in there.

The basic premise is that with the cost of production asymptotically approaching zero, you can more or less round it out to nothing. If it costs nothing to make, then you give it away Free. There are various broadsides levelled at the likes of publishers for daring to complain that people might reasonably be expected to pay for reading news or what have you, but there are counterclaims that Free TV is struggling (has anyone called an ambulance for ITV?) while paid for TV (cable/satellite) continues to do well.

While it is implied that Free can apply anywhere, I'm not so sure. In the case of mobile phones it is inverted, moderately priced phones are free when you pay for the facility to distribute or access content (voice, SMS or data). Similar models apply to broadband, and, increasingly, laptops, and it has even been suggested that such a model may apply to transport in the future, with the car being covered as part of a flat rate paid for the fuel.*

Of course, none of these are actually free - this model is a disguised form of credit with the cost of the hardware being spread over the lifetime of the subscription. But what's important, according to the commentary, is that the notion of Free is enough to change how people think.

However, content, it would seem, is where free really works. The discussions played out above centre on music, video, news and books.

I'm not sure how you might attach the same model to something like Adobe.

Pay $30 a month for our starter package with up to 10 layers per image and that will let you save out 75 raster file images that month. For $100 dollars a month get an additional 60 filters and get unlimited raster saves and layers.

Oh christ, I hope nobody at Adobe sees that.

The fact is, for leading edge apps, the monied option is the only way to go. Gimp is great for what I need, but it's not quite Photoshop. OO3 is a dog when placed next to Office 2007 (heck, for fun compare a rapid solution put together in Ppt 07 to one in OO Impress). Even Audacity, where the quality of output is indistinguishable from paid for alternatives, is still not the tool of choice with pros.

Sure, it costs bugger all to copy the files, but just as with Big Pharma, the cost of development of genuinely new products is so high that it can't be ignored.

At the same time, our industry is in the thrall of FOSS software - the most obvious of which is Moodle. This fairly mediocre application gets a lot of attention because of the Free label, but it's not without a great number of problems that are mainly attributable to the development model**. Cammy's tipping point post provoked some interesting replies, but for me the most telling query was Cammy's wondering about an OS authoring tool - there was one, eXe, and it was even made for Moodle, but it sucked and I think it may have died off now.****

My point, lost somewhere in my rambling, is that free content seems to be the bit that works. Yet I have not seen free elearning content.

Imagine, if you will, yet another piece of Brussels derived equality/compliance legislation washing up on the banks of the Thames outside Parliament. Six months later HR departments up and down the country are all of a panic about how to get their people "trained" on this. The usual model is for the ravening packs of the development companies to go to each individual company and create "custom" solutions. Perhaps the more forward local authorities will share this via Learning Pool (I think that's them) but not all will. A lot of wasted effort and money.

But what if an enterprising equality company was to simply give away the training in a packaged, generic course, or as a set of 'rapidready' ppt slides***.

Perhaps this could work fine for organisations that like that sort of thing
perhaps this would mean a lot of business for the company to tart it up and brand the content
Perhaps simply seeing the name on this would generate business later on

I see so much of the commercial elearning community discussing Free as it applies to us using other people's free tools, but isn't it about time that Free came in here too and started to disrupt things for us?

* God, I don't know where. This is the Internet, have a look for it. It's some smart bloke who made a fortune out of an Internet company and decided to put his money somewhere interesting. Israel may feature in this story and I know the BBC ran a story about it.

** Actually there is a really good discussion going on in the Moodle forums right now about usability and its absence in OS products.

*** an idea of a company which I cannot bear to name, for fear of seeming like a kiss ass, but whose new chief evangelist is more than welcome to claim credit for.

**** Actually, I'm not sure that this would even be possible since there are so many takes on what an authoring tool might look like the development community would probably tear itself apart, or produce a tool so diffuse it would be no things to no men (or women). [Actually the best bet for a clear project would be to work on building in Articulate/Adobe/PointeCast Presenter type facilities directly in to OO Impress - but perhaps there's another post in that idea]

***** There are very few people who will actually notice that there is no five-star comment in the body of the text. This is here simply to apologise to you for having taken up your time and to ask you to spare a moment more by adding a comment about which you think would be more awkward, a broken leg or a broken arm - let's say it's your writing hand - Your contribution on this would be really confusing to anyone who hasn't read this footnote...

What passes for work

2009-06-17T23:51:00.002+01:00

I've just abandoned a post in which I wondered if it was time to ditch the 'e' in elearning. I was prompted to think about this as it is the question I have submitted to present to Eliot Masie when he speaks to an e-Learning Network seminar this week.

When you've got a term that encompasses Articulate authored text 'n next packages to online synchronous webinars to emmersive multi-player simulation environments to videoed lectures on YouTube to Ning social networks, it strikes me that you are working with a term that has lost any specificity and thus any real meaning.

I have been thinking about this as I have been trying to get back round to blogging a little more often after getting distracted by Twitter (@danroddy if you fancy it) but I'm struggling as a) I'm fairly busy and b) not sure what to write about at the moment as I am all over the shop. Tasks include:

developing and managing a new Moodle VLE for attendees of our ILT courses (codey stuff, admin and process mapping)
supporting and improving the learning experience of students on our foundation degree (nominally for elearning, but right now fundamental stuff like spelling, format and comprensibility)
creating a series of short learning objects for guided learning hours for our NVQ candidates (actual elearning in the sense I am accustomed to)
introducing and championing online working enviroments, Sharepoint and Basecamp
creating quick video how-tos for any of the above
recording and editing podcasts
creating videos for use in on-site training courses where access to units is limited
creating feedback systems (for trainers, not happy sheets for students) for the ILT events
bit of ppt coaching

And all this comes about as a result of my 'elearning' experience.

So there you have it - no real point to this post except to try and catalogue the diversity I face really more for my benefit than anything else. Sorry.

Why I do what I do

2009-05-31T08:13:00.009+01:00

Learning rocks.

Let me say that again.

Learning new things rocks. It's a buzz. Learning gives me a thrill. When I learn something new I feel good.

It doesn't matter if that is an immediate and interesting fact that won't materially change my life*, or the slow dawning that things I have read weeks or months ago are coming together in my head to be synthesized in to a powerful new understanding that I know will make my personal or professional lives easier, more productive or just plain better.

I suspect, or at least hope, that you also know this, as learning is a fundamental part of our lives, for I suspect that you, like me, are in the learning trade. Sadly, being a part of the trade does not in itself confirm an interest in learning*2, or mean that someone even shares the buzz that I feel - but I suspect that in your case it does. Why am I so presumptious? Well, you have gone out of your way to read something on an esoteric topic by a writer of no repute because something I have said at some point has resonated with you, or someone you trust, and as a result I have ended up on a blogroll or feedreader somewhere. You're not likely to be here by chance.

If we are lucky our jobs provide us with the reason, means and opportunity to learn. If we are less so, then perhaps it may offer one or two of those things. If we are blessed then we work for people who not only allow us the freedom to learn, but who are also actively a part of the process by which we develop and grow.

If someone is truly unlucky then they do not share our interest in, or enjoyment of, learning. For whatever reason those people have been turned away from learning, more than likely due to fear through association with things that have not been pleasant, helpful or explicitly worthwhile. Sadly then, the remarkable faculties that all humans are born with (to a lesser or greater extent) turn to other perhaps less positive activities, and potential withers or is subverted.

Because I love learning, and because circumstance (but not, I suspect, chance) has led me to a job where my love is my work, I see myself as a champion of learning - a learning evangelist as we might put it these days. Someone who has to go out there and make the case for learning. In doing so I have to recognise the limits of my influence and work within them to make sure that opportunities and reasons for learning and improvement are created and/or taken. I want to nuture 'the buzz' and create the circcumstances for more people to feel the way that I do about learning.

As with many things, giving learning at least as good as receiving it.

My tools are irrelevant - classrooms or online, studybooks or presentations. My power comes from study and understanding of how we learn and understand: learning begets learning. Buzz leads to buzz. Am I a learning pusher? I might be.

So, what is it that motivates you? Is it the buzz? If not, what brought you to the trade?*3

* The 'l' at the end of the name of my wonderful hometown, Bristol, is there because of the infamous local accent - it added that, and took away a 'g' from the old name 'Brigstowe'. I love that fact.

*2 It's my experience that there are a great many people for whom the learning trade, more likely 'training business', is a) profit making b) easy c) comfortable d) about power e) is 'creative' (even if it's not quite what they really wanted to do - ie broadcast media) f) just something to do. Yes, there is no reason why it can't also be some of these things, but let's not forget the primary motive, eh?

*3 Trade not profession? Far too full of cowboys, quacks and hacks. Myself included. You're excluded from that description mind you - you're undoubtedly a professional of great integrity.

This post was born out of discussions with my wife, observation of my son's development, numerous blog posts by many writers, especially a couple by Dave Pollard and particularly one by Donald Clark recommending TV show 'The Wire', feedback from some student clients recently, occasional discussions on and offline, satisfaction born of seeing postulated thoughts being confirmed, and so on. It started out in my head as something quite concrete and got a bit fanciful. It might read badly, but hey, this is my reflective learning space and I'll reflect how I want to - sorry. Now, I have to grab the shopping bags and get down 'Asdawl', as the locals say.

Internal Communications Manager - "trainer" for the informal learning era?

2009-03-09T12:46:00.007Z

In my last internal L&D role, now some three years ago, I came to the conclusion that development of staff, in organisations large enough to have such things, really falls somewhere between three areas:

Training/HR
Communications
Knowledge Management

This (hardly revelatory) insight struck me as I wandered back across the car park to the ivory tower of the training department from yet another run to the top floor to get an IT 'hint' in the company magazine and a delve into the lair of the webby beasts to address yet another forum usability issue on our Intranet, all in the name of organisational improvement.

So is this qualification - Internal Communication Management PgDip - run jointly by Kingston University and Capita L&D, the future of L&D qualifications in an era of informal learning?

This item may have passed unnoticed, however, today I spotted another piece of junk mail that fed the same thoughts. The Internal Communications 2009* show boasts in the email (though not clearly on that link, but definitely on this PDF** ):

HR And Internal Communications Debate
Should internal communications and HR be integrated? Speakers from the BBC internal communications and HR teams share how they are working together to deliver an Employee Value Proposition and Employer Brand.***

Of course, the fault with both of these departments as they are traditionally arranged is that they are concerned only with information travelling in one direction: top-down. And I hardly need invoke the names of those commentators who would have something to say about such things.

Adopting an informal learning pose and looking a little more closely at the course spec, alarms bells ring louder:

Each module consists of a workshop, including expert speakers and topical case studies where you will study the role of the internal communication manager, employment practices and the nature of information and communication.
You will explore the effects of internal communication on the organisation and the impact of organisational factors on internal communication. You will look at the strategies and policies needed to underpin internal communication objectives and actions. You will also learn how to measure the effectiveness of internal communications.

Nowhere does the description suggest that any part of the course may take into account the changed nature of modern communications, or communications systems. In fact, it sounds so wholly academic and divorced from actual work that the only thing the course appears to teach you that you may apply directly back in the workplace is the measurement of IC - the old ROI game that training departments spend a disproportionate amount of time trying to prove - using up resources that precisely undermine their own case.

To be fair, I'd hazard that more than 80% of internal communication in an organisation is informal and I suspect that it receives a whole lot less than 20% of the attention of qualified internal communications managers.

Does your organisation 'get' peer-to-peer communication? Are you still having to develop 'training' solutions that really aren't?

* Is it just me or is it not beautifully ironic that an event devoted to the best in communications should have at the top of its blurb, A Sentence Written Entirely In Gratuitous, Distracting And Unneccesary Title Case? Oh, and there's a spelling mistake in the web page title. Makes me want to weep.

** Which you may care to look at if you really have nothing better to do with your time than wait for it to load. I really don't think these people haven't gotten over the age of print. But then, that's Hay Publishing through and thru.

*** I'm beginning to wonder if I've been too harsh. Surely this is the result of a faulty caps lock key?

"Do you have a blogging policy?"

2009-02-03T14:08:00.002Z

Just got back from another interview, but this was the first one where I asked "Do you have a blogging policy?"

I'm hardly a high profile blogger - there's only you that reads it - but nonetheless, a couple of the people I've spoken to recently have indicated that they are aware of my online activity. Perhaps because I am the top ranked "danroddy" (in categories as diverse as 'frisbies owned', 'slices of toast consumed annually' and 'Google rank') this should be expected.

But in this interview we were getting down to the nitty-gritty (me? Healthcare insurance? After the last lot they'd be spoiling me!) and it occured to me, since they seemed like the kinda folks who would allow me to develop rather than squash the life out of me, that while I'm there I may feel I have something to say to people. And this is where I would say it.

Their response was; if it helps you and you don't give away any secrets, and don't do it in company time, then that would be okay. And that's a good result I think.

Leaving aside then the issue of whether I get the job, what's your place of work like? Do they know you blog? Are they happy to have you train yourself with the words of others? Would they be less obliging than the guys I spoke to today? Do they think it's some novel diversion but not relevant to them in anyway?

A cure for the page/slide hangover?

2009-01-31T13:50:00.009Z

One of the example demos for online presentation tool Prezi makes a very valid point:

slides are a side effect of an old unused technology, slide projectors. Still, all presentation software today relies on slides.

Likewise, most e-learning (asynchronous courseware) still exhibits features of its flat/linear predecessors.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing as some very good stuff has been done using those earlier technologies, but the computer screen is not a page or a slide. In fact, it can be so much more.

Comic book author Scott McCloud explores this theme in his presentation at TED2005 and shows how comic books have tried to review their relationship to the page/screen to avoid the mistake of carrying an old paradigm forward.

McCloud traces how linear graphic narratives such as the Bayeaux tapestry by necessity - cost, accessibility - gave way to fractured, paginated narratives. Then he shows how innovative graphic story tellers are beginning to examine again how to use the limitless space of the computer's memory to create joined up storylines. He emphasises looking at the screen not as a page, but as a window.

This is of course commonplace in games design - think of chasing Lara Croft or flying a sim - and as such is gaining ground in learning with the likes of Caspian's Thinking Worlds or people using Second Life as a classroom or even cheap filmset. But based on what I saw at LT09 this week, I would imagine the majority of elearing still uses the page/slide mindset.

Much is made of the benefit of tools like mind or concept maps and how they offer an additional visual element to how information is structured, allowing us to interpret their content in a wholly different way. But at their heart most mind maps are simply heirarchical outlined lists, and often computer based mapping tools are very restricted in the options for including graphical elements. Concept maps are often quite complex, showing the multiple relationships between components, but often requiring detailed re-reading to understand and rarely offering the interpreter any guidance on how to follow them - lacking the scaffolding that would help learners of novice content.

The Prezi pan-and-zoom technique looks like a good way to resolve this problem. It offers a page/slide-free representation of information; clearly posesses a capacity for a linear path (it's a presentation tool after all) but also allows free exploration; it literally allows the learner to pull back and get an overview of the subject or drill down for greater detail (offering a Mandelbrot or microfiche-like capacity for zooming).

I find this novel approach quite exciting. Of course, there's been nothing to prevent this sort of thing being done before in Flash - I saw it in a Casio mobile phone ad a year or more ago - but to try to create this would have been a complex matter and remarkably hard, if not impossible, to get all this specified in a way that designers I've worked with would have been able to interpret well. Prezi is yet another tool that would place advanced creative control in the hands of non-specialists.

So, do you think that you could meet Scott's call for casting aside our hangover from the era of the slide and the page - could it be what he calls a 'durable mutation' - or does the convenience of linearity and familiarity mean the page turning model of elearning, for good or bad, will stay with us?

Thanks to Jane Hart for the Prezi link, lost in the torrent of good stuff on her PotD.

UPDATE: It would appear that Prezi is in private beta. I've applied for it, but if you get in, please let me know how you get on. You can still look at a couple of working demos regardless. And check out the neat new GUI design - Office Ribbon? Pfft. Deckchairs on the Titanic that was...

Learning Technologies 09 - the exhibition

2009-01-31T09:51:00.003Z

I've only been to LT a couple of times before, back in 2005/6. There seemed to be much more going on this year and that point of view was reinforced by a conversation I had with a former colleague who felt that this year there were genuine innovations in evidence, rather than last year which, for him at least, had been a load of waffle and hot air. Others may differ in this view of course.

In this post I'll look at the exhibitors and I'll talk about the (free) talks that I caught later.

As always with these things, some stands made a bigger point than others. The Adobe stand was the fanciest, a bold statement written in brand that diminished every other in the room. They had an entire auditorium put over to non-stop replays of their demos of Captivate/Flash and Acrobat. The new e-learning suite looks fantastic and looks to offer a new way of working to companies whose IDs are that bit more technical, offering seamless integration and movement between Captivate, Flash and Photoshop. People with the skill set to exploit the entire suite are going to be few and far between, but if you have a group of developers and IDs working across projects then by all accounts the new system could have a profound effect.

Other big stands included Mohive, Skillsoft, PPI, Epic, Line and Brightwave. Saffron Interactive were present again with a reprise of their kitchen of a few years ago, pushing the 'blended' learning angle with blended drinks (perhaps they do this every year). That year they were giving away copies of Clive Shepherd's blended learning cookbook, an underestimated work of great value that has probably given birth to many learning interventions over the past couple of years. This year, not representing a potentially valuable client, as I did in 2006, I was unable to score a copy of the new book. Sad really as the last one has been a good help to me over the years.

But frankly most of these companies were all saying the same thing, so their messages are barely worth repeating (though at last I got a handle on what Mohive's tool does that other e-learning companies find so useful - you can use it to storyboard and review, even if you ultimately use other tools to create).

Caspian were demoing their remarkable “easy to use” 3D tool for creating immersive environments. Following a couple of demos you could see the vestiges of click-to-progress e-learning hidden in some of the projects, but when your progression is through a well realised real-time 3D environment, who would ever notice? For big card learning, such as the airline and oil-rig safety demos they were trailing at the show, it's hard to imagine how or what else you might want to put in its place.

Small time players offered more delicate delights. Aardpress Publishing, who I saw over the summer when they announced their Moomis suite of corporate reporting tools was going to be made open source. These are guys who have wised-up to the potential of using software you don't have to pay for, and in developing their add-ons have made a useful contribution to Moodle. For giving away software that they have spent time working on, they deserve kudos.

The mood

One thing that was missing from the show was the general air of doom and gloom that seems to be prevalent just about everywhere else. I spoke to a couple of companies who were quietly confident about the coming months, though no-one was so incautious as to make bold claims for the state of play by the end of the year. The general feeling was that to be freelance right now would probably be okay. Hmm. We'll see...

Various presenters did mention stats that they had rustled up from their clients, but even those did not seem to be too terrifying. There were stories that people were cutting back, but it wasn't everybody, so the jury will have to remain out on this, for the next couple of months at least. Whatever happens I think that companies with diverse client bases will stand the best chance, while smaller players who struggle for business (like absentees Academy Internet) will get swallowed up by larger companies with the resources to ride out the troubles ahead.

Just a pointer for anyone thinking of going next year - the in venue facilities were lousy. The coffee was so-so, the food average and the service barely deserving of the name (I honestly thought the girl in the cloakroom was just going to give up and go home half way through trying to retrieve my case). If you want a decent break away from the floor next year try The Albion pub just up the road - decent food, nice enough beer, cosy environs and, hopefully fixed for next year, WiFi.

eLearning breaking through - Articulate reviewed

2009-01-29T21:21:00.003Z

Before Christmas I mentioned that I'd spotted a review of Moodle in a national magazine. Well, I bigger and more widely influential magazine, PC Pro, has reviewed the current darling of the rapid development movement, Articulate Studio.

They rate it quite highly, it scores 5 of 6; here's the summary:

A simple, fast and effective way to produce sophisticated online presentations, but it's expensive.

Interestingly however, the review throws up what they perceive to be two competitors - one is Adobe's Captivate, while the other, offered as the 'cheap and cheerful' alternative, is Wildform Flair which is something I've never heard of. Anyone else used it?

Will's Webinar - Learning Myths

2009-01-23T17:10:00.004Z

Attended the Will Thalheimer webinar (sorry, I just can't call it webinosh). Struggled a bit since I signed in at the last minute (thought I'd registered in advance but I didn't get any reminder like last week - which I missed anyway...)

So, here are the notes I hammered down and later I'll add my reflection on the approach - this was my first non-sales type webinar. I liked it.

Contemp notes

Gathered 140 myths. Wow, that's a lot of myths!

Top myth, bad learning design is good learning design. I really can relate to.

I also relate to the mistaken proclamation - It's a training issue when it isn't. Been there, seen it, advised the client to call me again when they had actually agreed on the process to be 'trained' (there wasn't one - that's why there was a divergence in approach...)

Another myth I would have thrown in - 'there is only formal learning'. Rarely do we, as learning professionals, get to be able to promote peer-to-peer learning. It's almost as if that is not our remit...

Surprised by 'learning is always beneficial'. It IS. It rocks! (oops).

Bad is good:
Will gathers a huge list of things that I learnt as being 'true', underscored by formal training (CIPD CTP anyone?), backed up by books and supported by people I worked with. Thankfully, I'm a lapsed CIPD learning professional. I am now free of their dogma...

Shame the sound doesn't work.

I think the key piece we miss is the evidence - evidenced-based is the way to go, but the vast flood of material on learning design is mostly fluff - filler to sell a product or a point of view. Wonder how we can actually help add to the body of evidence. Is there a guide to how we can work on this? Some clients would welcome the opportunity to get associated with trials and so forth (wouldn't they? Anyone working with the BBC? Don't they have a public service remit?)
...

Err, that's it. I'm not a great one for note taking. I suspect you would do well to go and check out Cammy's...

Other attendees notes
Cammy Bean (I was right - she got it all)
Will Thalheimer (of course he was there - here are all his notes, including participant comments)

Training Specialist - one of the 30 best careers for 2009?

2009-01-22T17:20:00.003Z

Just spotted this interesting article on the US News website - bit late as they posted this before Christmas, but better late than never.

They list their choices for the 30 best careers for 2009 and amongst those on offer (3 others: usability expert, firefighter, clergy) you'll find Curriculum/Training specialist. This vague categorisation seems to take in the job spec of just about anyone in the EduBlogosphere, but then we're a flexible bunch.

The list itself is quite interesting as they have tried to be objective and give their criteria for our consideration. They also give their selection of over-rated careers (two examples: teacher, architect) and sleeper careers for the future - most interesting of which is simulation developer, which is one that some of us would see as falling under our current description of training specialist.

Learning Technology - making the most of a learning opportunity

2009-01-21T13:02:00.004Z

I sat last December eyeing up the conference line-up for this year's Learning Technologies , the UK's main commercial e-learning event and was drawing up a fantasy timetable.

Sadly, being a lowly freelancer with no-one to pick up the tab* for the eye-watering ticket cost, it was nothing more than day-dreaming, which was a real shame as the line up includes quite a few speakers that I'd like to see (how about Itiel Dror, Tony Buzan, or George Siemens?)

Still, never mind. Since I have the time I will still be going, to make the most of the some 50 free seminars that will be running over the two days. Any opportunity to learn from others in the business is good (and by extention I intend to share what I find with you).

The risk with these things, and I have been before to LT, is that they are thinly (and not so thinly) disguised 'advertorials' given by the various exhibitors at the stalls around the exhibition. A quick scan down the list reveal which to be wary of; for example, the first seminar in 'Theatre' 1 is detailed thus:

Have you ever come across two organisations that are exactly the same, with the same values and a common set of competences? We haven't. That is why we work with you to deliver customised online learning solutions.

This workshop will introduce you to some of the customised learning solutions we've created for clients over the past ten years and give insights into the direction that we believe learning is heading.

The first paragraph has all the hallmarks of having been taken out of the company's sales literature. The second sounds it would be the 'about us' part of a pitch presentation to new clients.

Others may be more neutral - it seems possible that a software company prompted the Royal Navy to tell us about how they are using PSPs, but it could be an interesting talk and I would hope the representative of HM's Armed Services will maintain a detached perspective.

This is not to knock the talks at all - it's good to see so many people willing to put in the time to give these talks and they have to be able to get something out it in return, or what's the point? But at the same time there is a distinction between a worthwhile presentation that reveals some kind of insight in to our business (and tells us about the comapny behind it) and enduring a 30 minute sales talk full of implausibly 'extreme' marketing jargon.

Thankfully, the various 'theatres' are open areas so I can always apply the Law of Two Feet and find another speaker. I'll report back what I find next week.

* If, however, you're an overseas organisation, keen to attend, but wary of overstepping your carbon footprint, I could be your proxy if you like! There's still time yet...

The 'learner' fallacy - delusions of influence in L&D

2009-01-20T12:54:00.005Z

The training/development/HR profession is always intensely interested in its own use of language. Perhaps because it spends so much time alongside the diversity hounds of the HR department, or in the company of the mind-benders of NLP, the 'Training Department' has seen the change to 'Learning & Development' and is obsessed with its 'learners'.

While this is laudable, and shows a commendable attempt to place the focus on the recipient of their endeavours, it strikes me as a bit odd. Most business sections are named after what they do, rather than the influence they have on other people (after all, if the Sales team were called the Buying team, things would get really confusing, though of course the Buyers would now be called the Selling team).

If anything, grandly calling ourselves 'learning professionals' is rather presumptuous; we don't really have a great deal of control over whether the person sitting in front of the computer, or in the classroom (or holding the device or whatever) actually does learn anything - we can instead only hope to facilitate and influence them.

In classical media the people creating the material there are more realistic - they speak of viewers, readers and listeners, not 'enjoyees' or 'understanders'. Likewise, the teaching profession is a lot more upfront about what they do, as they at least admit to teaching (let's leave aside, for the moment, any discussion of whether anyone learns anything at school any more, or whether or not the person at the front of the class should be called a Tester).

What's the alternative?

Instead perhaps we should take a step back a think of our audience as 'users'.

More than enough type has been devoted recently to discussions on the (in)validity of learning styles, but let me add another thought to the mix. Should we consider models of 'user styles'? You might come up such designations as:

dedicated users removing themselves from distractions
multi-tasking users enlivening e-learning screentime with IM and email
technophobe users* struggling to read on-screen and hating having to use the infernal machine they'd rather not go near
impatient users* skipping as much as possible until they have a WIIFM moment.

The design of products better suited to the demands of people is called ergonomics; on the web this is 'usability'. Web browsers, the delivery vehicle of almost all e-learning, have settled on a common set of features that mean users can really switch from IE to 'Fox to Opera without a second thought, making the interface 'invisible' and living up to Steve Krug's demand 'Don't make me think.'

Yet many e-learning courses, even those for the same company, change their interface each time, making strange the experience and drawing the focus of the user away from content to dwell instead on form.

The use of knowledge

Knowledge=power, so the saying goes, and the benefit of recasting our audience as users goes on.

Our concern for our learners ends ends with the course - "have they learnt what we told them?" Thinking about our users prompts us to think again - "So they used our course, but how will they use what we have told them?"

I remember being told by one client how, as soon as we delivered the training course that she and I had been mandated to deliver, someone in another department would go through it and copy it up, more or less verbatim, to the KM system. It was there that most people would reach the information when they needed it (away from the walled garden, or should that be prison, of the LMS).

In that case the company processes that steered us to designing and delivering the course, focused as they were on returning course completion metrics, steadfastly refused to acknowledge how the staff used the information.

Aiding our users

Would a focus on how knowledge may be used influence our choice of the format? Advocates of the job aid supported approach to course development, like Cathy Moore, know full well that recognising the fallibility of cognitive processes is an important part in understanding how our users can make the most of the time you and they are spending in creating and using your outputs.

Tell your users what's happening...
...let them know why it matters to them and where they can find out more...
...even give them an overview of the detail...
...but then give them something to use so they can get the precise detail when they need it - be that a job aid, a wiki, or whatever.

I'm not, I must point out, advocating forgetting about what we want our audience to do, ie learn, but I'm hoping that by rethinking the label we might be able to step back and make space at the learning table for other parties that have a part to play in helping people in an organisation get better at what they do - principally, in my experience, people involved in knowledge management and internal communications , but perhaps also taking advantage of your marketing team, all of whom have common goals - making your business better - but who rarely, if ever, ever think about learners.

So, are you confident that you are always designing for learners, or users?

* Okay, even I would baulk at these terms - perhaps we might go for reluctant users and outcome-focused users. You tell me...

2009 - the year of consumer e-learning

2009-01-06T10:58:00.006Z

We should all be aware by now that making any attempt to predict the future is a fruitless task, if our goals are to accurately anticipate what's going to happen. If, on the other hand, the goal is to have something somewhat amusing to look back upon and produce a wry smile 12 months from now, then I'm all for predictions. So here is my contribution to the Learning Circuits Big Question for January.

In fact, I'm going to make just one, as I believe it ties together a number of threads that other commentators have already: 2009 will see a rise in consumer e-learning.

The focus in the e-learning industry tends to be either academic applications or use in the corporate sphere - take for example the UK industry awards that are almost exclusively pitched at corporate development.

Part of the problem is the invisibility of the industry to outsiders. In the June 2008 edition of e.learning age I wrote about a company based out of Japan that have developed a really good model of language learning based around podcasting, and enthusiatically taken up by a global audience of linguaphiles. A great example of a web business, it is built around a large amount of free content - the podcasts - and a range of paid-for services that extend the usefulness of the audio. When I spoke to the head of the company, Peter Galante, and suggested that what they had developed, actually based upon a customized Wordpress blog, was a sophisticated LMS, he shrugged, not understanding the term. He was, however, keen to see how he could pitch his system to corporations as a great way of improving internal communication and learning.

Such examples are not rare. Wikipedia may just be another useful fall back story for no news days - 'Wikipedia full of lies' being the general tone - but for many of us the idea of a welcomed and fully supported wiki on the company intranet, making the most of peer-to-peer, bottom-up learning is all to often a dream. Yet Wikipedia is precisely the place that a majority of web-users now start any quest for new knowledge.

It's hardly a revelation that the likes of the Nintendo DS have opened channels to users that have previously been off-limits to technology, but with mobile telecoms finally reaching the point where we have very powerful - and crucially usable - computers literally in the palm of our hands, the reality of being able to fit e-learning around our daily lives gets ever closer. With always on 'net connectivity ('living in the cloud') meaning we aren't even reliant on having to synch devices - everything is always connected to online repositories - such technologies take a step closer to transcending that very label and just becoming 'stuff' around us. Indeed, for most of the people who read this post, and most likely their children, that's already happened, but the next step is to take our cousins, parents, aunties and even grandparents with us.

So why will this take off this year? Precisely because there is this confluence of themes that others have been supporting and engaging with - mobile technology, cloud computing, ever easier to use devices, openness to gaming - coinciding with the ongoing spate of "unpredictable moments of opportunity" that is the net result of global turmoil that will be the steady background hum for 2009. With so many people likely to need to increase their individual competitiveness in the coming year, we'll all be looking for ways to get or maintain that edge. e-Learning may have its moment to shine.

Open Source life, LMSs beyond Moodle

2008-12-18T23:20:00.006Z

I've recently become a fan of Open Source Living, a site that rounds up the best of the many and varied OS apps that are out there.

I find it rather more useful day-to-day than the more far-ranging but rather bewildering SourceForge, probably because while that site seems more targeted at developers, OSLiving is a bit more selective - it seems to weed out the thousands of half finished, one-man-in-a-bedroom-every-second-Sunday-in-months-ending-with-'y' type apps that fill out any search on SourceForge. (Incidently, if like me you haven't visited SourceForge in the last few weeks it's had an overhaul, so do pop in, won't you?)

One area that naturally caught my eye was e-Learning, given an unusually prominent position as the second section under content management, after blogging, but ahead of illustrious app categories such as forums and wikis! No doubt this is due to the prominence of Moodle which appears to be breaking out in to mainstream consciousness - popular British computing weekly MicroMart is even carrying an article extolling its virtues this week.

Moodle is of course THE open source e-learning item of the moment*1. You know something is big when it even starts to be worthy of parody, but the fact of the matter is it's a success. The Open University have spent a lot of money on it, which has in turn seen more people pick it up, it is getting an enormous established user base (for something in the educational sphere its remarkable apparently*2) and its adoption in the corporate sphere is championed by no lesser luminaries of the UK scene than Kineo (2).

But OS software is really no different than other software and where one project blazes a trail, there will be others tagging along*3 and so it was with a certain amount of excitement that I found some other LMS projects:

eFront
Hailing from Greece and available in two flavours, the Enterprise edition is pitched firmly at the corporate sphere, but incurs support fees I think. From the limited screenshots it looks pretty.

Docebo
Like eFront this includes chats and wikis and allsorts of lovely web 2.0 stuff to supplement your training, and claims to support 'blended' learning. I hate that term, but if that means it helps manage classroom learning (so is a true LMS rather than an LCMS) then that's cool.

Dokeos
Interestingly OSLiving doesn't even list educational establishments as the potential userbase for this LMS. Again, looks pretty. For a better insight, and an example of great minds thinking alike*4, check out Steve Rayson's review at the Kineo website. You can even log on to their demo site. Can't begin to say how cool it is that it integrates with OO Impress in a presentation-to-SCORM content model. Brilliant, and it's even called Oogie. Marvellous.

Claroline
Unabashedly targeting the educational sphere, this proclaims to have the stamp of approval of none other than UNESCO! What other e-learning app, or of any other flavour for that matter, do you know of to get a thumbs up from the UN? In 35 languages apparently, so hardly a fly-by-night project this.

What's amazing about these (to me at least) is the level of sophistication of these apps straight out of the wrapping. The demo site of Dokeos set up by Kineo featured a chat room and even a virtual classroom. Simple they may have been, but there they were. Almost no organisation can say that they can't afford e-learning now. And what's more, the feature sets on show here eclipse any corporate LMSs I've been in contact with recently.

In the brave new world of the freelance e-learning specialist that I find myself from January, I will be exploring at least Dokeos as it seems a very interesting proposition.

*1 if moments can be said to last a couple of years or so.
*2 it would seem schools are a fractious, clueless bunch and don't often do things together, so the edu-soft market is awash with crappy two-bit offerings or large corporations selling crap.
*3 except GIMP - has anyone spotted another decent OS image editor? Or for that matter, do you know of a simple graphics app suited to sketching diagrams? Small, quick, simple? GIMP's a bit heavy for that, you know. Answers in a comment please...
*4 I found Dokeos on Tuesday then read Steve's review on Thursday - I thought this was us both picking up on the zeitgeist early, but I may have been late to the party. Still, OS is Steve's business, so he should know quicker than most...

Moving in to the Cloud

2008-12-04T14:08:00.005Z

I've been an enthusiastic convert to Cloud living since I discovered Gears, the Google extension that allows me to take web apps (Google Docs mainly) offline with me.

It creates a local database that backs up your Docs data and synchs it with the online version as soon as you connect back to the 'Net. The interface for Docs suits the way I like to think more than the now clunky, hand-me-down files and folders concept of Word and its ilk, and being able to carry it around and switch between my works PC and my two home machines without needing to copy files back and forth actually helps me a lot.

With this kind of platform neutral feature adding real strength to the 'the-browser-is-the-OS' argument, you could be sure that the boys in Seattle weren't going to let their stranglehold on the desktop/office slip away too easily.

The response is Mesh, a kind of synchronised folder for the net generation. It requires that you install Mesh on each machine and as far as I can tell, still relies on nominated 'meshed' folders, but the basic principle is the same - work on one machine and the files will be available on any others just as soon as Mesh can check back in with the mothership (ahem, connect back to the 'Net).

Since this will still, as far as I can see, perpetuate the files and folders system, I am unlikely to feel the need to opt for this in a personal capacity, but if it means flexible working without lugging the laptop for example, then I can see clear benefits.

The real star of this post is actually the 2008 Learning Trends collaborative tools mindmap, but then I like to hide the subject of my posts down here at the bottom as a special treat for those of you that read this far.

Right then, I listened to the blog and other tales

2008-12-04T00:13:00.003Z

I've decided that it is time for a change. Reflecting on what has been happening this last year I have come to the conclusion that if I'm going to get to blog more often I'm going to have to make changes to how I fill my day.

So in the interests of Learning Rocks I have opted to change jobs.

Okay, so my decision to leave my current employer is not entirely about blogging, but it would be too sensible to say that it wasn't at least a tiny factor in it.

You can expect more on this channel, and more frequent updates, from now on.

In the meantime, I would really suggest you take a look at Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe (Series 2, Episode 3) on the fantastic BBC iPlayer. Brooker has pulled together some of the best TV writers in the UK - Graeme Linehan, Russell T Davis and more - to talk about writing. There is a lot to get out of this (especially if like me you are terrible procrastinating writer) about the creative process generally, some of which I think can be said of good ID. Highly recommended.

Say goodbye to your name tag

2008-11-09T20:30:00.000Z

Once again something I've been thinking about is something that Donald Clarke commits to type. This time he's calling for a change to conferences. I was musing on the same thing earlier in the month, but like the point made in my last post, I'd let it slide and not gone back. Incidently, in the time that elapsed since starting this second attempt at addressing the issue I notice that Viv Cole from Academy Internet has also added to the debate - an important voice on the matter given his involvement in organising the eLearning Network events.

The source of Donald's ire this time is the rather bland structure of the usual business conference (you know the kind of thing - seating in neat rows, predictable sandwich fillings and snacks on sticks, coffee in insulated jugs, venue stamped pens and stationary). The structure of all this, Donald notes, is nothing more than our school days writ large. As such we should not (if we're behaviourists I suppose) be surprised if this inspires the same sorts of reactions as the classroom does - like wanting to sit at the back, only listening with one ear, shuffling away as soon as time is called.

Really, with all the other changes that have taken place in society over the last few years, surely we should expect to see changes in business conferences? Well, yes we do - sign up for WoLCE now and get a free DS Lite...*

But that's not really fair. These kinds of events are under pressure to be conservative - the various bodies that have a vested interest have certain expectations: sponsors want their name treated with respect; companies paying for the attendees to be there will only want to pay for something that seems legit; the venues running the things know "what people want" and so on.

So the traditional conference structure is unlikely to be able to change, even if the participants, like me and Donald, would prefer to see something a bit different.

But, there are alternatives.

Jay Cross et al are putting together the second (I think) Corporate Learning Trends and Innovations unconference. An unconference is a self-consciously labelled attempt to draw attention to the fact that it is NOT like a conference. And by reputation last year's event, despite a title that is sooo straight it could walk in to a room full of reggae dancehall singers without fear of violence, was a great success - the participants reported a genuine sense of getting something new out of the experience and I will be there myself this year round (if I can manage it).

However, I have to say that there is nothing like actually getting together and MEETING people in the flesh to make new connections and try new ideas.

So what are the offline alternatives? Here are a couple of ideas that I rounded up recently:

BarCamp is a West Coast inspired get-together for codies that has expanded to take in all sorts of messages. It takes the format of a free weekend camp out (typically in the offices of a friendly sponsor) organised collaboratively via a wiki. There areBarCamps planned in Senegal, Tajikstan and more than a dozen in the pipeline in the UK alone. BarCamps also feature elements of...
Open Space Techology. Frankly the web evidence for OST has more than a little of "cult" about it, but the basic approach is very informal and democratic. One of its key features, and one that Donald explicitly calls forin his blog, is the two feet rule. The event should encourage people who aren't getting, or adding, anything from/to the debate to use their two feet and move on**.
Lightning talks, Ignite, 20/20 presentations, Pecha Kucha. These are all variations on a theme, and could really be part of any of the above. The common thread that binds these together is the idea that brevity helps when you are trying to get your message across (a point clearly forgotten by the author of this post). Pecha Kucha is phenomenon started in Japan by a couple of foreign architects who wanted to get others from their profession together to share their knowledge. Aware that given half a chance there is nothing an architect likes to do more than stand around and talk about themselves, they imposed a limit of 20 slides to accompany them, and only 20 seconds per slide; meaning that presentations can fair whistle along. If 20 seconds is too long, the Ignite format shortens it to 15...

* Seriously, the headline sponsor for WoLCE is the Daily Mail. Now, while I can understand the benefit that tawdry hate-rag gets out of associating itself with the Ski Show and such like (I'd swear they used to be behind the Ideal Home exhibition though it's EDF now), I'm stumped as to why they are involved in WoLCE. Do they run a spread on the show? I doubt it (though I'll never know unless someone else tells me).
** though in the spirit of true freedom I suspect that should you wish to hop, roll, crawl or slither away you are just as welcome.

What blogging tells you about yourself

2008-11-09T19:18:00.002Z

I realise I've been blogging intermittently for more than two years now. In the time that I've been doing it I've had bursts of creativity and feeling that I've just had to get down on the page, and other periods (much of this year if I'm honest) where the mojo has been lacking and I've not felt that I've had quite so much to say, or at least that I've been prepared to say.

But looking at the post admin pages for the blog, and at the posts that I've started and not ever finished, or bothered to post, I'm conscious that, for all the wonderful effects that blogging can have on your learning, the fact that it is public and open to the scrutiny of your peers and colleagues, clients and competitors, means that there is usually a need to be circumspect in what you commit to the page.

There are posts that I've started that I've never published since they run contrary to my employer's position on the matter, or pieces that I've re-read and dropped since they could be interpreted as a critique of work by colleagues and clients (or even my own) that some people may not intpret as being helpful. There posts where I've simply not been comfortable with the way that I've articulated by point and I've left them with the intention of coming back to edit them and, well, they're still waiting. Heck, there are even comments that I would like to have made on other people's blogs that I've pulled after typing.

Is this right? Should your employer's line on something stop you from having, or exploring, contrary points of view? Should the fear that someone may have thought you knew about something stop you using your blog to reflect on it when you have something to say? Should the thought that a piece of advice you might make to another blogger as a comment may not be politically sound, even if it is unrelated to your day job? If so, does this raise questions about how you choose to blog, and make it available? If a blog is for CPD, is it right to place it in the public domain?

My discarded comments are lost in the digital dust of cached pages and autofill memories but looking through the subject matter of unpublished blog entries I can see that there are themes to some of those abandoned posts that are telling me some interesting things about me that perhaps I should look to revisit and do something about.

I guess that this fits the adage that what is not said is sometimes as important as what is said.

Questions that this whole issue raises, what does your abandoned scribbling tell you about your self?

This post with thanks to Clive Shepherd whose own exploration of what his blog means to him and to others prompted me to commit this comment to the page, and, crucially, the 'publish post' button.

Sweet moments in web browsing

2008-10-23T07:38:00.004+01:00

Following Cammy's discussion on seat time in elearning (far more interesting than this post btw) I found myself at the Brandon Hall site where Janet Clarey had taken up the same question.

While you are there, and hopefully adding your contribution to the debate, just check out the sweet tag cloud that seems to take its name quite seriously. Nice touch.

Snapshots of 21st century learning #1

2008-10-13T13:35:00.003+01:00

My friend has just started his first teaching job as a graphic design lecturer at three different FE colleges.

The levels of the students varies from establishment to establishment, but he admits now that setting a research project as his first major piece of work with one group was perhaps a little optimistic.

Dismayed at the lack of progress that was being made he accompanied them to the library. The source of their problem was clear. Students would take books off the shelf and leaf through them at random, wondering how they were supposed to find what they were looking for beyond seredipity. My friend had to introduce the idea of the index and the contents pages as the crude, real-world precursors to the search function...

Getting perspective - the geophysical view

2008-10-12T18:51:00.002+01:00

I've been working with a client in the financial sector lately, so I've had my focus directed at the markets perhaps even more than I might otherwise (not that we can avert our stares from the car crash).

So this is not really elearning related, but is instead a beautiful take on perspective in these interesting times - from a great blogger who is, I think, a Brit working in the financial sector in Tokyo.

Three tiny tools to help your course development

2008-10-08T10:52:00.007+01:00

I am still doing a lot of work with development tools such as Articulate/PowerPoint, Captivate and most recently KSTutor, supplemented with standards such as GIMP and Kompozer.

In the line of this I have at various points had cause to look to add to my toolbox with some very nifty, but tiny micro apps. Here are three I am using at the moment:

GetColor SF: In essence a standalone version of the dropper tool offered by GIMP, Photoshop et al.

If you are working in PowerPoint you don't have the same luxury. GetColor offers a great way to get the hex value of any colour on the screen, and even save them for reference.

Arguably an essential addition to the PowerPoint learning designer's desktop.

Colour Contrast Analyser: Not sure if your imagery will meet accessibility requirements? This little app assesses contrast between colours. If you are working with the likes of Ufi you may know about this, but if you aren't, especially if you are doing your own SME-centred in-house development, this is a great way to get "free" accessibility.

This is a product of an Australian organisation called Vision Australia and a great example of an interest group that not only campaigns for equality but actually goes out there to make it easier for people to comply (overcoming inertia) after all - choosing colours wisely is essentially a 'free to implement' accessibility standard.

Sizer: A simple little tool that allows you to set the size of a window. With screen sizes now rapidly diversifying this allows you to choose to view at standard size, or to set your own sizes. Useful for viewing courses as your learners will see them, or for setting them prior to a capture session if you are using things like Captivate or KSTutor.

On the side of the good guys

2008-07-07T22:14:00.003+01:00

From time to time I get a bit worried that what I'm doing isn't, well, "worthy". Each week I meet a group of guys to play Ultimate Frisbee. As a game it's a bit different and the crowd that gather are a bit different - renewable energy engineers, sustainable development advisors, livestock researchers, conservationists.

"So what do you do?" comes the question, to which I mumble "elearning designer". Once I've explained what elearning is, "You know, that stuff you get sat down at a computer when you join a new company and have to check off..." they roll their eyes, if they haven't completely glazed over.

Against the roll call of fascinating, planet saving jobs my team-mates boast, I feel like perhaps I could be doing something a bit more useful right now instead of taking the comfortable option of cosying up to big corporates for a living.

But then again - I could be doing stuff like this: The story of stuff.

The first "internet documentary" I've seen (as opposed to video documentaries broadcast via YouTube or similar FLV based sites), this short piece is a great example of high fidelity knowledge sharing online - easy to watch, well animated, easy to navigate (reminds of TED which is no bad thing). And it is, of sorts, elearning (without a concept checking quiz or list of objectives in sight).

But cool technical points aside, the documentary reminds me that elearning is on the right side - elearning helps to make a positive difference:

People don't travel as much if they are participating in elearning.
By and large we don't make huge demands on people's systems that they are forced into another cycle of consumption on their hardware - we just piggyback on a tool that is there already.
Training online can help cut down the consumption of additional material (have you ever seen how classroom training EATS pens, paper and flipchart stands?).
Heck, we might even expose people to interesting new ideas that make their jobs better and/or their lives more worthwhile (perish the thought)

Get ready for the goldrush?
I've heard a variety of outrageous claims for elearning's future - one I half recall is that elearning would "make the internet(?) look like a rounding error" in terms of value. I'm sure there have been many more over the generations of forms of technology assisted learning.

Well, people are using technology to learn in huge numbers now, just not in the way that was ever expected (think how many people start learning about something, anything, everyday just by firing up Wikipedia - but of course that's free). But as far as I can tell the claims have always been made on the strength of the idea itself, or a new technology.

I stumbled across a link just now to Monash University (does Australia even have any other universities?) which claimed the elearning market, including the higher education sector, was in 2008 worth US$100m - sorry I closed the link before I realised I'd want it for this rant). If recent developments in the price of fuel are anything to go by, this will be a figure that will rise sharply, and soon. As the price of fuel escalates it becomes ever harder to ignore the associated costs of running classroom events. With cool technology making the online classroom ever more appealing, people's remaining objections will only diminish. As learners become ever more accustomed to using the internet everyday,

While the current economic blip may delay the push to a more sustainable model of business from gathering the momentum it looked like it was building up last year, it will only be a matter of time before it will return with a vengence - just as soon as the "no environment, no economy" relationship finally sinks in.

For all the reasons above, but most importantly for economic reasons that will influence the decision of people with real influence - the accounting department, elearning could be about to come in to its own.

When PowerPoint is wrong...

2008-07-05T09:21:00.009+01:00

Last week I spied, tucked on a shelf following a recent office shuffle, a copy of The Cognitive style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within, by Edward Tufte - a critique of Microsoft's infamous presentation app as an effective method of communication.

It had been bought by a colleague, who has since moved-on, who was a great fan of Tufte and skeptical of the use of PowerPoint as an authoring tool; though I'm not sure there was necessarily a direct causal link. Since I'm spending a lot of my time (ie most of it) elbows deep in slides, images and Articulate Presenter, it seemed an opportunity ripe for seizing.

It actually makes for pretty shocking reading. The central strand of evidence is the example set at NASA, where PowerPoint usurped all the traditional methods of inter-scientist communication and ended up being the de facto reporting tool - of one of the premier scientific organisations in the world. Tufte gives us reasons that show that it was patently absurd that this should happen - the inability of PowerPoint to accurately present scientific formulae is only the beginning, and other flaws in its suitability to the task at hand meant that it could be argued that Bill's beloved slideshow generator played a part in the chain of events that led to the 2003 space shuttle disaster.

The deeply hierarchical structure of the default layouts in PowerPoint comes in for particular criticism, the root cause of the tendency of users to bullet EVERYTHING, principally it seems, because they can. As a result of the layouts chosen and the implicit level of importance that the bulleting hierarchy imposes, argues Tufte, crucial aspects of evidence that pointed to the risks posed by a seemingly minor incident on launch were missed by those taking the decisions to proceed with re-entry. In the event, damage sustained to the heat shielding on one of the wings caused the shuttle to burn up as it tore through the atmosphere.

With this point firmly made, Tufte moves on to the information density of PowerPoint. If you've read Tufte at all (and I wholeheartedly recommend that you do if you haven't - try this or this), you'll know that he loves the elegant display of data. His books are full of slick maps of Japanese train timetables that merge the beauty of ukiyo-e with the simple brilliance of underground maps and neatly tabulated rows of data that at a glance allow the reader to compare multiple 1000s of pairs of data with nary a flicker of the eye. Tufte's point is that, with careful planning (and not a shortage of artistic flair in many cases) it is possible to fit extraordinary levels of comprehensible detail in to quite small spaces. Even straight forward words can achieve this effectively. Examples of text density he cites include comparing characters on a page (Guinness Book of Records, 4,600; NYT website, 4,100; BBC News website, 3,400; PowerPoint, 98-250) or characters per square inch (for the above, 162; 43; 36; 1-3 - though this will obviously become mere fractions once you project it on the wall).

In another list of examples, PowerPoint rather damning comes only second to worst in amount of detail conveyed to Pravda, the old Soviet corporate adver-zine. Enough, surely, to have all but the most die-hard Microsoft fans scrabbling for the uninstall button?

Of course, Tufte is not alone in these criticisms. The "death-by-PowerPoint" meme has been around the block a number of times, and having myself witnessed meetings and training courses where the facilitator or trainer has read every word on screen, or plumbed the darkest depths of the standard Office clip-art files for the same image as I saw in the last course. Where Tufte stands out is at least he has some measured criticisms that make it easier to avoid the same mistakes - though I'll let you go to the source for these.

And so to the, "Yes, but..."?

These criticisms are entirely fair. Scientists at a major organisation like NASA should not have been encouraged to make all their reports in PowerPoint. The established method for, well, centuries, has been the written account or report. Simply because it is established doesn' mean it always has to be this way, but as Tufte forcefully argues, they are far more suited than a slideshow to the large quantities of evidence that scientific enquiry demands be provided (after all, peer-review can't happen without it).

It's surprising that even in a an organisation as august as NASA, the modern urge to boil everything down to soundbite, or elevator pitch had taken a firm grip to the point that everyone was scurrying around clutching sheaves of slide handouts. Surely with something as serious as spacecraft re-entry with a crew of talented, dedicated people on-board warrants careful consideration of all the facts - after all, for once it is rocket science.

I think that what was missed is PowerPoint is PRESENTATION software. It is designed to assist you in presenting something. It shouldn't be the thing itself. Which would appear to be the problem at NASA and is all too often the problem that other users fall prey to - the same problem that gets characterised as "death-by-PowerPoint". The presentation itself became the focus instead simply of the medium.

PowerPoint in the context of presentations is a quick, functional way to get images, graphs and key messages on a screen, to support your main message. It is not a place to write lengthy reports - it simply isn't designed to cope.

However, if you step back from the all-too-easy-to-adopt position of the "death-by-PowerPoint" crowd, and evaluate Microsoft's bete-noire as a simple, screen orientated page layout tool that even the most ardent technophobe can get familiar with, suddenly you can begin to evaluate it in a new light, and it this use that I will look at in my next piece: "...and when PowerPoint is right."

Learning how to rest

2008-06-21T12:07:00.005+01:00

We all now that in order to be able to learn effectively, just as if we want to do anything effectively, we need to be alert, energised and ready to perform.

One sure fire way to damage learning before it starts is to not be well rested. Various studies show that paying attention to getting enough sleep can have a profound effect on school students' academic performance. Here are a couple: here's a pretty good article from NY Magazine, and here's a meta-study on university student performance.

But getting enough sleep at the usual time can be tricky: pressures of school, work and daily living can nibble away, or simply chomp, at our time in bed, leaving us tired, run-down and running at sub-optimal levels. The solution is to nap - we've known this for a while of course, but I still get mocked for downing tools, kicking my feet out and snoozing in the office.

I usually find a quiet sofa to chill on, and set a quick 12 minute timer on my phone so I can take the edge off. It would seem I've been getting some of the best practices right too, according to this brilliant article on how to nap from the Boston Globe.

I am posting this here because not only is the information useful, but I like the simplicity of the article as a learning object. Nice graphics give it visual appeal, but they carry information too. The "timeline" in the middle is great because it evens outlines the nap-tactic to use for the right occasion.

Thanks to Merlin Mann at the excellent 43 folders for bringing this to my attention.

Let go of old technology - out with email

2008-06-07T08:37:00.002+01:00

For a while now I've had the funny feeling that email creates at least as much work as it facilitates.

Wondering if there were any other malcontents out there - I guessed there would be - I found this in an old blog entry from a guy called Lars Plougmann. He works at an organisation that promotes social software as far as I could tell. This rather amusing (though obviously made up) breakdown from August 2006 sums up how I feel about managing projects with email.

9 people read the email
8 people file the email (in their private folders, thereby duplicating effort)
7 people are interrupted in their work or thoughts when the email arrives
6 people will never be able to find the email again
5 people didn’t actually need to know about the change
4 people joining the project in the next phase wouldn't have received the email
3 people will be able to find the email again, should they need to
2 people will check back to the email at a later date when they need the information
1 of them will understand the email in context, be able to find it at a later date and action it

Based on my own experience of taking even just a day off, and then contending with the swamped inbox full of things I, at best, may need to know, some I definitely do and a fair load I certainly don't, this seems a reasonable stab at summarising the waste.

A hint that its time may have passed lies in the "e" tag which effectively marks email out as something of a digital antique - everything is "i" or "pod" now.

Email is over 40 years old, but its growth in popularity and arrival at ubiquity really occurred in mid-90s, the heyday of desktop computing and the beginning of the wide-spread adoption of the Internet. At the time "always on" Internet access was something of a luxury. We were still paying by the minute for access, and in any case, the 56k speeds were so slow as to limit what we could achieve.

But email, able to step online, pull down these messages from anywhere, that may have been sent only seconds before, was a miracle. Working on separate, isolated desktops was the norm and email was one of the best ways to make bridges between them.

Email changed how we could communicate, work and behave, just as effectively as the postal service, the telegraph and satellite communications did before it. And, just as the post continues to play a unique part in the way we communicate, despite the fact that in many instances it is now easier, quicker and cheaper to use email, email itself will probably continue to be relevant for years to come.

But for some tasks, in particular group working on shared tasks - ie projects - email, for the reasons above, has been itself replaced by a generation of tools, mostly web-based, that allow us to work in shared spaces. They allow us to easily and very effectively keep all our communication in one place, track tasks, hold meetings, share files, collaborate on documents - the list goes on. Instead of working on isolated desktops, we can work in our own project offices, each the size of the world if needs be.

Or rather, email should have been replaced in this way. But it hasn't. Sadly, these email killers are not new - collaborative tools like Google Apps, Zoho or BaseCamp, forums and wikis - and yes, even blogs - are now established, familiar and robust. Yet there continues to be a blindness in those who should spot the problems and their solutions, so we are stuck giving our time to the inbox instead of something useful.

For me it is ironic that so many people engaged at the intersection of technology and learning should take so long to see it.

The perfect voice, the perfect podcast?

2008-05-30T07:29:00.004+01:00

I've been given thought lately to the effectiveness of podcasting as a tool for delivering training. After discussing the issue with an expert in the field I can see how it could easily be classified under the "rapid" banner too. The expert, Peter Galante of JapanesePod101, revealed that he felt that success or failure of podcasting as an enterprise lay in one or two keys features, chief of which was an an engaging voice.

So, today's spurious-advertorial-disguised-as-science* piece on the BBC, courtesy of Post Office Telecoms, was actually fairly interesting.

The research purports to reveal the perfect voice. Researchers tested people's reactions to a variety of previously unknown voices (ie there was no bias based on previous exposure) then the voices that scored best were analysed to find out what traits they shared. It revealed the sorts of things that people found most appealing.

Issues they looked at included the tone, speed, pauses and so forth. The top voices for women included Mariella Frostrup and Dame Judi Dench; for men it was Jeremy Irons and Alan Rickman. While these folk are probably out of the budget of most elearning projects, they at least give you an idea of the kind of voices you should be looking to if you want people to receive your learning most favourably.

I guess that this would come with caveats - the antithesis for these plummy tones was Jonathan Ross, but with his listening figures contributing to Radio 2's position as the most popular radio station in the UK, clearly there are plenty of people who like him. That said, he was a TV personality long before radio so it's possible he simply brings existing fans with him.

However, key issues like clarity of pronunciation, richness of voice and sensible pacing are goals that can be aimed for by all podcasters.

* usually these are marked by a commercial sponsor (check) and some nonsense equation (check). The best champion in the fight against most of this kind of rubbish is the Guardian's Ben Goodacre in his Bad Science column.

Moodled - at last

2008-05-25T19:56:00.003+01:00

For a while now I've wondered just how good Moodle is.

On the prowl for a new project last month I decided to upgrade my package with 1&1 hosting to a compatible LAMP affair, and which gave me, for free, the option to get hold of learingrocks.co.uk which will just bring you straight back here.

This afternoon I finally managed to get my head around the tweakery that was required, courtesy of the volumes on the subject in the very useful Moodle forums, and so I have a working install of Moodle.

Next up, reading the manual to work out what to do with it...

For a reasonable assessment of Moodle and its prospects, here's Darren Sidnick of Ufi/learndirect.

Enter the Grand Learning Renewal Project

2008-05-15T13:12:00.009+01:00

Google have announced that they are swinging behind the social revolution with Google Friend Connect, creating APIs to enable any site to incorporate features usually associated with the likes of MySpace, Bebo and Facebook. Here's the Beeb on subject.

This should mean that the task of renovating our existing learning ghettos - the soulless, dank, lonely homepages of most LMSs - should become a whole lot easier.

Places of learning should not resemble the online equivalent of the East End of London, circa 1970, or the Detroit of countless straight-to-what-was-once-video -but-is-now-more-likely-to-be- DVDs - that's to say empty places where all you will hear is the echo of your own mouse click.

No, if we want people to learn, or more importantly if we want them to want to learn we need to create hospitable places where they get the sense that there are other people around doing what they're doing. Learning.

Vive la revolution sociale!

On a more balanced note, Brent Schenkler has a great post that tries to combat the erroneous binary opposition that it's social networking OR face to face.

Image by detroitderek on flicker

At last: AICC and SCORM elucidated!

2008-03-10T18:45:00.003Z

When I crossed the fence from elearning organiser to instructional designer, I half expected to be indoctrinated in to my new world, perhaps with a funny ceremony in a darkened room, or a the very least with a FAQ of top elearning bepuzzlements and an explanation of what LMSs did.

I never got my first wish, and blogging was what took care of the second, but sadly it's taken nearly two years to get the solution to the last issue. RoboNekp, or perhaps more likely, Rob on NKP, has published this comparison of the two main standards, SCORM and AICC, which finally clarifies a couple of points that I've wondered about.

If only the introduction to SCORM in the ADL documentation was as clear, or that the tiresome series I read last year in one of the print journals that laboured the idea that SCORM was internet dating for lonely hearts learning (or something) had simply never been written...

Thinking about not thinking

2008-01-27T23:24:00.000Z

I'm probably a latecomer to this particular party, but I recently read Steve Krug's "Don't make me think".

If you're not familiar with this great book but you design elearning, or work with it, I really suggest that you at least spend an hour down your local Borders and flick through it (it's so well put together that you'll get most of the take-away points in that time). Krug is a web-usability expert, and since the publication of the first edition of this book in 2002, I think he probably deserves the epithet "guru".

Krug central premise is summarised in the title of his book - anything that makes your users think twice about anything other than what they are trying to achieve when entering your website is an error. For Krug, the enemies of good design lie in splash pages, deviant navigation, unnecessary words, buttons that don't look like buttons (and non-buttons that do), CEO-inspired "wow-factor" - in fact, Krug's enemies are, by and large, enemies that should be common to elearning designers.

Krug's lesson is a simple one, but one that segues neatly with the work of elearning sciencey types like Clark and Meyer. Where Krug sees a fraction of a pause and a loss of good will, Clark and Meyer would probably sees cognitive interference.

One part that really struck a chord with me is Krug's advice to try to stick to recognised navigational patterns. As a reference he unapologetically refers to Amazon's way of doing things - many of the best facets of commercial web-design are on display there - if perhaps they weren't devised for it in the first place.

I'm doing quite a lot of rapid approach content of late - mostly with tools like Articulate - and one good feature of these tools is the interactions are quite straight forward; the learner soon forgets about the interface and can concentrate on the learning. At the same time, reviewing a couple of courses I wrote a couple of years ago I can see some instances where "cool" interactions I thought up to explore content are more than likely going to cause my learners to blow a fuse, or at the very least break the flow of their learning.

What we want and what we get - the difference

2008-01-19T02:30:00.000Z

I'm not sure whether you will be able to see this article from MSN, but if you can't, I'll summarise:

The author, some MSN intern, looks at a Which? study (Which? is a consumer magazine in the UK) that reveals that the majority of people would like simpler gadgets. Our author, let's call him Patrick, thinks on this and spots a very reasonable reason for the dischord between what people are after and what they get - 'feature lust'.

Okay, so Patrick doesn't put it in those terms, but he may as well have done. He draws the point that while we may want a TV that we can slump in front of, switch on and watch, we also want to plug seven different gadgets into it, fiddle with the colour settings, tweak the sound...

In short, we think we know what we want - a simple TV - but we go and buy bells and whistles.

Much like elearning.

The shopping list is usually pretty simple upfront: cheap way to train X,000 staff in Y weeks, budget £Z. And often enough this could be achieved with a little thought and sacrifice. Except that what gets added to the mix is the need for vip videos, branded graphics, pizazz, wow factor, "engaging interactions" - the list goes on. And the list rarely includes anything that will impact the learner in a positive way.

More often than not, of course, the person buying the TV will go into the store knowing what they're after but will be "persuaded" by a sales person to buy the SuperBlack screen and the 7D Immersive Audio. And likewise the elearning sales person is as much to blame for some "training" decisions that are not in the best interests of the learner.

I think that this point also crosses with Donald Clark's article on the UK eLearning press - these magazines, that land on the desk of pretty much anyone who as ever so much as hinted at the idea they might buy or sell any amount of elearning, sell a vendor-friendly view of elearning, typically hinging on the next great technology that one or more of their advertisers is looking to make a return on.

Which is a shame, for there is a lot to be said for keeping things simple.

When the school is part of the curriculum

2008-01-10T20:59:00.000Z

As a parent of a young child I'm only now really aware of how little schooling has changed since I was my son's age, a quarter of a century ago. For all the advances in society in that time, there is still the playground, the sand box, the quiet corner and so on. This is nothing surprising - the unchanging state of schooling is something that exercises other edu-bloggers fairly frequently.

In the case of my son's school, one of its strengths is also a weakness; the solid Victorian structures are packed on a very small site, hemmed in on all sides by densely packed housing and in the architecturally sensitive Clifton region of Bristol. While this size means small class numbers and no way the authorities can expand it to capitalise on the strong reputation it has, at the same time the classrooms reflect an approach to education that came into being when the docks down the hill were alive to the sounds of ships from all over the world trading their wares and the paint was still drying on Mr Brunel's fabulous suspension bridge just around the corner. That was a while ago and the city, and society, have changed somewhat.

So this excellent narrated slideshow, showcasing a unique new elementary school in Tachikawa, a city in the sprawl of the Tokyo megalopolis, is really interesting. The very fabric of the building itself is part of the children's education: there are no classrooms, only an open plan interior that extends around the playground; the playground spreads onto the roof, with a slide into the yard and rope ladders from the class areas through skylights set into it; a tap in the yard spills water out across the wooden floor so the children can watch and observe how it runs away.

Japan is a hugely traditional country. Many of its schools (like the one below, in Toba-shi, Mie-ken) were built to short order in the massive urban expansion of the post-war period, seemingly from the same handful of plans. Consequently they look identical and are easily recognised as you ride the trains. The institutional look, as the designers of the new school say, reminds you more of a prison than a place of learning.

In order to be radical the Tachikawa school had to be private to bypass the otherwise restrictive planning regulations. Unfortunately this highlights that, regardless of where you are, genuine originality and innovation in education seem available only to those who can afford it - the rest have to make do with what's always been there.

Using a natural voice

2008-01-09T23:12:00.000Z

A neat summary of some key ways to express yourself in a friendly, conversational tone here on a post from Pick The Brain.

All too often, writing on behalf of an organisation seems to disengage the normal part of the brain that people usually rely on to communicate and instead adds some kind of 'quasi-formality loop'.

The article discusses the research in the book 'eLearning and the Science of Instruction' that shows that there are real learning gains to be made in addressing learners in a way that reflects conversation - in effect 'tricking' the brain in to thinking that it is part of a conversation which is an activity that we somehow rate as more valuable, hence more memorable, than simply reading.

Since we all know how to talk, ensuring that we use a more relaxed tone in addressing learners is, in effect, a free benefit. Great stuff.

Dr Ishii's Brain Training

2008-01-06T23:15:00.000Z

Not really anything to do with elearning as such, but an interesting exercise in problem solving.

Have a go at this unusual little flash game, aided only by the curious bit of Japlish to start.

New year - new tongue?

2008-01-03T13:14:00.000Z

Got a NYR to learn a language? It wouldn't happen to be Spanish, would it? If so, I have the thing for you.

JapanesePod 101, my favourite Learning 2.0 opportunity (even if the LMS behind it could do with some work), have now extended to other languages, Spanish and, given that they are based in Japan this is useful, English. They are offering extended free trials to anyone who has signed up to J-Pod, and to anyone they know.

In the holiday spirit of giving and exchanging
gifts, I'm going to give YOU, and ANYONE YOU
would like to INTRODUCE, a 30-DAY FREE

TRIAL of all our Premium features on both the new

SpanishPod101.com and EnglishPod101.com.
I ask for no money in return, just a subscription
through iTunes and if you have the time, a review
on iTunes of what you think (and please be nice).

Again, it is our community that makes

JapanesePod101.com such a special place to learn,

and we think SpanishPod101.com and

EnglishPod101.com will be just as special for students

of Spanish and English.

To subscribe to our podcast and post a review
simply follow the links below and click the "subscribe"
button on iTunes.

EnglishPod101.com iTunes Store
SpanishPod101.com iTunes Store

To get your 30-Day Free Trial and to test drive
all of our Premium features, simply sign up for a
7-Day Free Trial using the links below and you'll
automatically be upgraded to 30 days:

EnglishPod101.com Registration Page
SpanishPod101.com Registration Page

Please be sure to share this with anyone who you
think may be interested.

I can endorse the approach of J-Pod and if they are extending the same model to these two offerings it can only be good. Give it a go!
Oh yeah, happy new year by the way.

Leveraging my own grey matter

2007-11-22T23:46:00.000Z

I've been having bad few weeks; various influences had put me in a tough spot.

So much so that the first part of this week was spent struggling with a course outline for a new client that should have been ready at the end of last week. Coming up with something that would satisfy the simultaneous demands of the client, my new boss, the improved (more standardised) business processes we are implementing and leave me with mental capacity to spare for home was looking like too much.

A quick chat with a colleague - a recent addition to the company ranks - made a world of difference. Just 30 minutes of chat left me feeling better. The fact that it consequently took just 15 minutes to write a rough overview of the entire course, and just 2 hours to subsequently write a 7 page course outline that I actually feel excited about developing just blew me away (okay, the arrival as I did this of 5 super-sweet layouts from our great GD helped, but still).

It wasn't that my colleague told me what to do, but how to approach the problem.

"This is all wrong," she said taking a look at the template outline I had taken along to show her. "That's not how you think."

Like I say, we are putting in to place new processes so I was trying to use the new standard outline document. I'd looked at the required content, lifted the structure the client had used, mapped their learning outcomes against sections and then... and then...

Every angle I looked at was functional and dull. Not through any fault of the client or the system, but because try as I might, using this approach all I could do was to take facts and say "this goes here and this goes here" and what I was left with was a series of facts and what the learner would get would be the same series of facts. BooorrRRING!

Worse than that, I wasn't in possession of the full facts - we're still in the period where the client is fact gathering. Every blank space left me in a panic. I was immobilised.

"You don't need to know," was my colleague's zen-like reply when I appealed to her to tell me how I was to reconcile not knowing the information with writing the plan.

"How would you write this?" she asked me after I let slip that this sort of thing (corporate induction in the public sector) was exactly what my first training job was. After a long pause, I conceded that I didn't know. I'd forgotten.

"But it was easy then - I was the SME!" I protested.

"Exactly. You know this so it should be easy for you now. How would you do it?"

So I started to say how I would train people - without any thought on the detail of the content. Things started to come thick and fast. "Good, you could probably write most of this course without knowing anything." I didn't believe her.

She went on to explain that she feels I tend to be more free-thinking and creative insofar as when I'm thinking my thoughts race off and diverge. Where I was going wrong was that in sitting with the highly structured document template in front of me I was trying to force my brain in to a mode that didn't suit me.

She went on to describe how what I needed to do was embrace my brain's desire to think wildly and only once it had stretched it legs, refine the results in an organised way. The other key point was that she said I HAD to limit the creative time or else I would spend forever thinking.

So I did. I went upstairs and got out my lovely new mindmapping pens and the unlined pad that I had put together having seen my colleague's similar set up. I put some soothing music to power my thinking and set the alarm on my watch.

Within minutes I had sketched out a plan that rolled from theme to theme in a coherent fashion, carried the learner along a path that was structured and built on each point. It clicked buttons the client wanted to hit, linked in themes and objectives. It used the learning principles I had been so conscious of missing in the earlier attempts. It felt good and in my mind I can see how it will look.

What's more, it covered everything they'd asked for, and more, and has the capacity to absorb the inevitable bits and pieces that will need to go in as everyone thinks again about what to include now that a concrete plan is coming together.

It's not going to be an award winner, but it feels right. But for me the best thing is the way it developed. The results have left me buzzing since. I like my job again. My colleague rocks.

A seal of approval for wikis

2007-10-31T23:02:00.000Z

The venerable RSA, the UK Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures & Commerce (how'd they fit all that in to 'A'?) has endorsed the use of wikis, according to a press releasey email from Wikispaces. Their initiative is launched under the zeitgeisty sounding OpenRSA. What's more, it all started courtesy of the current belle of the ball:

OpenRSA started as a Facebook group - now with 340 members - after a get-together of about 15 people.

It seems the wiki is working out well:

Participants in events can add their reports, we can embed video, and also take in a
feed from the chief executive of the RSA, Matthew Taylor.

One day all organisations will see and harness the levelling power of wikis as shared workspaces.

Welcome to the party GIMP 2.4!

2007-10-31T21:09:00.000Z

The GIMP, the brilliant open source graphics package, 43rd most useful elearning tool on Jane's list, has hit 2.4.

It's a good upgrade too. Improvements to the appearance are only the most superficial (but it is a lot prettier). The selection tools, arguably the most frequently used, have been radically improved with drag handles making getting exactly what you're after much easier. The context menus for many of the tools have been improved meaning that greater options are on hand.

If you, like me, are a non-graphics kinda person who can't justify the expense of PhotoShop, but who nonetheless needs to occasionally tweak images with a little more precision than Office Image Manager or MS Paint allow, GIMP will help you.

Download it here.

(Darn it, I can't begin to convey how excited this made me!)

Been caught napping

2007-10-23T12:56:00.000+01:00

I've become something of the "rapid" specialist of late.

We have managed to show a client that for their needs rapid development tools like Articulate are what they need to be able to produce quick turnarounds on material that is mostly about presentation (product training) and liable to last minute changes (their industry constantly shifts).

The lightbulb moment has been particularly gratifying since I have thought that they would be better off like this for some time. I'm not a big fan of page turning elearning (who is?) but I'm even less a fan of taking up time to produce page-turning elearning when tools like Articulate and PointeCast allow reasonable results in comparatively little time.

I have subsequently been drafted in to produce other product training type elearning for some other clients of the same salesperson, so pleased have the first clients been with the results. As a result I am getting more and more familiar with the tools and finding ever more interesting things you can do (the Articulate demo piece where it is possible to edit a wiki in a window in a course is quite neat - interesting to see if our developers would match that as easily!)

Yesterday I chatted through what was possible with my new boss. He was impressed by what he saw. Tools like this have until now passed him by (it's not really anything his clients have asked him for). I think pretty quickly understood the challenge that faces companies like us in maintaining value in our bespoke development when off-the-shelf products like those I'm using can give such results for so little labour.

Kirkpatrick - misunderstood again

2007-10-04T23:49:00.000+01:00

Acres of screen and print pages have been given over to the relevance or otherwise of Kirkpatrick's model of evaluation. Indeed, so much time seems to be spent critiquing it in the training press that it is easy to assume that everyone knows it, and from the number of voices lined up for and against, that everyone understands it.

Today a colleague received a request to make sure the course he was working on featured Kirkpatrick analysis.

'Well, we can do a "happy sheet" and intra/post course testing,' was the group reply, in an attempt to crudely match the good doctor's schema.

But no! The client wanted a survey at the end of the course that addressed all four levels of Kirkpatrick in one go:

what do you think of this training course?
have you learnt what you need to know?
will you change your behaviour as a result of this course?
do you think your performance will improve?

Now, I'm not sure of the background of this particular client, and I have no idea if they are in a training department or not, but someone, somewhere has only made the most cursory glance at the literature here. I think we'll be working with them a little more to straighten this out.

Perhaps, sadly, what it made me think about was just how out of the loop I am when it comes to the whole training cycle. For our clients we are simply a means to an end - nothing more than the design phase of the training - so I never get to learn how the training went down; I never get any learner feedback or statistics.

I used to enjoy the thrill of sorting through the post course sheets (back when I was a classroom trainer) looking for comments (instead of a straight row of satisfactory ticks) and trying to implement changes for the next time to get better. Or the nervous feeling of awaiting the six-month peer review. Still, being an elearning guy now does have its benefit - no more bloody business hotels...

GetOut of My Space!

2007-10-03T22:04:00.000+01:00

The Times ran a short piece in last week's Public Agenda section reporting that the Times HES says that under-graduate students are rejecting attempts by tutors to colonise spaces such as YouTube and MySpace.

According to a poll by Ipsos MORI:

students regard the virtual worlds as a place for entertainment, socialising and information-gathering.

This doesn't really surprise me - the idea of getting a tutor's mugshot on my friends list on FaceBook is as cheesy and toe curling as the supply teacher using "street slang" in an attempt to get down with the kids.

Of course, this runs contrary to another report a few weeks ago in the Gruaniad, and picked up by Donald Clark, stating that an MIT lecturer's iPod videos are doing a roaring trade. I suspect the difference is that, as Donald says, his are quite excellent examples and are being picked up by all comers, rather than the rather tatty, droning automaton working in the local FE college who is looking to fill his/her evenings by starting online relationships with their students...

OpenOffice Impress - a rapid tool?

2007-07-25T11:57:00.000+01:00

The open source movement supports pretty much all we have to offer. It is entirely possible to create blogs, wikis, elearning courseware and even LMSs for free.

To design your projects you can replace Adobe with a range of sophisticated desktop apps such as GIMP, Nvu/Kompozer, Inkscape, Audacity and so on. If you aren't entirely ready to leap on line for your documentation handling courtesy of the likes of Google Docs, you have one very powerful option, OpenOffice.

I've just noticed that OpenOffice Impress, the counterpart to the well used 'authoring tool' PowerPoint, has the option to output to Flash directly. has anyone used that feature? How easily can this be "SCORMed"? Anyone tried that?

Facebook - a group for us, and thoughts on its value

2007-07-21T14:55:00.000+01:00

While I'm still not sure how, or indeed why, Facebook could or should be turned to educational purposes, I'm still interested to see if it can.

To that end I've joined Elizabeth Murphy's 'Facebook as a learning tool' group. There's some discussion on there with most people arguing that it can be put to good use. However, the one comment that has struck me came from Nicole Cargill-Kipar who says:

Perhaps, then, the question is if we actually want to encroach into the students' social spaces.

Quite so. Does every new space have to be bent to elearning's needs?

Of course, this approach comes from the Education sector. I've more experience of the corporate space. I would feel uncomfortable, both as a manager and as a user, using Facebook as a networking space bringing together my personal and private lives. After all, one of the great joys of FB is having it unearth people you had long since lost touch with, wherever they are (I've had two such people contact me in just the last 3 days), but I'm not sure that I want to be linking these same people with the folk who sit at the next cubicle at work.

But what if corporate intranets used the same approach to building online relationships organically? Of course, this would really only work in large organisations - in my own company for example I don't think it would be make much sense - I'd have achieved all my meeting and greeting pretty much by the end of the second day.

But it's in this larger corporate sense that I could really see the social networking model having value as a place for informal learning and discussion. For example you could post queries to your friends, much as you might in person anyway, but you wouldn't have to open yourself up to the entire organisation, as you might on an open forum. Your time meeting other new inductees would bear fruit for much longer than those first few days.

I'm still not sure that I see how content would be pushed via the FB model, but as a place to share learning, I can really see how the model has benefits, even if FB itself may not be the place to do that.

Shifting up a gear and getting rapid

2007-07-21T09:44:00.000+01:00

At my company we are finally beginning to see a shift towards calls for rapid elearning options coming from our clients, or other clients being won over by what we show them we can offer to speed up their turnaround if they adopt rapid tools for certain parts of their output.

This is all to the good. The pressure cooker of bespoke development does no-one any good if the basic situation is that content cannot be finalised until only days before the final rollout of training is required. It even less useful if the content is apt to change AFTER the training begins, as it does with one company we work with. Collating changes, forwarding them to developers, testing the results, getting sign off, LMS testing and finally integration can ome in days after we might otherwise fire up PowerPoint, tweak the offending content, distribute for sign off and publish to SCORM output. Its a no-brainer.

By far the most convenient approach for us in these circumstances is the tried-and-tested PowerPoint to Flash route (Breeze, Articulate, PointeCast et al) as it allows the SMEs, mostly experienced classroom trainers beside their elearning roles, to get on with collating and editing content, while we can help by ensuring standard appearances and the optimum use of the tricks and workarounds that disguise the output's humble origins.

This approach is increasingly becoming attractive for dealing with that part of elearning that we do where we are dealing with straightforward knowledge transfer - performing the function that a memo may have done in the past, but with the trackability afforded by an LMS. This is not what I would hold up as a shining example of the benefits of elearning, but some clients feel it necessary and for them it is a huge advantage. I suspect that if many elearning practitioners are honest, they'll admit that they've seen this before - after all, it comes out of the same place as much of the compliance work that forms a huge part of the demand for elearning in the corporate environment.

I'm pleased as this allows our clients time to lift their heads up from the worry of gathering content that in the grand scheme of things is ephemeral, and instead they can begin to focus on that sort of content that makes for real benefit for their learners - and by cutting time on what is really, in terms of the final outcome, the 'little stuff', they are able to free budget to tackle the 'good stuff'. And that's a win all round.

Facebook? How? Why?

2007-06-28T02:29:00.000+01:00

I've been out of the loop for a while. Partly because I've been busy, but partly because, inspired by Drew Meyers, I joined Facebook a few weeks ago - after all, who could resist a line like "How Facebook is completely changing the internet."

I wasn't alone. About the same time about a dozen of my close friends (not distant acquaintances, people I speak/write to at least weekly) were doing the same thing. Ever since I have had a steady stream of people getting in touch. Quite simply, it's amazing.

In the same way I had a "Road to Damascus" conversion to blogging last year, I can now see that the idea of so-net software could have huge benefits in the corporate environment - the idea of being able to gently broadcast ideas (instead of forcing the point in email, or hiding them away in forums) , share apps (I'm thinking how you could set training courses up) or simply get to know colleagues in different places. Like blogging, so-net software's ability to create spaces for communication, rather than sterile channels like mail and IM, makes it easy to find new ways to find and create value in thought.

What I'm less certain about is the idea that Facebook itself is the ideal place to do this (or here or here). Maybe it's a cultural thing (most of the folks saying these things are American) but I'm to be convinced on the value/desirability of merging social and private lives in this way. Work/life balance is a tough enough gig anyway, without having the walls removed entirely in your on-line life.

Maybe I'm missing a trick, but the idea that what I emote on a Sunday morning after a night on the sauce with friends will be visible by the MD (if I can get him to accept my friendship invitation that is) does not fill me with warmth. Equally, the idea that I should self-censor in order to avoid trouble is equally worrying.

One thought I can't help but think: if there is ever to be a tangible "PLE" I think it will bear a simple blue and white logo in the top right - and I'll be sharing it with people that I haven't seen since school.

Cogitating cognition

2007-05-30T15:58:00.000+01:00

It's strange, but every time I read anything about cognitive load it seems to be in a pure, old-fashioned, "words on a page" kind of context. Really dense, heavy words on a page*, like those in this rather interesting article by John Sweller.

It interests me as I have been evaluating the work that I and colleagues have been producing to see how I can get better results out of our development team. In thinking about scripting challenges I also had a chance to consider my thoughts on how to structure pages - I feel cheated if I can read everything quickly and easily - it's almost as if I want to struggle! So, I favour pages that are quite busy - not complex for the sake of it, but I try to use the space to ensure lots of information is on hand, if not actually presented all the time.

But this is odd as it directly contrasts with my prime love - cutting the BS out of training waffle. I come to ID from a background in classroom training, mainly in "Business Language" use (strange term - not sure what it means) and I get quite lively in arguments about use of the passive voice, inappropriate deployment of the reflexive pronoun in place of the object pronoun and my despair for the souls of those who misuse the apostrophe.

However, it was the same job (and CIPD training route) where I learnt my trade that led me to acquire faith in a variety of unchallenged assumptions: great hoary legends like the progression from seeing to teaching graph (Donald Clark enjoys ripping in to such things). Amongst that there were approaches to designing learning that were handed down and received without challenge (I was just starting).

So my quandry has been, while there may be nothing I enjoy more than hacking a draft script down by 20, 30 or 50 % and presenting something clean to a client, if my aim is to simplify the words, am I undoing all the good by unthinkingly building pages that may distract? That's what I needed to work out.

Recent posts by various people have prompted me to spend more time reading than writing (hence my recent quietness) as I try to find evidence based guidance on developing training materials.

So it is that I come to be reading densely packed text as I am trying to get back to the source - and in the most part it means academic papers.

Quite serendipitously a mail in my inbox led me to unearth this little treasure trove of papers on the subject from several authors, but mostly Sweller - I haven't had time to read all the works, test the URLs for authenticity or cross-reference other authors, but they seem sound. At the bottom of the page I've even noticed links to Meyer and Clark, who were the stars of a post by Clive Shepherd that started me off on my learning trip, so it may be even more useful.

* Not that I'm making anything of this you understand: from what I gather - the cognitive impact of dense text in this academic setting is offset by the lack of other distractions - thankfully I'm not trying to relate it to extraneous diagrams or a word for word narration. And anyway, academia has its own style and conventions - wordiness mostly (and yes, I'm guilty of that one too, but this is my blog, not learning copy).

TED launches a new super encyclopedia

2007-05-10T08:03:00.000+01:00

Not sure whether this is directly related to the view that Wikipedia is not the greatest thing ever, one of the founders described it as "broken beyond repair" (sorry, I can't remember where I read that), but a new on-line super encyclopaedia focusing on the creatures of the earth is to be launched.

Anyway, this is from the press release:

Many of the world’s leading scientific institutions today announced the launch of the Encyclopedia of Life, an unprecedented global effort to document all 1.8 million named species of animals, plants, and other forms of life on Earth. For the first time in the history of the planet, scientists, students, and citizens will have multi-media access to all known living species, even those that have just been discovered.

The big difference with this EoL and Wikipedia, other than the focussed remit, is that, in the interests of accuracy, this won't be a wiki but an expert authored resource, albeit with a larger number of experts than might have been the case in the past. In this fashion it hopes to avoid the damage to reputation that the unscrupulous "false" editors have wrought upon Wikipedia. Is this tacit recognition of the problems with wikis? That they allow anyone, credible or not, to "interfere" with the efforts of genuine experts?

Whatever the case, I think that this will be a great resource for learning that truly rocks. It's not actually up and running yet - it was only first discussed in March, but some mock-ups are available. Have a look at the Encyclopaedia of Life here.

Cheating Rocks!

2007-04-30T13:09:00.000+01:00

I have a small boy who is just entering the education system at the moment. The schooling he is getting seems comfortingly familiar but then he's only four - things at this end of the learning scale have changed much in, well, centuries (for those that got it at least): a bit of painting, holding pencils, building blocks and jugs of sand or water. Playing Rocks, right?

Like all parents I wonder about the quality of the education he'll receive, whether the school will be well funded and the other pupils a help or a hindrance - unlike most in the UK I get worried about moving him into a foreign system and whether one or the other would be better (if China was the alternative, that might well be the conclusion). The last thing I need to be worrying about is whether the fundamental approach to his education is right.

Karl Kapp has a great article here that shows just how out of date school thinking is becoming. The skills taught in schools (passing exams) are not those skills that people need to succeed today.

Redefining elearning

2007-04-30T08:48:00.000+01:00

Spurred on by one of those emails that "does the rounds" I tried to come up with a few alternative definitions for aspects of our business. The rules are add, take away or change one letter.

SCORN compliant
what some rapid elearning has to be to get past militant LMS managers.

e-leaning
a point of view, especially prevalent in sales people, pushers of LMSs and IT folk that online training is the panacea for all ills.

rabid elearning
too much course based elearning written in PowerPoint causes learners to foam at the mouth and bite people.

fusability
how a poorly designed user interface can short circuit a user's brain.

intereaction
a click-here, do-this activity that causes learners to respond in ways not anticipated - like throw their mouse away in frustration.

and here's one for devotees of ILT:

SCONE compliant
what a classroom course must be to make way for a really satisfying afternoon snack.

Aha! #2 Practicing what we preach

2007-04-25T23:02:00.000+01:00

For me, the revelations are far from over. The elearning bloggers are all very much walking the walking the walk.

Hot on the heels of the eLearning Guild event in Boston, indeed as a result of a meeting there, Clive Shepherd has kicked off an interesting experiment in collaborative working - the elearning SME 30 minute masters.

So far it has been a few tentative tweaks to Clive's original effort - I suspect most people are cautious about wading in and doing anything that may seem to contradict the the very point of the course. I've thrown one comment in and am contemplating opening up some more pages to start populating ideas for content, but I haven't just yet...

However, in having this team of elearning professionals come together in this way, it is in the spirit of Tom Haskins article here about educators practising what they preach and the absurdity of the notion of a formal qualification in informal learning.

Social Learning - my Aha! moment

2007-04-19T21:58:00.000+01:00

I really like this diagram by Clark Quinn that tries to summarise the relative value of various elearning tools. I find it quite a good illustration of where most organisations that are new to elearning go wrong - almost all their initial investment will be in the bottom left corner. And that is hardly likely to get the big leaps in performance that they will have/have been promised.

But what it really did was make me think about social learning. I've never really been sure about the actual learning benefits of all the social learning hype, yet here it is represented as the middle of this diagram (almost a z-axis?).

Thinking more about it I was struck by something. A group of people I've never met gathered in a city I've never been to discuss a series of pretty obscure topics that weren't in anyway picked up by the mass media. And I learnt from it.

In entries by Cammy Bean, Clive Shepherd, Stephen Downes, Tony Karrer and Brent Schenkler and the whole PLE meme that spread about over the weekend I got a significant portion of the benefit of actually attending at least a part of the eLearning Guild Conference.

Thanks to blogging I have learnt simply because the conference happened. If that doesn't rock, nothing does.

Personal Learning - Corporate Environment

2007-04-15T09:04:00.002+01:00

So far at work I've managed to avoid mentioning the TLA "PLE", mostly to avoid the blank stares and potential ostracism. However, the blogs often come back to the subject and this description, by Michelle at Bamboo Project is about the best description of how it works I've found.

For me, the most important technological component in all this is RSS, really simple syndication, the bit that makes the blogs work and what feeds my Google homepage - the start of my own PLE.

While in a really great meeting at a client this week where someone from one part of the business challenged someone from another part to come up with some new approaches it became apparent that what was wanted was a variety of presentations of the same material so learners could choose their method of learning: podcasts, video, micro-training - anything but another page-turner.

The problem was that to use the LMS to distribute all these different versions of the same thing would be a mess. I suggested RSS allowing learners to pick and choose the subject areas or formats they prefer - it fell on deaf ears - if it can't be tracked and reported on in the LMS they weren't so interested.

Does anyone out there know of an instance of RSS making it in to the L&D strategy for a large corporation? I'd love to know so I could help these guys get the solution that suits them best, and examples of people like them getting the learning right would really help.

TED's back

2007-04-06T01:56:00.000+01:00

Not too long ago I posted on the subject of the TED Talks - a lecture series given by some of the the most eloqent speakers in the world on subjects as diverse as education, economics, engineering and ecology. These short videos are for me a great example of the very best of the free, wide ranging teaching available out on the web.

The good news is that they are back. TED 2007 took place in early March so the videos are starting to appear, beginning with the winners of this year's awards: Bill Clinton, E O Wilson and James Nachtwey. And they are available in a hi-res 480p format.

Brilliant stuff.

What goes unsaid

2007-03-15T01:10:00.000Z

I read the elearning blogs and I feel I am learning a lot and I am.

I'm learning about people's beliefs and hopes and ideas. About what inspires them.

What I'm not learning about is what people do.

There is a strange gap in the elearning world, and it's as true of the print media as it is of the online world. Read a blog, pick up a magazine, attend seminars and while there is plenty about ideas and theories on how we need to create "experiences" and be moving to game based learning, there is absolutely no indication of when and how such approaches are to be selected - after all, if we are to be subtle and nuanced in handling our learners' needs then it is important that we recognise the strengths and weaknesses of these new ways of thinking and apply them when necessary. One way would be to offer concrete examples of how a new product launch could be given an "experience" (oh, it is, by the guys in marketing). But this never seems to happen. The stats are wheeled out, research is mentioned, but what we might do with this knowledge is never really discussed.

Sure, I know the US Army used a simulator that was actually released as a game, and there are some games that allow in-depth exploration of life at the top of the corporate ladder. And I can understand how that might come to be - both are realms awash with dollars so they can afford the time and money.

But does anyone ever venture to suggest how game based learning might be brought to bear on the worthy but dull subject of the Age Discrimination Act, or how to make an "experience" of the introduction of the new Somi Nokisson 1234x super phone? No.

Sure, I have ideas of how that might be achieved. But on a budget of a couple of grand and week or three and 20 minutes of learner time, tops?

Trust me, I'm all for ditching LMSs and trying to trust in the learner, but the practical realities are that its not going to happen. The secret shaded working lives of these voices does nothing to illuminate the cloudy future for the rest of us either.

Compare it to programming magazines and journals, or design sites that examine the techniques and secrets of pin-up pros, perhaps with appraisal of their work, or step-by-steps to getting the same effect.

Then look at the good examples of elearning 2.0 on the net. They are short presentations with (or without) audio driven from YouTube and cobbled together in a rapid dev tool and blogs. Hardly ground breaking, but for me it has been a worthwhile learning event.

What seems to be missing from the discussion of all this is people going "yeah, and we got learners to understand how to recognise fraud by doing x, y and z." I've yet to find an "experience" on line telling me how to be better as a learning designer. Every one wants to tell the world what the future is without actually showing anyone else. And as we all should know, showing would trump telling - actually getting us involved would seal the deal.

Unless it is that I'm missing the point. As a wordy liking, self-motivated learner perhaps I have already created my own "experience". Brilliant. But hardly the kind of approach that will get through to the call centre operative who just wants to answer the phones till 5.30 then get outside to his or her car and go home.

I guess that this is the sort of thinking that the people who proclaim a new world of learning want to hear - I'm in touch with a new market for their thinking and they can come and poach it. But the fact is while the voices of the future speak in vapid marketing hyperbole without any substance that will allow their clients (or their competitors and that's probably the point) to actually conceptualise what it is they are on about, short rapid learning driven courses (that hated word) are going to continue.

Oh, and I purposely haven't linked to anyone else here as I'm sure that would not be a way to win and influence.

What to track?

2007-03-11T01:13:00.000Z

Something that I often struggle with when I'm dealing with clients is "what is it you want to record about this learning event?"

All these companies have spent large sums of money on their expensive LMSs and are spending not inconsiderable sums of money, usually with the company I work for, on creating "courses" of elearning for their staff.

Part and parcel of their specifications is typically a locked down navigation that forces the learner through a linear learning route - exactly the sort of thing that Donald Clark pours cold water on here and vexes Cammy at Learning Visions.

From this they are able to get stats on time spent elearning, who has completed what and a whole host of stats that, at the end of it tell them nothing at all about how the behaviour of the learner has changed as a result of the training. With compliance training this is basically the point - how much diversity training is delivered online for example, despite the fact that diversity training is by and large discredited (such as in this paper).

The emphasis is on what the training has said, not on what the learner will do. I see this in some of the material I'm given where learning objectives begin "By the end of this training you will have learnt..." instead of "...you will be able to..."

One "problem" with elearning as it is reported to me is that learners just take the assessment without doing the learning. My natural reaction is to say "So what? Let 'em." (Though naturally I bite my tongue!) If the learner does that and passes then they have saved themselves 20-60 minutes of their life (I only do short courses).

If on the other hand they fail, then that is not the fault of the elearning - it's the fault of the learner for not having prepared themselves properly. If they don't seek to rectify it and try again, this is not a reason to force all learners to sit through a sluggish course that has unnecessary usability constraints - it's a disciplinary/performance management issue. After all, if a company sends a delegate to a classroom based course and they don't show up, or come in, fail the exam and go home, it wouldn't be long to expect that person to be having a "chat" with the boss or HR...

So I would argue that the only thing that need be tracked is the assessment and let everything else go - effort would be better spent in designing learning resources that are useful and appropriate as job aids, reference works, neat little broadcasts to keep people up to date and support informal learning rather than hamstrung mandated learning that no-one enjoys.

Access more knowledge

2007-03-11T00:54:00.000Z

With the recent list of the world's top five brands revealing elearning to be a big benefactor from the work of those companies, I thought it worth mentioning this post on how to get the most out of Google, arguably the most important of the list to our subject.

Google never ceases to amaze me. I'm happy to admit I am one of the dozy users who just splats three words associated with my subject of research and goes with it. At least I usually make a point of jumping about four pages in to the list, but I'm hardly sophisticated. Actually, I'm still buzzing over the fact you can type calculations straight in to the search bar, or type "define" before a word to get a definition of it.

It's a global player that it is genuinely hard not to like - all the others, the Microsofts, Walmarts, Fords, BPs, BAs, the list goes on; these guys can from time to time leave a sour taste in the mouth, and though the whole "agreement with the Chinese authorities" thing may not be their finest hour, Google still shine.

Overshadowed by marketing

2007-03-06T22:26:00.000Z

I work closely with the training department of a large company in the communications sector. A highly competitive industry, new products and services are like sand - constantly shifting and rearranging. The best training can hope to achieve is take a nice snap shot and package up that for release to the people out there selling and supporting the offerings.

The constant shifting and changing presents training with a huge problem when it comes to their elearning. In order to get it as accurately aligned as they can to the final release they have to leave it late - something that is easily achieved as the project team often give the training fairly low priority. If they try to get an early start on anything the effort stands a good chance of being wasted as the content moves.

In the event that the project team do not co-operate on developing the material the chance of training successfully lobbying to get a project rollout held back until the training is ready is slim.

You can bet the house, however, that if the guys in marketing haven't got their glossy brochures together to sell this to the punters, there would be no problem holding product off.

In this I am reminded of a recent post on Passionate Users. It's not that I wish to suggest that these guys are the kind of company to figuratively "flick the bird" at its customers - actually, I know that they don't being a fairly satisfied customer of theirs - but I do think it is a sad and probably all too often repeated scenario where training is the poor cousin to the big boys (and gals) in marketing, and in the push to market the needs of the signed up customer are secondary to those of the new, as yet untapped, opportunity.

In praise of page turners

2007-03-02T22:38:00.000Z

Bane of learners' elearning experiences?

Not if they looked like this!

All that programming effort to produce a (gorgeous) 2D simulation of a £5 magazine. But imagine what this would look like on a tablet or an interactive whiteboard (like they have in my son's class at nursery!).

Learning Visions: The Learning Show

2007-02-27T23:19:00.000Z

Learning Visions: The Learning Show

I was looking out for new voices in elearning and found another fan of Will Thalheimer. I was especially struck by this part of Cammy's response to Will's Learning Show on forgetting:

I cringe thinking about the amount of material I've tried to cram into a course -- because that's what the client told me they wanted.

Which is EXACTLY how I feel about certain courses I've worked on, and where I've pushed down my better judgement to match what the client wanted...

Oh God - the bit of my job I like and it's a dead end!

2007-02-27T22:26:00.000Z

I have to admit, I'm in the middle of the possibly the worst week of my life. I'm mean really, it's been, well, dreadful. As one of my clients, for whom everything seemed to be going wrong, put it "it's not like anyone died," but frankly it's not much consolation.

The fact is, I hate project management. I love ID. Unfortunately for me, in my organisation the IDs do the PM. So I have half a job I love and half a job I loath. Nevermind.

So to come to my Google homepage, follow a couple of links (this one, and then this one) and then read Brent Schlenker saying this:

DIY is killing ISD

...is to discover that the bit I like is, well, if not laid out cold on a slab, at least lying bleeding in the gutter clutching a mortal wound. Bugger. That ruined my evening. Or at least it might have done if not for the comment a few lines lower on that entry.

Well, it would have ruined my evening if not for the fact I realised that ID is going to suffer a glorious, hammy strung out "luvvey" death complete with multiple last gasps and dying speeches. What we in the elearning blogosphere (they're in where the air is thick - out here it's a bit difficult to breathe - I feel faint...) can easily forget is that the percentage of learners who can penetrate the technology to go fully DIY is still very thin. And for all the spectacular growth in blogs, wiki, 'casting, blah... there are still huge numbers of people for whom learning is a gross imposition on their time, or the idea of actually consciously making an effort to find something out with a computer is crazy talk.

And for them, I'm patiently waiting with a cleverly designed little something to help them see the light.

Blogging - a maze in learning

2007-02-22T22:41:00.000Z

For ages I've been meaning to write about how the blogoshpere (sorry, it would appear my fingers have been drinking) is conducive to the best learning I've experienced in years. In particular, I've benefited from setting up my own Google homepage and following the thinking of people that have impressed me when I read their work.

This followed a call to action by a colleague seeking blogs he could add to his Google homepage. I've since added a handful of other tabs and this has meant that for me the act of firing up my web browser has become an act of learning. Which is what I like.

A great example of how this offers itself as a great method for learning can be seen in this exchange:
Clive Shepherd, English e-learning figure of note, wrote in his blog about a seminar he attended with a neuroscientist called Dr Itiel Dror, of Southampton University. I'm all for listen to the experts on matters of the brain, for as I have said in earlier posts, all too often the L&D industry/media seems to rely on pat received wisdom (to the ire of people like Will Thalheimer). The entry is interesting, but did seem to have one or two things in it that I wasn't sure about.

This was picked up by Steven Downes, pre-eminent e-learning blogger from Canada, and dissected in a fairly visceral fashion. Downes really knows his stuff, or at least gives the impression of knowing it, and the result was, for me as a learner, a better understanding of the relaionship of the brain to learning, and more importantly, the relationship of both to me as a learning designer.

But here's the real Learning Rocks moment: Clive picked up on this and whacked it on his blog. So it shows that he is engaging with the critique, he'll have learnt something from it; his readers (like me) will have gotten something out of it; arguably Steven will have gained something from engaging with it. So we have a triple win here.

Brilliant.

All politicians should be made to read this

2007-02-22T22:32:00.000Z

I stumbled across this, in a link buried in someone else's blog. Isaac Asimov no less, showing the basis of the idea of multiple intelligences argued in so very cleanly a fashion that there is no need to read Gardner - it is abundantly clear from this piece alone.

I can't help but think that the morons who dismantled all the non-academic channels of learning in English FE teaching and decided that everyone needs a university education might also have benefited from it.

Herd learning - I'm a sheep

2007-02-11T22:29:00.000Z

I don't mind admitting it. I saw a really good article on Donald Clarke's blog about how he'd been looking at on-line video as a great learning resource. I was still heartily banging on about the wonders of Wikipedia to anyone that would listen (actually, I still am).

Mysteriously, within days other British based learning technologist blogs were also miraculously singing the praises of YouTube learning. I noticed this apparent synergy because so many of these blogs appear side by side on my Google homepage reader.

So off I went and followed Donald's lead. And blow me if he wasn't damn right. I already shouted out his main link, TED Talks, as a great source, but this one is more partisan. I don't mind saying that I like this one as it looks at the big questions of the day - questions far bigger than elearning anyway. Check out Meaning of Live TV. Oh, for the record, the interviewer, Robert Wright, is a speaker at TED and I found this site via his entry on, yep, Wikipedia.

I have been learning a lot this weekend, but the main thing is that, if I didn't have a wife who loves TV, there would be no need for a TV in this house. Not with this stuff out there for free.