Day Two Learning 2008 - Giving Training a Second Chance with Second Life

OK, I will admit that the popularity of 2nd life among training professionals surprised me. With our own experience at Allen and the reticence of IT departments to open up to public virtual environments, I was surprised to learn the amount of pilots and experimentation being done in the area. So, beside downloading 2nd life tonight in the room on my computer, time will tell if virtual classrooms migrate from the world of WebEx to the Islands of 2nd life….

For those interested in this topic, Google some peeps that seem to have a good handle on this topic: Aaron Silvers form Grainger and Miki Mantas of Sears did a great job introducing a lot of the virtual reality issues to attendees at Learning 2008.

I think the best session on this topic was one by Professor Tony O'Driscoll of Duke University that really delved into the de facto change from the world of Internet access and search to the world of participation and collaboration we are now experiencing. Virtual reality environments add depth and dimension to learning, offering the potential of context that of much training lacks. This session started taking me down a path that was one of my main objectives for this conference: What learning objectives and training and performance challenges beg a virtual reality type solution? Hit Tony’s blogs for a good discussion on when and for what these type of solutions can be appropriate..

Can we move from WebEx to 2nd life? We may have a ways to go as virtual worlds still rely on large local clients to create the virtual world. I am sure thin clients are out there and need to see if Webex, Centra and others are offering plug-ins or widgets that can offer virtual meeting spaces.

As a nerd and player of EQ and WOW, VR should be a no brainier. Does the anonymity and alter ego’s that we create in our recreational efforts in gaming lend themselves to greater intimacy we expose our selves to in Facebook and Myspace. I may be of the wrong generation, but wonder how we can mix the power of having our employees open themselves to their coworkers with the opposing trend of more and more anonymity in the VR world. Which can offer a greater force of productive growth and learning efficacy?

I hope to share more as Allen continues to examine the vitality of 2nd life and other applications for our partners and customers.

First Day at Learning 2008

As can be expected, this year’s Masie 2008 is a show and a challenging process for learning professionals to check and recheck some of their assumptions about training and development. As can be perceived from my latest blogs, I have social learning networks on the brain…

After participating in a session and as many one-on-one conversations I could fit in, it seems social learning networks go beyond the immediate reach of the traditional corporate training function. How does one deal with the creating of a social milieu that lacks the level of control and compliance that has become so endemic in training programs. Lets remember with all the talk of gen Y we also have become more regulated then ever before.

No one can question that our learners reach out to social networks to gather information. I am getting a sneaking suspicion that what we tend to refer to as social learning is a revisit of the old EPSS (electronic performance support systems) question. We have always believed that training driven by ad hoc learner needs was needed. But the effort to create EPSS has been daunting.

We tend to minimize the openness and self regulation of social learning to the level of a database of unstructured content that may or may not have contributions from few or many contributors. But then if one must ramble on this topic, then the glass is half full. Like it or not, our learners are not foreign to the idea that if we make it painless and motivational enough their knowledge, opinions and impute will land on the corporate wiki, blog and knowledge base and around sites outside the corporate boundary.

A few things I will be pondering over the next few days:

1. Must the role of the traditional SME be reevaluated? Is the SME a community—not a person—and can such an approach have the responsiveness we demand of SMEs?
2. How does one design for unstructured content? Do we leave our design at the doorstep once we establish a structure for how information is to be organized?
3. Will the roles of training departments be largely to become moderators of forums and the cops of wiki and blog posting etiquette?

One thing I do know: The question of social learning is a reality. The question is how long we chose to ignore it or how ready are we to embrace it in a way that has value for our organization?

More to come.

Boredom and the Brain

Today I had a chance to finally read this month’s edition of CLO. I enjoyed reading Norm Kamikow’s editorial letter, “The Real Root of All Evil,” a short treatise on boredom and learning. Part of the article references research on brain functions and the correlation of boredom to attention span. The article got my brain running in different directions, as often happens (perhaps my attention span is particularly short?), and I began thinking about a fascinating book I read a couple of years ago, Mind Hacks: Tips & Tools for Using your Brain by Tom Stafford and Matt Webb (they have a great blog that I recommend, too). The book basically breaks down into layman terms how the brain works, particularly focusing on some of the strange ways we can manipulate the brain once we understand its wiring. For example, take this test on “inattention blindness:”

Click the following link then read the content/instructions under “View the ‘basketball’ video,” then come back and read the next paragraph of this entry (don’t cheat – you’ll ruin the fun!)…

http://viscog.beckman.uiuc.edu/media/mindhacks.html

Okay, you’ve watched the video and counted all the passes made by the people in white, right? Are you sure you got the number of passes right? Maybe you need to go back and count again? I think you should. Come back and read the next paragraph after you’ve recounted.

http://viscog.beckman.uiuc.edu/grafs/demos/15.html

Great! Now, go back and start the video again, but this time count the passes made by those in black, then come back here to this blog again.

http://viscog.beckman.uiuc.edu/grafs/demos/15.html

See anything you didn’t the first time around?

Our mind is an interesting place, indeed. But back to boredom. The fact is, very often, the “learning” we’re put through is boring. It taxes our attention spans, or it fails to challenge, or it doesn’t motivate, or a million other things that lead to boredom. Our failings often are the result of either presenting learning the same way over and over (because of budget, resources, or whatever other limiting factor) or we swing the other direction and try to make something “fun” for fun’s sake – yet the “fun” learning doesn’t really challenge the brain after all, leading again to boredom. No new revelations there. So, the question is, What are you doing to avoid boredom in your learning initiatives?

Masie Learning 2008 Conference

Just a reminder that we'll be sponsoring the upcoming Learning 2008 Conference. Our CEO, Ron Zamir, and our Director of Learning Solutions for the West, Marty Newey, will be attending classes and also will man our table in the Learning Gallery. If you're attending the conference, stop by and let them know what projects you're working on. Or, better yet, drop Ron or Marty a line through the Masie's social networking site, LearningNet.

Silver Learning in Practice Award at CLO Symposium

Recently, Allen journeyed to sunny San Diego to be a part of the CLO Symposium in Coronado. At the awards ceremony, CLO distinguished Allen with a silver provider award for the e-learning course developed for Toyota Motor Sales, USA, Inc. You can read about the press release from CLO or visit our website to read ours.

We met a lot of great learning leaders at the symposium and enjoyed being able to share our project and to hear about the other projects through the "Winners Circle" the next morning. In December, all of the winners will be featured in the CLO magazine.

We'd just like to take this moment to thank Toyota. Their dedication to their training is an amazing story we felt honored to share.

Face to Face

Thanks to tools like mobile phones, WebEx, IM, and video conferencing, it gets easier and easier for Allen to start and end a project without a face-to-face meeting. The benefits from forgoing travel favor both the client and me, the designer. The client avoids paying for travel expenses and travel time. I avoid jet lag and sleeping in a strange bed. I'm sure this list could go on. Of course there are cons. Yet more often then not the pros seem to out weight the cons. A recent client meeting helped remind me of the benefits.

Until technologies can simulate real-life (think Star Trek holodeck only real, not programmed). it's impossible to read body language in a WebEx meeting. Since we (human beings) communicate up to 60% through body language a lot of information is lost. Now, I'll admit some of this information can be recovered through questions and follow-up. Yet it's easier to just watch a person's reaction and make judgment than determine what they went by voice tone.

In our meeting, my project manager and I were trying to determine what the client wanted for the look and feel for a new course. We shared several different examples. Without saying much, we could tell that these examples didn't excite them. The spark on their faces just wasn't there. We followed up with more questions, and the client showed us in house examples that work and didn't work. Before we knew it we realized that the client want something different that really appealed to the Gen Y demographic while using a limited color palette.

Now having just written that paragraph, even I think we should have been able to determine the need by phone and email. It would be simple to email examples to the client. Then the client could tell us what they like and didn't like. Unfortunately without understanding the end goal, we couldn't give them a sample interface to work with. Upon returning to the office, a graphic artist created several new interfaces based on new feedback. Now we hope (crossing our fingers) that one of the sample interfaces is closer to the goal and that the client can relate by phone the small changes we needed to make.

While the face-to-face meeting was minor convenience to my life, it wasn't a waste of effort. It gave us the ability to deliver a product that meets the clients expectations. At the end of the day that's what it's all about.

Allen's work for Wachovia featured in Elearning! Magazine

The October issue of Elearning! has a lengthy case study on a project we helped Wachovia with. The initiative was geared to new tellers in an effort to specifically reduce the costs associated with high turn over. But I won't spoil it for you. Read it for yourself!

Do You Know the Way to San Jose?

I just returned from San Jose, where I was in attendance at Brandon Hall’s Innovations in Learning Conference. I had a great time, connected with some of our clients, and also gave a presentation. I think that training folk are sort of a tough crowd—many of them have teaching and facilitating backgrounds so it can be a little daunting. I talked about remixing instructional design. We played mashups from DJ Clivester and DJ Schmolli. I even threatened to do an Ellen-DeGeneres-style dance routine. Mostly, I spoke about some of the consulting work that Allen has been doing related to 2.0 technologies and how to bring them into the overall mix of instructional strategies that we use with our learners. We talked about the need to mix at two levels—both at the level of learners and at the level of designers. Learners need to be able to create more robust profiles and set up detailed preferences in the company’s learning management system. They need to have ownership over their own training plan and not (just) receive a pre-determined curriculum defined by their current role. The plan itself needs to be more robust—it needs to recommend RSS feeds, help them join a learning network, determine which types of offerings are best suited to their interests and goals, etc. As for designers, I think that we need to look across a broader range of learner activities as we design a curriculum. Some portions of the curriculum need to be made available in multiple formats, and they may even need to shift their role, taking on additional responsibilities as learning content managers and not just as designers. If you’re interested, you can learn more in the handouts from the session . Of course, I’ve stripped out some of the client-proprietary examples but you’ll still get the idea.