All right, alright, I get the point

Over 10 years ago, I sat in a Journalism editing course as a freshman. My instructor told us that “all right” is always written as two words—always. I tucked that bit of knowledge away and used it as I developed my editing skills in various discourses. As a university instructor, I would write “all right” and “alright” on the board in my composition classes and ask my students to explain the difference. I would hear a variety of answers, although few were ever correct.

I would explain that the standard in formal writing was still “all right” (since the dictionaries I consulted had “alright” listed as a colloquial version of the word). But, today when I searched a few online dictionaries, “alright” showed up as an adverb, with no note of nonstandard usage. That doesn’t mean I will be using it any time soon, but it might mean I will tolerate it a bit more when I see it used in such a way.

I frequently told my students that language is changing; we are changing it. Spelling will change, definitions will expand, and new rules established. A friend of mine once asked why I attempted to use proper grammar when people just don’t speak that way. But, my question for him was, “Does language evolve because of ignorance and laziness or because it reflects a change in people and culture?” Should we simply concede to incorrect usage because that is “how people speak”? Look at this article for more of a discussion on this issue.

As instructional designers, we are constantly working with language, so we must pay attention to how language is evolving, especially in a culture infiltrated and effected by chatting and texting. And, it might not be such a bad thing to use good grammar as we teach everything else.

I don’t consider myself a grammar snob, and I don’t correct people when they speak (unless they ask me a grammar question), but I really believe the beauty of language is that a person can use it to communicate better and more clearly.

For those of you who can’t help but find grammar mistakes in the world around you, I have included a few blogs that reflect just how important it is use good grammar and correct usage as we design instruction. I hope they provide a bit of humor as well.

The Grammar Vandal

The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks

Apostrophe Abuse

I’m also including the question and answer page from The Chicago Manual of Style site. Those of you who enjoy why and how language is used will appreciate it.

Economy forces mission critical training programs to forefront...while e-learning expenditures and investment decline.

A preliminary “State of the Industry” report from Training Magazine and Bersin & Associates breaks down some of the expected and unexpected trends of 2008. With a waning economy, cost cutting is occurring within Learning and Development throughout all organization types and sizes, including a certain amount of reduction in staff. As expected, need-to-have L&D initiatives, particularly mandatory/compliance and job-specific training programs, saw growth, while other areas shrank, most notably in the area of IT and executive development.

None of this should be too surprising. What I find interesting, though, is the reduction in spending on online learning. After several years of growth, and the continued promise of cost reduction, e-learning took a noticeable hit this year. Initial indications are that the cost to produce, deploy and manage online learning has not yet lived up to the cost-cutting dream.

Expect more and a further analysis upon the official release of Training Magazine’s 2008 Industry Report.

Corporate Training, Meet Social Networking

Corporate Training, Meet Social Networking

In the Best Practices column of last month’s Chief Learning Officer, Josh Bershin tagged the use of social networking as a “here-to-stay” member of corporate learning. He notes that LMS vendors have various challenges ahead and lists practical applications from Dell, IBM, Starbucks and others.

As I spoke with our Allen Learning Portal team about the article and social networking trends, the outcome was two-fold: 1) Allen’s Learning Portal has gone beyond housing training courses and has provided social networking capabilities for over two years and 2) Allen continues to provide new social networking capabilities.

Each client has Allen customize the Learning Portal to meet its needs and solve its challenges. Aside from the standard directory tool, some examples of the portal's social networking capabilities include the following:

• Pre-work Discussion Groups: Prepare learners to attend training. Give trainers an opportunity to assess a groups knowledge and skill level
• Post-training Discussion Threads: Topics include Q/As, difficult concepts, requests for more training, new best practices, etc.
• Class forums for ILT: Trainers can moderate these forums between ILT sessions or learners can post questions, insights, and individual/group work after training is over.
• Wikis: Learners and/or moderators can post thoughts about either ILT or WBT training or post helpful information and best practices. Moderators can approve changes students propose or can leave the wiki open and allow learners to modify content as needed.
• Webinars: Learners can attend and discuss live training. Learners range from employees to clients so discussions can include How Tos, Q/As with SMEs, etc.

The highlight of the article was Bersin’s best practices for how to manage such tools rely on the idea that the tools encourage “bottom-up energy.” We agree with him that the more learners know about how to use the tools, the more likely they are able to manage the tools themselves. In addition, Allen has found that companies implement our portal in ways that add value to employees and client’s daily lives.

What do you think of Bersin’s article and or about our Portal (Allen Learning Portal demo)? How could you use the ideas and tools to improve your corporation’s learning?

Obama and Social Learning

Being involved for over 25 years with training, I have always grappled with the question: Does a new generation demand a new way of learning and more specifically become so different then the previous generation to make the old way counterproductive?

In the early 90’s we addressed the change in self paced learning. Video disk and CDROM were the hit as we got used to a generation that was used to learning in front of a screen and not in a classroom. Towards the end of the millennium, virtual classrooms began to push the traditional classroom to the world of synchronous learning. In the early part of this decade, the WWW forced us to look at deconstruction of information as we began looking towards creating small learning objects that people can search and find.

While we continually adopted new technologies, have we ever faced a situation were one age group did better in front of a computer or in a virtual meeting then another?

At Allen we have had the chance to conduct in-depth usability and needs analysis for our clients that need to train multigenerational audiences. Assuming that the motivation to learn and advance can be assumed to exist at a certain level across a specific learning population, we have not found any difference in the generational approach to one or more modalities assuming training on how to interact with the technology was given. Moreover, the acquisition of a new way of communicating—being the computer, e-mail, smart phones, discussion groups and forums, and finally Web 2.0 modalities such as LinkedIn, Facebook and blogs are being adopted across the board. While the younger amount us my have been the early adopters, our grandmother as much as our teenager at home can live comfortably with new modes of communication and knowledge acquisition.

So were does this leave us? In my opinion right smack at the recent election of our first African American President Elect, who was virtually unknown to most of us four years ago.

President Elect, Barack Obama, is not the first to use the web for fundraising or mobilization of supporters. The uniqueness of this election must be seen more in the dominance of user-driven content to galvanize and motivate people to act beyond their traditional comfort zones. The velocity by which social networks distribute, update and validate information makes the way we post information on our corporate website comparable to the snail mail to e-mail. Supporters of Barack galvanized each other across the generational divide. Granny may not have been a frequent visitor to the Obama Blog but someone in her immediate vicinity was there to impact the message with fervor and motivation.

Moving a large distributed corporate audience in one direction or another is a primary task of learning organizations. We traditionally do so by developing the programs and content out learners need. Obama has moved a nation. We can do well to learn from what has happened to find the way to move our much smaller constituents by engaging them in the learning process well before we’re used to in the past.

On-Demand Ideas

I’ve often asked myself why we (the Allen team) sometimes have some of our best, most creative ideas while we’re working on a pre-sales mockup or demo and why that creativity sometimes outshines the work the work that we do later as part of the project. I think that there are several reasons, not the least of which is that it is sometimes easier to be more creative when there are fewer constraints. Often, in the pre-sales process, we don’t yet know what those constraints will be. They may be technical, legal, or specific to the quirks of certain stakeholders. Sometimes having less information can be a good thing, at least as a starting point. This past week, I got to be involved in two very different types of creative meetings. One of them was a brainstorming meeting for a project in pre-sales, where we needed activity ideas for a course in pet health and nutrition. The other was for a project that we had just won, but it had a very ambiguous scope. We needed to design an online reference tool to help users of a system that tracks data from drug trials. I think that we came up with some good ideas for both projects (and I’ll talk about those later on). I thought I would write up my very own pointers on getting the most out of meetings where you need on-demand creativity:

• Invite a variety of team members and not just the usual suspects. The dynamic of such a meeting requires all kinds of creativity. Even people that have historically come up with some creative ideas will do better if they can bounce ideas off of someone else. The project manager for the online reference tool invited our technical lead, a graphic design lead, and an instructional designer in addition to a couple of extras. The interplay of technical, graphic, and instructional strategies prompted us to come up with a solution that none of us would have come up with on our own.


• Invite one person who doesn’t know what’s going on. Okay, I admit that this person is often myself but I think that there is a valid reason for inviting someone that maybe didn’t do his or her homework (and doesn’t know what the solution is supposed to be). Of course, this may at first be annoying to those that did their homework, but the clueless person will sometimes throw out new ideas precisely because he or she doesn’t know enough to self-censor a half-baked idea that may later morph into something valuable (assuming some input from those in the know).


• Apply some pressure. I think it’s sometimes more difficult to be creative if you have all of the time in the world. On the pet nutrition course, if we didn’t come up with something interesting in that hour-long meeting, the designers wouldn’t really know what to script, the artist wouldn’t know what to mock-up, and the people getting ready for their sales presentation wouldn’t know the rationale behind our design. If it has to get done, it’s more likely to get done. If there is still time, then it’s iffier.


• May the best idea win! One potential pitfall is when a creative session gets too fair. All ideas aren’t equal, and it takes a team that really trusts each other and that isn’t after individual glory. You have to be willing to let your own contribution get mutilated by someone else, to let it get passed over entirely, and to realize that creative people don’t always play fairly. There is a difference between being cutthroat about ideas and being cutthroat as a person.


• Someone is going to need to go back to their cubicle and develop things further. Things will continue to change as things get executed. Sometimes, this process will enhance and complete the original idea and other times it will take it in another direction, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I tend to favor plans that can be scaled up or down to suit the available resources and timeline. If it can’t be scaled and things are tight, the risks may not be worth it and maybe the practical idea should win out.

I’m sure that’s more than enough advice. For every rule, there is an exception anyway (usually several exceptions). How did our brainstorming meetings turn out? Well, for the pet nutrition course, we came up with a couple of activities. One activity teaches anatomy by playing off of Da Vinci’s sketch of the Vitruvian Man, wherein the learner contrasts the Vitruvian Man with a Vitruvian dachshund and a Vitruvian housecat. Another is a kitty weight loss challenge, sort of a Biggest Loser: Cats. For the online systems reference, we came up with a design that allows learners to search for exactly the information they need, tag that information so that they can easier find it later, and see the collective tags of their peers and coworkers. They can navigate by role, by step in the system process, or search by their tags. Arguably, this is not as fun as spoofing feline weight loss. On the other hand, it is very different from how we had envisioned the solution originally and much more usable by learners.