Still Catching Up

I've been trying to get all my notes from DevLearn2008 posted for my instructional design colleagues that couldn't make it to this year's event. I'm still working on that. Good thing I took good notes!

I'm also trying to catch up on my blog writing and reading since work and life have been pretty busy lately. There's a lot of great information that came out of the DevLearn conference and a lot of new people I'm reading, so it's taking a while to get up to speed.

I guess that's what the holidays is for though, catching up, reviewing what happened in the year that just passed, and making plans for the new year to come. I'll keep posting my notes and hope that I can help add a little to the growing bank of eLearning and instructional design knowledge out there.

Happy Holidays - no matter which ones you subscribe to!

Notes from DevLearn08: Learning 2.0 and Workplace Communities

This was another session I attended at the DevLearn2008 conference. It had to do with how learning is changing and how the LMS of the near future might work. It had some great information on how the influx of the Millennial Generation is changing learning, how informal learning is being recognized in on-the-job (OJT) learning and how to incorporate communities into an LMS to acknowledge the learning that comes from informal sources and comprises most of the learning a person will receive on job. I believe I have the hard copy of the handout that went with this session. If anyone is interested I will send you a pdf of it.

Presented by David Wilkins of mzinga

Learning is changing from 1:many (formal education) to many:many (communities)

Millennials:

• work as a tribe, not for a company
• digital generation
• close relationships with family
• openness and flat organizations, peers provide as much coaching as managers

Informal learning accounts for 87% of OJT learning (according to Jay Cross); other numbers (US Dept. of Education, for one) indicate roughly 70%

• 1:1 (99%) - emails, files
• need to make this many:many
• use discussion, use blog
• this makes it searchable

Want to make web 2.0 impact learning: change behavior, have business impact, learn a new skill

Need to find right mix of formal and informal learning

• some things, like OSHA training, should be expert led
• other things, like leadership training, could be learner led

Layer social network over company org chart to make sure social knowledge and expertise isn't lost. (Losing historical knowledge because it's not in the formal learning system can really hurt a company when someone leaves.)

Formal learning will probably split into 2 hybrids:

• formal + social media - bottom up, talent development
  
• formal + HCM (Human Capital Management) - top down, talent management

Getting people to adopt the change is the big issue

• need strong support from respected SMEs
  
• need an incentive program to make sure SMEs add value to the community
• have "gardeners" to check data and make sure it's accurate and current
• include social content to break up silos and get people talking to each other that otherwise might not have
• also helps people to relate social activities and cross-pollinate to work
• helps them learn the technology

Think through end game to determine strategy for incorporation of LMS, social media and community
2 models to get us there:

• Amazon model - social media about a learning resource
• Community model - social media for it's own sake
• piece of model is formal learning
• Amazon model could reside inside community model eventually

• ID becomes facilitator to social media elements around learning resource as well as designer of the learning resource

• move from teach a man to fish to teach a man to teach

Moderation types (all currently in use in various areas):

• Pre-moderation - post is vetted before it goes out
  
• Technology moderation - filters for certain words to only vet those posts
• Post moderation - community moderates itself through people reporting others doing inappropriate posts

DevLearn2008: Keynote Day 2 - Dan Roam

I took lots of notes for this keynote, but this was the day I was sitting behind Dr. Karrer (see the "Blogging Doesn't Hurt" post). He had his post up by the end of the session and it was brilliant. It also included much of the same information I had just taken in my own notes. Therefore, I am simply going to send you over to his post on this keynote!

I also recommend finding out more about the Back of the Napkin at Dan Roam's site or in his book. Especially good reading for those of us that are visually-minded anyway!

Notes from DevLearn08: Work Literacy Session

This was a session presented by Dr. Tony Karrer on Work Literacy

A brief intro into what is meant by Work Literacy from the About page:

Work Literacy is based on the beliefs that:

• With the growth of new technologies, explosion of new information, and accessibility of experts around the world, there’s a growing gap between the work practices and skills that most knowledge workers possess and the resources available to them.
• As knowledge workers we need practical skills, methods and tools that will improve our effectiveness and help us stay on top of our game.
• This is an issue that’s evolving quickly and we need a way to start discussing the implications, sharing ideas and learning how to better manage our work and learning.

Again, I found this session very interesting, so my notes are not in perfect English, but I think this is something any instructional designer looking to the future should be looking into.

Memory:
Cognition <-> Working memory <-> Memory

• Metacognition, metamemory: tools, methods - the way gen x and boomers learned
• Millenials have google, pdas, computers, and infinite ways to search for information that would have been impossible to find using a card catalog and a microfiche reader

Information Overload:

• amount of info available now is like 18th century person being bombarded with the NY times, which has more info in one week than in their entire lifetime
• brain likes finding new info and craves it like a drug, so info overload had negative affect because we aren't adapting well
• skills are not keeping up with the changes - Example: "~" operator in Google = "like" so searches synonyms - almost no one knows what this is and doesn't use it, so they are now building it into the search itself. Just shows how many people don't keep up with new technology.
  

To find information you can search Google but you don't have validation on the information. Can also use tool like Linked In to search for experts (can select degrees away to make sure you get people that will talk to you) that can give you validation on what you find in Google search.

To become more productive:

• Using tools like del.icio.us to tag bookmarks and can find almost anything you've been to now with desktop search and Google search history
• Blogging is another way of taking notes and putting down what's important to you
• RSS feeds allow you to keep up with all the blogs and news updates
• Online apps (ex: google spreadsheets) allow for online editing by multiple people

21st Century: Concept Workers

• A Whole New Mind, Daniel H. Pink
• Most valuable people in an organization
• eLearning 2.0 - shifting to learner-centered collaborative informal learning
• tools include blogs, wikis, social bookmarking
• use tools, including blogging, to become expert and evangelist for adoption
  

**wikipatterns site and book** - tools to help spur adoption of a wiki and helping it grow to be a flourishing community

If you are interested in seeing the handout for this session, let me know and I will send you the pdf file.

Notes from DevLearn08: eLearning Research Panel

Here are my notes from a very interesting discussion on where eLearning is going based on the perspectives of some researchers in the field. It was a really engaging talk, so my notes are a bit sparse as far as being pretty English, but I think you will get the general idea of the discussions and where they went. I have included links to each researcher's profile on their business sites in case you are interested in finding out more about them.

Panel:
Kevin Oakes - does lots of research for ASTD
Claire Schooley - Forrester, information and knowledge mgmt group, came from academia, most clients are corporate, proprietary research requested by corps
Chris Howard - qualitative/quantitative research on measurable best practices for corps
Kevin Martin - human capital mgmt group, primary research that's end-user driven, talent mgmt, metrics to show value of trng/talent programs

Moderator: Will Thalheimer (with Guild Research)

Types of Research: Product/Service review research; basic research (academic); applied research (academic); research to practice research; industry research

Top Trends:
Learning 2.0 (theme of conference) is also going to have biggest impact on corp training

• collaborative
• learner in charge
• innate with younger generation
• chaotic
  

Talent Management (best practices)

• integrate learning with recruitment
• learning with development/career paths and corp objectives
• more organized and methodical - need to balance 2.0 with talent management (chaos and organization)
• learning can get left behind in talent management as groups focus on performance mgmt
• very few companies have integrated talent management right now, so will be up-and-coming in the future

Learning 2.0

• Trust/culture is biggest barrier to using 2.0 tools
• Can use grassroots to prove concept and build business case but need to get some help from top to get real change made
• GE and Qualcomm are strong 2.0 cultures

Economy - good or bad for industry?

• Data suggest it's bad, budgets are down significantly
• Link yourself to business challenges - best thing you can do
  
• Look into using more video conferencing for training/meetings that people would have traveled to before
• especially hi-def telepresence types
• be sure to show % savings on travel, green practices
• Crisis forced companies to put resources into training, L&D
• criticality of retaining key workers and getting them to be more productive
• brings L&D into focus, makes them more accountable
• learning more important in tight economic times
• L&D usually takes big hit in down times
• show ties to business results to stay viable

Talent Management - where's it going? Learning taking a back seat?

• performance should increase to quarterly informal reviews to integrate with learning (best in class already do this)
  
• where are gaps? use learning to fill quickly
  
• benefits are hard to measure, sometimes anecdotal, but are real
• increases visibility of learning
• have to break down silos of traditional HR groups, make groups work together to see benefits of integration
• chasm between what hiring managers need and what HR thinks they need

Measuring Learning - top priority?

• measure in ways that board understands
• profitability
• revenue
• meeting business needs
  
• not necessarily Kirkpatrick levels
• generally not a top priority, even though they say it is
• The Training Measurement Book, Josh Bersin

Q&A

• Interview top performers to get knowledge that can then be disseminated to rest of staff. This is best way to get informal knowledge out to everyone.
• Understand financial drivers of business to be able to correlate learning to business.
• Ask them what the business "pains" are and then develop training to address those "pains"
• Hybrid between centralized/decentralized learning departments is what best practice companies are finding works best
  

Blogging Doesn't Hurt

So at yesterday's keynote address at the DevLearn 2008 conference, they started out by asking everyone in the audience to turn to someone else and tell them what they learned from the day before. My comment to the person in front of me was that "Blogging doesn't hurt!"

He looked at me with a rather puzzled look and I explained that, as someone new to blogging, it can be intimidating and that some people find this "painful". That seemed to be a good enough explanation for him. He even asked if he could use that in his work. I agreed. I think this is something people need to know. It's not scary, nothing bad is going to happen when you push the "publish post" button.

And in case you were wondering who the gentleman was that asked to use this phrase, go check out this blog: http://elearningtech.blogspot.com/. The man's name is Dr. Tony Karrer and he is the kind of exceptional elearning leader that I was hoping to find in coming to DevLearn this year. He has an amazing collection of elearning blogs and posts very thorough and relevant information here. I will definitely be checking this out regularly and will have new resources to explore for quite some time to come.

If you'd like to hear him in person, he will be presenting at next week's Corporate Learning Trends and Innovations 2008 online conference. It's free and I highly recommend Mr. Karrer's presentation, Work Literacy - Implications for Learning Professionals. Check out the information here http://www.learntrends.com/. It's co-hosted by another favorite resource of mine, Jay Cross, and George Siemens of the Learning Tech Center at the University of Manitoba.

I don't know if I will have time to check in to the other sessions offered, but will be following these thought leaders for some time to come. Makes that $1095 all worthwhile. :)

I'm not crazy!

OK, so I've been thinking about blogging for a while. You know, being a web 2.0 fan, you should eat your own dogfood and all. So, thanks to some friendly goading from the speakers today at DevLearn, I finally decided to just jump in and start. That should round out my web 2.0 work as I've adopted just about everything else already!

I've been at the DevLearn 2008 conference (day 1 today) and finally found people that believe, like me, that the current corporate learning and development environment is truely dysfunctional and I wasn't just imagining things. What a relief! I'm really not crazy - well, at least not about that.

However, it does look like things are really as hard as I had imagined they would be about getting learning groups and the corporations (or any groups, really) they reside in to take the leap and really embrace informal learning, web 2.0 or pretty much anything outside of the current SOPs.

I'm hoping that the types of people that I've seen and met here at DevLearn 2008 can help make that culture shift happen. At least I know I'm not alone now!