Conference replays : Learning 2009 and Learntrends

Around the new year, there is some more time to look up from our busy busy projects and jobs to what is happening in learning land. That's probably why that is also the conference season for a lot of learning conferences. Traditionally, I only visit one conference in the flesh: Online Educa Berlin. But I've attended some others 'virtually', as they post replays of their sessions for free on the web. I wanted to share those:

- Learntrends: this was a completely online free conference done by Jay Cross, George Siemens and Tony Karrer. Replays for most sessions at the learntrends site.

- Learning 2009: This is Elliott Masie's conference in Orlando every year. He posted some video of the major sessions too. Go here.

If I don't find the time to blog before Christmas: have a merry one.

Battle of the bloggers 2009

I realise it has been ages since I blogged on this one. In 2009 I did a lot of internal blogging inside the firewall of IBM, and on my homocompetens blog, but less here.

 

Anyway, I've done it again. I mean hosting the battle of the bloggers at Online Educa Berlin. This year the panel had well known bloggers Clive Shepherd, Donald Clark, Ellen D Wagner and Jane Hart. Here is the presentation with the 5 topics of the 'battle'.

 

Battle of the bloggers 2009 - Online Educa Berlin

View more presentations from Bert De Coutere.

 

The title of the session is just great of course, and we all know it doesn't cover it. It's not a real battle (luckily :-) ) and it's not just about bloggers. The audience was even less talking and more into typing on the backchannel than last year. It was an honor to host it again.

Update: I realise you need more than the slides to get this year's battle topics. So here is how to replay your own battle of the bloggers.

• Warm up : In December 2012 (according to the calendar of the Mayas) the world will end. How will learning/teaching/tools/training be different between now and when the world ends? Look around what lives in research, what vendors are vending, the trends of learning land, etc.
• Round 1 : About the brain. There has been a lot of talk about the brain and learning this year. We still don't know much about the brain. The rest of the body is easy: that's just mechanics really. But there is so little we know about the working of the gray matter. The picture on slide 9 is taken from an art exhibition. It's a new ultra portable device that scans for brain activity. Based on what part of the brain is active, metal plates on the ceiling make noise. The press article mentionned potential application in the field of e-learning: you can tell when a learner is distracted and respond to that in the e-learning course. Mmmm. Scary thought. "Mr Stevens, I don't know what you are thinking right know, but I know it's not mathematics."...  At the one hand there are books such as 'brain rules' that provide practical tips for learning based on brain research. At the other hand, it's not because we know how two neurons communicate in the brain, that we can sensibly make any extrapolation on complex processes such as learning. What if anything can we use from brain science to make learning better?
• Round 2 : The picture on slide 12 is one of 'the oldest profession'. But that is not correct. If you ask me, our profession is the oldest. And with 1/60 Americans in the education business, I'd argue we are not only the oldest, but also biggest profession of them all. But we don't seem to agree on anything. At the one hand we celebrate 50 years of Kirkpatrick's 4 level learning assessment, but at the other hand you'll find a lot of reasons why that model is crap. There seem to be so many urban legends in learning: left/right brain, you remember 50% of what you smell, learning styles, etc. Is there a common language in learning? Do we agree on anything or are we all working in our little corners? Having common understanding and common language can lead to scale and scope effects and make our profession stand out more and more productive. At the other hand, a highly fragmented and unregulated profession that doesn't have a common language or understanding has more diversity. Or maybe we should keep using models even when they are crap, just because these half lies are the only thing that keeps our profession together. What do you think about the common language of the learning profession? Whe hold these truths to be self evident...
• Round 3: The picture on slide 15 is 'a fool with a tool'. Don't you find it strange? People will always tell you 'it's not the tool, it's what you do with it', and then go into a 1 hour discussion on specific features of specific tools. What's with that? The observation here is on the top 100 most used e-learning tools as traced by the Queen of e-learning tools, Jane Hart. Only one of them, on place 14, is a pure and hardcore learning tool. It's moodle. All the others are tools that at the best have learning as some by-product. Should we have more dedicated tools for proper learning? Or should we move more into the direction of finding learning uses in everyday tools? If we go for the latter, what with all the research funding and corporate R&D on the many learning tools, not to mention the dear old LMS?
• Round 4: This round in short is about the central question: will we have more success with instructionally sound or with contextually relevant learning? Instructionally sound is good content, with proper pedagogical models behind, and proven impact. It's the learning we would all like to develop and diffuse. It's the learning that gets awards. Contextually relevant learning is good enough learning but at the exact moment of need. The world moves at hyperspeed. Is there still time to create pedagogically sound material? Do monkeys run the show instead of professionals?
• Round 5: The wall. It has been 20 years since the Berlin wall came down. In our field, there are many walls. There are walls between the education and the corporate training world. There are walls between individual institutions in the education chain, as there are walls between the corporate divisional kingdoms that have their own learning organisation. There are walls between learning and the other functions of talent management and HR. There are walls between related (or equal?) fields as knowledge management and training. You can do two things with walls: keep (or enforce) them or demolish them. It's very popular to bring down walls, certainly in a world that is increasingly interconnected. Breaking walls in our field means open standards, open content, an education chain, learning integrated in the work, etc. But maybe some walls are there to protect us? What if you are not an English speaking culture, should you have walls to protect you against the flood of the wisdom of English speaking crowd? What if the walls keep us together instead of spreading us out in all directions? What if they keep out evil or ensure you can charge for your service instead of drowning in the all-for-free world? In short, this round is about walls, and which walls to keep, and which to destroy.
•  

 

On a sidenote: when I logged into slideshare.net to upload my presentation, my picture had changed. Is that a new feature? I don't care how much more you like that picture over my face, it's not me!

 

Learning outsourcing hits the classroom

The learning outsourcing that I know about deals mostly with the learning administration. When your students call the enrolment office, little do they realise they are being served out of India or the Philippines. It is common for multinationals to either group their learning administration and IT where is is cheap, or to outsource that purely operational side of learning to others.

In last week's Data News (a local IT magazine here), I read that learning outsourcing has hit the classroom training. It is actually cheaper for IT administrators to get their Microsoft, Cisco or other certification by flying all the way to India and do the courses and exams over there. With the airline fee and hotel included, that's still cheaper than earning the title in the local country.

So now learning outsourcing gets very physical...

I know what you're thinking...

In the arts centre STUK here in Leuven there's a special installation by artist Christoph De Boeck. You can actually listen to your brain. Here's how it works: the visitor puts on a new technical innovation made by Imec on his head. That device measures brain waves and sends those signals to hammers that hit metal plates on the ceiling.

The reason I tell this in my learning blog is because of what I read at the end of the corresponding newspaper article: Imec lists as a potential use for its device, next to all kinds of medical usage, e-learning. The device can see when you are distracted and at that moment the course may react with an interruption or engaging activity. Fiction? Soon reality?

Phoebe pedagogic planner

Phoebe is a Jisc project in the UK. It calls itself a pedagogic planner, and you can create/view/share lesson plans that are structured around templates.

Free/open source elearning authoring tool MOS

I haven't tried it out, but it looks good on screen: MOS.
In their own words:
"MOS Solo is a Windows application to create learning courses, presentations, assessments and surveys. The courses created are SCORM conformant and can be viewed in a LMS or directly on the Internet."

You can download and use it for free, but it is made by a company with add-on products, so not a Linux-like open source movement. And I couldn't see where to get the source code either, so I'm not sure where to place this one relates in the open source / commercial spectrum. Tut then again, I wouldn't know what to do with it.

Futurework: sample of learning in Second Life

50 sites for educational games

This site lists 50 places to get your educational game. It includes some that I know of, like the IBM Innov8 game that is free for academic use, or PowerUp, but most of them were new to me. Interesting list.

Link:
Online Colleges

Social learning

(Taken from my internal blog at work.)

This is a blog post 'on demand'. There is this new thing out from IBM Research, called the 'blog muse' that lets people request others to blog about a certain topic. The tool will find the 'experts' on the topic and ask them to dedicate an article on is. As I like the approach of 'blogging on demand' a lot, here is my view on 'social learning':

Social learning is not new at all. Some call it informal learning. I think learning is the oldest profession in the world (yes, not the other on), and it has mostly been a social activity until the mass education system of the industrial age changed that somewhat to a sender/receiver happening. What is the most natural thing you do when you are stuck at whatever you are doing at work? You ask the ones next to you. Conversation is social learning (and as Jay Cross called it a lost art.) The thing is that the person next to you is probably not the best person to ask, just the most availabe one. Enter technology. We have a lot of technology now that enables us to make social leaning work better. Social learning has always existed, social networking technology makes it work more and better.

• We have always been able to ask someone for guidance. But now we have technology to ask people far away (IM), asynchrounously (forums, email), to search for experts, etc
  
• We have always been able to coach people. Now we can do it remote, virtual, faster and further.
  
• We have alway been able to write down our experience in journals.Now with blogs people can follow our journey and learn from that anywhere and all time.
  
• We have always been able to work together on documents. Now we can do that remote in real time via whiteboards, wikis, etc
  
• We have always been able to search for expertise. Now a system can link us in real time with available experts via social networking and profiles.
  
• We have always been able to bookmark interesting information and learning. Now social bookmarking makes that availabe to the crowd, and the crowd tells us what is worthwhile.
  

The hugh potential of social learning or informal learning is not to make it formal (and kill it), but to unlock the potential of 70 to 80% of learning on the workplace. Do that by supporting it instead of forbidding it (install your own social software instead of blocking access to facebook), by making it visible, and by making it count.

Reflection

This quote deserves its own post:

All too often, we support content, not learners.
(Patti Shank)

It's true, we all too often do. Protecting learners from the vast amount of unnecessary content would be one good place to start. It's not because the content exists, or someone thinks it wouldn't hurt to know that everyone needs it. Is there an 80/20 rule here that enables us to cut 80% of the content and allow people still to do the actions we wanted them to do by giving the training?

I3 change implementation model

The May edition of 'E-learn magazine' mentions the I3 Change Implementation model in its article 'e-learning means change'. In the 6c learning model, I refer to 4C as context, and adapting to your company's context. Change management is one of the ways to do that. I3 simplifies change implementation to inform, involve, integrate.

• Phase 1: Inform, generate awareness = answering the what, why, how, who, when and whatsinitforme questions, via posters, emails, presentations, speeches, etc
• Phase 2: Involve, generate involvement = change attitudes and behaviors and start with key influencers. You can use meetings, road shows, lunches, etc
  
• Phase 3: Integrate, generate commitment = make sure the change is accepted as the norm, for example linking it in with the current performance evaluation, key initiatives, processes, etc
  

Weird. Left brain or right brain test.

I'm not a firm believer that artistic and mathematical skills are neatly split among right and left brain. The different halves don't do exactly the same, but the simplistic picture that is sometimes put up of it is an urban legend of learning if you ask me (and read 'brain rules' book by John Medina).

But that's not the point, have a look at this site, and tell if the lady spins clockwise or counterclockwise. That says if you are right (rechts) or left (links) brained. The weird thing is that if you do some other activity she might suddenly change rotation. Is this really a proof that we use right/left brain for different activities? Or some other weird experiment? It does freak me out...

http://content.jobat.be/nl/artikels/ben-jij-een-linker-of-rechterdenker/?utm_source=jobat&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_term=2009-05-13&utm_campaign=jobat-tipvandeweek

Learning can make an argument

This graph comes from Datanews, a local weekly IT magazine. It lists the education budget per employee for the major Belgian IT companies.

So, why would you select, say, IBM to outsource your IT to instead of EDS? IBM employees get more than double of the education every year. That is strong evidence they are more competent and knowledgeable on the latest developments.

Learning can make a sales argument too. We don't use that enough.

Talent On Demand - book review

For profit corporations have one goal for talent management (including learning): to make supply meet demand.

Read my review on this enlightening book on my homo competens blog.

10 steps for integrating e-learning into a business

Kevin Kruse (2004) suggests ten steps for integrating e-learning into a business, I've put in brackets how that links to the 6C dimensions of the 6C learning model:

1. identify the business need (1C)
   
2. gain leadership support (6C)
   
3. assess your culture (4C)
   
4. choose the technology (2C)
   
5. Gather your resources (6C)
   
6. identify the appropriate learning model (1C)
   
7. define your content strategy (3C)
   
8. ensure you've got support (5C)
   
9. manage the transition (4C)
   
10. measure it (6C)
    

Impact of learning

The video by Kirkpatrick on MBAvid.com features in my last post deserves some extra attention. Around 39 min into the video, two slides are discussed on what impacts the effectiveness of a learning program.

Activities contributing to learning effectiveness:

• pre-work contributes for 26%,
• the learning event itself for 24%,
• the follow up for 50%;

What do we see in the spending behavior of the learning function?

• 10% goes to the preparation,
• 85% to the learning event and
• 5% to the follow.

The speaker concludes that we are spending the money were we ware the most comfortable: the learning event itself.

In the next slide the causes of training failure are displayed: lack of preparation or readiness 20%, bad learning intervention 10%, application environment 70%.

It builds a strong case to have more of our attention and money spent on the afterlife of a course. Actually, the whole idea of learning being an event is not the right approach. People learn through a period over time in which they soak in knowledge and skills, learn to apply them optimally and adapt to their working environment and job.

MBAVID.com : business video education portal

MBAvid.com is a collection of educational videos for general business use. The library covers the usual topics found in an MBA course.

Take for example this video tagged with learning. It's a son-of-a-Kirkpatrick talking about measuring the impact of learning.

More new learning on the cheap: yAuthor.com, GoView,

http://yauthor.com
As they say themselves: yAuthor.com is an on-line service with authoring tools allowing authors to create professionally looking interactive content easily. There. It's a beta project of Young Digital Planet (I believe they are in Poland.) As other emerging authoring tools (udutu, unison, ...) this one is completely online and will create you the things you wanted to create a few years ago: courses with tests and multimedia, downloadable in SCORM format ready for the LMS. Don't get me wrong, I see A LOT of potential for these tools, especially combined with collaboration features for the extended e-learning development team. And these tools WILL lower the bar for e-learning creation with cheaper tools. BUT it is still optimizing the kind of learning we were wild about three years ago. This is still the wiseguy(s) making a course of all things that you need to go to after you find it first.
I have not made a course with yauthor, but it looks well designed and easy to use. Might be a winner.

http://goview.com
Another classic in e-learning is screen recordings for application training. I've posted earlier about new, online tools to let you capture your screen and upload that to a site for sharing. GoView is another one that is in beta. This one is backed by a big one: Citrix.

Great instructional design with action mapping and the e-learning blueprint

Cathy Moore is a freelance instructional designer that coined the action mapping approach. She has now a great online tool for instructional designers that is easy, to the point and valuable: the e-learning blueprint. You can see the first pages for free, the rest works via a subscription model. Take the tour here.

Design Lively Elearning with Action Mapping

View more presentations from Cathy Moore.

Visual thinking: the way of the whiteboard

Very inspiring talk by Dan Roam on 'the way of the whiteboard'. For example he has a 6x6 rule to picture anything in 6 aspects based on how the brain processes vision.

http://videos.visitmix.com/MIX09/C16F