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The March Big Question on the Learning Circuits Blog asks why it is that open content initiatives such as the OER Commons and the Open Courseware Consortium haven't had a bigger impact. I have some suggestions:

• There is no history or culture of content sharing in workplace learning and development. Most l&d departments operate in glorious isolation and would probably never consider engaging with their peers to share learning content. There are, of course, exceptions and associations can play a valuable role in identifying common needs across a vertical or horizontal market sector and helping to centralise efforts to create new content. A good example is Learning Pool, which creates e-learning content for sharing across local government in the UK and helps to ensure that content developed in the field is distributed more widely. This is not a free service, but it does reduce the costs to any one local authority significantly.
• L&d people may simply never get to hear about the free resources available because these are not advertised in magazines or shown at exhibitions.
• Social media will not fill the dissemination gap, because most l&d people don't use them, at least not for professional purposes.
• And we should never forget the power of the 'not invented here' syndrome.

I nearly forgot to mention another exception to the rule that's so close to home I couldn't focus on it - the 60-minute masters. This resource for occasional instructional designers was created collaboratively under a Creative Commons license. The resulting short course has been taken by many thousands of designers around the world. The content can be freely adapted and distributed in any form, as long as it is not sold on commercially. Perhaps we could have more projects like this.

The February Big Question on the Learning Circuits Blog (I know, it’s March already and I’m late on this one) queries what the place is for instruction and deep reflection in a culture in which people increasingly just dip into things and move on.

Well, I have no doubt whatsoever that formal training inputs have been reduced in length significantly (one hour classes, 30 minute e-learning modules etc.). I’m sure that the primary cause of this is that no-one’s got the time to spare anymore, but the real reason should be that longer knowledge-dumping sessions just don’t work that well, because of the cognitive overload they cause. Genuinely participative sessions, involving discussion and practical activities can, of course, be usefully spread over many hours or days, but there’s still too much tell and test going on out there.

When it comes to blog posts and web articles generally, the tendency has always been to go for brevity. That’s not just because readers are overwhelmed with information and have to be very selective, it’s also because work-related information consumption is very much goal-oriented and lean-forward, not reflective (and certainly not ‘surfing’).

Am I concerned that we are all becoming information brokers, passing on links to each other without taking the time to read and reflect on what we are recommending? Perhaps a little, but we should remember that the 90:9:1 rule suggests that only 9% of users are ever going to replay to a posting. And some of the most thoughtful people I know very rarely put their thoughts in writing. Apart from anything else, they’re too busy.

A month back I had the fortune of being asked to present to CEdMA, an association of senior training managers in large IT companies who have the responsibility for training up their organisations’ customers in their various products. It was clear from their discussion that the market was changing:

• Customers are demanding shorter courses.
• Customers are demanding more online delivery.
• Customers are becoming more savvy about the fact that large-scale knowledge dumps in the classroom don't work.
• Customers are turning to lower-cost, third-party providers.

It seems unlikely that IT companies will be able to rely in the future on the classroom as their main delivery medium. Ironic as it may seem, IT companies could do with a dose of their own medicine and start to embrace 21st century culture. The IT customer training of the future could look very different:

• Learning and support materials could be (and already are in some cases) provided online free of charge to customers as a gesture of goodwill. It's becoming ever harder to sell content anyway.
• Online communities for customers can work alongside the free content to encourage dialogue and help build customer loyalty.
• Specialist topics can be covered by webinars. These will dramatically reduce the indirect costs for customers of live training and could be revenue earners.
• Top dollar can be charged for short, face-to-face workshops which fill in the gaps and meet customer-specific needs.
• And some additional revenue can be generated by bespoke, value-added services (skills audits, evaluation and other consultancy).

It's true that this bundle of services will earn the IT companies much less from customer training than they might have achieved in the glory days of the classroom. But those days have gone and half-full classes must now be costing more than they earn. Where the new IT customer training will score is in the enormous benefits that can be achieved in terms of customer loyalty. And in the end, these are IT companies after all, not training providers, and their priority is to keep hold of their customers so they can continue to sell to them in the long term.

I met Bert de Coutere at Online Educa in December. He chaired the Battle of the Bloggers in which I participated.

Recently Bert sent me a copy of his intriguingly titled Homo Competens (Beta Book, 2009), an exploration of competence and how humans acquire this. I only got so far as page 31, when I encountered the following analysis by Bert of the stages in the building of competence:

Learning	If you are mainly learning, you are an apprentice.	You are building knowledge, skills and behaviours.
Doing	If you are mainly doing, you are a practitioner.	You are building experience.
Sharing	If you are mainly sharing, you are a master.	You are building reputation.

 

Bert makes clear that these phases overlap to some extent. After all, we're going to be 'doing some doing' at every point in our careers and also hopefully some learning and sharing. But what Bert's analysis did for me was to clarify to some extent where I find myself at this late stage in my career. I've done my fair share of learning and doing and I'd like to think I've achieved some success at both. But now my principal activities as a consultant seem to be writing, presenting, teaching and advising, which I suppose collectively put me fairly and squarely within the sharing stage. I can't stop learning and I love to do some doing when I get the chance, but my primary role in life is now as a sharer. So if I sometimes wonder why I'm spending quite so much time writing and talking (and often for free) then I'm only doing what comes naturally. I know because Bert told me so.

Viv Cole drew my attention on his From the Coleface blog to an interesting article by Des Woods and Henry Marsden published recently in the UK's Training Journal called How Professionals Learn (sorry, but you'll have to pay for the download). Woods and Marsden focused their article on senior staff working in professional service firms (accountants, lawyers, etc.), but I don't see why it shouldn't also apply to senior managers, academics, doctors or anyone else who has graduated through an extensive training and risen to a senior professional position.

The authors make a number of useful points about the unique problems of training this group. I've selected a few and added my own commentary:

• Professionals will only turn up if their investment in time is going to be rewarded by tangible returns directly related to the problems they face in their work. This should apply to all training, of course, but professionals are acutely aware of the value of their time and are not motivated by the idea of some time away from the day job.
• They will be more attracted to training that is delivered by people as senior and credible as they are. This is a potential difficulty, because senior people have little time to devote to training and can sometimes make poor trainers. On the other hand, trainers with less obvious subject matter expertise will not cut the mustard, however brilliant they are at delivering training. Ideally you need to use top experts who are also top trainers and inevitably they will cost top dollar.
• They like to network with other professionals of similar or greater reputation. They won't want to be thrown in with a random selection of more junior employees from around the organisation.
• The training must be quick and to the point. And, of course, all training should be, assuming it gets the job done. The problem lies not with the provision of knowledge but with skills development, which takes time.
• The training must not challenge their current competence. Any hint of a remedial intervention and noses will be immediately out of joint. These are people who have a high opinion of themselves and want others to feel the same.
• The content must be intellectually stimulating and challenging - in-depth cases go down well. This is an audience with high levels of prior knowledge (which makes it much easier for them to acquire new knowledge in the same domain) and high metacognitive skills (they have a fair idea what they need to know and how to acquire this knowledge). Anything less stimulating than their day-to-day work is going to be a turn off.
• The majority of self-study e-learning is likely to be too slow, too long and too boring - they just want the key points. Self-study e-learning is too structured for this audience, which doesn't need or want the structure. It's quite possible it's also been written by people less senior and less clever than themselves and this will be blindingly obvious. It's not e-learning that's the problem - it's the way it's done. Simulations and scenarios might be more acceptable as long as they are relevant, challenging and fiendishly clever.
• They are not game for follow-up activities designed to embed the learning. A blended solution may be the most effective option, but the professionals are not going to play the game (unless there's a high-status qualification at stake). With knowledge training, the follow-up probably isn't necessary for this audience, but when you really need to develop new skills in this audience (interpersonal skills come to mind) then you've got a problem. The early days of learning a new skill can be anxiety-ridden and embarrassing, and the last thing any professional wants is to humiliated in front of their peers. Probably the best option you've got is individual coaching, an expensive but potentially powerful option.

Thanks to Woods and Marsden for bringing this difficult audience into focus. They have helped me to realise that you just have to have a plan B when it comes to senior professionals. I'd like to think I am one myself, so it really wasn't too difficult to get inside their heads.

Sometimes you feel you're being drawn into a battle and you're not sure why. A good example can be found in the animosity that the celtic fringe (Wales, Scotland, Ireland) feel towards the English. Their feelings are perfectly understandable, of course, given the dominating behaviour over many centuries of the Anglo-Saxons, but are not mirrored by the English, whose attention is more focused on those who they, in turn, wish not to be dominated by (the Americans perhaps). It's a one-sided battle, because only one side is angry and up for a fight. I, for one, have no strong feelings one way or other about the Welsh, Irish or Scottish. I wish them well, except, of course, when they play England in any sporting contest.

I encounter a similar situation when I come across Mac users and Apple aficionados generally. When they find out I'm a PC user, they seem up for a fight. I don't have any problem with the fact that they wish to spend a lot more on their computers. I understand that Apple is a more stylish brand and that some people feel it is worth paying more for the prestige that this reflects upon them. Good for them, but their religious zeal is lost on PC users, who have no problems with Windows and the Office suite, which do more than enough for them and are much more reliable than Apple users think (particularly now we have Windows 7).

It's not as if it's an ethical issue. After all, both Microsoft and Apple aspire to a monopolistic status in their markets, as do all capitalist ventures. Both have achieved this (one with operating systems and office applications, one with MP3 players and perhaps eventually with smart phones). It's the job of regulators to make this position difficult to accomplish or to maintain.

And Microsoft and Apple are not even direct competitors. One is predominantly a software company and one is mainly hardware. A much more important battle is the one they both face against free and open source software.

To show just how one-sided these wars have become, most PC users are perfectly happy to buy iPods and the English are happy to holiday in Wales, whereas you won't often see a Mac user buying a phone running Windows Mobile or a Scotsman cheering on England playing Germany at football. But all this negative energy is wasted. There are battles out there that really are worth fighting.

I must have delivered many hundreds of presentations over the years, including some fairly high profile events, so I wasn’t optimistic that I’d find a lot to interest me in Confessions of a Public Speaker (O’Reilly, 2010) by Scott Berkun. I was wrong. I have never seen Scott speak, but I can tell you that he’s a great writer who kept me thoroughly engaged and entertained. This is not your run-of-the-mill effective presentations book – it’s packed with tips that you can use straight away.

He tells some home truths, designed to make you feel a little less anxious:

“Most people listening to presentations around the world right now are hoping their speakers will end soon. That’s all they want. They’re not judging you as much as you think, because they don’t care as much as you think.” Steady on Scott!

“If you’d like to be good at something, the first thing to go out the window is the notion of perfection.”

“They (the audience) want to be entertained. They want to learn. And most of all, they want you to do well. Many mistakes you can make while performing do not prevent those things from happening.”

It’s perfectly natural to be scared, because, as Scott reminds us:

“Our brains, for all their wonders, identify the following four things as being very bad for survival: standing alone, in open territory with no place to hide, without a weapon, in front of a large crowd of creatures staring at you.”

If you need one good reason to buy this book, it should be the section on what to do when things go wrong (you’re being heckled, everyone is staring at their laptops, one guy won’t stop asking questions, everyone hates you, and much more). Scott’s advice is both practical and hilarious.

You might wonder why Scott, who makes his living presenting, should want you to be as knowledgeable on the subject as he is. Well, he’s not stupid:

“No matter how much you hate or love this book, you’re unlikely to be a good public speaker … Most people are lazy … There will always be a shortage of good public speakers in the world, no matter how many great books there are on the subject. It’s a performance skill, and performance means practice.”

Last year I was lucky enough to see Malcolm Gladwell live in Brighton (see my review). Thanks to a train journey to and from London yesterday, I’ve finally followed this up by reading Gladwell’s Outliers (Allen Lane, 2008). Many of you will have read this by now, but just in case you haven’t, the gist of Gladwell’s ideas is as follows:

1. Becoming a world-class success in what you do, is only partially related to what you are as a person, i.e. what you were born with. You have to be tall enough to be a basketball player (but not necessarily the tallest) and clever enough to be a mathematician (but not necessarily the cleverest).
2. To fulfil your potential takes a serious amount of practice (10 years or 10,000 hours as a guide). The more practice you do the better you will be.
3. To be able to commit this amount of time to practice, you’ll need a supportive environment around you (aspirational middle-class parents with cash will help) and ideally be born into a culture that encourages hard work.
4. Once you have the required skills, you then need a dose of good fortune to be around at the right time and in the right place for there to be a ready market for your skills.

Gladwell is a fabulous writer and backs up his ideas with some captivating accounts of real-life events and an intriguing exploration of the numbers. Whether you agree with his conclusions or not, you could do a lot worse than to accompany him for at least a few hours on his journey.

According to a Neilsen report, as quoted in A World of Connections, a special report in The Economist on social networking, in October 2009 the countries in which users spent the most hours using social media were Australia, the UK and Italy. For each of this top three, the average user spent over six hours in the month.

Why these three? I haven't got a clue, but if I were to base my views on outrageous stereotypes then I'd say that:

• Australia is first because, if you live in a desert, thousands of miles from anywhere, then you need all the help you can get in keeping in touch with your mates.
• The UK is second because there are too many timid introverts for whom any human contact is better than none.
• And Italy is third because there are too many mad extroverts for whom there's no such thing as too much communication.

But of course I wouldn't dream of resorting to such dangerous generalisations, so what are the real reasons? I'd love to know your views.

I have been asked by Karl M. Kapp and Tony O’Driscoll to participate in the Blog Book Tour for their new book Learning in 3D: Adding a New Dimension to Enterprise Learning and Collaboration. I’m actually stop #19 on the tour and the show is not expected in town until next Thursday. However, I won’t be anywhere to be found on that day because I’ll be walking in the Canary Islands enjoying a real immersive experience. Sorry, Karl, and you had such a well-planned schedule as well.

Now I’m not going to pretend that the use of 3D worlds for learning is a specialisation of mine. I’m not even much a gamer (I vowed some years ago to keep as far away as possible from games and programming, because both were so enjoyable and addictive that they threatened any chance I might have for a life that involved interaction with other human beings). However, I’ve had enough experience with 3D worlds to see how they might successfully integrate with other learning and development activities and where they stand out as the best fit for the job.

What I am determined not to do is to regard 3D as intrinsically superior to 2D just because it has 50% more dimensions, any more than I feel a Flash web site is any better than one created in HTML. I know it’s a cliché but it really is ‘horses for courses’. Just as plain old HTML does the job better than Flash in 90% for 90% of websites (with elearning a big exception, where Flash really does win out), 2D is likely to be the right choice for 90% of learning and collaborative environments. I may have exaggerated the percentages, but I doubt it.

None of this is to play down the importance of 3D environments, nor to underestimate the opportunities that we are faced with now 3D is less rocket science and more of a viable option. Just how great those opportunities may be will depend on the type of 3D experience you are looking to create and the appropriateness of this experience to your learning goals. Back in 2007, in 3D e-learning is as diverse as 2D, I set out how I felt the applications of 3D worlds could be mapped as synchronous and asynchronous or individual and collaborative, just like 2D e-learning:

So what about Karl’s and Tony’s book? These guys know much more about this subject than I do and this shows from page 1 to 416. I might feel they are over-playing the significance of 3D, but this may just be because they have explored the possibilities in a lot more depth than I have and are justifiably more excited as a result.

However much you feel 3D worlds will impact on learning and development, there is no question of their relevance and potential importance. If you want to make a really informed judgement – and you should – then this is the book for you.

I’ve just joined another Wetpaint site that seems to offer some interesting considerations of required shifts in communication strategies for educational institutions.  IN terms of communication, what can schools, teachers, administrators learn from students.  While the focus seems to be upon K-12 contexts at this stage, based on recent exprrience I think there is plenty [...]

It has been really interesting to watch Old Aunties attempts to embrace the possibilities of web2.0 and participatory culture. My favourite show on the one-way-box “Q&A” is an excellent example. It is very engaging to watch the video mash-ups submitted by pensioners and students alike, and hearing the challenging questions from the audience. Even just [...]

Are flash based Learning Objects dead?  They sure are expensive - since 2001 the Teaching & Learning Federation (TLF) has used “AUD$123 million ….. divided by 6300 curriculum items. That’s close to AUD$20,000 for each single (eg, Flash) TLF curriculum item,” observed Stephen Loosley (Member, Victorian Institute of Teaching) when he opened some excellent discussion [...]

Kim Flintoff drew the attention of readers of the fantastic West Australian eChalk email list to this video - eSN TechWatch: Preparing Kids for 21st-Century Success. Kim observed: Yet another smart person (Daniel Pink) recognises what needs to be done in education – why don’t things change? Interesting that embedded arts is identified as [...]

This public service campaign video was filmed at the CoSN (Consortium for School Networking) annual conference. The wisdom with which educational leaders like Alan November, Greg Whitby, and Stephen Heppell explicate the urgency of giving teachers the tools to connect with 21C learning and their students is poignant in this video. The massive task [...]

This Technology Integration Matrix is a very handy reference point for school administrators, especially those ready to take the plunge and give students the opportunity of 1:1 access the Digital Education Revolution funding offers. It is worthwhile clicking on the links under each indicator to see how the integration works in both shared and 1:1 learning [...]

As @dswaters pointed out at the recent ECAWA unconference I am not the most social creature online these days! I do engage with some discussions on email lists and a little bit more lately on Twitter but in general this year I have not really been joining in the dialogue of the blogosphere as [...]

Technology now dominates every area of our lives and educators need to make sure they are prepared for its inclusion into our schools. This may mean making a break from traditional teaching methods; but there is no denying the inevitability of technology being thrust into curricula around the country. Many teachers may be [...]

Paul Fuller was our special guest in a live Digital Chalkie webcast in this conversation around how one globally aware primary school got their one-to-one parent funded notebook program off the ground please tune-in. Paul explains about the students’ reactions, planning, financing, technical and pedagogical shifts. Below is a podcast of Digital Chalkie webcast #6: How [...]

Great - we finally have computers making their way into the hands of Australian students. But what if they don’t have access to the internet that will really equip then as 21C learners when they get home? (I’ve written more about the Meraki solution on my own blog here.) In this scenario, I have been [...]

Dan Pink’s Drive, The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, provides convincing arguments in favor of intrinsic motivation. We have had too limited a view of what drives performance and we need a whole new operating system for some of the places where science says one thing and business does another. The patches are just [...]

Working Smarter, the 2010 Edition, is priced like lobster in an upscale restaurant. The price is whatever we feel like. Current price of hardcopy = $16   After March 16, $20 Current price of download = $10  After March 16, $16 Enlargement

This post continues the discussion among the members of the Internet Time Alliance about appropriate terminology for learning in the network era. This is an exploration, not an ultimatum. The main point is getting the job done. That pays the bills. Everything flows from working smarter. All learning is social, so that’s not really a useful distinction [...]

Christian Crumlish has a fantastic job. He maintains Yahoo’s design pattern library. He gets to think about the little things that make the web work that you never have time to think about. Christian teamed up with Erin Malone to write this incredible book just out from O’Reilly. When my electrician cut my power at 9:30 [...]

Working Smarter, the 2010 Edition, regularly sells for $19.98 (hardcopy) and $12.00 (download). This week the hardcopy version is marked down to $16, the download to $10. Here’s an excerpt. I’m investigating the price-sensitivity of demand. The price will probably go up again next week.

Nielsen Business Media is shutting down Training magazine and its companion Web site, trainingmag.com. The March issue will be the publication’s last. The move includes the elimination of 11 positions, a spokesperson said. I first saw Training magazine in 1977. At the time I didn’t know the training business from a hole in the ground. “You mean [...]

Karl Kapp and Tony O’Driscoll have written a definitive book on virtual worlds, Learning in 3D:  Adding a New Dimension in Enterprise Learning and Collaboration. Many people think of virtual worlds as the realm of characters in bizarre costumes and companies out to waste their PR budgets. Karl and Tony see a phase change in how [...]

Inside Learning Technologies is an important magazine in the U.K. (Isn’t it odd that while the net spans the globe, learning magazines remain confined to their home countries?) For the current issue, I wrote an article entitled Making Business Decision: the Hand and the Heart. This is the sequel to last month’s Speaking the Language of [...]

The January 2010 Edition of Working Smarter was released today. Subtitled Informal Learning in the Cloud, this edition focuses on social learning and implementing web 2.0 technology. The hardcopy version of Working Smarter costs $19.98. Believe me, I’m not trying to fool you with trick pricing. My publisher’s algorithm won’t let me charge $20 even. I [...]

Two of my colleagues at the Internet Time Alliance, Jane Hart and Charles Jennings just returned from speaking at the Learning Technologies conference in London. Jane & Charles The conference program would lead you to assume that the Learning Technologies conference would be a hotbed of social and informal learning. Jane addressed how L&D is changing. “People naturally [...]