Majarkeun

Lose the Teaching Work is Learning

A year back, when I decided to go with the idea of ThoughtWorks University V2, I was seriously influenced by Jay Crosss idea of a workscape. We already had a very successful graduate induction program in the form of ThoughtWorks University, and to change it meant flouting rules like "If it aint broke, dont fix it." But then, I think a bit like my friend Aaron Silvers - "We should be fixing things all the time". I wanted to move from a purely academic approach towards learning to an approach that we drove through real work. I wanted to rethink the reason we ran the program and if instructional soundness really translated into workplace effectiveness. Our team took a gamble towards workscaping the program. I can say safely today that weve seen results that make me proud to be part of the program and I believe were making a dent in the universe like never before. Last Thursday, the team of graduates at ThoughtWorks University enabled a local charity Sukrupa by launching their website complete with a donations system. This apart, theyve made significant progress with a student records system and an ecommerce project for the same client. In todays blogpost, I want to reflect on our experience of the last six weeks and share with you how real work has made ThoughtWorks University a better program for the company and the world at large.

You Cant Train People on Values
"Profit, smarts, and growth is essential, but the meaning of work-life must extend beyond the bottom line." - Jonathan Wolter
At ThoughtWorks, our values and mission are at the heart of how we work. My colleague Jonathan Wolter, has written eloquently about our mission to advocate social justice. While our mission and values are at the core of our DNA, I dont believe we can train anyone on this. We can do great presentations and elearning courses and convince ourselves that we did a great job, but frankly you believe in a mission by pursuing it. You cherish values by living them. Teaching of any kind lacks the realism to drive home a passion for missions and values. At ThoughtWorks Univeristy, we set our graduates the task of enabling Sukrupa - a local school thats on a mission to educate children from Bangalores slums. Its amazing how a challenge with a real world impact can galvanise people. In solving this problem our grads not only pursued software excellence and helped change the world in their own little way, but they also lived ThoughtWorks values as a means to the end. If you read about our values youll soon realise how a small, real world problem can easily help them live each of our cultural traits.

Experience is the Biggest Teacher
"Experience is what you get when you dont get what you wanted" - Randy Pausch
Often it takes seeing what doesnt work, to realise what could actually work. We took a risk by starting the project with little upfront analysis. In the initial weeks of the project we were literally playing it by ear, taking our clients requirements as they came. While we took this chance knowing the potential benefit for Sukrupa and for the graduates experience, the uncertainty and the lack of coordination on the team was disconcerting. There was even an occasion when our otherwise affable client was put off by our amateurish approach. When you put a group of talented, passionate people together though, problems are only an opportunity for greater responsibility. A quick shuffle of team roles and our analysts had nominated a testing lead, a UX analyst, a project manager and backlog cop. From that point on we never looked back. The graduates have forged such a strong relationship with our client, that itll drive most experienced account managers to shame. Technically, and process wise - our graduates struggled; but their passion kept them resilient through ups and downs of the six weeks. The role of the trainers was just to be coaches - guides on the side, who would chip in with their experience and help the project along in the right direction. At the end of the day, the trainers have learned heaps about leadership and the students have learned heaps about client management and software delivery. We didnt teach them anything - they learned through experience.

Nothing Succeeds like Success

"You know that youve done well, if your customer breaks out in tears during a showcase." - Patric Fornasier
You can teach people all you know, but theyll never know what its really like until they achieve real success. In the past six weeks our graduates wrote real tests and real code, configured one-click deployment for the project, elicited and delivered real user stories, worked in a true Agile environment, and managed a real client relationship. As I sat through graduation on Friday, I looked at each of our 20 new consultants -- their confidence and energy was evident. As I later wrote to these consultants they arent rookies anymore - they know what it takes to release software. They can now stand alongside their more experienced team mates and still be confident given their success on our project with Sukrupa. I hope its heaps easier for them to pull their weight on a project, knowing that theyve seen real success.

---

This ThoughtWorks University brought for me, my happiest moments as a ThoughtWorker. Its been an absolute privilege working alongside each of these 20 young people - and its an experience thatll take some beating. Its also provided evidence to my hypothesis that challenges and failure can be great catalysts to learning. Ive seen that smart, passionate people, given a worthy task, will learn and rise to challenge. I hope our story can inspire you to make real work an integral part of your learning programs. Do chime in with your thoughts in the comments section - Im very keen to hear what you think. And by the way, please donate unabashedly to Sukrupa - a small donation from your side could go a really long way for this really special school.

Available link for download

LSG Webinar Using live online training as part of a successful learning blend

Its been a while since Ive reported a webinar, so today with the new series of Learning and Skills Group sessions, Im getting back on the live-blogging circuit. Ok, kinda. Anyways, todays topic is (as you may have guessed) "Using live online training as part of a successful learning blend.". Charles Gould of Brightwave and Matt Turner of Live Time are going to be trying to answer the question that most people seem to be asking of synchronous learning. So, as most LSG webinars, I think this promises to be an interesting event. Lets get started.

Charles and Matt seem to have discovered a huge demand for synchronous learning in the course of their consulting work in the elearning space. So lets see whos attending this webinar:

• 17% Trainers
• 11% Learning Designers
• 20% L&D Manager
• 19% E-learning Professional
• 17% Other

Hmmm... thats a fair mix and people have various different motivations for attending this webinar. Looks like one of the focus areas is to highlight the differences between webinars and a live, online training course.

So what is the difference between a webinar and a live online training course?

There are some subtle differences and here are some of them:

• Online training sessions are a bit more formal and have some well defined outcomes.
• They tend to be more action-oriented in their approach
• They have objectives and motivations which are consistent across the trainers and the students.

I could argue this a bit, but oh well! So anyway, back to main question - how do you integrate online training into your learning blend? Theres various stuff that needs to happen before, during and after the session itself. Heres a picture that expresses Charles and Matts thoughts about the activities that you may want to plan for online training.

Online training is starting to be a good supplement to classroom and elearning activities. The benefits are quite obvious - costs, the lower carbon footprint, the ability to actually do it without any huge constraints. We need to look beyond just those benefits though - we can have lots of people in the training, we can all talk together, we can walk out without offending people and most importantly, its an nice way to bring geographical diversity to your classroom. So its a little more than just a virtual classroom.

That said, theres no opportunity for body language, eye-contact and then again theres a myriad of distractions available to us -- for example Im live blogging at this moment.

It looks like everyones been involved with online training in some way or the other. So lets hear some of Matt and Charles tips for online training.

Technology
As you may already know, there are several options for online training tools. Theres DimDim, Live Meeting, Webex, GoToMeeting, Lotus Live Meetings, Cisco Webex and Adobe Connect. If youre still deciding, here are a few things to consider:

• Bandwidth - does your organisation have enough bandwidth on the network to run this kind of thing?
• Storage - where will you save most of your data, recordings, etc?
• Risk - how secure is the service and how open or closed is the option youre using?
• Integration - are you using it with your LMS or other systems?
• Costs - how cheap or costly is your implementation going to be? How much staff time are you going to need?

People
People, as weve already discussed have a myriad of distractions in their life. People are people and if they want to multi-task, they will! When you dont get eye-contact, its a gigantic difference. If youre multi-tasking then youre perhaps going to be a good online training thats because you already know what your audience will do.

So, what you dont want is someone reading a script. What you dont want is someone reading script. What you do want is someone bringing in a bit of a personality. Voice is crucial to the success of an online training session. Using a headset helps and perhaps a directional mike maybe? Trainers need to be hugely expressive online - remember people cant see you; so make peace with that and do what you can to overcome that hurdle. As human as you can sound, the better for you!

Content
So lets see what kind of subjects work well in this medium.Ive now completely lost visuals- damn! So Ill just go with what I hear.

Seems like soft skills are a good area to discuss online. Bringing in experts and to keep it short and simple is a good idea as well. Learning from suggestions that others make is a great way to influence behaviour. The more you can involve people, the better - 90% of the talking should be from the participants. Teach people how to use the tool and how to use the chat box. Just as Don does for the LSG webinars, it does helps a lot to get people used to the environment. This is the equivalent of getting people used to a training environment. Also, get peoples views by using polls as an activity. This is the equivalent of how we do polls (show of hands) in a classroom.

Dont overdo the poll though, but beware the meaningless poll - they can break up the momentum of the session. So use polls where you expect a distinct set of answers, but if things are just obvious, dont just do it for the sake of doing it.

Final Tips

• Ask people what theyll commit to do once theyve been through the session.
• Whats going to stop them from doing what theyd like to do.
• Discuss these hopes and concerns with participants.
• Dont be ambitious - its not about what you want to do to look cool. Its also about managing change and getting people comfortable with the medium.
• Roland from Live Time has a tip - the technology is there, but dont go overboard!
• The voice of just one person gets boring after a while, so vary it by bringing in audio, video, etc.
• Dont get flustered if things go wrong - remembers Murphys law.
• Be flexible - something that works in one session, will not necessarily work in the next. The dynamics of people are extremely crucial to keep in mind.
• Online training takes time. To make something, simple, short without the benefit of physical presence and the interactivity that people expect, is always tough. So try getting as much of this work done up front and make sure you prepare well!
  

Available link for download

LSG Webinar How great content systems and communications create provable learning results

Hopefully Ill have better luck with this webinar than I had with the last one. Without too much stage setting, let me get straight to the topic. Steve Ash, Director of LINE Communications will speak today about his experience with Ford Europe and how they found a better way to train and communicate with their network of car dealers. Theyve implemented a portal called the Learning Center as well as the Ford Foundation a suite of content for sales people to gain essential skills to sell Ford vehicles. So Steve promises to cover:

• How a portal approach enables rapid, targeted access to learning
• Why a communications campaign is essential for adoption
• How elearning speeds up time to competence
• Calculating and demonstrating cost savings
• Showing provable increased performance by learners

Its tough to stay focussed on a webinar while live blogging it when youre in a classroom full of bright students with an interesting discussion on hand. So, Im going to do the best I can with these notes, but if theyre pants - dont shoot me.

OK, Im interested particularly in how people are improving business performance with learning.

So Steve asks: What do you think a learning function should measure and report on?

Some interesting answers from the group:

• Improvement in ability to carry out tasks
• increase in meeting targets
• that skills base increases
• improvement in performance
• Expectations of stakeholders (ROE noit ROI)
• were they appropriate to the role
• impact of learning - efficiency, effectiveness
• Return on expectation
• Should be based on business reqs and Learning outcomes that result from the lna
• behavioural change
• Committment
• What the buisiness expects

OK lets see what this case study is all about.

The Company and their Challenge

Ford was founded in 1903 - one model and one colour of the car. Now they obviously create so many different kinds of vehicles. The profits they make are related to the technological advancements for their cars and even the extras generate huge profits for the business. Ford Europe is the subject of this case study - they have 8000 dealerships with 25000 dealers. So thats huge scale!

Jacob - Head of training at Ford had a challenge. Traditionally, people would go to Henry Ford College. People join, and after 3 months of trial you get hired by the dealers (youve sold from Day 2, btw). After this you complete the minimum training and then by month 37 youre fully trained. Unfortunately by month 37, 40% people left or dropped out. So their problems were:

• 40% staff turnover
• People never trained in Ford Brand
• People rarely trained in all products
• People never had any tests on their competence.

So the question was "Why?" they were doing things the way they were doing.

So Jacobs objectives were:

• Increase vehicle sales
• Increase profits - Do more for less

The most important thing Ford need to realise these objectives was to increase retention because it was costing them a fortune to recruit. The second was obviously time to competence, which in the original state was quite high - 37 weeks!

The most important part of executing the project was in the space of Change Management, apart from all the L&D aspects.

What they did and how they did it

At this point, Steve is showing us the Learning Center and the Ford Foundation learning materials. Lets see. Theres a really nice video introducing the Learning Center and really whats in it for the sales folks - on time, any time, etc.

The big thing for the team was that elearning was a new way of learning and they had to construct different messages for each group of people in the corporate heirarchy and I think this is key as is the delivery of the message. One size fits all rarely fits anyone. Steve is showing how they used a standard look and feel and how they varied the media to suit different people and different purposes. It seems like a very professionally executed change programme. I see greenbacks floating -- this is bound to be costly, but Im sure its well worth the cost. Ok - time for 1 more demo!

Steves now showing another of these introductory videos explaining the benefits of the elearning programs. The look and feel looks really polished - its more of the same though. The idea is to communicate effectively.

The results
The program reached out to 23820 people. The more difficult measures however were around replacing the existing training binders.

Ford went ahead and broke the training materials into vertical and horizontal chunks dividing not just the product lines but also the knowledge and skill areas across these product lines. Now people can actually get trained in 13 months and potentially be promoted to sales managers by month 36. A huge improvement on the past approach.

They also released 24 different language versions, so people could access training in a language that made sense to them.

Now Ford is looking for ways to make the learning modules even shorter and to increase the number of delivery platforms to take the materials to mobiles, tablets, etc. They also have a request to move materials to a format where sales people can use these with customers as well! Sounds like theyre loving it, arent they?

Metrics
In terms of the before situation - the cost per person used to be 390 euros! That was a fair chunk of change for binders. Now, they spend as little as 65 euros! More importantly they can track completion and progress.

93% find the training useful. 81% people find it useful to sell vehicles before the launch event. Most importantly, amongst two people selling cars for 5 years, the person who had done elearning outperformed the people who hadnt done elearning almost consistently. More importantly the people who scored highly on the elearning did better on sales than the others. Thats a very powerful statistic to send out to management to talk about the success of the program. Attrition had gone down tremendously as well!

In summary, this is a hugely successful program from Fords perspective. The top tips;

1. Pursue business metrics.
2. Dont underestimate Change Management.
3. Fun, engaging, interactive content is critical.
4. elearning really works!

I really loved this experience report - great tips and inspiration. One thing for me to remember - Change Management is everything. Im going to get some lessons from our Change Manager - Liv Wild. Thanks Steve!

Available link for download

LSG Webinar Choosing the right social and collaboration platform for learning

Aah! I finally made it to this one. Had a busy afternoon till now, but now its webinar time. Todays LSG webinar is by Jane Hart, one of the world’s leading experts in social and collaborative learning. In todays webinar shes promised to examine three platforms explin what they can and cannot offer. Im kinda interested in what could be a low-cost Ning replacement. Ive also got a blogpost planned on this topic - keep your eyes peeled if my blog interests you. This is my third time with Jane - shes amazing and shes especially nice to me online so Ill do my extra bit to record her webinar properly. She blogs at http://janeknight.typepad.com, btw and if you arent following her already, please start following her @c4lpt. Shes the best source of wisdom about social learning, IMO. So take it away Jane - give us all youve got.

Craigs asking me about whether I have my superman outfit on -- dont know about that Craig, Ill do my best!

Janes asking us whether were just curious about social learning or are we looking for a Ning alternative or if were just evaluating platform. Looks like theres a huge mix of people and needs - and a lot of curiosity. Hmmm.... anyways, here are the liveblogged notes.

10 criteria for selecting the right platform

Here are some of the criteria Jane mentions we should think about when selecting a platform:
1. Purpose: How will it support learning?

• Will it be a formal learning community?
• Will it be for a PLN/.
• Will it be a group space
• Will it be a file sharing network?
• Will it be an enterprise wide social and collaboration platform?
• Will it be an external platform?

2. User Functionality - What should it do?

• Social Networking
• Communication - messaging, discussion, chat
• Sharing - links, resources, etc
• Sub-groups - open or closed collab spaces
• Collaboration Tools - blogs, wikis, microblogs, etc

Ning seems to be good for most stuff here. Don says that Ning is great for bulletin board style stuff but not project collaboration.

3. Closed or Open Source - Can you look under the hood?
4. Hosted or Installed - Can you host it within your firewall? Do you have to be on the cloud?
5. Data ownership and export - If you do have stuff on the cloud, do you have an NDA on your content and can you choose to not expose your data? Can you move data out of the platform?
6. Terms of use - What kind of work does the platform allow you to do on it?
7. Ease of set up - Ning scores highly on this
8. Ease of customisation - Ning scores fairly highly on this as well
9. Ease of use - and Ning scores well on this too! Yaay! but it aint free anymore! Damn!
10. Cost - Janes reading my mind here. So the question is -- is it free? Is is commercial only? Is there a choice of plans?

Theres obviously the bunch of pros and cons beyond these parameters that you should consider. I for one wont restrict myself to a matrix, though a matrix like this will be really useful for you to make your initial evaluation. I like this Jane!

Janes 3 social learning platform demos

So what platforms are you going to show us Jane? Theres heaps of names going around in the chat area. Ok hold your breath!

Platform1 - Grou.ps

Grou.ps is a great Ning replacement. It actually allows your to migrate your Ning network which is kinda cool. And you can create your own little YouTube if youd like. Some interesting pieces of functionality:

• Wikis
• Blogs
• Social Networking
• Calendar
• Video
• Filesharing
• Chat
• Groups
• Media sharing
• Facebook Integration - it actually pulls your information from Facebook profiles (very nice)

Janes started off a grou.ps site here. Should be a nice place for inspiration. Ill take a look.

Platform2 - Socialtext

Socialtext is an enterprise class social learning platform. It offers a variety of features including but not limited to:

• a desktop client that allows you to microblog - I think its called Signals;
• microblogging;
• wikis
• shared spreadsheets - ala Google docs
• there are a range of socialtext and third party widgets to extend your social platform
• closed groups if you need them - though Im not a big fan of them
  

One problem with signals is that it doesnt support hashtags. BTW, my desktop sharing has died.

Platform 3 - Elgg

If its Jane speaking youve got to expect a mention of Elgg. I actually like Elgg a lot and it got mentioned on Hanifs webinar. It has a whole bunch of good features:

• widgets
• social networking
• blogging/ microblogging
  
• open-source
• closed groups
• control over CSS and eventual look and feel - this is one place where elgg scores a big win
  
• granular access control - user and admins can exercise a high level of control of what people can see. This is a good feature from the privacy standpoint.

The great thing about elgg is that its hugely extensible given all of the plugins from the community. There are heaps of examples on Janes website in case you want to look up stuff.

So now for the side by side comparision:

Functionality:

• Grou.ps is a good social platform. Social Text is a great enterprise collab platform. Elgg scores in both areas

Closed or Open Source:

• Grou.ps is Open Source, though clunky when you download it. You can host or install it. Socialtext is Open Source as well, though outdated in that version. And then you can host and install it (SocialText appliance). Elgg however scores as being open source and being a hosted and installed version at the same time.

Data ownership and Export/ Tems of Use
Heres a table from Janes presentation.

Ease
Heres a table from Janes presentation.
Cost
Grou.ps has a variety of plans, Elgg is free, but you need config effort and Social Text has a free version but youll perhaps need a plan to make the most of it.

Thats a fair comparision. That was a whirlwind session, really dense in information and quite insightful. Ive struggled to keep up I must say. Im now going to tune into the QnA. Janes gone ahead and put up all this stuff here. Thanks Jane!

Available link for download

LSG Webinar Designing e learning for impact

Liveblogged notes from the second Learning and Skills Group webinar for the day. Lars Hyland is the Director of Learning services at Brightwave. Larss plan was to share a series of tips that make all the difference to whether e-learning succeeds or fails:

• Avoiding death by LMS
• Ensuring your e-learning is learner- and performance-centric
• Creating meaningful and memorable interactions for your learners
• Introducing the IMPACT model: better design for better results
• 5 tips for design success

Im very excited to see the examples Lars is trying to show. Im a big fan of his work, though I feel some of it is too high-end for my liking.

Why training and elearning fails

Whats the elephant in the training room? Were delivering training:

• to the wrong people
• by the wrong people
• at the wrong time
• in the wrong way

As a result theres no learning, no value and a lot of time wasted! Elearning (not just the classroom) suffers the same problems. A lot of elearning is:

• too dull
• too inaccessible
• lacks relevance

This results in the same problem at a greater speed. Essentially similar point to what Laura made in the earlier webinar.

Why DESIGN is an essential ingredient to engagement

Elearning demands more of the learner. Its hard to hold attention - distractions are all around us! This is an interface sitting between us and the content. So design matters to make elearning effective!

The IMPACT way of designing

Interaction

There are various levels of interaction ranging from game based learning to the good old Click Next to Continue.  A few examples that Lars showed, that were quire useful:

• the use of a visual metaphor to explain a complex topic;
• the use of analog sliders to show dynamic change in outcomes

The common trend I see from these examples is that learners can actually see how their actions impact their real life outcomes.

Again if you look at the example above, youll notice that learners have an activity to learn about missing stock from a showroom. So theres a problem as youd have in the real store and youll learn from discovery by interacting with real customers in real situations. The example included real applications that people see at their job so they can transfer the skills back to work. Good example of teaching people to do something than remember facts.

Key Learning: Make your interaction mimic the real world and real scenarios.

Multimedia

Elearning is essentially a multimedia experience, so theres a good reason to focus on this element, isnt there? Again, integrating custom flash, video, audio isnt tough even with rapid-elearning.

Key Learning: Try very carefully to draw key points by intelligent use of media. Green screen video isnt very costly these days, so transparent background videos on your slides is really easy!

Personal

This is a big opportunity for instructional designers where we can personalise the experience for every individual learner. So Lars point is that too broadly generic content may just not stick and may not be contextualised to peoples workplace. Of course, it isnt that easy to do this without spending too much money, but I take his point.

So is there case for personalised action plans, personalised feedback, personalised learning logs and the like? The example above provides different interfaces for people with different tastes. How about mobile and computer versions of the same course?

Actionable

A lot of learning and training doesnt translate into actions very easily. Why dont we align learning around helping people perform actual tasks? Cathy Moores action mapping approach speaks to this end. No fluff, only stuff!

Challenging

Dont over-simplify and patronise your training/ elearning. If you break it out too much then it doesnt reflect the real world appropriately. So its important that you reflect all real-world elements in a challenging and fair manner. Provide your audience an opportunity to go wrong, gain from intrinsic and extrinsic feedback and activate new skills in safe-to-fail environment.

Timing

Lars touched upon the topic of learning interventions. We try to cram too much stuff in too little time. People forget as the learning event ends. How about spaced out courses, where you give people an opportunity to have more events to reinforce their learning. This minimises forgetting and is in line with the research from Will Thalheimer.

There could be various other factors affecting IMPACT -- it could vary by your situation.

Provide easy ways to access learning

Learning management systems that are data and report centric arent learner centric. The context of the learning can get lost. How about structuring your learning management platform to be more user-friendly and learner focussed? How about a portal approach? How about centering it on a campaign or desired performance or capability or a target audience?

Lars point was that design of how we get to elearning is crucial in increasing engagement and creating the pull to do more in the elearning and learning technology space in your organisation. I completely buy that!

The point Lars made about anytime, anywhere learning and reaching mobile audiences makes complete sense to me. The fun part is that with tools like iWebKit anyone can do it.

A few other design considerations.

Think about making the following elements of design:

• Applied - scenario driven, contextualised
• Authentic - practical, pragmatic
• Open - put the user in charge of navigation
• Intuitive - design and structure encourages reuse
• Accessible - learner centric portals
• Dogma-free - dont be dogmatic about instructional theory.

Available link for download

LSG Webinar Social learning on a shoe string

Back to my webinar reporting business for this afternoon. This Learning and Skills Group webinar is by Hanif Sazen of Saffron Interactive. BTW, for those whore interested, Saffron Interactive write a very good blog here. I have completely gotten hooked to social and collaborative learning though I think we need to be careful with the social word. Anyways, Hanifs talk is about how we can create our own social learning platform without falling on our faces or breaking the bank.

While I dont have to go through the rigmarole of doing this stuff at ThoughtWorks - we already have a pretty robust social learning infrastructure; I can imagine todays webinar should be very useful for most L&D professionals.

So with this, Ill begin my live blogged notes to cover a session that promises to be really useful and timely for the kind of world weve stepped into as learning professionals.

The big question -- why should we be looking at Social Learning today?

Lots of answers to this one:

• 70% of learning is informal
• Its power and impact
• Relevant and contextualised to work
• People learn from each other
• It ties to modern technology and makes learning more effectivel
• Were in an increasingly mobile world
• Lots of pressure to do things quickly
• Generational change in the workplace
• Growth of social media in recent years

I cant type as fast as people are going.

When facing information overload, making it impossible to keep up -- social learning can help manage the load.

Were being driven to be more agile and add value -- this means we need to work smart.

We are increasingly mobile - yet we need to collaborate.

Right you are, Hanif!

So, what is social learning?

Very simply put, its about learning from each other -- and we do this already. The workplace is the best place to learn because learning is contextualised to your current situation. Practitioners make the best teachers, because they know the real ways to get things done. As someones already said, "Information out of context, trumps instruction out of context."

On a shoestring, though?

Most of our tools are new, most models are new, most organisations are very early on in their journey so from that perspective we need to manage the risk of these projects. So the shoestring comes in so that you can put something up without risking in everything based on industry buzz.

There are heaps of free tools:

• Elgg
• Linkedin
• Yammer
• YouTube
• Viigo
• RSS
• Google Wave

We could go on with the list.

Saffrons take on Social Learning

Hanif showed us what theyve come up with using Elgg, at Saffron. Seems to have heaps of features:

• User Profiles - to understand who does what and what are they good at?
• Blogs
• Social Bookmarks - for generating collective wisdom (ala delicious)
• File sharing
• Social Networks
• Groups - great for communities of practice

Of course, this can all seem very basic, but then Hanig showed us the Wiley faculty network, which does a heap of custom stuff like finding mentors, attending workshops/ classes and all that a publisher that Wiley looks for. Very interesting stuff!

Swatch is another great example of using Elgg to create something really usable, pretty and successful. Their site is a nice way to connect with the external world. Wow! I knew Elgg was great, but not this great!

For the umpteenth time in the day another of my favourite tools gets mentioned - Yammer. Were using Yammer quite successfully and at my team, weve done away with standups because of Yammer and we use this greatly for knowledge sharing.

Something Hanif brought up was around using external tools like Linkedin to build your company network using group features. I think this is something we should do more and more. The most important thing to remember is that these tools are mobile friendly -- so the more we use these, the more we can help people learn in the short time spaces they have. This is obviously arguable given learning requires commitment. That said, doing assessments, showing video, status updates, etc can happen using mobiles. Why make it difficult -- social media should make our life easy!

Building Vibrant Communities

According to Hanif, the key to doing this is around 6 major points:

• Address a business need - if you cant articulate this, its perhaps not worth it!
  
• Consider the organisational culture - not every culture can sustain things like this with existing culture. How can you help make collaboration a part of your culture? What evangelism and nurturing will your communities need?
  
• Use the term knowledge media not social media - Andrew Mcafees said this too!
  
• Involve stakeholders
• Find some champions and just do it
• Measure and learn - everyones learning and you need to adapt quickly with what works and discard what doesnt work at the right speed.

Were obviously driving towards some great benefits:

• Research and agility -- we find solutions faster, we learn faster
• Talent Management - you can soon start to recognise your best people and spend less time on archaic performance management processes
  
• Driver for creativity -- people learn from each other, so they are likely to build on each others ideas and raise the innovation quotient of the company.

Hanifs tips for success:

• Start on a shoestring
• Find and communicate the business need and benefits
• Use it as part of a blend -- you dont want to put all your eggs in the social learning basket. That may just not provide the breadth your audience needs. Theres a place for fomal learning, elearning, virtual classrooms and everything else.
  

Good stuff from Hanif in general - mostly a social learning primer, but definitely an hour well spent especially seeing everyone elses views about this stuff. I feel validated in some way for thinking the way I think.

Available link for download

LSG Webinar When Learning is Working The 70 20 10 model in Action

Can I say how excited I am to be at this webinar with Charles Jennings? As a big fan of Jay Cross idea about workscaping and as someone whos put this idea into action, this is definitely a topic very close to my heart. I dont know what Charles agenda is, but if its about the way work and learning are synonymous, Im sure hell strike a chord with me. These are my liveblogged notes from the webinar, totally unplugged -- so I promise to keep it as honest and real as I possibly can.

So what does Charles want to talk about? What are the key challenges that organisations face today? Change is increasing everyday and we need to keep emowering our workforce to keep up with change and keep building their capabilities. We dont do training right - we, in fact do it very inefficiently. Charles is going to present a model on experiential learning that really works and hopefully hell share some empirical evidence for this as well. Nom, nom, very exciting.

Charles asks us to think about some of our most significant learning experiences and to think of where they occured. For me most of my learning happened at work. Charles has picked up my favourite example to explain experiential learning. I use the example of how we learn to ride a bike - we got bare minimum instruction, but we learnt from experience, failure and reflection. We didnt real a manual or go through detailed training -- we just did it and learned!

The Trouble with current Formal Learning Approaches

Much of formal learning is content rich and interaction-poor. We learn to know but we hardly learn to do. I called this the phenomenon of growing the knowing flab vs building the doing muscle. This is the big problem with formal learning programs in organisations these days -- if theres a best practice, content rich training works. OTOH for most knowledge workers, its an interaction rich approach thats crucial, because it prepares us to face complicated and complex problem domains and thereby deal with novel and emergent practice.

Most away from work training and learning leads to the phenomenon of the forgetting curve, because instruction out of context leaves nothing for workplace performers to remember and apply what theyve been "told".

Most of the participants like to get involved and try things out. They like to have dialogue and discussion. They like presentations which are organised according the logic of how they work and learn. They like to experience how things work. This is amble evidence that proves that people like to learn through interaction, working with others and real experience.

Real Adult Learning

Humans like other animals learn through experience, practice, conversation and reflection. Real adult learning is about acquiring new ideas from experience and retaining them as memories. Instead of structuring learning around content, we need to structure them around creating learning experiences.

Charles is now introducing the 70:20:10 model from the Princeton University which says that we learn 10% from training, 20% through observation and 70% through real experience. This is a model, not a recipe, but has significant evidence about this.

70:20:10 is a framework for thinking outside classes, courses and curricula. Most organisations spend their money on the formal training curriculum, where the bulk of the budget should ideally go to helping people learn from experience. A lot of the evidence comes from the initial assertions by Jay Cross and then from studies by Capital Works , Education Development Center at Massachusetts, US Bureau of Labour Statistics and Institute of Research for Learning. Charles will give us more evidence and studies later.

Incorporating 70-20-10 in Value Based Learning Strategy

First things first, this is only a model and not a silver bullet. The percentages are only indicative. So Charles recommends that we dont get hung up on the numbers and focus on the context because implementations will vary with the problem on hand.

This is quite understandable, given that youre very very unlikely to see behaviour change through classroom sessions. OTOH, this is extremely likely to happen with the constant "interventions" that informal learning creates for us.

Most managers say that they learn through informal chats with colleagues, search engines like google and through trial and error. This is some real research from Good Practice.

Charles mentions that thinking 70-20-10 requires a mindshift and cultural change whereby we can, as learning consultants help our organisations understand and be aware of the opportunities we need to create in the workplace people to pick up and hone the skills they need to grow. This means working with businesses to create sizeable investments in informal learning, getting managers involved and development driven performance management.

Charles also suggests that we include 70-20-10 thinking in the competency framework of various job families. This is something weve tried to implement via the concept of learning paths. Charles suggests through that we go a step forward where we list out recommendations in each area of the 70-20-10 model for each role to seek out their development through experience, observation & feedback and formal learning.

The Role of Managers

Managers are strongly involved in the development of their people. Not just Charles and I, Esther Derby says so too. Managers have the most impact in terms professional development and the mindset of "lets throw them to the trainers", takes away a lot of responsibility from leaders. The corporate leadership council has research that says that people who work with managers that are committed to developing them, outperform those with less involved managers. (I think thats what I saw, though I could be a bit wrong)

Working with team member through learning logs, coaching regular feedback, and goal setting are crucial skills for managers.

L&Ds Readiness for 70-20-10
The focus of L&D has to change:

• Moving from maintaining catalogues of courses, etc to managing workscapes.
• Moving from designing and developing materials to supporting learning experiences in the workplace.
• Moving from a course centric approach to a performance centric role.
• Moving from predominantly classroom and elearning driven approaches to a multi-channel, multi-modality approach.
• Finally we need to move from a learning focussed approach to a performance and productivity focus.
  

---

Great stuff from Charles, I really liked the stuff hes mentioned and this resonates with my own approach in L&D. Thank you!

Available link for download

LSG Webinar How to design learning aka “Serious” games

Its been a really busy time which has left me with no time whatsoever for webinars, PKM, tweeting and everything that makes life on the internet really interesting. Anyways, Ive spoken to my team about making time for this webinar, so thanks to the guys whore being nice to me - I get to attend Patrick Dunns webinar on designing serious games.

This is my second webinar with Patrick - the recap of the last one is here. Patrick Dunn has been designing, producing and thinking about various forms of learning technology for more than twenty years. I particularly enjoyed his last talk and Im guessing this one will be quite exciting too.

So, here are the live blogged notes.

Don starts off in his (now famous) midnight presenter voice and is introducing Patrick in the way only he can. And after Dons usual house keeping, Patrick begins. Good morning, Patrick.

Typically in the west, people spend more on games than on films. Modern games are starting to permeate peoples lives in different ways. The above video from YouTube is a nice one to watch and see how this landscape is changing.

SG = OP + LO + PC (Patricks formula to explain serious games - explained below)

Serious Games = Organised Play with Explicit Learning Objectives usually delivered on Computers

Learning Games are part of a wide spectrum of learning exercises. You mix ingredients to come up with an experience that actually solve problems. So you mix elements from traditional elearning and learning games to create learning that meets a business objective.

So some of the elements of game design/ and even a good learning experience:

• Relevant challenges
• Sensory stimulation
• Flow
• Learner Centricity
• Repetitive Rehearsal
• Personalisation
• Safe failure
• Socialisation
• Incremental challenge
• Guiding feedback
• Contextualisation
• Stories
• Emotional Engagement
• Characterisation

But all of this is tough to distill down and simplify - why do games really matter is the big question?

First things first we can categorise most of these elements into 3 areas:

• Simulation
• Sensory Stimulation
• Repetitive Rehearsal
• Safe failure
• Guiding feedback
  
• Motivation
• Flow
• Relevant challenge
• Learner Centricity
• Personalisation
• Socialisation
• Incremental Challenge
• Narration
• Stories
• Emotional Engagement
• Characterisation
• Contextualisation

So once you need a game, you need to pick and choose elements from these buckets to decide what makes sense for the experience youre trying to create.

So heres the notion thats really makes a difference:

Extrinsic Games: Youre just dressing up a dry topic to be a game.
Intrinsic Games: Youre helping learners practice a skill by playing a game or simulation.

Big questions to ask ourselves when designing the game

What game is it?
How do you play?
How do you score?
How do you win?

And heres where my webinar screen goes kaput! So all Im doing is following Patricks voice! So pardon me for being stupid with my writing. Oops and Ive lost sound too.

OK - Im back after logging in again. Patrick is now showing a bunch of learning games examples I guess - I still cant see whats on. Patricks now showing a great example from Cathy Moore.

The idea is that all successful games produce an emotional reaction. And the challenge is to cultivate these reactions from a design perspective.

• Some questions about your story:
• Whats the perspective?
• Who are the characters?
• What are the surprises and twists?
• How does the story resolve itself?
• How will learners feel when they play the game?
• How do you establish the mood?
• Most importantly how does this relate to the business objectives?

So what keeps us interested when playing games?
We play by exploring, calculating, shooting, picking clues, etc. So there are bunch of things to take care of  when trying to plan this interest.

• Micro-macro structure?
• One thing at once/ many things at once?
• Few similar interactions/ many different interactions?
• You could try different things:

• branching journeys - like the branching simulations you can create using traditional tools;
  
• guided discovery - more like the controlled learning games from Thinking Worlds;
• open - more like the games that we usually play and of course you can create these using Thinking Worlds too.
  

Patrick is demonstrating a great example of a controlled simulation with a series of decisions that affect whether or not you win a penalty shoot out in a football match. Your decisions have a real-world impact, so you get feedback for how your actions affect the overall outcome of win or loss. Good stuff.

You have a lot of choice when designing things - so you need to be able to nail down various aspects of game design well in advance.

Most importantly, your game needs to give you feedback on whether youre doing well or not and whether you failed or succeeded. Feebdack is crucial - you need to decide how much is intrinsic and how much is extrinsic.

Top Tips:

• Play games yourself!
• Think experience not content
• Be 100% clear of learning rationale ("Why am I designing a game?")
• Really know your learners
• Plan your architecture (macro structure) carefully.

Sorry, my writings all messed up today - Im at a hotel with bad internet, so Ive just snapped up the pearls of wisdom.

Available link for download

LSG Webinar Emerging learning tools you cant afford to miss

This afternoon, Im attending a Learning and Skills Group webinar by Julie Wedgwood - where she plans to share with us an amazing new suite of tools that has caught her imagination, demonstrating how they work and why shes been using them.

Ive never been to any of Julies past events but given how well known she seems to be in the UKs elearning community, Im quite keen to hear what she says.

These are live blogged notes from the event and as always Ill do my best to capture the proceedings with some of my views thrown in for equal measure! Julie promises to focus on tools thatll help us with our changing roles as trainers - being facilitators, graphic artists, animators, designers, and every new aspect of our jobs.

So heres a quick list of the tools that Julie showcased today.

A Quick Fix for Amateur Photos

A good picture is worth a thousand words and given how cool digital photography is turning out to be, its more an more available - though very few of us are good photographers. So how do you make your photos look better on slides, elearning, etc. So what tool did Julie show? One of my current favourites - Poladroid. Its a great tool to create vintage style polaroid pictures. You will see some of these on my blog posts and demo elearning modules. Mywebface and Zwinky combined with Poladroid, can be a potent combination. Polaroids - dont have to be posh as Julie says -- they just need to be real.
A great new tool Julies showed was Shape Collage, which can just convert a bunch of pictures you own into a collage of the shape of your choice. And the output looks just great.

Message Posters

Who doesnt like to do posters -- but if youre like me then you perhaps suck at it. So if you want to create a motivational poster, Big Huge Labs has an online app called Motivator. And then again, the output may not blow you away, but I guess the fact that you can make things really quick makes it very useful for a lot of people.

Colour scheme tools

Big Huge Labs has a colour schemer too, but then I like Kuler much better and on my desktop I like Color Schemer studio and Pixie. Obviously colour coordination lends a huge amount of professionalism to your presentation. Ive written about this on my recent blogpost as well, so this is handy advice.

Screen Annotation Tools

Julie demonstrated this screen annotation tool called Mouse Shade -- on the Mac I use Omni Dazzle. Theyre great to annotate the screen when recording screencasts or doing application training or even doing some special effects during presentations. Theyre definitely two great tools that you should have depending on which platform youre on.

Free Tools for Accessibility

Some tools that I couldnt keep track of especially amongst Julies accessiblilty tools list:

• Rapid Set
• Spr-Ort
• Orato
• Sonar
• Big and Chunky Mouse Pointers
• Mousekeeter

Finding Tunes to play in Elearning or Training

Julie showed a great site called Television Tunes for you to find and use the kind of tune that you want for training and to use in your courses. You should get a broadcast license to use them for yourself. You can get a broadcast license by asking PRS for Music. Its a great way to get social culture into the classroom, help people relax and takes the edge off some of your difficult subjects. Please check the legal statement before you use these PLEASE!

Creating Animation Sequences

Im sure what Ill see here: another of my favourite free tools - Xtranormal. Julie, youve won my heart by promoting my latest favourite tool.I recently put up a demo with this on a previous blogpost.

Creating Simple Props

Often youll need props to create the right kind of environment in training - for example a Britains got talent style buzzer maybe! Julie told a very interesting story of how she used this kind of a prop -- you should make Julie tell the story. Ill be no good with it. You can get your own stuff from I want one of those. Very very interesting!

Julies webinar was so fast paced, that I got a lot out of this session. Some of the other tools I love are:

• Prezi
• Vuvox - online collages
• Dipity and Xtimeline

If you want to get in touch with Julie follow her on Twitter or over email.

Available link for download