Quick Post from Learning 2006

A quick post before I go to the first session. There were some great sessions yesterday. I attend one on competencies, a great debate on whether Instructional Design is dead or not, (Tom King was on the Dead side who I later got to have a cool conversation with.) and Wayne Hodgins gave a great presentation on Mashups and why they are so important. I also got to talk to Wayne after the session for a moment, that was cool. Finally, Dennis Dammerman, former CFO for GE talked about how GE valued education and he said that he never required his organization to proof ROI as a number. Very interesting because GE spent a huge amount of money on training and learning during the Jack Welch era.

Tom King mentioned that I should check out Adobe Apollo(sp?) and that the had given a live demo at MAXX that was cool.

I am about to head off to another session on social networks and I am hoping to get some more understanding about how LearningFlow might help serve the needs of corporations. I haven't really been thinking about large businesses, but I think that there might be a fit for them as well.

It would be good to go back and reconstruct my path through Learning2006 with links to the wiki, but I don't know if I will have time. Another Mashup needing to be born.

Editor of PC Magazine

I am....was in a session with Jim Louderback, the editor of PC magazine. It is cool because it is a smaller drill-down session and it is cool to hear him talk about the latest and greatest. He went around the room and had everyone pull out their device and he seemed pretty familiar with each one. Wouldn't it be cool if it was your job just to know the details about every new technology. I would love that.

He is...was saying that the move to multi-core processors is a good thing. However, he says that Microsoft is not doing a good job of making the case for upgrading to VISTA.

He is..was talking about the WII gaming system and indicating that it boots up in seconds and is really small. A question about podcasting led Jim to discuss some of the players and using USB drives as a delivery mechanism. A new product for video, Serious Magic, Communicator.

The one question that I thought of, ok one of the questions I should have asked him about was the power of pc processes now that most of the apps are going to the web? How will this trend impact processer speeds in the future? Can we just let Google upgrade?

It was a pretty cool session.

Funny thing heard in the Lunch Line

So, I was standing in the lunch line yesterday and I am listening to conversation in front of me, (It was impossible not to.) I hear a elearning vendor telling a potential client about how they could track and manage all their elearning needs. When asked about content development, the guy says there are some small shops around that do that, if you need it. When asked what technology the system is based on the guy says, some java stuff and some PHP stuff mixed together. The guy seems happy with the answers and they continue to talk. Interesting. This is probably what I sound like when I talk about our technologies. We have some stuff with some other stuff.

Hanging at Learning 2006

So I am hanging out this morning at Learning2006, drinking my coffee thinking about the critical thoughts of today in elearning.... Are courses dead? Is instructional Design Dead? Will I ever learn how to market learningflow so that a larger audience can participate in it? BUT.... the only thing that I can focus on is the way cool iMac that I am using right now. It is sweet. The keyboard on a mac just seems really comfortable. I wonder if it goes but to my using a mac for so long before I was consumed by the Windows world. The screen is crystal clear and the interface is like riding a bike, you never forget.

Man, I've got to get me one of these!

Lack of Content Companies

Elliot talked about the fact that there isn't enough content companies to service the elearning economy. I wonder is ITConversations and PodTech.net two new elearning content companies? We also think of wikipedia as well. Since the information is coming from the web, can't we just pull from it?

Here is an example of content pulled from a web site, wikipedia, and YouTube. I created it in 20 minutes for my son's third grade class.

General Session BBC

Nigel from the BBC is discussing how the began to post information on the Intranet in the form of podcasts, blogs, and wikis and they became an organization that uses media. Their employees capture video and post it to the web. Internal challenges included raising the profiles of internal components of the organization.

lessons learned: learned they are an expert organization and liberating that was powerful. You must have a powerful team. Leak things quietly into the organization.

There are cultural differences around the world. Generationaly? Mandated that they had to claim their expenses online and everyone quickly adopted. Role in moving learning forward. Where is it going next? Velocity. formal/informal will blend and merge. status will increase. in destabilized environment we need a learning culture. C-Level, getting it? if they don't get it, stay away. Survey, half-time is spent on talent issues.

How disruptive is the next wave going to be? a sunomi.

The Future of Learning

This session is by Elliot Masie and he is going to try to share his views about the future of learning. (THESE ARE ROUGH NOTES.)

Starting...

The World is Flatter. Things are going to be faster, shorter, more global. The process of creating competencies, skills, and knowledge will change. He suggests pulling out a map from Knowledgeworks.

Changes in learning are not coming from the learning industry. Some things that will impact learning. The democratization of content. USB keychain port. - smaller. Tom Friedman says... This is what keeps the military up at night. Can create content, distributed instantly, and modified. How do we deal with the bad guys using these tools. A webex session on how to steal cars? We wouldn't say keep email from the bad guys. Content can be created by anyone, anywhere. It looks and feels authentic. We are going to fundamental shifts of what content looks like.

We take official content and give it to the powers that be. Control of that content is critical. In the flatter world, the content will no longer be controllable. How will lawyers deal with this?

What this means to learning.
1. Learning development will be done by those closer to the work.
More people are going to create content and it won't flow through your office.
2. We are not going to train people to the level we have before

Content is going to be contextualized by social networks. (note--- like learningflow.com) We are going to see that social networks, real tipping point is SpaceBook and MySpace. There is a tipping point, the next two years you are going to build and deploy social networks. Not interested in all the people who work for the organization. What do regional managers think about this article? This might be scary for an instructional designer. A social network will drive that design. What does instructional design look like in social networks.

Admiral Moran says that the training has to happen the day before the mission.

Podcasting provides a different moment. I don't have to by the album to get the song. iTunes has allowed this to happen. Elliot doesn't even think that we have begun to think about how we will be able to buy the slice of content. Breaking content into slices. Thin slicing of content will be important to contextualize training to the moment. Phone-based GPS system. What if the GPS could be mapped to content. Challenging for 2 reasons. What if they don't get enough? What if the thin slice is not enough? One answer is more robust assessment.

Encourage to develop a course... need policy on x. 16 knowledgeable users are asked to write a few words of paragraphs in a wiki. ID looks at that structures that content and sends it out to 30 to 40 other people. Then it can be published.

MIT has set up a center on collective intelligence. 300 people are writing a book and it will be out in June.

Back to the podcast. A lot of content now reading based will be stopped. We don't believe K12 needs to read everything. How do we change to media-based. One of the fundamental pieces is storybased content. How did we get stories out? My role as a trainer will be to react to the content. Another point on the map is the learning economies. Why are there not enough content companies? No robust content... coming. Look at YouTube and CNN.

3. Gaming and Simulation

This will be powerful. The problem in work is that there isn't enough practice. What if you could practice firing someone and fail a few times. Get shot. Fail forward. What is it that games can do for education? The way to construct a set of challenges that people are willing to invest time to try and fail. Being tested continuously.

-- self service. This is your track. Some is learner triggered, but most is managerial. More of a value in learning. LMS and ID is not optomized for self-service. Visualizing competency knowledge and visualization. What do you know or don't know about your car breaking down. Could you create a knowledgemap? Figure out a way to visualize our knowledge. What I know, don't know but could look up. Here is what I don't know and it could hurt me. Go through a process for self service.

Serious Trend.... traditional training department is toast. We need more learning professionals then ever. Trad. training department is a centralized office that distributes content across the company. metrics for this office are volume. How many people they trained last year...
More interesting numbers. How do learning move the business results? Who cares what the return on $ investment? ROI is not so good. Wage hours is the real cost. Instead look at impact. What was the impact? Training is not linked to impact. Shared services units. Lean and mean shared services that compete for resources. Hiring new people like librarians. To find powerpoints in your organization. Slide 8 is awesome. Search fest... each student must quickly search for and varify truth. Discoverablity of content is important. Look at information and make it discoverable. Build, protect, and encourage social networks. Orientation duration? We don't intellectual discuss the length or orientation training. what is the least amount I can teach so the learner can learn the rest. How to ask the right questions?

We have to get way more diverse in our training departments. More people who work in the business. We need them in our training departments.

Look at the maps and engage in the discussion. NCLB... will our society be left behind?

Our job as a classroom trainer usually is to add the exceptions to the published content. We are going to get less certain things. It might be this, or that.

He talks about medical knowledge and how you deal with what we don't know. (this one hits home for me.)


Learning won't look the same in the next three years. Lot less courses. elearning is a command and control model. Moving into self-serve it will be deeply interactive. Assessment has to get way better. Assessment has to get harder. As a learning industry how do we look at learning.

provocative Technology - high fidelity video conferencing - see their nose hairs. Video to mobile first. New hire.... 7 people 7 bottons. Everyday ask 20 questions with coach.
How will we seize it. No gloom and doom. Change will happen because the way the we do knowledge in the world.

Learning 2.0... the Session

Brent Schlenker is starting the learning2.0 session. He is asking what web2.0 is... Application is the platform. Everyone is creating content, not is the traditional format. The feeding things to folks who have decided to opt in. These are raw notes.

Rip. Mixed. and Feed culture. We take it and turn into something and send it back out there.

Brent talks about Jon Udell's screencast of wikipedia. He recommends that you check it out. Brent explains that every month that goes by it changes. One question, is "How many people are blogging about their company?" A few hands went up.

A question brings us back to what is web 2.0? Brent explains that it is about how people are using the web. He feels it is all about the stuff. All the new tools, new start-ups, pulling all this together. A question is then asked about web2.0 vs Internet 2. I guess this discussion isn't going to get too deep...

RSS, Blogs, and Wikis. How are we going to create platforms that are universal? RSS is possibly one of these systems connectors.

Disney allows about 4500 people that are regularly blogging on their internal site.
Semens is currently doing a lot of agile development. The updates come by the minute and update the wikis all the time. They are regulated heavily, but they do it with guardrails. Versioning, audit trails support that process. They are starting to work on developing a product on the fly, while the FDA monitors the process.

(details should be posted on the web)

One thing is that environments will tend to police themselves. Our own skeptical nature doesn't allow this to be possible, but Brent encourages that it can help. Our current systems will become obsolete if we do not enable this process. All current documentation becomes completely outdated if it is only 6 weeks old. Gatekeepers can cause this aging.

The CEO can get into the water cooler loop by allowing people to blog within the organization. One question is that people may not be candid within the organization.

This is much less about the technology then about an extreme culture shift. These are all new things in participating in this environment. Most kids have no problem in baring their souls on MySpace.

Brent talks about learning2.0 being able to extend the conversation among those invested in content creation. The most valiable stuff is the "quickly etible stuff". Really short video snippets. Rip. Fix. and Feed.

Question: What about intellectual propert? This is a tough question.

Example from UK is the open university. Putting content out into public space. Mentoring and coaching will be the value add.

I hear about all this stuff... but how do you get your feet wet.


The wiki for this session is here.

Learning 2006 Sessions

Finally got to the wifi here in Orlando. I am in the session for learning suppliers. Cushing Anderson is saying that we believe that we have the thing that solves everything. He is characterizing some of the problems that our industry has faced.

I hope to post throughout the conference.

Attending Learning2006

I am a very lucky guy in so many ways. Most of my luck has is my family. I have two incredible kids and a great wife. But today, my luck is that I will be attending Learning2006. I will get to go and engage with people who care about elearning and get what I have spent a lot of time invovled in.

I have attend TechLearn when it was a Masie sponsered event at least two other times (maybe three). I really enjoyed those conferences. My goal is to try and talk with others at the conference about our elearning strategy at our company and if they think LearningFlow is a good idea.

UPDATE: Conference Schedule in Google Spreadsheet

Learning2006