Leading a Horse to a Fire Hose ...

From a post - Professional Cat Herder -

In my line of work, corporate training, I have seen this first hand several times. Management scratching their heads because people aren’t taking advantage of the resources that are available. We have all heard the saying, “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make them drink.” We just haven’t done a good job of telling the horse that it is hot and drinking now will prevent thirst in the immediate future. Its not the horse’s fault for not knowing this, its ours for not sharing this information.

I think this is something that we've all seen and lived. But this is becoming more and more challenging of an issue. As Harold Jarche just pointed to in his blog - Learning 2.0 Value Chain -

Reward attention, because it’s everything on the Web

Attention is a big issue. There is a fire hose full of information available to everyone today and we all think our part of the fire hose is important. So we can lead the horse to the fire hose, but should we expect them to drink it all? And can we really say that the information we are providing is particularly important? And is it important right now? Or should it be available in the minimum about just when they need it as a reference? And how would they find it at that point? Oh, and keep in mind that they won't find it through the LMS?

It's a funny change that's going on ... quite a change of mind set - of course, it's hard to break habits. I find myself grappling with this all the time. In the messages in this blog and in my speaking about the importance of building new learning and work skills - growing personal work and learning environments - etc - should I expect to get some attention? Should I expect to get some change of behavior? Or is this a futile effort that's a small part of the fire hose that is a nice to have in a world of have-to-have only?

eLearning 2.0 - An Immediate, Important Shift

I just finished reading a blog post on Read/Write Web - eLearning 2.0 - All You Need to Know. Normally, I find the content on R/WW to be pretty good, but this time, it left me a bit flat.

I'm a big believer in eLearning 2.0 and it's interesting to R/WW's take on eLearning 2.0. But the title - "everything you need to know" was a particularly bad choice of words. As you read through the post, you really don't get any sense for what eLearning 2.0 is all about. They talk about things like Nuuvo (more or less an LMS), Google Apps (online applications) as examples of eLearning 2.0 applications. Without some explanation of how they might be used in an eLearning 2.0 way this probably hurts more than helps.

What might be more valuable to the readers of R/WW is to focus on the fairly fundamental shift represented by eLearning 2.0 which is very similar to the shift represented by Web 2.0. After that shift is better explained, then look at how different tools and systems might support people who are making the shift (learners) or people who are responsible for helping others make the shift (corporate training / educators). At the end of the day, eLearning 2.0 is much more than would be indicated by reading about the applications listed in this post.

But what really got to me about reading the post by R/WW was that it was easy to read it and come away with a belief that eLearning 2.0 is all about adoption of these applications. Which to many people equates to "it's about them."

And that's a problem. The most important thing to understand about eLearning 2.0 is that it is an immediately applicable and important shift in learning that applies right here and right now for most knowledge workers. Adopting a practice like blogging as a personal learning and networking tool or adopting Personal and Group Learning Using Web 2.0 Tools as a means to support collaborative work teams is something that is an immediate and important shift for knowledge workers - and that's you!

The bottom line is that eLearning 2.0 is not about a bunch of applications, it's about adopting practices that leverage these applications to support work and learning in new, powerful ways.

Ideas on Making Conferences Better are Flowing

In case you've missed the conversation on Better Conferences. There are some fantastic ideas flowing. Come join the conversation.

Value of Blogging - Thanks Tracy

As you know, I've started Pushing Harder for People to Blog - at my recent presentations, I've really pushed people hard. Luckily a few people take me up on my suggestion - and what makes me happy is when I see things like Tracy Hamilton saying

I attended the eLearning Guild’s Annual Gathering this year and one presentation really hit home for me. The speaker mentioned that since he had started blogging, a year previous, he had learned more from blogging and reading the blogs of peers than he had in his entire academic career. I though to myself “Ya, right? Who’s going to believe that?” He knew the audience was thinking the same thing and said to just try it and experience it yourself.

So the first thing I did upon my return was start my own and behold he was right. I truly believe I have learned a great deal from this simple process. Blogging is a wonderful way to learn directly from one another. Each day I read many different postings from people I then can summarize, analyze, draw my own conclusion and post my own ideas and thoughts on those same topics. By doing this one simple example of peer-to-peer learning/teaching I am able to learn a many new things each day and expand my existing knowledge on those topics of which I am already aware.

Tracy slightly misquoted me - I actually talked about the Big Question around Blogging and some of the responses - see Top Ten Reasons To Blog and Top Ten Not to Blog - particularly:

Karyn Romeis & Barry Sampson both said - I’ve learned more via blogging over the past year than I learned in the preceding several years!

Read more from Tracy on this in: eLearning 2.0 - I'm trying to DO IT

Better Conferences - Response Needed

I'm pretty sure it's not just me... I believe we can build better conferences. And, I need you to help by doing one or more of the following:

• provide a response to the poll below (won't show in an RSS feed - sorry)
• provide suggestions for what you'd like to see in future conferences (add comment).

If you don't vote, then we'll assume you either will never go to a conference or think that every conference is just great as it is.

I am talking to conference organizers fairly often and I'm sure they'd love to hear your frank opinions.



If you've been a reader of my blog for a while, you may have figured out that I'm almost continually surprised by what I consider to be obvious problems with the conferences I regularly attend - and no offense to the eLearningGuild, ASTD, etc. - because most conferences have these same problems.

Certainly a big part of the issue is that attendees are quite willing to hop on a plane to attend a conference, but are much less willing to spend time preparing. If you talk to any conference organizer, they will tell you that it's almost impossible to get people to spend time ahead of a conference preparing. So, while my suggestions in Be an Insanely Great Professional Conference Attendee, Conference Preparation and Better Questions for Learning Professionals may be theoretically correct, in practice they don't stand a chance.

But this really does make you wonder. And, I'm not alone. Dave Pollard tells us:

The self-initiated learner can now often learn more in an hour's online research than in an hour listening to the most profound and articulate expert. And while some don't have the skill or interest in doing such research, and are willing to pay money to hear someone step them through something they could teach themselves for free in the same time, the freeing of information has raised expectations and lowered the satisfaction of many audiences with formal conference presentations and panels.

And, don't tell me that you've not felt that you could have spent your hour's worth of time in a session in front of a computer and received much more value by just searching on the keywords being used in the session.

Now, I'm personally not ready to throw in the towel on conferences. I still feel that Face to Face Still Matters. But I believe we need to see some changes in order to make the conference experience a better use of time.

Some some initial thoughts/suggestions -

1. Experts Only Time

Most conferences attract 50% newbies. So most sessions have to bring along newbies. Let the newbies have their time, but create opportunities for the experts to exchange.

Mark Oehlert and Tom Crawford suggested that we do a day prior to the conference and only invite experts. We are all willing to help make this happen. We think that doing this similar to an unconference style or doing it around The Big Question type topics where we get to exchange ideas with other experts in the field would be a fantastic learning and networking experience.

2. Unconference within a Conference

Unconferences allow the participants to present themselves on particular topics. I'd suggest we learn from this kind of exchange, but that we do it a little different. Here's my current thinking:

• Have a morning of the first day session aimed at a particular audience segment, e.g., managers of corporate eLearning, facilitated by me and someone else that will help them identify their key issues, big questions and also identify topics they would want to discuss with others, what they would be willing to present as a case study to be discussed, or a topic where they might want to lead a discussion. Alone, this would have value in just identifying what they need to focus on. A mini strategic planning session.
  
• We would then take these topics and establish cracker-barrel sessions that look at particular issues, e.g., how do you structure your eLearning production, centralized vs. distributed. You could probably do 25 minute exchanges in small groups around these topics and get tremendous value from each other. Yes, this would take a lot more work. No you don't get to just sit in the audience. But, wouldn't this be a good use of time?
• Also, wouldn't it be great to have this list of issues just to know what everyone is facing. And as a presenter, it would be great to know the key issues that people are facing.
  

3. Better Fun Activities

I'm not sure that I know how to make this happen for more attendees, but Beer Tasting at ASTD TechKnowledge, Boston, Beer - Bloggers - Learn.com and similar things at ASTD in Atlanta were definitely fun. Getting together with other experts over some beer was great. Having a really great Southern dinner at ASTD and talking about the implications of eLearning 2.0 was great.

Part of this is being able to connect with people who you will have good conversations with. Part of this is having fun activities that are actually fun and allow for good conversation. Food and beer/wine seem to help. But the typical conference thing, with a little bit of food and one drink ticket (and why just one - how about 3 or 4 - and add that into the cost) just doesn't work all that well. And finding people to talk to around particular topics never seems to work either. And, I'm not convinced that Conference Networking Tools really helps with this.

4. Passionate Keynotes aimed at Us

There's some really incredible stuff going on in our field right now. Learning is changing. Technology for learning is changing. This is an exciting time to be part of this field. While Jim Collins was inspiring at ASTD (and probably much more inspiring if you haven't read Good to Great). However, there's a big leap from what he was talking about to taking action as a member of this community.

While I know that getting big name speakers is a tried-and-true formula for conferences, I'm tired of feeling like I'm seeing entertainment rather than getting value. I'd much rather hear from luminaries in our industry talking about real issues that we are facing and firing us up about the real opportunities. Or maybe I'm the only one who is excited about what's happening here.

5. Demos

One of the reasons for my recent Big Question - Examples of eLearning? was that it is often hard to see demonstrations of what everyone else is doing. I like that the eLearningGuild at DevLearn has done a room full of demonstrations in the past. Some are really good. Some not as good. I liked going to a presentation by the folks from Brandon Hall that showed demonstrations of award winning projects. However, as I discussed in Award for the Best and Worst Presentation - the fact that the people weren't there to give context made it frustrating. What would be even better is to invite a few folks like Will Thalheimer to a session where some different pieces were presented and we could hear what's good and bad about them. Another good one with demonstrations is Judy Brown showing a bunch of mobile learning applications.

One thing that I would require as a conference organizer is to have demonstrations near the beginning of a session. How many sessions do you sit through a lot of blah, blah waiting for them to demo something cool? Then they finally demo near the end and it's not interesting at all.

6. Expert (or Crowd) Produced Cheat Sheets for Sessions and Expo

As I wandered around the expo hall at ASTD, what I really wanted was help in finding anything that was new/different. Seeing a bunch of custom vendors, niche off-the-shelf content folks, etc., made it hard to find much that was new or different. Because Bob Becker from Becker Multimedia had approached me before the conference, I at least got to see his device used to record customer interactions on something that looks like an iPod and then you can use the recording much like you do in a call center. A good idea. Something new and different.

But, what else was new and different in the expo? What would be worth checking out? The way you find out is by talking to people informally over lunch or dinner. Why don't we have a few experts ahead of the conference talk to the vendors and create a cheat sheet to help us make sense of the expo? Or we could allow attendees to post (twitter?) with cool things they are finding?

Doing this for sessions would be a bit more difficult, because it would have to be done ahead of the session. Finding out over lunch that there was a great session that you missed doesn't help. So, again, maybe we rely on experts ahead of time to go through the content that is going to be presented and create notes, a cheat sheet or something like that. It might help the presenters too. We could also allow things to be tagged with something like - demo at the end. But even better would be demo at the end and probably not worth seeing.

7. Free Wifi

Need I say more on this.

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Okay, what did I miss? Add a comment below. And please fill in the poll.

Emergent Knowledge Management

There's been a long running discussion around what Knowledge Management is going to look like going forward and whether big systems that manage knowledge are going to be there. For example, see Bill Ives’ recent post, and Paula Thorton.

As I read through these, I began to wonder what happened to the idea that KM was going to move along the lines of what Andrew McAfee talks about around Enterprise 2.0. I had imagined that we would provide relatively simple, free-form tools like Wikis, blogs. Structure would come from a layer on top such as social bookmarking and digg, and, of course, from search across unstructured content. There would be tools like social networks that would allow us to find people inside and outside the enterprise. KM would become more of an issue of how you provide structure and get leverage on these free-form tools.

This vision aligns well with what I see happening in eLearning - Direction of eLearning - Emergence or Big System Tacit workers will use their PWLE to work and learn and it will be up to us to figure out how to aggregate and provide structure to leverage this information into valuable content for others in the organization.

Am I missing something here? Do we really think that there will be a new wave of Enterprise Knowledge Management or other big systems?

Quality and Web 2.0

In a post by Will Richardson - Web 2.0 as “Cultural and Intellectual Catastrophe” he points to a recent post by Andrew Keen - the author of the Cult of the Amateur. Andrew tells us -

it’s obvious that Web 2.0 is a cultural and intellectual catastrophe

The basic issue is experts vs. collective intelligence. As Michael Gorman tells us in Web 2.0: The Sleep of Reason, Part I:

reference works were not only created by scholars and published by reputable publishers

One point of caution - this is all being published on Britannica's blogs - which has a vested interest in maintaining a Cult of the Expert. At the same time, this echoes what I read recently in The Chronicle - New Metrics of Scholarly Authority - Michael Jensen -

right now we're still living with the habits of information scarcity because that's what we have had for hundreds of years. Scholarly communication before the Internet required the intermediation of publishers. The costliness of publishing became an invisible constraint that drove nearly all of our decisions. It became the scholar's job to be a selector and interpreter of difficult-to-find primary and secondary sources; it was the scholarly publisher's job to identify the best scholars with the best perspective and the best access to scarce resources.

The publishers and peer review assured the quality of what is produced. In Web 2.0, quality theoretically comes from public review and scrutiny.

This is exactly the issue many of us face in the development of training. We are the experts. We validate the quality of the content. Without us in the mix, how do we know that the content being created by learners is accurate, of high quality, appropriate, etc.

These are fair questions for us to ask, and there certainly is a problem when experts are drowned out by a group of people who have more time and interest in pushing for alternative views.

At the same time, one of the people commenting on Will's post said:

To me Web 2.0 is new tools. It’s how we use them, not the tools themselves, that matters.

I'm not sure it's that simple. What's changed is that there now are incredibly easy to use tools that allow all of us to be content creators. There is an incredible flood of content. And it gets produced incredibly quickly.

Print publishing cycles and normal kinds of peer review are simply too slow to be a reasonable filter on the communication. Instead, we get many-to-many communication that is fundamentally different than what we've had before.

I also believe that something else is changing - access to resources. My son's ability to access California Gold Rush Historic Maps from the David Rumsey Map Collection to do his report on routes taken to the Gold Rush is something that none of us had when we were in 4th grade. Spending 10 minutes to zoom into the description on the Map of the Gold Regions of California, Showing the Routes via Chagres and Panama, Cape Horn, &c. was an incredible experience for my son. Add to it that he updated Wikipedia with an additional route and a link to the map collection.

I would be curious to see what Britannica has on this topic. The information I could get to without having to enter a credit card didn't mention the route through Mexico. But more than that, having the link to that map and the collection of maps is something that Britannica will have a hard time replicating.

I do believe that there's still need for expertise, review, authoritative sources. But there's also a valuable place for the speed, breadth, depth and network in Web 2.0. Certainly, I'd much rather scan the blogs in my blogroll than read a copy of Training Magazine. The magazine content never can go into as much depth, it can't cover as many topics, the content is at least six months old and it doesn't allow me to engage in a conversation around it.