Learning Technology Consulting

Just attended the Mzinga Customer Conference and had many useful discussions around how community tools and formal learning can be integrated. But I wanted to share one of our experiences. Mzinga had the wisdom to expose us to a fairly new toy for creating fun and engagement. They placed Flip Video Cameras on the tables and encouraged us to video each other (similar to still photo cameras at a wedding reception.) The quality of the cameras are surprisingly good and are a low cost option for creating an engaging experience at any learning event. We also discussed how this can be used for guerrilla video blogging. Here is a sample:




Mzinga Conference Flip Video Test from Darryl Toney on Vimeo.

On the final day of the eLearning Guild Annual Gathering 2008 the keynote topic was Things I've Learned in My Life So Far by Stefan Sagmeister. He is an award-winning, graphic designer who shared some of his observations and life lessons. He shared different graphic arts projects and how they challenge us to look at the things in new ways and use unconventional methods to motivate and inspire people. Some samples he shared are listed below:

• Starting a Charity is Surprisingly Easy


• Being not Truthful Works Against Me


• Complaining is Silly. Either Act or Forget


• Trying to Look Good Limits My Life

I also attended a session called, Informal Learning in a Global Enterprise: The CA Story by Ron Ateshian from Computer Assoicates. He shared how they deployed a custom social networking application created by Q2Learning to support informal learning in the enterprise.

Traditional training had always been a push model.

Catalysts for Change

• SME and Instructor experience was the most critical part of the learning experience
• Silos were competing for intellectual capital and resources
• Competing budget forced program consolidation and efficiencies
• Need to centralize
  

Learner Breakdown

• Employees - 17,000
• Partners - 4,000
• Customers - 50,000

Mission: Simplify Learning through technology
Vision: Embrace and integrate information and non-traditional learning

What we Did

• Corporate wide LMS
• Ebook platform books 24/7
• Virtual Classroom and Virtual Labs
• Standard development & delivery methods
• Self-service CA TV platform
• CA Learning Collaboration Suite
• Q2 Learning's xPERT eCommunity and eCampus

CA Learning Collaboration

• SCORM Conformant
• Configurable
• Discussion threads
• Blogs
• Wikis
• RSS Feeds
• Resource Library
• Subscription options
• Chat and Virtual Classroom
• Tagging with full-text search capability
• Training Centers
• Wrapped and transitional learning
• Enable push and the pull

Best Practice Tips

• Use the ADDIE model and identify business and learner needs
• Involve stakeholders from the beginning
• Make use of RFP and Test-Case scenarios
• Use seasoned project managers
• Evaluate the effectiveness during and after roll-out
• Create templates

Labels: eLearning Guild

The keynote, The Future of the Internet, was given by John Patrick author of Net Attitude. He spoke about where trend are going for how internet technolgies are useful to people.

Labels: eLearning Guild

Man!! My second day of the conference was a lot more hectic than the first. Of course, that is simply because my first day was a single session. Today was all about deciding which sessions to attend and therefore, which ones to miss.

The day started with a key note from Keith Sawyer, Ph.D., Professor of Psychology & Education, Washington University and author of the book, Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration. He states that while there are many reports on how important innovation is to the future of America - what's missing is an understanding of how innovation works. He poses the question, How do you create a learning organization to support innovative knowledge? He frames teaching for innovation as learning for creativity.

Characteristics of Learning for Creativity

• Build on learner's prior knowledge


• Encourage reflection on the learning process


• Carefully scaffold authentic situated practice


• Combine inquiry and project-based activities with information delivery


• Foster learning in collaborating groups

Innovation is not the work of a single idea or individual. The innovation process is a constant combination of many small ideas with many contributors. We have to create a learning environment that leads people to that way of working.

I also attended a presentation on LMS & Community: Like Hand and Glove facilitated by Dave Wilkins, Senior Product Manager at Mzinga. My good friend Dave, pictured above, discussed how new technologies and social networking empower the individual and the community and ways in which community and learning 2.0 technologies can help organizations better manage "informal" content and informal social networks. He discussed the differences between expert-generated content and user-generated content and how learning organizations must enable both of them to truly support the ways people learn. One of my favorite quotes from Dave's presentation is

What if instead of teaching someone to fish,
we could teach someone to teach someone to fish.

This was also the first day that teh Expo Hall was open with all of the learning technology vendors. Every time I go in there I feel like a kid in a candy store and can't decide what to investigate first. There are way too many vendors to list but here are some that stood out:

• Udutu offers a free course authoring tool called myudutu and now they are working on embeddding an LMS into Facebook.
• SuddenlySmart offers a graphical flash authoring tool called SmartBuilder.
• Flypaper offers flash presentation tool that operates much like powerpoint in the way that you use templates. One interesting slant is that they have created an online community from which you can retrieve templates and submit ones that you created.

Today I attended a pre-conference session entitled, "Web 2.0 Innovations for Learning: Podcasting, Social Networking, Wikis, Virtual Worlds, Blogs, and More" presented by Anders Gronstedt of The Gronstedt Group, Inc. Anders shared several examples of web 2.0 tools used for learning and facilitated discussion from the attendees to share examples also. During the last part of the presentation, he led us through a tour of Second Life while in world, for those of us who had accounts. It was a very interesting and engaging presentation.

Many of the examples he shared with us were either standalone or proprietary so unfortunately I can't link you to them, but I will describe some of the information here and provide links when possible.

First he started with some interesting information about how learning and learners are changing. The new generation of workers only have two sources of credibility; Peers and Parents. No longer a captive of the classroom, they create consume, mash-up and share material with each other. These Digital Natives (people exposed to new collaborative technology since birth) want to be engaged, in control, part of the story line with no tolerance for traditional training.

The best that can be said about most eLearning is that it "gives you the sensation of a coma without the worry and inconvenience." But some companies are making a fundamental change...

IBM

• 3,400 active blogs
• 70,000 employees use wikis
• 5,000 podcast episodes, two million downloads
• 25 islands in and 6,000 employees in Second Life

SUN has 4,000 employee blogs open to the public at blogs.sun.com and is one of the only fortune 500 companies whose CEO blogs.

National Semiconductor spent $2.5 million on video iPods for all its 8,500 employees

Intel hosts a wiki, "Intelpedia" with 5,000 pages, 13.5 million page views in the first nine months.

Nike's SKU - Nike course curriculum is presented as a subway underground.

EMC's podcasts

• 5-10 new audio casts and 2-3 "vods" a week
• Downloaded by the thousands every week
• 15 minute ideal time

Victoria's Secret - Podcasts featuring its models, available in stores in wireless docking station.

Jamb Juice plays podcasts in the store during opening and closing when no customers are there.

Car Dealerships use a sales simulation called "Hire The Winner" as part of the recruiting and interview process.

Volvo has a business acumen simulation in which you run a dealership for three years and make decisions on product marketing, employee hiring, training, etc. and watch your business grow, or fail.

Pearson offers an overview of their businesses at Pearsonville

There are also numerous learning experiments in Second Life. Some Anders toured with us include:

• "Train for Success" - a meeting place for the Groenstedt Group
• "NOAA" - an immersive weather center where you can view live weather maps and walk into an underwater tsunami
• "Cisco Hospital of the Future" - A hospital where you can tour new technology.
• "Greenies Home" - Where you can explore a house scaled up such that you have the perspective of a toy. For example, this can be applied to electronic equipment repair trainng in which the learner is actually inside the equipment looking at the parts and solving repair scenarios.

In summary, training organizations should release the illusion of control and accountability and adopt adna dapt new modes of facilitating a learning experience.

• from watching reading and listening to doing, simulating, and engaging
• from telling and testing to conversation and application
• from sage-on-the-stage to ubiquitous learning
• from people going to training to training going to people
• from effeciencey, cost and "rapid development" to effectiveness, growth and performance improvement

Okay...Okay. I know that it has been a long time since I have posted on this blog. I thought I would use my participation in the eLearning Guild Annual Gathering 2008 as an opportunity to create some new posts. Stay tuned as I share my experiences ...

This week in my studies of Web 2.0, I am investigating social networking and bookmarking sites. For social networking I setup an account on Yahoo 360 and invited a few friends to my page. It seemed to work so far but I am not seeing the value yet. For social bookmarking, I setup an account on Yahoo My Web. I can save pages there but couldn't quite get all of the functionality to work.

Pros: I am a little more familiar with the purpose of these tools.

Delta: I would have like to have more of an overview of the purpose and value proposition of these tools along with a demo of the actions.

A colleague of mine, Jane Johnson, posted an article commenting on data privacy in the corporate environment, New Course Well-Timed for Agilent. This brings to mind the data privacy aspects of web 2.0 tools. It seems that these tools are all designed with the intent of sharing information with other and collaborating easily. This causes concern when you think about the type of data that may be discussed in the corporate environment. Also, while it is an advantage to utilize applications hosted outside the firewall, it presents another concern for data security. The security features need to be enhanced to provide ease of sharing without resorting to internal hosting.