Jane Bozarth (the “self-proclaimed queen of elearning” as she puts it) has a new book out on April 11th.  Having bought her previous two books (E-Learning on a Shoestring and Better than Bullet Points), I know this third one will be just as valuable and helpful to the working trainer as Jane outlines the entire process of training from performing analysis to evaluating the training results.

Educause has just released a two-page briefing on the “7 things you should know about . . . Google Apps” (PDF). The Google Apps consist of a collection of communication tools, productivity tools, and web building tools. There is an education version which offers some nice added features and is free to K-12 and colleges. I often mention the Google Apps in my presentations on personal knowledge management because of the ability for students and faculty to collaborate on shared knowledge artifacts such as papers and classroom presentations.  The two-page briefing is well worth sharing with your colleagues and chair.

Harold Jarche has an intriguing post where he comments on a colleague’s observation that smart people at universities learn more by interacting with colleagues and spending time at their desks. From my perspective, I agree that there is some truth in that. But, I also think that Jarche is too quick to dismiss the lecture.

If done properly, a lecture can be an outstanding learning event. You just have to have a good presenter with a good topic and enthusiasm for that topic. My local library stocks many titles from the The Teaching Company which are essentially filmed lectures from outstanding professors. And Richard Feynman’s taped lectures are popular offerings from the Scientific American Book Club.

Any teaching method can be effective if done correctly and with the learner in mind.

Great for the content (a brain scientist talks about her own stroke)  and for the way she presented.  Just watch it (Sound).

Still pondering the implications of the Learning Long Tail. A couple of quick observations:

1) The False Argument of Formal Learning versus Informal Learning: How instruction is delivered is an important part of training but it obscures the larger question of how the instruction will be absorbed and used by the student. I think that if a learner is motivated, they will learn just as well from the old-fashioned lecture as they would from an informal bull session at the local coffee house. When you view actual data on people’s preferences for learning, you see a mix of informal and formal learning:

Soft skills
1. On-the-job training
2. One-on-one coaching
3. Peer interaction and feedback
4. Discussion groups
5. Live classroom instruction

Hard skills:
1. On-the-job training
2. Workbooks and manuals
3. Books and reading
4. One-on-one coaching
5. Live classroom instruction

Plus, there is no real sharp division between formal and informal. Rather, it is more of a continuum. I’ve been to public lectures which have been quite lively and informal while I have been to conference meetings which were very formalized. Based on the social learning model from Long Tail Learning, I developed this typology:

1. Social Learning - Learning with group interaction whether in a formal classroom setting or community of practice
   • Structured - Learner’s acquisition of knowledge will be objectively evaluated by a third party
   • Unstructured - Learner’s acquisition of knowledge will be personally evaluated or may be informally evaluated by group
2. Reflective Learning - Learning without group interaction where the learner monitors their own progress
   • Structured - Learner’s acquisition of knowledge will be objectively evaluated by a third party
   • Unstructured - Learner’s acquisition of knowledge will be personally evaluated or may be informally evaluated by group

With this typology in mind, trainers can better determine how deliver instruction because they are considering both the learner’s goals and how the learner’s acquisition of knowledge will be evaluated. This typology also works well with blended learning which I believe is the best way of preparing and delivering instruction.

2)  Mental Model Based Learning - Dawson’s Developing Knowledge-Based Client Relationships is not about training but his advise on how to build value-added services by building a relationship based on creating knowledge for the client seems almost a precursor to the Long Tail Learning concept.  This is because the consultant examines the client’s existing mental models and then helps shape the mental models to the desired goals of the consulting relationship.  People manage by their mental models and they create mental models through interactions with others and through their reflections.  I see the knowledge niches in the Learning Long Tail as being manifestations of individual and group mental models.

Mike from Mike’s Doc Blog was kind enough to comment on my posting about the nonexistence of a generation gap in elearning.  Appears that Mike is doing a dissertation on question of whether current instructor-led practices are adequate for 21st Century education.  This research is ground-breaking and I am eager to read what he comes up with (as I am sure many in the training and education community would be).  He bases his research on “gap analysis” and I am hoping he wouldn’t mind posting his proposal abstract so that I can gain a better understanding of his research questions.

One of the issues I argue with my colleagues about is the use of Wikipedia and online social networking tools by students.  Even though I point out that the Oxford English Dictionary was created using a similar method (for pre-Internet times) there is still the knee-jerk reaction to ban anything that didn’t come from an authorative source.  Harold Jarche makes a good point about this concerning Ryerson University’s banning of a “virtual study hall” in Facebook.

 If that is banned, then what about MyNoteIt?

Spent the weekend considering Karrer’s Big Question for March. I initially wrote a short comment but that was before I read the article that started all this: Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0. If you haven’t read it, please do before continuing on with this post.

There are some deep issues here and I am still considering them. But, I sketched out an outline to help focus my thinking on this topic.

The Challenge

1. Need for knowledge is greater than ever - There is a lot of evidence for this and I would suggest starting with Homer-Dixon’s The Ingenuity Gap.
2. Knowledge goes stale faster - Maybe it’s just my perception from the IT industry but knowledge does seem to have a shelf life. In academia, there seems to be departments such as philosophy that appear to possess timeless knowledge but even there, issues such as stem-cell research and cloning challenge the conventional wisdom.
3. Knowledge bottleneck - We have greatly increased our ability to collect and sort data but our ability to convert data and information into knowledge is much slower. If you are familiar with the Four Cs of knowledge conversion (Comparison, Consequences, Connections, and Conversation), you can see why the bottleneck exists. You just can’t automate the Four Cs (at this present level of IT).
4. Knowledge Fragmentation - And there is the challenge of the Long Tail of Knowledge Niches. It takes some effort to span these niches and one has to calculate the benefit in doing so. It’s paradoxical but the wide reach of the Internet actually encourages people to gather in niches. It is quite possible to construct a mediated reality in which you only speak to like-minded people and shop only like-minded vendors.

In building the new Learning 2.0, I believe these five ideas may help.

1. Embrace the model of Social Learning in the article - Brown and Adler make a great argument for this new model. I only add another example as support for the power of social learning.
2. Reflective Learning - My contribution to this.  As I often state in my presentations on Personal Knowledge Management, “knowledge comes from within people and between people.”  A person needs time to reflect on the information they have acquired so that they can successfully incorporate it into their personal knowledge base in their mind.  When I was introduced to journaling and mindmapping, I became a much better learner and was able to contribute more to learning with my peers.  Personally, I believe that reflective learning is not receiving enough attention in the Learning 2.0 model.
3. Learner-Centered Skills - I take these from Van Weigel’s article on curricular capabilities for course management systems.  They are especially relevant in the Long Tail / Learning 2.0 model:  “critical thinking, self confidence, peer learning, and knowledge management.”  The critical thinking corresponds to the reflective learning while the peer learning is social learning.  Self confidence is important in helping the learner bridge from reflective learning to social learning.  And the knowledge management skill is vital in traversing the Long Tail.
4. Deep Smarts - Excellent book which details how to help someone along the curve of experience to become deeply smart in their field.  Leonard and Swap show how to drastically shorten the time it takes to make a person an expert.  Given that we don’t have time for the normal ten years it takes, any time saved means that person is more productive and the knowledge more relevant.
5. Neurolearning - Spurred by Zull’s The Art of Changing the Brain, I have been studying the field of neuroscience.  With the discovery of mirror neurons and the data collected from fMRI, the conventional theories on how people reason are rapidly being replaced with new insights.  I am still exploring the implications but I am convinced that discoveries in neuroeconomics and further research on attention will revitalize the field of learning.

I’m sure I will have more on this.  Fascinating question!

On the Learning Circuits Blog the Big Question of the month is “What is the scope of our responsibility as learning professionals?”  Tony Karrer bases his question on the concept of “Long Tail Learning” which essentially argues that as the need for knowledge increases so does the production costs while the shelf-life of knowledge decreases.  Training (and education) must change or they face a future where the training function becomes irrelevant due to high costs in producing irrelevant knowledge products that have no impact on the organization’s needs.  What is needed is a way to lower production costs while increasing the relevance and ROI on our training (and education).

This is also becoming a major issue in education as a recent article in Campus Technology points out.  Not only do we seem to fall short in preparing today’s workforce for the current challenges, we are challenged with preparing the future workforce.  I agree with Karrer that the challenge can best be met with Web 2.0 tools but the bigger challenge is finding a way to overcome the attention deficit of students and adult learners.  That is why I think the emerging merger of neuroscience and learning will have a great impact on this issue.

This is why I like Jane!  Everyday is like an elearning Christmas present.  Today’s pick is particular great because I just ran into this problem this morning.  I had to demonstrate how to set up an FTP connection for my web development class.  I have tutorial for it but it’s a year old and doesn’t help the Vista and Mac folks.  If only I had a quick and easy way to do this.

And now I do.  Check out uTIPu for a free screenshot application and free space to store your tutorials.

Jay Cross emailed me concerning my last post about him. He is upset about what he perceives as “unwarranted attacks on my integrity and judgment” and asks how I would feel if “some character assassin you had never met began spewing out this misinformation about you on the web.” Well, I have had that happen and it is unpleasant. But, I am not doing that to Cross. He puts forth ideas, opinions, and arguments in support of informal learning and I am questioning those, not him personally. As a consultant and public speaker, he should know that you open yourself to criticisms and questions when you advance ideas. It’s the marketplace of ideas and through open and honest debate, you refine those ideas.

I will apologize on one point. I accused Cross of not being aware of earlier statements advocating the use of blogs and wikis as knowledge management tools. In his email, he quoted several 2002 postings of his that argued this point. Faced with the evidence, I concede that I was wrong on this point. This is a great example of how to answer an argument: with facts and reasoning.

Cross asks if I he did something personal to me to cause these unwarranted attacks. I only know him through his book and his blog postings. It’s nothing personal because I don’t know the man. The impetus for my criticisms is the same as with other consultants who I feel use hype instead of facts, marketing instead of research, and tout the latest, greatest process that will solve everything. Having suffered through these folks when I was being thrown from one failed change project to another as my government, nonprofit, and profit bosses tried to find the magic solution for our latest woes, I became intensely skeptical.

And I am also emboldened by two recent books: The Halo Effect by Rosenzweig and Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths And Total Nonsense: Profiting From Evidence-Based Management by Pfeffer and Sutton. There is a lot myth out there disguised as truth and it should be questioned - especially in the education and training field.

When I wrote my five-part series on Cross’ Informal Learning, there were no personal attacks or character assassination in my words. I asked legitimate questions and asked that Cross back up his (sometimes overbroad) claims. He dismissed entire fields of well-established and proven concepts and methods and these extraordinary arguments required extraordinary evidence.

At the end of his email, Cross gives me this warning: “If you keep this up, I will call you on it. Take this seriously.” I don’t know what this means or what Cross has in mind. If he would like a honest debate on the subject of informal learning, I would be glad to oblige. He can start with the criticisms that I raised in my series.  I do find merit in informal learning as I wrote in the conclusion to my five-day critique:

“So, there should not be a conflict between formal learning and informal learning as Cross suggests. Both approaches have their positives and negatives but, when properly blended together, you have an amazingly powerful educational and training system.”

I am not going to stop writing about informal learning either positively or negatively as I will not stop commenting on other topics in education and training.  And I have put my ideas and opinions out for criticism and questioning.  I invite the debate.

I see that others have picked up on the stereotype that the new training technologies are only for the young generation.  I’ve written before about the generation gap issue and have mentioned this in subsequent presentations.  There has been some resistance to the idea but for the folks who have read the book, they see the logic (and more importantly, the data) that proves that the generation gap, if not a myth, isn’t really a major factor.  It’s good to see that research is trumping the myth.

I actually spent a couple of days debating whether I should respond to this post from Jay Cross.  What made up my mind was when I saw a colleague with Cross’ Informal Learning book as she was making plans to put together a workshop on effective teaching.  After a lunch conversation and the forwarding of my series that criticized informal learning, that topic is off the agenda.  As I argued before, Cross is good at taking established ideas and repackaging them as his own while disparaging the original source.

In this case, Cross crows about the effectiveness of personal blogs as knowledge management tools in the organization.  He makes the claim that many organizations remain dubious about the benefits.  This may have been true - three years ago.  But, as a quick search on Wikipedia and Amazon demonstrate, corporate blogging is a well-established practice.  People have been blogging about the virtues of blogging as PKM for at least four years.  And Cross just discovered it now?

Why do I get so angry about Cross?  Because of statements like these:

“Unlike their counterparts in medicine, engineering, and computer science, business school professors don’t generally see themselves as the inventors of new methods, tools and approaches. Most study management as it is, and seldom dream of management as it might be, or should be. They describe, but they don’t create.“

Has he never picked up an issue of the Harvard Business Review (or the Stanford Business Review, Sloan Management Review, etc.)?  Has he visited a local bookstore and seen the shelves groaning under the weight of the new business books that are constantly being trucked in?  What about the business schools like Rotman that are amazingly innovative in their approach to management education? I can’t believe that this fellow is taken seriously when it is so easy to prove him wrong.