DIFFERENT

Sometimes you feel

Like the only one

In a world of confusion and mistrust

There’s just no place for you

But stick your chin out

Tell them all to go away

You are who you are and no one can change that

You’re different, that’s you

So ignore the teasing and the taunting

Ignore the voice inside you telling you you’ll never feel right

In this world there’s place for everyone

Even if some forget that

Religious, crippled, young or old

You’ll always have a place

Different, weird, normal or strange

That’s you, accept it.

In a nutshell, I’m finding the pundits who call for change and have great ideas about change essentially talking vapourware. In other words, lots of talk no real sustenance there. Now no one is going to readily fess up to being one of these people but people will happily point to someone else to say, ya, I know what you mean. Examples of this abound and the one thats really kicking my ass these days is the focus on mLearning and the ‘revolution’ that awaits. Lots of talk about how this time its different. The revolution will happen since there is no choice. I’m not terribly old by any stretch of the imagination, but I was there when ‘eLearning’ was where ‘mLearning’ is at. Stats about the proliferation of computers in the home. Desktops were taking over and this time, we’re not talking DVD’s. The potential was huge. Our options for delivering ‘learning’ (and if you know anything about me, thats a dumb  thing to say) was incredible because of the media options available combined with the proliferation of the technology. Where are we today? What are we saying about eLearning? Here’s an email I received from a participant in one of my recent sessions at DevLearn:

I was stuck by the candor from a lot of the industry guru’s that “learning is broken.”

Here’s a gentleman who isn’t part of our industry attending an industry event about eLearning and hearing everybody talk about how eLearning is broken. So when I hear about the mLearning revolution I freak out and here’s why:

Those who are talking about the revolution have yet to build anything revolutionary (there are exceptions of course). Those who are building revolutionary items are getting drowned out by the talking heads who cry for a revolution but build nothing or borrow the same paradigm for delivering content using new technology. When are we ever going to freakin’ learn that the revolution won’t come from applying new technology to the same models we’ve used. The new technology does open doors. It does present new opportunities. But until the model for delivering educational content changes, we will forever be using new technology to deliver old and broken solutions.

Not everybody is doing the same old, same old. I take great pride in our organization for essentially being a think tank for 10 years. We have no mainstream products, we have never made it big, but we have always played with ideas and built out processes and technology that are totally unique. Would I be happier if some of those things achieved mainstream success? Of course, but I’m happier for having experimented for 10 years than to have simply done what everyone of my competitors did, which is build for mainstream. Have we built a revolution no? But we have operated for 10 years that there are alternative and better models for getting educational content into the hands of people that need it.

I contend that there is no revolution afoot. I see big ideas that will never be implemented and thought leaders who don’t really grasp ground level realities. Before we ever get to a revolution in delivering content, we need our educational institutions and our corporate universities to experiment with a different classroom (in other words, no more walls, electronic walls included). As I said in a previous post, to date we have focused on trying to expand the reach of the teacher (MOOCs are a great example of changing the access paradigm of students, with a goal of increasing the amount of students who access great content) as opposed to supporting models for a single student to access more teachers and a more personalized approach. Yes, these talks are on the fringe, but thats where they remain.

There are without a doubt some interesting developments happening in companies like mine all over the world. They remain on the fringe. If your going to talk revolution with me, show it to me cause I’m not buying what your selling!

• My designs have nothing to do with me
• A design is about rendering a service
• A design is a frictionless portal to the service it renders
• A design may create friction if it enables behaviour change
• The face of a design should model the expected behaviour of its audience
• A design does not live in a vacuum. It must interface with the system(s) in place.
• For designs to interface with other systems, structure must be part of the design
• It is possible to measure a design
• To measure a design, measure the behaviors coming from the design

My Instructional Design Manifesto

• I will not design based on what I like
• Instructional design is about providing access to contextually relevant information to the user
• Instructional designs are about removing barriers to contextually relevant information
• Instructional design may create friction to help model a behaviour change
• The way instructional design looks should model the expected behaviour of the audience (Explore, Question or Click Next)
• Instructional design does not live in a vacuum. It needs to interface with existing business systems already in place
• For instructional design to interface with existing systems, it must include a structure that details this interface
• It is possible to measure the impact of instructional design
• To measure the impact of instructional design measure the behaviours resulting from the design.

My day ended in intellectual turmoil surpassed only by feeling duped into believing it would go anywhere else. When I get into discussion with people, I become emotionally invested in the discussion and really do enjoy the dynamics of moving ideas forward, often through an interplay of agreement and disagreement. I consider myself thoughtful and have a natural inclination to dive into ideas and explore them in the artful exercise of mental masturbation (does this make me morally liberal?)

Anyways, another side to my opinions and thinking other than masturbatory reflection (see how I do that…make it seem all cool) is the fact that I am still to this day very much involved in the trenches, working with clients on real issues, applying ideas in the design and development of systems that help solve problems and working with developers to define whats possible. That doesn’t make me special but it does give me a leg up on those who do one or the other (Thinker versus Doer). I am always happy to concede my own ideas in favor of ones that make more sense and which ultimately seem to advance who I am and what I can contribute back. Despite the ego battles I have with myself and my innate desire to be right, I’m pretty good at saying…yeah…that makes more sense.

Its become very popular these days in Learning and Development to talk about the clear and notwithstanding complete failure of existing infrastructures to support ‘learning’ in the workplace. Its now common sense to acknowledge the “other” resources people use to acquire knowledge, develop their skills and better themselves whether at work or at home. Enter rhetoric:

“I’m not talking about DESIGNING learning – nor tracking it nor managing it. This is my whole point!”

“Why do you need a system? In the workplace the important thing is what you can do, not what you’ve learned”

So, its very fashionable to reject the notion of tracking and managing ‘learning’. I don’t disagree with the futility in trying to do this simply because I don’t believe ‘learning’ can be tracked. We can track the net contents of what we might have picked up while learning. But the net contents together are not the sum of what we may have learned. In any case, yes…very good no tracking and managing learning. Why do we need a system then, because its all about what you can do. Right? Perfect! Riddle me this, how is it that you know someone is doing what they need to do? Can they do it better? Are they doing anything wrong? Don’t know, we don’t have a system because its cool to reject the notion of tracking.

Where does this come from? Where does rejecting ‘tracking and managing learning’ come from? IMO it comes from the unrest caused by having LMS systems become the hub and command center for organizational learning (whether academic or corporate). This situation only made worse by this thing called SCORM.

Newsflash: If your blaming SCORM for anything other than technical limitations you are ignorant. SCORM simply made the existing classroom paradigm operable in a digital world. Thats it. It didn’t invent the classroom and it didn’t invent how we ‘track and manage learning’. It simply made those elements cross platform in a digital world. So all your huffing and puffing about what SCORM didn’t allow you to do and how constraining it was, blame the classroom. Sure there are things you couldn’t do in a SCORM environment that you could do in an environment without technical constraints and what did you do? You built the digital classroom anyways by building courses and modules fashioned after well crafted objectives. Except it wasn’t portable to other systems. Hmmmm….

Back to rhetoric. So its all about performance yes? I agree. Is this an L&D issue? Yes…in as much as its an issue for the entire organization. So to that end focusing on individual employee performance is about as useful as focusing on individual learning. The only performance that matters to an organization (and I own one) is the performance of the organization. I understand the tacit relationship between organizational performance and individual performance which is why as an organization I need to be able to make decisions about what is needed to enable my machine (the people) to perform the jobs they need to do to help the organization perform. This isn’t about performance support. This is about an organic, wholistic approach to building systems and connecting to systems that support an organization’s performance.

I go back to the rhetoric for one second:

“Why do you need a system? In the workplace the important thing is what you can do, not what you’ve learned”

Very popular but complete drivel. Every business is a system. Its a system for delivering goods and services that match a need. Workplace performance is part of that system. You can’t just say no need for a system because its about an individual’s performance. In fact in rejecting what individuals learn and adopting a stance about how individuals perform, your simply swapping one evil for another. Thats not understanding how systems work. What matters is organizational performance. Thats the goal. So how do we get people contributing to that, thats our question. And if you don’t think we need a philosophy about how to enable that and systems that implement theory then I’m not sure you get the dynamics of a network. SO while yes, the common sense rhetoric points to performance of the employee, thats about as useful as what employees learn. Alot of fluff no substance.

If you want your organization to perform your ultimately looking at maximizing the supporting systems that contribute to the network (your organization). This includes people systems, technology systems, policy systems, management systems, etc. To know if any of these systems are failing you need data. Observing someone doing their work properly is gathering data. Rejecting analytics outright is a sure sign that you really don’t get it. What I heard in that last sentence I quoted is this “we just need people to perform and its ok if we never really know whether they are or aren’t.”

Makes no sense right? If you really get this performance thing (and again the performance support rhetoric is just as bothersome to me) then what you get is that we all operate in a system. Optimizing performance is about optimizing the system and every business is interested in that.

If your going to optimize a system then you need to understand where the system is breaking down. As far as L&D goes, we should all be working from the same page that the existing approach and infrastructure that is commonly used to support employees in a corporate or academic setting is insufficient. That doesn’t mean we can’t rethink how to get employees contributing to the system they operate in more effectively, or educating students in a more meaningful way (building on who they are and connecting them to the world they live in). Rethinking the approach requires us to rethink the framework, the part of the system that connects people to content in an enabling way consistent with the bigger picture approach.

So while I concur with the ideas of not tracking learning and losing the idea that we can design learning, to not embrace ‘tracking’ or data gathering is simple minded and ridiculous. Talking about how the new TinCan spec is just another way for the ADL to stuff us into a box is an expression of ignorance. To reject the notion that new thinking requires new systems and thus a new design paradigm is short sighted at best.

Just my opinion.

The project began as most of our projects do. Got a call from a highly respected global financial institution with offices in Toronto who heard about us, worked with us (we did work with them but a different department), saw some of our work and wanted to talk to us about building a ‘Global’ online orientation program. The ‘course’ had to be SCORM compliant, run on their LMS and track who did what. Sound familiar?

This may not make sense to you. Whats important is that TinCan gave us a mechanism to completely redesign what an online orientation experience good be and provided our client with a platform and infrastructure to use outside of this one project and begin rethinking how information gets distributed.

Whaddya think?

On the one hand, I think about typical eLearning sales training – the kind that uses “immersive”, “game design” hoo ha, the kind that has scenarios and decision trees, the kind where I can “explore” how my answers affect the scenario….you know….engaging, immersive, yippee.

For the record, I’m not saying don’t do that, or that there isn’t evidence that it may work, or whatever. I’m poo pooing it because it doesn’t excite me and sure as hell doesn’t excite me when I think about how to use TinCan. Here’s what excites me.

Salesforce.com has a suite of API’s, it has some pretty decent analytics going for it and if you’re in sales, your company is probably making you use it (or some other CRM like it). Salesforce tracks your opportunities, types of opportunities, what you win, what you lose, what your win rate is, etc, etc. This excites me, because thats all data thats already captured that can be used to create targeted content that speaks to the actual data. More importantly its data that can inform and be used by ‘intelligent content’ through API’s to deliver personalized, on demand content. How many instructional designers have ever asked for data from their organization’s CRM when developing sales training? (Good for you! Seriously…thats good stuff)

Although I was poo pooing my wonderfully immersive sales training, what if I had designed the content using semantic markup (which you can’t really do using Lectora or Articulate) that matched the data structure of salesforce? What does that mean? That means that every “scenario” I had built had metadata around it that matched some opportunity type in salesforce. Every step in the “scenario” found in the elearning was semantically marked up (metadata) to match the steps found in my salesforce sales cycle model. This goes way beyond providing metadata in a SCORM package. This is about every paragraph, every question, every answer, every feedback being marked up to map to existing data models in salesforce. Why would I do that and what does that have to do with TinCan?

I would do that so that the data from salesforce could be used to tell my content what scenarios I need help with and what steps of the sales cycle I need practice on. The exciting thing about this, is I can do that today without TinCan. This is designing content for an intelligent web and the advantages to doing so. SO…where does TinCan come in?

Well now I can implement TinCan to produce statements that speak directly to the data in salesforce and produce ‘analytics’ that tell me things like:
Person A took alot of time working through scenario A and typically loses deals of type A when actually selling.
Person A was sent an email containing a link to practice scenarios dealing with type A.
Person A clicked into the practice scenarios dealing with type A, practiced for two hours.
Person A was much more successful at selling type A deals.

In other words TinCan data easily integrates with other data because it is consistent with the technologies being used throughout the organization within its enterprise class software systems. Its the openness of salesforce, its API’s, its analytics and my ability to build content that can talk to salesforce directly and use TinCan in a way that merges what was once in a silo with the actual systems and processes that actually exist that makes this exciting for me. I imagine being able to show my stakeholders a single dashboard that has a single view of merged data between salesforce and activities and experiences people have with content that was built to purposefully support the activities that take place in salesforce.

So when I hear that TinCan can be used with existing models for designing and developing the online learning that exists today, I lose interest. I’m excited about the freedom to explore how to build better models for supporting performance and being able to contribute to the effectiveness of the organization. I was going to end this here: but if you’ve read this far I want you to think about one more thing. Stop focusing on the individual and helping the individual learn. Focus on the network you support (your organization) and how you can build stuff that helps the network. Feed the network.

I’m often talking about the ‘magic bubble’ of learning during my speaking slots and wanted to talk about the alternative. The magic bubble of learning, is the piece of training we create that carries the message we want to deliver to our ‘learners’ (thats what you call em, not what I would want to call em) in a carefully crafted, story, scenario, simulation, text, etc. We, the instructional design community have great research about how to carefully construct that message using the tools available to the most skilled craftspeople to achieve maximum probability that the message is ‘retained’. It is our assumption that if we follow best practice, follow ‘evidence based design’ that we stand the best chance of creating ‘learning’. Admit it. Thats what most of us assume and believe. ‘Learning’ of course is measured through things like ‘retention’, ability to spout back the message, score really well in multiple choice tests and even if your really good, properly execute the process.

The scenario I just gave is actually best case scenario for the magic bubble because often designers don’t know the research, the evidence about what produces things like retention, scoring really well on multiple choice and hacking back answers. That being said, while I support research driven ‘best practices’ and I’m into the ‘evidence’ I haven’t yet come across ‘evidence of learning’ that has completely satisfied me. Here’s why.

The first time you learned the quadratic equation, that first class when it was explained to you, shown to you and you got to practice it, most of us if not all of us, regardless of how well we ‘learned it’ that first time, when we went home to practice it’s like we never really ‘learned it’ to begin with. So we practiced it again in class with the teacher and we had questions which were answered, we had more practice time, we went home and we still didn’t get it. It wasn’t until we went through a process of learning (each of us at our own pace) that we got it. When we got it, we probably very quickly forgot why we never understood it to begin with. But I want to go back to the very first time a teacher explained it to us. I want to imagine us taking a test (the kind we use to measure learning today) regardless of how the teacher explained it to us, using whatever medium, and using the results of that test to determine if we had learned anything. What would the results show? I imagine the results would be dismal showing very little learning. Yet some of the learning that takes place in us, doesn’t have a measurable interface. Some of the measurable stuff doesn’t happen until years later, but would never be present had not some initial spark, experience, intervention occurred. In other words regardless of our ability to score well on the tests or execute the quadratic equation, there was learning (more or less for some of us).

Have you ever experienced something that triggered an event from your past setting off an aha moment in the present? Ahhh thats why he told me not to do that…..Learning isn’t measurable is what I think, at least not in the way I think of learning. I can be exposed to something (call it information), take little notice of it, show no measurable result that I’ve learned anything until sometime later where all of the sudden I realize I did learn something.

Learning isn’t an event and it can’t be packaged. Designing for learning isn’t about that perfect combination of stuff molded together regardless of what the research says. Designing for learning is about respecting that process and understanding that the learning is actually in the hands of the consumers (thats what I call em) and not in the hands of the designers or trainers.

Whats the alternative? The alternative bears in mind the following:

a) People learn when they have an interest (intrinsic or extrinsic) in what they’re learning

b) Learning is the word used to describe the continuous process of knowledge acquisition we are engaged in every second of every day. It cant be turned off, it is always on.

c) Learning (as defined above) can’t be measured since its a process.

d) Some artifacts of learning can be uncovered, some can not

Given these points, designing for learning is about supporting ‘interest’. Interest here is both instrinsic and extrinsic which includes things like, I need it for my job. You can generate interest in others, but you can’t create it. You can support interest but you can’t force interest on someone. Designing for interest means allowing people to ‘explore’ that interest. I talk about widening the path in your training as opposed to closing it around things like learning objectives. Allow exploration and allow divergence. These things support the process.

Given that people are learning every second of every day, your task is to draw their attention away from something else. Here is where best practice can come in handy. Simulations draw attention to something specific and hold attention. While engaged in a simulation your not learning anything else. Using proper communication theory and best practices for design all help keep the tap turned towards your stuff.

The net content of learning is not learning itself. If your designing for learning then measuring the net content is only part of the picture. Query the process. Don’t focus only on what happens during an event (like an elearning course) query experiences outside of the event and support that process as described above. Provide resources and alternate paths for people to travel to explore and build mechanisms for capturing experiences. Use that data to provide better support that feeds the interest.

We can’t, have never been able to, nor will we ever be able to create learning. We don’t even teach. We communicate. If some of our communications influence others to learn, then we will have taught.

or as my son says…whatever

So, in mid October my book ‘Learning on Demand’ comes out and from this point forward, I will focus my attention on providing information and insights into technologies and design models that feed an ecosystem for learning on demand. Topics I will focus on include:

a) Using analytics to gather data, help machines learn, and personalize content

b) Content modelling for instructional design

c) Instructional design for a content on demand world

d) Innovative technologies that support a learning on demand model

e) Semantic web technologies in learning

f) Technologies and design models for true performance support

g) Learning as a process not an event

My friend Brian Dusablon is working on a book site for me which I hope will be up soon where additional conversations about this topic with the readers of the book can be had. Hopefully my posts can be helpful to people and help provide resources for those who have an interest in evolving web technologies and how they can be used to support the learning process.

If you want to leave me any advice or ideas on how to contribute positively to your goals and learning initiatives please feel free to drop me a line.

Thanks

This all about perspective (reality tunnels via Robert Anton Wilson). The default human perspective on things starts with the ‘me’ as the starting point. This is only natural since our senses were built to move outwards from ourselves as the center. However, we can move beyond this traditional human perspective through thought and emotional intelligence. So when we (L&D people) talk about ‘performance support’ we talk about it from the ‘me’ perspective looking out which is why an otherwise very intelligent man would say “It’s time to make it a central part of our workplace learning strategy. No, better yet, it’s time to make it a central part of our business strategy.”

Sorry but…Make ‘performance support part of our workplace learning strategy’? You do realize that workplace learning is actually part of a ‘performance support strategy’ if your looking at it from the organizational POV. In other words, workplace learning coming at it from the organization inwards fits into a performance support strategy as does everything.

“it’s time to make it a central part of our business strategy.” – To begin with, I laugh at the thought of L&D people making business strategy decisions outside of L&D. Secondly, performance support has long ago been a formal strategic business unit of organizations called ‘operations’.

Now the problem you see, is this isn’t a mere obfuscation of the words ‘performance support’. The rhetoric we hear nowadays about performance support is a great example of why L&D is so innocuous. Its an example of myopia mixed with arrogance. Myopia because we always look at things strictly from the perspective of ‘me’ outwards and arrogance because we are always building our own infrastructures separate from what already exists within organizations.

Part of the solution is to begin supporting the organization using the organization as the central POV and work your way inwards from there. Resolve ‘organizational performance problems’ along with the rest of the organization. Organizations solve performance problems using new policies, buying new equipment, hiring different people, cutting resources, etc. These decisions are in theory (definitely not in practice) made through careful analysis of a variety of factors, most importantly being ‘Is the business making money’. If your going to try ‘implementing’ performance support from a ‘me’ POV then your simply going to be deprioritized. However if you work in concert with existing infrastructures for resolving organizational performance issues, your now working as part of the network.

In summary, we need to stop looking at performance support as a separate strategy that WE can choose to implement or not, since the fabric of every organization is in fact composed of a network of units purposefully built to support organizational performance. If your doing something other than trying to support ‘organizational performance’ then your probably better off in Academia (which has its own issues). Given that the fabric of every organization is in fact fortified through the goal of organizational performance, our purpose is to support that fabric. Creating our own infrastructures and defining ‘performance support’ as a subset of a workplace learning strategy is simply wrong.

I love what Mike Rustici says in his response to: Is Tin Can Backward Compatible with SCORM?

“No, it’s not. And, dude, you’re totally missing the point.”

TinCan is an extremely effective, efficient and well conceived (considering its age) specification for generating and storing data related to ‘experiences’ that can be captured online. They don’t have to be online experiences, they just need some hook into the cyber world to generate and capture data. Does that sound like a solution to you? Probably sounds useless almost as useless as the data you have been collecting to date around online learning while you’re sleeping with an auditor. If you’re sick of sleeping with an auditor, and think you can do better, maybe you should start to listen to the TinCan chatter

Fact: TinCan as a specification will be able to service existing paradigms for delivering instructional content.

Fact: Your tool vendors and your LMS vendors are working on that, and thats all great.

You know what though (and here’s where I’m gonna lose some of the TinCan community’s support) if thats what you want then you should know you’re not going to get any additional value out of TinCan because you’re still doing the same friggin thing.

What TinCan does as a specification is it frees your mind man….it frees us from the pomposity of delivering ‘learning’ and we can focus on supporting organizations however they need our support. We don’t have to be training people anymore (unless thats your thing). We can endeavour to work with our organizations and find out what data will be helpful to them and build out the tools to generate that data. TinCan is THAT. Its a retooling of our processes to look at what we can do with content, reshape it in creative ways that give our organizations data from which they can make intelligent decisions and be part of an organization instead of sleeping with auditors.

TinCan is NOT a solution. You can’t buy it, and from where I sit, I don’t care that existing content authoring platforms use it, because this is a standard that was meant to break the courseware mould. I for one am going to take full advantage of that and give my clients what no toolset can do. I’m going to give them value by designing unique experiences formed around their business requirements, and deliver data that is meaningful for them.

TinCan is NOT a solution but man oh man, are my clients going to LOOOVE this!