edCetra Training

My day started great. We at edCetra had a real positive meeting about capturing the value we deliver in a simple, meaningful and actionable way. Sounds pretty banal considering we’ve ben in biz for 11 years now. You would think we would have that figured out. Well we have and we did, but it was never simple and it was never expressed the way we did so today. So…BIG breakthrough for me.

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.

Choosing the title of this blog was a tad challenging since I am in fact a huge supporter of performance centric solutions in business. Whats getting to me is the idea of “performance support” being something we (as in employees, L&D managers, CEO’s) can choose to implement or not. If you think it is, then I disagree with you. I think if you are part of a business whether you run it, or just work in it, the function of every department, every strategic business unit, every person is part of organizational performance support. What every business cares about, is the performance of the business. Every decision made within a business is all about performance support. Marketing is performance support. Sales is performance support. You get it? So when L&D talks about performance support, its this strange arrogance maybe stemming from our unenviable position of impotence that we believe it were some novel strategy that WE can implement.

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.

Its been a while….

A long long while….

But during that time I’ve seen some amazing things and have had the pleasure of turning a concept into reality and then letting that reality steep in…wait for it…reality. Thats right, my reality has been steeping in other people’s reality and this my friends is helping us at edCetra Training get ‘real’.

Lets talk about some of the amazing things I’ve seen. A couple of weeks ago, I was introduced to a company called Mark Logic at their annual Mark Logic User Conference. I thought I was going to check out some new fancy content management system that played nice with XML, and instead saw a revolution in database technology. Mark Logic is a non-relational database built for dealing with today’s unstructured Big Data problem. In brief, all the stuff thats out there in social networks, blogs, data capture in analytics tools, intelligence data doesn’t necessarily fit all that well in a relational database since the data is all structured differently and has no inherent relationship. Using Mark Logic technology, there is now a way of curating all of this stuff and keying in relationships and normalizing ‘stuff’ so that there is a fuzzy network of relationships between everything. I’m probably explaining this like an instructional designer having gone to a programming conference….but hey….you get what you pay for. I also saw neat little tools at the User Conference like a tool that can scan web pages and somehow find names, places, etc and begin to catalog and index where the content appears and then allowing it to be discoverable in bite size chunks. Combine that with Mark Logic database and now you have an engine that can scan, curate and store information with very little human intervention. Kevin Kelly once said that the real impediment to the semantic web was someone needs to go through the web page by page and catalog all the information within it, so that we can build a taxonomy that fits everything….not so Mr. Kelly. I’ve seen the future and it looks promising.

Now, onto concept to reality steeped in reality so that we can get real. Its never made sense to me, that training and development people haven’t tuned into technologies that leverage existing content within organizations and exposing it using XML so that the transformation from legacy content to new wonderful eLearning/mLearning content is an XSLT away. The one thing that the Mark Logic conference taught me was that my intuition about where companies are investing their big dollars is indeed in leveraging existing content and that the underlying technology to that is XML. Tie that into what simple observation shows us, which is Google is a far better learning tool than any of the eLearning systems we use today, and a far better paradigm for organizational learning emerges. This new paradigm is one in which courses are assembled at run time, within context of the user who is publishing the content, at the users request and specific for the device on which it is published. It starts of course, with a simple search.

I am a learner. I am at point A and I need to get to point B. I look it up. I see that there are some videos, images, flash assets, user generated content and some text on getting to point B. I am on my mobile so I choose first some text, and then a quick video and hit a button to publish this content to my phone. It happens right there and then. I feel confident I can get to point B, but I review the user generated content by having that published to my phone. I learn a great tip and remind myself that when I get back to the office I should create a job aid with the user generated content I just read. I get back to the office having completed my task. I go back to the system, do the same search, find my user generated content and say publish to PDF. It does it, right there and then. I decide this is really valuable for my team, so I tweet what I’ve just created. Now others can download the PDF I created right there and then. This is fantastic!

This people is real! It can be done. I’d love to see this bake in reality longer and make it really real. What a trip!

What is a ‘Content Cloud’?

A content cloud is information available on the web grouped by context, including target audience, relevant competencies, and other pertinent metadata. The cloud is built using multiple documents and multimedia resources that have been semantically marked up at the most granular level, and then served up to the user as a single repository of content and related media assets.

Content cloud users have the ability to assemble the information within the cloud in any sequence and available format that they would like, regardless of where the information is initially drawn from. Formats available to the content cloud user are eLearning, mobile and PDF. The branding of each modality can be customized to the respective organization that has implemented the content cloud without regard to the actual quantity of content.

Sequencing Topics

Why a ‘Content Cloud’

Why do people use Google®? People use Google to solve problems and gather information at the time at which they need it. The success of Google® is based on intrinsic user motivation expressed as interest. The ability to plug in a search term and generate results that are specific to my request within seconds has revolutionized access to information and most importantly OUR OWN EXPECTATIONS for how we want to learn. Google’s® shortcoming is that it can only draw links for you and reveals results within many different entities that you are then required to explore and vet for yourself.

A content cloud will not only display results of searches but will allow you to aggregate materials together as a single resource that you can either refer to at a later date or reference at the time of need. Content clouds also have smart device interface designs that will pre-filter relevant content based on the device you are using to access the cloud. In most cases this applies to mobile devices where the cloud will only draw on mobile ready content when returning to the user relevant search results.

Aggregating Information

When would content clouds be used?

It is hard to imagine a more prolific performance support tool than the web itself. Content clouds are used in much the same way, in that they provide individuals access to content at the moment of need and in a context relevant manner. The most immediate use case is to support the performance of employees on the job. In thinking about this phrasing, we are not precluding using clouds for ‘training’ in the conventional sense. We are leaving the door open to the notion that training may very well be a function of performance support (operationally speaking) and that using the cloud to train, would be done so at the moment of need.

Other uses of the cloud can take place on the learning administration side where the cloud is used to assemble curricula and training programs by facilitators or content administrators and then handed over to the users or loaded on to an LMS. The cloud performs the same way as previous, the only difference is an operational one at the organization level.

InfoCloud Export