Flash For Learning

Last Friday, I submitted two white papers forged with considerable ideas and suggestions from professional colleagues (Tom King), fellow professionals (Ethan Estes and Steve Flowers), and new colleagues from around the world (Martin Ebner).

Like Philip Hutchinson, I began the efforts with a serious attempt to produce a formal and very “serious” (read: academic) body of work. I additionally tried to take an informal, yet collaborative approach to writing the papers through the use of Google Docs. Like Philip, even though I turned in my papers on time, I don’t know that I got it all written exactly as I want to express my thoughts. Without ample review of the papers prior to their submission, I must accept that they’re conversation starters (hopefully), and that the discussion that should follow will take the initial ideas proposed and give them life and definition.

My papers are here:

• SCORM 2.0 Content Authoring Standards & Services
• Engagement, Collaboration and Community in SCORM 2.0

I would ask (beg) regular readers and other interested parties to read and discuss the papers on the LETSI pages. But if these papers don’t strike your fancy — there are plenty more to poke your sticks at. At the time of my writing this blog post, there are 70 papers submitted for review, and more are coming in as I write. To say the call for white papers is a success is underscored by the overwhelming (and seemingly unmanageable) response.

Ironically (or just coincidentally depending on whether you’re a fan of Alannis Morrisette or not), the transparent and completely open formation of what is to become SCORM 2.0 is happening at the same time as we learn about the dissolution of the ECMAScript group and the CSS-WG in the W3C. Plenty of good discussions of what went down here, here, here and here.

It’s pretty crazy to me that all the reasons being cited as to why these two groups fell apart all boil down to similar root causes:

1. Trying to take on too much by doing innovation by committee instead of codifying exemplars of best practice.
2. Working behind closed doors.
3. Losing the “vision.”

LETSI is starting off well. Everything is out in the open. You don’t need a login to read any of the goings on — it’s all there for the public interwebs to see. You can read the white papers. You can sign up on the site and add commentary and contribute your thoughts into the fold. You can blog about your opinions and just by mentioning SCORM or LETSI, someone is bound to pick it up with Google Alerts, and even in passing, your constructive feedback is going to get rolled in. Many of us are on Twitter (I’m @mrch0mp3rs). And look at the response so far: 75 white papers submitted for review. I don’t know how many submissions were expected — I figured ~30 would be a success, so the number we have (and more are coming in daily) is just a resounding signal of the interest and the resounding success of transparency.

At least, that’s how I see it.

Managing that level of response is proving to be challenging. The rewards, however, are so worthwhile. Each member of the Program Committee has a “Bird Dog” — which means we have a paper we’re going to actively promote and raise awareness to. I have ten (they’re small ones — like a page each). That also means ten times the discussion (suckas!!!)

We’re going to swipe at these white papers by tagging each of our bird dogs to help us wrangle them into the requirements that will ultimately come together at the SCORM 2.0 Workshop in October (see the LETSI site for details — I’ll be there). The first stab we’re going to take is tagging a paper as proposing a SCORM “evolution” or “revolution.” It may seem simplistic, but we have to get a handle on the wide scope of ideas by starting to categorize them.

• Evolution – SCORM looks like relatively the same animal as before. It has the about the same scope and it solves very similar problems, but perhaps in new and innovative ways.
  
  
• Revolution – SCORM is a new beast entirely. It tackles new problems, increases the scope or completely changes the conceptual model.

The papers I’m particularly fielding are all by Yannck Warnier. I would encourage you to read them and discuss them (topics and links below):

Avoid SCORM Profiles

Cross Domain

Cross Platform Test Suite

Database Structure

Documentation License

Interactions Objectives Example

LMS SCORM Library

Not Exportable Type

Recommend SCORM API

Sequencing Examples

Technorati Tags: scorm 2.0, letsi, standards, css 3, ecmascript 4, w3c, white papers, transparency

I posted how much I was impressed with Doug Lynch from Wharton School of Business… thanks again to Elliot Masie for making these great videos available.

I admit it, I’ve been a big fan of Dan Pink since the book came out. Masie just posted the very well-produced video of his keynote at the Learning 2007 conference.

Gotta love the distribution of information.

Link: sevenload.com

Someone uploaded Don Tapscott’s presentation from a Web 2.0 conference in Berlin. It’s not word-for word, but it’s pretty similar to the keynote he gave at Learning 2007. So for those of you that want to hear straight-up and unfiltered what I’ve been blogging about… enjoy. Since Tapscott’s own blog references it, rest assured that you’re not doing any harm by watching the extraordinarily high-quality bootleg.

Blogging

Notice how I’ve been a little more active of late? A couple of things related to that:

• I’m using MarsEdit to actually post entries to the blog, which allows me to write when I’m at the computer, and not necessarily just when I’m at the computer and online.

• It also translates Markdown syntax for writing in text editors, which is a habit I picked up very early in my blogging that saved me a ton of time by not having to do HTML markup, allowing me to write more “in the flow”. Markdown has had a spotty history of working or not working quite right with Wordpress (it’s back to working again now), but with MarsEdit, I can do it on the fly much faster, which is awesome. Plus the integration with iPhoto and Flickr, so I can add a little more color to the posts.

• Since I’ve been tracking readership of the blog through Feedburner, I now have a better sense of how much this blog gets read a day/week/month, etc. I thought I maybe had 3-4 people a day hitting the blog, which doesn’t encourage a lot of writing, but Feedburner helps visualize for me how many people subscribe via RSS in Google Reader, for example. It also gives me Metrics on how many people from Morden hit the blog (about 8 visits yesterday alone — Hi, England!). And it helps paint a picture for me of what topics are popular and what’s not (SCORM 1.2 and ExternalInteface by a wide margin). Google bought Feedburner. It’s free to use and it’s been a bit of a motivator, since about 60-90 of you hit this site every business day.

Pecha Kucha

One of the things I picked up at Learning 2007, specifically at Dan Pink’s keynote was this Pecha Kucha thing that I talked about earlier. So this morning I tried it in a bi-weekly staff meeting to talk to what I picked up from the conference.

I could see a look of angst in the crowd of peers and superiors in the beginning, as the pace of my presenting was markedly faster — as if to groan, “Oh no… Aaron’s innovating AGAIN.” But after a couple of slides, I sensed a very dramatic change in response. I think my people responded very positively to the change in the format, recognizing the elimination of waste and the amount of focus it takes to put it together and present information in this way.

Truth be told, I thought it would be a breeze to put together, but I actually had a hard time, both in finding good visuals (pictures) to capture what I wanted to share, and in the absence of graphics — condensing text on the screen to be absorbed in a 20-second exposure.

In the end, I found it a strengthening experience and I plan on exercising my Pecha Kucha skills further, especially when I have to present information live. I don’t know how well it would work in an asynchronous environment, because I think part of the experience is the idea of “being in the room.”

Reading

I ordered a couple of books from Amazon based off of suggestions from various friends at Learning 2007. One of them is Gadgets, Games and Gizmos for Learning, which is turning out to be a very interesting read suggested (and blogged about) by both Tom King and Brent Schlenker. When Tom King is telling me how to cheat this book, I’m way sold.

Kapp describes a differentiation within the GenX/GenY populations in four phases affected by the gaming that was available to each part of the population as they came of age. And I’m completely blown away by his observation — like it speaks to me and my peers both of my age, a little older and younger than me.

Kapp describes “gamers” in four groups:

• Gamer 1.0 (gaming from 1970-1980), defined by the game: Pong.
• Gamer 2.0 (gaming from 1980-1990), defined by Pac-Man, Space Invaders, Battlezone, Super Mario Brothers and Tetris
• Gamer 3.0 (gaming from 1990-2000), defined by Myst, Zelda, Manic Mansion, Tomb Raider, Diablo, EverQuest
• Gamer 4.0 (gaming now), defined by The Sims, WoW, Grand Theft Auto III

Each of the defining games have a level of activity that grows more complex with each group; each have a growing degree of realism; each require an increasing degree of cognitive processing; and each require a higher degree of player collaboration than the games preceding them.

This ties in very well with Dan Pink and Don Tapscott.

Interesting, INTERESTING brain dump from Elliott Masie on “Talent 2.0.”

One of the things Don Tapscott (Wikinomics) was very passionate about yesterday was about the future of talent management and retention. Elliott shared some pretty radical but insanely genius points that I’m sure he’s collected from a host of people over the conference.

What if your company had a hiring model where you weren’t trying to hold onto people for 30 years? What if you only tried to hold onto workers for three years and embraced the fact that your talent will leave… learn more… and come back — probably several times in the span of their careers? What if instead of hoarding all the big learning events for managers, your company made it a policy to on-board your workers with a very advanced set of skills and certifications that are transferable throughout your organization and others, like LEAN/Six Sigma, PMBOK, PMP, BABOK and so on? What if you profited from your workers wanting to leave, by contracting them out to your business partners, clients, competitors or even organizations in different verticals than your company’s? What if not only your organization was known for its products or its customer service… but that your model of employee development could become a profit center? What if your company kept up with what your alumni workers were doing and maintained relationships with them to return to your company as consultants, contractors or even clients?

The big thing is that no one really knows what’s going to work in the coming shifts in the demographics of the workforce. No one really knows how well the methods employed in learning and development work NOW. But there are ideas floating around that paint a picture. I’m going to be reading a lot more on this topic, because I find it fascinating, provocative and most of all, truthy.

You could hear a pin drop this entire Learning 2007 conference if you were trying to have conversations about LCMSs. In other words, no one was talking about it other than me. Lance Dublin, whom I admire a lot, led a session on implementation and lumped the LCMS and LMS in the same bucket, but everyone was talking LMSs. LCMSs? Nada, zilch, zip, nein!

So, by a nifty mistake, I ended up in a Learning Consortium meeting instead of the 10 Years of SCORM meeting I had planned to show up to. I sat with Judy Brown and Rovy Brannon from the ADL Academic Co-Lab at University of Wisconsin, and at 8:30 in the morning on the last day of the conference, it became a very intimate open discussion with Elliott Masie, instead of the guided activity to collect themes for the next year of the Consortium.

I addressed the elephant in the room and asked Elliott why no one was talking LCMSs this year when last year we were beaten over the head with it. His reply was honest and maybe a bit surprising.

Elliott told me that an LCMS purchase right now has about a 30-month lifespan, because the real shifts in the tools learning organizations will use will be in powerful Talent Management systems and powerful Content Systems (not solely learning content or authoring tools), because there is a shift more and more towards immediate knowledge, which means that the traditional e-learning as we do it will be supplemented more and more with our broad spectrum of documents (excel, word, powerpoint stuff within what we currently call a document management system). Elliott suggested this is because the search and retrieval features of document management will significantly improve.

Now, Elliott did tell me that it’s not a bad idea to turn on an LCMS because of the workflow benefits we can gain and the way in which it, as a tool, will support standard quality of content… but his caveat was that we should know going in that in three years or so it will probably be outmoded because of the leaps in both technology and the necessary shifts in talent management that will make the top-down management of content too time-taking and too laborious to do. In other words, “rapid” will get “rapid-er.”

So as “learning content” changes in its form, its authors are going to be spread throughout the organization. I think an LCMS is useful for the reasons Masie described, but in the planning for my organization, I need to organize the change management issues related to shifting our Instructional Designers into learning content producers and then, eventually, learning content specialists consulting with the rest of the organization which will do the authoring. That’s a very distinct set of change issues that is related but not necessarily coupled with change management dealing with the LCMS.

When I think about this distinction, I think the LCMS isn’t such a big deal for my organization to handle… and the change around the roles, communication chains and workflow in our future are going to be much more difficult if we’re not very clear about the change we want to create and understand the impacts on all of us and the clients inside the company we serve…

Basic Approach:

• Conceptions of learning and human nature matter
• We tend to adopt one or more of three common sets of conceptions
• There are basic tensions and questions raised by these sets
• It’s worth struggling with these questions

Conceptions of Learning:

• Behaviorist
  • Selection of behavior by educator
  • Pursuit of individual satisfaction
• Cognitivist
  • Mental representations mediate
  • Active learning toward genuine understanding, like a scientist
• Sociocultural
  • Tools & systems beyond the lone thinker
  • Humans embedded in social applications

I’ll forego much of the discussion of Behaviorism and Cognitivism because they’re pretty well-known. Learning isn’t something that an individual does — it’s something that a whole system does. Reading uses a number of different tools. There are heuristics attached — teaching kids to read isn’t about putting something in the kid’s head that wasn’t there before — it’s about filling in the gap in the system that enables them to do something they weren’t able to do before.

People are essentially social, where others fill-in the gaps. People only function in environments where they have the tools to function — maps, communication tools, etc.

Does it matter if people “genuinely understand” as long as they get the behavior right? One answer belies a cognitive slant — that given the right information and the right environmental variables, it’s still up to the individual to be able to make the right decisions. The other answer is hard-nosed, “the result is all that matters” model of performance.

At a meta-level, we need to treat people as cognitivists… but as an organization, we need to be behaviorists. Over a long enough timespan, behaviorists believe that a dumb, rigid process selects and reinforces things naturally. In the case of intrinsic motivations, though, behaviorism can subvert the things that cognitivists nurture and take away the performance unless there is the motivation to follow it.

Can others choose the direction of learning, or should people explore? There’s no solid answer one way or the other on this. Which is why sociocultural approaches may make more sense in a corporate environment.

Do individuals learn, or does learning involve others, objects and tools? Instead of formal assessments, use authentic assessments where the assessment is built into the activity, like a simulation. We think of individuals as units that can be moved around an organization (or outside of it).

“Wikinomics” is up for a Pulitzer Prize for Business literature.

How are youngsters changing the way we think about talent? Training, retention, collaboration and managing them? Within this new culture, there is a new culture of work and therein will lie the answers of how to accomplish this.

Myspace has 220 million members, growing at 2 million members a week. 85% of all college students are on Facebook (700,000 in Toronto alone). But this is no longer about getting online — this is now about a new mode of production. Web 2.0 is a change in the way we innovate the structure and architecture of an organization. It’s changing learning in many ways, driven by economic, social and demographic factors.

Tapscott worked with a group of 300 kids; found out they have no fear of technology. They’re not thinking about the technology — they’re thinking about what they’re using it for — the content, be it a live chat with their friend(s), downloading from iTunes, looking through the Hubble telescope. We focus on how amazing it is that technology enables this… they’re thinking about how cool Mars is.

The population is biforcating. There’s a huge wave of youngsters (biggest in other parts of the world) under 28 and they’re entering the workforce. Meanwhile, we talk about cutting funding for education and there’s more kids under 28 than there ever were Baby Boomers.

If you look at the map of kids under the age of 15, India and China dwarf the rest of the world. And Asia as a whole is way more wired than the US and Western Europe.

Kids are growing up bathed in digital. They watch less TV than the Boomers. They telescope online, chatting, IM’ing AND doing their homework on the computer when they get home from school. They think differently. Brain development between 8 and 18 years is affected by the change from being hooked on video. Kids are now authorities on the massive changes in government, economics, trends, ideology — because they’re more connected. Kids are lapping their parents on the information track.

“Kids look at Email as a formal technology, like for thank-you letters and official communications.”

How these kids are different:

• They want freedom of choice
• They want freedom of mobility
• They are better scrutinizers
• They have integrity and expect integrity

“The Daily Show isn’t funny… unless you know the news”

• They need to be entertained (which is blended in with learning, collaboration and “work”)
• They want speed, not immediate gratification. They can’t stand useless bureaucracy.
• They flock to innovation

This leads to Talent 2.0 — the kids got it right. Paradigms put boundaries around things — based on assumptions that are so strong that you don’t think about them. Peter Sengey was right in that the person at the top can’t learn for the organization as a whole.

And… it turns out that I’m one of three people in the entire audience blogging this by show of hands. Nice.

Tapscott just stated that the Gen X’ers are having more problems adapting to these changes than the Boomers, because the Boomers have kids and understand better how to talk to them.

Opinion: I call bulls__t, but I agree with everything else Tapscott is saying, so I’ll investigate further at his follow-up session.

The new web is dropping collaboration costs (the technology is just better), so peers can now come together and create value. Marketocracy is a peer-to-peer mutual fund with picks selected by the network. Wikipedia puts out encyclopedic information that rivals Britannica. Zopa allows people to borrow money from other people without the need for banks. Linux is the dominant operating system in the world, and it’s not “owned” by anyone.

Stanton Wortham from The University of Pennsylvania, Wharton School of Business is talking about learning theories, their characteristics and contradictions.

Behaviorists believe that organisms learns by feedback from their environment. B.F. Skinner is among the most prominent behaviorists. You create a situation that rewards students for doing what you want them to do. Positive behaviors lead to positive responses — negative behaviors result in negative responses. Behaviorists want control and access to good rewards, has to have clear goals for what they want students to achieve and they need to be consistent.

Cognitivists believe that students need to have control of a situation in order to understand it. Students are trying to get students to build their own models of understanding of the world. They create an environment with lots of tools and manipulables to come up with their own answers and monitor/question their actions to support the students in building their own path to the right answers. When students fail, it presents an opportunity to revisit issues and choose another path.

Behaviorists and Cognivists believe that the individual is the thing that learns, and learning transfer happens when an individual learns something from one context and applies it in another context. Socio-culturalists believe that it’s not individuals that learn, but a system that learns. It’s not crucial that an individual understands everything about a subject, but that they contribute their part to the system.

Note… this is the first time I’ve heard about a theory of social learning, so I need to find out more about this because I’ve previously thought of myself as a Cognitivist, but this sounds like a way to highlight where learning is going — possibly coupled with Cognitivism.

I was originally going to go to a discussion on Performance Support with Frank Nguyen next, but I may follow up more with Dr. Wortham.