Both SCORM 2.0 white papers have been submitted, so I’m doing my weekly review (GTD style) and wanted to clear the plate with something lighter than pedagogy or DITA or IE 7 rollouts.
Don’t get me started…
Anyway with a month of using the iPhone, I’ve had one lasting annoyance and that’s synching my calendar information with Google Calendar.
I plunked down $20 and picked up Spanning Sync to sync calendars between Google and my Mac. If you’re a Mac user and you normally use Google Calendar to expose your calendaring information from “the cloud,” it’s worth the $20 for the lack of drama.
It just works. The Google CalDAV deal is great from iCal by itself, but you can’t write from the iPhone using only Google’s CalDAV exposure.
I’ve been using the iPhone like a fiend for organizing my consulting, work and home stuff, so after the 15-day free trial period, I bought it. Spanning Sync usually costs $25/year, but you can save $5 by using my discount code if you decide to buy it:
DYHBSH
In full disclosure, if you use my code I’ll get a $5 referral fee from Spanning Sync. Once you’re a subscriber you’ll get a code of your own so you can make money every time one of your other friends subscribes to Spanning Sync.
Every time I synch the iPhone to the Mac, it syncs with iCal. iCal synchs flawlessly with Google. In version 2.0 (coming soon, I read), they’ll also be able to synch contacts — again it should be no fuss.
Yahoo has a fantastic Design Stencil Kit in several formats, including OmniGraffle and Visio. I’ve recently started jumping on the Information Architecture bandwagon and found that visually planning out a web-based design with wireframes was not only helpful but saved me a bunch of time from the “let’s see what kind of layout I can code today” method.
As I continue to work on my pet project of building good SCORM content for the iPhone (just for kicks), this kit from Yahoo will be a big help.
Paul Artiuch at Wikinomics had a fascinating blurb today abouta recent OECD report that compared how many hours workers spend on average in a couple different nations, vs. their GDP. What’s interesting is that the technological capability edge by itself doesn’t look like the big indicator of GDP that productivity might be.
Artiuch writes:
The OECD numbers, however, show that this linear relationship does not exist. For instance, an average South Korean works almost 1000 hours per year longer than the average Norwegian, while enjoying half the GDP per person. Both countries rank in the top in terms of their use of advanced technologies – Korea might even have a slight edge in terms of internet and mobile adoption. Granted, there are many other factors at play including natural resource wealth, distortions such as wars, workforce participation rates and cultural norms. However, the differences are significant even between seemingly similar countries such as Germany and Italy.
I only mention this because one of the things that Pink and Covey hit at is that the indicators of success are the drive and consistency to keep trying. This is another piece of a performance puzzle that supports that if you have the drive and can keep trying more efficiently… well, to the victor go the spoils.
So keep cranking out that AS3, kids — and reuse the code that works as much as possible
Last week, I finished a two-day class on the 7 Habits for Managers (the FranklinCovey class). I’ve been down this path a few times having attended Leadership Forums a few times, reading through 7 Habits way back in college and the 8th Habit a few years ago. It’s all good stuff, but I entered the class a bit reticent that I wasn’t going to have any big a-has about myself having been through this material before. I was wrong.
On Saturday night, I saw Crowded House perform. This event provided an epiphany that I will attempt to relate in my normal, long-winded and winding manner.
As a former music major and the writer of many many cheesy love songs back when I lazily pursued musical ambitions, I appreciated many torch singers. I knew a handful of Crowded House songs and I like those songs. I’d tape them off the radio or off of other friends who had them on CD when I’d make mixtapes. I just never liked them so much that I had to own their CDs until I worked at a used-CD store. Then I had so many CD’s that, like my penchant for buying books, the CDs just sat in my shelf until the advent of iTunes allowed me to rip them, store the albums electronically and sell of the CDs. As a very early owner of the iPod, I’ve now gone through several iPods, each with far less capacity than my music library. In fact, it is to the point that even though I create new playlists on a weekly basis (the modern day mix tape), I can’t dig into my library fast enough or far enough, and now I just fill my iPod up completely at random just to discover what I have in my library.
Now that’s already a paradigm shift over how most people approach their music library, but it continues further down the rabbit hole. I’ve been taking this approach — just randomly filling up my iPod to listen through my library, metal or classical or outlaw country or throat chants from Nepal — for years now. And it’s through this shuffling that I’ve now heard pretty much every Crowded House song recorded and discovered that I’m a HUGE Crowded House fan. Despite never really being aware of my exposure to them when they were regulars on the airwaves, I look through my catalog of torch songs and they sound like imitations (at worst) or allusions (at best) to Neil Finn’s work, both solo and collectively in his bands Split Enz, Crowded House and the Finn Brothers. This epiphany combined with a deep and abiding love of music drove me to network through friends of friends to find someone willing to go with me (my wife is six weeks from delivering our second child, so standing for three hours at a show is just not high on her preferences — also, she’s much more into metal as far as shows go).
I found a friend of a friend who was game, even though he was just a passive fan of the one or two songs he knew. It mattered not, I just needed to share the experience with someone, as well as enjoy a couple pints of Guinness before the show. It was a fantastic show, and Crowded House introduced several new songs — my favorite new song, “Turn it Around” is below:
After my 2am burrito following the show, I was still pretty awake ruminating on the performance I just saw. I thought a lot about this song and how much I really liked it. I spent a little time on Sunday night (after catching up on Battlestar Galactica) seeing if the set list from Saturday’s show was posted by a fan so I could, at least, figure out the name of the song. By Sunday night, I had not seen a set list from my show… but there were a number of setlists already posted up in various fan forums. This is a practice that goes back to fans of the Grateful Dead, Phish, Black Crowes and Pearl Jam: dedicated fans who chronicle every show and bootleg available. From this I was able to get the name of my song, and then I proceeded to search again for “Crowded House Turn It Around” and TWO YouTube videos came up immediately from different fans at different shows.
It immediately hit me that I should’ve brought my new Flip camera instead of chickening out, but I’m still in a mindset that cameras are going to be taken away at shows, like an unfortunate experience I witnessed years ago at a Phil Collins show. Since then, unless it’s expressly stated that cameras are allowed, I leave them at home.
This thought immediately turned me on my head with regards to how we distribute official knowledge. Let me try and work backwards. See, even three years ago, there wasn’t a YouTube (at least, not a popular one). There weren’t compact video capturing devices that people could afford easily (like around $100). There wasn’t a culture that made it de-facto “permissable” to record concerts even with amateur equipment. If you were brave and cunning enough to sneak in your equipment, there wasn’t a way to easily share it with anyone beyond your immediate friends, unless you were also resourceful enough technically to run your own FTP server, and even if you were using BitTorrent or some kind of Gnutella-based file sharing protocol, people would have to be stumbling onto it — it’s not like you would be able to easily Google it. But now you can. Now, it’s expected that after I go to a show, there are perhaps multiple ways of getting a recording of that show, even if it’s not me who’s doing the recording and posting.
There’s a lesson to be learned with how we approach Subject Matter Expertise. It’s been said on a few forums that the biggest time delay in getting Rapid Learning out to learners is in the Subject Matter Expert reviews. In the current (and arguably antiquated) model, this assumes that SMEs can’t create the content themselves — that producing instructional material is a job for ISDs or content developers — some other “title” or person than the SME themselves.
Well, what if the learners capture the content live and share it, doing the work of producing and tagging material they find interesting? That’s an idea. The rub is that much of the content we’d expose them to probably doesn’t reap the same kind of fandom as a band does. Well, okay then: what if our Subject Matter Experts just put it out there? The tools are getting better (Articulate Studio 08 looks promising and easier than Articulate Studio 5). The tools are getting cheaper. The tools are getting easier to use (try editing some video with iMovie 08 and let it just export directly into YouTube). SMEs aren’t taking up the valuable time to get information out to learners — WE ARE. We need to think differently (again) about what our job is — our job is to help craft the message. We can help contextualize it. But getting the message OUT to learners? That doesn’t have to be the job of content developers or instructional designers any more. And it shouldn’t, because we’re wasting time.
What we should be doing is helping identify what the semantic questions are addressed by the SMEs when they capture their knowledge and publish. We should help make it easier for knowledge centers, be they groups of people or individuals themselves, to know that there’s new informational content out in their periphery and provide border resources to pull information together. Field Trainers and Training Managers can be creating “playlists” of the information that is put out by SMEs, customizing that information for learners who have finite and contextual instructional needs.
We’ve tried to automate this with intelligent agents (both in the instructional technologies and even tools like “The Filter” for iTunes) — and they kinda work. But a good instructor knows how to build curriculum. If we make it easier for people to answer their own questions or for facilitators to pull on knowledge resources to quickly create informational materials, I think you’ll have a state where knowledge transfer happens faster and the information is more appropriate. If you couple this with an ability for the learners to SHARE the information that’s useful to them with others, you start to build communities, however dynamic, of learners engaged in the discourse.
This is how users of many generations behave online now. We need to think about how to capitalize on the active engagement of the learner as a possible facilitator of flexible organizational learning.
GenY workers are going to need to come into the workplace and approach their older coworkers, managers and peers in ways that make them “user-friendly.” I’ve been fortunate enough to land in an environment where the favor is returned many-fold, which is to say — the boomers I work with and for take an active interest in not just “what” I’m saying…. but “why.” I think that’s a pretty good start for a survival guide to working across generations over the next several years. Thanks to this economy, we’re all going to be working together a lot longer than anyone thought
Have you looked at the Stock Market lately? You don’t have to be in the United States to appreciate the situation. We’re in for a bumpy ride. It may not be the end-of-days scenario that noted economists, politicos and pundits predict, but it’s obvious to me here in Chicago that the market is going to be turbulent, which is undoubtedly going to affect what people, organizations and governments spend money on — and that’s going to affect corporate, academic and government budgets… and as far as it impacts corporate budgets, it’s definitely going to impact me and my work. Here’s how I see it rolling.
How solid are those plans for upgrading your LMS? Chances are you won’t unless there are technical reasons that make it an imperative. It might have been difficult last year to make the business case to upgrade a piece of enterprise software last year when the market was still good, but this year with the coffers tightening, dropping another couple hundred thousand (or a couple of million depending on your scale) is just not likely. Big ticket items like LMSs and LCMSs are probably going to be on=hold for acquisition unless you can show without a doubt how what you buy will a) save the organization a ton of cash in other ways, thus reducing costs overall; and/or b) improve productivity in measurable ways, thus reducing your operating costs overall.
In fact, let’s make that the common theme for this post. See, when budgets are just the “normal” kind of tight for learning, education and training, you have the opportunity for doing small Research and Development projects (not like there’s lots of official time for those, but you can fly some pet projects under the radar until you’re ready to show them off). When there’s a promise that next month will be another record breaking milestone, you can get that expansion or that new acquisition through a little easier. But when times get tight, you need to really be concerned about the bottom line — but you also need to focus on infrastructure. You want to be able to do more with less — but you also don’t want the people or the services you rely on to get destroyed in the process of running lean.
Your budget was probably set in stone (concrete, maybe?) before the start of this year. Use it to train your people in a variety of needed skills so that an Instructional Designer or a Content Developer can do a lot more than they could before. Use it to upgrade the authoring tools you use. Use it develop those reusable templates you’re going to need next year.
If your organization hasn’t gone mobile yet, you’re likely not going to in the next two years. Keep reading what other organizations are doing with mobile, because discussing and designing the future is very important — but not as important as being able to squeeze the most value you can right now.
If I was to weigh in on how we’d spend what money we have this year, I’d advise the following:
Definitely
Transition our main authoring tool to something collaborative.
Upgrade our simulation capturing tool to make sure it’s as robust and stable as it can be.
Invent or Acquire a means to manage media assets, learning objectives, competencies and how content maps to and with these things.
Pick up some media software (Flash, maybe something for digital video)
Code for custom E-Learning content (for those custom jobs or content upgrades from years ago that all of the sudden just stop working)
Train the tech savvy on Flash, HTML and JavaScript; train the Instructional Design-savvy on Graphic Design principles. Train everyone on curriculum development, project management and personal productivity skills, because when organizations make due with less, that usually means people who do — do more.
Maybe
Upgrade hardware to mobile equipment to go to where the internal client is
Push out collaborative authoring tools to Subject Matter Experts.
I’d welcome any questions or input on this topic, because I think we’re going to see a shift similar to what the commercial sector saw in 2002 and 2003 when the dot-com bubble burst. For government, this will be the first time in a very long time experiencing this. For you folks in the acaedmic sector, this is old hat to you
Perhaps it’s a side-effect of the age we’re living in, but I’m easily distracted. I have three screens during the day with which to do my digital work. I have two computers. I have virtual desktops that help me stay organized. Two main email accounts. Instant Messaging. Multiple Blogs to write for. About 50 RSS Feeds that I read regularly. Podcasts. Music.
That’s just the digital daily work environment. Couple that with working in a cubical and all the pop-ins that normally happen, and anyone with as many inputs as I have would be prone to distraction, too. I’ve gotten to the point where I can’t really shut off any input without mulling over the fact that it’s gone. But… I still need to tune things out once in a while. This probably sounds like it’s akin to leaving the TV on as background noise while you work, and to some extent that’s true. There are some tasks that require a greater level of concentration. Writing is up there.
As one of my development projects at work is winding down, I’m starting to pick up the organization’s learning standards revision work that I began back in November (funny how time flies). Unfortunately, unlike my email that I normally skim through, this requires me both to read what I’ve already written and make changes based on some feedback that I received — and now append new writing and some re-organization on the side. I can listen to music as I do this, but all the windows I have open on a regular basis make it very difficult to focus my attention. And, call me nitpick-y, even the various toolbars and formatting in all the different Word Processors and text editors I have available to me distract me as I worry about the presentation of the content rather than focus on the content itself.
A good programmer works on abstracting the “presentation” layer of things from everything else. That way, you can “skin” an application or a piece of content to look however you want it to look. I’m now writing with that in mind thanks to two different text editors for both Mac and PC.
On my PC, I’ve downloaded a very simple text editor called DarkRoom, which is basically all the power of Textpad — only it’s fullscreen text on black (instead of black text on white). There’s no spellcheck. There’s no grammar checking. There’s no formatting of the text. It’s simply the text, much like in the days prior to Windows. It blocks everything else out and allows you to just write and save as a .txt file. You can open it or copy-and-paste it into Word when you’re done and do all the formatting there. The software is free, and stable ‘enough’ to use.
This software was inspired by software for the Mac called WriteRoom, which does the same thing but is a bit more mature (and thus is an actual product you have to buy as shareware). WriteRoom allows you to modify a number of settings, including setting the background color. WriteRoom also has an auto-save function, which is always handy. WriteRoom is a joy to use on my Mac and now after trying both of these text editors, especially after reading so much about them on 43 Folders, I get why people love this way of writing.
So if you need to write AND you need to focus on writing, I highly recommend whichever of these runs on your desktop or laptop.
E-Learning is by far more popular in searches, though the volume of searches definitely has dropped from 2004 (which we can discuss by itself ad nauseum as far as reasons why people are searching less for E-Learning). But in 2007, in particular, the notion of “Performance Support” has gained much more buzz in news references. Now, this can mean a lot of things, but the fact that E-Learning never makes a blip in the news probably says something, too.
As we make E-Learning smaller and more granular… are we naturally evolving a model of instruction to something more like Performance Support?
By the way — as an interesting post-script to this, the top 10 regions, in order, who are literally looking for Performance Support, are…
South Korea
India
Singapore
Australia
Taiwan
United Kingdom
Canada
United States
Netherlands
China
Anyone want to take a stab at how employee productivity by nation matches up with this ranking for a search?
One of the links that came across my Del.icio.us feed this weekend was a little post about how to make a living at being a freelance web designer without having to be really good at design. The author wrote about the 80-20 rule — that basically getting 80% competent at being a web designer wasn’t really hard — but that last 20% to go from competent to awesome was really really tough, and takes a very long time.
With learning content so similar in every technical way to web content, the same rules apply, but as with everything in our trade, it’s got a little bit of a twist to it.
Keep reading for an example of real action items from a cursory review of existing content being modified for a new version of the learning content.
Continue Reading »
Flash For Learning is written by Aaron Silvers, Learning Strategist for a multinational corporation. He writes about Flash and Flash-related topics for E-Learning, as well as other musings on organizational learning, within the context of Knowledge Management. Aaron is also a husband, dad, cyclist, musician and nerd.
On my PC, I’ve downloaded a very simple text editor called 
