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.

More on LETSI and SCORM 2.0 coming next week.

Technorati Tags: iphone, ical, google calendar, spanning sync

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

Having poured through all this material on a couple of rounds over the past several years, understanding how Covey’s Habits stem from Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) that goes all the way back to the 1920s and even from being in Boy Scouts, I feel like I I have developed very strong, very natural leadership skills…. yet formal recognition of leadership (the “management” word) has often eluded me. What I realized over the last two days, both through the class and in a couple of situations just outside of the class, is this: being a natural leader is one thing; being a leader in an organization is another, and I don’t have the skill/talent to be in that role. I’m not shy about what my plans for my career have been, but this is an epiphany that I will be struggling to get comfortable with over the next weeks/months.

It started with a bit of humor my instructor (who knows me from work) employed where he referred to me as the “techie” guy. It got under my skin as it often does to be thought of as the “tech guy.” I’ve often wondered to myself “Why don’t they ever think of me as the Learning Strategy guy?” Right after this question popped up in my head, in class, I realized this was not the right question to be asking. So I asked myself a question so new to me I had to write it down:

Why do I dislike the perception of me being the tech guy, and what am I doing that’s reinforcing that perception?

Well, for one thing, I stick out as much as stand out. Leaders stand out from the crowd because of their work, their commitment to the team… I stand out because of those things too, but I call a lot of attention to myself. I mean, I can start with my look. I choose the nerdy glasses because their edgy. I like dressing with a bit of zing. I like recognition. I like sticking out. Organizational leaders don’t stand out because of anything they “do.” Organizational leaders stand out despite what they do. In order to stand out, I’m still trying to stand in front of others, and in an organization a leader isn’t out in front. They’re behind the scenes. They blend.

I fit in, but I doubt anyone would say that I blend. That’s a key difference.

Another, larger a-ha, came later. A casual friend of mine joined LinkedIn on Monday who’s looking to leave her 14-year career in teaching and take a chance on doing something, anything new. I’m coaching her through this because I’ve been in exactly that place, and I like helping friends out. As I accepted her request to connect, I looked at her profile and noticed another employee in my HR department that she’s connected to, but whom I know only in name. Well, last week I had the opportunity to meet this person, so I just introduced myself to her and immediately asked her how she knew our mutual friend.

What I failed to do was provide any context for why I would even be asking about this person. So, I probably came off as nerd, weirdo, freak or stalker — point is, I got so excited at the chance to solve this little mystery in my head that I forgot about manners.

So… I’m socially awkward. I do a good job of masking it in most social situations, but it’s situations like this where it starts to show up. Friends and coworkers probably find some of my awkwardness both amusing (or annoying) depending on how or when it manifests.

These idiosyncrasies are common among technical leaders in all areas, but not in areas like HR that deal in the people trades. And that’s where I think my communication issues are coming into play. In technical settings, I often felt like I was the nerd who could speak to the non-techies — but the exposure to non-technical people was pretty limited. Now, I’m in pretty limited company and surrounded almost entirely by non-technical people, whom I must interface with almost 100% of the time. It’s different.

People talk about moving up in organizations as “having to play the game,” and while that may be true, that’s not the challenge I face moving up in an organization. I can’t champion the needs or wants of my team if I’m stumbling over my own words or misrepresenting their end goals. In a more technical environment, maybe it’d be more than acceptable. In any organization, style matters as much as substance — and some of my personality traits just don’t play well when it comes to that kind of communication.

It’s probably made acceptable in peer-relationships because (I’d guess) I add enough value to the relationship where people are willing to look and listen past my rambling (and probably what comes across as moodiness). To consult my team, I shouldn’t have to change a thing — but as my circle of influence grows, so too does the population of people who just don’t know me and whom I don’t know. Those miscues are unacceptable in positions of organizational responsibility.

Everyone reading can learn from this, but this should hopefully resonate with other technology-prone people, peers and friends, who have struggled with opportunities to grow as a consultant, as a developer or as a designer. I don’t know that anyone could put their finger on this in a way that I would understand. My idiosyncrasies are not flaws, but they highlight the challenges I have in navigating non-technical waters.

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.

I welcome your thoughts…

I’m a fan of Clive Shepherd’s blogging and regard him as one of the best learning technology writers around. He has a real sense of the big picture from the inside out, and as a younger practitioner and budding vision guy, I like the fact that I’m always learning something from his blogging.

However, Clive’s opinions on GenY have popped up a couple of times, and for some reason, it really pokes a stick at my pancreas, prompting me to respond in rant-like ways. When that happens, I have to share what’s on my mind. It might be rude, but when the Lord was passing out the congeniality filters, I must’ve been running to the loo (I like to try and write British when given the chance).

Case in point today: Clive’s post on how GenY will weather the seemingly inevitable recession. Having been accused of being brash, arrogant, obnoxious and a prima-dona on more occasions than I care to recall, I guess I identify with GenY even if I’m a couple of years too old for the label, going on most people’s math.

You should read what Clive and I both wrote in context, but I’ll pretty much copy-and-paste my reply here to get the gist of my point. In the US, the divorce rate for the parents of GenY is above 50%. Their parents, mostly of the Boomer set, are of a generation replete with examples of the worst kinds of greed and corruption. The guys who ran Enron to the ground? They were Boomers, not GenY. The guys waging this unconscionable war in Iraq? They’re boomers, by and large — not GenY. The CEOs of these insanely large lending firms that are foisting a US Mortgage crisis on the global economy? They’re also boomers. This broad brush doesn’t paint the whole picture of baby boomers, but let us acknowledge reality: raised in the 80s and 90s where toys, gadgets and items of commerce often made up for the inability to spend time with your kids… well, GenY is what the boomers made of them. You have a generation where most kids did not come from the “nuclear” family mold and were among the first generation to truly have to take care of themselves as their parents had to work more and more. To be fair, I’m positive Gen X and Gen Y is filled with scum, too — we just don’t get as much fanfare as Mainstream Media gives to the Boomers. To see our band of miscreants, you can always turn to YouTube.

So when you have an entire generation who have been raised by a generation that appears to have spent much of its integrity in the late 60s, worked insanely hard, got a little drunk on the prosperity handed down to them by their parents and grown fat on the interest earned in various power and money grabs (junk bonds, savings and loan scandals, risky mortgage schemes…) why shouldn’t GenY want more?

Why shouldn’t they expect more? Not just “more” in terms of treasure or comforts — but more out of themselves? Society has let the bar drop so low that what seems to me as such simple demands as respect, dignity and self-worth pass now as arrogance.

For the first time in living history, GenX and GenY are inheriting a world that has dimmer prospects for the future than the current state — that’s a marked difference from the world and workplace people born in the 50s and 60s inherited.

I think GenY could stand for a little mea culpa from the baby boomers. For all the whining and moaning I read about how GenY is so impetuous and demanding, I think it’s both naive and arrogant to assume that GenY, GenX or just about ANYONE should have to go through a parade of jobs (not careers) where as an employee you’d be expected to attend endless gamuts of meetings with no point to them (the famous “meeting to plan a meeting” meeting, as an example)… or put in the 50-60+ hours a week knowledge workers in the States are pretty much expected to put in now only to see their salaries only marginally increase year after year… or any number of humiliations bestowed upon knowledge workers humorously jabbed at in episodes of “The Office,” where the laughter you emote is always tinged with a touch of bitters because it rings home just a little bit too true. I should reiterate.. it’s naive and arrogant to think anyone should have to work like this just because you might have “paid your dues.”

THANK THE MAKER (as C3PO might say) that I have it good. I have a great job. I feel like I actually contribute something to the world. I feel like I’m actually making an impact — slowly, but I can see subtle imprints on my organization.

I have lots of peers who after 10+ years in the workforce are STILL questioning why they ever left mom and/or dad’s house.

WOW! That’s quite a rant, huh?

So how does this relate to learning again? Well, it’s quite simple: audience awareness. 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

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

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.

Here’s my not-so-scientific report:

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…

1. South Korea
2. India
3. Singapore
4. Australia
5. Taiwan
6. United Kingdom
7. Canada
8. United States
9. Netherlands
10. China

Anyone want to take a stab at how employee productivity by nation matches up with this ranking for a search?

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. So no context is really needed here. I’m revising a course I built last year for the same internal client. Here’s the notes I took down of the high-level changes that need to be addressed.

It goes on and on for about 20+ rows, I won’t retype it all… you can view it here if you really want to. Of the changes spelled out, I’ve identified about three of them as “Critical” — these are the ones that will take the most time to produce, require the most “design” to get the message right, have the highest potential to need more rework because the presentation of the information can be so subjective and they have the most ambiguity. To the client and the project manager, these represent maybe 20% of the changes I need to make, but they’ll probably take about 400% of the time it will take me for all the other changes combined.

See, each change is equally weighted to the client, the subject matter expert and/or the project manager. But on the design and production side of things, we know that there are some tasks that take considerably more resources than others. The degree to which project managers “get it right” weighs heavily on their understanding of what things take more or less effort than others.

There’s another side to it, though. That 20% I’m talking about — a lot of it is playing right into my weak spots, which is visual design. I know a lot of graphic designers who dabble in Flash enough to be dangerous, and I know that many more technically brilliant people who can’t make something pretty enough for them to look at themselves (you know who you are). I’m a jack of both trades but a master of none, which is where I’ll bet a lot of you readers are, too.

I guess I’m not sure what this all means, but it occurred to me on the train this morning that as tensions ride high in project management of learning technology projects, one of the core reasons has to be how each team member weighs the level of effort on a given task — and that’s probably a good place to start having conversations about developing and designing E-Learning with your team. In other words, what does it take to build x? Because there’s nothing to technically building a simple click activity for a timeline… but if you want it to look right, consistent with the interface and the content — it may take a level of effort far beyond the basics of slapping the pieces together or using Articulate Engage. You may draft out the interface for about five hours for a 30-second piece of content, and only the last draft you make is useful.

And… it still might not be “right.”