mLearning. sLearning. The venerable and ancient eLearning. Can we just be clear that these names refer to product channels and/or brand names but not to actual 'learning'? I think the one that comes closest is social learning and that is most helpful in a Web 2.0 way in that it indicates, in my mind, a break with the way we've done education and training since the start of the Industrial Revolution when we started this idea that the demonstration of one's skills and knowledge should be done in some increasingly artificial and solitary manner. Social learning at least acknowledges that for the whole of human history, the activity of learning has taken place within the context of a group or social setting.  Why do I bring this up? Because it causes trouble is why. The same way that the fiction of Dale's Cone of Experience (w percentages of course) creates false expectations - the same way that the mythical story that a Hall of Fame hockey player would ever skate to where the puck isn't creates an illogcial structure for performance - these things just aren't wrong or misunderstood - they make our jobs harder.  Have you ever, ever sold learning? If you have, I'd like to buy some - what quantities does learning come in? I've seen training for sale. Seen some good performance support products. Seen some great mobile solutions. Never saw learning.  So what's the problem? Well describe the ROI of learning. Like nailing jello to the wall right? I can describe metrics related to an individual's or an organization's performance though. I can tell you if that performance changes after contact with a training product or after the deployment of a performance support system - if I have access to establish a baseline and collect the metrics afterwards. What I can't tell you is if anything was learned. Maybe it was. Maybe the folks have learned how to mimic someone doing the job right - that's learning but not a metric related to whatever product you deployed.  How about we just talk about how effective these channels are reaching more people or allowing greater access to content or support at the moment of need? I know we'll keep calling it xLearning but let's just be clear that A) it's not really learning and B) we can do that as long as we accept that we're also creating issues for ourselves by doing that. ....and no, the Chinese character for crisis is not a combination of danger and opportunity. 

Would you ever go camping and just set your tent up without checking the ground underneath? You're supposed to check the view in your mirrors when you first get in the car right? Would you ever travel to a foreign country for the first time without at least glancing at a guide or phrasebook? Hopefully you answered "no" to those questions - let's act like you did anyway.  What you're doing up there is establishing the context for your actions - hopefully you're doing that because you know that understanding that context can be key to that endeavor being successful. Now here is where it gets weird. You'll do those things, sometimes without thinking, and yet chances are you've deployed an enterprise-wide application costing many thousands of dollars without even a second thought for the culture into which you're tossing it. You also recruit people, hire them and toss them into a mix of you-don't-even-know-what. This great article by Meghan Biro really made me think about this this morning.  Everyone should understand that yes, you have a corporate culture. Culture grows organically - it doesn't need you to consciously act to grow it. The only difference is that if you are conscious of it, then you have a chance to actually influence it.  What Meghan's article did for me this morning was remind me that culture impact everything we do. Also, that at any one time, multiple groups within your organization may be living out different cultures. Don't think so? Go hang out with the developers or engineers for a while. Then go hang out with let's say the finance department. Yeah, exactly.  So how do you unite different generations and different operating units? You have to create/maintain/live a set of cultural values that is larger than any of those other silos. Don't be afraid to give people something larger than themselves to belong to. We actually really like that.   

It's no secret that I love time travel. Doc Brown and Marty. H.G. Wells...and of course, I'll take this chance to drop in this image ^ Allons-y and all that! I was reading "Advancing Ethnography in Corporate Environments" edited by the amazing Brigitte Jordan, and on page 16 of the Introduction, she brings up the role of time and temporality in corporate life and how those business ideas of time don't always align with how ethnographers need to grasp the organization of time in particular clients. This got me thinking though..... My employer, PeopleFluent is in the software-as-a-service space. We build human capital management software/systems (sales pitch available on request). That means that we have software developers, project managers, support, professional services, and the more standard corporate functions - finance, HR, L&D (that's me!)....it hit that all those units work together but none have exactly the same time cycles. Not only do those internal functions have their own time cycles, but because we have ongoing, daily relationships with our customers - we have their time cycles to be concerned with as well.  So what right? Well think about how the different time cycles carry their own pressures and demands not to mention the ad hoc time pressures created by someone walking into your office and dropping a new request on your desk. Then we sit around and wonder things like 'why aren't people taking our courses'? I'm just wondering if these competing time cycles are a vector that rarely gets factored into our planning. Are we trying to get hold of SMEs who are developers close to a new version release? Ever tried talking to finance folks at the end of the month?  Can we be time travellers then? Do we traverse all the time cycles of the organization and try to at least raise awareness of them? Do we factor in time differing pressures to our design and development schedules? So how could we draw all these various time cycles? Sine curves? Venn diagrams?  Can you picture a wall of clocks on the wall...they used to be set to different world cities but now they're labeled "Version Releases" "Support Calls" "Course Development"....? How different wold those be and what is that impact? ...just questions for now, for answers I'll hop back in the TARDIS and see you soon ;-)  

 We pour huge amounts of money into the recruiting process, scouring resumes and LinkedIn. We spend more hiring the exact, right employee. Are we thinking though, as Frank Herbert wrote, "a beginning is a very delicate time." So how do we handle those first, few moments when people show up on their first day, go to their desk for the first time (forget how much more delicate a beginning is for remote employees)? How much attention do we pay to that introduction to the reality of of organizations - those first moments when they are out of the recruiting envelope and into the job? I think that as it relates to this one moment at least, Ogilvy and Mather flat out nailed it.   I can't tell you how much I think this is a home run (what's more than a home run? Grand Slam I guess). They took steps to create something that not only imparts to a new hire their importance to the organization but also what the company's values are AND does it in a tangible, physical way that serves as a unifying point for all employees in a globally dispersed organization.  I'm looking at this box and the items in it and the quotes on it and although I am very happy where I am building a new learning environment at PeopleFluent; this package makes me want to do better. I can't imagine what it would be like to show up at work and find this on my desk on the first day.  So because we're all talking about organziational cultures and new forms of organizations and how to build them....this is important - THIS is a physical manifestation of organizational culture. Yes, of course it has to be backed up with real policies and support from management, etc but this is what it looks like at this level. Give everyone a rallying point. Make the culture you want visible. Make people PROUD to work for your organization. This box, this says all that. Well done. 

If you're on a business trip and you have to fly - think back to those days of yore when that meant that you would be out of touch for that time. I don't remember havign a lot of anxiety about it because we didn't kow anything else. You knew it was going to happen and you accepted it. Do that again. A couple of books (more are out there) address this - there is "The End of Absence" by Michael Harris and Sherry Turkle's "Alone Together." Truth be told, that's not even what this post about but I thought it was important since it's how I got the idea. Anyway.... I've always been interested in cyborgs. As far back in the distant past as 1995, I even got the chance to drop an article in a book called "The Cyborg Handbook." (you should all get An Illustrated Dictionary of Cyborg Anthropology by Amber Case if you haven't). My point in highlighting those works is that they both seek a more expansive view of cyborgs than we have traditionally thought of...I'd argue that the mobile phone has turned us all into Man/Machine combinations - cyborgs. That's cute and all but why does that matter? It's important when we think about designing experiences for people using their mobile devices. This isn't just about screen size...we need to keep in mind that we're designing for something that people see as an extension of themselves. How you like some e-learning designed for and delivered in the most personal of spaces/devices? That's what phones are now. You have to respect that space very differently than you do a classroom or even a course delivered via a laptop. Appropriate and thoughtful use of that space though has HUGE potential.  I was reading an article in WIRED about how mobile phones had unlocked so many creative outlets (for good and ill). One thing that struck me was this idea that with mobile phones, we can essentially tap into an emotional infrastructure made up of all of our learners and their very personal relationships with their phones. We need to think about how the dynamics that power such an onslaught of creativity on our mobile devices can be mimicked inside the enterprise. That's what people are really after when they say they want Facebook or Twitter inside the firewall....they want, enterprises are jealous of that storehouse of creativity and emotion that people tap into for all sorts of other things. To do that though, enterprises are going to have to ask themselves some hard questions.  People engage with those platforms in the same way they do with their mobile phones - with emotion and with a sense of ownership (there are many Flickrs but this one is mine). This isn't a technology question. These will be questions around how we organize our enterprises, how we determine and model corporate values, how we build relationships with our employees and our customers. These are very human questions - I hope we can find some very human answers.   

So when I was a wee kid, you know, before the Internet, we used to go on the car trips...usually like 4-5 hours...doesn't seem bad now but then, to a kid w lots of energy, that was like a day and a half. So I had saved up and bought a tape recorder - yeah, that long ago. I used it to tape TV shows to listen to in the back of the Grand Safari while I read my comic books. I don't remember all I taped but I remember two shows - Battlestar Galactica and Mork and Mindy. I loved those shows. Still a little sad that I missed the window on those suspenders. I remember when Jonathan Winters came on as their kid. Genius.   I had "Reality...What a Concept" and almost wore that album out. Good Morning Vietnam was amazing, Dead Poets Society is a flat-out all-time favorite - powerful and laced with painful irony now - Good Will Hunting - just no words for that performance. I don't have any great lessons here...I'm just remembering and missing someone who has been making me laugh my whole life. I'm gonna miss that guy. 

...how many Twitter followers they have? LinkedIn Connections? Instagram followers? Do you know if they have a blog/tumblr? Do you have any idea at all what kind of network that person will be bringing into your organization? Why not? No, seriously, why not? When discussions about blocking networks like Twitter and Facebook at the corporate firewall seemed more common (they seem to have settled down but I could be just not hearing the stories), one example I always used was about ROI. Now if you hire me and block my networks, you get the ROI of Me - depending on who you ask, that's worth either a lot or a little. If however, you hire me and allow me access to my networks, you get me PLUS the knowledge I can draw on from those networks that I've spent years cultivating - no matter what you think I'm worth, the ROI of Me + My Network is (does math in head).....MORE. When you look at my resume though, you've got no way to judge the value or potential value of my network - why not?  I know that some marketing groups/firms are using things like Klout and Peer Index to measure potential hires' social network strength but should that become more of a standard practice? If everyone in your organization is supposed to act as a brand ambassador, do you have any idea at all what the social networking reach of your ambassadors is? Did you just hire a Maven or a Connector? Can you / should you be looking at how to teach your employees to become Mavens and Connectors? We teach them all sorts of things but are we teaching them how to build and leverage the power of networks? Are we teaching them to become more valuable to our organizations by becoming part of more productive networks? Why not?  

I was never really good in art class growing up. I’d immerse myself in the project of the day and be proud of what I’d made, only to look up at the end and discover that everyone else had glued their macaroni or painted their plate just a little better than I. I particularly liked collages, I think, because they offered the less talented more room for error — mistakes just look like creativity in a collage. Maybe elearning is like a collage. Some text here, a photo there. Some images I cut and paste along the edge. And then maybe I move everything around and try another lay-out. I like that. I like strategy and learning by experience. So mapping out a template and building it 14 ways definitely floats my boat. Rapid-prototyping was practically invented for the strategist and activator (StrengthsFinder) in me. And I like a lot of other things about elearning: Having all these programs, and multiple instances of some, open at once: Captivate, Photoshop, PowerPoint, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Internet Explorer, Word, TweetDeck, Handbrake, Dropbox, Excel, and Project. The Rapid eLearning Blog and tips like how to make a PowerPoint template. Cathy Moore’s dedication to language. That elearning people are into Twitter and Facebook (community from Cali to London to Austrailia). Creative elearning people coming up with cool logos like the awesome little Litmos monster and the ninja photo of the eLearning Brothers. Cammy Bean. The beautiful, sleek, amazing app machine known as the iPad. Screenr. Saying, "How about a hover over?" The writers I’ve read the most: B.J. Schone, Jane Hart, Tom Kuhlmann, and Clive Shepherd. Nudging assets on the screen. Tahoma, Verdana, and Kristen ITC. Articulate — the authoring tools, the company, the blogs, and the online presence. Drop shadows. PNG files. Editing the Captivate files being discussed during the conference call. Putting secret doors throughout my elearning modules, mainly so I can jump around quickly, but also the occasional surprise room I hope some learner finds. Absorb, the best LMS on earth.

The landscape of learning management system (LMS) vendors is constantly changing. There have been dozens of acquisitions in the past decade, including a big one this week. This can be a scary time if your organization happens to be using an LMS that gets acquired by or merged with another company. After all, you’ve most likely invested thousands of dollars and many hours getting it set up and configured to work well. So, if your LMS vendor gets acquired by another company, what should you do? What questions should you ask? My first piece of advice would be: Just relax. The process of merging two business generally takes a while. You most likely won’t see any overnight changes. Take this time to think through several scenarios and prepare a list of questions for your account representative. Below is a starter list of questions that you may want to ask. The account rep may not know all of the answers if the news is still fresh, but it’s good to start thinking in these terms. To keep things straight, I’ll use the terms acquirer (the company who is making the purchase) and acquiree (the company who is being purchased). Question to ask: Why (specifically) was the company acquired? How will the roadmap for the LMS change? Will the underlying technologies change? What products, services, features, etc., of the acquirer will be made available to clients of the acquiree? How will the support model change for the acquiree, if at all? Will the hourly rate change for the acquiree? (ex. For customizations) Will any of your technical or support contacts change? Will there (still?) be an annual conference for the LMS and its users? I’m sure I left off some questions. What else would you add?

Larry Ober has been nominated as Best eLearning Designer in the Maestro eLearning Awards, dubbed the OSCARS of the eLearning industry. What follows is an interview between Steve and the award’s organizers, Maestro eLearning. Q. How did you get your start with eLearning design? Several years ago we engaged a vendor to create three eLearning modules for a new product launch. As you know, good quality eLearning modules are expensive. We were happy with the results, but realized after only a few months that the content already needed updating. When I went back to the product marketing team with the request for budget to re-engage the vendor, they were less than enthusiastic. So I offered to create the updates myself, if they would pay for authoring software. They agreed, and we invested in Articulate. Since then, I have created numerous eLearning modules, games, assessments, and other content. I’ve expanded to using Toolbook and other software. My largest project to date was the creation of three learning modules for a (different) new product launch. They were very successful, and I’ve updated them twice since they were created. By doing all this in-house, I’ve saved our marketing team well over $100,000 just on that one project. Q. Wow! What are some tips you have for new developers? First, be aware that many LMS systems already have integrated authoring software. If your company uses an LMS for learning content, ask the vendor if they have authoring software as well. These packages are usually easy to use, and integrate easily with the LMS you are using. If you plan to buy a stand-alone authoring platform, first consider how  much time you can spend learning to use it, and what capabilities you really need. Authoring software can be relatively simple, such as packages that convert PowerPoint slides to a SCORM compliant module. Other brands are very sophisticated, but you’ll need to take a class on how to use it, and plan to spend a lot of time on the learning curve. Finally, make sure the publishing capabilities match your needs. Most commonly you’ll need software to publish to a SCORM compliant module, but which version of SCORM does your LMS use? Do you have a need to publish to self-running CDs? How about mobile platforms, like the iPhone? Know your actual needs before investing money and time in an authoring software package. Q. What are some of your favorite tools? So far my personal experience is limited to Toolbook and Articulate as authoring tools. I’ve also used Audacity, a free audio creation and editing tool, as well as various video encoding and editing tools. For the novice user that wants to turn PowerPoint presentations into serviceable SCORM compliant eLearning modules, I’ve been very happy with Articulate. It allows the user to include audio, simple interactive animations, quizzes, and flash video. If you don’t need the SCORM encoding, another option is iSpring, a free tool that will convert a PowerPoint to flash video. For the more advanced user, or anyone authoring eLearning full time, Toolbook,  Adobe, and Lectora offer suites of software that are state-of-the-art. Both have sophisticated authoring capabilities, but either will involve a substantial learning curve if the user isn’t already familiar with authoring tools. Q. Before we end, could you expand your earlier thoughts on mobile-conscious design? Mobile devices, starting with PDA’s and now smartphones, revolutionized how sales calls are entered, and everything about CRM. In my experience, however, they haven’t delivered big gains in training—yet. The problem has been trying to fit traditional eLearning content on the smaller screen. In most cases, the read-ability is inadequate. In my experience, the screen size is appropriate for reference material and some interactive job aids. Another common use is for reference apps, usually simple calculators or wizards, to be used on the fly for calculating pharmaceutical or medical values. Two areas that have potential for growth are, first, as a response key pad for daily or weekly training updates. This would enable the standard ‘district conference call’ to become an interactive experience. A second future use may be as a time management device. Apps are becoming available that will use GPS technology to track where you are, and how long you are there. These apps can graphically present how long you spend at each customer location during a week or month, and track that according to that account’s current or potential sales. This analysis would allow the user to spend the time in the accounts that have the most potential. About the Interviewer Maestro eLearning is a customer service company in the business of creating custom online training courses. They’re collaborating with industry consultants and vendors to launch the Maestro eLearning Awards. Delight your colleagues and consider nominating them for some awards, such as Best eLearning Designer and Best eLearning Developer.