Alzheimer’s is the cleverest thief, because she not only steals from you, but she steals the very thing you need to remember what’s been stolen. ― Jarod Kintz "Bedpan for 119!" The words were slung across the counter like a diner waitress ordering ‘Shit on a Shingle’. "Excuse me?" I turned toward the speaker. "Yes?" "What did you just say?" "Bedpan for 119. Again. She’s pretty regular today," chuckling at her own wit. "Really?" The little voice inside me that attempts to keep me from uttering socially unacceptable comments (a hopeless job at best) fainted dead away. Faithy "For your information, ‘119’ is a person. She survived The Great Depression, a World War, an incurable and debilitating disease, and an alcoholic husband. She raised two successful daughters, taught hundreds more in elementary school and cared for her aging mother. She is 94." I drew breath. "And she never once referred to another person as a room number." "I didn’t mean…" "But, you did." I turned my back on her and went to visit Mother. *** It’s not that we were close, other than biologically. Mother was often aghast at what her daughters said and did on a regular basis. She was proud of us, sure. But she truly hoped that somehow we would be "gentler and kinder" than we were. Daddy took care of that, but she continued to hope until hope left her life at age 92. That was the year my husband left on an emergency midnight trip to New Hampshire to check on her in the hospital; the year that her friends in the assisted living home couldn’t cover for her any longer; the year that she ceased being the person she had been for all those years. She forgot to pay bills; she didn’t bother to come down for meals; she neglected her personal appearance. When my sister and I arrived shortly after my husband’s flying intervention to evaluate the situation, there were neat little pyramids of magazines and mail all over her living room floor. And on her hallway table was a pile of bright blue "You missed a meal - invite a friend!" tickets. I left Penny to deal with those and went in search of management. At 88 "Ah - Faithy. The Belle of our ball!" The woman’s smile was enough to curdle milk. Not that Mother was not the "Belle of the ball"…I am sure she was. She spent a lifetime being a social butterfly. She was exceedingly good at it. It made her happy. It made her friends happy. It made total strangers happy. Who were we to argue just because it did not make us happy? But none of that was the point. "Your ‘Belle’ hasn’t been eating much lately." I smiled back. She mistook the smile for friendliness. "Yes. We bring her up a bowl of soup now and then to tide her over." "Tide her over for what? There have to be a month’s worth of missed meals." "Well…" "And how often does the cleaning lady do her room?" "Oh! She comes in every Saturday morning. She just loves Faithy…" "Has she mentioned that she couldn’t vacuum because of the piles of magazines and mail all over the floor?" "Oh well, yes, I do believe she may have mentioned…", she vaguely pawed at message slips on her highly polished mahogany desk. "And that the towels so neatly folded in the bathroom have not been touched since the previous visit?" "Well, …" She looked past my left shoulder as if hunting for some crisis that she could run off to. "And didn’t those two events, if nothing else, suggest to you that your ‘Belle’ might be headed for serious trouble mentally?" "You must understand…" "I understand perfectly." I proceeded to - as my even less socially acceptable friends would say - ream her another one. I ended up with a quote from the legal agreement that Mother had signed when she first took up residence several years earlier…the part about regular nurse checkups and monitoring and intervention. The woman’s smile had turned sour by the time I left her. So had I. *** I stepped carefully over a pile of newspapers. "So," I said, "how soon can we get her moved?" Penny sat back with a fist-full of unopened mail in each hand. "I can come back in a couple of weeks…and John can probably come up from North Carolina to help with heavy lifting." "I think Eric can come up from New York. I’ll call to make sure. And rent a small truck" "But where…?" "Our house." I sighed as plans for my ‘front parlor’ faded away. "You always seem to be the one…I’m sorry…" "Can’t see putting her on airplane to California…can you?" "Not really…" "In the meantime, I suspect I have scared the resident functionary sufficiently to make sure she gets fed and bathed until we can get back here." I surveyed the remaining piles of paper. "I’ll get a trash can and dump all these mags - how are you doing with the bills?" "Getting there…trying to find the latest one for each and pay that one." *** Alzheimer’s disease has no survivors. It destroys brain cells and causes memory changes, erratic behaviors and loss of body functions. It slowly and painfully takes away a person’s identity, ability to connect with others, think, eat, talk, walk and find his or her way home. Alz.org We cleaned up the chaos and two weeks later Mother was on her way to live with me until she died two years later. It was not pretty. Alzheimer’s never is. In my brain I knew that going in. In my heart I had no conception of the devastation a person with this disease can leave in their wake. She became violent. She began wandering off so we had to have someone with her every minute of every day. One of us slept on the couch every night for her last year on earth because she would try to run away in the middle of the night. She lost the ability to dress herself. My husband and I went nowhere, ever, together. For two years we lived together as if we were single "parents" of an ailing child. One of use always had to be "there" for Mother. And through it all, her body soldiered on long after her mind had ceased to function. The bed pan incident was the last of a string of short-term stays in nursing facilities on her way to death. Each time she went in, we prayed she would quietly leave us, but she always rallied. She finally ended up in the hospital. We could care for her as long as she was ambulatory, but the last in a series of little strokes had left her unable to walk. That marked an end to our custodianship. *** At 90 "How is she?" I had driven well over the speed limit from my job in Waterville to get to the emergency room. "Not responding much at the moment." My husband was - as usual - the person who was on the spot when anything happened. The doctor stuck his head in behind the curtain. "We are going to start life support in a few minutes." "Excuse me?" He paused as if speaking to a dullard. "Life support. To keep her breathing." "You will not do any such thing." I amazed myself at how calm I sounded. "What?" "She has an DNR - a do not resuscitate order." "And who are you?" He had gone from being obnoxiously condescending to just being obnoxious. "Her daughter. Durable power of attorney. The DNR is on record with the hospital." And we squared off. "I will put her on life support if I decide to regardless of what ‘you’ say." He barked at me. I searched for calm and surprisingly found it. "It has nothing to do with what I say. It is what she said. Twenty years ago. In the presence of an attorney. To protect her from Doctors like you." We ended up in the social worker’s office where the DNR was read, validated and the Doctor was instructed about what he would and would not do. "You know," I said to the woman after the doctor had stormed off, "Mother took great care to make plans to prevent exactly what he was going to do to her. Does he really think she has a quality of life at this point? Or does he think at all?" The woman was wise enough to remain silent. *** She laid in the hospital bed under palliative care waiting for a permanent place in a nursing home to open up. I didn’t have to complain once she was moved out of emergency. They waited on her hand-and-foot; they sang songs to her; they cajoled her into eating her tapioca; they wheeled her down the hall in her wheelchair so she could sit in the sun. I did not relish turning her over to what I knew to be less caring staff. As it happened, she did not have to suffer that last insult. She finally breathed her last in her sunny hospital room while waiting for paperwork to clear for the nursing home in Prospect. I would like to say that was the end. But there was a post-script coming. Two months after her death - and a month and a half after sending notification of her death to the social services department, I got an official notice from that same department informing me that her claim for support was being denied. The stated reason? Written in hand: "Because she is dead". Even I - who am almost never, ever, without a witty and/or cutting come-back depending on the circumstances - was speechless. I recovered sufficiently to render one last scathing defense of my mother’s humanity to an uncaring civil servant and then gently closed the book on her life. We buried her ashes beside her long-dead husband in the little graveyard down the road from the house where she was born. The rest of her family is there and I am sure - I have to be - that wherever she is now that she has escaped her personal hell on earth, she has regained her memories and her ‘self’. You lose the person you love. And you are left with the shell… And you are expected to go on loving them even when they are no longer there. You are supposed to be loyal. It’s not that other people expect it. It’s that you expect it of yourself. And you long for it to be over soon. ― Alice LaPlante It took us six months to realize that we could leave the house together. Our first foray into the world together as a couple? A trip to the grocery store. It was fabulous.

Such an odd phrase - "neither fish nor fowl". So, of course the moment it snuck into my mind, I had to go searching for its origins. It seems that the expression may have first appeared in a slightly altered manner in John Heywood’s 1546 proverb collection: Neither fish, nor flesh, nor good red herring It is actually thought to have alluded to what various members of society at the time were expected to eat - fish for the clergy; meat for commoners; and red herring for paupers. So if something was neither fish, nor flesh, nor good red herring - it was not fit for consumption of any kind. Well - that is not where I was going when the title occurred to me. I was headed, instead towards a neither-nor kind of discussion; how mLearning is neither ILT, nor online…but something else altogether. Given current pressures to do more with less, the temptation is to just ram one or the other of those traditional (Was anyone watching when online training became traditional?) formats into a mobile delivery format and call it a day. Not only does that not make sense, it spells disaster…much in the way that "pool" was described as spelling "trouble" (right here in River City…). (My brain is like a good old barn - full of things I keep tripping over that I have forgotten were there but am delighted to have found again…anyway…back to mLearning.) Density First of all - both print and online formats are too dense. I already complain they are too dense the way they are currently delivered much less on an even smaller screen. White space is probably the single most under-rated aspect of human comprehension. Let me breath! Give me a little room to contemplate what I have just read. If you do, I might actually remember it. Or use it. Or bring it to bear on some problem I am facing. In the science of graphic design, white space is the element of design that allows objects to exist at all. If there is not what space (ie: a page) there is no place for an object to rest. The delicate balance between white space the placement of objects is to comprehension of the objects. This illustration is eloquent in expressing the difference a little white space can make: http://www.w3.org/wiki/CSS/Properties/white-space Online is ostensibly better at this than print, but you cannot prove it by a general perusal of most online training materials. It is still dense. It is just packed tight with different "stuff" such as pictures and slide bars, and navigation. We have this inbred need to make use of every inch of available print space. Anyone over the age of 35 probably actually feels "guilty" about leaving white space on the page. That all comes from when newsprint was dear. "All that was fit to print" meant all that could be fit on the page in tiny little letters. Space was money. Money cut into profits…you get the picture. And it is still true today in print training materials. But online should have realized by now that it can spread out a bit. Change is difficult. http://blogs.cas.suffolk.edu/history182/2013/03/21/question-2-the-great-depression-and-the-new-deal/ It is even more difficult when you go from huge (in comparison) canvases to hand-held mini-screens. Less has never needed to be more "more". Say what you want to say as succinctly as possible. No wondering about. (Like I do all the time in this blog…) No tangents. No "nice to know". Become a convert to the Dragnet school of writing…"Just the facts, ma’am." Size http://www.123rf.com/photo_12482623_basic-set-of-modern-web-mobile-application-icons.html I hate to say it, but sometimes size does matter. You know all those cute little buttons and icons you use online to let people direct themselves around? If you just shrink them down they get really tiny. And while my granddaughter can easily "click" on them with her equally tiny hands, I am going to "click" on half the paragraph along with the icon. So if you have more than one icon around I am going to hit both - or none. Don’t frustrate us. Make icons large enough to accommodate a human adult finger. Even better - as shown to the left - put a descriptive little graphic in your icon rather than trying to 1) write what it does in teensy-tiny letters inside it or 2) taking up valuable real estate with a lengthy text explanation beside it. And about pictures. You have no way of knowing where your "student" will be while reading your training. Pictures that are too dark will not display well if there is any glare around. And that gorgeous flow chart that has enough detail to keep a graphical designer busy for the next month or so is totally lost in an m* environment. No one can read it. Keep your pictures illustrative but clean and simple. Give me 3 pictures I can actually see rather than one that has print so small I have to get out a magnifying glass. Quizzes and Tests These need to be quick and easy - if you need them at all. My first choice is not to use assessments of any kind in mLearning. What are you going to test someone on about material that should take no longer than a handful of minutes to consume? The purpose of mLearning is not to master anything, but to become intrigued by it. It whets the appetite of the learner to seek out more extended learning opportunities…in which you can test to your heart’s delight. But if you must include a test of some sort, no typing! Except for those of us born after 1990, texting is a chore. Those little tiny letter keys are best left to the young at heart and dexterous of nature. In closing Think "snack". There, I have managed to bring myself full circle back to the dinner table. mLearning materials are intellectual snacks; bit-size bits of learning. And like snacks they need to be appealing to both our hunger (for knowledge) and our limited capacity (time for just a quick look) and entice us to come in for the dinner hour (full featured training). Think what you could do if your mLearning became the "Twinkies" of the training world….

As I get older and (just possibly) a tiny bit wiser (at least on alternate days and weekends…), I find that I am more and more drawn to the simplicity of childhood literature. "The Land of Counterpane" by Robert Lewis Stevenson is a poem about how a little boy who - being sick in bed - plays out grand adventures on his quilt. Both "quilt" and "counterpane" have their origins in the latin word "culcita" - a large stuffed sack. They both entered the English language by way of Medieval French…quilt from "cuilte" and counterpane from coute pointe which literally means "pricked coverlette". The change of pointe to pane was in reference to the Old English word for a strip of cloth - "pane". Anyway…the poem: When I was sick and lay a-bed, I had two pillows at my head, And all my toys beside me lay, To keep me happy all the day. And sometimes for an hour or so I watched my leaden soldiers go, With different uniforms and drills, Among the bed-clothes, through the hills; And sometimes sent my ships in fleets All up and down among the sheets; Or brought my trees and houses out, And planted cities all about. I was the giant great and still That sits upon the pillow-hill, And sees before him, dale and plain, The pleasant land of counterpane. I am not "sick and lay a-bed", but I can look over my shoulder at the patchwork of my life and see the various "campaigns" I have led from my own "pillow hill". Actually, patchwork is probably too fine a backdrop for it. I have always been in awe of the talented creators of patchwork quilts…the beautiful repetition of complex patterns in fabric and stuffing that serve both artistic and homely purposes. But what makes them so very appealing is exactly what stymies me about them…the repetition of the tasks involved. Yet another tangent…For those of you who know me well, that aversion to repetition may seem a contradiction of prodigious dimensions. Heaven knows I am a great advocate of repetition in and of itself as a process and as a strategy for reuse - but (I hasten to leap to my own defense here) I can write a program to accomplish the more menial enablers of that strategy. In fact, my passion for the approach is totally based on the ability to automate the processes involved. I have not yet figured out how to automate the tedious bits of assembling quilts. I have tried making regular quilts. I am not completely untalented in the art of sewing, and to create something beautiful and useful speaks to the creator in me on many levels. But I have always failed at it. I spend hours designing and planning the patterns; days seeking out exactly the right fabric combinations; additional hours cutting out intricate cardboard patterns to use as guides and then cutting the fabric itself. I even get four or five…or even ten blocks all sewn together and then I suddenly cannot stand to look at - much less work on - another one. I have several lovely quilted table runners, but staying the course long enough to create an entire quilt eludes me. Now, a crazy quilt…I can see through to the end. That seemingly unpatterned assortment of left-over scraps and trinkets repurposed into a thing of chaotic beauty is much closer to my view of the universe. While designing and creating a crazy quilt, the repetitiveness resides in the process - not the work itself. Each object/unit/piece that is sewn into the design is unique…different fabric, different size and shape, even different category of object buttons, cloth, lace…whatever. What is the same is each "instance" must eventually measure 10 inches square. I can handle that level of "removed" repetition. And then there are collages! I have always been able to complete collages. It’s the same principle…odd little pieces of "something" that get combined in nonstandard ways to tell a story. They must all go together in a 24×36 inch frame…but the insides are a seemingly random, overlapping, unrelated scraps. Actually they are neither random nor unrelated, but the relationships that put the lie to that description are buried in the mind of the beholder and the creator…which is the whole point, of course. Anyway…I seem to have wandered from the point of this post. My intent was to to write about my next great adventure. Robert Frost wrote a marvelous poem titled "The Mending Wall". It starts out: Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it, And spills the upper boulders in the sun… And I have a case of it. My life’s journey could very well be viewed as a grand assortment of willfully spilled boulders laying about the ground creating craggy passes through the well-built walls of my life. And there am I, eagerly crawling over, around and through them just to see what they lead to - or from. This wandering discussion of crazy quilts, collages and topple-down stone walls was a rather self-indulgent way of announcing that I am changing jobs - again. Come the new year, I will be joining old and, as yet unmet, new friends at Hortonworks as a Senior Training Manager of something-or-other. The title is not that important. Well - that is a lie of sorts. The title is really important for pragmatic reasons best left to pragmatic people who understand such political exigencies.  But what is really important to me is the challenge of the move…the things I do NOT know that I will be discovering…the things I DO know that I will be sharing…the "becoming" and all that engenders. That is what is important to me. And - the change. In "Dune" by Frank Herbert, the duke Leo Atreides councils a young Paul… Without change something sleeps inside us, and seldom awakens. The sleeper must awaken. In this moment while I am suspended between jobs I can look back at the path my career has taken and I am not only struck by the seeming chaos of it, but also by the repetitive serendipity of it all. I have worked at being (in no particular order) a university library assistant…statistical researcher…database programmer…choir director…industrial chemicals sales person…technical training program manager…systems course developer…coffee house singer…computer science faculty member…technical training manager…at (again in no particular order) universities, private colleges, Fortune 100 companies and startups. Tolkien might well approve… Not all those who wander are lost. But even I cannot see an obvious pattern or purpose in it. At least not one that was driving it at its inception. I can, of course pretend there was a grand scheme involved by looking in the rear view mirror and applying after-thought reasoning. But in reality it was accomplished as  much by stumbling from one opportunity to the next as by reason; by casual acquaintances and long-time friends; by grasping at straws and the kindness of strangers. By embracing change and risk. Dr. Seuss exhorts a young traveller: Oh the places you’ll go! There is fun to be done! I guess I never got around to growing up because I am still starry-eyed at the next greatest place to go and the fun it will be. You know, several times along this meandering journey I actually thought I had "made it". Those moments of self aggrandized hubris were inevitably followed by equally humbling moments of job elimination and layoffs…eventually followed by the next unexpected turn in the road. The truth of it is that I am often as much - or even more - surprised by the relative success of this apparently ramshackle assortment of career choices as anyone else. Don’t misunderstand…I give the decisions about my career choices a great deal of thought before I pursue them. I consider all the mundane things my Great Depression/WWII parents instilled in me…compensation, longevity (an illusion from gentler times), benefits…I look at all those things so it appears I am making a thoughtful, if not calculated decision. But in reality, my mind is made up about 20 seconds after the suggestion occurrs to me based on nothing more than a "gut feeling". The rest is window dressing so I don’t look the fool to anyone who might be watching. I am full of quotes today…and am reminded of the words of Joseph Campbell: We must let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for us. So as I joyfully start out on my next adventure, I am mindful of my past and my planned future…as much as anyone can be, I guess. But mostly I have my eyes fixed on the next hill on my counterpane wondering what will be revealed as I top it. In "The Hobbit" Tolkien’s Bilbo Baggins wrote about starting out on his great adventure… The Road goes ever on and on Down from the door where it began. Now far ahead the Road has gone, And I must follow, if I can, Pursuing it with eager feet, Until it joins some larger way Where many paths and errands meet. And whither then? I cannot say It is with the same inevitable optimism that I start my next journey.

Ready, Aim…PLAN…Fire! (cross posted from Hortonworks Bloomfire) We do training. In our world, we are constantly urged to get whatever "training" is at any moment in time, out the door and on the street before the paint on a new release has had the time to dry. This unrelenting demand for "new, updated, more, and better content" often results in training becoming a reactive, seat-of-the-pants operation. "Get it done; get it done now, just get it done - I don’t care how." (I should go into writing song lyrics…) The problem, of course, is that the processes and tools we have traditionally used - not to mention the types of deliverables we have traditionally created - do not support this ever-increasing pace of production. We start to cut corners. Quality starts to erode. We revert to the "kitchen sink" approach of topic inclusion because we have no time to adequately design anything else. We find ourselves caught by the law of diminishing returns. It’s a downward spiral that we must stop. And modular development and reuse is an approach that has been proven to do just that. However, leaping into developing modular content and reusing it without taking the time plan and design a new BackOffice operation to support it will not only NOT work, it will in most cases make the situation even less workable than it was at the start. The BackOffice View of Training So just what do we mean by "BackOffice"?  In inelegant terms it is all the "stuff" that happens behind the scenes before training becomes generally available (GA) to consumers. Just like a theater production, it should be invisible to the audience, but it is essential for the creator. For training, it includes a PROCESS that defines how we define, design, develop and deliver training content, and the TOOLS and TEMPLATES that we employ to make that process operational. It is not a new concept. It has existed since business offices first put the customer-facing activities in the "front" rooms of their buildings and their operational offices in the "back" rooms of their buildings. Today, it has less to do with physical location and more to do with function, but it has always been informal and haphazard in terms of integrated enforcement or consolidation. This approach has worked reasonably well for training when the only deliverable was the final product - a single course book. After all, in that situation it makes very little difference how a developer gets the work done as long as the work gets done and it "displays" correctly in the final instance. However, once we start creating, reusing, assembling and maintaining components at a granular level that supports adaptive reuse, the effect of non-conformity and/or non-integration can derail an entire initiative. A 500 page course can represent as many as 250 individual "objects" that must be cataloged, stored, found again, reused, assembled and versioned and then transformed into multiple formats on multiple delivery platforms in multiple languages - all without duplication and editing.  In that 21st century picture of the training universe, consolidation and enforcement of BackOffice components becomes mandatory. Quixotically, both practice and research has show that the more standard and enforced one is about BackOffice components, the more creative and agile one can be about training deliverables. The less time developers spend "fiddling" with content and tools, and the fewer choices they have about which tools and formats to use, the more time can be spent on designing exceptional and innovative training content and experiences for consumers. Planning The BackOffice A successful BackOffice plan must include: A formal development and release process An information architecture An insfrastructure The Formal Process It is essential to define and enforce a detailed development and delivery process in order to support a geometrically expanded catalog of content objects. It is all fine to dive in and create 1,000 content objects - that’s the easy part. Finding them, reusing them, assuring they can be displayed in any and all potential formats without editing - that’s the more complex task. And that task is best supported by a detailed process that clearly defines who on the development team does what, when and how. ADDIE vs. SAM ADDIE (Analysis, Design, Development and Evaluation) Probably the most popular development process at this time is ADDIE or some form of ADDIE. ( Read more about ADDIE ) It is a "tried and true" approach for developing training. The only problem with it is that it doesn’t work. Or - let me rephrase that - it doesn’t reflect reality and that disconnect can get one into trouble. ADDIE assumes that each "step" in the process can be completed in a systematic linear fashion. When a step is completed, it assumes one can logically move on to the next step in a perfect waterfall approach…eventually arriving at the conclusion of the waterfall process with a complete, accurate, deliverable. When has that worked recently? And how could it possibly work for a modular, adaptive approach to content creation where we never "create" whole courses, we "assemble" them? The reality of information/technology in our world today is that it never stops evolving - just as individual modules may change at different rates and points in time in a modular architecture. We may momentarily "pause" for a release, but at the very moment we do release something, its replacement is already being developed. And while we may "release" standard traditional courses on some sort of schedule, our modular training subscriptions will update whenever something changes enough to warrant an adjustment to that individual object. Our world, our content model - and certainly our technology - is not static enough to support ADDIE as a workable process. SAM  (Successive Approximation Method) SAM, on the other hand, assumes that content creation is an iterative process in which the developer constantly prototypes content. A SAM model requires that the process developed must be iterative, collaborative, efficient, effective and manageable.  If implemented reasonably, with limits on iteration stations (the corollary to analysis paralysis), SAM can be used to better reflect the reality of a modular approach to content creation for highly technical content. (Read more about SAM) The Information Architecture An Information Architecture plays the role of guaranteeing access to, and availability of, content for both developers and consumers. It is a model that describes 1) how content should be organized, interlinked, accessed and presented and 2) the rules for creating and maintaining said model. (Read more about Information Architectures) It is the blueprint for how content will be formatted, structured, and catalogued including rules for maintaining and using that content and the tool or tool selected to handle curation. As we move from courses to objects and lessons as the granularity level for delivery, the design and implementation of an information architecture becomes paramount for success if for no other reason than sheer numbers and complexity. iA Components In its entirety, an information architecture includes both BackOffice and consumption components. Our model will be using a training portal backed by an LMS created by SeerTech for the customer-facing portion of the iA. Our BackOffice iA will include the structuring and design of learning objects (the granular development level) and assembled deliverables (lessons and courses). Considerations for the design of the iA will include: Single source for raw content Selection Branding/rules within the source used to ensure standardization Defined formats for delivery (PDF, ePub, Mobi, HTML, Video…etc.) What are supported  Organizational standards within the deliverable Specifications Enforced structure for information types such as: Process (Description of what happens when during a procedure) Procedure (The sequential steps to complete a task) Principle (Underlying rules of a function) Concept (Opinions and ideas) Fact (A truth than can be observed or proven) Structure (Components or flow) Classification (How components or functions can be grouped) Attributes and characteristics used to define objects such as: Keywords Versioning Related objects Pre and post-requirements "Part of" linksAudience Technical depth Content/context structure and descriptions Assembly rules and routines Definition of BOMs Programming of assembly tasks Rules of length, coverage, formatting The Infrastructure We also need to define the tools and templates that will support our process and the management of our content. These typically fall into three categories: Content Management Learning Management Creation and Transformation Content Management System (CMS) (Read more about CMS) The purpose of a CMS is to provide a central interface for storing, authoring, editing, managing and modifying content. It manages workflow and provides a collaborative environment. A specialized CMS called CCMS (Component Content Management System) supports the creation of documents from component parts and typically uses DITA XML. Learning Management System (LMS) The purpose of an LMS is to administer, document, track, deliver and report on usage of content. While they are usually associated with customer-facing activities (such as the one we will be creating in partnership with SeerTech) they can also be used to track and report on internal content. This is important for us since we will be "delivering" content to deliverables and it will be important to record usage and versioning in terms of our repository of component parts - not just final deliverables. A "Two-Fer" Solution Learning Content Management System (LCMS) A more recent offering in the industry is the LCMS - which offers a combination of services from both a CMS and and LMS. They offer publishing, workflow integration and automation services plus: Template-driven authoring Collaborative environment Indexing and reuse Most LMS and LCMS products are SCORM compliant and may offering Tin Can API integration. We are exploring the use of Xyleme as an LCMS solution in our BackOffice. Creation and Transformation Tools The final bit of structure that needs to be imposed is a toolbox of applications that can be configured to automatically support enforcement of the information architecture model. These include editors and transformation applications such as: oXygen
(an XML WYSIWYG editor that enables the creation of templates) DocBook
(Semantic markup language that can be published as HTML, ePub, PDF and others) Calibre
(eBook conversion tool) There are any number of tools - open source and proprietary to choose from. Any choice must support: Single source editing Transformation to multiple final formats eBook, video, audio and graphics creation and/or transformations Fire! When - and only when - we have designed and implemented all of the above support functions and tools, will we be ready to start creating modular content, both by net new creation and conversion of legacy content. If we Fire! before these are in place, we run the risk of creating content we cannot find, assemble, or manage - much less deliver.

Training’s Job (cross posted from Hortonworks Bloomfire) Before I dive into a discussion of the various merits of ADDIE and the SAM Agile Development processes,( and why SAM is a better choice in many cases than ADDIE), let’s look at what we in training are actually tasked with doing. Or rather, let’s look at what we are NOT tasked with doing… In short, we are NOT tasked with designing the most detailed, fool-proof, unbreakable development process on the planet. We ARE tasked with creating training that excites and delights our customers while preparing them to solve business issues using our products and services. It is all too easy, and enticing for those of us with a management bent, to get caught up in the complex structures and interdependencies of a training development process to the point where defining and implementing the process itself becomes the end goal rather than anything to do with training content and delivery. In reality, a development process should merely be an enabler for the actual requirements we are tasked with fulfilling, not the driving force. It is a tool. And choosing that tool should be based on which one enables our ability to create exceptional training best. Speed - An Overarching Business Requirement The need for speed - the need to get training in front of consumers in the fastest way possible - has become one of the highest priorities, if not the highest priority in the training business today. Meeting this need has far-reaching implications on how we analyze, design and deliver training. Approaches to Design There are basically two fundamental process approaches today: ADDIE and Agile Development. ADDIE is a five-step linear process that focuses on approvals and exit criteria for each step before advancement.  It is a classic waterfall approach to development: Agile Development schemes focus on multiple iterations, collaboration, speed and reuse. Some Clarifying Terms Part of the confusion between these methods - and specifically within the field of Agile Development itself - is caused by the multiple related buzzwords floating around the industry. These include: Agile Learning Design The term evolved directly from the software development industry, The processes based on it focus on speed, flexibility and collaboration. Instructional Systems Design (ISD) A general term for the tasks associated with the delivery of training to learners. It covers assessment of need, design of solution, development of content, delivery of training and evaluation and maintenance of deliverables. Rapid Application Development (RAD) A term that covers a number of design models used to speed up software development, including training content that supports product adoption. These models minimize planning and stress collaboration, faster iterations and the use of open source solutions. Rapid Content Development (RCD) This process includes a streamlined preparation phase, iterative design, template-based reusable content and the heavy use of tools to produce cost-effective training in less time than traditional approaches. Initially focused on eLearning exclusively, it is now used across delivery methodologies. Successive Approximation Model (SAM) SAM is an agile development process that emphasizes collaboration, efficiency and repetition. It was developed by Michael W. Allen, the chairman and CEO of Allen Interactions, Inc. Choosing a Process Approach The process choice basically comes down to what kind of an environment you find yourself in regarding the development and delivery of training. You might use these three high-level questions to help clarify your position: 1. Are you in a predictable, process-oriented environment? OR 2. Are you in a fluid, adaptive-oriented environment? 3. Can you "freeze" a release and depend on it being accurate for the entire life cycle of the development? OR 4. Must you continuously tweak the design and content, even after release, to accurately reflect the current state of the product?   A "Yes" answer to questions 1 and 3 would suggest that a waterfall process could meet your needs. If you answered "Yes" to questions 2 and 4, that would suggest that an agile development process best meets your needs. Once you understand the business drivers in your environment and your real goals within that environment, you can compare waterfall and agile processes and choose the one that best matches your situation. Advantages of the Agile Development Method Scalability In the waterfall model, changes cannot be made to the initial design requirements unless you begin the entire process again. In an Agile model, changes are continuously integrated into the iterative model. Flexibility The ability to validate and complete/release any component portion of content covered in a project without waiting for the entire project to complete enhances quality by spreading the QA process throughout the entire process. It also allows for release and consumption of components before the release of an entire deliverable. Time-to-Market The scalability and flexibility of the agile model reduces time-to-market by reducing wait-time throughout the process and enabling modular release and reuse. This meets the customer demand for faster, more accurate content "just in time" and converts content into a revenue generating stream more quickly. Customer Satisfaction All of the above, results in customers getting access to quality content sooner and in more formats than with traditional waterfall projects. Advantages of an Waterfall Method Predictability This model enforces discipline. Every step has clearly defined inputs, outputs and exit criteria. Progress can be concisely defined and reported. A project manager can say without doubt exactly what will and will not be in a deliverable from day one of development. Any change this automatically starts the entire process over at the Analysis phase. Risk-Averse Because the model rigidly defines what will be produced when and how, it significantly reduces risk. If followed rigorously, the model will prevent release slippage and guarantee that initial expectations (no matter how off-target they become) are met. Ease of Management The model is simple to understand, easy to use, and especially easy to manage in geographically distributed teams. There are no "gray" areas of decision making involved - everything is defined and documented in the first phases of the project and adhered to throughout the project. ADDIE vs. SAM It all comes down to whether you need to be "agile" or not. In the open source world which I operate in, the choice always leans towards "agile". Why NOT ADDIE? Three issues come to mind immediately: ADDIE is Linear The ADDIE process assumes that each step must be completed before moving to the next step and enforces that assumption. While this is a great strategy if you are crocheting an afghan or assembling your kid’s swing set - it is not so great when writing about technical products that morph at an ever increasing rate. The "hot plate" that you designed a course around today may transform itself into a "microwave" tomorrow. With ADDIE, this leaves you with two choices: you either continue to push through the process writing about the "hot plate" and hope that some customers out there actually adopted it and want to stick with it, or you do a "Monopoly Move" (Return to Start; Do not pass GO; Do not collect $200). If you happen to be working in the open source world, this hop-skip-and-jump approach could quite easily result in you being caught in a never-ending cycle of analysis and redesign. You might not ever release any training at all! ADDIE is Designed to Manage Risk ADDIE is a member of the group of traditional processes that are designed to mitigate risk. The whole step-by-step organization, exit criteria, and sign-offs are there to reduce or eliminate the impact of any flaw in decision-making along the way. Again - while this is a reasonable strategy for content that can be relied upon to be stable for a relatively extended period of time (or the afghan pattern that has been around since your grandmother was a child - or the swing set that you will NOT receive an updated assembly kit for before you put it up), it is not reasonable for the constantly shifting technology of the Digital World. ADDIE is Predicated on Perfection Moving from one step in the ADDIE process to another is based on the current step being perfect: being complete in ever sense of word; socialized, approved, and signed-off on. This is especially true of the front-end steps to ADDIE (Analysis and Design) where - if following the true ADDIE approach - you would spend the bulk of your time before actually creating anything. I won’t bore you with how this works for afghans and swing sets - but it patently does not work for open source software training content. Today’s technology is based on rapid prototyping and community collaboration…neither of which demands perfection. In fact, in a sense, they actually depend on imperfection to drive innovation. The path of technology today is not derived from a game plan developed by heavy thinkers behind closed doors…it is constantly re-invented by communities of experts that "tinker" out in the open. Trying to apply ADDIE to this reality is the proverbial square peg in a round hole. Why SAM? The Successive Approximation Model is actually based on the behavioral psychology premise of "shaping". Shaping is defined as gradually training an organism to perform a task by rewarding any action the organism takes that resembles, or comes close to, the desired response. While that sounds fairly repulsive, (I suspect behavioral psychologists work at being repulsive), it actually can be seen as a form of iterative prototyping that fits very nicely into our open source world as an Agile Learning Design. SAM best suits the requirements of a training operation in an open source environment that must produce quality content quickly and reuse that content in multiple deliverables. SAM is Iterative SAM will produce content early and continuously. There are frequent opportunities in the process for redesign and correction, and its very nature enables reuse and modularity.  The "Savvy Start" process is designed to answer a myriad of questions around cost and time-to-market. Gathering information is focused on clearly understanding challenges and requirements, identifying opportunities, eliminating unviable paths, and brainstorming activities. It is NOT focused on endless research and prolonged needs assessments. It is refined by successive iteration, not excessive detail. SAM Supports Collaboration at all Points in the Process SAM involves stakeholders early and often throughout the planning and iterative design and development phases. It supports a collaboration model that values input while providing a decision-making structure to resolve differences. It avoids the management-heavy bureaucracy of ADDIE while fully documenting expected actions and tasks and providing easy communication. Content is reviewed by all stakeholders and prototyping assures that there is less occasion for confusion on the actual design and function of components. SAM is BOTH Efficient and Effective While there must be limits within which any development process operates (deadlines, milestones templates, etc.), the SAM process provides the freedom and flexibility to encourage communication while still providing a framework for managing limits and resolving issues. Collaboration and revisitation of design and process decisions help clarify where and when to focus resources to produce the best deliverable for the time, resources and money available. Repeated prototyping and design reviews encourage and enforce the elimination of product features and functions that do not directly support the intended solution-based training objective (the dreaded "kitchen sink" approach to design). SAM is Manageable Although ADDIE might be seen as having the edge here - as it is notorious for producing PERT charts that number into the hundreds of pages…and PERT charts are - or can be - a fabulous tool for managing milestones and multiple person teams; the ease of managing a process that does not work in the first place is not really a sterling recommendation. The SAM process WORKS and is manageable. And while agile processes have a less detailed process diagram, they still have the basic flow of analysis, design, development and delivery that we will always incorporate into any process we use. It just has these way-points in often-iterated chunks rather than a single, linear presentation. Iteration in this case actually simplifies management because it reduces the size and implications of any one decision. My Final Choice For training development in an open source environment with multiple releases per year, I would recommend an agile development process - and SAM in particular.

This post is the scripted version of a presentation delivered at the Training 2014 Conference and Expo in February, 2014 I am a trainer. I have held several other job titles - including the one I hold now - but in my heart-of-hearts, I am a trainer. And more specifically, I am also a creator of training. I got my spurs with studies in Adult Ed and Instructional Design and have had the opportunity to design, create and manage the creation of training for several giants in the technology business and more recently for several start-up companies. The former provided experience and opportunities that only working in a large corporation with a cross-section of specialized practitioners can get you. The latter provides the constant challenge and change that I have grown to embrace along with the opportunity to work with geniuses who make it up as they go. How much better can it get? I also secretly wear a couple of other hats. I am a writer - an at least semi-serious crafter of the written word. While I have been known to verge on being a grammar Nazi, I must admit to being incapable of spelling any word of less than 13 letters. Why in this day and age we continue to have four or five spellings for a word that sounds exactly the same but means totally different things, escapes me. (Yes, yes - I do get the importance - or at least historical imperative - of etymology. I merely question its relevance in daily discourse.) I was of that opinion 20 years ago when I was making up excuses for not being able to spell. (And don’t run that old comment about looking it up in the dictionary up the flag pole. Looking something up in a dictionary REQUIRES that you be able to spell it in the first place.) Given the texting universe of today, the opinion itself may no longer be relevant! So while I am old enough to still harbor misgivings about my inability to remember which spelling of "pare" goes with which definition - I am at least mollified. And I am a programmer; one of those obnoxious types who see patterns (and the opportunity to automate or make a "go to loop") in everything. During the first downturn in jobs during the latter part of the 20th century, I took up programming when my BA in English Lit didn’t light up the eyes of any potential employers. In the way of  classic whim-and-frenzy that soon led me to database programming and suddenly my universe expanded. Look at what I could do with information! And look at what I could use it for! And…so on. Technology was my version of heaven. Those three - sometimes uncomplimentary but always insightful - characteristics have resulted in a multi-faceted approach to developing training that insists on finding the most effective, least labor intensive, most automated method of creation. And since most of my work has been done on the corporate side of the ledger, you can pile ROI and lean management on top. I sort of got the whole semi-automated, semi-modular content creation and management thing down to a science by the end of the 20th century. My first curriculum-wide project reduced creation costs by 65% and time-to-market by 45%. I must admit to being pretty pleased with myself. Then the digital revolution erupted under my feet, and almost instantly, the training universe changed. What worked yesterday no longer made the grade. It was too slow; too labor intensive; and too costly. Suddenly I was back in the glorious - but ever dangerous - maelstrom of design and prototyping. Today I would like to share what I discovered and tested and used there. First, I want to briefly review what we all know but constantly forget about change. We shouldn’t be surprised by it. The history of mankind has been a seemingly never-ending series of game-changing events. We tend to call the entire process "evolution", but I rather think it is more like a revolution. In fact, we call them "revolutions". The Neolithic revolution came about with the taming of fire and the production of simple tools. Our ancient ancestors could suddenly afford to live in extended family groupings. The weak and the elderly were no longer abandoned to freeze to death in snowdrifts. Wisdom and experience had a chance to be shared and passed down through generations. "Man" had time to think and to dream and to want to have those thoughts and dreams carried forward.  "Training" was a matter of familial and race memory. The Agricultural Revolution enabled human beings to gather together and live in permanent, multi-family groupings. Humanity had even more time to spend thinking and dreaming. Experts began to emerge and professions began to be defined. "Training" focused on apprenticeships and one-on-one internships. The Industrial and Scientific revolutions brought about automation and codification. The companion change in training was one that has effected our education systems to this day. The strategy of "educating" groups of people to do the same things, in the same way, using the same "curricula" still guides the design our present-day educational institutions. Training was in lock step with the assembly line view of reality and has stayed relatively the same ever since. So now we come to the 21st century and the Digital and Information revolutions. Since we are a part of these, it is sometimes difficult to impartially perceive what is happening and the impact it will have, but some things are fairly obvious: community has expanded exponentially to include anyone who can access the Internet; professions constantly adjust to accommodate the instantly changing technology landscape; "audience" has lost its conformity; and deliverables must be available on a multitude of platforms in a multitude of formats. We can map these revolutions and the impact they have had directly to a (hugely simplified) picture of Maslow’s hierarchy. His terminology may seem a bit dramatic, but the predictable reactions to revolutionary changes in society can be traced throughout history. The hierarchy is not a single event - it is a repetitive process that happens over and over at personal and societal levels. A person can be transcendental in one aspect of his or her life and in survival mode for another. For anyone who has not been immersed in adult education theory - or behavioral psychology - Maslow was a psychologist who is best known for creating a "hierarchy of needs" that prioritized human motivation. The original 5-stage model was divided into 5 levels:       basic (food, water, clothing…etc.)       safety (physical, financial, health…etc.)       social (friendship, intimacy, famiy…etc.)       esteem (self-esteem, self-respect, valued by others)       self-actualization (to be all one can be). One could spend days discussing the details and arguing the fundamental "truth" of Maslow’s model. But for the purposes of this presentation, we need only look at two effects the model - and much subsequent research - revealed: 1) that people do not learn much of anything until they climb above the basic, survival levels of the model and 2) that as people ascend the hierarchy they learn more easily and apply their new skills more effectively. It is a self-evident concept. If a person is consumed by trying to put food on the table or how to prevent foreclosure, or how to keep their kids safe, they are not in a prime space to learn a new way to make widgets. Personally, I am not usually a rabid fan of formulaic approaches, but the programmer in me cannot help but assess the three biggest "challenges" that our current revolution presents in terms of Maslow’s "survival" through "transcendence" diagram.  We can correlate these three challenges - and our strategic responses to them - with Maslow’s hierarchy. They are - from bottom to top (needed for survival through needed to be best-in-class): Dealing with the change process itself Implementing social initiatives Taking advantage of emerging technologies Let’s look at them individually… This quote from Darwin really captures everything there is to say about embracing change, doesn’t it? Thank about it. T-Rex was definitely one of the strongest dudes on the planet, but when that meteor crashed into the Yucatan, it was some little mousy mammal that survived the holocaust. And the importance of being adaptable, embracing changes, is magnified by the increase in the rate of change that we face in the 21st century. We used to have years, decades, centuries - even millennia - between revolutionary upheavals. Not so today. They happen almost daily. And they are not small - they reach the entire digitally-connected world in minutes. Tweets, blogs, e-zines…one cannot escape the revelations nor can one ignore them because our students do not. Our students are not only part of the changes, but often are the instigators of change. There are four telltales that define change in the Digital Information Age:       Numbers       Connectivity       Environment       Social power. With 7 billion people on the planet, 2 billion of which are instantaneously connected to each other, it is impossible to ignore the masses. Our "village: as we used to like to call our social environs in the not-too-distant past has grown exponentially. So has our need to be aware of our extended community. Just the other day, I used a cliché that, in retrospect, caused me to virtually crawl under the table and hide. While speaking to one of my team, I likened a "change" in roles and responsibilities to the fact that we no longer were made up of a bunch of little Indians following a single Chief. I was referring to the rather hackneyed cliché  of Indians and Chiefs and trying to emphasize the old view of too many chiefs not enough Indians no longer was valid in our environment . We all now needed to be "chiefs" in various situations. However, as the dreaded "oh-no-nanosecond" passed before my guilt-stricken eyes, I realized I was speaking with an Indian…from India…who might or might not 1) recognize the cliché for what it was or 2) take offense at my cavalier use of the term. My point here is not one of political correctness…I am not particularly concerned about being PC. But I am concerned about recognizing and valuing the varied backgrounds and cultures of the folks on my team…and here I was, potentially running rough-shod over someone’s cultural sensibilities. In this instance my only option was to fall on my sword…but the real point is we need to start thinking globally and acting locally. Our village is the world. And while specialized programs will no doubt continue to exist, the physical numbers IN those programs is growing exponentially. And more importantly, the ability of those populations to communicate with each other changes the very nature of collaboration. As a student I no longer have "A" lab partner, I have a lab partner and 3 or 4 thousand other immediately available "experts" that I can work with at any given moment - 24 hours a day. As an instructor, I no longer have 20 students, I have 20 students who are constantly connected to another 20,000 students, instructors, subject matter experts and the INTERNET. This mega-society (Mega-Godzilla comes to mind…I can’t help it…I am a product of my science fiction roots…) is just beginning to sense and impose its power and influence. Remember that old 60’s mantra: "What if they gave a war and no one came?" Apply that logic to training. Or even more humbling…apply the opposite outcome to training…what if EVERYONE comes? Today’s training MUST be: Capable of being personalized Media-rich Available in diverse formats and on multiple platforms in various languages Data rich and relevant to students Solution-based It must be learner-centric. The days of teaching what the corporation or school or curriculum task force wanted students to know are dying, if they are not already moldering in the grave. Training today must be what the student wants or needs to know at some moment in time. If we meet that standard, they will come back to us the next time they have a need. If we do not, they will go elsewhere - and today there are plenty of "elsewheres" to go. My current mantra is: What they want, when they want it, how they want it, at whatever depth meets the current need on whatever platform is at hand. It reminds me of Corinthians: "I have become all things to all people". It used to be impossible for us mere mortals…but today we can get close. Getting there entails embracing all of these buzz words. We are battered with them daily…agility, flexibility, modularity, reusability…we must embrace all the "ilities". And therein lies the rub. (From Corinthians to Hamlet - this just exemplifies the nature of our expanded information universe.) The key - paradoxically - is the enforcement of rigorous standards. So how does that work? If we need to respond to a multitude of differing training needs, we need to build three things: a repository of hundreds - if not thousands - of stand-alone modules that can be reused without editing an infrastructure that will automate the "tasks" related to cataloging, finding, assembling and maintaining those modules a process that controls and monitors activity including feedback and source changes Think "Ford". Or Krupp. Or Tupperware. Or Legos. Or Intel. The ability to standardize and reuse "widgets" revolutionizes any process you apply it to. The process of creating and managing information - training, documentation - does not need to be any different. We have congratulated ourselves for years that what we do is a talent…not a skill…and therefore cannot be "curated" in the same way that other objects can. And there is a modicum of truth in that. There is a talent to imagining the best way to present information both on the page and especially on the podium. But the sad - or ultimately freeing - truth is that 90 - 95% of content creation IS a skill. It has to do with formatting and style and editing. A cautionary tale… When I was fairly "new" at a Fortune 500 company we experienced our first-ever round of downsizing. Our rather prestigious training group - those who supported the flagship OS for the company - was not to remain unscathed and we were notified that we would be losing one person to the layoffs. Being low woman on the totem pole, I had a rather rough couple of weeks until the announcement was made. The unlucky person turned out to be one of the people I considered to be top-notch. Top of their game. Expert to the experts. In retrospect, it came down to a rather simple business decision. This extremely talented person was overly-unique. She spent hours - literally - getting tables and lists exactly the way she wanted them…days fiddling with illustrations…weeks word-smithing 700 page student workbooks. There was nothing "standard" about her courses. Each one was a jewel - unfortunately, an insurmountably costly jewel to create and maintain. I - on the other hand - was busy cutting my teeth on my first reusable module-based curriculum made up of "good enough", standard objects. (Just as an aside - I still believe this woman, who remains a dear friend - is probably the best course developer on the face of the earth.) But the truth is, for the most part we do not need the best on the face of the earth. We need competent folks who develop standard, reusable content that allows us to be adaptable at any turn of the wheel. We need to plan our change strategies in terms of "come what may", not in terms of today’s glitch. The whole online, interconnected, always available social thing is probably one of the most - if not THE most - difficult pieces of the 21t century strategy to accept and navigate. We pretty much all come from a background of "using stuff"…we use processes, tools and designs to make our training better. We use these tools. But we do not - nor are we required in any way to - "become" a text editor or a video camera. But as Peter Thomson opines…you don’t DO social media - you have to BE it. And it is the "be it" bit that is darned difficult for those of us who were not born and bred to bare our innermost secrets to a mere 2 billion folks - 99.99999% of whom we do not know and 20% of whom may be sociopaths. To do that, we need to change our understanding of belonging and being valued. That all happens in Maslow’s second tier of needs. Look at that statistic. 2 years from now (I am reducing my own personal angst over this by giving them all 12 months of 2015 to get it done) 50% of organizations that manage innovation processes will gamify them! How does that extrapolate into training do you think? It scares the pants off me. But even more important than the terrifying thought of gamification itself, is the increasingly important role of community and prestige. Our students are members of multiple online communities - each of which has its own recognition profile. We are used to organizations driving recognition and we are used to manipulating that to benefit training consumption…think certificates and certification. But we are also used to identifying those levels of achievement for a limited number of members. In fact, our whole traditional understanding of prestige through association is based on limited membership. We compete for membership. Well, we can throw that out. In our new world, anyone - whether they have consumed our training or not - must be eligible to become a valued/certified/blessed/recognized member of communities that are based on skills and knowledge. We must recognize the fact that training - in and of itself - is not the only path to validation. And for training to be a recognized a valid path to the achievement of value, we will need to become immersed in online society. For training that means we must become all-inclusive, collaborative, globally communal AND cross-functional. And we need to do all that in the instantaneous fashion Internet users have come to expect. In order to do this we must first design and deliver our training in formats that lend themselves to this new online social environment. While eBooks and online displays of full courses play a role here, they do not really reflect the "burst transmission" nature of social communication sweeping the world. It used to be that sound bites were a way to introduce topics; today they must BE the topic. Instead of gourmet meals, we must offer a smorgasbord of training delights. Students must be able to fill their plates any way they want to and return to the feast as many times as they want. While they do so - they must be encouraged to talk about it, comment on it, add to it, and invite others to join it. And while we certainly will continue to charge for these things, we need to construct creative and flexible pricing strategies that offer many levels and ways of consumption and that include a healthy number of free items. We need to run sales. We need to promote our wares in whole new ways - online social ways. We need to implement badging for informal learning and we need to create "roles" within our training communities that members can aspire to. So, we need to get better at constructing training objects and we need to get better at mass-producing them. The communication stream needs to be relevant and continuous. It needs to not only contain relevant material but also to have a form and function that telegraphs relevancy. Form MUST follow function in our brave new world. Just pushing traditional content to a web-based delivery vehicle is not - and never has been - good enough. We need to rethink, redesign, and recreate our curricula into collections of learning objects…stand-alone, consumable chunks of training. Once we have mastered the whole learning object creation concept, we need to connect with and populate a myriad of social avenues. All entries in these individual environments can (and should) link to a central training location or portal, but each environment should have its own page or channel or list (or…??) that is branded with a  training logo and offers both embedded tidbits of training information plus links to that central repository. The moment someone drew this graphic, it was out of date. So how do we keep up with the latest and greatest? Let’s be honest. None of us is ever going to have the budget to dedicate an entire segment of our staff to finding, populating, reporting on and updating content in this ever shifting environment. But there are companies out there whose entire purpose for existing is to perform those very tasks. Depending on your actual budget, you can choose to just be routinely informed, or contract for initial postings, or outsource the whole effort. Search on "best internet marketing" and peruse the list. Additionally, you need to think about SEO - Search Engine Optimization. SEO used to describe how to get traffic to a single web site…it now must include how to get links from multiple sites - none of which you own - to your site. And it includes the design and implementation of landing pages that can be customized to suit the needs of potential consumers. And spiffy logos. And loss leaders. And Swag. And analytics. Again…contract with someone who does this for a living.  They are often the self-same folks who do the marketing piece. Social immersion can be an all-consuming effort. Contracting with a company that specializes in this not only provides a self-limiting feature (your budget) but also forces you to systematically consider which avenues in this universe of chatter strategically relate to your services and products. Finally, we come to my favorite segment of the strategy - technology. I admit it. I am a techy at heart. Employing technology represents the actualization of this strategic approach to 21st century approach to training. For, it is the tools and technology that enable us to become "best in class". Another anecdote. When I was 10, my favorite aunt gave me a wind-up alarm clock - you know one of those old funky metal jobs with the two bells and clapper on the top. The first thing I did with it was take it apart down to the springs, screws and gears and put it back together again. It took me several tries to get it back together so it would work, but eventually I figured it out. Once I mastered that, I cannibalized it to make a series of little gear figures. I think a gear or two is still rattling around in my boxes of "stuff" I cannot bear to part with. When asked by another relative (probably my least favorite aunt) why she had given me a clock of all things, she simply replied "So she could take it apart, of course." Smart lady. Taking stuff apart - and putting it back together in varying orders within varying contexts is what training in the 21st century is all about. And technology allows us to do that without breaking either the bank or the backs of our employees. When you went to a training course "Back in the Day" you were handed a printed book. Period. You schlepped that book through airports, onto trains and into the back seat of taxies. You dog-eared the pages you needed most often and - if you were really lucky - you got selected updates mailed to you in plain brown wrappers. Things change, and eventually, you might have been given access to an online COPY of the same book. Initially they were pretty unusable. The organization that worked so very nicely in print was much less conducive to online consumption. The wheel turned once more and the concept of "above the fold" (around in the newspaper world for over 1 hundred years) was applied and navigation, at least, got a little better. But it was still just the same old book on your computer screen. Really adventurous operations played around with sidebar TOCs and "point-and-click" navigation soon became a differentiator. The way we provided materials changed slowly, over time. Everyone got "used to" new ways or chose to stay with old ones. Things were cooking along just fine at a speed that we all could accommodate, when WHAM! The world went ADHD on us. Today - to be "with it"…to be anyone at all…to be "best in class" you MUST accommodate multiple formats on multiple platforms at whatever depth of coverage any potential student wants.  And the content MUST be designed for this approach, not chopped up from traditional materials. This is not optional. It is required. The "transcendent" training strategy for the 21st century is, let’s be honest, a mess. It contains so many variables that one finds it hard to discern the basis, or constant, from which those variables are derived. If we dive into it without planning and forethought plus the tools and technology to support our frenzied efforts, we will end up with an even worse mess. One last anecdote. I was once asked to update an application that went into a database of statistics to write reports on menu item selection. All I had to do was add four new types of fish fillets. One would think that was not an earth shattering request. But when I opened the code, what lay in front of me was a single, unsegregated, undocumented mass of programming code. There were no line breaks, no indentations to visually help me find routines, no documented explanations of what the original author was doing, how or why. Just 60,894 lines of unrelenting code. I admit to hoping that the reason I was being asked to edit the code WAS because the programmer who wrote it HAD been run over by a bus. I am absolutely sure that every little bit of logic needed to find and describe fish fillets was in that program, but there was no way on earth I was ever going to find them. (Did I mention that he named his variables sequentially? "Fish Fillet - Cod" could have been 99381 or 02947 or 5498 - who knew?) If the guy hadn’t been run over by a bus, I was going to volunteer to drive. I started over and rewrote the entire application. The point is that creating an initial pass that meets a current need is the least of our worries. We can go out and create 1001 learning objects tomorrow…well - next week anyway. But once we have created them, we need to be able to find them, use them, describe them, update them and assemble them…otherwise they are useless except for that single one time use. Luckily for us, there are tools like Content Management Systems and Learning Management Systems and User Portals that help us create AND manage all those objects. These types of tools are essential. Absolutely required. But even before we get to the curation part of our strategy…we need a creation strategy and that requires object oriented content design. Object Oriented Design is the application of Object-Oriented programming concepts to the design of reusable modules. While it has been applied to the creation of code objects for years now, it has only recently become a standard method of creating information. It uses the same conceptual basis as OO programming: SOLID. SOLID has 5 principles that must be applied to any object…(Bear with me - this looks complex - but once we get through it, it will be quite logical…) Single responsibility (SRP) Every object should have one, and only one, reason to change Every object should do - or describe - only one thing For training, this works well at the major learning objective level. Our "objects" discuss only a single learning objective. Open-closed (OCP) A Class of information should be OPEN for extension (we can add to it) A Class of information should be CLOSED for modification (we cannot change it’s meaning/description) This is a complex concept…let’s use an example. Classes describe a group of like objects. We could have a class called "Content Module" and a class called "English". Both of these are what we call "concrete" classes in that they cannot be changed. So, what happens if we want to add a "Module" written in French? We would need to create an entirely new class "French" and define an entirely new connection the class "Content Module" connected with a class called "French". You can see how that would proliferate. 16 modules in different languages becomes 16 individual instances. This illustrates the CLOSED part of the definition. But instead, let’s create what is called an ABSTRACT CLASS called "Language". Now we can have a single relationship of "Content Module" to "Abstract Language"…and we can create "derivative" classes such as "English", "French", "Spanish" and so on. This is called EXENSION and illustrates the OPEN part of the definition. Using this method we have a single relationship between "Content Module" and "Abstract Language" followed by a choice of derivatives. Liskov Substitution (LSP) Derived classes can be used in place of Parent classes They must act the same as the parent The Liskov substitution demands that derivative classes must act just like their parents. In the above example, English and French are both exact matches to "Language" in that they are both spoken and written forms of human communication. If we created another derivitive: "COBOL" for example, we would be breaking the Liskov Substitution because COBOL is not a form of human communication and cannot be "substituted" in exactly the same way that other "Language" derivatives would be. Alternately, we can create a relationship between some class and "English" and it would act exactly the same way a relationship between that class and "Abstract Language" would act. Interface Segregation (ISP) Clients should not be dependent on interfaces they do not use. In simplest terms, this is a protection against the creation of too general, too all-encompassing abstract classes. Using the same example presented above, if we DID lump human languages, programming languages, honey bee dancing language and Victorian flower language all under a general class called "Abstact Language" we would be forced to impose requirements that relate to programming syntax, for example, to honey bee dances. This is patently foolish. It is, of course, much more subtle in the world of programming and/or information design, but the logic is the same. One set of characteristics and dependencies for all classes and their derivatives. Dependency Inversion (DIP) Design is based on abstractions. This principle separates glue code (in training terms: context) from application logic (in training terms: content). It enhances reusability by separating the context in which a unique piece of content is used from the content itself. Thus - again using our language example - grammar rules for French will not impinge on grammar rules for English…and neither will affect the implementation of "Abstract Language". So, clear as mud? Great! (Well, maybe?) Look at it this way. The five principles of SOLID are used to assure that "objects" - be they programming or information - are stand-alone, free from contextual limitations, capable of being expanded without causing rippling adjustments and are easily associated with groups of like objects. These principles result in highly reusable, clean, code - and - highly reusable, clean information objects. The good news is there are a multitude of applications and tools such as structured writing editors and Information Mapping that do the heavy lifting in this area. Well-defined and enforced processes and instructional design do the rest. It is more an approach to things that we already do than a change to them - although it does require a more defined method of creation than many of us may be used to. At this point, if I have not either bored you to death or chased you screaming from the room, you may be asking yourself about the linear approach of Maslow’s hierarchy. And you would be spot on. We are finding that nothing in the 21st century is very linear. Maslow assumes a progression through the stages to reach "transcendence" which implies a beginning and an end destination. In 1943 there probably were beginnings and endings. But today we cycle through the stages endlessly. That sounds rather depressing, but in reality it is a life saver. It means we do not have to try and be "perfect" every time we create something because in short order we will be recreating it to meet the ever-changing landscape of our training world. Just as ADDIE - that bulwark of risk-aversion, exit criteria-based content creation processes is slowly, but inexorably being replaced by adaptive, prototype-based creation processes such as SAM (Successive Approximation Model), Maslow has been revisited in terms of the repetitive nature of human adaptation cycles. In truth, it has always been repetitive, but in the past the cycles were so long that the "go to" loop was indiscernible. Today, there seems to be one waiting to greet you every Monday morning. At least we can be reassured that we know the process and how it works. And we know that they are not strictly linear. A survival aspect in one space may interact directly with a transcendent aspect in another More importantly, we know we need to run faster. Embracing change, immersing ourselves in the social environment of today’s digital world and using technology are three ways that help us run faster. And running faster means it is essential to get comfortable with being uncomfortable. Change is a fact of life in the 21st century - as are massive social interactions and constantly emerging technologies. The better we position ourselves and our training operations to benefit from those truths the more we can use them rather than be subject to them. What we knew we no longer know. What we did, is not we should be doing now. Accept it and move on. Finally, I would like to share Arthur C. Clarke’s third law of the universe with you: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. I say: "Be fearless! Do Magic!"

from "Planet Princeton" Fought my way through snowstorms and airports, but I am finally back from the Training 2014 Conference & Expo. I had the good fortune of presenting a break-out session at the conference in San Diego the week of Feb 3. (You can review my presentation and speaker notes here…) Other than having to dodge the latest-and-greatest East Coast snow storm (becoming a habit), it was a rewarding experience. I thought I would share some of the handouts from the sessions I found really interesting with you: Mobile Objective Methodology - Jennifer Hofmann "Jennifer Hofmann is the president of InSync Training, LLC, a consulting firm that specializes in the design and delivery of virtual and blended learning. Soon to be featured in Forbes Most Powerful Women issue (June 16, 2014) as a New England Women Business Leader, she has led InSync Training to the Inc. 5000 as the 10th Fastest Growing Education Company in the US (2013)." Her "Learn to Learn Online" free online course runs every week and is available here. Her company also offers "bite-size" learning events (InSync Byte) From Mel: I found her handout insightful (if very short), and the offerings on her company website provocative. I think both would be worth checking out. It is Time for Standards - Bruno Neal "Bruno Neal is a scholar and a learning and development authority. He has written dozens of articles and two InfolineTM on Informal Learning and Quality in Learning and Development. He is a Certified Professional of Learning and Performance (CPLP) and currently works as a Learning Strategist for Indiana University Health Learning Solutions, an author, Instructional Systems Designer, and a Training and Performance Improvement Specialist." Learning Solutions approaches partnerships with a focus on outcomes, efficiencies, assessments, and overall value for the client as well as the organization. From Mel: While the level of standardization in this presentation may be beyond what you might pursue, the basis and benefits described are a worthwhile read. So, No One Told You You’re a Marketeer - Jean Barbazette, Maria Chilcote and Melissa Smith "JEAN BARBAZETTE is founder and MARIA CHILCOTE and MELISSA SMITH are Managing Partners of The Training Clinic, a Seal Beach, California, training consulting firm founded in 1977. The Training Clinic is the largest "Train- the-Trainer" company in the United States. The company provides state-of-the-art design, delivery and management of training through on-site and public train the trainer workshops and certificate programs as well as seminars on over 30 professional development and supervisory topics. " From Mel: We are all NOT going to become marketeers! However, the requirements and steps in this handout can be applied to any effort to redesign curriculum and to include social learning as one of the offerings. Capturing Elusive Level 3 Data - Ken Philips CPLP "Ken is founder and CEO of Phillips Associates, a consulting and publishing company with expertise in performance management, measurement and evaluation of learning and sales performance. He has more than 25 years experience designing learning instruments and assessments and has authored more than a dozen published learning instruments." From Mel: A lot of this is "above and beyond" what most need. But if you are going to be looking at revising  surveys for customer satisfaction,  pages 6 - 8 of this handout provide some very good tips on writing survey questions. Getting Started with Agile Project Management Methods - Megan Torrance Megan Torrance is the CEO (that is, Chief Energy Officer) of TorranceLearning, an eLearning design and development firm with an intentionally random client base. Megan brings over a decade of business consulting and project management experience to her instructional design and development work. The TorranceLearning team combines creativity with pragmatism, and fun with focus. eLearning guru by day, and ice hockey goaltender by night, Megan is devoted to not only delivering outstanding work to clients, but also creating a top-notch work environment based on trust, flexibility, compassion, and fun. How to Create an Effective Certification Program - Judith A. Hale, PhD "Judy is the author of the popular resource about certification - Performance-Based Certification: How to design a valid, defensible, cost-effective program,2nd ED (2012). Her firm, Hale Associates, has worked with clients in all industries in the private and public sectors for more than 25 years." From Mel: We have just gotten our toes wet in the certification pool. This is a good read for how to proceed. Secrets of a Scrum Master - Donna Knapp "Donna Knapp is the author of several books including: The ITSM Process Design Guide: Developing, Reengineering, and Improving IT Service Management. IT organizations increasingly recognize the need to design, re-design, and improve their internal IT service management (ITSM) processes. While popular frameworks such as the IT Infrastructure Library™ (ITIL®), Control Objectives for IT (COBIT®), Microsoft® Operations Framework (MOF), and the ISO/IEC 20000 standard describe what to do, they do not describe the mechanics of how to do it. The ITSM Design Guide closes the knowledge gap by providing detailed guidance on assessing, designing, measuring, and integrating ITSM processes."  From Mel: Using such tools as JIRA to manage projects in an adaptive way is a requirement in today’s open source world. SCRUM is a foundational concept for this approach. ccThe Impact of the MOOC Market on Corporate Training - Josh Bersin "Josh Bersin founded Bersin in 2001 to provide research and advisory services focused on corporate learning. He is responsible for Bersin by Deloitte’s long term strategy and market eminence. Josh is a frequent speaker at industry events and has been quoted on talent management topics in key media, including Harvard Business Review, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, on BBC Radio, CBS Radio and National Public Radio. He is a popular blogger for Forbes.com and has been a columnist since 2007 for Chief Learning Officermagazine. Josh spent 25 years in product development, product management, marketing and sales of e-learning and other enterprise technologies at companies including DigitalThink (now Convergys), Arista Knowledge Systems, Sybase, and IBM." From Mel: Although still searching for secure footing, MOOCs are a trend for the future. So far, they have been seen as the purview of the academic world, but they are beginning to appear in corporate training. This is a good read on the subject. All-in-all, a nice little collection of broad-ranging subjects that relate to today’s training world. Enjoy! And check out these folks’ companies and services. Now - back to our regularly scheduled snow storm…

It all started when I heard Dion and the Belmonts singing The Wanderer on an "oldies" radio station: They call me the wanderer Yeah, the wanderer I roam around, around, around… http://tinyurl.com/pstofuj Are you old enough to remember Dion? I find it alternately disconcerting and reassuring that I am. He was the non-vanilla hunk from New York who fronted a 1950’s-1960’s version of a "boy band". His main appeal was that he was "dangerous" in a very safe way…an early entry into what would turn out to be all-and-all rebellion in the late 60’s and 70’s. And there he was, snarling the lyrics out while I rearranged furniture in my once-dining-room-now-turned-sitting-room. Don’t go there. I have a "don’t ask - don’t tell" approach to my addiction to furniture arranging. ***** When I was young, a "Sunday Drive" was the family’s standard fare as an after-Mass activity. (Gas was cheaper then!) http://tinyurl.com/lmy7a49 We wandered our way through back roads, around hidden ponds, and up and down winding mountain paths. Sometimes we played the "Take a Turn Making a Turn" game…each of us in turn randomly picked a direction to take at a crossroads until Daddy finally called a halt and brought us back to our better-known haunts. In later years, we adjusted the game so each of us had 30 minutes to choose a direction before handing the choice off to the next person in the car. It was great fun and - knowing my father’s firm belief that Armageddon was coming - it had the hidden agenda of training us to find our way in "foreign" territory. (There were always hidden agendas with Daddy…) We especially liked taking dirt roads just to see if they actually went anywhere. (Dirt roads in Maine sometimes just "stop" for no apparent reason and at no particular location.) **** http://tinyurl.com/msm39ou Did you know there was a car company in Germany with the brand name "Wanderer" from 1911 - 1941? I am happy to report I am not old enough to remember those. Alas, I am also old enough to miss cars that had all those sweeping curved lines. Who could resist a Sunday drive in something like that? But to be honest, I have to admit that I pretty much ignored car makes and models until I was old enough to see beauties like this in antique car shows, but I do remember that our Sunday drives were made in an Oldsmobile. http://tinyurl.com/n89z736 It was olive green and had horribly scratchy mohair seats and tiny little rear windows. I was perennially car-sick and usually ended up sitting on Mother’s lap with my head hanging out the window like a Cocker Spaniel. (Fresh air helped.) Given my propensity for motion sickness I am not sure why I loved - and still love - jumping in the car and taking off for indeterminate destinations. Of course, these days I don’t get motion sick which might explain at least part of it. ****  All of Daddy’s activities were designed to teach us something although we often didn’t learn what he intended. I learned two immutable laws of nature regarding the randomness of wandering back roads as they pertained to Sunday driving: The First law was that given enough time all random turns in and around Gorham, Maine will end up in the very long, very bumpy, dirt driveway, (masquerading as a dirt "road"), of some old coot who lived in Denmark, Maine. Said "old coot" will inevitably be standing at the bottom of his very long, very bumpy, dirt driveway with a pipe in his mouth and a faithful Collie (who no doubt had alerted him to incoming trespassers) at his side, smirking while you back and fill the car around to get out of his yard. http://tinyurl.com/khmcqub I have always been tempted to return to Gorham, some 50 years or so later, to test this law…just to see if I would still end up in that same driveway and if his ghost is still waiting to intimidate Sunday drivers who have stumbled onto his land. Not tempted enough to try it out for real, but tempted none-the-less. This picture of a rental in Denmark, Maine looks about the same except for the make and model of the car - and (thankfully) no old guy with a dog. ****  On July 16, 1933, John Jacob Niles wandered into the town of Murphy, North Carolina. While there, he attended an evangelical meeting, and heard a little unwashed Appalachian girl sing three lines of a hand-me-down carol that he expanded into the famous hymn "I Wonder as I Wander". The little girl - Annie Morgan - sang the fragment seven times. She got a quarter each time she sang it which was enough to buy her destitute family a meal and get the out of town. http://tinyurl.com/lxwsalq Niles performed the song for the first time on December 19, 1933 and later published it in his "Songs of the Hill Folk" in 1934. You can here it here, sung by Niles. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRMSmaA-1-I) I wonder as I wander out under the sky How Jesus the Saviour did come for to die For poor on’ry people like you and like I; I wonder as I wander out under the sky ****  The Second law I learned was that my mother should not be allowed to play the game. Her turn at choosing always resulted in our heading back in the direction from which we had recently come. When we switched over to the 30-minute version of the game, her time slot inevitably led to going around in circles. Three right turns and, (after much exhorting from the back seat), one left, no matter how distantly separated will eventually result in facing back in the direction you started from. I did test this little bit of wisdom much later in life, in a different State, and true to form, Mother managed to lead us back to where we began even at the advanced age of 88. She was nothing if not consistent. This law of nature, was even more confounding given that Mother could not actually find her way out of a paper bag. Given any city, any town (including the one she lived in all her life), or any barren wasteland, she would inevitably get lost.  ****  In 1945, Mother was chosen to be the "lead car" in a convoy of Army wives who were following their Army husbands while moving from base in Alabama to Nevada in preparation to ship overseas. This decision was not based on any talent she had related to reading maps or following directions (see above) - she just happened to be the oldest of the Army wives in question and was therefore granted some illogical patina of wisdom. She did know how to boil water - which many of them didn’t, so there was a modicum of proof that she was better prepared for life in general than her counterparts, but leading a convoy was definitely not one of her strong suits. They started off fairly well and covered about a hundred miles before they stopped for lunch. Unfortunately, Mother got the car turned around in the parking lot and headed straight back the way she came when they pulled out to continue their journey - about 12 cars dutifully following like ducklings all in a row. Despite being headed the wrong way, she followed the turning directions on the map (ignoring little things like town names and route numbers, of course) religiously until at a subsequent rest stop the accompanying Sergeant at Arms pointed out that Georgia seemed to him to be a bit "out of the way" for a trip from Alabama to Nevada and turned her map around. They did finally get to Nevada. A day late, but they got there and we acquired this fabulously funny story to tell and re-tell at Thanksgiving dinners for years to come. **** Back to 1967 and our cross-country camping trip. In the middle of Saskatchewan, on the Trans-Canada Highway - at that time a two-lane ribbon of unending road with nary a curve or turn - Mother managed to go down a cow path (well, probably more accurately a bison path…) while we all napped in innocent bliss, in search of a loaf of bread. This miscalculation resulted in 25 miles of bumping and twisting to finally arrive in a two-shack cul-de-sac with a stoic Indian (silent, white braids, cowboy hat, single red feather) behind a bullet-ridden counter selling bread that appeared to have been delivered 2 weeks prior to our arrival. (I am not joking, I could not make this stuff up…) http://tinyurl.com/mbzpapr For those of you who have not personally driven the Trans-Canada Highway across the plains of Canada, let me explain. There are no hills. No towns to speak of. No trees. Nothing but this great expanse of prairie land with a thin purple line on the horizon that you drive towards in the blind hope that the Canadian Rockies really are out there and that you have not inadvertently stepped into Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone. There are the occasional "planned" stops right at the edge of the blacktop where one can buy gasoline and sundries (and bread). Unlike Mother’s choice of turn-off, they are well-marked. To give her a little credit, there was a sign with "Store" scrawled on it at the mouth of the road. Of course, it was an old piece of metal roofing with ruggedly haphazard black letters, but it was technically a sign. This dirt path also disappeared into the horizon with no line-of-sight to any store or even those purple Canadian Rockies which might have been a warning to most drivers. And, in my then teen-aged brain, I could not but wonder if a buzzard might have been sitting on the sign encouraging unwary tourists to take the turn. Needless to say, no bread was purchased. The "old coot’s" Canadian doppelgänger was left behind and more backing and filling ensued. ****  Very much later in her life, at the age of 93, after Daddy was long dead and she had come to live with us in our front parlor-turned-efficiency-apartment, Mother wandered off for the last time in her life. It caused quite a stir before we finally found her again. Heretofore we all had our daily routines nicely mapped out. I left very early for work at a nearby college leaving Roy to manage her - and his - day. Her routine was to spend most of the day with an equally elderly although younger than Mother by 15 years or so neighbor lady. His routine was to get her settled at her little table in the bay windows of her room with a breakfast of tea and biscuits and then take the dog out for a short constitutional - or rather let the dog take him out for a constitutional. (Tasha was a Great Dane who was kind enough to let us think we were in charge.) When he returned, Mother would get dressed and he would take her over to Jane’s and then proceed with the rest of his day which included boats and boat yards and other sea-worthy endeavors. When he and Tasha returned on this particular morning, however, Mother had disappeared. Her clothes were still neatly laid out on her bed. He checked the bathrooms. He checked upstairs where she sometimes wandered because she forgot whose house she was in. He checked the back deck because she liked to sit out there beside the flower garden. He checked up and down the street where she sometimes wandered off to because she wanted to go to church and thought the church was just down the street. And just before he called the police to report her missing, he went over to Jane’s - just to check. Sure enough, there she was sipping tea with Jane. Why Jane never thought to call and tell him that Mother had shown up on her doorstep in her bathrobe, we will never know. I am sure it was some sort of conspiracy that had to do with honor among the elderly, but it certainly aged both of us. And for 12 more months, until she died at the age of 94, she peppered our lives with her special brand of wanderlust. We became exceedingly more vigilant and curtailed or chaperoned these urges appropriately. For her part, she became exceedingly more wiley and plotted her escapes daily. Sometimes we let her win just because everyone deserves to win every once in a while. Alzheimer’s caregivers ride the world’s biggest, fastest, scariest, emotional roller coaster every day. Bob DeMarco **** http://tinyurl.com/o324y8w On that same cross-country camping trip in 1967, Mother blithely drove us down an off-ramp in Seattle into the middle of China Town because she was so busy exhorting us to "Look at the Space Needle!" that she forgot to steer the car. (It could have been worse. She could have driven straight off the overpass.) In those days they had not yet built a matching "on-ramp" for every "off-ramp" on the Interstate and no amount of backing and filling could repair this instance of off-course wandering. Daddy actually took over driving on that occasion - with Mother reading the map. Since Mother couldn’t actually read maps, this detail was only offered to give her something to do while Daddy wandered down side streets in Seattle for an hour or two, (reminding us every 5 minutes or so to "Lock the doors!" - that Armageddon thing again), until he found the Interstate again. **** Faith at 65 You know, I always thought of my mother as a lovable, social butterfly who - like butterflies - flitted from place to place looking for the next beautiful bloom with no real plan in mind. That is not to say I thought of her as dim-witted. Far from it. She had a brilliant and creative mind that provided her daughters with the role model of a woman carving out her own career in a world that at that time did not relish the thought - a proud woman who just didn’t deal with navigational direction very well. I am no longer sure that was an accurate supposition. Not all those who wander are lost JRR Tolien - The Fellowship of the Ring

Yesterday, we took the old love seat to the dump. Of course, we don’t actually have a "dump" anymore. We have a "transfer station". It sits out on the Dump Road, the incongruity of which makes me laugh every time I drive down it, but I guess that is only because I am old enough to remember real "dumps". *** Dump runs when I was 12 were magical things. The Gorham Town Dump was a cleared piece of woodland off a dirt road named - appropriately enough - the "Dump Road". I suspect that almost every small town in Maine had a road named the "Dump Road" (Every one of them also had a road named "Poor Farm Road" but that’s a whole other topic.), on which there was a parcel of cleared land designated for - well - dumping stuff one no longer had a use for. http://tinyurl.com/qh6l767 True - some of what got dumped there was just plain trash. But a lot of it was useable, even valuable, if someone had a real need for something and no money to buy it. And some of it - just a fraction of it - was the stuff of magic. In the Summer of 1960, on a typical Main Summer morning, Bob Kimball, Judy and Jeanie Kimball, and I took a run to the dump. Dump runs in those days were always done in the company of Bob Kimball, one or more of his older daughters and a smattering of neighborhood kids. We went, empty handed, lounging the back of an old baby-blue and cream Ford pickup truck. We had no trash; this was no trash run. It was a dump run - the purpose of which was to look for treasure. I don’t know how Bob always knew when there was treasure to be found. Perhaps he was psychic. He certainly liked to pretend he was, grinning at you with a twinkle in his eye. (In my old age, my common sense leads me to doubt that eyes actually  "twinkle". But my very tangible memory of our neighbor-dad insists that there is no better word for the "Come on! I dare you to doubt me!" look.)  Or perhaps Bob just had an "understanding" with Old Man Fogg who lived on the premises and whose job it was to keep the bears from getting too nonchalant around humans. Whatever the reason, Bob always knew when to load some free labor in the truck and head for the dump. On this particular run, he was hunting for an old pump organ. Dumps are like land-oceans. They have currents and eddys; islands and peninsulas; and piles of flotsam and jetsam drifting through massive stretches of uncharted trash. What is found one day on the top of a jutting heap of old newspapers and magazines may be found the next under a pile of railroad ties or sitting all by itself beside a blackberry bush. It all depends on the ebb and flow of the dump. Bob’s organ was fairly new to the Dump so it was still circulating around the surface currents. We found it snugged in between an old metal-framed bed and 25 empty oak barrels in various state of decomposition. The bed was, in turn, stacked tightly against old man Fogg’s shack, so we had to move the barrels to get at the organ. It took us the better part of a whole morning to dig it out and get it loaded into the pickup truck. Then we had to unload it again and put it in Bob’s barn. After that we spent another 2 or 3 hours wiping it down and cleaning the keys and stops. Finally, at around 4:30 that afternoon, I got to sit on an old kitchen chair at the keyboard with Judy and Jeannie each pumping one of the bellows and play a halting rendition of "Battle Hym of the Republic". It worked. Barely. Stuck notes and whistling stops were duly noted and another round of tweaking and cleaning resulted in a glorious, if somewhat breathy,  recital of "Bringing in the Sheaves" at around 7:30 that night. We were exhausted. And thoroughly pleased with ourselves. When I left Gorham for college 8 years later, that organ was still in Bob’s barn. It probably was there when he finally sold the house and moved up the Ossipee Trail. I wonder if the new residents took the time to play a few songs on it every now and then, or if they just threw it out. *** In 1990-something, a dear friend was in the midst of a divorce, complicated by the death of her mother, and the need to not only move into her mother’s cozy house (and out of the sprawling contemporary cookie-cutter abode she had shared with her soon-to-be ex-huband) - but also to consolidate 12 rooms of furniture into 6. None of these were simple tasks. But like any good programmer-type, she ticked them off, one-by-one. And one creative strategy she employed was to offer me - an admitted sucker for anything antique, and at the time the owner of a 13-room farmhouse with an attached 3-story barn - an antique love seat and matching chair. The chair was nearly perfect. That was because it gave the impression of being fragile and prissy - so no one ever sat in it. I love it to this day because it is low to the ground so my feet actually touch the floor when I sit in it, and its arms wrap around me low at my hips rather than so high up my chest that I feel like I am practicing an iron cross maneuver on the Olympic rings. It is the essential read-a-gothic-romance-on-a-rainy-Sunday-afternoon chair. On the other hand, the love seat - while upholstered in the same very blue/gray, very floral, very sturdy tapestry - had, like the organ - seen better days. It had been reupholstered at least once before I came to own it - and I reupholstered it at least another two times - once in burnt umber and the second time in very bold green and white stripes. After I recovered from my need to personally hand upholster every piece of non-wood furniture in my house, I switched to ill-fitting love seat covers. You know the kind - guaranteed to stretch to fit all love seats while actually not fitting any real love seat in existence. http://tinyurl.com/ka958fn (This picture is a good match for it in shape and size. Mine was a bit more fussy, and the arms were fuller - but you get the idea.) When I assumed ownership, it had two broken legs that had been tacked back in place which held pretty well as long as you didn’t try to move the love seat. If you did that, they fell off and cleverly lodged themselves strategically under the bottom in such a way that guaranteed long ugly scratch marks on the floor. In the way of all things really intelligent but doomed to failure, the thought of removing the two precariously attached legs before attempting to move the love seat never seemed to occur to any of us until we had gashed a couple of cross-grain canyons across the floor. Some things are just pre-ordained. The love seat spent most of its years in my kitchen on the farm - under the two windows that overlooked the front lawn. I occasionally swapped it out for the church pew depending on whether I wanted more space for sitting or more comfort while sitting - but it always had a place in one of the gathering spots in our house. And it saw a lot of our life while it sat there… *** There were, of course, major milestones that readily come to mind… The night that Kristin finally met the lady in white - a friendly ghostie who came with the house and liked to perch on the chair arm of visiting friends and family as if listening in on gossip is one. Kristin had been longing to meet our ghost for several years, but when the moment arrived couldn’t get a sound out of her mouth to arouse any of us to witness the event. Bells tinkled, curtains wafted gracefully, and the gentile lady drew the covers up over our visiting guest, tucked her in and exited through the library wall. http://tinyurl.com/k9gh2vr We took to calling it the "Lady’s Love seat" after that. Some historic scrounging led us to believe that she was the daughter of a farmer who lived in a house up the road. She married a railroad man - which in those days meant she would most probably be a young widow. So her wealthy farmer-father built the farm we lived in for her and her husband and set them up with a Depot Store across the street where the railroad used to run. She was a fragile little thing. And it comforted Eric while the sturdy little fan that usually sat in the back room window coaxing cool breezes from the rock garden into the house blew air across his chicken-pox covered little-boy body. He was determined not to scratch a single one of them, so we recited every poem known to man (well - known to an 8-year-old boy whose grandfather recited Shakespeare, Coleridge, Henley and Service - among others - on a daily basis as if they were a necessity for life) to distract him from the itching. There were a prodigious number of titles in that list. All of them long and most of them tragic.  His favorite at the time was "The Cremation of Sam McGee": There are strange things done in the midnight sun By the men who moil for gold; The Arctic trails have their secret tales That would make your blood run cold; The Northern Lights have seen queer sights, But the queerest they ever did see Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge I cremated Sam McGee. They all suited Eric’s maudlin belief that he was about to "Die of the Pox". Obviously he had been doing some tragic reading of his own… And it became a refuge for me when, at the age of 48, I finally decided the time had come to leave my husband of 25 years. I spent long nights curled up on it contemplating my navel and the way of human relationships. Its rounded curves and soft corners wrapped me in a warm shroud that made me feel less exposed at a time when my days seemed an endless parade of naked emotional retribution. It was the "bully pulpit" from which I crafted my  rampaging campaign to punish - even, perhaps, destroy - the man who had broken every naive dream I ever dreamed. And it was the confessional from which a dear friend said to me: Remember this man is the father of the best and most beautiful thing you will ever produce - your son. And it was where on a balmy August evening a handful of years later I learned to accept love again and reject the hate I was so desperately clinging to. And, in the end, it was Tasha’s bed. http://m5x.eu/black-great-dane/ Tasha, our beloved rescued Great Dane who didn’t really fit on the love seat at all - being a good 6 feet tall when on her hind legs. She declared it her favorite spot anyway and only allowed us to share her "bed" if we let her lay her head in our laps. On long winter nights she liked to lay on her back, all four legs suspended in the air, tongue lolling out, dreaming dog-dreams while her resident kitties purred contentedly on any open body space they could find. When she was 15 - an outrageous age for a Great Dane - and dying of cancer, she spent her last night at home on her love seat surrounded by her loving kitties and her two grief-stricken humans. *** But by 2014, the love seat was beyond saving. It had probably been beyond saving for ten years or so, but that did not prevent me from insisting that we move it from the old farmhouse in New Hampshire to our new home in Maine. And it did not prevent me from making one last triage upholstery effort. But yesterday, in a veritable frenzy of decisiveness, I enrolled my husband in the grand effort of loading it into the SUV and driving it up to the dump. Or rather, the transfer station. Then I drove home and immediately immersed myself in sorting through the miscellaneous drawer that is the default storage cranny in every American kitchen, so I would not change my mind and dash back up the road to bring the love seat home again. Of course I still have the chair. I wasn’t up to being that decisive. *** In 1982, Gorham did away with "dumping" and opened a more politically correct "transfer station" out on Huston Road (one presumes for the purpose of  "transferring" rather than "dumping"). Huston Road is way up on Route 114 strategically distant from the picturesque center of town. This move not only removed the often lingering "odour" that accompanied an on-shore breeze, but also opened up the Dump Road for renaming and repurposing into a housing development. I have often wondered if small children innocently excavating in tidy-lawned backyards occasionally unearth unsavory remains that their parents cannot - or refuse to - identify. Barely controlled hysteria and a frantic run on hand sanitizer presents itself to my very jaundiced mind’s eye. In 2006, the transfer station was closed and anything to do with either "dumping" or "transferring" was relegated to a contracted removal service. The erudite denizens of Gorham may now eliminate all their unwanted "stuff" by third-party intervention. No muss, no fuss, no personal interaction. No angsting over throwing away belongings that have witnessed a family’s triumphs and tragedies. And, no magic. We live in a disposable society. It’s easier to throw things out than to fix them. We even give it a name - we call it recycling. Neil LaBute

Paul Stern in the Wall Street Journal (Sept. 17, 2012 R8) offers six principles for getting people to take steps to save energy. He suggests that changing behavior does not depend on the size of the financial incentive, but other factors as well, which I connect to our Coproduction Experience Model:Get people to think big (in terms of the one or two big changes that have the greatest impact) - VisionMake the savings obvious - IncentiveMarket effectively - Vision, AccessProvide convenient, credible answers - ExpertiseKeep it simple - AccessProvide quality assurance/guarantee - Access, IncentiveMr. Stern goes on to give an example illustrating these factors, Cash for Clunkers, as well as a variety of private company business models that apply the factors. But he also reminds readers that saving energy isn't a key objective of most households and businesses.

I came across this TED talk as I was doing some research for my class to help students better understand the Vision and Access aspects of our Coproduction Experience Model. In the talk, Thomas Goetz talk about the re-conceptualization of medical information provided to patients. The core of his talk is the feedback loop, and around the fringes he alludes to the concept of goals, especially with the speed sign + radar feedback example. But more of what I find interesting about his talk is the connection between the feedback part of our Vision model and the information/nuance part of our Access model. You'll see this in the redesign of medical lab reports. http://www.ted.com/talks/thomas_goetz_it_s_time_to_redesign_medical_data.html

All of the cars in my family are 1998-2001 models. And they are wonderful because they all lack one key feature: the crazy array of dashboard electronics now found in today's cars.According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, car owners are so baffled by "proliferating dashboard electronics" that automakers like GM have had to beef up call centers to support customers. Call centers have even gone so far as to install a dashboard simulator in the call center to customer service reps can sit in a simulated car while they are talking with the customer so they can better explain how to use certain features. The photograph below illustrates this. Over the past 15 years we've suggested (and developed) similar kinds of resources and simulators. One was for a scientific instrument that analyzed DNA. We provided call center representatives a simulator of the user interface so they could navigate the product along with the customer. Same thing with our utility clients, strongly suggesting that functioning simulators of in-home energy displays were available in the call center so that reps could provide better customer support. So, while one can applaud GM on providing great resources to their call center representatives so they can better help customers perform, it still doesn't get around the interface issues that are the root cause of the customer performance problem in the first place.While our family might not have the nicest looking cars on the block, we certainly aren't baffled by them.

Your customers have to post a video online that explains how to complete a task with your product. One of my students turned me on to this. http://screencast.com/t/g4jyZMOPTZwg. Enjoy!

One of my students posted this image to our online discussion about the Vision and Access components of the Coproduction Experience Model. It was taken on a street in Chevy Chase, Maryland. It appears that if you want to more safely cross the street, you grab a flag, start walking and waving it like crazy, and then place it in the flag hanger on the other side of the street. Not sure of its effectiveness, but it sure has a lot of customer performance elements.Okay, can't resist. I can easily see pranksters turning this flag thing into something like Monty Python's "The Semaphore Version of Wuthering Heights."

Several years ago I posted a blog article regarding the urinals at the Amsterdam airport in which they silk-screened an image of a fly. The purpose was to enhance the co-creation of value - to eliminate the mess men made when they had bad aim. It worked - guys aimed for the fly and no more mess.Now, it has gone one step further. Guitar Pee is a urinal that plays, records, and posts online the music you make when you pee. Appears to be first installed in Brazil. Visit www.guitarpee.com to see a video of how it all works.

Puget Sound Energy has a very creative campaign called "Stinky Bill". The aim of this campaign is to raise safety awareness of natural gas by teaching customers to recognize the smell of gas. A brochure that includes a scratch-and-sniff circle is included in the customer's monthly bill. This campaign nicely illustrates the coproduction experience elements of Expertise and Access:Nuance (using the sense of smell to develop customer performance).

Buried deep in our coproduction experience model, at the top of the Access pyramid, is an element called Nuance. Nuance is the model's link to the emotional side of customer experiences, specifically in the five senses of sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. I was excited when I came across the WSJ article on Sweet Sounds that Sell (10/24/12, D1), which examined the various ways sounds are integrated into coproduction experiences. The scritch of a Sharpie pen as it writes. The click of a cosmetic container. The music a dishwasher plays when finished.From an emotional standpoint, sounds enhance the esthetics of a coproduction experience. But there is also a rational angle to sounds. Sounds provide feedback that help customers recognize when they are performing well (for example, the click a container makes when it is closed, to signify that it is closed properly and won't spill the contents, or the pop of a container to signify that it is open (and that it is sealed and fresh, as well - Snapple uses this technique).

My wife and I went to the movies last night, something we rarely do. After all, with a big-screen TV and Netflix, one's home is a movie theater.Before the movie started, the screen displayed an ad for a new service called CineMode. CineMode is an app for your smart phone that, when activated, puts your phone in a sleep mode. But here's the customer performance kicker. If your smartphone remains in CineMode for the entire length of the film, then you'll earn a reward. - a digital coupon for treats, movie discounts, and so on.The whole aim of CineMode is to influence customer performance, specifically that of deviants who text and do other things with their phones that impact the quality of the customer experience for other movie goers. Obviously, setting customer expectations didn't work. So some stronger medicine was needed. However, after displaying the CineMode ad, the theater then displayed a stronger message: if you use your phone in the theater during the movie you will be asked to leave. Which incentive do you think will be more effective? The CineMode reward or the threat of removal from the theater?In my customer experience class, my students conducted fieldwork several years ago that explored this kind of deviant behavior. They set up situations in which a confederate's cell phone rang in three situations: a public area, a quiet room in the library, and at a diner that has large signs prohibiting cell phone use. The "customer norming" in the first situation was none; in the second, it was non-verbal expressions and glances shunning the behavior; and in the third it was both verbal and non-verbal actions by both other customers and staff to shun the behavior. But the classic theater behavior modification is John Water's short that informs people about smoking policies in theaters. You can see it at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnpofBtijF8.

Automobile manufacturers are integrating a variety of sensing devices into vehicles that monitor a driver's performance, with the intention of increasing driver safety. These includes sensors that measure brain waves, sweat, heart rate, sleepiness, heart rate, glucose levels, breathing, alcohol level, and so on on. Based on what these sensors detect, a vehicle could respond to enhance safety, such as turning off a radio, blocking a cell phone call, or some other actions.

Are you one of those people who always want to get the last drop out of a container? I know I am, whether it is the toothpaste tube, dish soap bottle, or jelly jar. To meet this customer requirement, manufacturers are modifying their packaging to enable customers to get the last drop, and other companies are providing tools that enable customers to get the last drop out of packages, such as the Squeeze Ease sold at the Container Store. See the Wall Street Journal article for more details.

When I was in graduate school, one of my possible dissertation projects was to investigate using customer performance methods to increase diabetes patients adherence to taking their insulin shots or pills, as the case might be. Similar to my interest in prescription adherence 20 years ago, a recent article in the Wall Street Journal explored a variety of customer performance aids to help ensure patients take their medicine when they are supposed to. These include blister packs that include labeling that indicates the date when specific pills need to be taken and wireless devices that alert a patient if they have forgotten to take a pill. These are all excellent examples of how the Access:Interface and Access:Information components of the Coproduction Experience Model can enhance customer performance.

The strongest method for influencing customer performance is Vision, which focuses on designing experiences that have clear goals and rich feedback. At the Consumer Electronics Show this year, a number of devices that offer Vision to consumers for health and fitness activities where introduced. These devices included wristbands and armbands that measure various biometrics, and an electronic fork that measures how quickly a person eats. If one is eating too fast, then the fork vibrates to indicate to the eater to slow down. And, of course, all these devices enable consumers to upload the data that these devices collect to a computer, smartphone, or cloud-based service so that you can track and display the data, set goals, and otherwise geek out with our own personal big data set about you. About 30 million of these devices have been sold in 2012, with an expectation that the number will rise to 160 million by 2017. See also the WSJ article Marching to a Vibrant Drummer (1/15/13) for an article about related feedback devices.

Many monthly bills, such as from your utility, credit card provider, phone service, and so on, have for a long time been complex and confusing. New regulations and laws have started to address this problem, with the aim of enhancing customer performance - specifically in terms of having the information to make good decisions (Access:Information). Read more about what's being done to enhance credit card bills here. 

The wave of smart technologies is upon us, from smart meters and devices that help use better manage our energy use to a trash can that takes pictures of what we throw away to determine well our households are aligning with "green living." From a customer performance standpoint, these technologies fall into the Access component of the coproduction experience model, but deliver most of their benefits through the Vision component, namely through the principles of goals and feedback. The other elements of the model are represented as well. Take the trash camera. The goal is green living. The analysis of the trash is the feedback. Points are awarded if you are doing good (Incentive), and remedial instruction is offered if you are not (Expertise). And there we have it, a complete coproduction experience.The debate, however, is whether the devices are "good smart" or "bad smart". Good smart devices let the customer stay in control. An example is the HAPIfork, which assesses your eating speed. Lights indicate when you are eating too fast, but it is up to you to make the decision to slow down (no, the fork does not retract its tongs, but it would be really cool if it did, to make you take smaller bites).Bad smart devices don't give you complete control. An example of bad is a breathalyzer in a car. Blow a blood alcohol level of 0.8, and the car won't start. Socially, this is good, at least we think so. But the question is how far this idea can be taken. Several years ago, in the electric utility industry (where I do a lot of work), California regulators considered making programmable, controllable thermostats for commercial businesses mandatory, as well as the mandatory participation in electric demand response events which require customers to reduce their energy usage for a few hours on hot summer days. Needless to say, this didn't go over very well and the proposal was shelved.In our own research, it is clear that for customer performance to emerge, customers feel that they are in control of the situations and performances in which they engage. We need to help them in most cases, and only take over in the fewest of cases. It will be interesting to see how this facet of customer performance balances out. See WSJ 2/23/13, C1 for more insights on this.