This morning I sat through the most awesome keynote by Andrew McAfee - author of Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization's Toughest Challenges. Andrew is one of the 100 most influential people in IT. His talk was not just informative and eye-opening, it was immensely entertaining. In short it was a privilege.What did I learn?Andrew's talk deserves a fairly long post (though with very random thoughts). His address was in 3 parts; the definition of Enterprise 2.0, the "state of the art" as he saw it and the things to avoid ("how to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory")The Definition of Enterprise 2.0Involves use of emergent technology or new uses of technology or social software;Solves business problems and answers business goalsThe State of the ArtAndrew defined the state of the art of Enterprise 2.0 under 6 major headings:AltruismPeople want to help each otherEnterprise software needs to be people centric not document centricThe paranoia about risks is not senseless, but overrated. Most risks never materialise because in the enterprise, you don't have the luxury of being anonymous like on the web. People are unlikely to do the "wrong" things. In fact they never do it.The entry barrier for people to want to help each other, needs to be low -- eg: Twitter. People can help each other and do that within just 140 characters!ProcessThere's rarely one best way to do things in today's business world -- the era of best practices is dying.People need to have the ability to self select and self organise when contributing content and deciding how and when to collaborate. We need to limit workflow - it can't take several levels of approval to do something simple. Structure shouldn't be imposed. Tools need to facilitate structure and structure should develop over time.InnovationExample: Innocentive, the idea of crowdsourced innovation, where its only a matter of getting a different person to take a look at your problem and solve it for much less than the solution is really worth!Getting more eyeballs to look at a problem often generates more solutions. Expertise is emergent, not identified. Anyone can be an expert and people are recognised for their contribution and not their position/ credentials. Communities should be the one that people want. Nothing should be imposed. (Something someone said "Communities of interest" vs "Communities of Practice")IntelligenceHarness the collective. The wisdom of crowds makes decision making really powerful. Peer decision making, peer reviews, peer innovation and peer feedback make ultimate sense (given the number of eyeballs looking at the issue!)Andrew gave the example of the prediction market's analysis of the Obama campaign where crowdsourced probabilities resulted in a more accurate prediction of the election results than the most sophisticated analysis by expert statisticians.BenefitsEnterprise 2.0 gives you the opportunity to "narrate your work" to the extent that you can all of a sudden demonstrate your expertise.It creates for better social connections. You are connected to the right people sooner. It offers the opportunity to benefit from varied perspectives on a certain topic.ImpactResults of a McKinsey study about web 2.0 tools shows:Access to knowledge 68%Access to internal experts 43%Employee satisfaction 35%Increased innovation 25%Increased customer satisfaction 43% Its a bad idea to sit out the Web 2.0 phenomenon. We need to look at technology with a fresh set of eyes. We can't go back to "business as usual" after this recession. Businesses need to leverage technology as one of its key components.Things to AvoidDon't try to replace email: Instead think of things that email cant do. Don't accentuate the negatives: Instead point out risks while accentuating the huge business benefits. Don't fall in love with features: Start simple, iterate through the solution Don't declare war on the enterprise: Its a bad sales strategy to alienate the very people that'll sponsor such a thing. Organisations need structure to functionDon't build walled gardens: Instead allow multiple groups to flourish in the same place. Moving between groups needs to be seamless.Don't overuse the word "social": It creates the wrong connotations for the business; especially in a time when we're seeking tangible results.© Sumeet Moghe, 2009

The first concurrent session that I attended this morning was Ruth Clark's talk about Evidence based Training. Ruth talked about moving from fads and fiction to facts about the use of multimedia in training and education. Ruth as usual was her confident, articulate self and displayed some wonderful research and evidence that contradicts a lot of traditional wisdomWhat did I learn?Learning styles are overrated and a waste of time. There's no relationship between someone's learning style and their eventual performance on the job. eg: being a visual learner doesn't mean that you will have a high recall of an image. Liking a session has no correlation to an individual's learning in the session. A highly rated session may not be the most effective.People need the bare minimum detail to apply the learning. Extraneous detail is confusing (war stories, anecdotes, etc) and while immensely likeable, can hurt learning.Tips for use of multimedia in elearning and training:Graphics with text create the highest impact learning because of the dual encoding phenomenon. This is a great mode for novices and apprentices. Audio narration is proven as the most effective method of providing descriptions to graphics. This should be the default on elearning courses, with the ability to pause, and turn off. Simple line drawings are much easier to recall than complex 3D pictures. Stills are often more effective than animation, to explain how things work. In such situations, animations put the brain in a passive state and create extraneous mental load Videos are proven to be effective in teaching social skills and motor skills and to show examples.© Sumeet Moghe, 2009

ICERI2015, the 8th annual International Conference of Education, Research and Innovation will be held in Seville (Spain), on the 16th, 17th and 18th of November, 2015.  Important dates: Abstract Submission Deadline: July 16th, 2015. (included)Final Paper Submission Deadline: October 1st, 2015. (included) Registration deadline for authors: October 1st, 2015. (included) Conference Dates: Seville (Spain), November 16th-17th-18th, 2015.Game-based learning and Gamification are some of the conference topics.

The last session I attended today was Kim Ziprik's short talk on "Business Alignment: Focus on the Workplace ...Not the Classroom!". Kim took aim at the tendency of training departments to "train their way out" of a performance problem and how that has very little impact on actual workplace performance. She went onto talk about approaches that may be useful to bring the focus back to the workplace, where most learning happens.What did I learn?There are tremendous challenges that training teams are facing as a consequence of the changing pace of businsess:performance variables; learner motivation; change of business situation; retention drops drastically a short time after a training event. training doesn't address the entire value stream and looks at localised optimisations training is a cost based exercise that traditionally doesn't focus on workpplace performance whereas we should be investing in learning which is geared at solving challenges in the workplaceKim talked about creating "Learning Wells and not Training Dams": drive what people need via their experience levels. She gave tips very similar to the ones I used in my older post about the Dreyfus ModelLeverage performance based tools like: Job Aids (Standard Work?); Employee Performance and Support Systems; Self Assessments; Coaching; Communities; Career based curriculum Integrate learning into the workplace - create continuous learning opportunities. Redesign your Learning Architecture. Rethink the roles your training team plays, the places where training happens, the measures for effectiveness, technologies assisting learning and the culture that surrounds these experiences. Reduce the dependency on a single source of information. Harness the power of the collective - people together are far smarter than you can ever be.© Sumeet Moghe, 2009

I can't attempt to summarise Eric's keynote, also because I feel woefully inadequate to be able to tie together the thousand pieces of wisdom and interconnections that he through out in the speech. My slow brain's going to take some time to process this information. But anyways, I did a mindmap while Eric was presenting, and I'd like to share it with you. Here you go! Click on the mindmap for a full-size version, because I imagine it'll be impossible to read at this size. Again, its a very personal note-taking approach, so I don't imagine it'll be most intuitive.© Sumeet Moghe, 2009

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This afternoon I sat through Adam Mash's (? I think that's his name) session on Google Wave. Being a Google Wave tester, nothing that he said was new for me except he highlighted a few things worth reiterating.So what should you know about Google WaveThere are some really interesting uses for Google Wave:Collaborative creation of documents, reports, observations, requestsGroup/ Afilliation rosters; Agenda, meeting minutes, to-do list combos; Collaborative proposal Writing and approval; Collective visioning and brainstorming; Getting to know you style stuff Fun, special interest conversationsA few things that people may not know about WaveThe complete wave guide -- all there is to know about Wave You can create and access public waves. You can explictly choose to follow public waves. Wave is an open protocol, so it is possible to create custom clients to interact with Wave. Just like every other Google Application, Wave is extensible and there are already quite a few extensions in play for Google Wave, that will make it a fully featured collaboration platform whenever it is out. It is not possible to remove people from a wave, yet. Support for mailing lists and groups isn't great yet. Actually its almost non-existent. There's a twitter feed for google wave at #googlewave© Sumeet Moghe, 2009

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The last session I attended today was by Julia Bulkowski and Erika Grouell from Google about how they're leveraging Web 2.0 technologies to help drive performance in their company. Again, nothing new given that Google's products are all free for public use. This said, it was a great reinforcement of how much you can do with just one integrated (single sign-on suite).Key TakeawaysCulture is key to adoption of Web 2.0 technologies.Google and ThoughtWorks have very unique cultures that are geared towards rapid technology adoption, minimal access barriers and hierarchy and a lot of companies still need to figure out the best structure to make Enterprise 2.0 adoption succeed. A clever use of blogs and discussion forums: Practicing and reviewing transactional skills like writing and email communication. A clever use of Google Code Labs: Leverage fellow software developers to learn a programming language. Use Google Code labs to provide code snippets to learn practical styles and patterns of programming. Very wiki like, especially with revision history and crowdsourced descriptions. This makes experts visible and lets new developers ramp-up quicker. A clever way of sharing instructional resources: Create a Google Wave and embed it into your class homepage. People can discuss the problem amongst themselves, but at the same time make a private submission to the instructor if this was an assignment, test, etc. A clever use of online photo and video sharing: Sharing howto's, tips, screencasts, tutorials. Take a look at YouTube's Google Apps Channel. As a social tool as well, users can create their own tutorials, etc and they could do videos of themselves doing presentations and get feedback from each other. Clever way of preparing for a session, panel discussion, conference talk: Use Google Moderator so participants can brainstorm questions for the session. Helps you prepare as a speaker as well. Providing Web 2.0 services in the enterprise is a way of reducing your risk. If you don't, people will in any case use these tools outside and then you don't have any control and have in a way increased your own risk!© Sumeet Moghe, 2009

Again a great storytelling keynote by Leo Laporte, arguably the czar of New Media. Leo touched upon the stories of his life and the shift from advertising driven mass media to content driven new media where he's trying to be the "CNN for Geeks". Great wisdom and since some people liked my mindmap from yesterday, here's another one. Please click on the image for a larger size. As Leo said, "Its a river of information, dip your foot in whenever its convenient."© Sumeet Moghe, 2009

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Stephen Walsh and Cammy Bean from Kineo put together an interesting session on how you can create engaging elearning without really burning a hole in your pocket. Cammy and Stephen are friends and I really enjoyed their session. They put together some great examples of elearning that were, let's just say quite stunning! There were some great takeaways for attendees and I've summarised that in this blog.Key Takeaways Things that bore people: Navigation; Text Heavy; Endless videos; Talking heads Cookie cutter approach to design; Locked navigation; violating basic rights of freedom; Systems simulation; Patronising or elementary content; Monotony and Redundancy; How to design rapidly: Show, don't tell: Get a prototype out as soon as possible; "Get it wrong first time, and iterate from there." Get in front of users as soon as you can; Keep a playlist of ten tracks of design.Stephen introduced to the audience his Ten tracks of design: Hit me with your best shot: Use stories that show what can go wrong. Find the killer fact, stat or quote. Learn from your marketing team. Give me a Reason: Object to learning objectives. Instead of a dozen boring learning objectives, try a lead-in video and show what normally happens and then point out how this will solve a problem that your learners will face. Getting the best stories: Get war stories from your best people and get true stories from your newer people. Don't just go to your senior people -- ask people in the trenches, so that way people who go into this training will actually relate to the real situations. Audio interviews over Skype were a great idea Stephen put forward. Tear down the wallpaper: Use purposeful graphics. Make them earn their place. "Decoration isn't design." This is assessment in the real world: Make it tough as hell. Make it open any time. Do it, prove it, move on. Make more mistakes: Find the mistakes that hurt the most. Simulate them in elearning. Keep them real, play them out. When you're providing feedback provide more than just incorrect/ correct observations, add context about why a choice is appropriate or not. A little less conversation, a little more action: Simplicity is tough, cut your training to the bone. Watch out for dialogue amongst characters. Keep text to a minimum and tone it down to the absolute key message! What more can I do?: Think outside the course -- create a learning campaign. Reach out with online support - don't do everything through elearning! Don't get caught up in the technology, think about the problem and the solution. What's are the different ways to spread the word, the simplest way to get learning out, and the most effective way to get them engaged. Keeping it real: Make the most of media and use audio and video where it counts! Use real people and film them (think of doing it secretly, so people aren't conscious!). When people's identities are at risk use a witness protection style by blurring people's faces out. Video is proven to be the most effective medium for behavioural skills. Now what?: The end is the beginning. Call to action and then don't let go! Build in ways to sustain performance and link into your LMS and Knowledge Management System to access follow up activities and resources. Leverage communities of interest and people's desire to be altruistic.© Sumeet Moghe, 2009

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The last session from DevLearn 2009 that I sat through was the one by David Mallon from Bersin & Associates, called "The Changing Learning Function: Rethinking how your organization works". David was presenting empirical evidence from 798 Organisations and 40,000 training and HR business leaders and using Bersin's analysis about what the new face of the learning organisation should be like.What I learnt Why are we talking about all of these new technologies? Its because business is changing and that's forcing businesses to rethink what we do in each of our departments and that includes learning and development, knowledge management, and the like. Are all the thinks we knew about our job really as good and are we using ourselves in the best way for our organisation? The problem is context, not content. Its everyone's responsibility to deal with information and act on it. Everyone is a knowledge worker and the overwhelming amount of information floating around. Its tough to find the most useful information. We need to reuse and have some set of standards to be successful. Frequent change of information makes it difficult to find the most current information. Inconsistency of information formats or sources makes it difficult to use and comprehend new info. Learning professionals have the ability to create the context and the standards that organisations really need. The ongoing role of a modern enterprise L&D function is two fold: Deep Specialisation:Focus on your company's niche. What's your competitive advantage? Learning Agility: At an organisational level, how quickly can you add new skillsets, learn from your mistakes and create new capabilities. A change is needed: Large and midsized organisations are still spending most of their learning time in their classrooms. Technology enabled learning is gaining strength each year, but very slowly. Having said this, most leaders believe that on the job experience, mentoring, projects, job rotation, and coaching are the most valuable learning approaches. 72% companies believe that the most valuable learning approaches are informal, yet only 30% of resources are focussed in that area! So, we need to optimise the informal learning in organisation and not just the classroom. The modern learning organisation should be structured in the following framwework: Your Learning Programs addressing your Audiences and Problems Your Approaches and Architecture: Formal Learning: 20% Informal Learning: 80%. This includes On-demand Learning: Elearning, help, search, books, etc Social Learning: Blogs, wikis, forums, communities, social networks, etc. Embedded Learning: All the ways that we learn inside work. eg: Performance Support, Feedback, Rotational Assignments, Course Corrections, Retrospectives, etc. The Disciplines that people need to master to adopt these approaches The tools and technology that support these disciplines But most importantly, beyond all of this, under the hood -- there's the culture of the organisation. The Modern Enterprise Learning Index (MELI) is a set of 10 indicators to determine readiness/ capacity to support learning agility and thrive in the face of informative change. (Internal Indicators: Capacity Building, Business Analysis, Content Efficiency, Adaptation, Versatile) (External Indicators: Business Driven, Talent Linked, Timely, Targetted, Proximal) Retention after training events is high, but it drops over time and so does expertise. Learning is a process and not an event, so informal learning create a series of events that helps people learn over time. How about blending informality into formal learning by leveraging online communities, and by using tools such as Job Aids (Standard Work), Forums, EPSS, etc. David showed a case study from Nationwide insurance in how they blended informal learning around a large formal program to help a major capabilities shift for the company. IBM Blue Pages was another example that David showed as an enterprise wide collaboration system. Coaching is a highly underestimated way of creating learning over time. I loved the case study of BT that he showed where they were looking at Formal Learning supported by Social Learning, developed by anyone, using segments lasting minutes, delivered by anyone, given just in time, pulled and in real time and was dynamic and adhoc (long sentence, I know!) This apparently built reputation and people wanted to contribute to be known as "the guy". The community flags inappropriate content and there's hardly ever been anything that they had to pull out. David lastly looked at the Disciplines we need to engage in as Learning professionals to make our organisations successful. He had culled this using data from the 10% of the most successful companies he had surveyed Knowledge Management: Develop overall strategies for capturing and harnessing the collective knowledge of an organisation. Business Intelligence/ Analytics Information Architecture: Structuring information to make it easy to find. Stop paying attention to a single course, but pay more attention to the learning experience. This involves thinking spatially across contexts. Performance Consulting Development of Rich Media (information, visualisation, etc) The role of a Training team: "Center of Excellence for Learning in the organisation". Focus on capabilities (preparing for tomorrow) as against skills (preparing for today).New Roles in the learning organisation: Performance Consultants Instructional Designers Work out in the biz, teaching others to structure knowledge; Supervise SMEs. Add additional disciplines to create environments Be masters of the business Measure approaches in business terms View fast/ efficient business performance/ improvement as ultimate expression of their ablities. Content Developers Multimedia Specialists Information Architects Editors/ Production Support Community Management Content Stewards Moderators Program Managers SME's © Sumeet Moghe, 2009

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Its amazing how things happen to me at airports. I was flying out of San Francisco this morning and as is usual for me, I was very hungry for a big breakfast. So as soon as I got to the airport, I was hunting for a big meaty adventure. So I located Lori's diner on the north side of the airport and ordered a large breakfast with hashbrowns, eggs, sausages and bacon. You can see that I enjoy my food! When the food arrived though, it was in a paper plate and I had to cut, pierce and tear the crisp bacon with little plastic cutlery. If you haven't done this yet, I suggest you do it simply to know how tough this can be. The fork couldn't hold the bacon down, the knife just scratched the surface of the meat and the plate kept moving around. It felt like being asked to dance in an iron cast. And then suddenly, just as I always do, I thought about the learning tools we tend to provide to people in our organisation. Don't they often feel just like plastic cutlery and paper plates? But then aren't these tools very similar to those on the big, broad internet? Why do the tools on the Internet work so well? Why do enterprise intranets suck so much? I guessed I could put some thoughts down.The Internet and the Web2.0 revolutionThere's no denying that we're in the information age. In fact as Tony Buzan says, we're perhaps past the information age and we've reached the intelligence age. Andrew McAfee in his speeches often quotes someone saying, "The internet is the world's best library, only the books are all on the floor." Andrew continues to clarify that we've reached a point where the books are not really on the floor. They're organised using means that are more sophisticated cataloging system that we can think of. A thought and a few words can get you to the resources you need. The strange, self organising, voluntary yet incredibly effective nature of the internet amazes all of us. How did we reach this state where a spaghetti of links has metamorphosed into this incredible resource that most of us can't live without? On the other hand why do the same Web2.0 tools fail when we deploy them in the enterprise? There are a few phenomenon that separate Web 2.0 sucsesses from Enterprise 2.0 failures.RecognitionWhile we'd like to think that people like to help each other and that is obviously true, one of the biggest reasons for people to contribute content on the internet, is the recognition they get. Your work is out there for the whole wide world to admire or criticise, and with more eyeballs looking, you have the opportunity to grow from the fact that there are a bigger number of people following. For example, I prefer blogging on the internet as against my corporate intranet, simply because I can reach out to more people this way. People sometimes comment on my work, they email me and I feel good about what I do. A blogpost on the corporate intranet doesn't always get people the same kind of responses and it almost feels like they're doing all that work for 'nothing'. I remember someone saying, "People usually have no more than 10 minutes each day to contribute content 'for the benefit of others'. When they have a choice between the broad, appreciative, internet and the puny, thankless intranet, the decision is quite simple."Critical MassA small fraction of a huge number is still a big number. Only about 1% of the internet's users contribute to Wikipedia and that's part of the participation inequality phenomenon. Similarly, very few people contribute to YouTube or write a blogs. Organisations often go by the assumption that if Wikipedia is successful, so will a corporate wiki. Guess what, 1% of a 500 person company is just 5 people. Intranets built on the same principles as the internet just don't have the benefit of the critical mass. The tougher it is to compose a resource, the lower the participation is and conversely the higher the need for a critical mass is. When deploying Web 2.0 technologies, organisations often forget how important it is to generate the critical mass of participation to create the eventual snowball effect that we see on the internet.AnonymityOn the internet, people can get away with quite a lot of things. It doesn't matter if its Martin Fowler, Jay Cross, Tony Karrer or Joe Nobody's blog. You can post an anonymous comment and stay away from retribution. Hell, even a credentialised comment doesn't invite retribution. It doesn't matter how caustic your commentary is -- you can choose to speak your mind. Contrast this with a CEO's blog or wiki article on the intranet. In some places one could get fired for offering criticism to such resources. This limits participation everywhere - blogs, wikis, forums, etc. Then again, there's the fear of looking stupid in front of your co-workers. People feel safer on the internet than they do on the intranet.Friendship & NetworkingThe internet is a great way for people to stay in touch with friends and to find like minded people. OTOH, corporate intranets conveniently ignore the word 'social' when deploying tools. The common feeling is is "If we make software social, then people won't focus on content -- they'll spend time socialising. We want people to learn, not socialise." In the absence of the opportunity to connect with the people you're producing content for, the motivation of producing content is lost. Its very difficult to keep producing reams of good content without knowing if anyone really uses any of it. After a while, the most active of contributors give up.Usable Tools & a Low Entry BarrierMost importantly, the internet is rich in tools that are: a) Immensely usable; b) Have a very low entry barrier -- take very little effort to get started with; Take a look at the examples from our day to day life. Things are becoming simpler every day. Google, is the simplest search engine you can imagine. How much effort does it take to Twitter? Look at every tool that's gained mass acceptance, YouTube, Facebook, Orkut, Wikipedia, you name it and you'll realise its awfully easy to use. The biggest thing however, beyond all of the usability charm is the fact that you don't need to go through multiple levels of authentication to get to these tools. Tools like the ones on the Google stack, allow you to have a single sign on as well. A lot of tools keep you logged in forever or allow you to use desktop clients to make their usage simple. Contrast this to most enterprise intranets, characterised by multiple logins, security guidelines and usage restrictions. It really does feel like the plastic cutlery and paper plate.What should our Enterprise 2.0 deployments look like?When managers pitch for Enterprise 2.0, the focus is always on the business benefits, productivity and risks. Unfortunately we don't often think about the very social nature of the web -- the culture of altruism that makes the mish-mash of links stay alive. The key is in trying to bring in a similar cultural change in our organisations. I'm not talking about revolutionary, 'overthrow the tyrant' kind of changes. I'm talking about the little incremental changes that can make the use of social media in the workplace just as effective.Frictionless and Ego FreeWe need to think of how we make it easy to use social media in the workplace. How can we reduce the number of levels of authentication to access these tools. How about implementing single sign on? How can we foster a culture of open communication so that no one gets fired for openly expressing their views or sharing their criticism (unless they're really being jerks.) When a CxO airs an idea, how open is she to let the idea be shot down? How can we ensure that we encourage flatness of thought, where ideas from management are no more or less valuable than those from the usual workforce? How about using tools that require minimal expertise (think microblogging, wikis, video blogs, social qna)?Reward ContributionsIn most cases people want to help each other. The internet hinges on this altruism and people benefit from the recognition they get for their contributions. When you're competing against the internet for reach and recognition, the success of social media in the workplace depends on the reward people perceive for making a contribution. The rewards could be intrinsic, like a reputation the system automatically builds for you as you contribute and the way people perceive your contributions. The rewards could be extrinsic and small -- people seem to love stuff like coffee mugs and t-shirts. The recognition can be case-by-case; for example the COO writing in to someone to complement them on an article they put up. Or a community of practice putting up someone's video on YouTube as reference material. The key is recognise and reward contributions to the company's knowledge space.Connect PeoplePeople like to create content that other people will use. People want to help each other; but people are more likely to help each other if they know each other. More importantly, the power of connections is illustrated by Andrew McAfee's theory about strong ties, weak ties and potential ties. Having a number connections, strong and weak mean that people can now reach out to other people whom they never knew, who have potential solutions to their problems. The ability of being able to reach out to an expert in Australia, when working in Brazil, is not just really useful its effective and exciting. The power of social and professional networking of the kind of Linkedin or Facebook is immense!Don't police, let users moderateControl is an illusion; 80% of learning already happens outside your 'control' spaces. Exposing this learning via social media provides options for influence: correcting, improving, extending. People already share bad information in very scary ways. The power of social media is in the fact that you can allow users to moderate each other. Think of users flagging content as inappropriate, or collaboratively editing content to remove inappropriate information. The wisdom of crowds is much greater than we can imagine. When we set more eyeballs looking at the content, we increase the ability to have useful content. Compare this to having just one moderator who has to verify that all content is appropriate. This is where the Wikipedia story makes so much sense.Be a spider, harness the webLets face it, despite how useful your intranet is, people will still go to the Internet for many things. People will still write their blogs, tweet, publish to YouTube and use Slideshare. The good old saying is, "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.". So if you can't beat the internet, its perhaps a good idea to aggregate user generated content off it. How about aggregating a user's Twitter feed, their blog, their Facebook status and their Linkedin profile onto their corporate profile. Combine this information with projects they've worked on, discussions they're part of and wiki pages they've authored, you've got very useful information contextualised in the right place! Information is power, intelligence is when you contextualise information. Combining information from the public internet with information from the intranet and then giving it the power of search can truly unleash the power of Enterprise 2.0.There is of course the whole layer of viral marketing and evangelism that I've conveniently missed, but my guess is that a lot of organisations already do that and useful systems will market themselves. I'm quite excited by the prospects of Enterprise 2.0 and I love what I'm seeing as the visible impacts of such technology in the workplace. ThoughtWorks is soon launching its own Enterprise 2.0 consulting offering. If you'd like us to assist you with your Enterprise 2.0 plans, please get in touch with us to know more. And don't forget to post liberally on the comments section of this blogpost.© Sumeet Moghe, 2009

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The last few days in Hong Kong have been incredible -- I saw some great sights, participated in some interesting activities and backed all of it up with some great food. Talking of food, I very quickly realised that its kinda tough to get by without using chopsticks in Hong Kong. Now I'm sure that some upmarket restaurants offer forks and knives for food. Food for me however, spells 'cheap and streetside'. The only cutlery I got at these places were chopsticks and soup spoons. Thankfully I know how to use chopsticks, so I had no trouble. Its interesting how I learnt to use chopsticks though. At one point I decided that eating with chopsticks was cool, since I'd seen some of my friends do it and it was kind of a distinctive thing to do. So I read up a "how-to" for using chopsticks, which since I had no opportunity to use, I forgot in a few days. So when I actually did get the opportunity to use chopsticks, I fumbled for the first ten minutes and actually messed up my shirt! It took me about an hour to finish my meal, but by the end I had found an inelegant way that worked for me. As time passed and I visited more oriental restaurants, I gradually perfected the art -- often I'd get little tips and hints from my friends and that helped me get better. Now, I can eat a complete meal with chopsticks and pretty quickly too!People learn iteratively, over timeNow why am I telling you this story? I think my story about learning how to use chopsticks is quite representative of how we learn. Information that we can't apply immediately at our job fades away into irrelevance and soon enough recall of this information is close to zilch! We remember learning that we can apply immediately and the things that we remember the most are the ones that we learn when performing a job i.e. in a performance context. Most importantly, we learn iteratively and over time. Malcolm Gladwell, in his book, Outliers - The Story of Success, explains how strong amateurs accumulate about 2,000 hours of practice by adulthood. Future music teachers build up about 4,000 hours. Really good students amass about 8,000 hours and "elite performers" invest about 10,000 hours of practice. If we take even the point of reaching competence from the absolute novice state, that's about 2000-4000 hours of work! That's got to take several iterations of learning. One of the reasons I support social media and bite-sized learning, is because it gives learning professionals the ability to help learners across this iterative learning journey.You learn iteratively too, irrespective of your 'learning style'One of the objections that I've heard from trainers about social media very often is, "But that's not my learning style..." or "I don't learn that way..." or "Have you considered that it may not be someone learning style to learn this way?" I have a tendency to snap back at these objections, but as I think this through more pragmatically, there are a few things I'm realising:We're all social learners Some of us may take time to realise this. If we look back at our experience, there will have been several occasions when we would have asked a question on a discussion forum or looked up Wikipedia or searched on Google. If we haven't done either of these, we've at least learnt something over a coffee table conversation or over drinks or while working alongside someone. In fact I can bet that most of us learnt how to do our jobs more as a consequence of such informal activities than as a consequence of some heavyweight training. You ARE a social learner, regardless of what you think!We need to 'learn to learn'One of the key developments of this age is the amount of information that's out there in the wired world. Its fascinating how much relevant information even a poorly constructed Google search can throw up. The ability to stay connected with friends and colleagues through social and professional networking tools such as Facebook and Linkedin gives us the ability to leverage weak ties in a manner we never even imagined before. Add to that the plethora of other social media; Wikipedia, Twitter, Yahoo! Answers, Digg, blogs, etc and there's a wealth of intelligence to exploit. People who don't leverage this phenomenon are missing out on something really big. If you truly don't learn this way, then you must learn to learn this way. Otherwise my guess is the world will soon pass you by and you'll be of decreasing value to your organisation.Social media is 'more facilitative than facilitation'If as learning professionals we choose to stay fixed to just one mode of learning then we're holding our organisations back. I say this for both instructor led training and elearning. In fact I feel its important that every formal learning experience includes a larger mix of informal learning opportunities as compared to formal ones. That's where the real value is and that's how we support the iterative nature of learning. In fact after working for a firm that practices Agile, I'll go to the extent of saying that "A single mode of education sans informal learning, is the waterfall of the learning world." Purely formal learning opportunities attempt to help learners solve tomorrow's problems with yesterday's wisdom. Most importantly they adhere to a design that's decided in advance as against being just-in-time, and designed to purpose. Informal learning on the other hand, is contextual and flexible.Here's where you can start your informal learning journeyLearning professionals need informal learning too and believe it or not, there's help to be had in all sorts of places. I'll list some of my favorite places to learn. Please feel free to add more in the comments section - I'm sure there are heaps.Blogselearning Learning is a collaborative effort started by Tony Karrer and is a collection of blog posts and articles all around eLearning. You can subscribe using your email ID to get free article recaps.Tom Kulhmann's blog for some reason isn't aggregated on eLearning Learning. That said, its a great resource for people to learn simple, yet effective ways to rapidly produce high quality learning. I've learnt heaps from Tom's blog. He's a true guru.Online Communities There are various communities online that you can use to connect with other practitioners and to get help, share ideas, have discussions and what not. Here are some that I find really useful.The Learning and Skills Group is a UK based community on Ning, that's really active and has about 1800 members on it. Its invitation only, but I guess you can talk to Don Taylor to get on the group.There are a few Indian groups that are really active too, and very useful:KCommunity is a community of Knowledge Management professionals in India and is a very active group that does a lot of social stuff.Instructional Designers Community of India (IDCI) has a lot of members from the learning community, though I must say I have serious criticism for some of its leaership. (YMMV)The Learning Solutions group also has some interesting discussions, though the traffic isn't comparable to other groups. Some really interesting members on the group though.Twitter Hashtags Its amazing how much information you can find through Twitter. Its difficult to keep up, but not if you combine search and hashtags. Here are some of the hashtags I tend to follow on Twitter. You name a luminary in the field of social media/ elearning and that person's tweeting, so I'm not going to list individuals here.#elearning#e20#socialmedia In addition (how can I miss this?) #lrnchat is an online chat that happens every Thursday night 8:30-10pm EST over the social messaging service Twitter. I've put these up on iCal as recurring events, every Friday morning (India), so I never miss them!Other ResourcesCentre for Learning & Performance Technologies (a.k.a C4LPT) of Jane Hart fame, offers a range of free resources about learning and about social media. ScreenR is screencasting for Twitter! You can use the free screencasting application, under the constraint that you say what you want to say, in 5 minutes. You can find heaps of tutorials created by the huge community and you can create your own with almost zero effort! Lastly, the recently launched Learning Solutions Magazine, and the very recent LearnTrends virtual conference are a great source of absolutely amazing knowledge about organisational learning.I hope you enjoyed today's blogpost. Please comment liberally to let me know what you think. If you'd rather use email, please write to me and share your thoughts. Do you have a favourite resource that I've conveniently missed? Please add that to the comments section. Social learning is well and truly set to be the next big thing and I'll be really keen to learn from your experiences.© Sumeet Moghe, 2009

According to a study of the UK National Institute of Continuing Adult Education workers in the UK prefer informal learning to improve work performance. In the study 2,057 workers were asked what ways of learning are useful in learning to do a job better. In total 10 interventions were presented. Learning by doing was the favourite method with an 82% finding it helpful. This was followed by being shown how to do things by others (62%), and watching and listening to others (56%). Just 54% felt that taking a course paid for by the employer or the worker was helpful, followed closely by reflecting on your own performance (53%). Reading books and manuals (39%), using trial and error (38%) and using the internet (29%) were the least favourite methods. I have been thinking if I should be surprised by this outcome. I think the question of workers preference is only interesting to a certain extent. I prefer to learn via trial and error, but know that in some case a more structured approach can be helpful and more efficient although not preferred by myself. Also when you compare something formal with something informal there might be a tendency to prefer the informal. Another interesting part of the research attacked the question where the responsibility for professional training & development lies. Just over one in five workers (21%) said that their employer was mainly responsible for their learning at work, whilst more than one in three (36%) accepted that it was mainly their responsibility, with the balance of 39% reporting that it was a shared responsibility. Fewer (28%) of the youngest workers, aged 17-19, felt the main responsibility lay with themselves, whilst 41% of 55 plus employees thought they bore the main responsibility.

I'm going to have to ask you to pardon me for not making this a typical visual post. I'm using the Bangalore Airport internet, which is excruciatingly slow, so I hope you understand. My friend Krishnan has been pestering me to come up with a few guidelines for producing elearning. The fact is that I'm not an expert to come up with such a list, but I can speak from my experience as a not-so-great instructional designer and a consumer of some such content. I want to point out that there are other resources that I'm aggregating from and some of the best, practical tips I've found are from:Cathy Moore's blogTom Kulhman's blog Our friends at Kineo who publish some wonderful free thinking, especially gems like how to Yawn Proof your eLearning Of course, there are some other great resources on the web as well. Google should be able to help you find a lot more in this area. I've written a few posts as well, on elearning and for instructional designers, which you may also find useful.Here's some of the wisdom I've been able to distil down from these sources.General Guiding Principles Use Rapid Tools to create elearning: Supported by Tom's brilliant post about the business benefit of rapid elearning. Focus on solving problems, not delivering information. Cathy Moore writes eloquently about this. Be iterative, get users and reviewers to look at your work as soon as possible. As Cammy Bean would say, "Get it wrong the first time, then iterate from there." This is something I want to do more of and more often.Instructional Design PrinciplesPeople don't have the time or the patience for long drawn courses. Think of dividing your huge course into little coursels (like morsels), each of which focus on "how-to" do something. That way even if people look at your learning during a 10 minute break, they'll get something out of it. Also, if they search for "How to ____", they're more likely to find the learning they need. Tom Kulhman has written about coursels here and I've written about them too in this post. Use the Star Trek Model for simulation designConsider multiple modes to deploy the learning. Remember, we're in the age of social media, synchronous learning and enterprise 2.0. I daresay its foolish to try and do everything from within your elearning. Follow an action mapping approach. I can't emphasise this enough, but I'll let Cathy Moore do the talking. Last but certainly not the least, don't forget to leverage your SME to develop your elearning. Using a Powerpoint deck to source materials for your elearning is a cardinal error of elearning. Nothing substitutes collaborating with a person who knows the subject well. Write in plain English please. No one understands gobbledygook. Multimedia Usage PrinciplesSome of the multimedia principles Ruth Clark mentions from Richard Mayer's research, is really useful in case of elearning. Here's Cammy's recap of Ruth's session from DevLearn 2009. Use audio judiciously in elearning. Please, please, please avoid narrating exactly the same thing that users see on screen. There's considerable debate in elearning circles about the use of audio in elearning. I look to wise people such as Cammy Bean, Tom Kulhmann or Cathy Moore for best practices. Use Skype or your SME's to record for your courses if possible. Sometimes rough around the edges is better. Use powerful, full screen images instead of those in separate frames of their own. Here are the various places you can find images from. The Presentation Zen blog is a great resource for ideas on presenting information visually. Use videos when you can, especially to depict emotional impact or to teach soft skills or to quickly demonstrate a task through a screencast. Remember too much video and on-screen conversation or talking heads can bore the hell out of people. Think "authenticity" and try a guerilla style with your videos.I've tried my best to try and share some of my thoughts without being too prescriptive about each implementation detail. What ideas do you have? Please comment and let me know. Thanks!© Sumeet Moghe, 2009

I've tried my best this year to average at least a post a week. In the last few weeks however, my vacation has thrown me off my blogging schedule. Backpacking through Sri Lanka with limited access to the internet has meant that I couldn't be very prolific with my blogging. But now I'm back, so hopefully I'll be back on track in weeks to come. At DevLearn, I was in a discussion with a few other e-learning industry colleagues and a lot of them seemed to believe that they were limited by the tools they were using. While for some edge cases this is true, I refuse to believe that tools should limit our ability to create effective elearning. The fact is, that today you can do a lot of what experienced developers do in Flash based elearning, using rapid tools. In this post, I want to show you how in less than 2 hours, I was able to take a flash-based course and deconstruct it to create a rapid-elearning version.The course in questionKineo, a renowned provider of elearning solutions in the UK recently showcased one of the courses they did for the Great Ormond Street Hospital. Amongst other things, the course sits on Moodle and it's a great example of how to stretch an open-source LMS. I've decided however to focus solely on the elearning course they've created. I must clarify that I'm not trying to suggest that one approach is better than another; nor am I trying to advocate Kineo's design. This is a purely academic effort at trying to replicate a flash based course using a simpler tool. Also, to defend myself a bit, I must also say that I may actually try something different if I actually did the module myself. For a couple of hours work, I guess this is a reasonable output to start iterating from.The course templateOne of the things that makes custom flash standout, is the ability to create a custom, branded interface for elearning. A less known fact is that you can do similar stuff for rapid elearning tools as well. There are two ways to do this:Modify the flash-based player/skin for your rapid-elearningThere are scores of examples for custom interfaces with rapid-elearning tools. Articulate seems to lend itself to this pretty easily. A couple of examples from Kineo are the SSC HIPAA course and the one for O2. If you need a custom interface for your course you can contact them or e-mersion. If you just want to get away from the default Articulate look, then you can even try buying a skin from the e-Mersion store. Very recently Dave Mozealous from Articulate wrote about how you can obtain or create custom skins for your courses.Use Powerpoint to create your interface and manage your navigationWhile I haven't used this in the version I created, I realise that Kineo created their course with a teenage audience in mind and they wanted to create an interface that would appeal to this demographic. If you notice the look and feel of the course and the Moodle page, it's pretty obvious who they're targeting. I tried my hand at doing something from within Powerpoint. Take a look at the example navigation above. This is done solely from Powerpoint and uses nothing but Powerpoint elements. Here's the template for you to muck around with. For people who'd like to delve into this further, here's a wonderful article by Tom Kulhmann on How to design custom templates for elearning. Tom gives away 8 free templates in this article, so its well worth the read.The course contentsHere's the link to my version of the course. The course wasn't very difficult to reproduce from within Powerpoint and Articulate. Most of the course is fairly linear and most interactions were easy to reproduce within Engage or Powerpoint itself. Some fancy rollovers were difficult to reproduce in a short time, but you can definitely achieve that as well using minimal Flash skills. Take a look at Tom's blogpost that answers how to achieve the rollover effect. And here's Dave Anderson's tutorial on the same topic. The key is that I don't have the time or the inclination to go any further than this, but because you can produce stuff so quickly using rapid elearning, you have the ability to quickly create a prototype that you can then iterate from.The answers are not in the toolThe fact is that these days, with so much interactive content available for free and the number of modes you have to create synchronisation and interactivity, the tools should never be a blocker. What still remains important is the skill of sound instructional design. Think about action mapping to make your elearning livelier. There's great information available about scenario based learning - use that to lend interactivity to your courses. Elearning is not about rollovers and animations, so your limitation should only be creativity and not technology. How did you like my blogpost today? Please let me know by posting in the comments section or by emailing me. If you want the source files for the course I put together, email me and I'll be happy to send them to you.© Sumeet Moghe, 2009

As a part of the eLearning 2.0 toolset Wiki’s are often mentioned as a powerful instrument for collaborative learning. Until now limited information has become available on the pedagogical potential of Wiki’s. One of the first articles I have come across is by Renee Fountain. It is quite interesting how he lists the pedagogical power of this tool. In wiki format of course!

'Collaboration' seems to be the new buzzword in organisations today. In fact, Andrew McAfee suggest that instead of saying social software we use the term 'collaborative'. So yeah, technology is fast changing the way we collaborate in the enterprise, but how can we use technology to collaborate better in our teams? Of course there's always the question of culture that we need to address first, but once that's done we need tools to facilitate collaboration. Here are a few tools that I find really useful for in team collaboration.Google WaveBlame me for jumping on the Wave bandwagon, but really it's a really useful tool. As the creators of Wave would say, email was invented before the internet. If email were invented today, it'd perhaps be similar to Google Wave! The fact is that email is fast becoming really unsuitable for collaborative fast paced discussions. Every email that's gone back and forth more than 5 times and has had people added progressively, starts to become really difficult to comprehend. This is where Wave, with its synchronous communication model fits in. If you're working on a document with someone and simultaneously facilitating a discussion on what the document should contain, use Wave. If you want to have an online planning session, try Wave. Google Wave will soon have a number of Gadgets that'll make collaboration so much more interesting and productive. Take a look at this list of wave gadgets to know what I mean. Most importantly, Google Wave integrates and plays really well with the rest of the Google Applications stack. For $50 a year, you can replace your collaboration suite with that of Google's and get Gmail, Google Documents, Google Sites, Google Videos, Google Groups and Google Calendar for your own domain. To know more about Wave take a look at these 15 features of Google Wave and then refer the complete Wave guide for more information. Don't have a Google Wave account? Email me, and I can send you an invite.MingleOkay, okay I work for ThoughtWorks. That said, Mingle doesn't need you to be a ThoughtWorker to be a fan. Mingle is a project Management and Collaboration tool. Its a part of our Adaptive Life Cycle Management suite. "Adaptive" is the keyword here. While every other project management tool under the sun, imposes or "prescribes" a structure on you, Mingle allows you as the team to define the structure that works best for you. Mingle's interface mimics the Agile card-wall which fosters collective ownership and real time visibility across the team and all stakeholders. Mingle also has an in built wiki, for in-project documents and information. The latest version of this tool captures your informal conversation using its new functionality called Murmurs. Murmurs integrates with the Jabber IM platform, to centralise and capture all project communication. Add to that Mingle's ability to integrate with 3rd party collaboration tools such as Google Documents, Google Calendar, etc and you have a truly Web 2.0 project collaboration tool. And yeah, it integrates with Google Wave as well! Mingle is free for 5 users for a period of 1 year. So feel free to download and have a play around. If you want to know more about Mingle, attend one of our webinars or contact us for a demo.CampfireCampfire is a web-based group chat tool that lets you set up password-protected chat rooms in just seconds. Campfire goes a step beyond Instant messaging which is super for 1-o-1 chats, but hopeless for large groups. Then again, working with different services is a pain. AOL don't talk MSN, don't talk Google, don't talk Yahoo. Campfire is network-agnostic, so regardless of which network you prefer, you can continue to collaborate with your team using Campfire. So, for distributed teams Campfire provides a great platform for synchronous communication.SkypeWhile telecommuting is becoming more common each day, organisations still aren't handing out phones with huge calling balances to employees. How do you telecommute without busting the bank with your telephone bills? With better internet connectivity and fast improving tools, VOIP is here to stay. My favourite VOIP tool is Skype. Its free for computer to computer calls and costs very little for computer to phone calls. It allows me not only to call 1-o-1, but also to do conferences and to share my screen with the person on the other side. I look at it as Telephony 2.0. If you've used Skype, you perhaps know what I mean. If you haven't, I strongly recommend that you tie it into your project collaboration stack.DimDimOften, a conference call isn't enough to collaborate effectively. You often need to conduct a meeting with whiteboards, presentations, synchronous communication and what not. Here's where a web-conferencing tool can come in handy. DimDim, in my opinion is the easiest web-conferencing tool for your team, especially since its free for upto 20 people in a room! Take a look at the video above to see how cool DimDim really is and feel free to try it out -- it costs you nothing! Now this is definitely not an exhaustive list of tools that help collaboration in teams. What tools do you use? I'd love to hear from you, so please post your ideas and suggestions in the comments section. It'll be nice to know how you're using some of these tools, so I can get my hands dirty with them as well! Again, if you want a Google Wave account, email me, or drop a comment for this post and I can send you an invite.© Sumeet Moghe, 2009

Hello and welcome to my first official blog post!!For my first blog I would like to introduce myself and let you know what avenues I am planning to go along for this blog.First off my name is Scott McNamara and I am a native Detroiter. I currently work as a special education teacher in Warren, MI. I have my Master's in Adapted Physical Education and my Bachelors in Special Education. I'm currently the president of a local non-profit called Camp Abilities Michigan and I teach a class to children with Autism for Oakland University.I absolutely love what I do and would like to dedicate my blog to helping to promote education for students with disabilities. In this blog I will be keeping you updated on my camp as well as tips to create a successful non-profit. I will review educational articles and videos that may help out in the special education field. I will be doing occasional interviews with people in the field or people who influence the special education profession. I will commit a large part of my blog to discussing the benefits of adapted physical education for children with disabilities.What is adapted physical education you say? In most areas of the nation adapted physical education is a relatively unknown/under utilized field. But from my experience and from field based research, I can tell you that children with disabilities can benefit enormously from receiving services from a trained adapted physical educator. Physical education teaches across 3 major domains for any child, where as most other direct services and related services only teach to one domain( such as a physical therapists teaches only to psychomotor). Those 3 domains are cognitive, affective(social), and psychomotor(physical). Most children with disabilities struggle with all 3 of those domains. Another vital aspect of physical education for children with disabilities is that there is a absurd amount of obesity rates among children with disabilities when compared to their typically developing peers. There is a much lower amount of people with disabilities that are involved in their communities. Having physical educators who are certificated to work with children with disabilities would help in both of these areas.When I have witnessed non adapted physical educators working with children with disabilities, most of them do try to make many accommodations so that the students are successful. But try as they might, they are not trained to work with children with disabilities and many times struggle immensely with trying to modify curriculum and trying to regulate behaviors. This is no discredit to physical educators. They do not have the prior training to excel in this area and it is crazy that it is expected of them.Adapted physical education is an aspect of the law as well. It is actually the only curriculum specially mentioned in IDEA, one of the most potent laws that defines special education rights for students with disabilities. Since this is the only curriculum that is specifically mentioned in the law, you would be under the impression that it is a very critical and needed curriculum. But whomever has interpreted the law does not agree with the lawmakers and has denied many students with disabilities their rights.Here is the EXACT wording of the law:Physical Education Requirement in IDEA34 C.F.R.300.39(b)(2) IDEA defines "physical education" as the development of:Physical and motor skillsFundamental motor skills and patternsSkills in aquatics, dance, and individual and group games and sports (including intramural and lifetime sports).20 U.S.C. 1401(29) Special Education. The term 'special education' means specially designed instruction, at no cost to parents, to meet the unique needs of a child with a disability, including -(A) instruction conducted in the classroom, in the home, in hospitals and institutions, and in other settings; and(B) instruction in physical education.34 CFR 300.108 Physical Education. The State must ensure that public agencies in the State comply with the following:(a) General. Physical education services, specially designed if necessary, must be made available to every child with a disability receiving FAPE, unless the public agency enrolls children without disabilities and does not provide physical education to children without disabilities in the same grades.(b) Regular physical education. Each child with a disability must be afforded the opportunity to participate in the regular physical education program available to nondisabled children unless -(1) The child is enrolled full time in a separate facility; or(2) The child needs specially designed physical education, as prescribed in the child's IEP.(c) Special physical education. If specially designed physical education is prescribed in a child's IEP, the public agency responsible for the education of that child must provide the services directly or make arrangements for those services to be provided through other public or private programs.(d) Education in separate facilities. The public agency responsible for the education of a child with a disability who is enrolled in a separate facility must ensure that the child receives appropriate physical education services in compliance with this section.I believe that this law is explained very clearly that physical education is mandatory for children with disabilities and that students with disabilities have the right to have specially designed physical education services if needed. Yet still their is wide spread ignorance of this field and the benefits that can be gained from it. One of my biggest goals for this blog is to try and bring knowledge and awareness to the under appreciated field of adapted physical education.Quote of the day:Students don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.Anonymous