One of the biggest gaps in the learning-and-performance field occurs after the training is done. Learners fail to apply what they’ve learned and their managers fail to support training implementation. Fortunately, the Fort Hill gang writes again. Where their blockbuster book, The Six Disciplines of Breakthrough Learning, laid out a comprehensive process for getting training results, their new book (Getting Your Money’s Worth from Training and Development) provides a call-to-action for training’s most important players. Using the brilliantly diabolical approach of dividing the book in half—one half for learners, the other for managers—Jefferson, Pollock, and Wick provide an energizing action-plan to help organizations maximize training’s impact on job performance. I’m so impressed with the Fort Hill guys. It seems that they (1) have looked deeply at the training-and-development trade, (2) found an area where time and time again we fail to do what’s right, and (3) written the perfect book to ensure that training maximizes business results. Too often in today’s organizations, training is seen as magic pill that works without alignment and support. In this double-dose of a book, Jefferson, Pollock, and Wick explode that myth, helping both learners and their managers bring potency to the training effort. The design of the book tells the story itself. Managers read from one cover while learners read from the other cover. The book’s title stays the same—Getting Your Money’s Worth from Training and Development—but the subtitles change for the two audiences (i. e., A Guide to Breakthrough Learning for Managers; A Guide to Breakthrough Learning for Participants.). Only in partnership is training truly effective. The symbolism speaks loudly, but so too does the content, showing how both learners and their managers can work together to ensure that training transfers to on-the-job performance improvement. The book is written in a conversational style. It speaks directly to the audiences in terms that will resonate. No motherhood and apple pie in the Fort Hill world. It’s all about results, wiifm’s, and tools. The example worksheets in the back of each book (remember it’s two books in one) are worth the cover price. I recommend this book with the greatest enthusiasm. Companies ought to buy two copies for every training participant. One for the participant and one for his/her manager. You can click the link below to learn more about the book (and go directly to Amazon to decide whether to purchase it).

Skype 4.0 is here and it's worth getting. So says David Pogue: http://tinyurl.com/d45o6w.If you don't know what Skype is, try it. It's FREE. It will let you connect with people over the internet in visual phone calls. Don't forget to dress.

Google has a nice blog post out on its use of eye movement research.I remember getting a tour of Fidelity a few years ago and learning that their eye movement studies on web browsing showed that people were beginning to ignore big dark chunks of graphics because they thought they were advertisements. My dissertation advisor, Ernie Rothkopf did a classic study (with Billington) in 1979 using eye movement data to test whether learners actually paid more attention (had more and higher-quality eye movements) toward information in the learning material that was targeted by learning objectives than to information that was not so targeted. It turned out that learning objectives worked to boost learning because they prompted learners to pay more attention to the objective-relevant material and less attention to the rest of the information. See: Rothkopf, E. Z., & Billington, M. J. (1979). Goal-guided learning from text: Inferring a descriptive processing model from inspection times and eye movements. Journal of Educational Psychology, 71, 310-327.To answer the question I posed above. Yes, more of us should be using eye-movement research to support us as we do e-learning design.And by the way, as web pages change their strategies to gain our attention, our learners may change their strategies to avoid things deemed irrelevant. Moreover, as our learners see more and more of our company's e-learning, their eyes may learn where to go...In fact, a lot of them already have a well-learned capacity to find the NEXT key through a swarm of bees.

Generation Y, millennials, iPod Generation, better at multitasking then their elders. Yadda yadda yadda. You've heard it all before, but is it true? No. Probably not.Read this great article in the Monitor on Psychology by Rebecca A. Clay.It says: People in general are not good at multitasking. Young people are no better than their elders at multitasking. Multitasking actually takes longer. It is NOT a time saver. Learning done while multitasking is shallower learning, leading not to deep understanding (and flexible mental models) but only to an ability to regurgitate rote information. Although I recommend the article, I do worry that some of its conclusions are drawn from too small a research base and may encompass a slight bias against the new media revolution. Still, I think we need to read these warnings because too many in our field don't see any downside to the new technologies.

Since 1998 when I started Work-Learning Research, I've been trying to spread the word about research-based principles of learning. I naively thought that good information would resonate so much that it would change practices industry wide. I've largely failed in that endeavor up to this point.That's okay. I've learned a simple truth about influencing others. It's hard.Take two recent examples outside the learning field. Antibacterial soap and vitamins. It has been widely reported for about five years or so that using antibacterial soap is generally counterproductive. It has also been reported over the last two years or so that taking vitamins may produce no benefits and in some cases can be harmful (see today's article on vitamins).I've sent many articles on these topics to my family and close friends. Many people just can't incorporate the new information into their old mindsets. We've learned for so long that germs are bad and vitamins are good that we think from those points of view. New information is deflected before it can become part of our new thinking. As learning professionals, we know that "Telling Ain't Training" and "Training Ain't Performance" (thanks Harold), but we often forget that long-held views are not easily overcome. We need to be more careful and more energetic in confronting them. It's not our learners' fault when they don't make the turn. We have to make it our fault. We have to take responsibility.

Nicholas Kristoff, Op-Ed Columnist for the New York Times has a problem. He wants to tell people about the genocide in Darfur but people tune out after a while. Click here to see his latest attempt to keep our attention.Click here to see his recent work on this topic with George Clooney.Advice for Learning ProfessionalsAs a learning professional, have you ever utilized "celebrity" to grab your learners' attention? I'm not necessarily talking about movie stars. What about a well-respected person in your company? Your CEO?Of course, it's not always easy to get this right, but it's a tool we ought to have in our toolbox.By the way, which link did you click first above? They're both the same...

Robert Gagne's 1st event of instruction was "Gain Attention." Michael Allen's company, Allen Interactions, has been saying for years, "No More Boring e-Learning." We've all heard the stories of how often e-learning turns learners off. And yet, there is still a whole lot of boring e-learning out there. An article from the eLearning Guild helps us avoid the trap, specifically by helping us start our learning interventions in ways that grab attention. Paul Clothier interviews Carmen Taran, author of the book Better Beginnings. Dan Balzer and Susan Manning offer an excellent Podcast on the topic. You can find the link to the Guild article at their web page as well.

Are you an independent consultant or contractor in the workplace learning-and-performance field?Worried about the economy or energized by it?There is a lot of anecdotal worry that the economy is hitting the training-and-development field hard, perhaps especially so for independent consultants and contractors. I decided we ought to gather our own data to see what's really going on. If you're an independent in our field, take my survey at the link below.Click here to take the survey...In addition to getting a snapshot of the current situation, the survey will help us look at how 2009 is shaping up, and share strategies we independents are employing to survive/thrive. I'm also asking whether independents might be interested in forming a group for mutual benefit.PASS THIS ON TO ALL THE INDEPENDENTS YOU KNOWPLEASE PASS THE SURVEY URL TO YOUR NETWORK.Please let people know about this so we get as wide an audience as possible. Consider notifying people at both the center and periphery of your social network so that we get a wider cross section of respondents. Please also send notifications spread out over time so that we widen our net as well. I will keep the survey open for two weeks or so (or longer if responses are still rushing in).Here is the link to send to others:http://tinyurl.com/c6pjl91. Send to your independent colleagues.2. Post in groups you belong to.3. Send to your social-network friends.4. Post on your blog, twitter, etc.5. Send to your email newsletter.

This is cool.Check it out.

Yikes!! I did a quick search online for video release forms and found that they were poorly written, mired in legalese, and too one-sided. So, I did what any good instructional designer would do, I wrote my own.I am NOT a lawyer, NOR do I assume that identity on my blog, SO YOU SHOULD check with a lawyer first before borrowing from my attempt (or using it as is).Still, I'd like to know what you think. Especially if you're a lawyer who specializes in this sort of thing. If you're not a lawyer, but know one, send it to them to get their input.Here's the document. Download BetterReleaseForm_w1 What do you think?

A nice new review of research on goal-setting provides some balance in how goals can be used to guide workplace performance. The following (admittedly low-quality) graphic comes from the authors' working paper. The authors don't deny that goals can be useful and powerful. Instead, they focus on the negative side-effects that can occur. Their balanced approach seems eminently sensible to me. The SMART goal revolution didn't always acknowledge some of the downsides, nor did it provide a Situation-Based Learning Design approach, providing learners with a sense of when to use goals, and when not to.Everybody in the Learning-and-Performance field ought to read this working paper at once.The authors: Lisa D. Ordóñez, Maurice E. Schweitzer, Adam D. Galinsky, and Max H. BazermanMy thanks to marciamarcia on Twitter for letting me know about this important work.Working Paper Executive Summary (copied from first link above):For decades, goal setting has been promoted as a halcyon pill for improving employee motivation and performance in organizations. Advocates of goal setting argue that for goals to be successful, they should be specific and challenging, and countless studies find that specific, challenging goals motivate performance far better than "do your best" exhortations. The authors of this article, however, argue that it is often these same characteristics of goals that cause them to "go wild." Key concepts include: The harmful side effects of goal setting are far more serious and systematic than prior work has acknowledged. Goal setting harms organizations in systematic and predictable ways. The use of goal setting can degrade employee performance, shift focus away from important but non-specified goals, harm interpersonal relationships, corrode organizational culture, and motivate risky and unethical behaviors. In many situations, the damaging effects of goal setting outweigh its benefits. Managers should ask specific questions to ascertain whether the harmful effects of goal setting outweigh the potential benefits.

If we in the learning-and-performance field are serious about on-the-job learning (a much better term than "informal learning"), we need to be serious about how managers in organizations do their work, and specifically about how they guide learning on the job (and incidentally how they use formal training initiatives to enable and improve on-the-job learning).Recently, a group of leading management thinkers got together to re-imagine management.Here is a brief blog post on their thinking. It is well worth some reflection.

The following photographs I took with my cell phone (Samsung Omnia) looking outside my windshield while double-parked in Harvard Square, Cambridge, Massachusetts. You can click to enlarge the pictures. Here is a question for you to answer:Why do the snowflakes in the picture look like needles (or needle-like structures)? To make this more difficult, more than one answer is correct. 1. They broke apart while falling to the earth.2. They were originally formed as needle-like structures.3. They shattered into pieces when they hit objects.4. The temperature of the air dictated the shape.5. They combined into needle-like structures while falling.See if you can guess one of the correct answers. DON'T FORGET TO HIT THE "VOTE" BUTTON !! Survey Results - GlowDay.comHow This is Relevant to the Workplace Learning-and-Performance Field.Most people will probably get the answer to the snowflake question wrong, even with a 40% chance of getting a correct answer. Most of us have only learned about the prototypical snowflakes, those with beautiful six-sided symmetry. But as it turns out, snowflakes actually can take many forms, including the needle-like snowflakes in the pictures above. Snowflakes formed at different temperatures form into different patterns. Here are a few articles on snowflakes.Article 1Article 2Why do we think of snowflakes as hexagonal even though we must have encountered other snowflake types throughout our lives?Yes, we were trained wrong. Indoctrinated in the six-sided mental model of snowflakes, we haven't always been able to see what is right in front of us. Does this sort of mental-model obfuscation happen in our field? You bet. It happens in every field. Here are some candidate mental models that we ought to watch out for: Kirkpatrick's four levels. Learning objectives. Immediate feedback is always best. More information is good. Telling is sufficient. Learners know how best to learn. Providing feedback is enough to correct mistakes (it's not). Training is sufficient. etc. etc. This is just a quick list. I'm sure I have my own blind spots.The key is to recognize that we might be blinded by our preconceptions, we need to be open, and we need to have a way to get valid feedback on what we're doing.Sometimes hiring an outside learning guru can help. Sometimes reviewing the research can help. Still, we need better feedback loops. We need to measure better.I'm available to help.

The Peanut Corporation of America (PCA) is now famously known for making seriously contaminated products, killing 9 since September 2008 and sickening almost 700 others. You all know that. What you may not know is that PCA was inspected by the leading certifying agency in the food industry on multiple occasions and was given glowing reviews.Here is what the Washington Post reports:David Mackay, Kellogg's chief executive, said his company trusted audits performed by the American Institute of Baking International, the biggest food-inspection firm in the country. The institute conducted scheduled inspections of PCA's facilities and never flagged serious problems. It issued a "certificate of achievement" and a "superior" rating last August, when PCA was getting results from internal laboratory tests that revealed a salmonella problem in its plant in Blakely, Ga., congressional investigators said. Many well-known companies (including Kellogg) trusted outside food auditing firms to test the ingredients they were sourcing for their own products. Others, like Nestle, sent their own auditors and rejected PCA products after finding rat droppings, beetles, and other detritus in PCA's products. Not surprisingly, PCA paid American Institute of Baking International to perform the audits (AND to certify PCA as in compliance).Lessons Learned When a company pays an auditor, the auditor may have incentive to be lenient. When a company relies on outside inspectors to assess other entities, they may not get good information. When an industry fails to provide good oversight and regulation, bad things can happen. Just because something is certified, even by the largest or most prestigious certifying body in an industry, doesn't mean the certification can be trusted. It's not just about good people, it's also about good structures, oversight, and information. Is this Relevant in the Training & Development, Learning & Performance Field?Yes. You bet. We have: Awards that are biased toward those paying award application fees. Top 10 and Top 20 lists that represent the awarding entity's client list. Industry research based on surveys sent to the research entity's clients' client lists. Industry research that is biased toward the research entity's biggest clients. Conference sessions that are guaranteed for companies who pay for exhibit space. Webinars by sponsoring organizations. Etc. Unfortunately, there is no trusted journalistic institution in our field. Our trade organizations are timid because commercial interests pay the bulk of their operating expenses. Most of our bloggers (me included) are timid because we earn our living in the field. Where the hell are the freelance bloggers who our social-media evangelists promised would rise up to fight corruption and injustice?Best Advice in Current StateThe best advice at this point in time is: Be skeptical. Do your own digging.  Form groups of other skeptical diggers and share information. Don't just get angry about this. It's the way the world works. Find work arounds. If you can't point fingers, gently avoid the corrupters. If you're entangled with a corrupting entity, gently work to reform it, or leave it. If you are a corrupter, forgive yourself, reform yourself. Do good work.

Great list by Janet Clarey of some of the most notable women in the Learning Technology field. Click here to look at the list.

It was November 2008 when I started using Twitter. About 120 days of Twittering. Hmmm.Feels like years.I've sent 233 tweets (about 2 a day). I have 256 followers. I follow 66. I first blogged about Twitter on November 14 2008. See my first thoughts on Twitter.Here is a mosaic of my followers:You can get your own twitter mosaic here.My twitter experiment continues.It's some good, some bad.One key is to develop strategies not to be too distracted.I've certainly learned about some cool stuff I wouldn't otherwise know about.What I don't know -- and can't know -- is what I've lost while I'm Twittering or following the paths that start on Twitter.If you haven't Twittered, I recommend giving it a try for 2 or 3 months. Get a twitter account. Enable everyone to read your tweets (otherwise you look like a paranoid). Look to see what others are writing (me for example at WillWorkLearn) DON'T follow too many people yet (less than 5).Why? b/c following begets followers, and you will want a community (later). Create some tweets each day. Try to provide (a) some value (links to good info) and (b) some insight into your true self. AFTER, you've done the above for a week or so, begin following others. See what happens. The <5 folks you originally followed (who aren't yet your followers), send them an @ message to let them know you exist...so that they may join your community (and become a follower). Build some strategies to avoid too much time loss. See what happens.

Video Overview:The following video provides an entertaining and, I hope, enlightening look at the humble job aid.Featuring: This is only the second video that I shot and edited. See how I did.   Allison Rossett, co-author of the book, Job Aids and Performance Support (with Lisa Schafer) is interviewed.   Worldwide public introduction to incredible new talent, the incomparable Alena.   Brewer the dog has cameo role.   Video Notes:Because of YouTube size restrictions, it is divided into 2 parts.Enjoy in HD (if your computer can handle it) by: Starting the Video Clicking on HD at Lower Right, AND Clicking on the full-screen display (the box in a box) at Lower Right IF the audio doesn't track, your computer can't handle HD. Part 1 Part 2 Purchasing (or learning more about) Allison's Book:

Eric Shepherd of Quesionmark offers a white paper on his blog that goes into some nice depth to help you think through the level of security you might need in your learning assessments.As I've written here before, there are many reasons to provide learning assessments, each having it's own design needs--and security needs as well. Check out Eric's blog (and the first hyperlink) to get the white paper.

Eric Shepherd, CEO of Questionmark, asks a great question on his blog. "As Learning and Assessment Professionals What Could We Have Done to Prevent the Financial Crisis?"Click to check it out. Eric provides a great list of things on the learning side. I added some things as well.I'm a great believer that we all have some ability to influence, so I'm inclined to say, "YES," we could have done some things better.Not that we have control. Not that others aren't more responsible. Certainly the incompetence of the former presidential administration, the deregulatory mindset we'd bought into, the senior management we work for. But, we could have done some things differently. What do you think?

A new journal is forming to support applied e-learning research. Check it out. Get involved.

At the recent eLearning Guild conference in Orlando, I was asked to lead an Espresso Cafe roundtable discussion on a topic of interest. My topic: The Pluses and Minuses of Social Media and User-generated Content.I promised folks from my three sessions that I'd post all the results. Here they are:Plusses: Users engaged. Relevant to the users. Not-distracting, real-world. Enables learning when training experts not available. Can augment online courses. Can capture water-cooler talk (that would have happened anyway). Opportunity to debunk inaccuracies. Capture institutional knowledge. Enables the use of internal experts for informal learning. Because informal, can be more comfortable to use for people of different languages and/or cultures. Or different socio-economic groups as well. More of an equal exchange. Leveling the playing field. Creating more democratic or egalitarian organizations. Novel, interesting. Quick feedback on what doesn't work. Not corporate-down, so more likely to be attended to without skepticism, jadedness, etc. Opportunity to connect with customers. Keep up with younger workers coming in. Headquarters experts may not be as trusted as those who work on the ground. Timely, instant updates. Get details from someone who actually does the job. Emotional connection. Convenience. No geographic boundaries. RSS feeds enables more targeted info. Employees may be able to affect policy. Could make us improve our policies for fear of law suits. (Like this: stuff that's posted can be used in court. Organization then has impetus to make changes quickly). Questions coming first is a good learning design. Can give organization more of a sense of what's going on in the field. Cheap. Builds community if people are tackling serious issues together. Feeling engaged. Employees have instant access to experts. Another data source. Develop connections. Know who knows who AND who knows what. Enables virtual relationships. More reflective--learners have to reflect to write, to learn deeper. Wisdom of the crowd. Opens up links to other things. Sets agenda, letting people know that there are other things. Generate buzz. Smile sheets shared. (Rate my teacher. Rate my professor). Best practices are distributed. Will make things easier. Info at fingertips. Minuses: Might have to get used to it. How do you make it usable? Duplicate information. How to make pertinent information instantly accessible. Opening up floodgates. Cultural hurdles and disconnects. Competes with other channels of information. Perhaps top-level buy-in is required. A big distraction. Time user. Productivity drain. One more thing to do. We are still learning how to utilize wisely. May need support, maintenance, and the resources thereof. Information may not translate to behavior without directed support. How to confirm validity of content. Info can be used in lawsuits. Is the time beneficial? Danger of noise. Hard to get to best information. Time to create. Hard to measure. Maybe we're fooling ourselves. Could be incorrect/bad information. Could be offensive information. Must bring people up-to-speed on technology. Can create cliques. Time suck--filling up on candy. Dangers of giving censors power. Do these media self-select different types of people, biasing information gathered? Time is our most limited resource. The key organizational-productivity leverage point. Often implemented without planning, no marketing, no preparation, etc. Sometimes systems have no purpose. So costs/time not parlayed to maximum effect. Unnatural groups may not work, may have difficulties. One or a few can take over. Example: General in military told story of how soldiers posted how to defuse an IED. Info was wrong. 2 died. Enemies can use information too. Many see this as the be-all end-all, creating big blind spots, overzealous implementation, poor planning, poor focus. Potential permanence of information and/or systems. Personal vs. work issues may arise. Thanks to all the folks who contributed to my discussions. It was kind of hard to hear, but here are the names to thank: Nancy, Leslie, Terra, Pat, Sonya, Betsy, Michael, David, David, Ann, Joyce, Nancy, Chris, Chris, Richard, John, Susan, Paula, John.

Okay, I made these suggestions on Twitter today, but because it's so ephemeral, I RT them here: A Better Twitter Query: "What's happening for you? Use "MT" when you are suggesting a link to your own stuff. 1.The Better Query encompasses the original query (still in use today): "What are you doing?" BUT it also conveys the way a majority of my Twitter contacts use Twitter, to convey what they find exciting, useful, notable. Sure, we have to go back to the 60's and 70's "What's happening man?" but those times weren't all bad.2.MT=Me Tweet. The MT idea helps people know whether the Tweeter is plugging their own work. This is useful in many ways. If you really like what someone you're following has to say in their longer off-Twitter conveyances, then you'll want to go there (and vice versa). It also enables the Tweeter to follow common interpersonal traditions by enabling spam-warnings. For example, in normal conversations we might say the following while looking apologetic, "Well, I know there are lots of perspectives on this, but here's my thoughts..." thus lubricating the social dialogue. Finally, some smart Twitter programmer will come up with a way to measure MT's and then self-promoters can be labeled as such.Please RT (Re-Tweet) these ideas if you like them.(1290 characters) about 9 tweets.

Last year I wrote at length about my efforts to improve my own smile sheets. It turns out that this is an evolving effort as I continue to learn from my learners and my experience.Check out my new 2009 version.You may remember that one of the major improvements in my smile sheet was to ask learners about the value and newness of EACH CONCEPT TAUGHT (or at least each MAJOR concept). This is beneficial because people respond more accurately to specifics than to generalities, they respond better to concrete learning points than to the vague semblance of a full learning experience. What I forgot in my previous version was the importance of getting specific feedback on how well I taught each concept. Doh!My latest version adds a column for how well each concept is taught. There is absolutely no more room to add any columns (I didn't think I could fit this latest one in), so I suppose this may allow diminishing returns on any more improvements. Check it out and let me know what you think.

Learning professionals (like me) can often gain insights about our industry from people in the field who have different vantage points than our own. I recently talked with Eric Shepherd, CEO of Questionmark, to get a sense of our industry and how it has been affected by the bad economy. Eric has been a good friend and long-time supporter of my research over the years and I've come to value his counsel.Questionmark is the leading provider of assessment software according to a recent eLearning Guild study. I thought from his perch overseeing all-things-assessment, Eric might be able to give us some unique insight into the learning-and-performance field in general. Check out my interview with him at the recent Guild conference. I divided it into two parts to make viewing easier.Part 1: What trends do you see that we may be missing?