Between the corporate and academic worlds, the borderlands are wide and mostly ill-defined, but you can always rustle up a ruckus by asking, "What’s the difference between training and education?" I’m not that big a ruckus-rustler, and nearly all my career has taken place in the non-academic world-at least since a Certain University bounced me, and other unworthies, from its adjunct faculty because we lacked what it referred to with a straight face as "the terminal degree." But even in the efficient system of a corporation (which, as Voltaire might have said, is at times neither efficient, nor systematic, nor corporeal) you can spark a decent-sized ruckus by asking about the difference between training and learning. The main difficulty is that many people who’ve worked in what used to be called training and development have come to see that training as it’s been practiced can be: Narrow in scope (the task, maybe the job, rarely the function) Limited in timeframe (this week, this month, this quarter) Modeled on the dreariest aspects formal education (classrooms, lectures, the semester contact hour) Posited on the transfer of skill-and even more so on the transfer of knowledge I think all of those are generally true, though I don’t think they’re generally evil.  For example, I see "transfer of skill" as a metaphor for a process through which someone who lacked a skill comes to acquire it.  I do not equate that phrase with "content dump," though I’ve sat through more than one training class that held strictly to the knowledge-as-freight approach. Still, the traditional (albeit diminishing) approach to training is a kind of freight train. There’s no steering wheel; someone else controls the signals and throws the switches.  To further overextend the metaphor, the suboptimal form of learning is-I don’t know, some solar-powered, personal flying car, powered by your innate desire to learn. I’m all for learning, and in particular for learning the things that interest me, but I’m not delusional enough to think that I can necessarily maintain the standard of living I’d like to maintain solely through that. The drawback, at least in the most extreme forms of this point of view, is that somebody’s got to value your ability to learn what you want, when you want, enough to provide you with a means of making a living. I’m sure people manage that, even a few people I know, but I have no clue how to pull that off myself. And that’s okay. Especially since I have a new home (Victoria, British Columbia) and a new job-working for a crown corporation in BC. (It’s roughly the equivalent of a not-for-profit corporation, established by the province to administer public-sector pension plans.) I’m a curriculum designer, which means I work with stakeholders and subject-matter experts to figure out how our people can master new or changing conditions in order to better serve members of pension plans, as well as satisfying the requirements of the plans themselves. The job search that led to this move is one reason I haven’t posted here for so long: I’d hit a slow period in terms of consulting, and I was ready to make a change. Moving 3,000 miles to another country seemed to have accomplished that. Years ago, my first professional experience with social media was as part of the original TRDEV-L listserv begun by David Passmore of Penn State. (If you have no idea what a listserv is, then you have some idea how long ago that was.) Many participants wanted to make clear that they spoke for themselves and that their opinions were not necessarily those of their employer’s. My own email signature for TRDEV-L included "My opinions, not GE’s." Tthat approach still holds. I’ve missed my blog and want to resume thinking out loud about the interests, ideas, and notions that I see as relating to learning and performance in the workplace. None of this should be taken as necessarily reflecting any policy or program of BC Pension Corporation, or the province of British Columbia, or the government of Canada, or anything other than something that held my interest long enough for me to write about it. It’s good to be back.

I recently came across a link to this infographic by Julian Hansen. Infographic by Julian Hansen I don’t see most infographics as a job aid. They usually aren’t intended to guide you through a task, and don’t usually serve well as reference job aids (my term for information that’s been organized for quick reference). I don’t think this would serve as a true job aid for most non-designers-it’s really busy, and the criss-crossing paths could easily confuse someone. As this Fontfeed article states, though, that wasn’t really Hansen’s goal.  Instead of simply browsing through type specimens, Julian wondered if he could come up with something more rational, a systematic approach [to choosing typefaces]. His project took the form of a flowchart on a poster. Studying different type finders made him come to the conclusion that selecting type really could be a matter of taste…. This made Julian decide that his poster should not only be useful, but also be light-hearted and make fun of stereotypes. This made him throw in options like "is it an Italian restaurant?" for instance. His ultimate goal was to show that typefaces convey a whole lot of meaning that "ordinary" people just don’t see. Assuming that’s true, I see the chart as one way to demonstrate understanding: here’s what I think about fonts and when to use them. This is part of what I think Jane Bozarth means when she says, "We learn by doing, and by telling what we’re doing, and by watching others do things, and by showing others how we did something." Personally, I’m not much info fonts. That’s not the point, though. Work like Hansen’s has the potential to trigger further interest in people.  For example, after reading his chart and the Fontfeed article, I happened to see a tweet by @MizMinh linking to an article on The Next Web: The Science Behind Fonts (and How They Make You Feel) Personally, all my working out loud lately has been done on site, in my new job. I’m not unhappy about that; I’m working on an engaging project and I have collaborative colleagues. But I’ve been neglecting other avenues, and this post is one effort to overcome that neglect.

For a few months, I’ve been head-down in my new job (I’m a curriculum developer with the BC Pension Corporation). Much of it involves helping our staff adapt to changes in the tools they work with or in the processes that those tools work on, in order to serve our members-the people covered by various public-sector pension plans here in British Columbia. There’s a significant procedural component to that. Pension plans in general are governed by all kinds of rules — vesting requirements, contribution tracking, tax issues — and can have so many options that they’d daunt Benoit Mandelbrot. That’s one reason that a few weeks ago I noted this post by Misty Harding at the eLearning Brothers site. One trigger for her post on handling boring content was boring content: I realized that I didn’t need to spend any more time wrestling with that yawn-worthy content, and neither did the learner. I achieved this through (brace yourself Instructional Design World), not focusing on the content. Much of what she then offers will strike many people as common sense, but those people are probably turning out pretty good stuff. This is a quick summary; read her full post for helpful details. Give them something to do that isn’t at its core touring the boring content. Violate expectations: approach the learning challenge (as opposed to "the content") in an unexpected way. Let them take on a role so they need to solve a problem. Part of what Misty Harding is addressing, I think, is the gap between procedural knowledge and tacit knowledge. In any organization serving individual customers, be it BC Pensions or Zappos, you’ll find reams of procedures. Invariably these deal with routine processes — or at least processes that can be routine-ized, because at some level the steps and the decisions are predictable and the range of outcomes is fairly small. What’s far more challenging is combining these procedures effectively-a point that Harold Jarche makes in this diagram: From Tacit Knowledge Not Included by Harold Jarche If like me you’re trying to help people who have to deal with things on the "routine work" end of the diagram so they can deliver things of higher value, then whatever training and support you produce benefits from being set in a realistic context. It also benefits from avoiding stuff that doesn’t relate to that delivery. (I recall an EEO compliance officer who insisted that people needed to know the dates of EEO-related legislation-in a course on helping an employee to pursue a discrimination complaint.) "Realistic" also does not mean the typical software Field Trip: This is the Last Name field. Enter the last name here. This is the First Name field. Enter the first name here. This is the Street Address field. What do you enter here? (ad blooming infinitum) The training course I’m working on at the moment deals mainly with changes to our procedures caused by legislation going into effect next month. It’s not earth-shaking; it’s not going to reset paradigms for everyone who works at the corporation. Even so, our design relies heavily on teaching the rules and principles by having participants work through a series of problems. Even the initial look at procedures for choosing the beneficiary for a pension will involve opening the online procedures (just like you do in the target jobs) and working a sample nomination form (our term) through the initiation, evaluation, and entry stages. What about things that are new or significantly changed?  Well, take one new on-screen button. It enables a feature that didn’t exist in the previous version, because the underlying capability didn’t exist. No matter what the label is on such a button, without context people are likely to misinterpret it. Rather than introduce it as part of a field trip ("here are 27 changes you’ll see on 9 different screens"), we’ll deal with it in the third practice exercise, which will be the first time clicking that button would make sense. What’s all this got to do with tacit knowledge? In part I think tacit skills emerge as you combine procedural skills (and interpersonal skills) in job-related contexts. You’ve got to build them up, and working with realistic problems-including relating them to your experience, speculating about variations, and exchanging ideas with experienced people-is one way to help foster that construction of knowledge. Public domain button image by decosigner.

Four years ago I started using the WWDiary app to keep track of how I was doing with the Weight Watchers approach to, well, watching my weight. I never officially joined Weight Watchers, but my wife did, and I seized an opportunity for self-improvement. I’ve written about this topic here, and especially here (my favorite), and most recently (if Oct. of 2011 is recent)  here. I’m revisiting the topic in part because as I write this, it’s four years to the day since I started with that app, and I weigh 55 pounds less than I did then. Another reason is that this anniversary, and how I reached what to me is a milestone, relates closely to the idea I came across today  in this tweet from Ruud Hein (@RuudHein): The link in the tweet takes you to this post on Google+ and onto another of those virtuous cycles that make the hyperlinked world such a joy at times. I’m crediting Hein, who credits All Smith and Branko Zecevic with linking to a post on Inc.com by Jeff Haden. (Got that?) I want to highlight the excerpt that Hein highlights: Commit to a process, not a goal…. We put unnecessary stress on ourselves to lose weight or to succeed in business or to write a best-selling novel. Instead, keep things simple and reduce stress by focusing on the daily process and sticking to your schedule instead of worrying about big, life-changing goals. When you focus on the practice instead of the performance, you can enjoy the present moment and improve at the same time. Often in my life, to-do lists have just depressed me-especially the end-of-day or end-of-week carryover, as still-to-do items plodded through the calendar. There was the temptation to knock off a mess of low-priority things. (Admit it; you’ve done it, too. The deadline is looming and you spend the afternoon fixing the transitions in PowerPoint.) Looking at the process is a higher-level way of answering the question, ""What do you want to have happen?" Four years ago, I started with "lose some weight" but reframed that to "get in good shape" (which I guess sounded better to me at the time than "be healthy," if only for the active verb). That turned out to be a far better goal, because it was easier for me to identify some processes likelier to get me there eventually. I don’t mean for a second to position myself as a expert on weight loss — but I’ve become a far better manager of my own systems. I’m a practitioner of things that tend to keep me on a path I wanted-and still want-to be on. I’ve been at my new job four months now. I have coworkers I look forward to seeing, people who want to share, to experiment together, and with whom it’s a pleasure to figure things out. Even as my current project rushes to the delivery date, I find myself engaging more both with my face-to-face peers and, sporadically, the many virtual colleagues I’ve encountered. That’s part of the practice I need to be practicing: not just connecting, but regularly and purposefully connecting. Not just reading, but regularly and purposefully reading. Not just thinking out loud, but regularly and purposefully doing that. CC-licensed photo by Víctor Nuño.      

I’ve spent most of the past four months learning how public-sector pension administration is affected by WESA (the Wills, Estates and Succession Act that goes into effect in British Columbia on March 31). That’s because my assignment was to design WESA-related training for the people in my organization who deal with members of the different plans we administer at BC Pension Corporation. In the training / learning networks that I connect to, I frequently see discussion (and occasional grousing) about "compliance," which often seems to mean "having to comply with some picayune requirement." At the moment there’s a video clip making the rounds of Twitter and Facebook, with a flight attendant joking through the standard safety announcement. I thought it was funny (though it wouldn’t be if I had to hear it five times a month), but the mandatory pre-flight announcement is also near the bottom rung of the compliance ladder. Where I work, compliance can mean "make sure we meet the legal and fiduciary requirements established to protect the interests of the individual members of pension plans and of their public-sector employers." Putting that in terms of accomplishments, we want to be able to: Accurately describe the options you have for nominating (designating) who will receive: Any benefit available if you die before retirement Any benefit available if you die after retirement Correctly explain options for allocating benefits among multiple beneficiaries Review nominations submitted by members for completeness and accuracy Correctly enter that information into our system Update information based on changes from the member or the employer …and a number of other changes to how we’ve done things prior to this legislation. So one part of this post is to say "yes, compliance can matter," and the other is just to talk a bit about how fortunate I’ve been in this new job. I was assigned to the WESA my first week on the job, because my acting manager believed it was good for people to have a project that’s their own. I worked with the person writing our procedures related to nominations; he guided me through the initial thickets of terminology, acronyms, and workflow. My colleague Chris, the senior member of our instructional designer group, helped me plan my project and gave invaluable ideas from a course he’d developed on a similarly complicated topic. I also got to work with several subject-matter experts who "work in the plans," as we say — their day jobs involve dealing the members of one or another of the BC public-sector plans, so they know this stuff. Best of all, the experts who were the instructors were eager to avoid information dumps and talk shops. Ultimately we created three versions of our course, tailored to three different job categories. Lots of practice cases — including simple ones they walked the participants through, so people could see the relevant part of the system and update a (fictional) member’s records instead of just having someone tell them how they’d do it back on the job. I’m thinking of writing a bit more about this. I need to find the right balance between describing what I think is worth talking about, safeguarding specifics about our members and our systems, and putting people to sleep with more information about nominating beneficiaries than they might want to know. I’ll figure that out, and I’ll try to get my posting frequency up a bit. I’ve been missing the thinking-out-loud for quite some time.

I came across an email in which I’d noted a contribution that Terry Seamon made to an online discussion about learning at work: Ultimately, the answer to "Do you understand?" is "Yes, let me demonstrate." Sometimes-especially at large conferences-it can seem as though  many trainers and instructional designers lapse into a kind of cognitive ritual, reciting orthodox objectives, sometimes for every 15-minute segment of formal instruction. "At the end of this topic, the student will be able to advance to the next topic." I’m in favor of performance-based objectives, but mostly as a tool for design, not as a benediction recited over the heads of people who would much rather get something done. I firmly believe that what learners would rather hear is more along the lines of "This segment shows you how to calculate flood insurance rates for residential property." Or, if they’re dealing with softer skills, "Next, you’re going to practice planning and conducting a counseling session when an employee’s performance has become unsatisfactory." That’s 15 seconds, not ten minutes plus time to post the flipchart. It’s a virtual course? Then you have a much shorter audio/video lead-in. Sometimes people benefit from knowing theory and concepts about a field, but as van Merriënboer and Kirschner say, you can’t practice theory. Theory is a kind of map, an effort at organization, like Samuel Champlain‘s maps of New France. Maps and theories get better as you put them to use, incorporating mindful experience into the previous effort at organization. Champlain’s 1612 map of New France (from Wikipedia) There was a time in my career when I’d strenuously avoid using "understand" as an objective, and I still think that on the part of someone planning any kind of structured learning, it’s at best oversimplification and at worst a sign he should have gone into another line of work. I’m speaking of the developer, though, not the client; more often than not, the client’s using "understand" as shorthand for a fistful of skills (and, frequently, a bucketful of facts). Seamon’s statement above offers a way out of the dilemma without having to rant about behavioral objectives. How can someone demonstrate that he understands the difference between a single-life annuity and a joint-and-survivor annuity? Maybe he describes key differences; maybe he identifies examples of each when presented with descriptions of various types of annuities. Maybe he role-plays a conversation and gets feedback on his answers from an expert. You choose among demonstrations like these depending on what someone needs to accomplish in the workplace, and both you and the learner are better off for the choice having been made.

The other day a project manager was remarking on the early stages of large projects and the inevitable changes that occur as those projects unfold. I’m no project manager, so I was doing internal translation. I see a big project’s requirements document as like the initial design for a kitchen remodeling: in the new inventory system, we want to have glass cabinets,  a wall-mounted oven, an island with its own sink, and on the south wall, bigger windows (for greater visibility into the supply chain). Only later in the process do you discover you won’t have the time, or the money, or both, to move Finance’s plumbing. You’re facing some rethinking, but that doesn’t mean starting the project requirements from scratch. If  right now you’re wondering why Finance has a sink, then my analogy failed. Or, you recognized adjustments that you’ve seen, or that you can imagine, even though the project you’re thinking of didn’t involve inventory, Finance, or a kitchen, then I think I made my point. A larger point is that, when it comes to improving performance, what’s crucial about an analogy is not how clever it is, but how effective. The goal of an analogy is to help someone make a connection or reach an understanding that he hadn’t yet made. You can’t guarantee that your analogy will do that, though you can road-test it and modify it so that it’s more likely to. Cleverness carries a risk that you’re focusing on surface elements, or on outside references that don’t apply to the immediate situation. Shakespeare’s plays are as full of analogies as O’Hare airport is full of wheeled baggage, but many of those analogies rely on references that in the twenty-first century we don’t understand. Sweet are the uses of adversity which like the toad, ugly and venomous, wears yet a precious jewel in his head.  — As You Like It It might be clever to work Shakespeare in, but if this one’s your choice, you’ll likely connect only with committed theatergoers and unreconstructed literature majors. I tried a different line once, as a lead-in to a course on vendor-managed inventory. If you can look into the seeds of time, And say which grain will grow and which will not, Speak then to me…  — Macbeth It might not work for you, but I managed to avoid using a stock-art photo of a warehouse dock. More important, the inventory people saw the connection  to the topic. That helped me escape the too-clever trap, although technically this wasn’t an analogy, just an indirect lead into the topic. Banquo was not in this scene struggling with inventory control-but he was interested in knowing what the future might hold, which is a true, on-the-job concern for warehouse managers. So the real test might not be whether you’re using an analogy, a metaphor, or a simile — but whether the way you present something new makes the aha! more likely. CC-licensed kitchen sink photo by Steev Hise

Here’s a Gaelic proverb: Is iomadh urchair tha dol ‘s an fhraoch. (Many a shot goes into the heather.) In other words, when you hunt, you miss. And if you fire indiscriminately, paying no attention to when or why or how, not trying to figure out why you missed, and not turning to anyone else for feedback, you’re  going to continue putting a lot of shot into the heather. In my personal life, I’ve been sending a fair amount into the ground lately because I’m learning something new. And as I think is often the case, "learning something" really means "learning several different things, and also learning how they work together." I joined a choir. I haven’t joined a choir before, so I’ve been learning different but interrelated things: The lyrics to songs I didn’t know (which so far is "all the songs we’ve been practicing") The melodies of songs I didn’t know (see above) The tenor part for these same songs Those are all examples of explicit knowledge: they’re factual things. Learning the tenor part, for example, means learning the succession of tones. I’m having to learn some tacit skills as well, such as what Maria von Trapp called "minding your own business" — concentrating on your part when other choir members who are not tenors are singing right next to you. In addition I have to learn pronunciation, because I’ve joined Guth nan Eilean (the Voice of the Island), the Victoria Gaelic Choir. It’s been a great experience. I ran into the choir when they were performing at the Victoria Highland Games last May. I was especially struck by how clearly they enjoyed what they were singing. It probably helped that I recognized two or three of the songs they sang. It didn’t surprise me to discover there’s a worldwide community of groups who thrive Gaelic song. I’m especially impressed by people like Kathleen MacInnes and Mary Ann Kennedy who’ve made their language part of their careers. No, not many people speak Scottish Gaelic. I can’t, except for a few traveler phrases and a handful of songs. But I always want to know the meaning of any song I sing in another language, and the Victoria Gaelic Choir gives me another reason to do that. Here’s a whole flock of choirs at the Mòd (Gaelic festival) in Paisley, Scotland, last year, singing the unofficial anthem of such choirs: Togaibh i, togaibh i, cànan ar dùthcha, Togaibh a suas i gu h-inbhe ro-chliùitich; Togaibh gu daingeann i ‘s bithibh rith’ bàidheil, Hi ho rò, togaibh i, suas leis a’ Ghàidhlig! Praise it, praise it, the language of our country Give it honourable status Promote it with spirit, and treat it with affection, Hi horo, praise it, up with the Gaelic. ‘S i cànan na h-òige; ‘s i cànain na h-aois; B’ i cànan ar sinnsir; b’ i cànan an gaoil; Ged tha i nis aost’, tha i reachdmhor is treun; Cha do chaill i a clì ‘s cha do strìochd i fo bheum. It’s the language of youth, it’s the language of the aged, it was the language of our ancestors, it was the language they loved Although it is now old, it is robust and strong It has not lost its power, and it has not surrendered to misfortune.    

My ancestors were all Scots-MacDougalls, MacLeods, MacLennans, MacFarlanes, MacIsaacs, Rankins, Macdonalds, and more than one who spelled my last name MacFhearghais-and so I’ve followed the run-up to next Thursday’s referendum asking "Should Scotland be an independent country?" This is a question for the voters of Scotland, and I don’t pretend to have advice on how they should vote. In the social media streams I follow, though, I’ve seen many remarks to the effect that, despite excesses here and there, discussions in Scotland have had a high level of seriousness. Just today, on the Facebook page for an artist I follow who’s an ardent advocate for Yes, a person planning to vote No was invited to a public discussion. He felt secure enough to ask with an emoticon wink, "Will I be safe?" Ordinary individuals are exploring, considering, pondering, which is a good thing for any democracy. What this post is about is not a Yes or No vote in the referendum, but the thoroughness of one organization firmly on the Yes side-Wings Over Scotland, a political website focused on the media. What I mean by thoroughness is their approach to communicating with potential readers. I only happened to notice this because I came across a link to An Leabhar Beag Gorm, the Gaelic edition of their publication, The Wee Blue Book. (I don’t know much Gaelic, but I knew all four words in the Gaelic title, so it caught my eye.) As Wings Over Scotland explains in their introduction to The Wee Blue Book, none of the 37 national or daily papers  available in Scotland supports independence.  "Newspapers have no duty to be fair or balanced, but… the press being so overwhelmingly skewed to one side is a problem for democracy. "Our website…is biased, too. We support independence…" To that end, they’ve collected a great deal of information and assembled it into the Wee Blue Book. What’s impressive is how they’re offering it up. You can see on their August 11 post that the book is available: For smartphones and tablets For desktops and laptops For ebooks (epub, Kindle, etc.) As a website In print As an audio book And, as you’ve seen, in Gaelic. But wait! There’s more! Wings Over Scotland has a print-ready edition-and when they say "print," they mean A6 paper, self-cover, CMYK, saddle-stitched, with a 3mm bleed, on 130gsm stock, so you can "just hand the PDF to a printing company." Finally, they have a "low-colour, ink-saver version" for home printing, with instructions, so if you want to run off a couple yourself, you can. I’ve never met the Reverend Stuart Campbell, who runs the site, but I’m pretty sure he’s a lot smarter than the average social media guru whose self-promotions rain down on LinkedIn and Twitter.

CC-licensed image by Kudu Photo In the world of organizational learning, there’s always another bandwagon. In fact, they have to widen the L&D Highway every few years to accommodate late-model bandwagons, as well as service vehicles full of batteries, charging cords, and templated reports. Which is great-if you’re in the bandwagon-supply business, rather than the far less trendy business of helping people accomplish things on the job. I work for an organization where much of the staff works with complex computer systems. In our case, the systems help us administer pension programs — enrolling people when they start a job covered by one of our plans, producing annual statements of benefits, calculating estimates, processing transactions related to salary and service, and managing all the pension-payment transactions. Hundreds of thousands of people-I suspect millions, actually-work in similar jobs in any industry you can think of. I am pretty familiar with hotel, airline, and passenger rail reservation systems, and I’ve helped train people to use systems for managing inventory, conducting pharmaceutical trials, monitoring accounts in the consumer packaged goods industry, trading natural gas, and tracking shipping containers. Almost none of these systems had a way for people to practice tasks in a robust way. By robust practice, I mean features or capabilities that let people practice complete tasks, as they would on the job, without risk to data, resources, vendors, or clients. It’s my contention that most large corporate systems, although they’re the workhorses of the organization, have no way for someone to practice what he’s supposed to do in the production system-except by working with real data. I say "production system" as shorthand for the ability to reserve actual airline seats or handle actual pension benefits or process actual bank loans. And I’m going to say "practice system" when I mean the ability to exercise the same steps and skills without reserving actual seats, handling actual pensions, or issuing actual loans. In a financial system for managing bank branches, for example, if you wanted to practice the steps to process a car loan, you had to pretend you were issuing a loan to yourself. And you really had to remember not to click approve, or customer-you would have a loan. "Don’t push Approve!" is good guidance in that situation, but a lousy way to train someone in loan approvals. Is this your experience, too? Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll. Simulations are at best a half-measure. (At worse, they’re a fantastic way to set money on fire.) It takes forever and two weeks to develop a simulation, and the Thursday after it’s released, IT relabels the Pending tab and adds two new buttons on the Estimation form. (Added to original post: a comment from Clark Quinn on Twitter made me realize that this last paragraph could be misconstrued. I was thinking of simulations of some complicated corporate computer system-in other words, a standalone imitation of the production system, one that requires at least as much maintenance as the production system does.) True robust practice doesn’t mimic the production system; it mirrors or piggybacks on production’s capabilities while ensuring that anything that goes wrong in the practice system stays in the practice system. At Amtrak, we created a set of imaginary passenger trains-the "training trains." They had robust practice features, and also safety features. Robust features: Training trains ran on the same routes as actual trains, with the same schedules, fares, and accommodations. The set of training trains contained every accommodation available, so you could practice reservations that might rarely or ever come to you otherwise. Training train schedules, fares, features, and services were created using production-system data, so the training trains always reflected real-world conditions. Practice IDs could retrieve such production-system information as schedules, fares, routes, on-board services, and operating status ("Is train 353 on time?"). You could log into a practice ID from any terminal connected to the production system. Safety features: A person using a production ID could not display the training trains. (You couldn’t make a reservation for a real person on an imaginary train.) A person using a practice ID could not reserve space, create reservations, or issue tickets on an actual train. Practice users could issue the "print ticket" command, but the actual printed ticket clearly read TEST TICKET / NOT GOOD FOR TRAVEL. Practice users could not enter or alter production-system information — e.g., they could not report an actual train as departing on time or change the hours of a ticket office. To log into a practice ID, you had to log out of your production ID. Additional safety measures guaranteed, for instance, that imaginary revenue from training train reservations was not counted as actual revenue in the production system. We try so hard as learning professionals to create authentic, high-value formal training. And we talk a lot about the problem of transfer, the need for spaced practice, the value of whole tasks, and the like. But we don’t seem to advocate for measures that would deliver robust practice to the workstation, and many of us are a little uneasy about what was described to me as "letting people run around inside a practice system." Such running around, which I think of as "deciding what I want to practice, then practicing it," seems to me to have far greater potential for performance support than run-of-the-mill elearning, no matter how many images it has of people in suits, talking on phones.

I’m not all that fond of the word "curator." (Keep in mind, though, that for some time I wasn’t all that fond of the word "blog.") I was fine with the original meaning-a person in charge of things in a museum, zoo, or similar place of collection. I agree it’s a logical extension to use it for someone who chooses items from a collection, or chooses the items that go into a collection. In the online world, though, there’s a tendency to call anyone who slaps four things together a curator. Sometimes, I think, he’s just a guy letting you look into his virtual junk drawer. David Kelly looks at this more seriously. He believes anybody in the learning and performance field (or probably any field) can be a curator if they listen, analyze, and share: In a similar vein, Harold Jarche stresses the need for every professional to do his or her own personal knowledge management, and he talks about this in his Seek, Sense, Share framework. I’ve just finished my first year in a new job. One of the things I want to do in the coming year is more deliberate personal knowledge management. Part of that involves collecting information from the networks I’m involve in and sharing that with my colleagues. I know from experience this increases my mindfulness, and the more I seek, the more things I find I have to think about and to share. My trusty sidekick for sensemaking is Evernote. (I just looked up their home page, and I smiled at the tag line, "the workspace for your life’s work.") On my own computer, I can use their web clipping widget to add notes, adding my own tags and (if I’m so inclined) sending the new note to a particular notebook (section) in my Evernote collection. I can email things to my Evernote account, and from my phone I can create notes directly (in the Evernote app) or share things from other apps. All that’s by way of introduction. Some time back I created a "keeper" tag for items I wanted to hang onto, specifically because I might want to share them with people. What I’m now planning: a series of keeper posts. Rather than fling a bunch of things onto a page here because I have a bunch of things, I’ll go through my most recent keepers and pull out a subset of them. I’ll try to explain what I’ve kept, why I’m keeping it, and (at least implicitly) why I’m sharing it. That’s what the next post will kick off.

This is the first in a (theoretical) series of keepers — interrelated items shared by people I follow. CC-licensed photo by victoriabernal The keepers: Julie Dirksen said, "Add ‘brain games’ to the myth pile" with a link to A Consensus on the Brain Training Industry from the Scientific Community (The Stanford Center on Longevity). The SharpBrains blog offered A Brain Teaser for Each Cognitive Ability. Mark Oehlert shared a link to Models of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Models, by Simon Roberts, at Perspectives, an ethnographic blog. A post at Tom Kuhlmann’s Rapid E-Learning Blog led me to a collection of e-learning examples shared by people in response to the weekly e-learning challenge. And, reinforcing the video I posted yesterday, a 2012 Learning Solutions article by David Kelly, Is Content Curation in Your Skill Set? It Should Be. Why I’ve kept them, why I’ve posted: The Stanford and SharpBrains selections both deal with the brain. On the one hand, Stanford’s countering the simplistic attitude that doing X will keep senescence at bay. The promise of a magic bullet detracts from the best evidence to date, which is that cognitive health in old age reflects the long-term effects of healthy, engaged lifestyles. In the judgment of the signatories below, exaggerated and misleading claims exploit the anxieties of older adults about impending cognitive decline. SharpBrains, for its part, says that its mission is "to pro­vide inde­pen­dent, research-based, infor­ma­tion and guidance to navigate the grow­ing cog­ni­tive and brain fit­ness market." So cldearly they believe there are ways to maintain and improve brain fitness, though these beliefs don’t seem overdramatic. (Here’s Scientific American’s book review of The SharpBrains Guide to Brain Fitness.)  * * * That’s a lot of brain stuff, and I think a good supplement is the Roberts article on models that Mark Oehlert shared. It has a striking quote from anthropologist Alfred Gell: The technology of enchantment is the most sophisticated we possess. Under this heading I place all those technical strategies, especially art, music, dances, rhetoric, gifts etc., which human beings employ in order to secure the acquiescence of other people in their intentions or project…to enchant the other person and cause him/her to perceive social reality in a way favourable to the social interests of the enchanter. Says consultant Roberts, "We’d like to think that our interests are coterminous with those of the people we advise…[However…] In pursuit of certainty in the face of uncertainty, is it not sometime the case that the enchanter becomes the enchanted?"  * * * The e-learning challenge examples, for me, move from brain theory to workplace practice. Although I don’t work with Articulate, much of what gets done through the challenge can serve as a stimulus or even a model to get me out of far more conventional ruts. What’s more of a challenge than asking-and trying to answer-"How did she do that? How could I do that? How could I do something different now that I’ve seen that?"  * * * I really enjoyed David Kelly’s comparison between curation and photography. Decades ago, as he says, "photographer" tended to mean someone with a lot of technical skill and a lot of technical equipment. Mere mortals took snapshots, not photographs. …Just as tools exist today that enable the average individual to take a quality photo, tools exist today that enable an individual to curate information. I’m not quite ready to call myself a curator, but this post does contains items I thought worth keeping for myself that and potentially worth sharing with others. That’s good enough for now.

Last week, I had a Twitter conversation with Jane Bozarth and David Glow. All three of us, I think, started by having fun with the, um, suboptimal material Jane had been given to start with. I briefly described a spectacular example of a wrongheaded job aid, but we moved pretty quickly to the idea that mockery (however well deserved) wasn’t enough. So rather than post this fictionalized version as a candidate for the Worst Job Aid Ever, I thought I’d try doing two things: talk about why this attempt works so poorly, and suggest some things I’d do differently if invited. I’m grateful to David and Jane for encouraging me in this. It’ll be a bit wordy, so  I’ll break it into two posts. This is the first. Here are two pages taken from a set of assembly instructions for a piece of industrial equipment. I’ve edited the pages, but only to conceal the source. The layout is exactly the same as the original. (You can click the images to see them full size in a new window.) Assembly instructions, page 1 - 1  (By the way, when I said the layout is exactly the same as the original, I also meant that fifteen of the seventeen pages have an identical layout. Each page has space for three dropped-in photos; each has three borderless boxes of instructions [centered vertically, with text almost always in ALL CAPS]; each has the six boxes you see for safety, tools, quality, and so on.) Assembly instructions, page 1 - 5 You may have noticed that the assembly instructions were created in Excel. I confess that I’ve kept this unique document for selfish reasons: it’s one of the most bizarre attempts at guiding performance that I’ve ever seen. I’m not here to talk about bizarre-at least not today. I’m here to talk about why these instructors fail so badly. What’s not working, and why It’s true that never before nor since have I seen an assembly guide written in a spreadsheet, but that’s more a symptom than the underlying problem. A more important question: what’s Quasimodo’s problem? In other words, what are they trying to get done? I’d say their goal is to have assembled widget vats that pass inspection and meet cost guidelines. I’ve covered a lot of territory with "pass inspection," but the second-last sheet makes reference to a number of Quasimodo standards. (Click this image to open it in a new window.) Inspection guidelines and standards Although I never saw the actual equipment, it’s clear from photos that the finished product is about the length and width of a roomy parking space. Two or three people assembly it in a factory, from start to finish (meaning, not on an assembly line-the parts come to the assemblers). Assembly involves over 50 steps, several of which are variations of "repeat steps 1-5 for all four edges." So what? Well, mostly these steps are sequences of actions with few decisions: Position center end wall panel CAD on assembly fixture. Use two people or a jib crane to lift panels. Check submittal for end wall connection and bottom connection orientation. Fasten center end wall panel CAD to floor plane using 5/16 x 3/4 LG tappers. Fasten center end wall panel CAD to floor support channel ZCA using 3/8 x 1-1/4 LG screw. And so on and so forth… I imagine these instructions were printed, pages slipped into sheet protectors and stored in a ring binder at the assembly area. They’re like a recipe from an industrial cookbook. So the fact they were created in Excel, while non-typical, is less relevant than the barriers created by their overall layout and especially by their approach to guiding behavior. What else do we know about assembling the widget vat? Workers need safety equipment like hearing protection and safety glasses. Parts of the task involve specialized equipment (like that jib crane). Some ways of working are more efficient or more effective than others ("start at the center and work your way out to the ends"). Detail often matters (as in the note above to check the submittal, a kind of specification for one specific assembly job). And why doesn’t this attempt work well? To shoot the biggest fish in the barrel: Excel isn’t a word processor. It’s not a publishing tool (unless you’re publishing numbers and charts, or else tables of data). Creating this guide in a spreadsheet needlessly complicates the task of updating and revising — and even searching. This isn’t even well-done document publication via Excel. Here’s a portion of page 1-5 (the second image above).  Note that the photo includes two callouts labeled CA while the accompanying text refers to panels CAA, CAB, and CAF. If you had the Excel file, you could enlarge the two CA callouts in the picture, and then you’d see that one of them actually reads CAA while the other reads CAB. So Doctor Spreadsheet may not have been a proofreading whiz. But who cares? The reason Excel is a poor choice is that nothing calls for Excel. There isn’t a single calculation in the entire document. You might as well have produced this in PowerPoint. Or taken photos of alphabet magnets you arranged on your fridge. From a graphics standpoint, the lockstep layout assigns equal weight to two areas (task photos and procedural steps), and the same total weight to six blocks, one of which (quality) reads "n/a" on all but one of the 15 pages.  Most of the time, a third of the space on a page is sitting around doing nothing. Nothing except confining the actual performance steps to their all-cap prison. From a job-aid standpoint: Before you begin information (like equipment and parts to have) should appear before the steps in the procedure. Visuals, when necessary, should appear next to the step they illustrate. Information that’s not needed on a page should not appear and shouldn’t have a reserved parking space that does nothing but delineate whether the information might show up on a subsequent page. Steps should be clearer delineated, not crammed into a trio of one-size-fits-all holding pens: Detail from page 1-6 The vertical centering manages to complicate reading even more, a remarkable feat for such a small amount of text. Another complication: in this example, step 5 says to repeat steps 1 through 5-a good recipe for an endless loop. I think the assemblers would figure out what the designer meant, but it’s no thanks to the designer. So, as it exists, the QAC assembly instructions are hard to update, hard to read (from a graphics standpoint), and hard to follow (from a getting-your-work-done standpoint). It doesn’t seem like they’d easily get Quasimodo to the goal of assembled widget vats that passed inspection at a cost acceptable to the company — at least not until the workforce managed to build enough of these things to not need the instructions. In my next post, I’ll show some possible revisions and talk about why I think they’d help. But I don’t have to have all the fun: add your comments. Ask your questions-if I’m able to, I’ll answer them. Let’s see if we can get to IPI sign-off a bit faster. You know, so we can excel.

In a previous post, I showed a fictionalized example of an actual guide for assembling a piece of industrial equipment. These instructions weren’t particularly well done, and I set myself the task of making some improvements. I also wanted to explain what I did, and why I thought it was an improvement. Revision, page 1 The original, written on seventeen sheets in an Excel workbook, had more than 50 steps. I didn’t fictionalize them all, and I haven’t tried to revise them all. I’ve done two pages (that cover what 5 of the original pages did). I think these revisions are representative. (You can click each image to open a full-sized version in another window.) By the way: I don’t have any documentation other than what’s in the original widget vat instructions. In some places, I’ve made an educated guess about details that aren’t clear; in other cases I made things up. I’ll point these out along the way. On to the revision! Why my version looks this way We’re guiding a task that’s mainly a procedure: a sequence of steps that follow one another logically, with relatively little decision-making. Revision, page 2 I see this as a job aid for lots of reasons, including the large number of steps. A number of my revisions are part of what any good job aid should include. A clear title The original read "Main Assembly Instructions," which is ambiguous at best, unless Quasimodo Corporation only assembles one thing. Here I’m pretending that there are several models of widget vats that differ mainly in size. I’ve put the model numbers into the title so the assemblers can tell easily if these are the instructions they want. First things first: safety and prerequisites Every page of the original version had a box listing the same three pieces of safety equipment-as if the developer thought the assemblers might take off their safety glasses between pages 11 and 12. I’m also pretending that the "submittal drawing" spells out things like how many fasteners you need of each type. If that were not the case, I’d have to find out from my client whether (for example) the fasteners were stored at the assembly point, and if so how the workers could get more when they needed. Emphasis techniques Emphasizing what’s important The original version didn’t make much effective use of contrast, alignment, or spacing, so it’s much harder to figure out what’s important. That’s one reason I’m a fan of language like "before you begin." In my revision, that stands on its own as the header for a number of items that we want the worker to do before starting the assembly. And rather than the original’s unfortunate use of ALL CAPS, I recommend using capitals, boldface, or similar techniques in specific, limited circumstances. One of those circumstances is to highlight words like DO NOT, EXCEPT, DANGER, and so on. Don’t confuse people with detail Although the original used over 50 photos, in my revision I’ve hardly used any. In part that’s because I didn’t have good replacements for the photos-but also because many of the original photos fail to contribute useful guidance. One problem with the original images-and with photos in general-is that they often provide too much detail, making it hard to grasp what’s important in a particular step. Or they ignore context, also making it hard to grasp what’s important. Take a look at these three examples on one page of the original (click to enlarge): Details from the original instructions Drawbacks to these: Left: Why do I need to see a picture of the parts cart? The instructions say it’s important to push rather than pull the cart-but they don’t say if there’s a specific end I should push from. If there is, show it. If there isn’t, spell that out. Center: you might be able to figure out, after studying this picture, that you’re viewing the assembly area from the side-but you can’t tell whether the top of the assembled widget will be on the left or the right. Right: the instructions tell you: CHOCK ONE (1) WHEEL ON EACH END OF EACH VAT ASSEMBLY FIXTURE (FOUR (4) CHOCKS TOTAL). In my first revision, I’d missed the "four chocks total" part, which implies that neither the all-caps approach nor the FOUR (4) text/numeral approach helped. Although I didn’t have much to work with, I have a couple of examples of images I think would work better. The top picture in "image detail" shows a closeup helpful for one assembly step: the flanges should face up, and they should face out from each other. (Yes, I made up the term "bleem flange.") The lower picture is a line drawing rather than a photo. Line drawings are a great way to eliminate unnecessary detail. I’ve teried to reduce details to the essentials: you’re fastening two (more-or-less) L-shaped pieces together, and you fasten through holes that alternate large/small/large/small. (I’ve made the assumption here that the assembler should alternate directions when fastening these things: one fastener from one side, the next from the opposite side. If it were important to do that alternating while fastening, I’d add a box to spell that out. If you can install all the fasteners from one side, and then from the other, I’d spell that out. ) Some  problems in the original version stem from the decision to always use three photos per page in the original. That’s a lot like deciding that you need to use one semicolon per paragraph: not wrong, exactly, but needlessly specific. What I’d do instead: Leave out the cart photo. My assumption: the assemblers know what the parts cart looks like. If they don’t, they shouldn’t be assembling widget vats. Possibly include a close-up of the portion of the cart that I’m supposed to push, assuming there’s some sort of handle or push plate. Use a bird’s-eye-view line drawing to show the layout of the assembly area. In the text for this step in my revision, I made up some floor guidelines to show "top" and "bottom" of the assembled widget. I also made up guidelines on the frame to show where to place some of the initial pieces. Clarify where to place the wheel chocks. Chock one wheel of each assembly fixture. Written this way, it doesn’t matter how many fixtures you have, so you don’t need the FOUR (4) business so beloved by people writing procurement specs. Place the chock so it’s closer to the center of the fixture than the wheel it’s touching. (If this is a best practice; I have no idea.) Trying to build a useful set of performance guides like this can be a tool for analysis tool as well. You can’t create a successful guide without knowing what the inputs are, what the process is, what the outputs are, and what the standards for success are. How many assembly fixtures do I need? On the framework, which side represents the top of the assembled piece? Can I install 20 fasteners in one direction, all in a row, and then 20 in the other? And what the hell is a "submittal drawing," let alone the cryptic "BOM?" What’s more, you can identify items that don’t need to be in the guide. Frankly, I think it’s…perhaps less than helpful to list "vat part cart" as an assembly aid. That’s like saying, "In order to build your IKEA Poang chair, buy the Poang chair and bring it home." The changes here, and the reasons behind them, apply to most performance guides like this. In my next widget vat post, I’ll show some revisions I’d make that are specific to procedural or step-by-step job aids like these instructions.

I started to write about learning new software. But no one learns software for its own sake. Software’s like a second language: you learn it because you have a goal. Even the well-intended "everyone should know how to code" silliness has a goal, which is less about coding and more about something like logical thinking, understanding complex systems, or producing a result that the coder finds worthwhile. I decided I wanted to write about two things: why I wanted to learn this particular software, and how I’m not learning the way the program’s developers think I should. I’m not even learning the way I might have thought I should. It’s going to take me a couple of posts; this is the first. What I wanted to learn Last year, I joined the Victoria Gaelic Choir. Gaelic (Gàidhlig, Scottish Gaelic) was the language of my ancestors and even my grandparents. I know only a few words and phrases, but I’ve know Gaelic singing for a long time-and if you don’t, there’s a list at the end of this post to get you started. As I said last year, this opened a clutch of challenges. I needed to learn lyrics in a language I don’t speak-one whose spelling and pronunciation aren’t always easy for an English speaker: O seinnidh mi dàn do dh’eilean mo ghràidh (O, I’ll sing a song to the island that I love) "oh shay-nee mee dawn doh yell-un mo gr-eye…" And before the lyrics, I needed to learn the melody for many songs I’d never heard. (Tune first, words second; trust me.) Even for those I did recognize, I needed to learn the tenor part. I can pick out a tune or a tenor line on guitar, but that’s not a practical way to learn a choral piece. I seriously considered buying an electronic keyboard, but my son (thank goodness) suggested I experiment with a 30-day trial of Sibelius First. With Sibelius, I know what I’m doing. Or what I should do. This $120 package lets you compose music on your computer and share it with others. I didn’t plan any composition, but the features that caused my son to suggest Sibelius include the ability to scan printed sheet music, to create an editable digital score, and to export sound files. Sheet music to an mp3? Does it work? Let me show, rather than tell. That line of Gaelic above is from Uibhist Mo Ghràidh (Uist, My Love), an archetypal Gaelic song about the island of North Uist, where my mother’s people came from. O seinnidh mi dàn do dh’eilean mo ghràidh far an d’fhuair mi m’àrach nuair bha mi nam phàisd’ Far am bi mo chrìdhe gu deireadh mo là ann an Eilean Uibhist an eòrna. O, I’ll sing a song to the isle of my love where I was raised as a child where my heart will be to the end of my days In the Isle of Uist of the barley. If you want some idea of how I felt when everyone else in the choir knew this, listen to Linda NicLeòid — Linda MacLeod — singing. (I’ll resume below below the video.) A recording like this demonstrates the melody, and from Wednesday night choir practice I had a nodding acquaintance with the tenor line. But "once a week" takes the idea of spaced practice to an extreme. I needed to hear the tenor part on its own, a lot, so I could practice. I chose Uibhist Mo Ghràidh for this post to show what I was able to do after working with Sibelius off and on for about three months. Starting with a good copy of the sheet music, arranged for soprano, alto, tenor, and bass: I scanned the music into Sibelius. I edited a few errors the scan didn’t quite catch. From the digital version, I exported audio files for each part and for the four parts together. Sibelius allows me to choose instruments-which means I can make the audio sound like piano, or like human voices. I went the latter route. Here’s the full choir audio, and here’s the tenor part. The audio comes out as .wav files. It takes me less than a minute to convert them to mp3s, which I can then send to my phone or share with other members of the choir. That’s where I went. Next time: how I got there. It’s taken me a while to write this post, because I kept rethinking what it was I wanted to learn and how I could explain the context. If I had to summarize my own learning goal, it’d be "have the tune for the tenor parts to Gaelic songs I want to sing."  That’s an oversimplification, but it was also a 14-word target I wanted to hit. It took some effort before I could hit it, and the process of that learning is what will be in the next post. Those Gaelic songs I promised Raylene Rankin(Click for an appreciation from the Halifax Chronicle Herald) Song may be one of the most enduring ways to preserve and transmit a language. Here are a few examples-the links in the song titles lead to a recording of the song. When I’ve been able to find an online translation into English, I’ve put a link for that as well. (The links are set to open in a new window.) The late Raylene Rankin (a distant cousin) singing An Innis Aigh, The Happy Island, about Margaree Island, which you can see from my home town on Cape Breton. (Lyrics and English translation at the same link) Kathleen MacInnes, Òganaich An Òr-fhuilt Bhuidhe, Young Man with the Golden Hair (lyrics and English translation). The Campbells of Greepe, who start with puirt-à-beul ("mouth music") meant to imitate instruments and meant to dance to. Karen Matheson, Gleann Bhaile Chaoil, Ballachulish Glen (lyrics and English translation). Runrig, Cearcall a’ Chuain, The Ocean’s Cycle (both Gaelic and English in the video). There are typos in the Gaelic, but you’ll probably overlook them.

Lots of people in my extended network have been working out loud — sharing what they do, and the thought process behind it — long before #WOL as a term got very far down the street. This informal reflection (often followed by informal exchange) has made a tremendous difference in how I learn things and how I get better at things. If you’re not familiar with the idea, for starters there’s John Stepper’s book, and there’s Jane Bozarth’s Show Your Work. In both cases the emphasis is not simply on what gets done, but how it gets done. Before the week’s over, I wanted to go out loud with a small item that’s produced a lot of progress for me in the past six weeks. I’d like to have something more obviously impressive, but I’m going with "personally worthwhile." I can’t find the original source — most likely because it’s buried in the cognitive junk drawer of my Twitter favorites. But the idea is this: If you’ve got some future goal — say, you’re giving a presentation in four months — there’s research to suggest that framing your goal in days, rather than weeks or months, is a much more effective way of spurring yourself on. Try it yourself: which has more psychological weight? "I’ve got three months" or "I’ve got 91 days." The notion intrigued me, and with not much searching I found the Countdown Widget at the Google Play store. The day I installed it was four months ahead of the target I’d set for myself. But the widget counts down in days — so it displayed 120 on my phone. As you can see in the screen shot I took this morning, that’s now down to 78. I’ve got work to do this weekend. I made sure to put the widget on the home page, and so every time I glance at my phone, I’ve got a double reminder of the schedule I chose: the number of days appears, and the bright ring around the number disappears, bit by bit, with each passing day. What this has done for me is probably what end-of-the-day reflection does for other people, or a carefully tended to-do list: I look at this and ask myself what I can do next to move forward toward my goal. Another out-loud angle: I talked about this with a co-worker, and at least three times a week she’ll notice the countdown on my phone and ask what I’ve done on my project lately.    

Joe Ganci, a prolific and generous e-learning consultant, just published a column in Learning Solutions Magazine: The State of Authoring Tools: Where We’ve Been, Where We’re Going. I think it’s worth reading in full, especially since Ganci’s experience is deeper and far more recent than my own. His reflections on the origins of e-learning triggered a number of thoughts for me, and this post is a sort of extended comment on Joe’s article. Oh, boy, we’ve got learning NOW! (CC-licensed image by Patrick Finnegan) He mentioned two of the ancestors of modern elearning: PLATO and TICCIT, both of which began in the 1960s. I first encountered mainframe-based computer-based training (as elearning was called then) in 1978 via the IBM Interactive Instructional System, and two years later was the head of a team developing training for Amtrak’s new reservation system, using a competing product, Boeing’s Scholar/Teach 3. It’s telling that I couldn’t find a worthwhile link for either of these last two. I also remember a long-ago conference where someone asked, "How many of you have seen PLATO?" Nearly every hand went up. "How many of your organizations use PLATO?" Not a one. In 1979 I was put in charge of developing CBT for Amtrak’s new reservation system-to new it was still under development as we learned the authoring system and started designing the courses. Our IT department got the CBT software up and running, but we were left on our own when it came to using it. So I had to teach myself and then my team quasi-programming concepts like using variables to track progress, record quiz results, and control paths within a course. I clearly recall the next stage of elearning, a proliferation of chip-laden devices rolling through trade shows like the Bandwagon Express. When Joe mentioned the two Authorware camps — icon-draggers and codeheads — I recalled a set of definitions that’s served me well for years: Easy to learn: hard to use. Ease to use: hard to learn. Easy to learn and easy to use: won’t do what you want. The reality is that the people who buy elearning systems (as with much other organizational technology) are not the people who have to use them, either as developers or, alas, as learners. Hence my agreement with this passage in Joe’s article: Very often we hear vendors say that we no longer need instructional designers because the tools are so easy to use that Harry the Engineer can create the engineering course himself, or Susan the Physicist can build that physics lesson herself. The bean-counters in those organizations buying those tools are psyched at all the money they can save by not hiring or contracting instructional designers (and of course programmers) to fill their learning needs. They don’t know, of course, that the resulting lessons are often at the very least anemic and at the worst nothing more than boring text and images punctuated with a Jeopardy game and quizzes. Learners end up expecting their eLearning to be onerous and are resigned to getting through it as quickly as possible and in some cases cheating if they can. Some of those people may have taken a course I once worked on, aimed at supervisors. The client insisted that a lesson take two hours to complete-because that was the standard required by the state of California for the topic at hand. This approach and similar ones have nudged corporate elearning ever closer to to the status of Death By PowerPoint, only with voiceover. And the inevitable Jeopardy review. Formal training in organizations has always struggled between flashy features (the ooh!) and effective learning (the ah!). Far too often, the ooh wins — so you’ve got terabytes of animated demos of corporate systems, with the apparently mandatory click-click imitation typing, yet almost never a way for people at work to practice safely in the actual systems (such as via a robust training mode built into the system). I admire Joe Ganci’s optimism, and I couldn’t agree more with this opinion: If you ask yourself, "What will my tool allow me to do for this audience and this content?" then you’re asking the wrong question. The real question should be, "What is the best approach to have this audience learn and so what interactions should I build?"    

I’ve been collaborating on a course with my colleague, Tanis. An unexpected benefit has been the ability to float an initial idea, talk about it, and have it improve from the discussion, from feedback, and from new ideas these things engender. I want to talk about one of those engendered nuggets. I’m a bit hesitant, because when you get to the end, you may well think "Yeah, so?" For me the path was well worth following, and I might not have taken it without the back-and-forth with Tanis. So this is another form of working out loud. The topic doesn’t actually matter much. If you’re curious, see the following aside; otherwise, just skip past. About the topic: Many pension plans allow purchase of service, a way for a person who hasn’t contributed to the plan (for example, during a leave of absence) to pay additional money into the plan. That payment is the purchase. The person then gains credit for the corresponding work time-that’s the service. Purchasing service can increase the amount of your eventual pension. Different plans have different rules and coverage, and within a plan there are usually several types of purchase of service. You can see typical examples here (for an Ontario plan) and here (a Pennsylvania plan). Some pension plans use other terms, but purchase of service is the one we use. The nugget emerged as we juggled three goals for the first part of our course: Introduce a new type of purchase Connect this new type to what people already know Provide a framework to show what the various types of purchase have in common Employees taking our course would already have learned how to handle certain purchases, like the leave of absence mentioned above. In the new course, they’ll learn the details for purchasing arrears (payment for a period when contributions should have been made to the pension plan but were not-for example, because of clerical error). Version one: framework → known → new CC-licensed image by João Moura Working with internal documents and with our subject-matter experts, we discovered a pattern that seemed to apply at a high level to all purchases: Circumstances occur that make a purchase possible. The plan receives an application for the purchase. Plan staff analyze the application to see whether the purchase is permissible. Plan staff calculate the cost of the purchase. There’s a lot more to it, and there are nuances and conditions for each of those, but it didn’t seem like a bad framework. Having laid it out, we could ask participants how a leave-of-absence purchase would fit into this, since they’d already know how those purchases work. Then we could start talking about arrears purchases, to show how at this level they’re like other purchases the participants have worked with. On second or third glance, though, this version felt abstract. Our plan staff don’t work directly with frameworks; they work with the specific purchases. And so we moved to… Version two: known → framework → new In the revision, we decided to start by describing out a leave-of-absence purchase according to our framework: a person goes on maternity leave; she later applies to purchase the service; the staff evaluate the application; we provide a quote for the cost. We’d make sure participants saw how at a high level thus was how the LOA purchase worked. Finally, we’d introduce arrears purchases using the same framework. CC-licensed photo by MTSOfan This felt better, in no small measure because we began with the specific and not the abstract. And we felt we were doing a better job of connecting to what people already knew. As we worked on other parts of the course, we’d revisit the intro. Gradually we began to feel that we were explaining for the sake of explaining. I’ve been in the instructional design field longer than Tanis has, and I feel as though I should have known better. It’s always tempting to try and make things clear. As we poked at this, though, we realized that the key point is not that a leave-of-absence purchase follows these four stages, and so does an arrears purchase. What was important? Knowing about LOA helps you to learn about arrears. Version three: known → new Here’s the sequence we now have-and in the course, the sequence takes much less time than you’ve spent reading this post: Ask participants to describe the phases of a LOA purchase, from the member’s point of view, in 25 words or less. (We don’t care about word count; brevity encourages big-picture summary.) Show a diagram with LOA information illustrating our four phases: the maternity leave, the application, our research, the cost estimate. Discuss how the experience of the participants aligns with this pattern. Redraw the diagram with an arrears purchase replacing the LOA one. CC-licensed photo by James We really like having the participants start by sharing their own ideas about the processes involved in the purchases they already work with. We then show our summary (the LOA in the four phases) and make sure they see their own experience in that summary. Finally, we can start talking about arrears. So now we don’t belabor the four phases; they’re just stepping stones between the familiar and the new. We’re inviting participants to build the connections that work for them. What comes next? We use this intro as a springboard to what’s different about purchasing arrears. We ask participants what they think might trigger an arrears. If they already have an idea, great-we can reinforce that. If they don’t, that’s okay, too; their interest level is higher as we move into the explanation.  

In a previous post, I talked about deciding to learn Avid’s Sibelius First, which is software for composing music. My goal wasn’t composition, but I’d read that I could scan sheet music and produce an audio file. I’d joined a choir and wanted to hear the tenor parts for the songs we sing. This post is about challenges I ran into and reflections I’ve had about how I went about learning. Cha cheòl do dhuin’ a bhròn uil’ aithris. (It’s no music to a man to recite all his woe.) From a glance at the product site, I thought my choral problems were over. "Choose the note input method that’s most comfortable for you-play a MIDI instrument, transcribe audio, or scan sheet music." I downloaded the software and launched into my own 30-day trial. There’s more than one meaning for "trial." What I bumped into was my own misapprehension. After fiddling around with the menus and discovering that the reference manual is 437 pages long (not counting glossary, shortcuts, and index), I found that I couldn’t scan handwritten music (like the first piece I wanted to try), only printed music. I also discovered that while I knew a few things about music (I can play guitar and on a piano can pick out melodies on the treble clef), the details of Sibelius First were a bit like the details of relational databases or organic chemistry: the individual words mostly made sense, but the combinations and contexts often left me stranded. Chan e na léughar a ni foghliumte ach na chuimhn-ichear. (It’s not what’s read but what’s remembers that makes one learned.) Sibelius First comes with three tutorials whose printed guide is 87 pages long. Here’s what you find under "Start Here." Warning! However much you may dislike manuals, you must read the whole of this introduction in order to get started with the program. You are then very strongly advised to work through at least the first three of the five tutorial products before embarking on any serious work of your own with Sibelius First. Sibelius First is easy to learn and mostly self-explanatory, but if you don’t work through these projects you will run a risk of never discovering some basic features, particularly if you are used to notation programs that work in different ways. By the time you have completed the projects — which will take you only a few hours — you will be able to input, edit, play back and print out straightforward music, and you’ll know how to get going on more complicated music too. Actually, I stuck with the tutorial long enough to read the "7 main elements" of Project 1. They include opening a score, editing and inputting notes, selections (I think they mean "selecting") and copying music, and "Flexi-time™ input." Not a word about scanning. I had no interest in opening a score, and doubted whether Sibelius could open a PDF of a printed score I had. I had some specific goals in mind, and the admonitory tone of the warning didn’t seem to offer much hope of reaching those goals without submitting to a period of initiation. I don’t want to beat up on Sibelius. This is the crux of off-the-shelf software training: it homogenizes learners to such an extent that it abandons almost all context that’s meaningful to them. So I refined my context: how do I scan music? It was at about this point I began printing selected chapters of that 437-page manual. Tracking down mentions of scanning, I came across "PhotoScore," which seemed to be a kind of add-on needed to scan. Where was it? Why didn’t I see it? I was better able to tackle these questions, in part I think because their scope was more limited. At worst, I’d have to discovered I was wrong — but I wasn’t. It’s been a while and I may have the sequence wrong, but I think I did the download wrong. I assumed it was one big download with all the necessary parts. In retrospect, I had to go back to the download page two or three more times to pick up various packages I didn’t realize I needed. This began a series of two-steps-forward, one-step-back incidents, such as: Discovering I had to start PhotoScore from outside Sibelius. Scanning my first page and not understanding the results. Scanning a complete piece and figuring out how to edit Moving the edited piece from PhotoScore to Sibelius Discovering that I couldn’t hear any audio because I hadn’t downloaded the audio portion of Sibelius It’s been close to six months now. I’ve produced audio files for at least 10 pieces, including eight that include separate parts for all four choir voices, along with nice clean scores in PDF. I even bought a numeric keypad to attach to my laptop (see footnote below for technical explanation). Most important, I’m more than satisfied with my investment of time and money. And what about learning? Beiridh am beag tric air a mhòr ainmig. (The frequent little will overtake the infrequent large.) Especially early on, I’d work trying to transcribe a piece.  I’d stop when I felt stumped, roam around in the manual, but very often would make guesses about what might work. Some of those guesses became more educated in time. So I was doing the typically messy learning by doing (and, yes, learning by failing). Ironically, I continue to have very little interest in finishing the Sibelius tutorials. Some of that is just my annoyance at the tone of the warning; some is the sense that I may have taught myself a good portion of what I might have learned, and I’m several pieces of music to the good. On the other hand, now that I’m more familiar with what *I* can produce, I might be more open to picking up something unexpected. Which leads to another reflection: for me, in this circumstance, good enough is good enough. I’m not trying to make a living as a music composer or arranger; I’m just trying to learn my choir parts. I think there’s a message in that for those hoping to turn people in the workplace into All Learning, All the Time: most people don’t want to do anything all the time. At the same time, my definition of "good enough" is changing; my standards have become higher. When I see in sheet music something tricky like a pick-up bar (one at the start of a piece that doesn’t have, say, the four beats that 4/4 time calls for), I want to get the Sibelius transcription to show it and the audio file to play it as written. I’ve even managed to do things like take music written on two staffs, like this, and scan it… …and then have Sibelius expand it so that each voice is on its own staff, like this: That latter version takes more space, since the lyrics appear separately for each voice. Choir members like that; they can more easily focus on their own line, especially when not every voice is singing the same word for the same length. That’s another lovely song, and one you might have heard. Here are the Rankins singing it: And here are the lyrics in Gaelic and English. I’ve become more curious about musical things; I understand more about notation, and I want to figure out how to get Sibelius (and thus the audio files) to do things like multiple repetitions of a chorus — especially because in a Gaelic song like Horo Gun Togainn air Hùgan Fhathast (link to a BBC audio file), with a three-line chorus interwoven with two-line verses. My choir takes the summer off, and I’ve been working on a professional project (if you’re going to DevLearn at the end of September, I’ll see you there), but I need to reacquaint myself with Sibelius. I’ve got melodies to learn and tenor lines to master.

A Peak near the Shore of Lake WakatipuWhāia te iti kahurangi, ki te tuohu koe, me he maunga teitei.Pursue the treasures you hold most dearly - should you stumble, let it be against a lofty mountain. - Māori proverbI’ve just dropped in on Andrea Hernandez’s latest post, Getting (and staying) focused. She summarises her goals for the year but goes further, speaking of the self, the inner being, its place and relationship with the rest of the universe, and the need for avoiding overstretching. She has started what she set out to do by giving her blog a new look.I said in my heart,"I am sick of four walls and a ceiling.I have need of the sky.I have business with the grass." - Richard HoveyAndrea also reflects on her resolve to blog this year. I recommend you take a look at her post. It made me think about how I do things and how I go about them.Praxis through observation:I’m a great believer in ‘practice through observation’. Yes, you may have to read these last 3 words again. This may be a strange concept to some, but it’s one I’ve been aware of for a while. I call it mind praxis.I first discovered how it worked for me about 30 years ago, when I had to hang a new door while renovating my living room. The plan was simple. I knew what to purchase. I had the tools and got all the required materials. I’d just never hung a door before.I had watched my father do this task when he did renovations at home. And I’d watched him perform similar jobs with his chisels, many times, for I loved to watch my father at work in his joinery workshop. Through the practice of observing, and only observing, I’d learnt a lot.I pencil-marked the positions of the hinges. When it came to the chop and I had to lift the chisel and mallet to chip away the recess for the first hinge, I knew how to hold the tools. It was awkward at first, but the memory of watching my father showed me how to present the chisel to the timber, how to tap with the mallet, lightly at first, to mark the wood. How to take care not to tap too heavily, working delicately close to the pencilled line, clearing away waste timber from the recess as I went.I’ve also experienced this learning when watching technique in playing a musical instrument. Studying a master musician can lead to learning by proxy, if it’s done vigilantly and often enough, making it so much easier to accomplish when the technique is attempted by oneself.I’m not saying that all can be learnt this way. There comes a point when what’s perused has to be put to practice. But if one is familiar with related skills, putting a new technique into action isn’t as traumatic as it may first seem.If I don’t manage to fly, someone else will. The spirit wants only that there be flying. - Rainer Maria RilkeIt’s the same with blogging. Skellie’s advice is to study other expert bloggers. Just do it, and don’t think about the subject of the posts you’re studying. When the desire to write is there, the key is to start. If you have no past experience, pull on what you’ve learnt form your observation of others. For most bloggers just starting off, this will be all the experience they have had.Richness in variety:My involvement in the Comment Challenge in May last year was so very helpful to me, and for a number of reasons. One of the most helpful things was the sheer variety of tasks we were given to perform. And every new task held something different from the last. Michele Martin and her team of masters, recognised the need for the learner to keep shifting place while learning.There is a need for learners to provide this variety for themselves, to try things new. Even if it’s only a bit removed from what was done before, the difference is important. Sooner or later, the learner will see opportunities to put what’s learnt or observed into practice.Always keep movingMove to the open spaceBe ready for the open pass - Lino Di LulloTrying something completely new with technology is sometimes traumatic for me. This is part of how I am, and it takes a lot of effort on my part to make the leap. I don’t think this idiosyncrasy I have is entirely my own genius, for I’m sure many others have the same or similar hang-ups.But often I find that by trying something new, I’m taken down pathways that can be so intriguing, and worth exploring, that I inevitably find many new things to learn.There is a bevy of questions that I ask myself, always to do with relevance, as I take stock of what I'm learning, and it’s sometimes difficult to avoid the old cognitive overload that Andrea refers to in her post. It just takes time when there’s a lot to look at and learn, and I have to counsel myself to remember this.One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time. - André GideAndrea mentions the need for her to share and to trust in this sharing - with her students, with her work mates, with her colleagues in the blogosphere. Through these developments, the individual can discover new learning pastures and help others to do the same.It may be true that he travels farthest who travels alone. But the goal thus reached is not worth reaching. - Theodore RooseveltHaving read Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers twice now, I have twice confirmed my suspicions about the attributes of purpose, resolve and perseverance being so important to gaining expertise.Andrea has made a decision to push herself to improve in the way she shares her development and learning with others. Her words are resolute. They define exactly what it is she has chosen to do.Press on. Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful (people) with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.- Calvin Coolidge

Notepad, a simple text editor, has been released with all versions of MS Windows since 1985. I've been giving it a bit of airing recently. It’s one of those little apps that seem to have countless uses, simple as well as complex.Easy and simple html:Late last century, in my sojourn with html, I learnt that web builders often used Notepad directly to build web pages. This intrigued me. I’d realised that a file-extension had a function, and that in some files the extension could be changed without the screen exploding.Someone who is well familiar with the ins-and-outs of html can open a Notepad file and type in text, adding their own html code to put in the formatting, such as font, colour, text-size etc. Of course, the code remains visible as code when the Notepad file is saved.But by altering the file-extension (.txt) to .html, the file takes on a new function as web page, that’s recognised by the computer.Useful elearning:I’ve found this use of Notepad to be a valuable one-off measure for sending onto students active links to videos on the Internet. You can try this for yourself.Browse to your favourite YouTube video. Copy the embed code that permits you to share the video. Open a Notepad file and paste in the embed code. It's also easy to add a caption or notes.When you name and save the file, add the extension .html in place of the usual .txt . If you then examine the file, you’ll notice that it will be saved as a web page, as shown by its icon and file-extension .html .Double clicking the new file opens it, but the code that was pasted in will not be displayed. Instead you will see the familiar start menu for your chosen video. Altering the file extension to .txt permits editing.The html file made this way can be sent as an email attachment, making it easy for the recipient to open and view the video contents immediately, provided there’s a connection to the Internet.Obstinate files and Notepad:Occasionally, Windows Explorer’s indexing prohibits a file from being deleted until the next time the system is started up. This can be frustrating, but you can often use Notepad to help you delete the file. Here’s how:Open Notepad and select File > Opencheck that Files of Type: is set to All Files,not Text Documents (*.txt)navigate to the location of the file to be deletedright-click on the file and choose Delete and follow through to delete the fileempty the Recycle Bin.Not a criticism of Notepad:Something I learnt recently is that some people don’t like using Notepad. Perhaps it has earned this reputation from its peculiarities. Here’s an old one that I’ve only just come across.Apparently there is a bug in the application that can be made evident by saving a Notepad file containing 2 three-letter words, 1 four-letter word and 1 five-letter word, in any order with single spaces in between. Example lines that do this when saved as the only data in the file are:this app can breakedit the end errorNero hid the factsChoose your own four-letter name instead of Nero in the last example. Provided the Enter key isn’t used at any time when entering any one of the text lines shown above, the text becomes invisible when the file is saved and is then re-opened. Not all words trigger the fault.One line that I tried that didn’t disappear was: Good for USA ObamaI don’t think it’s a political plot. Check out WinCustomize.com.Thought for the week:If odd bugs are to be found in Microsoft Windows' simplest application, perhaps it’s best to take all the automatic updates!

Courtesy NASAA recent search I made on Google Reader returned, among other interesting information, a series of unrelated posts dated earlier than 2005 and that had no comments.They reminded me of the Ashleigh Brilliant quote:"I waited and waited, and when no messagecame, I knew it must have been from you."I frequently come across posts with no comments and I often think of why this occurs. Considering the millions of potential hits these lonely posts could have had, it seems unlikely that they should be so neglected. But of course, posts don’t acquire comments the way one might expect.Courtesy Google AnalyticsEven if one remains as the most current post on a blog for several months, it is very likely that its visitor profile will look like the above Google Analytics (GA) graph of a Typical Post. There’s a shower of activity when it is first posted. That activity quickly decays, evidenced by a sharp trailing tail; then nothing. It's dead Jim. The post becomes a time capsule, rarely visited, and usually never commented on again.When I first announced my Index Page, Sue Waters remarked that because of the way most readers interact with blogs, there is no guarantee it would be used. I think she was right in part. Even the most popular posts are visited and commented on most often when they’re newly up, but they all trail a rapidly diminishing tail of visits and comments that dwindles to nothing.There are exceptions:Tony Karrer’s Blog Guide for first time visitors is an exception. It was the first post I came across that evidently did not have the typical visitor profile. It had accumulated 27 comments by the time I read it, and had been posted on Tony’s blog for about 2 years. A reasonably popular post, it had a long comment tail and is still accumulating comments at the rate of 1 every 2 months or so.My own index page has a parade of visitors that makes it one of the most popularly visited posts on the blog. At the time of writing this post, it is top of the blog's popularity poll. It has a weekly procession of between 25 and 30 visitors with a reasonable average time on the page and favourable bounce rate.Both these regularly visited posts, Tony’s Blog Guide and Middle-earth’s Index, have their links clearly visible at the top right of their respective blog pages. They are also linked to, from time to time, in posts, so it’s easy to see why their visitor profiles are atypical.Courtesy Google AnalyticsVisitors to these special posts will come at a rate that coincides closely to the dates of new postings, as shown in the above visitor-frequency-graph of the Index Page to this blog.Blogger's day in hell:In Sue Waters’ post, Interlinking! Is it YOUR idea of fun?, she speaks of the time consuming practice of adding links in new posts to older posts on the blog - what Natasa describes as a Blogger’s Day In Hell.Unless the blogger is proficient in editing links in posts, I would not recommend attempting this. I must confess to using this practice, however, and I have recorded GA evidence for it providing significant visitor access to old posts.The ‘related posts - >>’ series of links at the base of this post is such a link system. Like the common links to popular posts in the widgets and lists on the side-bar to the right of this post, it can indeed delay the onset of time-capsule disease in older posts.related posts - >> ( 3 ) ( 2 ) ( 1 )

This article was first published on Futurelab in March 2008. I've reproduced the text of the article here with some minor amendments. Some links to resources are now no longer current.Considering the raft of links that could be included in the text, I chose to preserve the referencing style used in the original article. Those who detest wading through a fan of links will be relieved. Enjoy! It is today we must create the world of the futureEleanor RoosveltWhat is elearning?The language of elearning continues to expand, as is evident by the burgeoning number of glossaries of elearning terms[1] that are emerging. Elearning systems are big business[2, 3], education authorities are centring attention on their use in schools and there is interest in the effective use of elearning for specific ethnic groups of learners[4].But there is much discussion on what elearning should consist of. Some opinion holds that it should not necessarily exclude the use of printed text, while others believe that inclusion of the internet is not essential. Elearning is often considered as a means of permitting access to learning by using any or all of the following technologies:Simply the provision of passive learning material that’s electronically based, such as a pdf posted on the internet, is not commonly considered elearning. This is similar to the provision of text material as a single means of learning where no opportunity is available to ask questions or to enter into discussion.Elearning has immediacyA key feature of elearning is that it is interactive[5]. It uses a two-way or multi-way exchange of information that gives immediacy to the learning process and has the potential to provide the synergy that is absent when a student attempts to learn from passive resources alone. Numerous types of feedback can assist learning but not all of them are considered interactive:self-assessment (passive - needs motivation)online feedback/assessment (interactive - can be immediate)teacher feedback/assessment (interactive - can be immediate)peer-to-peer assessment (interactive - can be immediate)peer-to-peer discussion (collaborative - can be immediate).There are two broad spheres of interactive learning for student groups:synchronouslearning the same things at the same timetimetabled within set periodssometimes inconvenient for students in different time zonesfixed pace of learningpotential for social interactionsuitable for discussions - immediacyasynchronouslearning at own pace and according to personal time schedulechoice when to studyconvenient for students in different time zonesflexible pace of learningdelayed social interactionless useful for discussions - delayed feedbackImmediacy by way of direct interaction is understood to be very important to the learning process. While it is accepted that discussions are best done synchronously as this provides immediacy, asynchronous chat-room discussion does not exclude the exchange of ideas and opinion. Both these elearning tools have been widely used in studies using a collaborative approach to learning[6n/a].Computer-based learning or any electronic means giving direct feedback, such as open access interactive websites like BestChoice[7], can also provide a degree of immediacy, even if impersonal, while it does not need to be synchronous. Asynchronous learning allows a flexible pace and permits round-the-clock access, especially important for groups of students living in different time zones.Elearning can support teaching and learningJohn D Bransford and co-workers report that technology can play a significant role in supporting teaching and learning[8n/a]. It can permit students to gather information on real world-related problems which can be community-based or of global significance.Such technologies as communication networks and the computer software interface can offer prompt feedback to students. In addition to these advantages, scaffolding can occur when a technology assists students to solve more complex problems.Bransford further asserts that "it is easy to forget that student achievement in school also depends on what happens outside of school. Bringing students and teachers in contact with the broader community can enhance learning." He also upholds that "when teachers learn to use a new technology in their classrooms, they model the learning process for students; at the same time, they gain new insights on teaching by watching their students learn."Barriers to elearningLearning barriers introduced by the hardware and software of the electronic interface between student and the learning materials have been acknowledged and recorded since web-based course delivery was in its infancy[9].Provision of learning resources that are based exclusively on electronic means, or that require the use of electronic agencies, may not only limit student potential to learn but can also be impractical. This becomes evident when English reading material, such as novels and other long texts, are provided solely on CD-Rom or over the internet from an online library[10], or when a virtual lab environment[11] is offered as the sole means for studying practical chemistry.The keyboard presents a real barrier to student feedback in chemistry, Chinese, Japanese, mathematics and many other areas of learning where it is either impossible or extremely difficult to use the keyboard to write script or complex expressions and formulae. Moreover, one of the accompanying skills that the student must acquire is clearly the use of a pen.Many examinations require the student to read questions from the printed page and write their answers with a pen. The exclusive use of the screen and keyboard simply does not provide the necessary experience for a student to be adequately prepared for those examinations.Also the print quality of assessment items may well have to be maintained to determined moderation standards. But the provision of printable resources in electronic format, such as pdf, may not necessarily meet those standards when printed by the student and there is no simple way of checking this.A blended approach to elearningMany elearning authorities in industry[12] and in schools[13] now accept that a blended approach[14] offers countless advantages in most areas of learning, and good practice has been developed in a hybrid online model[15].A careful fusion of print-based and electronic resources, each chosen optimally for its specific purpose, is superior to the exclusive use of any single means of delivery. As well, learning outcomes may be enhanced by the provision of learner choice, where various types of resources having the same content are accessed through student preference, or where a resource has been previously selected to match a student’s personal learning style.What skills are needed to teach online?Being an effective elearning teacher calls for additional key competencies[16] that are dynamic, exacting and specific. Excellent keyboard skills as well as expert knowledge in specific aspects of ICT, especially to do with the elected elearning platform, are simply essential day-to-day requirements for the teacher.The ever-present advancement of ICT requires the constant acquisition of vital new skills and knowledge by all teachers through professional training and study, but the need is most urgent for the elearning teacher.Skills and knowledge also have to be attained by the attentive elearning student. This has additional implications for the teacher, who is often the first port of call for instructional assistance. The role of the elearning teacher can be far more demanding and exacting even than that of the traditional distance educator who selects appropriate learning resources and diligently assesses and reports on student work returned through postal services.Elearning contentThe debate over ways to develop elearning content has been going on for years in industry[17] and in schools. Use of existing internet material in a course requires vigilant maintenance as such resources are capriciously subject to change.Likewise the mercurial specifications directed by authorities over curriculum content can require constant revision of course material. The consequence of those and other aspects where change is a considered and important factor elicits the need for strategy in the development of elearning content.Digital resourcesWhile much consideration has been brought to the promotion of software used for building e-resources, no single method of content use has received more interest or attention than the reusable learning object[18] (or digital learning resource).It has been defined as a reusable, media-independent collection of information used as a modular building block for elearning content. Utilising a wide range of audio, video, animation and interactive technologies, it is perfectly suited to elearning and has enjoyed some use in industrial training as well as in pre-tertiary and tertiary education.The digital learning resource is particularly useful for introducing the student to concepts difficult to introduce in static diagrams or pictures, or where it would be impossible or dangerous for the student to view a particular situational instance such as the synchronous operation of a human heart valve or the function of moving parts of the internal combustion engine.Likewise digital learning resources are useful for demonstrating the use of equipment that cannot be supplied easily to the student, such as an electron microscope or other expensive instrumentation.Design theorySeveral researchers, including David Wiley, have developed an instructional design theory and a sequencing theory[19] for creating and using digital learning resources, both of which have a pedagogical foundation. But the concepts behind the design and application of this unique resource type are intricate, and to some degree these may have discouraged educators from using it as a learning tool.Nevertheless the digital learning resource holds merit in its modularity and has the potential to be extremely flexible. The idea of sharing resources of this type has been recognised and accepted internationally in SCORM (Shareable Content Object Reference Model)[20].References (some are no longer current).1 - http://www.learningcircuits.org/glossary.html2 - http://www.onlinelearning.co.nz3 - http://www.blackboard.com/4 - http://elearning.itpnz.ac.nz/5 - http://www.google.co.nz/search?hl=en&q=define%3Ainteractive&btnG=Search&meta=6 - now not available - www.infogreta.org/magazine/articles-9-2.htm7 - http://130.216.56.150/Public/ChemConf/8 - now not available - www.books.nap.edu.com/html/howpeople1/ch9.html9 - http://www.love2learn.com/delivery.htm10 - http://www.thefreelibrary.com11 - http://www.chem.ox.ac.uk/vrchemistry/LiveChem/transitionmetals_content.html12 - http://www.learningcircuits.org/2006/March/gray.htm13 - http://www.schools.nsw.edu.au/learning/yrk12focusareas/learntech/blended/index.php14 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blended_learning15 - http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/eqm0313.pdf 16 - http://www.e-learningcentre.co.uk/eclipse/Resources/teach.htm17 - http://www.learningtechnologies.co.uk/magazine/article_full.cfm?articleid=97&issueid=11&section=118 - http://www.learningcircuits.org/2000/mar2000/Longmire.htm19 - http://www.opencontent.org/docs/dissertation.pdf20 - http://adlcommunity.net/mod/resource/view.php?id=458( 7 ) << - related posts - >> ( 5 ) ( 4 ) ( 3 ) ( 2 ) ( 1 )

photo by Hannah DearThe gates of Wellington East Girls' College -within which is fostered a culture of learning.My good friend and fellow blogger, Shaun Wood, in his post,I Hate Homework But . . . , brought our attention to the post,Homework. Should it Stay or Should it Go?In these posts and in their accompanying comments, there is useful and varied strategy given on how homework might be administered. Advice is also offered on how homework should be checked and assessed by the teacher. Some argument is put forward for and against why homework should be given at all.While great store is placed in the virtue of lifelong learning, I found small mention of any need to introduce the culture and custom of it to the young learner.Could it be that the value of introducing the practice of lifelong learning has escaped the realm of the classroom? In deference to all the useful and worthy advice contained in the posts, and there was much, I left my comment on Shaun’s, the gist of which is here:In the secondary sector, home study is almost a necessity for many learners. As learners progress to certificate levels, it's crazy for them not to do home study.BUT the distinction between home study and homework is important. Many learners will not do home study unless given homework. There is a solid layer of learners who will do their own home study even if they aren't set homework to do.Home study is a learning accelerator pedal for many learners. By pushing it, some learners can take real control over what they can achieve. Not giving homework lets some learners slip through the net, and many of those simply do not know how to do their own home study.I'm a pragmatist when it comes to learner achievement. I believe it's a two way process when time spent is concerned.If the learner is prepared to put in the time with homework, I'm prepared to give them my time. If a learner is not prepared to put in the time, I'm not going to take time to follow it up, for the willing learners need my time.A culture of learning exists in the classroom and within the school.For lifelong learning to become a practice, the culture has to extend beyond the precinct of the school and into the home of the learner.( 2 ) << - related posts