Category: Conferences

“No more sitting on the fence” (Learning Technologies 2013 Summer Forum)

It was great to hear this, just a shame it was from a Learning Management System (LMS) vendor talking specifically about Tin Can.  However, it was my take away message from the recent Learning Technologies 2013 Summer Forum (LTSF).  The statement acts as something of a wakeup call; Learning and Development departments need to deliver, not just responding to fads but offering a joined up approach.  A Learning Management System that offers holistic support is, realistically, probably the easiest way to structure that support.

The challenge in my eyes, however, is if a LMS remains realistic.  In many ways they have evolved to the point where they cross over with many other systems, not least the near universal SharePoint.  Their USP remains testing/SCORM tracking and as such a stripped down basic LMS might work better than one which supports all the possibilities now discussed at events like LTSF.  If you are going beyond this then you need a joined up approach between L&D, Knowledge Management, competitor intelligence and other teams for:

  • Internal communication,
  • Sharing resources
  • Learning

With this in place professionals’ (in whatever company) know where sharing is recommended (although they’ll of course still use Twitter), how to collaborate, where to access relevant learning (preferably embedded with the relevant work tools) and have a clear understanding of how their career can progress both within their current organization or elsewhere.

Fad – A fashion that is taken up with great enthusiasm for a brief period of time; a craze.

L&D now have tools to deliver what a business needs by combining pieces of the puzzle so they are no longer seen as fads.  Indeed the LTSF presentation I attended from MindClick outlined some of the ways an LMS can be used for 1-2-1 support (the importance of which has been recognized by Bloom and others) at a distance, including via personal development plans, BYOD and badges (which in isolation could be seen as fads).  One way for your new LMS to not be seen as impractical is to make money and the SAAS LMS model is increasingly being sold as one to enable course sales via the extended enterprise.  This could be a fundamental shift for some L&D departments from pure internal support and, arguably, help drive up quality as a result.

The LTSF was dominated by a number of topics/tools for me:

1)    Tin Can/The Experience API/xAPI

2)    (Open) Badges

3)    (Learning) Analytics

4)    Mobile (Learning/Delivery/Authoring)

5)    Social (Learning/Collaboration)

6)    70/20/10

7)    Personalization (development plans/personalized curriculums)

8)    LMS/Portal developments

9)    eLearning

So, when is a fad not a fad?  Perhaps items 8 and 9 on this list can now be seen as evolutionary rather than revolutionary but the others are still gaining slow adoption.  The struggle for mobile adoption picked up by Andrew Jackson’s article (The shortest lived technology fad ever?) over on TrainingZone.  He also points out that eLearning is still revolutionary for many businesses which, whilst keeping some e-learning companies and consultants going, is – I would say – just a little depressing really in 2013.

I would agree that mobile was a fad but I would say it must now be considered as part of the learning designers’ toolkit, just as it is for marketers and other industries.  I would effectively consider 3-9 ‘traditional’ tools and 1-2 simply new ways of doing old things.  Ultimately the speed of ‘new’ technologies has changed and working them into a learning model should not be as hard as many people at such events seem to feel they are.  That said, they are not always as easy to adopt as the vendors would like to suggest but that is technical adoption rather than the enthusiasm of working something into your learning approach.  Enthusiasm, vision and a willingness to try things do not really need to be restricted by budgets either.  It was clear from a number of LTSF stalls that ‘phase 1’ deployments are something vendors are willing to support to prove concepts locally.

Yes, as Andrew says, we shouldn’t get hung up on the technology but neither should we discount the potential (especially of Tin Can) to transform learning and development.  Both 1 & 2 potentially open us all up to the world and make us think about our skills development in new ways, which can only be a good thing in my opinion (taking into account certain risks of course).  That said, LMS tracking, certifications and other tools did some of this in the past.  The outstanding question at LTSF seemed to be if capturing experiences should be automatic via Tin Can or rely on self certification.  I can see a value in a learning log of the (noun>verb>object) statements but reflection is also needed somewhere in terms of goal setting, and understanding your own learning.  I can see TC and Badges reinvigorating the personal web space and ePortfolio debate (or at least pushing LinkedIn into full adoption).

I think what Andrew tries to suggest is that, with mobile, we have simply responded to new devices, fine, but I would like to think that that response is about acknowledging issues such as flash vs. html5, app vs. browser, form factors, location of learner, etc. it should have never been about tablet vs. phone vs. laptop vs. desktop per se.  Similarly Epic’s talk at LTSF correctly identified that the Experience API (aka Tin Can) is useful in what it can mean for analytics, such as assessing the impact of learning, and thinking differently about the courses rather than about the development of a Learning Record Store for the sake of the learning logs alone.  KnowledgeAdvisors hinted at the potential of combining MetricsThatMatter data sets with performance data to change how L&D operates.  This includes making use of data to drive “performance based vendor management”, such as paying eLearning vendors only a percentage of their bills if their materials fail to improve workers’ performance.

Now, I appreciate my main interest is in Learning Technologies but many people seemed new to Tin Can and Badges.  That so many people did not seem to comprehend these is worrying and indicative that, like with mobile, we face years of presentations, white papers, etc that simply rehash arguments.  Maybe I have a ‘start-up mentality’ but I would rather see people presenting on early adoption failures than introductory presentations.  I hope this is what we see at Learning Technologies in January but I will not hold my breath.  Even better will be successful coming together of the two with experiences (captured via Tin Can) driving badge creation.  Another interesting piece will be to see the development and interaction of “apps everywhere” (as NetDimensions called them) with learning record stores and/or LMSs.  However, this is potentially not too different to offline LMS access that NetDimensions, and others, have supported via USB drive LMS systems.

The problem may be that for L&D to succeed in implementing what appears to be an optimized learning strategy it would need to be all encompassing of an organisation.  People will only socially collaborate and ‘surface’ informal learning in a tool if it is a tool they have to use or, unlikely, want to.  Thus, new ‘social learning’ tools at LTSF do not fill me with confidence – if someone is already using SharePoint, Yammer or similar has L&D not got to leverage that?  It would seem nigh on impossible to work in a light weight LMS/social tool such as Svelte Social (new to me I think at LTSF) if you have other tools in place.  NetDimensions, whose presenter used the “fence” idea, did a good job in explaining if the LMS can fit in as the social tool or not by saying organisation need to decide what system will be the “social bedrock of their organization”.  Here I would argue culture comes in as, say, a university has an advantage that the ‘place of work’ will be the VLE/LMS so the university’s staff can be encouraged to use that same tool for their own development as it is already the “bedrock” for their daily work.  It is more difficult in a corporate context but the big tools, like Salesforce, have acknowledged it by working social into their own tools.

I came away from the main Learning Technologies event earlier in the year feeling somewhat underwhelmed.  The question now seems to be, as vendors are making the jump into Tin Can and other solutions, can Learning and Development departments use these appropriately to meet business needs?  Simply adding on bells and whistles to an existing, monolithic LMS doesn’t seem to be an option to me.  Instead, organizations as a whole need to consider if L&D professionals in their organization really are just about running/building courses (as NetDimensions pointed out L&D and LMSs in some organisations are simply for compliance) or if they are true partners in making organizations “collectively smarter”.

For the record these are the talks I attended:

1)    The use of Tin Can and Open Badges for learning programmes (EPIC)

2)    Meeting learning objectives with Totara LMS (MindClick)

3)    How to build a business case for formalization of learning analytics (KnowledgeAdvisors – largely the same as these slides)

4)    What you need to know about portals (Redware)

5)    LMS – Evolution or extinction? (NetDimensions – seemingly a follow up to this article)

6)    Apps and video communications – top 5 things you need to know (Dreamtek)

Some more pointless stats

Following on from the dubious numbers in my Google Reader post, Slideshare have recently been kind enough to hint at what is possible via their pay plans by emailing me (on April 29th) stats on views of my presentations:

  1. Questionmark vs Blackboard for online tests – 778 views
  2. Whose education is it anyway? – Blackboard UK User Group 2010 – 566 views
  3. Supporting the transition from the physical to the virtual classroom – 480 views
  4. Using Blackboard for Pre-Entry Diagnostic Testing – 333 views
  5. ALT-c 2011: Breaking the ice, an instructional design approach for institutional growth – 252 views

These basics stats are also available via the ‘My Uploads’ section – my most viewed item being Pdp: Its Role And Implementation In The Law Curriculum as of today (926 views).

In total my 7 Slideshares have been viewed 3503 times (as of May 10th).

An issue here is how Slideshare deals with sites such as docs.hut effectively copying the resource.  Therefore, whilst there is some use in such statistics and analytics there is little value without some narrative from the users engaging with them, unfortunately a lack of comments means this is tricky to say the least.  Slideshare do offer some further functionality but there are clearly issues here – for example the best interaction around a presentation I have had is perhaps the ALT-c 2011 one above whilst its numbers in terms of views are not great.

When LinkedIn recently took Slideshare content and worked it directly into your profile I removed the presentations, whilst I am happy for these to be shared they are very much of their time and I would not necessarily recommend them as examples of my work.  I see Slideshare as something of a historic evidence archive of my development rather than examples of the kind of work I would produce today, another example where it is useful to keep different social and web tools separate for different use cases.

Vetiquette – the new Netiquette?

I recently attended the CIPD’s HRD Exhibition and amongst the free seminars was one which covered Vetiquette.  Now the presenter seemed to think that everyone would have heard of this, but I must admit not remembering it if I had.  Indeed a Google search shows that unless you start adding some ‘-vet’ and ‘-pet’s it is not a term with a particularly big footfall.  The basic idea in the talk was that Netiquette was somewhat out-of-date as it came out of early web discussion boards and email; vetiquette relates to the modern web of video conferencing, multimedia collaboration, etc.  I did not think too much about this until this weeks BSN MOOC grouped Netiquette within digital citizenship.  How much citizenship and literacy overlap are probably a matter of opinion but it made me take another look at vetiquette…

Safari books online has Vetiquette as the below:

VEtiquette, is coined to represent the special subset of behaviors required in a virtual team and to explore the difference in context that virtual work creates that makes special attention to such behavior particularly important…VEtiquette, which stands for “virtual etiquette,” is required in work that is typically real time and synchronous. Vetiquette guides team members’ behavior as they collaborate virtually either while speaking or writing using Internet, mobile, or video technologies. It can be summarized as, “Be effective, or don’t be heard.” This extra attention to virtual interaction matters because the effectiveness of the team depends on it.

Thus for the Blended Schools MOOC we perhaps can consider the need for vetiquette in fostering young people’s belief to be effective/heard but not pushy/rude when online.  This is personally interesting for me as my workplace performance reviews in the past have identified a need to be more assertive in getting my ideas across.  This is perhaps my oh-so-polite Britishness coming through in online environments or might simply be that I find the behavior of others too pushy and ‘tone myself down’ as a result.  As we all move towards a globalized world this will be increasingly important and it is difficult to get the balance right across borders.  It can also be easier to pick a level of appropriate virtual behavior with someone if you have met them in person.

When I did draft a netiquette policy for a previous job I included both the traditional ‘net’ and ‘et’ issues, as well as those identified as ‘vetiquette’.  I guess I really saw all of it as ‘netiquette’ within information/digital literacy.  There is a little bit about what I did on this presentation but in general:

  • The policy was drafted by looking at existing netiquette policies from around the web.
  • It was not really enforced, instead it was embedded in training resources for teachers and students.  It was up to individual instructors how they might adopt, adapt and enforce it with their own students.
  • One would hope that as time passes people will be increasingly confident in this area and the need to train people in vetiquette will be something for schools rather than the 16+ education providers.  Thus it is great to see it being considered in the BSN MOOC (see last two blog posts for more on this).

Reflecting on some recent Tweets & Google+ Shares

Whilst I log some of my personal development here I do not intend to consider everything I do, including reading.

Instead I will often share my reading via other networks.  Why?

Reading

  1. Most of my professional reading is via Google Reader.  I previously setup the option to push ‘shares’ in Reader to Twitter.  When Google+ launched this stopped working.  If I see something particularly interesting I will still share it in my ‘Work Related’ circle…just in case anyone is interested.  Its easy to do and at least allows my Google+ profile to have some use.
  2. Websites.  If something leads to me having a question or is something I think my Twitter followers might be interested in (especially if it is from a source they might not read) I will share there from time-to-time.

Tweets

  1. I do not tweet often, usually limiting it to live tweeting of events – with more in-depth reflections later in blog posts.
  2. Reflection on some particular tweets:

“Virtual classrooms are a response to austerity” http://soc.li/MIjMeod  “Virtual learning cannot replace the learning…of a classroom” …wow some old arguments there. Sounds like someone needs a friendly Learning Technologist to show them how. Also ignores student demand.

This was really just a reaction to The Globe and Mail (a paper I used to read now and again) choosing to publish what effectively seemed to be some ranting about a workplace…without much evidence of a justified argument.

#bett_latw great presentation on global l&d, another arguing for curation over creation.

The official hashtag for BETT Learning At Work was quite quiet so I tried to post a few summaries for anyone following.  The rising importance of curation was a theme – as picked up prior to Learning Technologies/BETT.

Opening talk of #BETT_LatW reminded me of the silly Idiocracy movie, suggestions of attention problems and obesity in the future world.

The presentation was excellent at considering the brain and the science behind learning.  This post was a little bit of fun as I doubt the Baroness would be a fan of the movie.

Leaving #lt13 exhibition – good catchup but nothing hugely new. Or did I miss something? Or a sign of things bedding down and maturing?

The Learning Technology and BETT shows seemed to suffer from multiplication of different hashtags.  Therefore, not many people may have seen this – I did get one reply confirming my feeling.  Other posts confirmed that people are concentrating on the learning outcomes rather than tech for tech’s sake.

Some #lt13 exhibition delegates VERY keen. Perhaps the security staff were just doing what they’ve been trained to do?

This was me being a bit bitchy – which is rare I would say.  I was simply blown away by how rude people were being to the Olympia staff  – would opening five minutes late really make much difference?  Do you have to be the first person in the lift?  I’m still presuming/hoping the worse culprits are not Human Resources professionals.

@ldnoverground part suspended. No crystal palace service.

Apologies to any Twitter followers that my rule of keeping it professional (with most personal/private stuff elsewhere – i.e. Facebook) is starting to slip.  If only because what was the East London Line now seems so badly served by London Overground information services.  I find Twitter hugely useful for getting around London when there are problems and will try to contribute.

Quick bit of reflection on the #6TrendsLD webinar yesterday… http://bit.ly/T05Ili

Finally, for now, a tweet which was a rare bit of advertisement for this site.  I’m still torn between if this site should aim explicitly to be useful for others or just be my random thoughts, if anyone reads this far do let me know what you think!

Do we really need another conference?

This time of year is my peak time for conferences with (in December, January and February) a number of events I am interested in, including:

  • Online Educa (I have never attended but have followed from a far)
  • CES (which seems to have got a lot more coverage in Britain this year)
  • the UK Blackboard User Group (very relevant in my old role but missed this year)
  • Learning Technology Conference and Exhibition (I have not attended the conference but have visited the exhibition for a number of years) and…
  • BETT (where I have also attended the free exhibition a number of times).

The big change to the above, this year, is that BETT (British Educational Technology Tradeshow) is transforming itself.  Moving from Olympia to the ExCeL, BETT is expanding from its 5-18 year old learner focus with new parallel Higher and Professional Education conferences.  These two events are free although presumably the aim, by filtering applicants this year, is to ensure their success and then sell tickets next year.

The move by BETT is interesting in that they are looking to support learning technology in the wider sense.  Their diagram illustration of this is similar to some of the explanations I have done in the past for how my experience and skill set can be applied and are not specific to industry or the age of the learner ‘customer’.

This change can be seen as a brave move by the organizers of BETT – whilst there has clearly been support for the event in the past (Michael Gove opened it last year; Vince Cable this) – expanding into new areas in the current economic situation seems risqué.  Alternatively, having the event in the same week as the Learning Technology event may cut participants/delegates travel costs as they can ‘make a week of it’ – or it puts BETT in direction position as an alternative (considering many people will only be able to take limited time off work).  Interestingly the Association for Learning Technology are listed within the ‘in association with’ section for the HE event, I did not attend ALT’s own conference last year – partly due to the cost.

On the COLRIC JISCMail list there has recently been a discussion on what words can be used other than ‘conference’ – this got me thinking about what different events are really trying to achieve.

  • conference (mix of sessions [talk, workshops, seminar, etc] but normally talk led with sponsor stalls – in academic spheres conferences will include full ‘papers’ and a focus on research based practice)
  • tradeshow (wider mix of stalls, focus on selling and product developments)
  • symposium (suggestion on the COLRIC list that this might be too American to be widely used in the UK)
  • workshop (interactive with participants ‘doing’ rather than listening)
  • user group (normally smaller than a full-blown conference but with a focus or common thread on a piece of software, theory, methodology, etc)
  • roadshow (demonstrations, presentations, end-user support/training)
  • roundtable (everyone on an equal footing, bar possibly a coordinator, contributing their viewpoint – highly interactive)
  • seminar (singular meeting/discussion often started by a talk/presentation/demo)
  • webinar (singular event or the delivery mechanism for parts of an online conference, user group, etc; usually presentation followed by discussion)

In all of the above examples networking around the ‘event’ is of course a key aspect and online networking (Twitter I am looking at you) will keep the conversation going beyond the physical or scheduled activity.

So are the changes to BETT really needed?  I would say that, especially when I worked in HE, there was no shortage of elearning events and conferences which supported the need for the sector to develop.  A number of years on, some changes are happening (MOOCs being the most obvious) but a lot of talking has failed to really drive change.  Therefore, I set the new BETT conferences, both the HE and corporate events, the challenge of focusing on how attendees can get best practice embedded in their organization – not just agreement between attendees which is all too often ‘preaching to the converted’.

If they fail to do this then BETT remains, as it was before, a networking opportunity, an opportunity to catch up with changes in technology and theory.  But this would mean that in many ways I would feel the HE and corporate strands would risk replicating and repeating other events.  The benefit of attending BETT in the past was to be more aware of the 5-18 (k-12) sector and learn lessons from it.  Pushing people intro the three stands of compulsory, post-compulsory and corporate education will risk loosing that cross-pollination.

Overall, it will be interesting to attend the corporate stream at BETT this year (my other physical event attendance is likely to be limited to the Learning Technologies exhibition) but I would not be surprised if, when I reflect on the week, I decide BETT is best for getting me away from my current sector and engaging with those companies whose primary focus is elsewhere but ideas and technology can be leveraged in corporate training and higher education.