Well, I’ve finally had my first go on a HoloLens – after failing at BETT – thanks to MakeReal at the latest Kineo client event.

It really confirmed to me the potential value of HoloLens for multiple solutions.  The example available to try out was an interactive site map (i.e. building complex not website) – great for not having to carry around scale models with you!  For learning there are some great examples starting to emerge – such as this one for healthcare.  Cost, of course, remains an issue – with the development edition currently a tasty £2719.  It was also an opportunity to try an activity via SteamVR OS – building a reactor in VR.

The presentations/workshops, away from MakeReal’s demo space, focused on:

1. Kineo’s Learning Insights report: Move for L&D to “facilitators of career development” from “deliverers of training”.
   1. I would agree with this.  I tend to describe my role as creating scaffolds for the organization to succeed and its people to be empowered.
   2. Report here.
2. Social Learning.
   1. This was a nice recap of some of the logic and reminded me of the need to continue to encourage people to share and shift cultures – for example, the value in people sharing their ‘bibles’.
   2. Ideas included “find an expert”, something we are trying to do via badges for people at the top of our competency model.
   3. Slides here. White paper.
3. Content Curation.
   1. I’m always torn on this topic as whilst I agree there is information overload I’m also conscious that information teams have fallen away in industries like law – in part as the WWW has made a lot of information free and thus the ‘value add’ from a professional team is tricky to identify/articulate.
   2. The challenge, as I see it, is how you combine a world of personal information management (the presentation mentioned bookmarking as example most people would do) and PLNs with opportunities to add value (context, metadata, write descriptions, etc.) centrally.
   3. Recommendation for a search > aggregate > filter > add value > promote model (akin to Jarche’s seek > sense > share).
   4. Couple of examples were run through – use of existing content to support BDO’s competency model (i.e. not needing to author new content) and Anders Pink as a tech solution (which I’ve trialed and like but raises questions over how it fits into your wider ecosystem).
   5. Slides here.
4. Interactive Video.
   1. Have to agree there is a lot of value in interactive video where you can find the right use case, authoring and deployment approach.
   2. It was interesting to see/hear the Kineo approach – including the blended of ‘learning’ content with existing promotional video, for example, with Rolls Royce.
   3. Some nice ideas – like weighting questions where there is ambiguity (no true/false), gopro cameras of POV style, setting up secured YouTube channels for UG content submission and the oft shared Australian Deloitte video.
   4. Some of this could be done in Storyline – advantage of their authoring is multi-device SCORM publishing.
   5. Slides here. Guide here.

Another in the occasional series looking at some of the reading I’ve stockpiled with reflections for anyone who might be interested in the topics covered:

It’s never too late to learn [Journal of Workplace Learning; Vol. 27 Iss 6; Russell Paul Warhurst and Kate Emma Black; 2015]

An attention-worthy approach (from Newcastle Business School) to the empirical study of workplace learning – as the articles puts it:

The informal, incidental, tacit and social nature of much workplace learning poses methodological challenges in ascertaining from respondents exactly what they have learnt and particularly, how their learning has occurred (Fuller and Unwin, 2005; McNair, 2013). Therefore, visual elicitation techniques were deployed in advance of interviews to assist participants in exploring such tacit learning accomplishments and implicit learning processes. Three visual techniques were used:

(1)  Timelines: Participants were requested to depict their work over the preceding ve years as a horizontal line showing the degree of change, and learning, as gradients on that line against a vertical axis scaled from “set backs” through “stability” to “rapid”.

(2)  Sociograms: Participants were requested to indicate whom they interacted with over a typical month, the nature of this interaction (e.g. face-to-face or electronically) and how signi cant they felt these interactions were for them.

(3)  Pictors: Participants were asked to produce a visual representation of how they viewed themselves in their social worlds, in response to the question “How do I see myself as a later-career manager?”

I thought the three approaches above were interesting ones considering the challenge in getting professionals to reflect and think how they have developed.  Indeed they could also be used to visually represent impact of programmes to, in part, tackle the evaluation challenge.

I have recently been running a series of workshops at my organisation on career development opportunities – in part around the advantages that the May changes to apprenticeships will bring.  The ability to retrain, even if you have a degree or other qualification, via an apprenticeship is a key message.  Thus I liked the idea that “ageing populations need to be seen as a key, growing, natural asset rather than, as typically construed today, a liability”.  The article itself focuses on informal learning but realistically there will be opportunities to think again about skills development via multiple routes.  “Later-career workers need to be alerted to the learning potential within their jobs and the capabilities to leverage this potential” – yep!

Whilst it is common sense to presume training needs to be reinforced/transferred to actually have an impact on quality this article argues for a positive relationship via a measurement approach.  Overall it is useful in reinforcing that training alone will not impact on performance: