Category: Professional Development

#fote13 – Some remote observations (including on Open Access)

Today I have been following tweets from the Future of Technology in Education event (#fote13) which a lot of my Twitter contacts seem to have attended.  Interestingly, it included some content on Open Access, less encouraging is that according to this blog at least the only question emerging early on was “so what else is new?”.

This made me think back to my previous comment that (learning technology) conferences all too easily preach to the converted.  Contrast this to Noam Chomsky, who I have been catching up with a bit of late, who successfully seems to suggest a way forward at the end of speeches/Q&As.  Admittedly, those ways forward may be difficult, even unrealistic, but he does seem to do a good job of at least proposing something.

Open Access interests me partly as it was a fairly big topic when I did my MA but also in that it offers alternatives to very established business models, which at the very least makes it worthy of attention considering how entrenched some are. Pre and prior to the MA I have attended a number of sessions over the years where the feeling in the room has been academics/librarians vs publishers and its interesting that Open Access models still seem to revert to that or concerns around quality.  The alternative discourse then becomes publishers saying ‘well you don’t want Amazon to win do you?’ when it perhaps should be academics saying ‘okay so what about self publishing?’.  Even though the web has various platforms for self publishing the argument seems to be that take up doesn’t happen due to the RAE, or equivalents, or that Amazon is already the one-stop shop.  This is how I see it though…

Accenture’s offering to help publishers establish new digital business models is an interesting development but also surely too little too late for those who have not progressed already, especially considering that the publishing industry is itself dominated by a fairly small number of big players (and even more so at the delivery level with Amazon, Play and iTunes dominating digital distribution).

For universities, the real value in MOOCs seems to be that it is bringing up old debates on improving the format of university courses and I would hope the outcome will be:

  1. A chance to reinvigorate the ‘university press’, with iBooks, Kindle and other formats bringing in funding.  If Korean secondary school teachers can make millions of dollars selling videos online surely UK academics could make a few quid via rethinking scholarly communication as mentioned above?
  2. Publicly funded research made available publicly.  Papers, yes, but also make academics disseminate via Wikipedia, etc.
  3. A better offering of varied course length/types for different audiences.  Foundation degrees were a start, but there is plenty of room for MOOCs to influence the pre and post degree skill/knowledge set (I’m presuming the degree already has plenty of online/blended elements – if it does not it more than likely should have had about 5 years ago).

All of the above would mean big changes for HE organizations and I suspect discussion will inevitably run and run, meaning plenty more conferences on such areas.  Ultimately they could find themselves in a more diversified industry but ultimately that makes sense – seeking revenue streams away from the traditional under/postgraduate teaching/research restraints.

Sorry, but I will not endorse you (on LinkedIn anyway)

I’ve written previously about my belief in the value of professional profiles, such as those introduced by professional bodies like CILIP, CIPD and LPI.

It was of interest then to see this article on the success of LinkedIn’s current alternative, the ‘Skills & Expertise’ endorsement.  Whilst I would agree that the author is correct in identifying the viral success of endorsements I would not agree they add anything to the platform.

Problems with endorsements include:

  1. You can set your initial long list, and this list can frame the conversation.  I deliberately set lots of skills in my profile, this was basically because I find this kind of approach a little silly.  The advantage of traditional job descriptions is that they force you to concentrate your application on 10-12 areas.  Having your online profile cover lots of items may be more accurate of a skill set but also dilutes the value of any one item by listing all of those other areas.
  2. It is not “fun”, instead notifications of endorsement can become annoying and the implied suggestion that you should endorse back is somewhat, let us say, pushy.
  3. Short phrase categories are of little use.  My profile currently has ‘E-Learning’ as the highest ranked endorsement.  This comes with a few problems, firstly, at one point I had ‘e-Learning’, ‘E-Learning’ and possibly even ‘e-learning’.  I eventually contacted LinkedIn support about how to merge these just to tidy my profile from the endorsements of others.  Secondly, a skill/expertise such as e-Learning is vague beyond use, do I know theory (yes), do I know how to use some related technology (yes) could I build an e-Learning tool from scratch (no).  Even in combination with other fields it remains vague.

So, whilst I appreciate those of you who have taken the time to endorse me I wont be jumping into that never ending pool.

I am the 83 percent

http://www.perforce.com/product/commons/i-am-83-percent

It may well just be me, but there seems to be more and more going on online about the issues caused by poor working practices around collaboration, in particular around documents.
This is interesting as it follows a presumption a few years back that, with Google Apps and new versions of Office, these problems were set to disappear.  As always, technology implementation without good change management has led to problems for some and what seems to have instead emerged are a complicated picture where:
  1. Some companies have failed to adopt new technology.  The imminent death of XP may drive laggards into reviewing practices and supporting improvements through tech.  For now, people are continuing to face challenges and wasting time due to inefficient IT.
  2. Some have adopted office solutions, badly.  I am increasingly of the belief that what is needed is ‘possibilities’ training in the tech sphere.  There is no point throwing people in to hours of, say, Excel saying training when what they actually need is for someone to look at what they do and offer possibilities for improvements.  For example, I wonder what percentage of the world’s population uses Excel everyday but do not know Macros even exist, never mind how to author them.  Sitting down with someone to spot where efficiencies can be made and identify the small differences in application understanding can, ultimately, add up to big efficiency savings.  This works across the board, for example I often sat down with people to show them how to do something with learning management systems only to end up asking ‘why do you do that?’ about how people operate in Office and other software.
  3. Some feel the need to look further afield.  I guess the outstanding question is if Office, Google and other major players are actually what you need.  The video above is a nice example of the problems identified by a company looking at alternatives whilst the likes of Huddle offer what can be seen as simpler but more effective solutions.

It is then of interest to see iCloud finally step up to the plate and potentially try to fill the enterprise-sized gaps in Apple’s offerings.

CILIP rebrand part two – aka for the love of ‘qualifications’

I had not intended to follow up my previous post with another but the disaster* that has been the CILIP corporate rebranding exercise has perhaps allowed for just as big an issue to go seemingly unnoticed.
 
This elephant in the room is what is happening to CILIP Qualifications.  Firstly, I will admit it’s not all bad but this just seems to make it even more disconcerting, the PKSB is good (as I’ve already suggested) and the simplifications in process make sense.   So what’s bad then?  Well…
  1. Fixed time (20 hours) for CPD – many members will know the problems this causes in their industries.  Lawyers, accountants, teachers and many more have professions backed by timesheet driven box ticking – no focus on learning outcomes or application of learning in the workplace or other professional activity.  Building a portfolio of evidence can be a pain but if we genuinely want reflective practitioners, working from a strong research basis, then portfolios are far better than saying ‘yep I’ve attended a course for two hours’.  This time driven approach is also difficult in light of 70/20/10 and other models which recognize the fuzziness of informal learning.  Again a portfolio, which for many people will be based on a blog they are maintaining anyway, allows for better recognition, articulation and reflection of and on learning.  I presume this is a change to encourage members to re-validate chartered status rather than doing it once and then letting it lapse, I fear it will simply water down the status of the ‘chartered’ role.  Of course a name change, from CILIP, within the rebrand may do this anyway.
  2. “Registration” – from primary school to Ellis Island this implies, to me, something you have to do.  Something you are forced into to make sure a greater power is aware you exist.  This is not how I envision my professionalism.  It is a tricky one, granted, but why not ‘career path’, ‘development path’, etc?  Perhaps the logic is that new professionals can be told to ensure they are ‘professionally registered’.  However, it again implies something you are doing for the good of CILIP rather than yourself.
* I’m taking “disaster” as the correct term on the basis that:
  • it has split the membership (the General Meeting vote being roughly 50/50) and undoubtedly alienated many people (the c.90% of members who did not vote).
  • correctly singled out on JISCmail lists and elsewhere as how not to perform change or communication management.
  • seemingly led to CILIP HQ being on the defensive and even less representative of the members than normal; the decision to call on branches and groups to support the rebrand seemed particularly odd as branches should be the conduit for membership concerns, not the other way around.
  • it even led to a horribly tabloid piece in The Times.
What does this all mean – well it encourages me to become even more withdrawn from the organization.  Indeed I may well fall into the ‘paying my dues and revalidating for the sake of it’ group I hint at above.  Amazing that a group I had such enthusiasm for six or so years ago can sap it away from you quite so impressively.

Did the Corporate University kill the Learning and Development department?

A lot of interesting stuff in the LPI’s report on the first results from L&D professionals mapping their skills to their new capability profiles.

For me, the big question which emerges seems to be if the trend for ‘corporate universities’ (CU)/’academies’/’business schools’/etc. have ultimately restricted L&D down a path they will struggle to come out of.  Yes, the CU focus can be argued as having created rigor in course development and deployment, often decreasing the reliance on third party training providers or off-the-shelf content, but they have in places restricted L&D to a fairly narrow subset of the the parent organization’s focus. The LPI summary suggesting the results show L&D professionals “lack the breadth of skill required”.

Where L&D is disparate from other support functions (including HR, IT and KM functions) there is immediately a risk of disconnect when it comes to actually building an overall framework for employee development and increased work efficiency.

Of course this isn’t necessarily a problem, yes you might need a wakeup call but, in some organizations delivering/developing trainings might be just what is needed. It might be that the organization needs what LPI results would suggest, at least historically, the respondents can supply.

The challenge from the LPI and other benchmarking would be for these professionals to reflect and consider if their team really offers what their organization needs and, perhaps more importantly if they do not, is another department at least filling the gaps. As an L&D professional you might want a role that we can see as the “21st Century profession” but other professionals are similarly looking at expanding responsibilities so I slightly question if the “Training Ghetto” is inevitably a bad thing.

Just as an academic university is only as good as its student support (including libraries, IT and facilities) perhaps the challenge now for corporate universities is recognizing how to create the collegiate atmosphere around courses (social learning) and user generated content management (library services).  That information architecture and developing communities/collaborative learning are identified as weaknesses in the LPI results then it would seem to be an area L&D departments need to improve in or at least leverage other teams in their organizations.