Some recent reading

I recently realized that I had made various rough notes from a number of different things I have read over the last year or so.  Below is an attempt to aggregate these, all very rough.

How HR Technology Bolsters Learning

I would consider that we are now seeing the end of workplace technology’s focus being on replacing paper processes to areas where the value is more ephemeral and informal.  This includes the explosion of ‘social’ tools and their ability to amplify work, especially in cultures where working out loud is encouraged.  This article (How HR Technology Bolsters Learning) highlighting that HR technology is beginning to focus on both  “employee’s self interest as well as that of the organization” – see my previous post mentioning my professional interest in supporting people and therefore their organizations.  However, I would fundamentally disagree with the article for stating that the more “radical” improvements in HR tech for learning are “because millennials demand it”.  This contradicts the articles own chain of thought – there are many reasons for improving the use of tech for learning not least that “retention was frequently low” with “historic…online training”.  It is not a generational thing, sorry, lets just stop that already.

Stop With “The Future Of Learning” Already

A nice article in both encouraging an end to TFOL talk but also recognizing that there are different types of workplace learning – compliance, professional development and capability acquisition – needing to be recognized and often approached differently.

Digital Curation: A Collection of Dusty Old Curiosities?

I’m always interested in the idea of curation as a competency for L&D professionals, having come into learning from the ‘dusty’ world of libraries.  Indeed many of my concerns over the need for learning professionals to see themselves as part of a bigger support structure comes from my experience of seeing what has happened to the information professionals’ world.  There is one line in the article that will be particularly familiar to information professionals: “when learners/employees are more skilled in searching and sharing, they don’t need L&D to curate for them. Experts emerge and take over from L&D, and rightly so”.  This sounds very familiar to the ‘why do we need information professionals when we have online resources’ mantra of many an information service/library cutback.

The learning professional is no alien to such logic of course, with e-learning business cases too often focused on the cost savings (including headcounts) compared to face-to-face, rather than anything about quality.  We can see this across the board for support professionals though, for example, individual reputation management (via LinkedIn, etc.) is supposed to be replacing marketing in many industries.  Indeed when at a previous organization, working as a learning technologist, I rewrote my job description to be a two year contract to try and encourage a move to self-sufficient maturity by the wider organization.  This was not accepted, as I expected, as there is always scope for an expert pushing the boundaries and trying something new, updating policy as appropriate whilst maintaining standards.  However, the key thing that cuts across all of the questioning of support roles is time, support staff tend to earn less than those they support and thus the likelihood of, for example, teachers taking on responsibility for classroom technology over technicians/IT/learning technologies or lawyers handling their own research will always come down to cost.

As the article actually says, people will curate when “they value it” but, as we know – not least from the ‘The Future of Learning’ article above – there are types of learning people value more than others.  Therefore, I would argue, there will be areas where the organizational experts, SMEs and the individual will play a different part of the mix.  The learning professional, in my opinion, can curate to feed into a professional’s personal network as there will be mutual trust.  The learner will trust the organizations they are a member of (professional bodies, employer, etc.) to feed into their PLN whilst those same organizations will entrust their learners to appropriately develop their expertise.

Information service cutbacks have often based on the false idea that “everything is googleable”, as called out by another article on Curation, and value can certainly be gained from a learning team acting as the gatekeeper to quality hidden web/subscription resources.  It is certainly no surprise to hear presentations on the LSG Webinars, for example, espousing the value of HBR and other content for learning blends.

I would say curation has to be seen as a social activity, thus it will be hugely influenced by organizational culture.  Do you have a global, regional or local culture?  ESNs and the scope of curation and sharing will undoubtedly help you identify this.

The feeling remains though, when talking about things like weekly news round ups, how the information world has too often lived in isolation whereas curation as part of curriculum, capability frameworks or looser support of lifelong learning can play a more valuable role for our clients/colleagues.  However, whilst there is undoubted value in curation, I would be fearful of ‘learning’ departments looking too closely at the world of information for survival techniques.

Lost in translation: re-imagining L&D

I love the core concept here – that what we think about as ‘learning technology’ can be far more pervasive than L&D teams manage to see/implement.  Fundamentally it is about the productivity of the workforce and understanding of where things can work well.  As the article states the  “focus on implementing learning innovation at this granular level [the course] rather than at the macro organizational level…[means] practitioners are in danger of viewing organizational learning in the narrowest of senses”.

The idea, set out in the article, to move “upstream” to “design learning ecosystems” are inline with my personal views that to create a learning organization/culture we must establish the opportunities for people to learn and reflect via technology, policy and some formal training.  Even if, for example, only 10% of employees use a social learning tool, that is going to be a % increase on local learning that would not have happened with the possibilities for wider audience/amplification via such a tool.  Let’s not suppose we can do everything, but we can establish where there is room for improvement and tackle those issues and provide opportunities for people to learn from the appropriate people.

Office Mix: To Mix, Or Not To Mix, That Is The Question

I have asked if people are using OM on both workplace and HE-centric learning tech forums in the past with little or no response, so it was interesting to to see this article pop up.  I’m still to try OM in anger, due to the need to have the latest PPT version, but it sounds like a real opportunity for encouraging digital content production with a low tech skill entry point.

The “dramatic introduction” in the article will sound familiar, just updated, to anyone working in learning tech – the decades old battle of inconsistent behavior on browsers and the failure of browsers/standards to offer users/learners a standard experience.  My view on this would be, generally speaking, to avoid large scale ‘packaging’ and instead chunk content into formats we know should work, such as video, PDF, etc. including finally moving away from SCORM*.  Of course nothing is going to be perfect but by leveraging the delivery platform we make learning more like the platforms/networks we use outside of work.

As the article states, Microsoft are after the education pie; OM was one part of their products on show at BETT.  In many ways it offers the easiest route yet from Office/standalone learnign to digital multimedia content, here’s hoping it is worth the wait when I really get a chance!

* Can’t we just skip SCORM-packaging and go straight to HTML5?

I totally agree with the sentiment in this thread.  However, I would say HTML5 is not necessarily the answer.

Fundamentally I think there remains a lot from the historical legacy.  We can perhaps simplify the situation to see the evolution to eLearning v1.0 (SCORM packages) as being about taking slide/CD-ROM style corporate learning online.
This is quite different to other sectors, for example Higher Education.  HE effectively looked to LMS systems for file sharing and communication from the start – Blackboard managed huge market share even though their SCORM player did not work for years!  This was partly as the LMS itself did lots of the tracking – resources could be chunked appropriately rather than lumped into one tracked package.  When Web2.0 came then wikis and other tools could be integrated to mix-up the learning activity offering.
Most organizations have probably moved on to some extent from v.1 but the need to support legacy requirements means scrapping the old and starting afresh is always going to be difficult.  However, one solution would be to use online systems as platforms for a variety of content formats (in the same way social media platforms can be used to distribute) rather than authoring/packaging into html5 and having ‘courses’ that are single items.

The L&D world is splitting in two

I perhaps wouldn’t go as far to see the world as split in two.  I’d consider a blend of elements from the past, but with a clear drive to move on and improve, as the way forward.  Nonetheless this is an excellent article and has led to plenty of discussion since.  That said, the conversation is really a continuation of L&D’s professionals tendency to, in my opinion, be overly reflective (yes I know I’m reflecting and blogging to make that point) and not acting on where we know things can be improved.  Why?  Well that will vary by organization  but it will often be about a lack of time of course.

Overall we should be agreed that productivity, performance and engagement can be impacted by learning professionals and will play their part in avoiding another major economic meltdown.

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Probably enough for now – I have some more notes I will be in their own post.

Omniplex eLearning Community Demofest February 2016

I spent a few enlightening hours recently at the, Omniplex organized, eLearning Community event.

The event was arranged with various demonstrations in the room, with attendees given fifteen minute at each, rotating around the demos that interested them.  Most of the stalls looked at Articulate solutions, including a couple directly from Omniplex staff on their work.  Highlights included:

  1. Pizza Hut’s Batman themed course.  The course showed how high quality visuals can really make a difference to the learning storytelling.  The comic style similar to some of the training I have seen delivered by other organizations, including the US Army.  Each Pizza Hut store had an internal competition for high scores on the learning – reminding me of McDonald’s gamified till training.
  2. Changing templates to break the back/next monotony.  This was a relatively simple hack but it was a nice idea by Omniplex – have the navigation buttons at the top and bottom of the screen to create the artificial feel of a modern style scrolling webpage.  Elsewhere, there was a database training module that avoided the navigation buttons by chunking content to avoid the need for them, with much material delivered via embedded Captivate videos.
  3. Course completion for visiting a specific slide.  I’m pretty sure I’ve done some tinkering with this in the past but it was a useful example of using Articulate for something other than “you should read all the slides” or a “complete the quiz” format.  The basic gist being that you can do a lot by changing the labels on buttons and hiding Articulate functionality off-slide, away from what the user sees.
  4. Another example of using Articulate for a different use case, away from the usual course, was where it had been used to setup a competency self assessment framework.  I liked this as I’ve often reverted to Articulate as an authoring tool for non-SCORM items, it is a shame that people tend to always think about it just for back/next eLearning.

Perhaps the most interesting stall, however, was a non-Articulate orientated one.  The CoachMaster Academy showed their software which can be used to support the coaching process.  I really liked this idea – giving prompts and structure to a conversation, rather than relying on memory of best practice coaching approaches.  I tend to agree with the sentiment from a previous CIPD Show that coaching can be made too unwieldy, the software shown here could really help at the point of need for coaching conversations to make an impact.

Still not changing quickly enough? My thoughts on Learning Technologies 2016

This year I attended parts of both day 1 and 2 of the Learning Technologies Exhibition.  My takeaway feeling was that there really seems to be a failure of the learning industry to pick up the pace of change being seen elsewhere.

Too many of the exhibition sessions I attended just covered the basics of the topic.  Whilst I appreciate that a 30 minute session, with poor acoustics, is never going to be a wonderful learning environment, however, would you expect to go to a science industry exhibition and have people remind you about the logic that sits behind the Theory of Evolution?  Now I’ll admit to having never gone to a biology conference but, I’ll presume, the answer is no.  So why do we still see sessions with basic tips on deploying compliance training, how to deal with VUCA environments and what 70/20/10 really means?  I appreciate there are new comers* or HR folks attending who only have a passing interest in L&D but perhaps we could see, at least, clearer demarcation of sessions between “beginners”, “practitioners” and “demos”?  Donald Taylor, the architect of the conference and exhibition, has talked about Learning Leadership.  I would be tempted to say the exhibition, and perhaps even the conference, now need to evolve to encourage this.

* one of the most interesting conversations I had was with a business studies university student who was in London for the day to better understand practical application of learning and performance improvement in the workplace.  This made me realise that the problems I had with the show were perhaps that, after ten-ish years of attending the show and having attended the conference last year, I am now in the stage where I should aim for networking, catch-ups and a few sessions rather than filling most of my time with the free exhibition sessions.

 

‘Professional development teachers receive has a tremendous impact in the classroom’ (Nicky Morgan…*facepalm* and my BETT 2016)

I missed BETT last year due to work commitments so it was good to go this year and see the usual mix of product evolution and emerging ideas.

Enthusiasm I had from the event was though, at least partly, brought back down to earth by the email I received from the BETT organizers not long after getting home or, at least, by the subject line:

‘Professional development teachers receive has a tremendous impact
in the classroom’ (Nicky Morgan today)

The Day 1 highlights video that was included in the email is here:

Now, that specific quote from Nicky Morgan is not actually in the above video, it is in her 14 minute talk embedded below (text version here):

Whilst you might think the sentiment in the quote seems fair; for me, the quote is a real face palm moment.  Why?  Well, because it summarizes so many of the problems with education today.

The fundamental issue I have is that professional development is not something that should be talked about as being received, it is something you should undertake by seeking out opportunities and sharing with colleagues, it is personal, yet collaborative.  If the Secretary of State for Education is reinforcing such a fundamentally incorrect concept about lifelong learning it really is a worry.  Whilst I recognize teachers are among the very busiest professionals we have in the UK, so it is difficult for them to reflect on their practice, engage in communities of practice, etc. it would still be better to encourage all teachers to engage with improving their skill sets.  Instead she links teacher CPD to DfE, university and private sector funding, all of this whilst standing in possibly the biggest single free personal development event of the year.  Oh well, opportunity missed I guess.

There are plenty more points in the presentation that I could complain about but I’ll resist with the exception of the below piece:

“we have made it clear…that knowledge is the key to excellent educational outcomes…probably the worse attitude that we can take is that access to search engines is somehow a substitute for knowledge, it isn’t”

Let’s ask the future what they think of that opinion:

iwkad22

Okay, okay, so we perhaps do not need to go as far as to believe we live in a world where we can just ask a computer when we need to recall something (I’ll not go so far as to suggest tools such as Cortana and Siri are there yet).  However, there is the implied suggestion that the curriculum and assessment become recall assessments as a result of a focus on ‘knowledge’, rather than skills.  Let us see what the business community (well Accenture) has to say on that kind of approach:

Indeed, even if we just look at the “knowledge is…key” opinion from a Blooms Taxonomy perspective (aka Learning and Teaching 101), then recalling knowledge is clearly a pretty low level skill.  I understand the point that the EBacc has been introduced to ensure core knowledge, with higher level skill development possible on top of that, but it jars to me to suggest that search engines should not be recognised as a hugely powerful resource.  My own instructional design aims to avoid ever redesigning/reinventing/redelivering content that exists on the open web without, at least, adding value through context.

So what about my day at BETT 2016?  Well, there was not much that really caught the eye and I did not attend too many talks as I wanted to get around the whole show.  However, some thoughts below:

  1. Adaptive tech, as mentioned by Nicky Morgan, continues to bubble away as a potential game changer.  In the Higher Education sessions I caught Desire2Learn talking about their LeaP product.  The possibilities here for automated semantic matching to create bespoke learning pathways are hugely interesting.  It was also interesting to see how D2L had one of the smallest stands in the exhibition space when Instructure had a huge one for Canvas, I guess it goes to show how the funding of tech companies changes over time (albeit that Canvas was being pushed to the event’s core schools market).
  2. I tweeted before the event that it seemed around half of all stalls were new this year.  That number astounds me but shows there is still a lot of buoyancy in the learning tech market – or at least a lot of investment speculation.  To be fair this is partly skewed by the very small stalls where people are effectively pitching ideas – there were some interesting stalls in those spaces including around analytics products.
  3. The best demo I saw was of Arcgis.com – cloud based mapping technology, with a wide arrange of options and data mapping all within the browser.  Even better is that a lot of the tool’s functionality is public, with education users able to use it for just £100 a year (per school) as part of their CSR – their profit making sales coming from other users.
  4. Microsoft.  The main sponsors/partner for the event had quite a lot going on in their exhibition spaces (including the above Arcgis presentation).  Interesting to see them pushing the idea of combining apps (including OneNote), devices 1-2-1 (Surface), session recording (OfficeMix) and more for an integrated classroom experience.  With Google and others present it really does seem to have become the battle of the ecosystems, however with Office Apps on non Windows platforms I wonder how much value Microsoft can really suggest the bundling approach creates.  LP+365 was particularly interesting in looking to turn Office365 into an LMS, in contrast to the longer standing SharePoint solutions (such as this one).
  5. Discendum seem to have cracked some of the Open Badge deployment challenges, I liked the idea of learners being able to come up with their own badges and recommend colleagues/fellow students for those.

Adobe Education Summit 2015

Back in November I was fortunate enough to attend this year’s Adobe Education Summit.  I must admit it is a while since I have really used an Adobe product, beyond the obvious freebie ones and Connect, so I really just wanted to see what was happening with their suite of tools.  Indeed, in the past, Photoshop and Dreamweaver were two of my most used tools, in fact I used to support art students in developing their capability in those tools.  The focus on the day being largely being on the more artistic tools in Adobe’s suite, i.e. the Creative Cloud.

The event was the second held in the UK and was made up, as tends to be the way, between some official corporate messaging, user demos and thought leadership.  The event was also, to an extent, a celebration of 25 years of Photoshop – a pretty amazing fact in-itself considering the way tech has changed in that time.

Adobe keynote

This looked at some of the big trends they seeing from a generational, digital transformation and education sector perspective.  Nothing too much new in what was discussed but they did stress the rise of the Chief Marketing Officer in (higher) education and the impact competition and student demand is having.  On the marketing front, the Adobe ‘Marketing Cloud’ empowers schools and companies.

In terms of learning outcomes there was a mention for Tony Wagner’s more transferable skills (aka survival skills) vs student demand to see clearly what the tangible skills they will get from their studies.  There are clearly some crossovers here to capability education and assessment models that offer alternatives to the 1st/2nd/3rd model.  Interestingly, Adobe are hiring on demonstration of transferable skills – the technical expertise can, they argue, be taught in house.  With my L&D hat on this was obviously interesting to hear.

There were some interesting stats thrown in around the way, for example 72% of students surveyed wanted to be able to look at study options and information to help choose schools on their mobile.  Adobe’s positioning through the student life-cycle looking to help with:

Attract > Engage > Empower

Within engage, they have performed multiple activities, including working with universities on interactive books and mobile apps.  Meanwhile tools like the ‘Document Cloud’ can help organizations with their operations (including the digitization of forms).

Some organizational uses of Creative Cloud were considered, for example Uber’s phenomenal growth has been powered by ‘Creative Sync’ where head office can retain control over core marketing assets centrally, with different countries able to make use of them.  The advantage being that any updates at HQ will automatically filter through to the websites.  In the education space there was a look at Clemson Uni in the US who have taken the approach of “creativity as a competitive differentiator”, with digital creativity embedded across curricula and the whole organization (seemingly) working to this end.  Some of the tangible ways this has impacted have included library space being handed over to students for video production and other products.  Indeed students are expected to product an ePortfolio as a concrete piece of evidence beyond their resume.

I must admit that I had largely heard of a decline in use of Creative Cloud due to cost issues, however, growth numbers are apparently strong.  Perhaps I need to look again!  The ‘Digital Publishing Suite’ certainly looked an easy way to create mobile apps (no coding).

Finally there were plugs for the peer support available via the ‘Adobe Education Exchange’ and the value in some of the certifications available.

Adobe demos

There were a few main messages from these:

  1. no longer just about desktop, more and more about cool mobile apps
  2. increasingly about to work on a project across device and switching between apps
  3. mobile apps aiming to be fun and easy but with real utility, especially when combined with desktop

The main apps to catch my attention:

  1. CaptureCC: capture traditional media for digital work (i.e. hand drawn to vector), a little like OfficeLens for creative types 😉
  2. Premiere Clip: video stories
  3. Comp CC: create a rough sketch of web layouts, creates styled widgets and then can populate with digital assets later.  Those assets can come from elsewhere in your creative cloud so you can have a central store.  Effectively this seemed to produce a drag and drop web authoring environment when combined with Muse but you can also send you layout to InDesign, Photoshop or Illustrator.  I thought this was interesting in that it is a ‘creative’ solution to producing digital content in the same way that the eLearning industry have gone and produced their own tools (Articulate, etc) rather than there being a ‘go to’ HTML5 authoring tool.
  4. Slate: presentations in browser or app.
  5. Photoshop Sketch: not that I’m ever likely to be doing any drawing but the timeline feature is really nice.  You can effectively branch a project from a base to create multiple different images or finishes from a standard starting point.
  6. Photoshop fix: use the healing tool on the go!  The demo showed how you could use the ‘face tool’ to make the Mona Lisa smile!!

Guest speakers

Sarah J Coleman (aka inkymole illustration) and David Butler (VP of Innovation at The Coca-Cola Company)

Sarah’s talk was most of interest to me in just seeing her mindset around digital tools, she uses traditional and digital media.  However, there are some things she is known for (such as chalk-style effects) that she has only ever done digitally.  It was also interesting to hear how her digital approach has changed over time, she was apparently a big user of MySpace for self promotion!  There were certainly some lessons for those, such as me, considering the talk from a ‘learning’ perspective – not least “It’s OK to bugger things up as long as you had a go” (the kind of message that of course comes up a lot when thinking about learning cultures!).  She has worked with others to produce a film, “Stupid Enough“, aiming to provide better advice to aspiring creatives from the likes of Gareth Edwards.

I had to leave before the end of the Coca-Cola presentation but it was looking how ‘design thinking’ has changed their business.  From one which took decades to change or introduce new products it is now much more flexible and a “design driven company”.  I particularly liked the point that we are now all designers and our organizations need to work to get us designing better.  I’d argue we can see some bigger trends around this, if we thinking of data presentation (including infographics) the need to have an ‘eye’ for design is increasingly important (he says somewhat ironically considering the basic design I have opted for with this site).  His approach to design being:

explore > simplify/standardize/integrate > scale

Within the above, you can design for agility by having fixed elements (like the coke ingredients) and recognize the flexible pieces (new productions, sizes, packaging, etc).  For Coca-Cola this has led to three new billion-dollar juice brands in the last five years and increased growth in emerging markets (where the core product is fixed but distribution/sales models can be seen as the flexible elements).

Educators’ presentations

A number of presentations, I had to take a few calls during these so did not see them all but they included:

  1. rllearning.com: presenter has worked with teachers at his school to digitize curriculum.  He is also a Lynda.com author to help a wider audience, including students so they can help themselves.  Justification for all of this was to “help changes lives!”.  A very passionate speaker!  It seemed like a lot was done via publishing to the ‘Adobe Content Viewer’ app.
  2. tipsquirrel.com: presenter focused on why he has students actively using their mobiles [yes it seems there is still a debate on if phones should be left on or not!]  There was a lot of basic stuff on phone management in the room [the nicest idea was that they have phone breaks every 20 mins which also doubles up as a ‘brain break’].  The more interesting bit was how some apps are being used in the curriculum and by students, he mentioned: Capture, PhotoShop Light-room, PS Mix, PS Fix and Instagram for Photography.  Cross-subject apps included Slate, Adobe Voice, NearPod, Edmodo and RefME.