Can there be ‘original thought’ in the era of the knowledge-age organization?

I think I have only ever applied for one temporary ‘professional’ role.  My logic normally is that with constraints such as a mortgage I would not want to risk a period of unemployment.  However, in the case of this particular role it sounded fantastic so I thought I would apply.  I was pleasantly surprised when I was offered an interview even though I did not have one of the key ‘essential’ criteria of the person specification.  When interview day came I, for some reason, developed horrendous hiccups and generally did not do very well.

Anyway, one particularly awkward point was where I started describing past achievements and relating them to some of the prevalent best-practice theory in the discipline (eLearning).  Now I think I might have come across as suggesting that I (or rather my employer of the time and team) were ahead of the game.  At one point, I think, I even suggested it being a little ‘chicken and egg’ in that practice and theory become so intertwined that it becomes difficult to remember what came first – theory, you implementing an idea, recognized best practice, etc.  At best I think I suggested I was an original thinker and innovator, but without really backing it up as a reflective practitioner perhaps should be able to, at worst I appeared egomaniac-ish saying “I was first” to do various things.

Whilst I did not deal with it very well on that interview day, I would have now suggested that 100% ‘original thinking’ is incredibly difficult in our networked world.  In other words, we are products of our environments and if one has a particularly active personal learning ecosystem the ‘original’ source of an idea is difficult to track.  The challenge then should be to ensure you ‘stand on the shoulders of giants’ rather than reinventing the wheel.  Whilst the Internet has accelerated growth and sharing of ideas contributing to a world that is rapidly changing [I wouldn’t agree with all of this video but it is at least useful for seeing the prevailing mood] it also means that you can quickly appear out-of-date or just rehashing the work of others.  This has been particularly highlighted in the last week or so…

  • This article on big data in Higher Education, for example, makes a number of valid points but few are original.  Where it mentions work being done to track student achievement by their library use, many in HE will be already familiar with examples of such work.  Indeed some institutions already track devices (certainly of guests) to their networks and LMS/VLE data (should) has been used in ways such as those mentioned in the article.  Perhaps the issue the author really alludes to is the potential value in linking data and (I would argue) warehousing data from multiple institutions to see bigger trends.  Indeed this cross-pollination would help improve the data usage, for organisational effectiveness purposes, mentioned in the article.
  • In the L&D space, this week I watched the recording of a recent LSG webinar from Jane Hart.  Now I have followed Jane online for years which makes it tricky to pick out how much she is confirming my hunches/way of doing things as opposed to leading my thinking with original ideas but this recording really hit home.  Whilst I agree that it is fair to say ‘lets not kid ourselves, people are not going to adopt all of this’ (a point approximately made in the presentation) I have to feel that in an office/knowledge/people based business there has to be much smarter coming together of learning, sharing, collaboration, knowledge/information/resource management, etc. in the kind of ways Jane mentions.  I tweeted at an event earlier in the year that Salesforce-centric employees seemed to always be the example given of where some of this works, but surely there are leaders out there who are implementing appropriate organisational development(s)?

I would argue that joined up systems and data are one thing but, realistically, you need an enterprise where learning is fully embedded culturally.  Here is where education organizations have an advantage as learning is their mission but they should also be able to use the LMS/VLE as their organizational platform, alas I would imagine too many break that shared social hub by using separate Intranets, etc.  Yes there remain specialist functions, that need certain software (arguably a Library Management System would be an example), but for being an employee of a collaborative organization that shares, reflects, learns and adapts as one I really do feel we need to move from breaking things into silos of learning, knowledge, resource, etc. management.

Perhaps it is my own environment and ‘professional genetics’ of training and beliefs that sends me down the above road but surely the above should be the case and I am not diving into ‘original thinking’.  However, when you see so many project management, L&D, learning technology and other advertised posts which are clearly based around old models it does make me wonder.

LIKE event – Content strategies

I have often seen adverts for potentially useful LIKE (London Information & Knowledge Exchange) events without being able to go.  However, last week, I made it to one – the main presentation from the BrilliantNoise digital agency:

The evening mixed presentation about the 6Ps (using the above slides) with participant groups (organised via seating by what food people had ordered in advance – which worked as quite an effective way to get people to mix) thinking about the 6Ps in relation to their work in a way similar to what BrilliantNoise would do with clients in a 2-day workshop.  This was tailored somewhat to the audience, with the presenter not going into specific areas in too much detail, especially items such as taxonomies where she recognized the audience probably held expert level understanding already.  The appendix in the slides is the handout we worked through.

I felt I somewhat took over my group’s conversations and we tended to start our discussions with considering content in terms of my department’s work.  However, we did get a mix of views and others in the group elaborated on their experiences (mostly in law and accountancy firms) in regards to handling training materials and other content via intranets, content management systems, etc.

I found the 6P model a sensible one, recognizing many of its considerations from how I have worked in the past.  Indeed I may articulate these more explicitly when considering ‘Content Strategy’ type work in the future.

The notes I made, to add detail to the above slides, included:

  1. Purpose: Why the content exists, this can match your overall business goal.  [This depends on the purpose of your team and how niche it is in the organization?]
  2. Principles: examples include gov.uk’s “10 Needs” [I think this was talking about these from gov.uk].  Mentioned work with Nokia on their social media strategy, key outcome principle was “consider social opportunity in everything we do”.  Argued these should be high level with support of detailed style guides, etc.  Issue identified in the room was compliance and that getting people to follow principles and processes often proves impossible.  You should also consider how you work in existing company principles, values and other issues.
  3. Platforms: included a mention for wikis, Yammer and Diigo (the latter apparently used by a lot of their clients).  There was discussion in the room around corporate buy in to Microsoft products versus the productivity people have found via use of Web2 tech.  However, whilst the criticism of Office, SharePoint and CMS systems was predictable it was good to hear the point that ‘amplifying’ content is more than just Facebook and Twitter.  It was also acknowledged that content work is too often led by platforms with the tools leading the strategy [same could be said for Learning Management Systems, Authoring Tools, etc].
  4. Processes: these need to be clear, including who needs to be involved at the different stages.  It was argued that this is key for ROI and that you should not view in-house authoring/content as ‘free’.  The group activity again highlighted that, like with principles, whilst things can be clearly set out there remains the tendency for other priorities to overcome work, such as client work meaning people are not available [i.e. “everyone is too busy syndrome”].
  5. People: who is going to be involved, for example, who will be the editors, etc.  Suggestion was that there is no set way of doing things as team roles in relation to content really vary by how the individual business works.  Chief Content Officers are emerging as another c-level acronym, for example, at The Telegraph group.  The logic behind such roles being to encourage people to look beyond traditional editorial duties now that we are working in digital domains.  Challenges were identified in the room, including the silos created by different departments and how to tackle ‘enthusiasm’ where you need to find balance between a free for all of creation by proactive staff against too rigid a structure of control.  Finally, on this point, there was some discussion as to what ‘decency’ means internally with one person in the room telling a story about internal plagiarism of research and how you might need to ensure that recognition of original authorship/research is included in your content policies.
  6. Performance: is not just about page views, ‘likes’ and shares [mention for Forrester’s Engagement Framework (slide 31)].  Research has shown social media sharers often do not read the whole article or even spend much time on the page.  Instead you should try and seek feedback and intervention is key, if something is not being used then you need to think “why?”.  There was a nod here to making people more digitally literate and if content is not being used if there is a need for the author to attend some kind of training.  Benchmarks are difficult, you really need to base them on your hopes and expectations as well as what people have done in the past.

All in all it was an interesting evening [even though I had to leave soon after the main talk finished] and the 6P model is certainly something I will try to keep in mind going forward for making the key considerations, in many areas beyond content too, more explicit.

“Please enter your professional email address” – a fair request?

As mentioned previously, I attend a lot of free webinars, seminars, etc.

My attendance of in-person events has dropped somewhat since my most recent change of jobs (almost two years ago now!) as it is not so easy for me to attend things in the centre of London.  I always tried to take advantage of events ‘in town’, especially the multitude that happen around the academic hub that is Bloomsbury, all too aware that when the time comes for me to abandon London (hopefully career driven rather than meteorological) online events will be all that I have.

One worrying trend I have noticed though, with a number of recent events, is an increase in the insistence of registering with ‘professional’ credentials.  This takes a number of approaches, including:

  • registration forms that block @yahoo/hotmail/gmail addresses or insist on a certain suffix (such as .ac.uk)
  • selection of your organization from a drop down list (usually UK HEIs for the kind of events I want to attend)
  • increasingly clever forms that do not take, for example, 0 or 00000000000 as a valid phone number

Now I have a number of issues with this, including:

  1. I want to attend events for MY personal development, by registering with my personal email address the organizer has all they need to realize this fact.  If they want to know who I am they can Google me still, or look me up on LinkedIn (which I know plenty have done).
  2. If it is an event to create sales or, at least, to encourage follow up sale calls then by not completing my organization you should see that this is PRIMARILY for my personal interest, this is not to say that I will not repay a good event (especially if it was free) with business in the future, this saves the organizers time by not having to do followup calls.
  3. There are a lot of unemployed people who would, no doubt, find webinars useful for keeping up-to-date whilst out of work.  Certainly any charity or academic organization’s webinars, I feel, should not block these people, they may well be your future workforce.
  4. I appreciate some events (I’m thinking of those organized by JISC here) are for a particular community and are effectively prepaid for by those attending organizations via existing funding arrangements.  However, as MOOCs have shown, there is value in opening events up to get input from others, one enlightening comment from ‘the outside’ might make the event useful for the majority.
  5. You can use polls in a webinar to learn more about me than what a registration form typically asks for, this can be used to tailor a session so it is of most use for the majority of the attendees.

Overall, it seems to be a failure by some organizations to realise the importance in person-to-person relationships (and therefore sales) instead thinking about things from too much of a business-to-business/organization-to-organization viewpoint.

Steam Tags – crowdsourcing the shopping taxonomy

Steam have just launched a beta option for ‘steam tags’ a way for their community (75m users) to apply bespoke categorization on titles in their vast store.  Tags used regularly by users will find their way to becoming ‘Popular Tags’ that can be used by others to discover content via browse and new filtering options.

This will all sound familiar to organizations and institutions who have opened up intranets, library/learning management systems and other platforms to such crowd sourcing methods. Indeed it is not dissimilar to the ‘categories’ approach of this and other WordPress sites.

The FAQs resolve a number of the questions that always crop up with such approaches, such as “what about swear words?”, what about “different languages?” and if the content/game owner can alter the tags.  In all three cases the answers are predictable; swear words will be filtered out (Steam having plenty of experience of hosting complex user discussion boards), you will see tags from users of the same language group as you and customers’ tags will appear no matter what the designer/publisher thinks.  The latter is interesting in that it could show a disconnect and one might expect it opens up some publishers to looking elsewhere, for example, Ubisoft might find lots of “Excessive DRM” tags which they probably will not like and there is room for blatant hate campaigns.  As for the language point, it seems a little disappointing that the expense has not been spared on some kind of automatic translation, yes it might not work well but, at least it would break down some of the cultural/geographic barriers.  Overall, this is another community tool for a platform which, of course, has big plans.

I love the tag idea, thinking about it from my education perspective, I wonder how many organizations would genuinely open their Learning Management Systems to such tagging?  We’ve seen ratings (5-star) approaches for a while and so often see the extreme 1 or 5 star feedback scores, as tends to be the case in the Apple and Google stores too.  This more qualitative approach could be a big help toward sorting through vast content as systems grow and discoverability does seem to be the driving force.

Learning Technologies Exhibition – 29th Jan 2014

Stalls

As predicted, there was much interest in multi-device learning and this seemed to have replaced previous conversations, such as Apps versus HTML5 browser, etc. as mobile learning evolves.  The challenge now seems to be to decide if you want a SaaS authoring tool (such as GoMo), a local desktop application or a hybrid model.  The functionality gap between the SaaS and desktop is decreasing so the issue then becomes more about your workflows (for example if you want collaborative authoring etc).  Cm-Group’s Luminosity is an interesting middle ground with the Studio tool offering rapid authoring and a cloud file storage allowing for collaborative authoring but with appropriate locking of files, etc.

There was not too much in the way of new stalls, with the usual split between big systems doing multiple things (such as Cornerstone), smaller specific systems (such as SpiderGap in the 360 feedback space), eLearning providers and classroom/skills training providers.  One new stall was KPMG Learning Academy’s showing the ability of big organizations to try and leverage their existing expertise into providing services in the space.  Another area where there seemed to be an increase in stalls was with iTunes-esque aggregators for people to sell eLearning and other materials via single sources, such as opensesame.com.  In a related space, I was slightly surprised to not see more of re-emergence for IT Training considering the implications of Windows 8, new versions of Office, etc.

Similarly the talks I attended were largely updates on the on-going evolution of tools and ideas, rough notes below:

Cultures of contribution: How to motivate engagement with online learning communities –Brightwave/LearnerLab/KPMG

LearnerLab talked about engagement:

  • Asked what can learn from the consumer space.
  • Social networks still growing and driving Internet use. Mobile access is the key tool that is facilitating this.
  • Shows people want short, snappy, enagaging experiences [presenters at BETT having pointed out this is not necessarily a good thing for Brain training].
  • User generated content part of people’s persona and online personality whereas people are turned off by business systems as they don’t appear as relevant, easy-to-use, etc.
  • Budgets help but big IT can go wrong – especially if designed around tech not user.  Need to be more Netflix and less Healthcare.gov.
  • Get better by developing a deep understanding of your audience.
  • Should communicate purpose at every point, for example, Facebook does not offer you a blank space, it asks ‘whats on your mind’.
  • Make users understand benefits, seek to innovate experiences around familiar conventions, spot engagement trends and always follow policy of continuous testing using real user input.
  • Push your communication to users, do this by use of notifications, etc. with a call to act.  It should not be about revisiting a website constantly, you don’t want to be ‘another place people have to visit.
  • Take inspiration from emerging trends, for example, MindMeld helps engagement through suggested content.
  • Can we learn from curation techniques of social media? They are designed around the moment, different to how it is used in workplace.  Need clear objective, what should go in and out? What trying to achieve?

Brightwave took this on to think about user experience:

  • Learning tech has been developing rapidly, for example Tin Can.
  • People don’t tend to want to go to LMS, TC offer new approach via capturing informal – Tesselo built around this concept.
  • Capture TC learning experiences via apps (for example scan book or QR code to record) and bookmarklet. Don’t have to be on website to capture learning.
  • Then drive social through sharing and communication.
  • Curator role is SME to pick best resources from social feeds to turn learning experience into resource.
  • But what about motivation? Working in Open Badges (‘allow you to show off outside’) and reputation points for internal recognition.
  • Encourage a circle of activity: collaborate, share, currate and motivation.
  • How can social learning work with LMS? Pick out best of LMS content into social (Tesselo does inc Scorm but is a SSO back to LMS too). (beyond any use of badges – interesting badges mentioned before this?)

KPMG on deploying successful social media:

  • Talking about PEN – partner development program. PEN online launched as social media via Tessello.
  • Change management has recently become much bigger part of business.  Interest in change management really came from VC project, treated as IT project but didn’t really work out. So wanted to improve this project – business requirements, vision, support, behaviours and success criteria.
  • Key to success was clear business requirements before going out to vendor.
  • Vision very succient and clear to what wanted to do.
  • To overcome faculty resistance – gatecrashed faculty day, keep them in the platform, support the supporters step-by-step.
  • Also need to train IT helpdesks, especially to avoid signin problems.
  • Behaviours – know what you want them to do, role model behaviours for sharing, etc.
  • In the end, users were ‘overengaged’! Actually succeeded criteria.
  • Group of seniors so were allowed to go off and use it, good level of engagement but ultimately a small group and had support of faculty. Also did ensure people had agreed to social media guidelines before hand.
  • eLearning authoring tool that has come out of Epic, spin out company but still default tool Epic use when building content for customers.  Looks to have evolved nicely and worked smoother than when I have seen demos previously.
  • Based around responsive content: auto scaling, auto ammend menus to page, etc.  Need to think about layout design differently for multidevice. There approach is to think about column layouts.
  • Cloud based SaS – no software for collaborative authoring, includes locking of content and content reviews for team-based authoring.  Includes standard eLearning functionality like drag and drop activities.
  • Can create corporate theme for colour schemes and branding, etc.  However, showed how easy it can be to tweak fonts, colorpickers, etc. as needed.
  • Multiview previews built in. Don’t have to deploy to devices for testing.  All HTML5 but can also be packaged as native apps.
  • Can choose between vertical and horizontal sliders/scroll for paging. If in phone can have horizontal scroll combine with down (“sensible scrolling” – set restriction on how long scroll will last to avoid ‘scroll of death’).

Epic introduces gomo: beautiful multi-device learning. Simplified – GoMo

  • eLearning authoring tool that has come out of Epic, spin out company but still default tool Epic use when building content for customers.  Looks to have evolved nicely and worked smoother than when I have seen demos previously.
  • Based around responsive content: auto scaling, auto ammend menus to page, etc.  Need to think about layout design differently for multidevice. There approach is to think about column layouts.
  • Cloud based SaS – no software for collaborative authoring, includes locking of content and content reviews for team-based authoring.  Includes standard eLearning functionality like drag and drop activities.
  • Can create corporate theme for colour schemes and branding, etc.  However, showed how easy it can be to tweak fonts, colorpickers, etc. as needed.
  • Multiview previews built in. Don’t have to deploy to devices for testing.  All HTML5 but can also be packaged as native apps.
  • Can choose between vertical and horizontal sliders/scroll for paging. If in phone can have horizontal scroll combine with down (“sensible scrolling” – set restriction on how long scroll will last to avoid ‘scroll of death’).

Make your LMS mission-critical to your organisation – SumTotal

Argued through a number of points to consider:

  • Is your learning strategy aligned to your business needs? How learning impacts all your business? Learning worked throughout workflows?
  • Business environment more complex than ever: Increased regulation, more global, doing more with less, war for talent so retention is key.
  • What business critical issues related to learning?  Need to identify, pull out and highlight.  If fail can lead to business failures, bad PR, etc.
  • Learning tech must do more than automate.  Need just-in-time, real time collab with experts, targeted for career development, etc.
  • Context key, like how Facebook (one of their clients) targets adverts and other material to you.  Mobile isn’t future, its context. For example, pervasive learning including SumTotal learning embedded through Salesforce and retail platform.
  • Key argument: context and pervasive.  BYOD helps with pervasive, access learning from top of telegraph poll to a meeting room. Snippets of content, rather than length courses, help ‘integrated learning’ this is critical if it drives performance.
  • Examples where this can work – quicker onboarding, link learning to development, learning to career plans, improve social/informal learning, succession based planning (identify risks of person losing and where training need would come), drive compensation incentives for learning (completed courses drive compensation), single record for all learners (one place for complete view, HR, payrol, learning, etc).

Mobile learning content strategies for success – Kallidus

Followed on from a session last year, how mobile has moved on as it is no longer hype:

  • Only about 30% of audience doing mobile learning when asked, presenter was surprised not more (Towards Maturity suggests has been bigger adoption in general).

Two examples shown:

  • O2, had lot of old eLearning, looked to migrate. But BYOD so not onesize fits all.  Flash to html5 wasn’t good enough as still inconsistent outputs. Instead building much more detailed specification to try and ensure consistency. Motivation to do it was that staff expected to be access things on mobile and expect it to work.
  • Kaplan Financial Mobile app. Support 30,000 students – 67% said wanted material to be available, downloaded, on device. Students are presented with material related to course they’ve paid for.  Included flash cards for learning reinforcement, key topic video clips and quiz practice. Have had 6500 downloads from 50 countries.

Best practice tips:

  • Delivering eLearning via mobile or developing mobile learning (impact on content design)?
  • Keep it simple (ensure cross device usability – inc swipe functionality over use of buttons).
  • Design for multiple device (responsive).
  • Mobile friendly media (video increasingly so but remember formats and file sizes).

Repurposing existing eLearning:

  • Think about what actually works for mobile.
  • Aspects like shelf life and business case matter: don’t just shrink rethink; interactions need redesign? Do you need to rewrite the text?

The future:

  • More and more tablets
  • Video (inc 4G)
  • Mobile features (enhanced devices to take advantage of)
  • Content creation tools on mobile.
  • Argued that generational changes are impacting how we need to use learning to retain younger staff (especially as LinkedIn has made it very easy to jump ship).

From LMS to LES – CrossKnowledge

  • An LMS used to work, but they do not work for our organizations or us now. We are all generation C(onnected).
  • How move from top-down to Just-In-Time, but global, where everyone is different?  Can we make sure there is no ‘skills gap’ anywhere, no matter what people doing or where on earth they are doing it?  Yes, technology can help by coming in as social tool for a global audience.
  • Move from being about learning management system to technology being the backbone of a learning organization.
  • Argued most of us are generalists – less SMEs as can find what we need rather than being font of all knowledge on specific things.
  • Prescribed/push content is valid but in learner-centric, learning organization, want them to absorb learning, i.e. be free to pull learning that is available.
  • Forgetting curve shows classroom doesn’t work. Need to think longer term, learning as just part of work processes, seamless to working life.
  • BUT admit this idea of learning organization is not easy to create.
  • Argued against Tin Can as it is not important to track informal – allow people to be free and play. Focus should be on sewing together learning activities and work to form true blended learning.
  • L&D cant try and do everything, has to be shared ownership amongst everyone (especially managers and experts)
  • LMS has never been a place people live, they use different systems. So you need ‘invisible jacket’ of learning across workplace.
  • Move from managing learning to delivering experience: learning experience system, a new approach they have built out in last year.