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Jay's Other Blogs |
Research on Learning and Performance recent finds and thoughts Sunday, September 16, 2001
thinking in free verse
this morning in the fog in the past, before the tragedy, put stuff in, cram. memorize facts, learn to drive, believe in your vision, train your mind, staring into the fog, what's done is dunne. our brains are individual neurons of a global brain. without context, there is no content. without others, there is nothing to learn. it takes a village. might "learning to learn"
A disconnect in online learning
Since the dawn of the Internet age, boosters have predicted the end of leafy college campuses as schools go virtual. The miracle of the Internet was supposed to let great teachers reach any student, any time, anywhere. And people all over the world would get the equivalent of a Harvard degree through a computer and a network connection. What a crock. "The people peddling this stuff are suggesting that distance learning offers a bona fide education," said David F. Noble, a history professor at York University in Toronto. "But it's a con job. This is a scam. Distance education is just a digital diploma mill." Unlike Noble, I believe that new technologies such as the World Wide Web offer enormous benefits to students. But they work best as an adjunct -not a replacement - to traditional classroom education. Hounds baying at the moon. This is old news. I may put together a rants page of opposing viewpoints. populates the global village eradicates poverty only works for IT more bullshit than reality
On the Difficulty of Changing Our Perceptions about Such Things as Learning
Jay and Ursla Visser, Learning Development Institute An awesome paper. It's an open question whether we must destroy the schools to save them. Niels Bohr stressted that "All knowledge presents itself within a conceptual framework adapted to account for previous experience and that any such frame may prove too narrow to comprehend new experiences." Thus, the conceptual frame must be widened to restore order, abadoning some previous mental baggage along the way. For example, and I love this one, Nicolescu says: "Quantum physics caused us to discover that abstraction is not merely an intermediary between us and Nature, a tool for describing reality, but rather one of the constituent parts of Nature." To enable us to read new meanings into old words, the authors (Vissers) invent "<" school ">" and "<" schooling ">" as more expansive terms than school and schooling. This is tough to put into practice, "the conservative human mind is quick at creating old images in association with new words. Many a traditional educator may thus be seen using politically correct lanugage to describe stale practice. It's merely part of a well-developed immune system that fights change."
Back to Illich, this time on the Web of Education
Schools are designed on the assumption that there is a secret to everything in life; that the quality of life depends on knowing that secret; that secrets can be known only in orderly successions; and that only teachers can properly reveal these secrets. An individual with a schooled mind conceives of the world as a pyramid of classified packages accessible only to those who carry the proper tags. New educational institutions would break apart this pyramid. Their purpose must be to facilitate access for the learner: to allow him to look into the windows of the control room or the parliament, if he cannot get in by the door. Moreover, such new institutions should be channels to which the learner would have access without credentials or pedigree--public spaces in which peers and elders outside his immediate horizon would become available. While we can specify that the alternative to scholastic funnels is a world made transparent by true communication webs... preserving the right of equal access to the tools both of learning and of sharing with others what they know or believe. But this would require that the educational revolution be guided by certain goals: 1. To liberate access to things by abolishing the control which persons and institutions now exercise over their educational values. 2. To liberate the sharing of skills by guaranteeing freedom to teach or exercise them on request. 3.To liberate the critical and creative resources of people by returning to individual persons the ability to call and hold meetings--an ability now increasingly monopolized by institutions which claim to speak for the people. 4.To liberate the individual from the obligation to shape his expectations to the services offered by any established profession--by providing him with the opportunity to draw on the experience of his peers and to entrust himself to the teacher, guide, adviser, or healer of his choice. Inevitably the deschooling of society will blur the distinctions between economics, education, and politics on which the stability of the present world order and the stability of nations now rest.
Knowledge management systems built from the ground up on a logical taxonomy never seem to work. The latest approach in KM is to throw everything in a pile and let a search engine do the walking. Frankly, this is the only way I can find stuff in the far corners of my own websites. Let the computer do the work. In an ever-changing world, it's nonsense to try to hardwire knowledge.
*Prices are variable. Most listed here are starting points for a small collection of a few hundred thousand documents. posted by jay cross on 9/10/2001 | link
 The Nurnberg Funnel Reviewed by The frontpiece of this book shows a plump, happy faced youth dressed in the clothes of several hundred years ago with a funnel sticking out of the top of his head. Two teachers are industriously pouring large amounts of liquid knowledge into his head. This is the Nurnberg Funnel. It was supposed to "make people wise quickly." But the author of this book says, "There is not and never was a Nurnberg Funnel." (p.102) "Nevertheless the need to make people wise very quickly is often overwhelming. And in trying to make instruction efficient, designers have frequently lapses into trying to pour information into the learner's mind." Carroll's Critique of Systematic Self-Instruction Caroll thinks that "standard self-instruction" is often in "conflict with the learning styles and strategies" that ordinary people adopt spontaneously. These are the tutorials which "required users to proceed step by step through sequences of drill and practice exercises." (p.5) He has strong words to say about what he calls the standard systems approach to instruction. He says it has fundamental flaws and regards it as a single, thin, mechanical approach which only superficially understands how human learning takes place. In fact, for Carroll, systematic approach to instruction is the Bad "S-Word" pervading the otherwise happy world of the learner. Carroll's indictment, if substantiated, extends to much of the computer-based training approach being implemented these days. There is no questions that many CBT courses are numbingly dull drill and practice. On the other hand, it is a hopeful sign that somebody within the world's largest computer company has finally noticed how bad their manuals generally are. One is unable to determine from Carroll's exposition, however, if the S-word writers were represented in Carroll's experiments by the best of their genre or the worst. Serialists and Holists Pask (1976) describes two types of learners, "holists" and "serialist." Pask's description of holist learners sounds strikingly like those Carroll describes in the passages above (in the section titled "The Problems of Initial Learners."). One gathers from Carroll's book he believes almost all of us are holists. However, in my experience, roughly half of learners appear to be holists. Holists like to get the big picture before getting to the details. They like to start reading in the middle of books. They skip around a lot. They like making their own connections. Serialists on the on the other hand like to proceed through learning step by step. The like to fulfill all prerequisites necessary for one level before going to the next. They like to read books starting at the first page. Obviously, like many "personality typologies", it is better to regard "holist" and "serialist" as tendencies not types. Most people certainly can have aspects of both types. But Carroll might want to consider that some of his anomalous data on learner reactions to his minimalist manuals could well be explained by this distinction. I certainly found the serialist-holist distinction to explain otherwise puzzling data in some research that I have done on learning materials. Here are some of the quotes from Carroll that suggest serialists talking about Carroll's minimalist manuals: "...there was a tendency for learners to treat the intentionally incomplete hints, checkpoints and remedies as if they were the more familiar kind of step-by-step procedure."(p.136) Carroll also reports that several learners expressed a desire for "more structure" (p. 156) and that three participants "became frustrated enough to ask to be excused from the experiment and were replaced."(p. 167) Carroll is to be congratulated for reporting this anomalous data that runs counter to one of his major presuppositions (which is that substantially all learners act in the manner of holists) and he should not be blamed for failure to make something of it, since it would be hard to do that within the research and design paradigm he is working in. Knowingly or unknowingly, we have all been attempting to design manuals for holist and serialist learners for many years. Carroll's approach will certainly appeal to the holist in us. More than that, he may even have at least part of a framework for a single manual for both. That remains to be seen. Carroll has done at least one fascinating research project that points in this direction. In this design he prepared four versions of a minimalist manual: skeletal, elaborative, inferential, and rehearsal. But, regretfully, he doesn't provide sufficient examples of these four versions for me to comment further. the world is an onion. There's always a play within a play, and more layers to peel back. My personal learning style is at work here. Browsing text, stopping to re-read what catches my eye, then cutting and pasting what strikes me as worthy of retention into this Blog. When I can't lay my hands on digital text, I do something similar with Yellow Highlighters (one of the most powerful learning devices ever invented), even down to copying the highlighted text into a file (ref.doc) which was one of the seeds of what evolved into Jayhoo. The maxim says that the teacher always learns more than the student and right now I'm teaching, or at least providing links to, a faceless class. Frankly, it doesn't matter much if I'm the only one in the classroom when I further sift this Blog to create more distilled, refined content for www.internettime.com. (Take that, you little people sitting in the dark!) posted by jay cross on 9/9/2001 | link
Minimalism
and Documentation Mary Ann Eiler. 'Minimalism and Documentation Downsizing: The Issues What is minimalism? Is minimalist documentation Realizing that Carroll's original formulation of minimalism at the IBM What is Minimalism? (1) tend to jump the gun, (2) avoid careful planning, (3) resist detailed systems of instructional steps, (4) are subject to learning interference from similar tasks, and (5) have difficulty recognizing, diagnosing, and recovering from their errors. For each "problem" however there is a corresponding
(2) learn by thinking and reasoning, (3) desire meaningful context and goals, (4) use prior knowledge to manage and assimilate new experience, and (5) use error diagnosis and recovery episodes to explore the boundaries of what they know. These problem-types and corresponding learning strategies form the basis for Carroll's minimalist
Previews, introductions, summaries, and reviews often violate Principle Is minimalism a complete documentation solution? Carroll and van der
3 (more Illitch)
Schools select for each successive level those who have, at earlier stages in the game, proved themselves good risks for the established order. Having a monopoly on both the resources for learning and the investiture of social roles, the university coopts the discoverer and the potential dissenter. A degree always leaves its indelible price tag on the curriculum of its consumer. Certified college graduates fit only into a world which puts a price tag on their heads, thereby giving them the power to define the level of expectations in their society. The American university has become the final stage of the most all encompassing initiation rite the world has ever known. No society in history has been able to survive without ritual or myth, but ours is the first which has needed such a dull, protracted, destructive, and expensive initiation into its myth. The contemporary world civilization is also the first one which has found it necessary to rationalize its fundamental initiation ritual in the name of education. We cannot begin a reform of education unless we first understand that neither individual learning nor social equality can be enhanced by the ritual of schooling. We cannot go beyond the consumer society unless we first understand that obligatory public schools inevitably reproduce such a society, no matter what is taught in them. Once a man or woman has accepted the need for school, he or she is easy prey for other institutions. Once young people have allowed their imaginations to be formed by curricular instruction, they are conditioned to institutional planning of every sort. "Instruction" smothers the horizon of their imaginations. They cannot be betrayed, but only short-changed, because they have been taught to substitute expectations for hope. They will no longer be surprised, for good or ill, by other people, because they have been taught what to expect from every other person who has been taught as they were. This is true in the case of another person or in the case of a machine. School sells curriculum--a bundle of goods made according to the same process and having the same structure as other merchandise. Curriculum production for most schools begins with allegedly scientific research, on whose basis educational engineers predict future demand and tools for the assembly line, within the limits set by budgets and taboos. The distributor-teacher delivers the finished product to the consumer pupil, whose reactions are carefully studied and charted to provide research data for the preparation of the next model, which may be "ungraded," "student-designed," "team-taught," "visually-aided," or "issue-centered." The result of the curriculum production process looks like any other modern staple. It is a bundle of planned meanings, a package of values, a commodity whose "balanced appeal" makes it marketable to a sufficiently large number to justify the cost of production. Consumer-pupils are taught to make their desires conform to marketable values. Thus they are made to feel guilty if they do not behave according to the predictions of consumer research by getting the grades and certificates that will place them in the job category they have been led to expect. School serves as an effective creator and sustainer of social myth because of its structure as a ritual game of graded promotions. Introduction into this gambling ritual is much more important than what or how something is taught. It is the game itself that schools, that gets into the blood and becomes a habit. A whole society is initiated into the Myth of Unending Consumption of services. posted by jay cross on 9/8/2001 | link
A friend encouraged me to read Ivan Illitch, and I've just started. What wonderful prose! What grand, independent thinking. Deschooling Society begins,
"Why We Must Disestablish School" Many students, especially those who are poor, intuitively know what the schools do for them. They school them to confuse process and substance. Once these become blurred, a new logic is assumed: the more treatment there is, the better are the results; or, escalation leads to success. The pupil is thereby "schooled" to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. His imagination is "schooled" to accept service in place of value. Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work. Health, learning, dignity, independence, and creative endeavor are defined as little more than the performance of the institutions which claim to serve these ends, and their improvement is made to depend on allocating more resources to the management of hospitals, schools, and other agencies in question. In these essays, I will show that the institutionalization of values leads inevitably to physical pollution, social polarization, and psychological impotence: three dimensions in a process of global degradation and modernized misery. I will explain how this process of degradation is accelerated when nonmaterial needs are transformed into demands for commodities; when health, education, personal mobility, welfare, or psychological healing are defined as the result of services or "treatments." I do this because I believe that most of the research now going on about the future tends to advocate further increases in the institutionalization of values and that we must define conditions which would permit precisely the contrary to happen. We need research on the possible use of technology to create institutions which serve personal, creative, and autonomous interaction and the emergence of values which cannot be substantially controlled by technocrats. School appropriates the money, men, and good will available for education and in addition discourages other institutions from assuming educational tasks. Work, leisure, politics, city living, and even family life depend on schools for the habits and knowledge they presuppose, instead of becoming themselves the means of education. Simultaneously both schools and the other institutions which depend on them are priced out of the market. School has become the world religion of a modernized proletariat, and makes futile promises of salvation to the poor of the technological age. The nation-state has adopted it, drafting all citizens into a graded curriculum leading to sequential diplomas not unlike the initiation rituals and hieratic promotions of former times. The modern state has assumed the duty of enforcing the judgment of its educators through well-meant truant officers and job requirements, much as did the Spanish kings who enforced the judgments of their theologians through the conquistadors and the Inquisition. To detach competence from curriculum, inquiries into a man's learning history must be made taboo, like inquiries into his political affiliation, church attendance, lineage, sex habits, or racial background. Laws forbidding discrimination on the basis of prior schooling must be enacted. Laws, of course, cannot stop prejudice against the unschooled-nor are they meant to force anyone to intermarry with an autodidact but they can discourage unjustified discrimination. A second major illusion on which the school system rests is that most learning is the result of teaching. Teaching, it is true, may contribute to certain kinds of learning under certain circumstances. But most people acquire most of their knowledge outside school, and in school only insofar as school, in a few rich countries, has become their place of confinement during an increasing part of their lives. But the fact that a great deal of learning even now seems to happen casually and as a by-product of some other activity defined as work or leisure does not mean that planned learning does not benefit from planned instruction and that both do not stand in need of improvement. The strongly motivated student who is faced with the task of acquiring a new and complex skill may benefit greatly from the discipline now associated with the old-fashioned schoolmaster who taught reading, Hebrew, catechism, or multiplication by rote. School has now made this kind of drill teaching rare and disreputable, yet there are many skills which a motivated student with normal aptitude can master in a matter of a few months if taught in this traditional way. This is as true of codes as of their encipherment; of second and third languages as of reading and writing; and equally of special languages such as algebra, computer programming, chemical analysis, or of manual skills like typing, watchmaking, plumbing, wiring, TV repair; or for that matter dancing, driving, and diving. Skill teachers are made scarce by the belief in the value of licenses. Certification constitutes a form of market manipulation and is plausible only to a schooled mind. Most teachers of arts and trades are less skillful, less inventive, and less communicative than the best craftsmen and tradesmen. Let me give, as an example of what I mean, a description of how an intellectual match might work in New York City. Each man, at any given moment and at a minimum price, could identify himself to a computer with his address and telephone number, indicating the book, article, film, or recording on which he seeks a partner for discussion. Within days he could receive by mail the list of others who recently had taken the same initiative. This list would enable him by telephone to arrange for a meeting with persons who initially would be known exclusively by the fact that they requested a dialogue about the same subject. Matching people according to their interest in a particular title is radically simple. It permits identification only on the basis of a mutual desire to discuss a statement recorded by a third person, and it leaves the initiative of arranging the meeting to the individual. Three objections are usually raised against this skeletal purity. I take them up not only to clarify the theory that I want to illustrate by my proposal for they highlight the deep-seated resistance to deschooling education, to separating learning from social control but also because they may help to suggest existing resources which are not now used for learning purposes.
Thinking about learning
An optimal learner knows how to recognize boxes and to test their limits. The learner must feel empowered to assess the legitmacy of boxes and to differentiate reasonable boxes ("Don't drive while drunk.") from unreasonable boxes ("Do not remove this tag.")
Learners need to be able to select the right perspective. They need to know when to back away and when to drill down, when to look through the telephoto lense and when to use the wide-angle.  posted by jay cross on 9/8/2001 | link
MASIE Center/Advanstar Form Alliance for TechLearn:
 Elliott Masie is "pleased to announce a significant business This is a shame. Part of the fun of TechLearn was having Elliott's college roommate, and Cathy's dad and sister, and the amateur crew running the show. How long before the exhibit hall opens? Or that we're deluged with direct mail, contests, come-ons, and plastic bags full of marketing schlock? Who's Advanstar?
They lump e-Learning in with Telecom. *Does anyone serve untargeted market sectors?
Peer-to-peer
Here's Ray Ozzie, being interviewed in the August 13, 2001, issue of MIT Technology Review:
In a truly decentralized business environment, one not dominated by "channel masters" or forces of mandated central control, there is a simple rule that I strongly believe in. No single company—including that of the technology vendor—should be required to control the data, the user identities, the security, the quality of service, the systems integration or the systems management of the systems upon which the businesses collaboratively function. Don't think of the simple case of a single big company with many little partners or customers. Think of the case of a number of like-sized companies working together, co-dependent, having to deal with each other in a multilateral fashion. Who runs the systems? And who has control? And who can manage access? And who can do systems integration? All organizations need some level of control, systems management, systems integration, etc. And no third party—not the vendor, not an application service provider—should control the nature of the applications, the versions, the identities, the confidential information. posted by jay cross on 8/14/2001 | link
What's Personalization anyway?
Answer: There is a lot of information on the Internet and even on company intranets. Finding the right kind of information at the right time gets to be a daily struggle. Personalization is a means to narrow down on this flood of information. Companies that deploy personalization engines offer a service to their cutomers by catering to their needs--offering only the information that they are interested in, or might be interested in. It's because of the nature of this service that personalization is coupled with CRM (Customer Relationship Management) initiatives. We mentioned two crucial aspects of personalization in the last paragraph: Personalization offers... only the information that the customer is interested in, or These two aspects represent the two types of personalization: 1. Form-based personalization (a.k.a Customization): When a user fills up a form stating his/her preferences explicitly. The system obliges by presenting only the information that meets the set preferences. For example, myYahoo!, myExcite, etc. 2. Collaborative filtering-based personalization (a.k.a Recommendations): In this type, a user's browsing/buying patterns are analysed and compared to other users in the database. Now, this is mostly done implicitly. If a similarity is found then the user is recommended other users browsing/buying patterns. For example, the recommendation system of Amazon.com and CdNow.com. Explaining Personalization by using Fathom's Knowledge Trails
"Fathom is the premier destination for authenticated knowledge and online learning." I like it. You can explore along a concept, hopping to related paths as you go.
Tog's FIrst Principles of Web Design
Tog's Maximizing Human Performance
This project explores ways in which the strength of storytelling can be used to enable informal knowledge transfer.
The project's goals in brief are:
Some of this is very preliminary. Nice theory presentation on the value of stories in KM.
Slow news day.
posted by jay cross on 8/8/2001 | link
High-Performance Problem Solving
Using the SiTNA Alternative for Generating Synergy And Commitment We are educated and trained to think of problems in oversimplified ways. We assume that there is an "answer in the back of the book," one right way to do things. In addition, we tend to jump to a solution before we have thoroughly analyzed our goals, the situation, the stakeholders, our options, and the probable outcomes of our actions. This "programming" is related to our tendency to have a short-term focus-profits this quarter, for example. We adopt a solution mentality rather than managing situations. But our employees, our subordinates, see solutions as change, and their perceptions often elicit predictable resistance. As Linus Pauling says "The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas." Commitment compels participation, as our Law of Commitment states: Meaningful participation Sense of involvement, Feeling of influence, Psychological ownership, COMMITMENT. There has been a lot of "sense and nonsense" published about consensus. It is often confused with compromise. The difference is one of mental set. In the compromise mentality, it is win if possible, and minimize losses. In consensus you are assuming that there is a "best collective judgment" that needs to be discovered. If your people feel influential in the process, they commit themselves to the agreed-upon plan. It is desirable to come to agreement on ground rules before taking on the taking on the situation that needs attention. The rules need to be reconsidered from time to time during the process of creating the action plan. Here are some examples: How are decisions going to be made?
Avoid negative thinking, e.g., problems, issues, and dilemmas. Think in terms of possibilities, opportunities, and challenges. Search for substantial agreement without serious disagreement. Agree on a planning method, and stick with it. Attempt continuous creativity. Check your commitment level throughout. Communicate responsibly. Look for a plan that benefits all (synergy and win-win).
Don’t Smile About Smile Sheets
John E. Jones, Ph.D. Organizational Universe Systems Most training courses include end-of-course questionnaires that ask participants to rate various aspects of the experience. In the training industry, we refer to these instruments as “smile sheets” and often deride them in professional discussions. So why do we use smile sheets? The six most common reasons:
The ratings look valid. People who pay the bills to have their employees developed want instant results; they often want participants to like the experience. (Sometimes they use training as a cosmetic intervention to Improve morale.) End-of-course questionnaires provide quick answers. They fit in with the short-term mentality of some managers—”profits this quarter.” The professionals who staff courses also want immediate feedback, even if it is flawed. One of the severe limitations of end-of-course feedback is that it violates what we all know to be effective criteria of information exchange. In spite of that, trainers and facilitators often have an almost morbid preoccupation with wanting to know how participants reacted to courses. End-of-course questionnaires generate statistics with a pristine, truthful look, especially when the numbers come out of computers. This Is the GITO phenomenon: Garbage In, Truth Out. Believe it or not, this list of 26
What to Do Instead With all of these limitations,
posted by jay cross on 8/8/2001 | link
Preconditions for learning
I asked an astute fellow to tell me about his most meaningful learning experiences. He told me his most powerful learning came upon realizing that he really needed to know something...and that he didn't. He referred to this as the "On, shit" experience. Been there, done that. Can it be induced to encourage learning?
[5/26/2001 11:18:43 AM | jay cross]
"Viviance´s commitment to the successful educational experience of the learner is at the cornerstone of its corporate philosophy." Seven fundamental characteristics of our company´s "Education First" philosophy help ensure the audience has the highest quality learning experience: Education: Our focal point when we partner with you. Our first question is: "What knowledge content and skills do you need to transfer and to whom?" Then we begin our dynamic approach to deliver a world-class custom designed web-based education and learning solution. Communication: Information and knowledge should be free to flow. Using various online methods including forums, instant messaging, and chat tools, we strive to ensure that there are several pathways of communication within our web-based learning products. This communication structure melds together with the content, providing interaction between learner and instructor, and between the learners themselves. Motivation: Learning objectives need to make sense to the learner. The learner defines their goals and can create an educational scenario, and experience around it that is both positive and rewarding. Learning should be fun! Self-Exploration: There is more than one way to learn. We give the learners the freedom to go in the direction most appropriate for them while still giving them the needed guidance to achieve their educational goal. This allows them to find the knowledge they seek and need. As a by-product of this freedom, we understand that incidental learning may occur, thus enhancing the learner´s experience even further. Simulation: Learning from "safe" mistakes. Using highly accurate simulated environments, complex ideas and information can be conveyed efficiently and in a way that allows users to learn from their mistakes in a non-threatening environment. Think of it as a flight simulator for everyday learning. Customization: Meeting the learner´s needs. One shoe does not fit all. You need to provide your learners with the ability to choose their own pace and path in order to create the most rewarding learning experience. Globalization: To be global includes the ability to be local. In order to be defined as a true global provider, you must provide the local cultural awareness you need to service your clients worldwide.
The eLearning world according to Gartner
Where Is E-Learning Headed? It's global, governmental, easier to use, hosted, wireless, and up and down the value chain. As we've been saying for a year now, "Because enterprises have to view their partner's employees as its own, they should plan to provide e-learning and employee development -- including delivery and access -- for every key employee and enterprise."
eLearning Marketers, Wake Up!
Over the past six months, I've talked with the CEOs and/or marketing & sales people at Achieve Global, Andersen, Autodesk, Brainbench, Centra, Chasm Group, Cisco, Click2Learn, Communispace, Deloitte, Diamond Cluster, Digital Think, Docent, Element K, Forum, Generation 21, Global Knowledge, GP eLearning, Harvard Business School, IBM Mindspan, Intellinex, Isopia, Knowledge Mechanics, Knowledge Planet, KnowledgeWell, LeadingWay, Learnativity, Learnframe, McGraw-Hill, MindLever, NETg, OneTouch Knowledge Systems, Oracle, Pathlore, Powered, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Prime Learning, Provant, Quisic, Saba, Smartforce, SRI Learning on Demand, Sun Microsystems, TEDS, Thinq, Trelenor/ Norwegian Trade Council, Vcampus, VuePoint, and WBT Systems, and a bunch of their customers, too. I'd explain that I was gatheiring information for a white paper focused on the payback of implementing eLearning. Forbes had commissioned the study. The goal was to inform top management how organizations are using eLearning as a business tool to reduce cycle time, improve customer service and accelerate innovation. Our premise was that CEO don't care about training or learning or buzzwords like synchronous, LMS, and SCORM. They are, however, acutely concerned about results. I asked, "If the CEO of a major corporation walked into your elevator, and you had a forty-floor ride to get him or her turned on about eLearning, what would you say?" Four out of five responses would not have garbbed any CEO's attention. They failed to gear their message to the individual they were speaking with. Vendors are accustomed to talking with senior management. In the past, they didn't have to. Now that the price tag for enterprise eLearning can easily exceed a million dollars, everyone's interested. The CFO is interested in different aspects than the CIO, the line manager has a shorter timeframe than the CEO, and managers of training see things differently than managers of marketing. An astute vendor must tailor the message{s) to the prospect. Consider these differing points of view:
Invariably I'd also ask for customer success stories. I have read a four-foot stack of four-color "cases studies." Most dealt only with superficialities. No detail, no numbers, no meat. They jumbled benefits meant for different audiences. It's a shame the vendor cases are so poorly prepared, for past accomplishment is the best predictor of future success. Honest, comprehensive case studies conducted by third parties could pave the way for vendors who’ve served their customers well to replicate those experiences. Conversely, mediocre providers would have a tough time getting a positive assessment. Preparing cases is an area Internet Time Group is well positioned to do. In fact, we're in the midst of writing some now. If any worthwhile vendor was the moxie to invest in it, we'd love to take cases to a higher level -- to make them an honest and effective selling tool. posted by jay cross on 8/5/2001 | link
Here's a desperate marketing approach from Convene:
"Be one of the first to experience asynchronous Collaborative Web-Based Not only could you win $500, you'll join over 300 participants who have Wow, a whole five hundred dollars. Or, assume they get 100 takers. That makes the expected value of the win $5. Does Convene really think that people who put in an hour or two for $5 are the same people who make buying decisions for their organizations?
E-learning’s value depends on approach
by Elliott Masie I’ve had several intense conversations recently about the quality of e-learning programmes. People will often say: “But when will e-learning be awesome.” I believe we have to look at the field as an ever-improving art and science and place quality into that context. Web pages from five years ago are a joke when we look at them today, but then they were exciting and business enabling. Since then, we’ve learnt how to use the medium and have begun to understand the human response to technology. And, in the same way, e-learning is getting better and better. We have to consider several things when judging the quality of e-learning. First, don’t just compare e-learning to the classroom. Look at what it can do on its own, where it can reach people that will never get to the classroom and how it can change the process of how we share knowledge. For instance, a telephone call is never as good as seeing and hugging a good friend, yet that does not destroy its value and quality. Second, separate technology from methodology. Some of the constraints of e-learning are more in the technology arena, with the new processes of sharing media, such as voice and video, over the net. Let’s judge quality from a technology perspective and then also judge quality from the experience of a learning activity perspective. Finally, remember that quality may be cultural and generational. What one person gets excited about may be very different from another person of a specific age, position or culture. I love to ask what people really like about e-learning experiences and what they hope it will “grow into” in the years ahead.
MIT Technology Review: LESSONS E-LEARNED
Q&A with Richard Larson: A lot of my colleagues, who are otherwise impeccable scientists, make statements like "there is no substitute for face-to-face learning." I take that as a research hypothesis. Some might say, "We all know the on-campus experience is the best in the world." It's certainly the most expensive. The blackboard is basically an The typical brick-and-mortar university is used to teaching courses as a handcrafted thing. It's been used for centuries. That stagecoach doesn't work with this bullet train engine. To do this right, you have to invest up front in the kind of course students have come to expect. But you can go too far in that direction, too: all flare and no substance.
HBR: Time to Get Serious About Talent Management
Kristen B. Donahue If companies are serious when they say that people represent their most valuable asset, then it's high time they started managing that asset more aggressively--and more thoughtfully. Great talent management should not be delegated to the HR department. The ideas in this article are based on a panel discussion that took place this past May at the Burning Questions 2001 conference, a gathering of leadership practitioners and management experts, sponsored by Harvard Business School Publishing. The talent panelists were Teresa M. Amabile, Thomas H. Davenport, Helen Handfield-Jones, and Laurence Prusak. Well, duh.
from Word Spy this morning:
mixed reality = "blended" (special case) mixed reality (noun), an environment that combines elements of both virtual reality and the real world. "In a conceptual leap that goes even beyond the idea of virtual worlds, the --Denise Taylor, "Make an exhibit of yourself," The Boston Globe, April 12, 2001 Backgrounder
"The power of the image is in its metaphorical immediacy, in its almost frightening succinctness, in the succor it brings us as we try to understand. Understading is inherently simplification of a complex reality."
Dr. Roald Hoffmann, poet and Nobel laureate in chemistry
Good thinking
THIS MONTH IN RELEASE 1.0 Postmodern Knowledge Management By Kevin Werbach People constantly exchange information, the raw material of The fundamental problem is philosophical. KM suffers from the Postmodern KM avoids the deterministic view of knowledge that a postmodern approach to KM Companies and products covered include: To SUBSCRIBE to The conversation continues email list, please visit
Reconceptualizing Learning
We really don't understand how people learn. Marc Prensky's Digital Game-Based Learning lists these explanations:
There's more going on here than meets the eye. Learning is changing one's mind by adding new stuff, repudiating old stuff, or by making connections. But how does one change one's mind? Metaphors We Live By posits that all thoughts are relative. And most are expressed in words. This aligns with the popular wisdom that we learn from stories. The Mind's Past talks about the internal conversation always going on in our heads. Listen for a minute. Yeah, that's it. The book also describes a mediator between the brain and the mind called "the interpreter." Let's call the subconscious, autonomic brain simply "the brain;" it's attached directly to the senses. The conscious, aware portion of our gray matter, we'll call "mind." The brain gets sensations first. It rejects most of this sensory input and makes basic decisions about what to do next. Later, "the interpreter" creates a story to provide a rational explanation. The interpreter weaves together a plausible story to bullshit the mind into believing it's rational and in control. In fact, most decisions are made before they enter consciousness. Got that? Your don't make up your mind; your brain makes up your mind. Its interpreter spins yarns the way you do when recounting a dream. A lot more of the brain comes with mechanics "factory-installed" than we like to think. As Bernard Malamud has observed, "All biography is ultimately fiction." Gazzaniga says, "Autobiography is hopelessly inventive." Changing one's mind consists of convincing the interpreter that the facts of the matter or memories of the past or one's self-image or the rules of the game haved shifted. The changed interpreter puts a different spin on the stories it tells, for those stories must seem internally consistent. The stories must also maintain the fiction that the mind is calling the shots, not the brain. What might be the nature of this interpreter? Clearly, it needs an image of who its owner is and what the owner is capable of. I'll call this the secret resume, for like a printed resume, it's a very selective and self-serving sense of one's past. The interpreter also needs a worldview or meme library, the rules by which things operate. And the interpreter must retrieve memories, for this is the content of thinking. Changing either the secret resume, the worldview, or the memories changes the interpreter's stories. This is learning. The Mind's Eye tells us that "the brain is not primarily an experience-storing device that constantly changes its structure to accommodate new experience. From the evolutionary perspective it is a dynamic computing device that is largely rule driven; it stores information by manipulating the value of simple arithmetic variables We are a finely honed machine that has amazing capacities for learning and inventiveness. Yet these capacities were not picked up at a local bookstore or developed from everyday experience." They were, as the author says, "factory-installed." Our brains have a built-in macro library from which they select responses to environmental challenges. "We don't select sentences preformed, like Tickle-Me-Elmo dolls. Rather, we put together fragments to form the whole. So, too, with our thoughts. We think by selecting objects." Our memes are constructed from meme-objects, the grains that add up to a beach of thoughts. There's a hierarchy in learning, e.g. Bloom's taxionomy. To me, I think of changes to the heart (emotion-laden, deep inside, self-image), which primarily impact the secret resume. There are changes in the head (explicit = facts, implicit = memories), which are matters of facts and rules. And there are changes in the hands (tacit, manual skills, automatic functions) such as bowling or painting. [break. Next section to address how to effect change in heart, head, & hand.] posted by jay cross on 7/8/2001 | link
From: stephenlahanas@c...
Date: Tue Jul 3, 2001 7:09 pm Subject: Top 10 List For Facilitating Student Interaction 1 - Make the interactivity a required part of the course - specify 2 - Further require that half of the interactivity must be between 3 - Carefully focus the discussion arena by setting topic boundaries 4 - Be an active moderator - You're the instructor, this is still 5 - Support that further by designating "topic owners" (individuals 6 - Set Conventions for topic posting, (on the site and on your Top 10 List For Interactions: Web board feature configurations impact 7 - Set up an alternative navigation index for your topics. Listing 8 - Bury hidden treasures in the board - and tell the students that 9 - Don't drive yourself crazy if everyone doesn't participate - in- 10 - Use other tools to help supplement the experience: Chat, instant Copyright 2001 Mayacom, inc.
From: stephenlahanas@c...
Date: Wed Jun 20, 2001 9:00 pm Subject: Article - Top Ten Mistakes in Implementing Learning Solutions "Top 10 Mistakes in Deploying E-learning Solutions Mistake #10 "Researched to Death" - Fear of the unknown often leads Typically, at the end of a pure "discovery" phase, nothing has been Many necessary projects are stalled or killed as the diligent Mistake #9 "Feature Envy" Often, this mistake is a direct result of Mistake #8 "Family Feuds" E-learning tends to cross multiple domains A little healthy competition never hurt anyone, right ? Wrong. Putting together something as complex as an enterprise-wide e- Mistake #7 "No Raison d' etre" Why ? A simple question, but sometimes In most cases, the primary justification is a combination of cost Mistake #6 "It's Never Good Enough" - The Obession for Quality Like Education is an art and a science, we use methodology and panache I once taught with a technical trainer who was a professional How can we reproduce a "magical" classroom experience of any sort; Mistake #5 "Users or Learners?" The world of e-learning has fused Human factors and learner centricity must merge. What can happen Sometimes, neither the user or learner as such are directly Mistake #4 "Content is Content, right ?" In a word, no. The issue Content issues must be addressed at the beginning of any e-learning Mistake #3 "Solution Integration, we can fix it later" While content If you opt for small fixes you generally find those fixes tend to There is only one way to avoid this trap - choose an infrastructure Mistake #2 "What was this supposed to do?" Did anyone set clear goals Securing management or business support is not a one time effort - it Mistake #1 "Big Bang Chaos - Shifting paradigms and colliding The mistake most often made is "added entropy", when participants in Simplicity can make the difference between success or failure. All copyright 2001, Mayacom, Inc [e-learningleaders.com]
LMS selection, from ROI Leaders
Date: Thu, 05 Jul 2001 20:37:16 -0000 Not in any particular order: * How much do I have to spend, how stable is that budget ? * Can I do what I want without buying an LMS ? * Does what I want to do match what I really need to do ? * I am expected to generate revenue with this learning solution and * Are there any existing systems I need to replace - is integration * When, if ever, do I expect to deploy LO (learning Object) content ? * Do I need to have unique assessement and reporting capabilities ? * Who will run the project, who will run the system and what is their * What are the contigency plans if the LMS vendor goes under or * Do my people have the skillsets to handle this thing or do I need
David Gelernter, quoted in the NYT today:
"Working together, named files and hierarchical folders have turned modern desktop computers into electronic versions of a 1940 Steelcase file cabinet," he said. "We do the filing; we do the organizing; we do the retrieving. Why do we put up with it? How many of us wanted to grow up to be file clerks?" Fixing the file folder system might seem like an awfully small target for one of the most respected figures in computer science. But the issue and the design decisions that led to this current state of affairs are as fundamental to computing as they are intractable. And now Mr. Gelernter wants to sell us all a solution: Scopeware, a set of computing tools for helping information organize itself in ways that users can readily understand. The system, which made its debut in March, takes all the documents of a business (or, in a version still to come, of a single user) and works quietly alongside current software to organize every new document into a "stream" in the order the documents are created. Onscreen, the stream looks like a long row of icons receding into the past: word processing, e-mail, presentations, spreadsheets and more, identified by little symbols and a few words. Move the cursor over any document and a representation of it shows up in the lower right corner of the screen; a mouse click brings the full document up in its original form. The stream can be dipped into, and the documents sorted in a number of ways through powerful search tools. The Mirror Worlds team has designed the system to accommodate business computer networks, mobile laptops and hand-held devices, diverting the stream wherever it is needed. The effect of having everything in one place, Professor Gelernter says, is a new ease in finding individual documents that are now scattered among many applications. More important, he says, the stream forms a kind of narrative: it tells a story. "We sometimes forget that the basics of information management don't change," he said. "We think and talk and listen; we read and write and look at pictures. That was the essence of information management in the 13th century, and it still is today. Computers can put us in touch with the world and, more important, with ourselves." First we make our habits, then our habits make us.
Singing my P2P song...
Dan Gillmor: "Businesses are beginning to realize that ad-hocracies, typically small groups, are the place where some of the most creative thinking gets done. People out at the edges of organizations, communicating with each other and their counterparts at other organizations, inevitably find ways around corporate bureaucracies."
CIO eLearning Research Center
Links to many useful articles. "Ask the Expert" series by Harvi Syngh. Book reviews.
Message: 4, Digging Deeper
Date: Thu, 21 Jun 2001 19:49:17 +0200 From: "Trond Kristiansen" Subject: Resources on Learning Content Management Systems Hi all, I counted about 15 different LCMS and they are very different systems. Some of these systems have problems and are for sale, probably because it Resources: Managing Knowledge with Learning Objects. The Role of an e-Learning Content E-learning payoff is performance. Think organisationally but act Evaluating Learning Content Management Systems (LCMS), Peer3 White paper, Rules of the game. Learning content management systems promise to change the LCMS=LMS+CMS [RLOs] - How does this effect the learner? The Instructional Learning Content Management Systems. New technologies for new approaches E-learning Analysts Recognize Learning Content Management Systems, May 2001 "The Instructional Use of Learning Objects" (Online version) see: A Primer on Learning Objects, ASTD Learning Circuits by Warren Longmire Learning objects pioneers, ASTD Learning Circuits by Tom Barron
 Despite the NASDAQ downturn, a new technology trend is making its way into pundits and technology vendors' hearts: peer-to-peer (P2P) computing. The Gartner Group says P2P will “radically change business models.” Andy Grove, chairman of Intel, calls P2P “a revolution that will change computing as we know it.” And vendors such as Lotus, IBM and Hewlett-Packard are rushing alongside Intel to build P2P applications. Yet this type of computing and its repercussions on the IT community are still not understood by many people. How does P2P fit into the enterprise? What problems do CIOs have with P2P?
ASTD handouts , click download images, user: client, password: 1234, foler ASTD 2000 posted by jay cross on 6/15/2001 | link
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Jay
Martin Seligman introduces the concept of learned helplessness by describing a dog that's raised in a box with a glass top. After a while, you can take off the glass, but the dog doesn't try to get out. He's learned not to. 
This is remarkably close to the box formed by the famous challenge, "connect the nine dots." One of Frank Lloyd Wright's precepts was to "break the box," e.g. replacing solid 90o corners with glass ones. 
And so we come to context. A box is defined as much by what surrounds it as by the space inside it. In fact, there's always a whole lot more outside than in. To get a view of the box and its surroundings, the learner must hop up to a higher plane. A professor of mine in B-school called this "going up in the helicopter." Getting To Yes advises one to take a look from the balcony. The principle is to get some distance from the box, to see the box in its box. (The universe is a nested Russian doll.)
Around 4:00 pm, I drove down the hill to the Berkeley campus and visited the Education and Psychology Library. There I read The History of Instructional Design and Technology by Robert Reiser, published in two issues of Educational Technology Research & Development. One gem made this worthwhile:
