Had a little thought whilst driving home tonight..
Part of my role involves facilitating the Continuing Professional Development of a number of internal Learning Facilitators. I normally do this by facilitating some lunchtime-learning sessions, which to be quite honest receive a very poor response in relation to the number of facilitators we have on-site (part of this is due to operating a shift-pattern).
I’ve attended quite a few conferences and workshops this year and have gained a great deal from them, so I have hatched a cunning plan…
Book an offsite facility for a day with Wi-Fi access.Invite all Learning Facilitators to attend.Set up a Google Moderator series to allow attendees to choose some of the content for themselves.Invite all delegates to facilitate their own sessions (depending on the number of submissions these could be voted upon)Offer up a Flip Ultra camera (or something similar) in a prize draw to all attendees.Encourage delegates to set up a Twitter account prior to the un-conference and provide the support for them in doing this.Utilise Twitter and other Web 2.0 tools during the un-conference.
If you haven’t read this series to date it may be worthwhile doing so in order to set the context for this post…
Once I’d won the SMEs over (I’m still pinching myself to be honest) I invited 3 x local vendors to come and meet with me to discuss my idea and to see if they would be interested in participating in the procurement process. This was a huge advantage for both sides as it:
allowed me to sense check my ideas and proposed approachprovided the vendors with an opportunity to take a brief look around my organisation, observe some of the resources and channels that we currently use (and may well use to communicate the campaign resources) and ascertain whether they felt we could work together.
I’m pleased to say that at this stage all 3 vendors were keen to work with us and all of them commented on how refreshing it was to see a traditional subject such as compliance training having a radically different approach taken to it.
Having previously worked as a vendor I understood the complications and ‘quirks’ that can be associated with a tender process, so I was very keen (from both perspectives) to own a process that was as transparent, fair and simple as possible. Rather than wrestle with (or expect others to) the typical procurement portals that are often the bane of a vendors life I decided to use Google Docs (I can’t get into the habit of calling it Google Drive) to write and communicate my Request for Proposal (RfP) through.
This had the advantage of being:
freesimple to usemobile friendlyable to allow each of the vendors to ask any questions ‘within’ the document, thus negating the need for a procurement portal and allowing each of the vendors to see each others questions – and of course my responses – thus keeping the process as fair and transparent as possible.
Several of the vendors said that they seldom saw GDocs being used in this way and were welcoming of the approach.
In terms of what I included in my RfP I used a great deal of the advice contained in this post from Stephanie Dedhar along with my own previous experience as a vendor
Once I’d released the GDoc RfP I set up a f2f meeting at our offices to:
allow each of the vendors to come inask further questions in an open forumand also to provide them with another opportunity to look at some of our existing comms channels etc.
Again, the feedback I got from this was very positive with one of the vendors saying that it helped to confirm their interpretation of the RfP and removed any ambiguity.
At that point I:
sat backanswered questionsarranged some access to some of our portalsconducted a few Adobe Connect session to explain our internal collaborative platform to some of the vendorswaited…..
I did learn some lessons along the way with this approach, here they are:
Get your potential providers in early, way before you write the RfP – the conversation will inevitably help you shape your thinking.No matter how long you provide people with the opportunity to respond, somebody will be late.Include a ‘please let us know if you intend to submit a proposal by xyz date’ request. I didn’t, and as a result had a vendor drop out with only 1 week to go until final submission, despite having the best part of 2 months visibility of the project scope!!!
Keep on reading this series of posts to discover what happened after we’d received the proposals and what I’m calling the ‘end of the beginning‘
If you’d like to discuss how we may be able to work together to bring about a fundamental change in the way your organisation delivers its mandatory training or would like to advise on how you can maximise the effectiveness of your next tender process then please get in touch.
As I mentioned in a previous blog post, I intend to provide a brief synopsis of each chapter of ‘Designing mlearning‘, but more importantly I intend to answer the questions that Clark poses at the end of each chapter and then pose those same questions back to you ‘Dear Reader‘
Chapter 4 – The technology it’s not about
We start this chapter with a nod to the fact that the iPad (1) was announced during the writing of this book. Given that this is still considered a ‘recent’ book, this shows very clearly how dynamic this market is.
From looking forward we take a look back at a brief history of mobile devices commencing at the Palm Pilot, skipping ahead to mobile phones, through media players to smartphones. From there we review the advent of handheld games, tablets and recording devices, before acknowledging that by the time many readers pick up this book some of the descriptions will already be out of date.
We then take a look at a trend that gives a fairly clear indication of how things are going at the moment – “convergence”. More and more devices are providing a 1-stop shop for much (if not all) of the functionality that we used to associate with multiple devices.
Towards the end of the chapter we are reminded just how quickly this field is developing as Clark suggests that we may even be moving towards wearing glasses with a Heads Up Display - imagine that!
We finish off the chapter with these questions being posed (along with my responses):
How can you take advantage of any of the dedicated devices (media player, camera, PDA, phone)?I’m not sure that we really need to go out of our way to take advantage of the plethora of dedicated devices, after all our learners are already using them within their day-to-day lives to take pictures, record video, access the web, read novels etc. Given that dedicated devices are in my opinion “High Street” what I think we need to do is to tap into learner’s familiarity with them and start to drip-feed examples of how they can use them within a workplace environment. Why not model some good examples using dedicated devices? Often when I facilitate face-to-face activities, I make a point of recording audio feedback, video voxpops and photographs of interactivity using dedicated devices in order to model good practice for the attendees to (hopefully) follow.How can you capitalize the increasing ubiquity of the converged devices?Let’s be honest most organisations (even now) are not providing converged devices (read phones and tablets) to support learning programmes or ‘overtly’ to maximise performance. I believe they are providing them so that you have little or no excuse for not responding to emails! But let’s not let this worry us, instead let’s leverage the growing distribution of mobile devices for our own ends and start to offer resources, assets etc that can benefit from the functionality of the converged device.Have you considered the tradeoffs of providing (devices) versus supporting devices ?I guess the provision of devices ensures (to a certain degree) greater control and in turn ‘peace of mind’ (wrongly in my opinion) to organisations, but hey, if it increases the chances of mobile uptake then maybe it’s worth it? Of course, this approach no doubt brings significant expense with it in terms of providing the devices, however I’ve no doubt that it is easier to support 1 x device type as opposed to trying to support learners own devices. Of course allowing learners to use their own device means that they will be familiar with it and therefore more likely to use it and quite possibly less likely to need support, although the cost and logistics involved in trying to support multiple device types cannot be ignored.So folks, why not take a look at the questions above and provide your own responses in the comments below?
Since I started in my new role as a Learning Technologies Manager for Bupa International I’ve facilitated a number of ‘Lunch and Learn’ sessions for my colleagues within the HR team around a number of learning technology related subjects.
To date these have been:
‘elearning….. discuss’ – a 2 hour sessions which helped people to see ‘e’learning as being more than just traditional, ‘click next’ SCORM objects‘Getting Started with Mobile Learning’ – a 2 hour session which was essentially a dry run of my DevLearn 12 session‘Welcome Aboard’ – a 2 hour session centering around the use of technology within the onboarding / induction process
The latest ‘Welcome Aboard’ session was facilitated as an Alternate Reality Game. In order to add the context in which the game was being unknowingly played I referred to some research that I heard about at DevLearn.
Only problem is that there was no such research at DevLearn – it was lie, a misdirection, a bluff, an economical use of the truth….
To help me with this bluff I created the animation below using Powtoon which I played during the early stages of the session/game after I had prattled on about the DevLearn research ‘discovery’
It’s a cracking piece of software; cheap, intuitive, a great trial period.
Why not give it a whirl and let us all know how you get on?
It’s probably worth me expanding upon the deliberately vague title of this blog post before I go any further.
By ‘this‘ I mean ‘mobile’ learning.
By ‘another‘ I mean as we did all those years ago in the early days of ‘e’ learning. (admittedly I have no personal experience of those days, only anecdotal examples)
By ‘we’ve‘ I mean us in the L&D community. Both within the vendor community and the client community.
So what do I mean by all this?
During a recent meeting with some colleagues, I reflected upon the conversations that I have had with potential clients over the past 6 months with regards to the use of mobile technologies. With a very small exception (probably 2-3 out of approx 60 conversations) those conversations have revolved around the creation of ‘mobile learning’, which actually translated as the “shrinking down of desktop content to allow it to be viewed and interacted with on a mobile device“.
Very little, if any mention, of creating performance support resources…
No consideration of using the devices native functions I.e. camera, keyboard, GPS, voice recorder, to enhance the experience….
A heavy focus on the learner ‘learning‘ something from it, as opposed to the worker ‘enhancing‘ their performance from it (Hell, who needs to learn the London Underground routes if you’ve got the app in your pocket?)
And this is where I think we have got it wrong again!
We have used the blanket phrase ‘m-learning’ to describe the use of mobile devices to facilitate learning. Now to *us*, we acknowledge (at least I hope you do) that this can include using the device to (amongst other things)
Consume traditional self paced click next eLearning (yes of course there is a place for this)Listen to podcastsTake pictures of things to help us remember something in the futureEngage in online dialogue conversations with othersRecord audioDetermine your proximityThe creation of User Generated Content for othersCall for help!
Of course, with some degree of thought and design the above functions can (and probably should) be incorporated into many (I may even dare to say ‘all’) learning programmes, but in my opinion (based as I said on my conversations with many people on this subject) this simply isn’t the case.
Why?
Well I think the fact that we have used the term ‘m-learning’ which is not a million miles away from the term ‘e-learning’ (which let’s be honest, most people see as being click-next, self-paced stuff) hasn’t helped matters, I think we’ve inadvertently given the impression that it’s traditional eLearning on a mobile device has a part to play in it.
I also think that the recent hysteria over some eLearning authoring products and their ‘mobile readiness’ (which translates as traditional eLearning but outputted to HTML5 or a native app) hasn’t helped matters either
“Ooooo look! I can recreate my traditional self-paced, click-next stuff to work on a mobile device – I must be creating m-learning”
Well technically I have to concede
“Yes. Yes, you are”
but I feel that unless we start to make more noise about the fact that m-learning is more than shrinking down content and actually the ‘learning‘ part of it could well be redundant, we will miss another opportunity to really harness these technologies just as I guess we have done in the past……
Towards the back end of 2012, my organisation formally entered into a working relationship with Towards Maturity to help us better understand our Benchmark results and help us work towards creating an L&D strategy.
During one of those initial meetings Laura Overton made an almost throw away remark about a ‘Learner Audit’ (I’m not overly keen on the name, so we’ve labelled it as a Learner Survey) that she had undertaken some time in the past and that she was considering resurrecting as an offering.
Unlike the Towards Maturity Benchmark survey, which tends to rely on answers by those in an L&D role/perspective, the Learner Survey allows every single employee in the organisation the opportunity to comment on
how they access content that supports themfrom what devicesfrom what locationswhat methods and media they find most effectivewhether they are members of social networking siteswhether they are/would be willing to share their knowledge and practices with others etc
My eyes lit up at this point as I am about to assist in the development of our L&D strategy, so of course being able to hear from about our learners about their preferences, expectations, etc would be hugely beneficial.
Needless to say we took Laura up on her offer which as this press release explains made us the first organisation to do so.
If you’d like to hear more about the rationale behind the survey, here’s a short video of Laura explaining further.
In my next blog post in this series I’ll go into a little detail about the construction of the survey and how we worked together to provide a bespoke survey that would still allow multiple surveys to feed accurately into a wider-benchmark.
Since I started work in my new Organisation, I’ve facilitated a few Lunch & Learn sessions on the subject (unsurprisingly) of using technology to enhance and enrich what the HR team offer and how they offer it.
One of my sessions included this much publicised infographic
What happens in an internet minute
which generated a great deal of surprise and in turn, discussion – Great!
Prior to facilitating the session for the second time (I facilitate each session twice to hopefully attract as many attendees as possible) I reflected on the fact that the infographic references a ‘minute’; a period of time we are all familiar with, but one that let’s be honest is a bit too ‘abstract’ to the majority of people.
I then decided to approach the ‘time’ aspect with something that many people will be all-too-familiar with – the time it takes to commute to work.
Here’s a video that I put together to help to illustrate just how much is taking place on the t’internet as we all travel work (and on this particular occasion during my 38 minute daily cycle commute to work)
I’m not overly happy with the angle of the video, but to be honest it was a Flip camera ‘masking taped’ to my cycling to my helmet so I guess I should be happy that it didn’t fall off mid-commute!
I was fortunate today to participate in one of Jane Harts Masterclasses entitled ‘The use of social media in Learning’, but before I get on to that I desperately need to ask the following question
“What part of ‘Quiet Coach’ don’t people understand on Virgin Trains”?
I spent the best part of 2 1/2 hours this morning sharing a train carriage with Wayne and Waynetta Slob and their kids from hell!!!
Alarm Bells started to sound in my head when Waynetta went to the buffet car at 0817hrs and returned with 2 x cans of lager for Wayne (are Virgin even allowed to sell alcohol at that time?) The kids language was more colourful than Josephs amazing technicolour dreamcoat and from somebody who spent 16 years in the Army, believe me, I’m not shocked easily… but from toddlers!!!!!
At about 0900hrs I reached critical mass following Waynetta threat to knock Waynes “fu###ng head off” so I slapped the table and asked them
“what part of ‘Quiet Coach’ don’t you understand”?
To which I received the following response
“why don’t you fu###ng shut up”
Considering that my challenge to them had been the first words I had spoken since I got on the train several hours earlier, the irony of her response was not lost on me
so from the anti-social… to the social…
The rest of the day was far more enjoyable as a result of participating in an interactive, on-line masterclass facilitated by Jane Hart. Discussion took place around the 5 various types of learning that takes place within organisations, Jane Harts website does an excellent job of expanding on this subject.
Throughout the day Jane posed a number of questions relating to our understanding and use of social learning platforms, not in the usual verbal manner of posing questions, but via Twitter. It was then over to us to tweet our responses either within small groups or as individuals. I will update this post with the Twitter transcript as and when it is available.
I found this to be a really clever facilitation method as it not only allowed us to delve into the subject of social media and informal learning but allowed us all to get some quality ‘Twitter time’ under our belts.
I used my new Flip Ultra camera throughout the day to capture feedback from some of the delegates, uploaded the video to You Tube and then tweeted it back out to the group – all within an hour!
All in all, what started out as a nightmare of a day, turned into an extremely positive experience brought about by a well facilitated event, insightful information and great participants.
UPDATE – Jon Ingham has blogged about the workshop here.
As the end of a year approaches it’s time for the blogging fraternity to turn to the tried and tested ‘Top ‘this that and the other’ of 2012? and ‘My predictions for 2013? blog posts.
Far from me to turn down the opportunity to poke a little fun, here are my 2013 predictions / absolute cast iron guarantees…
My Twitter stream will continue to be bombarded with Instagrammed photos of hot beverages and food. Fortunately I use Tweetbot which allows me to permanently block hashtags. Unfortunately hardly anybody tags their #instagram photos.We will see a new word being made up within the L&D fraternity.Certain bloggers will still rant on about ‘killer apps / platform / piece of hardware. Why can’t things just be ‘good’, ‘effective’, ‘worth having’?Any podcast with ‘week’ or ‘weekly’ in the title is unlikely to ever be that, beyond its 5th episode.I will unsuccessfully use facts, data and research against gut feelings and anecdotes.2013 will be the year of mobile. Again.Apple will release an ever-so-slight modification of a product. Tech bloggers will work themselves up into a crotch-twitching, salivating frenzy reporting….. erm…. on the ever-so-slight modification.We’ll continue to have a L&D wide survey released approximately every 4 daysMany vendors will continue to ignore the native functionality of mobile devices whilst blowing their trumpets about how they are ‘leading’ in the mlearning world.A ‘free to use’ service will change its Terms and Conditions. Users will form baying mobs and burning torches will be seen.Certain ‘thought leaders’ in our field will use ever more bizarre diagrams to explore their concepts. It’s cos they’re clever see….
Whenever I meet people who are still in the tentative stages of considering utilising mobile technologies I always suggest that rather than initially invest in a bespoke mobile app or a mobile authoring tool, that they instead consider promoting existing apps to their workforce from within the various app stores.
I believe that this has several benefits
a ) almost zero cost to the organisation (the only cost I can see is the time to search for, identify and promote the apps to the workforce)
b) almost zero risk. The developer has taken the risk with the development of the app itself and as long as you have identified and then tested the suitability of any app, then the risks are reduced even further. The reason I said ‘almost‘ no risk, is that there is always the potential for the app to develop bugs or for the content to go out of date, which obviously has the potential to sour the experience for the learner and in turn for your plans to develop things further.
In order to help you with identifying suitable apps, I’m planning to start a ‘foot in the door’ section of this blog which will highlight some of the apps that I have identified as having the potential to add value to many workplace learner’s workflows and allow you to get your ‘foot in the door‘ with little or no risk/cost.
Some of them will be apps that my employer has produced; some will not.
Some will be free, others will have a cost attached.
Some of them I will have demonstrable experience of using personally and/or of others using, others will rest upon a gut feeling.
I will always try and add context behind my reason for choosing that app with some of them being apps that I have actually recommended to ‘real’ clients – as I’m sure you’ll appreciate I’ll be unable to reveal who the client is, but I will indicate that is was a ‘genuine’ recommendation.
A few months ago Don Taylor asked me to facilitate a session at the IITT’s Learning Live conference, a request that (as always) I jumped at for a number of reasons; there are the obvious ones:
An opportunity to meet up with colleuages who I have only ever interacted with onlineTo meet new people and further enhance my networkTo attend (for free!) some fantastic looking sessions facilitated both by people I know, trust and respect as well as some people who I do not (yet) knowTo showcase my skills amongst the wider industryBut there is an additional reason that may not be obvious and may not be everybody’s ‘raison detre’ for speaking at conferences and workshops and it is this It challenges me to ‘do‘ and ‘be‘ something different. As regular readers will know the opportunities for me to show my passion and interest in this area are restricted within my organisation so any opportunity to do so to a like-minded group of people is not only seized upon, but I guess it also acts as a testing ground for all the things that I am unable to do within my normal working day.Not only do I want the content of the session to resonate with the attendees who have (very often) paid good money to attend these conferences, but I also want the audience to leave with some additional ideas as to how to facilitate sessions and workshops in a different manner, a ‘meta’ session within a session if you like. I always find that a reliable way of doing this is to add a great deal of interactivity within the session and in particular within the navigation of the session. Now this can be a little tricky to do as you are essentially stepping away from the linear type of presentation that we all know, that is easier to put together and to a large degree is ‘safe’. I have in the past even managed to tell a story using a non linear approach and allowing the audience to choose wether they wanted the beginning, middle or end bit and in what order – and it worked!!!For Learning Live I have once again chosen to take a non linear to the session but this time I have decided (or as I have never done this before it may be accurate to say ‘gambled’) to take the navigation off the screen as I have previously done and bring it physically into the classroom, but to then take any decision that the audience makes and put it back onto the screen…… Well actually it isn’t and if you’re attending my session at Leaning Live then you’ll see (fingers crossed) how it all works – who knows it may give you some ideas in the future???As a little clue as to how I’m going to work the navigation aspect here is a short video that I have made to ‘set up’ my forthcoming session
….Don’t fall asleep on me; for a change this is going to be something H&S related that was fun, engaging and memorable. (you heard it here first folks)
My organisation is understandably H&S focussed and always strives to support initiatives such as the recent European Health & Safety week, despite maintaining a keen focus on H&S, regardless of any external initiative. However this year my boss suggested to our Compliance Department that perhaps we should do something ‘different’, alongside the more traditional email/intranet/poster etc campaigns in relation to the importance of maintaining equipment.
This is what he came up with…
Whilst the video clip doesn’t show it too well, each of the tricks had an underlying safety related theme such as:
Not undertaking tasks you aren’t trained to do (a cash in an envelope trick)Checking equipment thoroughly (using a piece of PPE that went from being serviceable to unserviceable… whilst an audience member was wearing it! along with the guillotine trick that you can see in this clip)Following instructions clearly (a simple hand grasping trick, which didn’t provide the desired (safe) outcome)
The feedback from the multiple shows that took place around site (to fit in with working patterns/geography) was very positive with comments such as
“refreshing” “memorable” “fun“
being in great abundance with the most obvious sign of approval being that people were arriving ahead of the performance times and were even phoning us to ask why the magician hadn’t been yet….. can you honestly say that your learners have ever had that response to a Health & Safety event?
This whole approach fits in with a ‘one liner’ that @larshyland mentioned at the last eLN event “think campaign, not course”
Think about it..
Many thanks to Constantia Artiste Management for allowing this footage to be used in this blog.
Lisa Johnson shares her teams success of delivering training to over 7000 people who are scattred throughout the length and breadth of the UK, with a team of only 5 people. Here’s how they’ve done it….
(listening time 22mins)
Subscribe to the podcast in iTunes
Shownotes
WebEx
The Charity Learning Consortium
BT Dare2Share project
Lisa had asked me to consider the duration of my podcasts as she had found anything 30mins+ to be too long. This married up with additional feedback I had received so we decided to ‘rattle through’ with a 20 minute(ish) podcast, which I think works quite well – but what do you think?
Would you have rather Lisa and I discussed things in a greater details but with a longer duration?
Over the past 18 months, I’ve had a number of conversations with various people from around our industry as well as outside of it on the subject of ‘going it alone‘, ‘setting up my own business‘, ‘escaping the rat race’ – whatever you want to call it!
First and foremost, I’ve always been flattered that these people have thought that I had ‘something’ that others would be willing to enter into a contract with me to obtain.
Secondly, I’ve always admitted to those people that I have a fear and a dread of leaving safe and secure roles to enter into what I perceive as a more risky world of the ‘self employed’.
However, I now realise that even full time employment in established organisations is still fraught with risks and that anybody – and I’m probably including you, Dear Reader – who doesn’t have a back-up plan or a safety net of some description is probably not doing themselves any favours.
That’s why I’ve decided to take Tayloring It to a slightly different place than I had originally intended when I first started blogging 3 years ago.
I’ve decided to start up my own small consultancy ‘Tayloring It’. Before you ask, “No“, I haven’t left my current role and nor is the writing on the wall - I’m probably happier in this role than I have been in any role since I left the Army in 2006. But that doesn’t mean I can’t start establishing contacts along with developing a portfolio of work and business accumen just in case my world looks different in 12, 24 or however many months in the future. Plus, I’m pretty sure I can help some people/organisations with what they’re trying to achieve too – without it interfering with my day job.
My plan is to offer down to Earth advice on the subject of Learning Technologies and their application in today’s work place.
This advice won’t be based on past glories from years ago or from being a member of elitist Industry ‘think tanks’ – No! – My consultancy will be based upon recent and current experience of deploying learning technologies and the associated aspects within conservative and risk averse industries such as the Nuclear, Rail and Financial sectors.
Recent experience within the eLearning vendor industry has also provided me with fantastic opportunity to become involved in a large number of industries, organisations and projects, the experience from which has only added to my own workplace experiences.
My website is currently being built by a fantastic supporter of my idea, Zak Mensah and will be launched in the next couple of weeks explaining how I might be able to help you out in more detail, but in the meantime here’s a short explanation which will no doubt feature on the website:
Tayloring It is a consultancy that works with individuals and organisations to practically apply technology as a solution to real-world challenges. It could be large scale projects or supporting everyday tasks, but our team has successfully created new approaches that maximise the use of technology while actually saving money/reducing spend. We enhance communication, learning and performance in the workplace, focusing on outputs not inputs. There are no other services like ours.
Tayloring It aims to change the face of learning technology in practice, one solution at a time.
I’ll be attending both days of Learning Technologies Conference & Exhibition 2013 and will be armed with my rather natty business cards
Tayloring It business card
so if you’d like to find out more about what my plans are the future, why not track me down, have a chat and grab a business card?
Alternatively, if our paths don’t cross, my details are on the card above.
“Yes” in so far as it is about introducing the concept of mobility into your L&D approach…
…. and “No” in so far as it’s not about a lengthy, decision riddled, strategic approach, it’s about simple, pragmatic approaches that you can adopt (and indeed may already be doing) that can help you get your foot in the door, prior to moving onto other things.
Most of the slides used in the screencast below were inspired by the JISC Mobile infokit by Doug Belshaw – so thanks to Doug and JISC for providing the inspiration for this.
I was speaking on the telephone with the fantastic @juliewedgwood on the subject of my progress with using learning technologies since attending LT10, when she suggested that @DonaldHTaylor may be interested in the story as a potential session for LT11… I joked about this…. mulled it over…. dropped Don an email….
… and so it came to pass that at 1400hrs on Day 2 of Learning Technologies 2011 I found myself co-facilitating a session entitled ‘Taking the next steps‘ with @simbeckhampson
I remembered the presentations at LT10 being broadly broken down into 2 types:
The sage on the stage with a pocket full of Bullet Points.And the ‘guide by your side’ with a pocketful of interaction and activities.
It will probably come as no surprise to you to hear that the content of the latter still resonates with me today and indeed Julie Wedgwood (who has become a friend and has delivered that same session back into my organisation for me) falls into that category.
It was that same impact that I wanted to have on those delegates who were kind enough to attend my session at LT11. Here are the simple steps that I took in planning and preparing my session.
Given that my session was about my ‘journey’ over the past 12 months I thought it would fit quite nicely into a calendar format.I identified 12 tools that I had used over the preceding 12 months and slotted 1 of these into each month, which then formed the basis of a PowerPoint deck.I asked my friend Sam, to create a desktop calendar from my PPT slides and then ordered 100 of them
I added some autotweets to each of the slides order to feed the #LT11UK Twitter backchannel.Given the target audience for my session I anticipated that many of them might not have a Twitter account (not yet anyway!), so I set up a Text Wall (courtesy of @xlearn) to allow non-Tweeters to experience participating in a back-channel.I realised that as I had only 25 minutes to cover a 12 month period that I would not be able to cover each of the 12 months, so I created a slidecast using Slideshare which allowed me to cover each of the 12 months in greater detail due to the lack of time pressure. Here it is:
At that point it was time to put everything in the laps of the Gods and as Nike would say
The footage can be viewed here (please not that is appears that this site is still being edited (at least I hope it is) but you’ll get the idea)
The actual presentation went as I had anticipated, however the feedback I received be it face-to-face, via the backchannel or peoples blogs was phenomenal and quite humbling. I had never thought for a second that such a ‘simple introduction’ to Learning Technologies would have pushed so many peoples buttons. Some people have commented upon the unusual, non-linear, delegate-driven presentation style that I used, others have mentioned how passionate I was…
… whatever the reason, the key factor for me was that people enjoyed it and gained some small measure of motivation of it. I wish you all the very best for your future implementation of Learning Technologie and if I can be of any help or assistance then please don’t hesitate to contact me.
On a final note a BIG “Thank You” to Julie Wedgwood for being the catalyst to me speaking at LT11 and to Don Taylor for taking a ‘punt’ on me.
Did you attend my session?
What (if anything) did you take away to action?
How is the action progressing?
Why not provide your responses in the comments box below?
It appears that US conferences have a slightly different view of accepting vendors as speakers compared with the UK conference circuit, which meant that following my submission of a proposal to speak at DevLearn 2012 I was pleasantly surprised to be accepted as a speaker at this years conference. (note: I am no longer working within a vendor environment, but fortunately my new employer is supporting me in meeting my commitment and of course to attend the wider conference activities).
Of course I’m excited to speaking at such a renowned conference but I have to admit that I’m more than a little intrigued by Neil Lasher’s blog post comparing the US to the UK conference circuit – I guess I’ll be able to take a look for myself soon!
In preparation for my session, I’ve put together a short video that I’m hoping attendees will watch prior to attending the session (previous experience at an eLN event demonstrated that the take-up of this approach was woefully low!) therefore maximising the precious face-to-face that we will have during the session. In the meantime, why not take look at the video yourself (it’s the first movie I’ve created on my Macbook using iMovie) and leave your responses in the comments section below.
Regular readers will know that I ‘moonlight’ as the Social Media correspondent for an industry-wide communications channel called Nuclear TV. (although I have now started calling myself Social Media and Technologies correspondent because……. well, because I can)
I recently had the Pullizter-worthy idea to conduct a number of TV reports on the use of Learning Technologies and Social Media within other industries, businesses and corporates.
In order to generate interest in the project I put out a tweet asking for willing interviewees and was contacted by Laura Overton from Towards Maturity.
Here’s the chinwag that we had….
If ‘you’ feel that ‘you’ have a story that you would like to share with others relating as to how your organisation is using learning technologies to add value to the business, (particularly where you have used them in a regulated, compliance driven market) then why not drop me a line.
The interviews will be hosted on the NLTV channel as well as this blog, if the interview is less than 15mins then I will place it on YouTube and you will also be provided with the edited footage and separate mp3 file for your own use.
Tomorrow I’ll be participating in Day 1 of a 2-day online activity entitled the Virtual Learning Show.
Here’s why I’m getting involved:
The titles and content of the sessions interest me (although I’ve been let down in the past in the gap between what was promised in a synopsis and what was delivered in the event itself)I’m interested to see ‘how’ some of the ‘big names‘ facilitate their sessions as I’m always up for stealing a few ideas!If I’m brutally honest though, what I’m really interested in is whether it’s feasible to run a days worth of online sessions. Admittedly they’re not back-to-back sessions, but my experience in the past has always been that of my ‘attention wandering’ towards the end of an hours session…..
How will I cope with multiple sessions over a day?
Am I the only one who finds even the *best* online sessions difficult to engage with beyond 45 mins?
A few months ago I wrote this blog post which centred around a learner could tell that they were at a ‘just in time training’ moment. I won’t reiterate the entire blog post here as you can always go back and read it here.
After writing that blog post I started to put together a mindmap with ideas as to some ‘triggers’ that could initiate ‘just in time’ support. I put a tweet out asking if anybody fancied collaborating on the map and unsurprisingly a number of people volunteered to contribute (don’t you just love the way these tool, foster and promote this type of one-click collaboration).
Unfortunately I then forgot all about the mindmap until Clarke Quinn‘s recent blog post, so Dear Reader here is the mindmap that a few of us collaborated on over the balmy Summer of 2011 (you may need to zoom in/out or expand to full screen to view properly).
I’ve also made the map a ‘wikimap’ which means that anybody can make additions to it (hint, hint)
During the early part of 2009 my organisation made the decision to bring its ‘self-paced’ elearning back ‘in house’ after a number of years of outsourcing.
The interview below was conducted earlier this month to celebrate 12 months of the system being ‘live’.
The interview was then broadcast over the info-screen system that we have around our site in order to celebrate the efforts of everybody involved, to maintain the profile of elearning and to provide a glimpse of what the future may have in store for us…
During the interview I mention some research that I have done into the use of Learning Technologies within schools, HE & FE, a real eye-opener for me was when I attended @jamesclays Mobile Learning Bootcamp.
It is my intention to give a little more detail over some of the modules we have created in forthcoming blog posts.
Towards the back end of 2012, my organisation formally entered into a working relationship with Towards Maturity to help us better understand our Benchmark results and help us work towards creating an L&D strategy.
During one of those initial meetings Laura Overton made an almost throw away remark about a ‘Learner Audit’ (I’m not overly keen on the name, so we’ve labelled it as a Learner Survey) that she had undertaken some time in the past and that she was considering resurrecting as an offering.
Unlike the Towards Maturity Benchmark survey, which tends to rely on answers by those in an L&D role/perspective, the Learner Survey allows every single employee in the organisation the opportunity to comment on
how they access content that supports themfrom what devicesfrom what locationswhat methods and media they find most effectivewhether they are members of social networking siteswhether they are/would be willing to share their knowledge and practices with others etc
My eyes lit up at this point as I am about to assist in the development of our L&D strategy, so of course being able to hear from about our learners about their preferences, expectations, etc would be hugely beneficial.
Needless to say we took Laura up on her offer which as this press release explains made us the first organisation to do so.
If you’d like to hear more about the rationale behind the survey, here’s a short video of Laura explaining further.
In my next blog post in this series I’ll go into a little detail about the construction of the survey and how we worked together to provide a bespoke survey that would still allow multiple surveys to feed accurately into a wider-benchmark.
If you’ve not already read my previous blog posts ‘Getting Beyond Bullet Points (visuals only)’, ‘Getting Beyond Bullet Points (with audio), Bringing in the BackChannel and The Learners Voice then I’d strongly suggest having a read of them before you read any more of this post.
Why?
Well for 2 reasons really:
1. The earlier posts will provide you with the context behind this post.
2. You will notice in the the earlier posts I suggest that whilst a modern, bullet-point free, visually rich presentation is certainly very engaging and less cognitively challenging for any learners, this approach certainly falls down when you distribute the slides on their own after the event.
Essentially all the learner is left with is a collection of pretty slides, which without the context that your narrative provides may fall short of it’s intended purpose. I mentioned that an audio recording of your ‘live’ presentation can be coupled with your slides to provide that important narrative, possibly utilising Slideshare to synchronise the various elements.
The second of this series of posts coupled visuals with a ‘non-live’ audio recording. The benefit of this was that I could keep the duration fairly short, improve the quality of the recording and stick to the ‘script’ – Of course, that also meant that any questions that were asked during the live session are lost to the learner and that any interesting digressions are not included.
To illustrate this point the audio recording below was recorded live at my LSG session. The audio was taken from my lapel mic, into the audio mixing desk and then directly into my Zoom mp3 recorder.
(listening time 59 mins)
Subscribe to the podcast in iTunes
Upon reflection, I’m not sure that I would ever use this type of audio as a learning resource. I feel that the lulls throughout the recording (when the attendees were undertaking group work) would be off-putting to a listener and only serve to make the recording longer, although of course those silences could be edited out.
I also feel that the duration of a ‘live’ recording would be naturally longer than a ‘clinical’ scripted recording, again I feel that the shorter the resource, the more likelihood of a learner accessing it.
But what do you think, would you rather listen to the live, uncut, raw recording?
Would you prefer the scripted, shorter version?
Or would you actually prefer to have both resources made available so that you can make your own choice?
Don’t forget, this is Part 5 in a series of posts surrounding my LSG11UK session.
Part 1 – Getting Beyond Bullet Points with visuals only
Part 2 – Getting Beyond Bullet Points with visual and audio
Part 3 – Bringing in the backchannel
Part 4 – The Learners Voice
Part 5 – Getting Beyond Bullet Points live recorded podcast
As I mentioned in my previous blog post, I intend to provide a brief synopsis of each chapter of ‘Designing mlearning‘, but more importantly I intend to answer the questions that Clark poses at the end of each chapter and then pose those same questions back to you ‘Dear Reader‘
;
Chapter 1 – Overview
OK, so I’m off to something of a false start here as I’ve just realised that there are no questions asked of ‘The Reader’ at the end of this short introductory chapter, but we are provided with a list of very realistic and pragmatic situations in which a range of ‘everyday’ roles and occupations can/could/do harness the benefits of a mobile device to increase their performance and value.
And guess what?
Only one of the examples is to undertake a compliance ‘course’! This (thankfully) fleeting mention of a ‘course’ provides me with a warm, fuzzy feeling that the rest of the book won’t be trying to convince me of the benefits of shrinking down desktop learning onto a smaller screen.
He also provides us with a definition for mlearning that he admits the eLearning Guild mobile learning research team struggled to come up with:
“Any activity that allows individuals to be more productive when consuming, interacting with, or creating information, mediated through a compact digital portable device that the individual carries on a regular basis, has reliable connectivity, and fits into a pocket or purse”
(eLearning Guild 360 Mobile Learning Research Report, 2007)
He finally reminds us that the pace of change in this area is so fast that any suggested, specific solutions would be unlikely to stand the test of the publishing process time, so instead explains what the book is really about; preparing the reader to take advantage of the mobile revolution.
Craig is joined by podcast panel regular Kate Graham along with some new voices which belong to Mandy Randall-Gavin and Niall Gavin. Today they are chatting about their recent journey into the…… “Blogosphere”!
If you haven’t read this series to date, it may be worthwhile doing so in order to set some context.
Having decided to commit to deploying the survey, Towards Maturity and myself started to create the question bank that our employees would be asked to respond to. Laura Overton already had a significant foundation for this survey so as a result it was more of a process of tweaking some of the questions to be able to the language that my organisation uses.
I took the decision early on to allow the survey to be undertaken anonymously, with the ability for respondents to enter their contact details should they wish to contacted by L&D to follow up on any of their responses.
As I’m sure you’ll appreciate there is a commercial agreement in place between my organisation and Towards Maturity, so I will not be posting the 23 specific questions, however they fell broadly into the following areas:
Demographic informationHow people acquire info to do their jobHardware people useBYOD related questionsWillingness to share with othersFormal and informal methodsRating of currently available methods/tools/platforms etcBarriers
It was important that we didn’t alter the actual questions or response types themselves as our survey results will be feeding into a benchmark study in much the same way as the Towards Maturity Benchmark study, however there were some occasions where it was logical to amend the wording to some of the response options in order to provide clarity such as:
Using organisational roles instead of the default role optionsUsing organisational department names instead of the default optionsReferring to our LMS, intranet and internal collaboration platform by name as opposed to generic titles.
All in all, the questions do a great job of gathering hard facts and data in order to help inform our L&D strategy and next steps.
In my next blog post, I’ll explain how we went about marketing and promoting this survey ahead of the official launch
During the early part of 2009 my organisation made the decision to bring its ‘self-paced’ elearning back ‘in house’ after a number of years of outsourcing.
The interview below was conducted earlier this month to celebrate 12 months of the system being ‘live’.
The interview was then broadcast over the info-screen system that we have around our site in order to celebrate the efforts of everybody involved, to maintain the profile of elearning and to provide a glimpse of what the future may have in store for us…
During the interview I mention some research that I have done into the use of Learning Technologies within schools, HE & FE, a real eye-opener for me was when I attended @jamesclays Mobile Learning Bootcamp.
It is my intention to give a little more detail over some of the modules we have created in forthcoming blog posts.
As I mentioned in a previous blog post, I intend to provide a brief synopsis of each chapter of ‘Designing mlearning‘, but more importantly I intend to answer the questions that Clark poses at the end of each chapter and then pose those same questions back to you ‘Dear Reader‘
Chapter 2 – The Details
In this chapter Clark shares a small exercise he undertakes when speaking on the subject of mobile devices, in which he allows people to acknowledge that cell phones, PDAs, iPods are ‘mobile learning devices’. I have to say that I’m surprised that there is anybody left on the surface of the planet that wouldn’t recognise those devices as mobile learning devices and wonder whether that is an exercise that may have lost its impact since the publishing of the book?
Some blisteringly high figures are shown as to how many hours a day the average American spend accessing the mobile web (and let’s not forget that these figures are 2-3 years old!!)
Next we take a look at, and dispel, some popular misconceptions around mlearning including (amongst others) such classics as
“we can’t provide mobile devices”
“courses on phones doesn’t seem like a good idea” (the response to which is thankfully used to introduce performance support)
“mlearning is limited to smartphones”
We then take a look at the business case for mobile learning and Clark explains that he believes that it should be the role of the learning function to take on the role of designing mobile performance – a point which I disagree on.
I believe that it should be the function with the clearest understanding of mobile learning and greatest passion to succeed that should take it on. In my previous organisation I spent the last 12 months as a member of the Comms team driving forward the organisations understanding of what mlearning was, wasn’t and how it could add value. I even pitched to the L&D team themselves and was met by some of the misconceptions that are included in this chapter. So I’m far from convinced that L&D should be the only potential champion of this.
We finish off the chapter with these questions being posed (along with my responses):
How many mobile employees are you supporting?This question raises an interesting point in my mind which is “what is a mobile employee”? Surely, unless you eat, sleep and live in your work environment then you are ‘mobile’? Admittedly there are some roles (such as mine) that have a very overt mobile nature to their role and as such attract the term ‘mobile employee’, but surely we should start to consider the effectiveness and value that all employees can add if they can maximise their mobility? Anyway, to answer the question we deploy 43 smartphones throughout the organisation.How widely distributed are mobile devices across your employee population?43 of ‘em, making about 30% distribution.What are the opportunities for improvement in mobile worker performance?Being able to complete web forms for various parts of our processes from mobile devices as opposed to Office docs from lap/desktops. Accessing client data immediately prior to a meeting. Accessing of network based data via VPN What are the benefits of mobile access to content for the employee population at large?Flexibility of working arrangements. Maximising ‘desk time’ by better utilising ‘dead time’ i.e. travelling, waiting for meetings to start etcPotential for less stress as they can call up info ‘as and when needed’ as opposed to waiting for ‘desk time’ So folks, why not take a look at the questions above provide your own responses in the comments below?
I think I’m fairly safe in saying that regardless of what organisation you are in, your employees are just as much at risk of having an accident or an ailment as the next person.
So of course the ability for them to be able to respond accordingly is in everybody’s interest. I’m sure there’s some form of ‘law’ that states that employers should have suitably trained people and that’s all well and good, but how likely is it that that person will be ‘on the scene’ as it happens? When did that person last undertake that treatment for ‘real’ or under assessment?I’m certainly not saying that those roles aren’t important, but why not augment that role by providing First Aid training / performance support to ‘all’ via their mobile devices?
If your employees are as prone to slips, trip, falls, cuts, grazes, (and worse) as the rest of us mere mortals then you’ve got a wonderful opportunity to ‘get your foot in the door‘ and prove the worth of performance support via mobile devices.
Why not take a look at these apps and consider whether you might want to direct your colleagues to them?
First Aid by British Red Cross (iOS) – £FREE
First Aid by British Red Cross (Android) – £FREE
(I have actually downloaded and used this app myself, check out the app store reviews for my thoughts)
Inevitably there will be some people who do not have a mobile device and will bemoan the fact that you are offering their colleagues who do have a mobile device something that they themselves are unable to benefit from, or they will complain over the fact that the apps cost money – don’t let this put you off.
Simply tell them to carry on using whatever tool or process they have always used – simples!!!
And you know what? Even if people don’t opt for these apps, you may have just sewn the seeds for them to look for an alternative….
….because earlier this week Lesley Price and I both tweeted about the same subject within an hour or so of each other. This was the thought that was running through my mind as I was driving home a few days ago, which I subsequently tweeted about…
Later on that evening Lesley tweeted this
This led to an exchange of tweets between us, which resulted in Lesley being kind enough to share an experience with me via this email.
A couple of years ago… I fell down stairs and sprained my ankle really badly. I had to be at a Technology Conference organised by Becta as I was facilitating a table…. Natalie, my daughter took time off work to drive me. She sat on the table I was facilitating…. even although it was an educational technology conference and she was a primary school teacher, she had no idea of the language and jargon that was being used. It was almost like the Emperors New Clothes and she was the child watching from the side lines. She sat all morning and the first part of the afternoon taking it all in. She then just said…. I have no idea what you are all talking about, what does Social Media mean? I typed that into questions that were coming from the floor… Facilitator picked it up and came to talk to her. She was youngest person in the room and just said… “now that I know what it means…I can tell you I use SoMe all the time…I just don’t see what all the fuss is about, that is my life! Why all the discussion??? Why don’t you just get on with it??”I have just talked to her again about it this evening and she still remembers the occasion… and still does not understand the facination by oldies. SoMe is part of her life…. she is not into Twitter, doesn’t see value in it. If you look at profile of average user of Twitter I can understand that. She uses FB, FB chat, skype , skype chat and txt all the time. Sometimes using more than one at once… makes for interesting conversations lol!!I am trying to persuade her to start blogging… she has wonderful ideas. Although she teaches reception she also runs Computer Club for Girls with Yr 6 girls. When the Tsunami and Japanese earthquake story started breaking, she put BBC news on her interactive white board and had it running all day as her reception class were interested in the live commentry that was coming through and bombarded her with questions. She doesn’t close down social networking when she is teaching, not that she spends any time on it, it just runs in the background, the kids are now used to ‘silly noises’ that come from her laptop and tell her she when she has a message! So kids completely understand SoMe… just don’t call it that…. they see it as normal… why are the rest of us making such a fuss about it instead of getting on with it!!So my question to you ‘Dear Reader’ is are we right, or are we waaaay off the mark?Is the ‘social’ holding things up due to it’s ‘connotations’?Should we just be referring to media, learning, networks etc and work under the assumption (a dangerous thing I know) that the ‘social’ is inherrent.Why not let me know your thoughts in the comments box below?
Regulars Twitter followers will know the fun and games I’ve had since October of last year with my daily Peacehaven – London commutes to undertake a 6 month contract.
Since then I’ve picked up the book ‘Remote – Office Not Required’ and have been (rather ironically) dipping in and out of it on my commutes into London.
Over the next few posts I plan to share with you some elements of the book, if you simply can’t wait, you can find it here. (Amazon UK store)
….wonder it is destined for anywhere other than the bin?
Well that was exactly what went through my mind when I was preparing my ‘take away’ calendars for my Learning Technologies 2011 session.
The desktop calendars had been designed to provide the attendees with a very ‘loose’ roadmap to assist them in implementing Learning Technologies into their role/workplace and were placed on the tables as a ‘freebie’ take away.
I have often wondered how many people took the calendars out of politeness and were ultimately destined for the bin, so you will appreciate how chuffed I was to receive this email from Lisa Johnson.
You will be pleased to hear that your desk calendar is being put to good use. Before I re-ordered it from Mar to Apr I realized I hadn’t looked at blogs so I made the effort to set up a blog page in WordPress! I just need to get the creative cap on and consider how I am going to use it. Now that we are in April and on podcasting, I’ve had our Director record a webex presentation. He was delivering an all staff meeting in London and for those staff that couldn’t make it we recorded it and sent it out at the same time. It’s the first time we have used the technology for communications and it’s been well received with staff feeling connected and seeing the Director being more accessible.
I’d like to thank Lisa for providing this feedback and hope that she’s continues to let us all know how she is getting on with using the resource.
Which brings me to you Dear Reader…
Did you attend the session? If so, have you had any success in implementing any of the suggestions?
If you didn’t attend, have you got any tips or suggestions for ensuring that your take-away resources make it beyond the bin?
Yet again Twitter has provided me with a CPD opportunity. The other day I spotted a re-tweet by Steve Wheeler (@timbuckteeth) relating to an Open Course on Personal Learning Environments, Networks and Knowledge.
Now I believe that I have been operating within a PLE/N for approx 8 months now (since my attendance at the Learning Technologies Conference in Jan 2010), I had just never labelled it as such or realised what I was involved in. Steve Wheelers tweets during his ‘European Tour 2010'! brought my attention to the subject.
Subsequent research has revealed the subject to be a little ‘academic’ for my poor brain, so I have decided to enrol on the open course to discover a little more about the subject.
That’s my aim for Learning Technologies this year.
I’ve spent the last couple of years attending/speaking at the Learning Technologies conference but if I’m honest, I haven’t really taken the time to dig into the exhibition as much as I should have done.
This year is different.
This year I will actually be participating in the exhibition myself, so armed with that physical immersion and the fact that I don’t have access to the conference upstairs, I will be spending some quality time looking around the various exhibitors in the hope of spotting something ‘innovative’.
So how do I define ‘innovative’?
Well to be honest I haven’t got a definition, but I have got a gut feeling. A few weeks ago, I was engaged in an exchange of tweets within my network of tweets around what innovation was and it became quite clear that people had very or subtly different definitions – and why wouldn’t they?
The sending of automated text messaging to learners ahead of an event may in some people’s eyes seem innovative, however to others it’s ‘old school’.
Many of us may see Augmented Reality as innovative, but military aircrew, in particular pilots, will tell you that Head Up Displays (HUDs) have been augmenting their reality for many, many years.
I’m definitely more open this year to seeing something out of the ordinary and a few vendors have already made some interesting statements about what they will be unveiling; but I’ll wait until I’ve seen it for myself before giving my post-event thoughts within this blog.
What I’m pretty sure of is that another rapid authoring tool, LMS or ingeniously ‘tarted up’ next button won’t be getting a mention.
If you’re heading down to the conference, what are you looking for?
I have been aware for some time now as to the benefits of social bookmarking and in particular the Web 2.0 tool, Delicious.
Regular readers will know that during a recent un-conference for a group of my organisations Learning Facilitators, I introduced them to Delicious and encouraged them to use the tool to provide their learners with an opportunity to continue their learning journey beyond the confines of their formal learning event.
And then I thought “Hang On….”
… Whilst I use Delicious as part of my Personal Learning Environment, I don’t actually use it as part of the learning design for my own events!!!! I was in grave danger of failing to lead by example… something had to be done!
Fortunately for me, I was in the closing stages of designing a self-paced elearning module on the subject of Display Screen Equipment (DSE) Awareness, so with very little hassle I was able to embed a link to my Delicious account which contained some links to external DSE related websites.
I then asked a number of our Learning Facilitators to PILOT the module for me; as this is where things got interesting…
@Reevo66 provided the following feedback
“I like the idea of the link to Delicious, but could this ‘link’ be set up on site anyway as some form of ‘general library’ of useful literature (could potentially be quite useful)”
Now whilst I think this is a great idea (and indeed I have already set this joint-account up), what had more of an impact on me was that one of our Learning Facilitators was not only able to see the benefit of linking the elearning to some Delicious bookmarks, but took the idea to a whole new level by suggesting a shared Delicious account amongst all Learning Facilitators.
Ladies and Gentlemen, Social Media has arrived in my organisation
Why not bookmark our Delicious account and see if our Learning Facilitators can be of benefit to you?
As I mentioned in a previous blog post, I intend to provide a brief synopsis of each chapter of ‘Designing mlearning‘, but more importantly I intend to answer the questions that Clark poses at the end of each chapter and then pose those same questions back to you ‘Dear Reader‘
Chapter 4 – The technology it’s not about
We start this chapter with a nod to the fact that the iPad (1) was announced during the writing of this book. Given that this is still considered a ‘recent’ book, this shows very clearly how dynamic this market is.
From looking forward we take a look back at a brief history of mobile devices commencing at the Palm Pilot, skipping ahead to mobile phones, through media players to smartphones. From there we review the advent of handheld games, tablets and recording devices, before acknowledging that by the time many readers pick up this book some of the descriptions will already be out of date.
We then take a look at a trend that gives a fairly clear indication of how things are going at the moment – “convergence”. More and more devices are providing a 1-stop shop for much (if not all) of the functionality that we used to associate with multiple devices.
Towards the end of the chapter we are reminded just how quickly this field is developing as Clark suggests that we may even be moving towards wearing glasses with a Heads Up Display - imagine that!
We finish off the chapter with these questions being posed (along with my responses):
How can you take advantage of any of the dedicated devices (media player, camera, PDA, phone)?I’m not sure that we really need to go out of our way to take advantage of the plethora of dedicated devices, after all our learners are already using them within their day-to-day lives to take pictures, record video, access the web, read novels etc. Given that dedicated devices are in my opinion “High Street” what I think we need to do is to tap into learner’s familiarity with them and start to drip-feed examples of how they can use them within a workplace environment. Why not model some good examples using dedicated devices? Often when I facilitate face-to-face activities, I make a point of recording audio feedback, video voxpops and photographs of interactivity using dedicated devices in order to model good practice for the attendees to (hopefully) follow.How can you capitalize the increasing ubiquity of the converged devices?Let’s be honest most organisations (even now) are not providing converged devices (read phones and tablets) to support learning programmes or ‘overtly’ to maximise performance. I believe they are providing them so that you have little or no excuse for not responding to emails! But let’s not let this worry us, instead let’s leverage the growing distribution of mobile devices for our own ends and start to offer resources, assets etc that can benefit from the functionality of the converged device.Have you considered the tradeoffs of providing (devices) versus supporting devices ?I guess the provision of devices ensures (to a certain degree) greater control and in turn ‘peace of mind’ (wrongly in my opinion) to organisations, but hey, if it increases the chances of mobile uptake then maybe it’s worth it? Of course, this approach no doubt brings significant expense with it in terms of providing the devices, however I’ve no doubt that it is easier to support 1 x device type as opposed to trying to support learners own devices. Of course allowing learners to use their own device means that they will be familiar with it and therefore more likely to use it and quite possibly less likely to need support, although the cost and logistics involved in trying to support multiple device types cannot be ignored.So folks, why not take a look at the questions above and provide your own responses in the comments below?
So I’ve spent a week concentrating on G+ now and I’ve made a few observations.
It’s much quieter in there than it is in Twitter. I’m not saying that’s a good or bad thing, it’s just quieter. I know that I can dip into G+ whenever I want and see some meaningful, useful (to me) threads of conversation without feeling like I’m going to be swept away by the Twitter Tidal Wave.
Of course, that also has its downside including the fact that the vast majority of my network aren’t using G+, so I’m not able to keep track as to what they are up to and what they are talking about – - but hang on – one of my reasons for moving away from Twitter was that I didn’t feel it was adding value! So why this feeling of abandoning my network, when what I’ve actually insinuated is that ‘they’ weren’t adding value!
But perhaps that feeling is retrospective?
I’ve noticed that since I blogged about reducing my Twitter activity a number of long-time Twitter followers have unfollowed me (I’ve never tracked this before, but thought it might be interesting to do so given this change in the way I’m using Twitter). Now this in itself I don’t find surprising, as why would they follow somebody who has said they aren’t going to use Twitter as much? But I haven’t said that I’m not going to stop blogging, or sharing resources etc, just that I’m going to concentrate on another platform for now.
A part of me assumed that those people would track me down on G+ and follow me in there, but that hasn’t happened. Which has got me wondering why?
Is it the fact that what I’ve been blogging about or the conversations I’ve been having, people have found irrelevant to them or is it the fact that they don’t want or need to be involved in another social media platform? I’d like to think it’s the latter as that excludes me from any perceived ‘fault’, but to be honest I’m suspecting that it’s the former.
Why?
Well for one very good reason really and that’s the reason I guess that I found my Twitter network as a whole to be adding little value – ‘guilt’!
There have been some people in my network that stopped adding the value that ‘I’ needed a long time ago, but I kept them in my network – why? – once again, guilt.
I felt I’d got to know those people on a personal level, either via Twitter, face to face, other channels or in a lot of cases a whole raft of ways. Even though they weren’t adding value to my reasons for using Twitter, I kept them in my network out of a feeling of guilt and awkwardness if I unfollowed them.
Is it wrong of me to think like this?
Can an online network grow into something other than what you originally engaged with it?
How do you then deal with that new ‘relationship’ once it’s non-intended use supersedes its original use?
Regular readers of my blog and social media followers will know that I’m not a huge fan of click-next, self-paced eLearning. Sure, there’s a time to wrap the whole learning experience up in a SCORM object, bury it deep within a Learning Management System and track the bejesus out of everything. (When I say everything, of course I’m not actually referring to whether the learner has been able to synthesise the content and has an ability to recreate it in the real world and the subsequent business impact, I’m actualy talking out who did it, when they did it, what score they attained, whether they ‘passed‘ and lets be honest about this; how good their short term memory is!).
The time being when an organisation needs to tick a box and cover their asses to prove that ‘training’ was provided to a learner, the place being (alas) most organisations. (I’ve just re-read the text above and realised I’m going off on one again, so I’ll get back on track…)
I much prefer the approach of providing support at the point of need via relevant resources. Many people will assume that those resources would be of a technical nature and of course they could be. They could also be a poster, a handout, a leaflet etc.
Given my interest in technology however, I’ve always been intrigued and surprised at just how overlooked the intranet is in many organisations, in terms of being able to deliver support in a way that is no doubt far more in people’s ‘workflows’ than an LMS is!
It’s this fascination with how under utilised intranets tend to be, that led to me volunteering to facilitate a number of scoping workshops in a previous organisation when the decision was made to overhaul its intranet offering.
Being a global organisation those workshops took place at each location with the same questions being asked of each group.
Below is the Google Doc that I produced to present the outcomes of the scoping workshop that I conducted, I hope you find the questions that were asked to be of use to you if you are considering developing your own intranet platform. As you can see very few of the questions actually refer to an ‘intranet’ at all, but instead ask how people work, the types of info they require, the media that info is presented in etc
…. Actually following today’s eLN event ‘Innovation in Compliance Training’ maybe it isn’t an oxymoron!
I’d had really been looking forward to this particular event as my organisation is heavily regulated and delivers a great deal of compliance training; to that end I was really keen to discover how other organisations and Instructional Designers have gone about dealing with the dry, uninspiring beast that is Compliance Training. I was so excited about the potential of the event that I invited my organisations Health & Safety Manager along, which he duly accepted… now the event had to deliver….
The day kicked as usual with @RobHubbard welcoming everybody and we were swiftly into the 1st session…
Creating a successful compliance culture – Viv Cole
This was a great intro session for many reasons, not least of which was that it was a group discussion exercise (so it got us all talking, first thing in the morning) on the subject of our thoughts and opinions on a compliance culture/training. Our particular table recognised the need for a lot of the Compliance Training that goes on, however a consistent thread of discussion was the fact that a lot of organisations adopt a ‘carpet bombing’ approach to compliance training. There was even an example of a financial sector organisation forcing there groundsmen to undertake basic FSA training; talk about ‘LARGE hand, small map’! I was pleased to explain that in my organisation there are only 2 x events that every employee has to undertake:
Fire SafetyDisplay Screen Equipment Awareness
and that we have adopted an Assess-Train-Assess approach to many of the other compliance events that we deliver, meaning that an individuals competence (or lack of) is the driver for refresher training as opposed to a refresher period expiring. This was something that I had hoped to deliver a Pecha Kucha on at today’s event, but circumstances unfortunately prevented me from doing so.
Viv then went on to share a list with us of the crucial ingredients to a successful compliance that had been created during a round table event with a number of compliance managers earlier this year list:
Leaders walking the walkclear responsibilitymandatory inductionregular updatesconsequence of non-complianceautomation of chasing mechanisms2-way relationshipalignment to business drivers
Stephanie Dedhar -User focused design to deliver gold-standard compliance training
I had been looking forward to Stephanie’s session in particular, as we had been tweeting in the run-up to the event and I was really intrigued as to how she was going to incorporate the Wordle that she had been requesting words from via Twitter.
What she did, which I thought was a really clever idea (and one that I intend to steal in the near future) was to use the responses from eLN members as a TNA tool to determine the content of her session, and here she is in full swing…
Stephanie extolled a 3 stage principle of:
Making the learners careShowing them that it mattersHelping them to live it
Like any good speaker, she inspired me to look into a few of her ideas in greater detail/implement a few actions on my return to work; they were:
Review this YouTube video on typographyAsk our Compliance department to provide facts and figures on fire-related incidents and Display Screen Equipment related injuries. This data would be broadcast over our info-screens to (hopefully) make the learners ‘care’.Review Stephanie’s award-winning piece of compliance elearning (Stephanie has subsequently informed me that she is no longer able to provide access to the content itself, but has directed me here)
Laura Overton – How the recession has impacted elearning
Laura Overton then took to the mic, to launch the Towards Maturity Learning Technology Benchmark 2010. Given that these were the results of an in-depth survey, there was a lot of data which would not be done justice by my Blog, so why don’t you mosey on down to the the Towards Maturity website and have a look at the report yourself? What really surprised me was that the use of Virtual Classrooms was reported as dropping compared to the previous benchmark??? How come? Surely in the ‘greener’, more cost-focussed world are living in, the uptake of tools such as this would be on the increase? Maybe @barrysampson’s tweet hit the nail on the head?
My action planning point from this session is actually a carry-over from a conversation with Laura at WOLCE and that is to:
Take part in a Beta test of the 24/7 online tool that Towards Maturity are developing.
Clive Shepherd – Competency or Compliance?
@cliveshepherd started off by regaling a tale of some time that he had spent in Uganda (which has been, and still is still considered as a risk-area) which had been preceded by a piece of understandably necessary elearning. The point that Clive was making was that the moment he was told it was MANDATORY, he became turned off to it.
To use Clive’s own words “we are the keepers of our brains, if we put ourselves of the learning itself then there is little if any chance of it happening“. This struck a real chord with me as my organisation does make many pieces of learning MANDATORY, now given that a significant % of our learning activities are H&S related, then perhaps this is inescapable, but for me there was a tie-in to what Stephanie had said about making the learner ‘care‘ about undertaking the learner.
Clive mentioned the great Blog post by @shackletonjones on the Affective Context Model. I’ve seen/read this blog post a few times and I get something different from it each time; it’s definitely worth a view, or 2, or 3….
Action planning points from this?
Review the Affective Context model blog (again)Consider a coloured hue with a photo to reinforce the context of the image (I spotted Clive has done this with a couple of images taken of him sitting at his PC)
Holborn Bars once again came up trumps with the lunch and we were back in for the Pecha Kucha 2010 final between Phil Green, Tony Frascina and Matt Brewer with Matt Brewer walking away with a Kindle for his efforts, which I hope he will be donating to his daughter, given her efforts in producing the images for his Pecha Kucha
Peter Phillips – Zzzzzzz Wakey Wakey, compliance doesn’t need to be boring.
Peter took us on something of a whirlwind tour of good and bad elearning design. He reminded us how easy it was to write bad multiple choice questions and how quickly you could fall into the trap of just designing ‘click next’ type elearning – in fact he showed us an example where the learner had to undertake 41 (no that isn’t a typo) consecutive mouse clicks to progress!!!
Peter referenced @CatMoores work a number of times, in particular her ‘Dump the Drone’ blog post
And Tom Kuhlmanns work in relation to do we really need instructions on how to use an elearning course?
He also showed us some great examples of engaging, emotionally charged elearning in these 2 examples
What really struck home for me though was his statement “good learning is good learning, regardless of the ‘e’” – and I do believe he’s right!
It was during the ensuing comfort break, that I had a quick chat with @larshyland who came up with a great phrase “think campaign, not course“. Great point Lars, and with my organisation now having a graphic designer and TV film/production crew, this is something that I will look to leverage in the future.
What am I planning to do with this sessions content?
Critically review the multiple choice assessments within the elearning I have produced
Donald Clarke – Compliance or Compliant?
Last up before the mad-dash for the tube was Donald Clarke who opened up by saying that he had no issues with the H&S related compliance training that took place, but it was the ‘Equality and Diversity’ type compliance training that he took issue with. Donald referenced several pieces of US research that disproved any benefit from undertaking such learning activities and came out with a fantastic soundbite
“The plural of anecdote is……. ‘not data’”
He also described the simple social media policy that the Channel 4 head implemented which went a little something like “Don’t be a dick!” – he then compared this to the tomes of rules that the BBC had produced, interestingly my organisation is considering implementing a Social Media, I wonder which approach model they will use
As previously mentioned I had taken my H&S Manager with me and I was really encouraged by his positive comments throughout the day and the vision and ideas that he had already started to formulate for the future.
There wasn’t much Tweeting going on throughout the day (which always surprises me, given the nature of these events), but for those of you who are interested here is the TweetDoc.
As always, the informal conversations that took place during the day were just as valuable as the formal sessions so I would like to thank everybody who contributed to an excellent day in whatever way. – Cheers!
What happens in an internet minute
Tayloring It business card
I think I’m fairly safe in saying that regardless of what organisation you are in, your employees are just as much at risk of having an accident or an ailment as the next person.
This led to an exchange of tweets between us, which resulted in Lesley being kind enough to share an experience with me via this email.
Remote – Office not required
…. (nope, not Susan) Innovation
So I’ve spent a week concentrating on G+ now and I’ve made a few observations.
Close up of a Zeiss scope
My action planning point from this session is actually a carry-over from a conversation with Laura at WOLCE and that is to: