ASTD TechKnowledge 06

February 1st, 2006 | Informal Learning, The Future, The Learning Business

This morning, hundreds of us packed the ballroom of the new Hyatt Regency Colorado Convention Center for the opening of TechKnowledge 06. Incoming ASTD president Kevin Oakes thanked the Rocky Mountain Chapter, advisory boards, hard-working staff, platinum sponsors, silver sponsors, planning committees, and others. Kevin and I go back quite a ways; Oakes Interactive was hawking training multimedia before the Web was invented. If I’m not mistaken, Kevin’s the first educational technolgy specialist to lead ASTD.

Elliott Masie took the stage to encourage us to adopt Extreme Learning. We should devote half our time to making incremental improvements in what we’ve already got, for instance fine-tuning and revamping existing programs. The other 50% should go into things that are dramatically different. He demonstrated a cool little device that projects a working keyboard on virtually any surface. (Elliott advises you not to use this as a sample of dramatically different thinking unless you want to lose your job.)

Elliott had just returned from a day at CIA University interviewing incoming officers. Their learning plea: help me see what’s important. He’s headed off to advise the U.N. tomorrow. The man gets around.

What if we started every day with a five-minute learning clip?

Business Week’s one-question customer service evaluation: would you recommend this to a friend? Not a bad measure for the training business. Who’s going to be first to base a training manager’s pay on this?

Elliott described a cardiologists’ conference where four large videoscreens are showing surgery live. An expert panel gives advice. The entire audience clicks in answers to questions. The Wisdom of Crowds meets medicine.

Elliott offers a new recruit three hours of face time. She says she’ll take a pass, asks if he doesn’t have a CD version. “Why would you want a CD instead of a live CEO?” The fearless recruit says, “You don’t have a fast-forward button.”

The Expo was plenty tame, save for this guy. The biggest news was who was not present: no Saba, no IBM, no Accenture, no Adobe/Macromedia, and to my great surprise, no SumTotal.

I’m a little disappointed with the session I gave on Blogs, Wikis, and Self-Service Learning. I thought the room was going to have wireless, so I planned to have two or three groups each set up blogs as well as wikis and an aggregator. No WiFi. Plan B (Jay starts a blog but mainly just yaps about stuff) didn’t live up to my traditional standard.

Next up was Bill Bruck of Q2 Learning on Creating and Sustaining Online Communities of Practice. After the session, several people told me they really appreciated Bill telling it like it is. Early on, he said that while he thought he was pretty good at fostering online communities, 90% of the communities he sets up fail.

We brainstormed reasons for the failure rate, coming up with confidentially, inaccuracy, bitching, time-consuming, and information hoarding

Collaboration software is often viewed as a way to start a community from scratch. Actually, collaboration software is better used to support existing communities.

From the audience, how to sell wikis. They’re an email reduction initiative.

Bill has been hosting an online conference of thought leaders about the marriage of web 2.0 technologies and learning. (Disclosure: I’m part of the group.) Over breakfast this morning, Bill had shared with me his surprise that none of us had focused on using web tech to support mainstream organizational learning. Maybe those who got into blogging and wikis as personal modes of expression have blinders that have caused us to overlook their value in supporting organization-wide programs. Blogs grew up as expressions of individual personalities, not as performance support tools.

I saved the best for last. A friend and I took a cab to the Buckhorn Exchange. Founded in 1893 by a refuge of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, the Buckhorn is a throwback saloon and restaurant festooned with hunting trophies, autographed photos of famous visitors, and a large collection of guns. The items on the wall next to our table included autographed photos of Will Rogers, Ike, and movie cowboys — and JFK’s fishing license.

After appetizers of rattlesnake salad (too much mayo) and duck breat, we dug into big, peppercorn-encrusted hunks of elk accompanied by a bottle of St. Emilion. Hunters had shot the elk way up in the Rockies only this morning. Just kidding. The elk are farm-raised, not picked off in the wild.

This place oozes history. The proprietor took Teddy Roosevelt bear hunting. One day, the nephew of Sitting Bull showed up with thirty Sioux and Blackfeet and gave the Buckhorn’s owner the saber taken from Custer at the Battle of the Little Bighorn.