Jackpot!

Concentrated wisdom from Serendip at Bryn Maur.

I believe that education must be conceived as a continuing reconstruction of experience, that the process and the goal of education are the same thing.

I believe that education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living.

-- John Dewey, My Pedagogic Creed

The teacher is not only a communicator but a model. To communicate knowledge and to provide a model of competence, the teacher must be free to teach and learn

-- Jerome Bruner, The Process of Education

We think we learn from teachers, and we sometimes do. But the teachers are not always to be found in school, or in great laboratories. Sometimes what we learn depends on our own powers of insight. Moreover, our teachers may be hidden, even the greatest teacher.

-- Loren Eiseley, "The Hidden Teacher" in The Star Thrower

A manual? Give me a break! Let me get in there and muck around and try various things and see what happens.

-- John Seely Brown, "Learning, Working, and Playing in the Digital Age"

SumTotal savings

Here's an answer for the critics who questioned how the Click2Learn/Docent combo was going to cut costs while moving forward.

SumTotal to invest $8 mn over 2 yrs

The company expects to move customer and technical support and engineering work fully to India.

SumTotal plans to increase headcount

HYDERABAD: SumTotal Systems Inc., the new entity created by the merger of Docent and Click2learn, plans to increase headcount in Hyderabad centre from 90 to 160, though at the global level it will go down from 470 to 400 (excluding Hyderabad additions) by the time restructuring is complete. Investment in Indian operations is also likely to be about $3 million in the next 12 months, according to Sudheer Koneru, Senior Vice-President, International Operations.

SumTotal Sets $3 M Aside For Hyderabad Development Centre

OUR EFE BUREAU
HYDERABAD: SumTotal Systems Inc, the newly-formed merged entity of Docent Inc and Click2learn, is planning to make its Indian development centre as the hub for products, services and research and development for its global operations. With a combined cash reserve of over $40 million in hand due to the merger, SumTotal has proposed an investment of $3 million in the Indian development centre over a period of 12 months, said Sudheer Koneru, senior vice-president, international operations of SumTotal Systems Inc.

Announcing the completion of merger of both the companies here, Mr Koneru said following the merger, SumTotal will end up saving $15 million annually, with a combined turnover of $60 million. The company, which has its largest manpower at the Hyderabad development centre, will add another 30 professionals basically for research and development and product engineering work, Mr Koneru said. He added, “We see the development centre emerging as a hub for our research and development, products engineering and solutions.”

Following this development, the R&D centre of Click2Learn, will now broaden its work and include the Docent product line. This will also increase the number of techies based in the Hyderabad centre from the current 130 to about 160 and expand the maintenance work for the two companies.

The investment of about $ 8 million would cover both the working expenses and capex in the company centre based in Hyderabad.

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Uncomfortable? Get used to it. Business is global. This is good business practice.

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Update

From ZDNet

Tech Update Software Infrastructure

Gartner CEO to CIOs: Embrace offshoring or else

By David Berlind
March 29, 2004

It's an open secret that Gartner reads Internet Time Blog, but this time they beat me to the punch by twelve hours.

Many of the IT jobs being outsourced today are destined to be wiped out by the efficiencies of Service Oriented Architecture in the next few years anyway. Gartner's Fleisher warns CIOs to take control of outsourcing rather than fight a losing battle against it. Otherwise they'll have to deal with the unruly consequences, much as they did when the obvious benefits of unauthrorized PCs forced centralized IT departments to adopt client/server architecture.

Fleisher identified four major factors that are going to reorganize the world of work:

• secure broadband wireless
• always-on/always-connected devices
• easy access to vast amounts of very reliable and very cheap computing power
• service-oriented architectures that make application development cheaper and faster.

The Workflow Institute was delighted to note that Fleisher did not mention worker empowerment, learning, culture, job enrichment, community, teamwork, or any other human factors, assuring us that we'll have plenty to do amid the evolution to the new way of doing business.

Training transfer to the job.

Have you heard -- or used -- these stats?

"Only 10% of training transfers to the job."

"Only 10% of the investment in training
actually transfers to the job."

"Although $100 billion is spent on
training each year, only 10%
of these expenditures
result in transfer to the job."

Rather than accept stuff like this, Will Thalheimer responds, "Says who?" You see, Will takes a scientific approach to learning. His workshops are fascinating because he describes experiments, not theory. (No, he doesn't pay me to say this.)

A Pennsylvanian named Robert Fitzpatrick nailed the source of the 10% bunkum above. Here's the story.

If you're a contrarian like me, you'll enjoy Will's site.

People, a good investment

Laurie Bassi is a rare individual. Research convinced her that companies that invest in their people just had to do better than penny-pinchers that cut training and payroll the moment the economy sours. She invested in a portfolio of stocks of companies that invest heavily in their people. The returns are "in line with a growing body of empirical research showing that organizations that make extraordinary investments in people often enjoy extraordinary performance on a variety of indicators, including shareholder return."

March 2004

How's Your Return on People?

Companies that invest in employee development can outperform the market. Just ask their shareholders.

by Laurie Bassi and Daniel McMurrer

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Every year for three years, Laurie and Daniel selected a portfolio of 20 to 40 companies that spent at least twice as much as their peers to develop their human resources. In 2003, these heavy investors in human resources outperformed the S&P by 17% to 35%.

Laurie Bassi (lbassi@knowledgeam.com) is the chairwoman and Daniel McMurrer (dmcmurrer@knowledgeam.com) is the chief research officer at Knowledge Asset Management, a money management firm in Bethesda, Maryland.

ISPI and Metrics

Measurement Counts! Metrics, ROI, and Accomplishments (the missing element)
by Carl Binder, CPT

A recent publication, Metrics, by Jay Cross of the Internet Time Group, presents an opportunity to comment on some current issues in measurement and evaluation. The author, who happens to be an old friend, is an entertaining and wide-ranging thinker (some might say Renaissance Man), and his book is noteworthy in part because of its unconventional form: a constantly updated eBook available for purchase online. Jay’s history in financial services, training, marketing, and a whole host of cerebral pursuits has left him most recently in the world of e-Learning, where he has become something of a pundit.

While I don’t agree with everything in Metrics, I recommend it because it’s a quick and enjoyable read, because it contains valuable references and links, and mostly because it challenges us to think outside many of the current ruts in measurement and evaluation.

Things I Like about Metrics
Here are some of Jay’s key points along with my comments:

• “Metrics are measurements that matter.” With this sentence, he challenges us to measure results that our clients agree are important and to look for large valuable improvements. He adds, “Don’t fritter away time on the small stuff.”

• “Start with business problems and work backwards.” He later adds that we should “focus on process not on behavior.” These comments point in the direction of our best strategy for measuring the right things, following Thomas F. Gilbert’s dictum to identify accomplishments, the outputs of processes or of individual jobs that contribute value toward business results. Behavior costs money while accomplishments have value. Following the path from business results back through measured accomplishments will lead to the behavior and improvement strategies that produce worthwhile organizational outcomes.

• “Forget measurement of value based on cost savings!” As an e-Learning strategy consultant, Jay has probably tired of cost justifications based on saving travel time and expenses. It is critically important that we find ways to use our technologies and interventions to improve outcomes, not simply reduce costs for the same (often mediocre) outcomes.

• “Time matters.” Whether we’re speaking of time to perform (fluency, productivity), time to achieve benchmark performance (ramp-up), or results over time (revenues, profits), we cannot ignore the time dimension in either our measurement of learning and performance during training or our measurement of desired business results.

• “Gather baseline data.” While it is easy to interpret this statement as simply that we need a “before” measure to evaluate the worth of our “after” results, the “line” in baseline is very important. To clearly understand the effects of our interventions, we must view current performance in the context of measured levels, trends, and bounce (or variability) over time. We need a series of counts (per minute, per day, per week, or per month) to establish a true baseline so that we can tell whether our interventions or ongoing efforts are changing trends, levels, and/or the “bounce” (variability) of measured outcomes.

• “You must be able to relate your decisions and choices to the profitability of your organization.” While much of Jay’s discussion focuses on what I call “validation data”—measurement to justify expenditures by showing that programs work—the best measurement systems support ongoing decision-making. This is why I recommend ongoing measurement as feedback to performers and decision-makers, and why I like Timm Esque’s book, Making An Impact, so much.

• Jay disagrees with much of the current thinking about ROI, suggesting that his book can save you the cost of an ROI workshop. Whether or not this is true, managers would certainly prefer to see how your program improves their specific outcomes beyond a general payback ratio or cost justification. And since some current-day ROI “methods” use subjective estimates of payback rather than direct results measures, we need to question in detail many ROI claims before we accept them.

Things I Don’t Like So Much About Metrics
Lest you think I’m giving my friend a free pass, let me make a few comments about shortcomings.

• The second half of the book is mostly a justification for e-Learning, something I would have preferred left to a few pages. I recognize that Jay makes his living in this field, but it would be more helpful if the book addressed the general case with a broader set of examples. Moreover, it is inconceivable that even the best e-Learning program will produce optimal results without efforts to improve other factors in a performance system, including expectations, feedback, tools, resources, consequences, and selection.

• Jay does not discuss what’s a good measure and what’s not. For example, he mentions the limitations of test results as metrics but does not explain that percentage correct is not a measure of performance because it is a dimensionless quantity from which we cannot determine either the count of behavior or accomplishments nor the time required to complete them. He does not point out that the best metrics count things in absolute units (dollars, widgets, gallons, etc.) rather than rating them on subjective scales. Careful application of all his recommendations can still yield meaningless measurement if we fail to adhere to this basic principle.

• Jay speaks of using both “subjective and objective” data. For me, the term “subjective” means open to wide interpretation or idiosyncratic. What I think he means by “subjective” is measurement of opinion or preference, which can be very objective if we refrain from applying “voodoo math” by summarizing numbers on rating scales of subjective impressions to produce “average” ratings. It is not subjective to say that “20 people out of 45 rated the program as very good and 10 said it was poor”—a quantitative measure of personal opinion that can be safely manipulated within the rules of arithmetic.

I suggest you read Metrics yourself, and discuss it vigorously with your colleagues and clients. I am sure you will find it both entertaining and illuminating.

Dr. Carl Binder is a Senior Partner at Binder Riha Associates, a consulting firm that helps clients improve processes, performance, and behavior to deliver measurable results. He may be reached at CarlBinder@aol.com. For additional articles, visit http://www.binder-riha.com/publications.htm.

my test page

Yesterday I followed a link from cogdogblog to a presentation in Breeze by Alan Levin, D'Arcy Norman, and Brian Lamb that showed the power of RSS in education. The presentation is worth watching simply as a model for rapid-fire, low-cost, yet compelling development. But in my case, the content was quite useful as well.

The Maricopa reference page, RSS Feeds via JavaScript, showed me enough to begin including RSS feeds in my webpages.

Check out my test page to see the most recent posts to a dozen favorite blogs.

Admittedly, I'm a newbie. (I think Stephen has been doing this since the beginning of time.) The page takes forever to load -- so I think I'll move the underlying scripts to my own server. Also, it doesn't look like the items automatically refresh.

If you're an RSS afficianado who owes me one or wants to top off her/his karma account, I wouldn't mind receiving some advice on this.

Ted Nelson, way out

Like the fish that is unaware of water, Ted Nelson says computer users are blind to the 2D tyranny of paper. Herewith, a few excerpts from his thought-provoking paper....

WAY OUT OF THE BOX
Theodor Holm Nelson
Keio University and University of Southampton

Computers aping paper, corporate learning aping school, popular songs aping wisdom:

Edubabble from Ontario

My co-conspirator at the Workflow Institute, Sam Adkins, sent me a delicious link to the Organization for Quality Education, a group of Ontario citizens up in arms over the poor quality of their public schools. Nothing is funnier than the truth.

Let's start with a few definitions of education buzzwords.

Buzzword: Research has shown...
What parents THINK it means: It's proven.
What it REALLY means: Other people say so, too.

Buzzword: Child-centered
What parents THINK it means: Your child is of greatest concern
What it REALLY means: Your child does what he wants to do

Buzzword: No memorization
What parents THINK it means: No boring stuff
What it REALLY means: We don't teach facts

Buzzword: High-order thinking
What parents THINK it means: Thinking
What it REALLY means: Lost in the fog

Buzzword: Brain-based learning
What parents THINK it means: Science teaches a lot about learning
What it REALLY means: I believe in feng-shui, too

Buzzword: Discovery learning
What parents THINK it means: It's fun to learn
What it REALLY means: Kids will spend a week learning what lively, engaged instruction could teach in a day

Buzzword: We don't "teach to the test"
What parents THINK it means: No drills just for the sake of passing some test
What it REALLY means: We don't like being told what to cover in class

Buzzword: Education theorists
What parents THINK it means: Deep thinkers about education issues
What it REALLY means: People who spout opinions without any supporting data

Buzzword: Education researchers
What parents THINK it means: People who analyze data about what actually works
What it REALLY means: People who summarize the view of the theorists

That was just a warm-up. What is a quality education? How can you judge? You look to your customers.

A quality education system produces students with the knowledge, skills, attitudes, values, and work habits needed to become productive, fulfilled citizens. It provides clear goals, high standards, good teachers and a well-organized curriculum.

Much of what is wrong with Ontario education today is the result of the system's clinging to an outdated concept of quality. Over the past 30 years, organizations in the private sector - and now increasingly in the public sector - have come to the realization that quality can no longer be patronizingly defined by the providers of goods and services. Today, quality means meeting or exceeding the expectations of customers. In other words, something isn't good quality unless the customer says it is.

So what are the customers of Ontario's schools saying? The employers and post-secondary educators, the school system's most obvious customers, are its most vocal and consistent critics. Meanwhile, parents line up overnight to enroll their children in academy schools where high academic and behavioural standards prevail, in stark contrast to the laissez-faire attitudes in most schools. Much like sixties Detroit automotive engineers who largely ignored the requests from motorists for smaller, fuel-efficient cars, the education system dismisses these criticisms as coming from people unqualified to determine what constitutes quality education.

Modern quality is about outputs, not inputs. Yet status quo educators define quality primarily in terms of inputs to the education system, such as funding levels, class size, and teacher certification. The effects of these inputs on learning outcomes, however, are anything but clear. Studies in some jurisdictions, for example, have found that the more school boards spend, the worse students learn!

Meanings are important. I maintain a glossary at Internet Time, one of about five edutech glossaries on the net that aren't simply copies of someone else's glossary. OQE offers a glossary for debunking edubabble. It's extremely thought-provoking. The definitions come from The Schools We Need & Why We Don’t Have Them by E.D. Hirsch.

metacognitive skills = A term that, like “constructivism,” has a legitimate technical but an illegitimate nontechnical meaning. The illegitimate, broader application of the term identifies it with “accessing skills,” “critical-thinking skills,” “problem-solving skills,” and other expressions of the anti-knowledge tool conception of education.

multiple intelligences = ...Despite the fact that schools are not competent to classify and rank children on these highly speculative psychological measures, the concept had become highly popular, probably because it fits in with the already popular notions of “individual differences,” “individual learning styles,” “self-paced learning,” and so on, not to mention its appeal to our benign hope for all children that that will be good at doing something and happy doing it. The distinguished psychologist George A. Miller has said that Gardner’s specific classifications are “almost certainly wrong.”

portfolio assessment = A phrase for a version of performance-based assessment. In portfolio assessment, students preserve in a portfolio all of some of their productions during the course of the semester or year. At the end of the time period, students are graded for the totality of their production. It is a device that has long been used for the teaching of writing and painting. But there its utility ceases. It has proven to be virtually useless for large-scale, high-stake testing.

I'm writing this as I explore the site. I was going along with Hirsch for the first few definitions but now I am beginning to suspect that he's an extremist. His message is that students need to master basic skills and learn facts with rigor. Only then will they be able to develop (Hirsch hates this term violently) "critical thinking skills." But Hirsch seems to win his arguments by setting up strawmen and then knocking them down.

Admittedly, my expertise is in adult performance, not childhood education, but I'm too big a fan of learning by doing to throw it out the window just because some teachers don't set it up right or some students don't join in. Hirsch says learning by doing is "a phrase once used to characterize the progressivist movement but little used today, possibly because the formulation has been the object of much criticism and even ridicule." He continues on, saying "The idea behind it resembles the real-life activities for which the particular learning is preparing the student. It is claimed that the best form of learning is that which best allows the student to learn in the natural, apprentice-like way in which humans have always learned."

So far, this sounds pretty good to me, but not to Hirsch, who writes, "By performing 'holistic' activities, the student, it is claimed, will reliably discover the needed learnings. This is an attractive doctrine, but it is also a highly theoretical one that has proved to be false. The value of such a method depends on its actual effectiveness. If by 'effective', one means that all students learn reliably and efficiently by this method, then the theory has been entirely discredited in comparative studies. Both recent history of American education and controlled observations have shown that learning by doing and its adaptations are among the least effective pedagogies available to the teacher."

I disagree. Situated learning -- doing the work rather than learning about the work -- is often the best way to learn. By "effective," I don't mean something works for all students, just that it's a winner for some of them. Of course learning by doing in the real world requires leaving the artificial reality inside the protective walls of schools.

I'd hoped to win one for the Republic of Berkeley, debunking public education, but I end up admitting that schooling is a supremely complicated area and that (Are you ready for this?) I don't have a clue as to how to fix it. It's late. I was looking for black and white; I found shades of gray. This is a provocative site, well worth visiting.

Speaking of timing...

I went to my DSL provider's site because they've imposed some limit on the number of recipients allowed per email, and I wanted to get some information. (The only inbound information I ever receive from these guys is a bill.) Their site appears to be five years out of date. Must be one of those artifacts from the phone monopogy culture of days gone by.

Windows 98 and your Pacific Bell Internet Services Account

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I'm in the midst of doing taxes. I once had a securities account with Bache, before they merged with Halsey Stuart Shields and were acquired by Prudential, becoming Prudential-Bache and then Prudential Securities before being acquired by Wachovia recently. Lord, but I detest banks. Here's one more reason:

Credibiliity

Chuck Fred is author of Breakaway. Here's my Amazon review:

Chuck and I talked this afternoon about the continuing lack of discipline in measuring the impact of corporate learning. That's the topic of my Metrics, my strongest statement yet that "training metrics" are a fantasy. The appropriate metrics for training are business metrics.

Chuck and I are both obsessed with time. Chuck's a former competitive runner and the "breakaway" of his book's title is that point when the winners pull ahead of the also-rans. It worked for Jesse Owens and it works for Wal*Mart. The name of this site is a reflection of my view of time. Time has become the prime business metric. How soon can our team reach proficiency? How can we get there faster? How can we stay ahead of the game? How can we speed things up? How soon will we be ready to execute?

The genesis of Chuck's book was interviews with 300 CEOs. He promised them absolute confidentiality in return for their candor. He maintains these relationships to this day.

Late last year, Chuck asked the CEOs about their levels of confidence in the ROI presentations made in suport of training expenditures. Specifically, he asked about purchases of off-the-shelf courseware, training technology & infrastructure, and training-related advisory services.

Nine out of ten CEOs said they had no confidence in the ROI of training as presented to them. You can reach Chuck at Breakaway Group.

Metrics

Jay: Thank you for Metrics. I read it immediately. (Most of what I needed anyway, which was a lot) I was able to compose a draft Revenue Model for E Learning Enterprise justification because your knowledge, references, links and other insights were there when I needed them. I will be discussing the metrics on Wednesday to determine the level of acceptance of my projections. The metrics included estimated comparative costs of conventional training to E learning, lost opportunity costs, profit loss, turnover savings, and increased revenue due to decrease in job analysis error rate. I don?t know where this is going, but the potential could be groundbreaking for solutions to problems in the industry under study. Your approach to ?get real? terminology regarding the important items to measure for training effect is refreshing and entertaining. I have been in the training, and performance change, business for more years than I would like to admit. However, these days are encouraging, because we are being invited to leave the laboratory of the ?fuzzy? and enter the arena of investments that matter. Regards, Frank Murphy EQUIFOCUS, LLC EQUIFOCUS offers training consultation, E Learning content development, and outsource services that improve performance for Equipment Manufacturers and supporting Service organizations.

Metrics is an eBook because it's continually updated. Buy a copy today. You can download the current version immediately. When the next edition is ready, I'll send you a copy of that as well.

Metrics shows you how to calculate ROI, but that's the tip of the iceberg. More important is understanding how business executives make decisions, how to describe "soft" benefits in monetary terms, how to sell your ideas, and how to perform a meaningful cost/benefit analysis. Here's a map of the topics covered:

"Can't imagine anything I'd add or change ... for anyone looking for a real understanding of ROI,as well as various ways to calculate their return, this is the best A-Z guide I have read. And you hit the nail on the head ... it's ultimately about performance and the cost of improving performance." David Grebow Chief Learning Officer Trinity Learning

Metrics, by Jay Cross.
100 pages, $250.

Social software & learning

	This morning the Emergent Learning Forum met in Menlo Park to ponder the convergence of learning and social software. Since most learning is informal, and most informal learning is person-to-person, how can leveraging one's ability to network with others do anything but make for better learning? The sum is greater than the parts.
	Altus Learning Systems captured the entire event on video and will sync it with the slides, so I won't go into detail here, so much as give the 10,000' view. Watch for the blow-by-blow at the Emergent Learning website.
	Spoke's Andy Halliday gave us the lay of the land. In the network at left, the colors dots are nodes. The connections between them are arcs. The entire diagram is a graph. Degrees of separation are the number of hops from one node to another. (The top right green node is three degrees of separation from the bottom left red node.) Social network analysis can show you the shape of a network. For example, on the battlefield you could map the radio communication among a group of tanks and figure out which is in control; that's the one you take out. Spoke is based on private information and self-determination. Otherwise, many business people would never participate. Unlike on Friendster, where participants share personal information to attract dates, a sales person is extremely protective of contacts. Privacy concerns are another issue. In the U.S., if someone hands you a business card, you feel free to share that information with others. In the EU, it's against the law to share that information!
	Anita Lo told us about how Intel selected and implemented an expert locator system. Anita joined us from Folsom, hence the photo of "the speaker." She related how Intel captures and re-uses actionable knowledge. One of our members noted how rare it is to see an engineering group thoroughly plan its in-house marketing as part of implementation.
	Traditional Knowledge Management follows a publishing model, said David Gilmour, CEO of Tacit Knowledge Systems, and that's tough to implement. By the time you design a new structure, the business has already changed again. Relying on users to update their own profiles is iffy, and the least likely to comply are the very movers and shakers you'd want to have involved. Then there's the fiction that everyone's ready to share information equally, when in fact it's a loaded political, selective, cultural situation that's anything but equal. David recommends a brokerage model. Tacit repurposes information that's already available (such as email and presentations) to mine the relationships and expertise held by each user. At first this smacks of spyware; in reality it's the opposite. Tacit provides pointers to people who are in the know. It never reveals the source information. Management can't see who's taking advantage of the system. This approach works because the system does most of the work. Users don't have to re-enter or code information. Categories are self-organizing. (Preparing and maintaining taxonomies is a pain.) Participants can opt out entirely or category-by-category. The benefit of pinpointing who else is working on the areas that interest you can be enormous. One pharma client found that lengthy experiements they were preparing to do had already been done in their European operation. This alone pays for the system.
	Alex Gault, Small World Ventures and a director of Emergent Learning Forum, announced a membership directory and networking initiative he has negotiated for the Forum. Scott McNealy calls this "eating your own dog food;" I prefer to think of it as "drinking your own champagne." Spoke is going to set up a voluntary network for members of Emergent Learning Forum. It will be a free benefit to members. We hope to spark formation of a global community of practice. This will roll out in April. If you want to participate, please join the Emergent Learning Forum. It's still free.	Keep up with Alex's blog, Collaboration Café.

The tools shape the worker

From Networking, Knowledge & the Digital Age, interesting twists on how the Internet is shaping social norms.

Thanks for the pointer, Seb.

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When I heard this on NPR this evening while driving to the Chinese squid market, I was hoping for second-source confirmation. Eschaton provided it:

Edinburgh -- finale

An overlong interview with the press kept me from participating in the afternoon's concurrent sessions. It would have been a tough choice: I'd gotten to know Don Norris, Jon Mason, and Alan Smith throughout the conference and here they were, all speaking at the same time.

I spent a while visiting Space Unlimited, a series of hands-on exhibits constructed by a group of teenagers who had spent months exploring eLearning and the future of school.

Most of what they had created was admirable and refreshing. Their exhibits lauded discovery learning, experimentation, self-expression, freedom of choice, and fun while learning. Some of their concepts were naive, for instance the fear that eLearning would be bad for the economy because of all those out-of-work teachers.

Film of student sacking a superfluous teacher

The "digital natives" gave the penultimate presentation of the conference. Ten of them took the stage and acted out their messages, something no “grown-up” had even considered. Instead of showing a PowerPoint slide about learning styles, they asked everyone to complete a personal Learning Styles Inventory.

In a truly lovely moment, a female student gripped the podium and surveyed the audience with a schoolmarm’s critical gaze. Someone in the audience snickered. “You there, what’s so funny?” she growled. That drew laughter. She shushed us with a penetrating frown of disapproval. Learning through intimidation. Remember it?

For the finale, a panel of experts took the stage to answer audience questions.

Among the opinions expressed:

• Regarding learning objects, we must be careful not to over-engineer once again.
• Regarding global acceptance of eLearning, do we have what it takes to offer true choice? Yes, at least we have enough to begin the expedition.
• We talked a lot about learners as consumers but we need scaffolding. Unlimited choice of diet leads to obesity.
• Workflow Learning and business process modeling bring a compelling vision
• Barriers to eLearning parallel those to traditional learning, e.g. “not enough time”
• Demand-driven learning works; supply-driven learning fosters resistance.
• Courses are dead, to be replaced by informal learning and communities of practice.

Four years ago, eLearning was sufficiently new that conferences convened an eLearning community of practice. We discovered what worked and shared it with each other. It was exciting to be among the enthusiasts and cognoscenti.

eLearning has become much too broad an endeavor to be a single practice. Some conferences are how-to events for neophytes. Others are guilds for experienced practitioners. And events like eLearnInternational push the boundaries of eLearning, learning culture, the future of learning, and the linkage of learning to other major forces in the world.

Mark Bell closes the event.

Back at the Sheraton Grand, several hundred people in formal dress were milling about. The Institute of Chartered Bankers.

A group of us headed out to Bar Roma for a final meal together.

Jonathan Star and Charlie Stuart

Don Norris

David Wilkinson

Edinburgh -- Etienne Wenger

Etienne Wenger is a social learning theorist who cut his teeth at the Institute for Research on Learning. He is best known for popularizing the concept of communities of practice. His presentation spoke to me deeply.

Communities of practice are not new. The earliest version may have been cavemen sitting around a fire talking about the best way to hunt bears. That’s the way “communities” work: practitioners in a field or practice come together to share, nurture, and validate tricks of the trade. Apprentices have always done this. Sometimes we mistakenly thought most of the learning was going on between master and apprentice. In fact, most apprentices probably learn more from one another.

Question: What does a flower know about being a flower? And what does a computer know about being a flower? Stumped? That’s because neither flowers nor computers are members of the human community, and it’s community that harbors knowledge.

A friend of Etienne is a wine professional. Describing a wine, the friend said it was “purple in the nose.” This meant absolutely nothing to Etienne, because he is not a member of the wine-tasting community.

Now imagine the wine-tasting friend is with his fellow wine tasters. He discerns a new element in the wine which he describes as a convergence of fire and gravity. If others in the group buy in, the fire & gravity meme is legitimized. Here we have the two primary aspects of any community: participation and reification.

By the way, the concept of community is value-neutral. The word community has a warm and fuzzy feel to it, but we’re talking about groups that can impede progress, engage in group think, or neglect their responsibilities to the larger organization. I recall being shut out of a community of instructional designers because I was perceived as a business man, not a designer.

Now let’s think about how eLearning might be a transformative force. Learning in a community involves answering four questions:

• Identity: Who are we becoming?
• Meaning: What is our experience?
• Practice: What are we doing?
• Community: Where do we belong?

Learning by sharing knowledge in a community leads to what Etienne calls the “horizontalization” of learning. In school or workshops, the learning relationship is vertical: there’s a provider on top and a recipient. In a horizontal community, peers learn from one another.

First generation knowledge management failed because it was top down. (Identify the critical knowledge and stuff it in a content management system. Nobody took ownership because no community embodied the knowledge. Now that we appreciate that knowledge lives in communities, we can facilitate KM by nurturing their development. Etienne quotes Pasteur, saying “Chance favors those who are prepared.”

Etienne suggests scrapping our industrial model of training and the notions that go with it. Learning will become an internal part of live itself. Teaching will fade in importance. Progress along a trajectory of development will replace skills training.

The three aspects of social learning are the Domain, the Practice, and the Community. What, how, and who.

Related links: What is Knowledge, Building Community, and Informal Learning.

Googling out these references to past entries here, I found that I'd already recorded many of the concepts Etienne presented in Edinburgh. No matter. It took an hour of live presentation for them to take hold in a transformative way.

Edinburgh -- Dinner

That Wednesday evening, a piper led us to a marvelous dinner party hosted by Highlands and Islands Enterprise. Wild rabbit terrine. Angus beef. Chocolate tart. Between Eilif Trondsen and me sat a community organizer from Barra.

Barra? It’s an island north of Inverness with 1,000 inhabitants. Most of the male residents fish for a living. Young people leave the island to complete their educations. Most do not come back. The organizer was exploring whether eLearning could prepare people for productive work on Barra, in order to save the island from depopulation.

Castle on Isle of Barra

Etienne Wenger and Jane Massy

After the meal, John Simonet provided the evening’s entertainment. He said people sometimes remarked on his strange name. John. He asked a teacher he was speaking with, “What do you teach?” “Bastards,” came the reply. He found this a bit strong, coming from a nun. Later… Know how to remember your anniversary? Forget it once. To the founder of NewMindsets, “Are you Welsh, Gareth, or did your parents just have a sense of humor?”

My guess would be that dinner table conversation was the richest source of learning for our community the first day.

Edinburgh -- Plenary

The day before, the plenary session speaker’s father had died. The Conference organizers drafted me to take his place. Serendipity strikes again! I’d assembled an hour’s worth of material and my first assignment had been to talk for only half an hour. Now I had a full hour and the entire audience.

I noted that lots of learning comes in the wrong size containers. Sometimes what you’re after is a few pages in a book or ten minutes wrapped in a lengthy course. This coaxes curriculum designers to pad out learning experiences into bigger packages. Often the author or designer imposes a false logic to make everything in the box a logical whole. I explained that we were going to change that this afternoon. Sequence often makes no difference. It’s chrome and fins.

Was everyone familiar with memes? A meme is an idea so hot that it propagates like virus. I showed a menu of a dozen memes.

“Pick a number,” I asked the audience.

These are all familiar topics to people familiar with my work. I'll give a summary paragraph or two on each topic and a link to more information on it.

1. The Birth of eLearning
In fall 1999, the dot-com era was in full swing, twenty-somethings were driving Ferraris and guzzling fine wine, Moore’s Law was Silicon Valley’s religion, and people began to talk of eLearning, an attempt to share the halo of eBusiness and eCommerce. Venture capitalists swarmed into eLearning, hoping to cash in on a Learning Revolution to eclipse the Industrial Revolution.

People are not widgets, certain aspects of learning cannot be automated, and first-generation eLearning was largely a failure.

5. Blended.
Blended is a term much in favor among those who originally defined eLearning as training by computer alone. When that didn’t work, they coupled online learning and face-to-face workshops. An extensive course would contain numerous slices of on, off, on, off, on, off, etc.

The on/off approach is absurdly limiting. Shouldn’t we always make available the best tool for the job? My eLearning palette includes collaboration, knowledge bases, simulation, just-in-time support, communities of practice, blogs, industry news, and more.

6. The Blogosphere
Blogs (short for web logs) are another symbol of the increasing importance of the individual over the institution. By and large, blogs are person websites characterized by:

• Frequent, often daily entries.
• Chronological sequence, latest entries first.
• Single author, speaking informally.
• Links to favorite blogs of others.
• Ability to comment on entries.
• Searchable archive of all previous entries.

Five million people blog. They are individuals, hobbyists, teenaged girls, geeks, authors, reporters, Howard Dean, corporations, political rebels, newspapers, and more. We looked at a few of the previous week’s entries on my blog at www.internettime.com. There was an explanation of Mobile Learning, photos of the Royal Mile, and a photo of shrink-wrapped haggis on the shelf at Safeway.

Imagine the power of easy-to-use, searchable blogs behind an organization’s firewall. Blogging is not for everyone and it raises questions of privacy and individual freedom, but if only a handful of people wrote insider blogs, it would provide so much information on the “shadow organization” – how things really work.

2. Hunt the Elephant
I had a CEO who admonished the staff to “hunt the elephant.” Don’t be distracted by chattering monkeys or jungle drums. Focus on what you came to do.

Soon after the term eLearning came into vogue, people began saying it’s not the “e” that’s important, it’s the learning. I don’t think they went far enough. It’s not the learning that’s important, it’s the action that comes after the learning. Executives look for one thing: execution. We need to talk with them about performance, about getting the job done, about hunting the elephant.

11. Bad Stuff
Poor design is at fault for some of the failure of first-generation eLearning to meet expectation. My first example showed a simple definition that had been tricked out as a page in a book, accompanied by an on-screen magnifying glass to make it legible. We also looked at an exercise where one learned proper casual attire by dressing a cut-out doll.

Finally, we tried a lesson in business etiquette. Which is the proper choice of things to say to your host following lunch?

a. “My bass was great. How was your chicken?” b. “Mind if I finish off your chicken?” c. “Nothing like a fine Single Malt Scotch to finish off a meal, eh?”

Most of us had learned the night before that the correct answer is “c.”

We need to treat learners as customers and to avoid shoveling this sort of claptrap in their direction.

4. Emergent Learning
Our world is becoming more complex, a tsunami of information is on the horizon, and we’re expected to do more and more in less time. We have little choice but to reconceptualize our roles as workers and learners.

“All the world's a stage And all the men and women merely players”

In bygone times, workers memorized their lines and followed the script. Today’s workers are improv players, making up their lines in response to the immediate situation.

3. Phase change

In 1999, the major justification for adopting eLearning was reduced costs. (Fewer airplane tickets, fewer salaries, and other one-time gains.) Then line managers bought into eLearning as a vehicle to prepare people to meet short-term goals. (Faster product rollouts, more informed sales people.) And now some senior executives think eLearning transformational. eLearning is a prerequisite of doing business in real time. Learning has become competitive advantage.

8. EAI
EAI stands for Enterprise Application Integration.

Thirty years ago, the prevailing wisdom was that business was made up of a variety of semi-autonomous parts: marketing, sales, manufacturing, logistics, finance, distribution, and so on. A hillside of silos. Then came Michael Porter who preached that all the parts were linked together in a “value chain.”

Enterprise software began to forge the links among disparate functions. And now Web Services are linking everything together, leading to an end-state where a corporation’s entire workflow is monitored and managed by one piece of software.

9. Workflow Learning
Imagine the worker in the turbulent white water of workflow. She receives guidance through contextual collaboration in the form of portals, IM, chat, blogs, web conferencing, workflow simulations, and smart knowledgebases. She is connected to the real-time workflow via business process models, social networks, expertise mining, personalization engines, and performance analytics.

Learning comes in real-time, right-sized chunks.

7. Visual Learning, also here.
Learning without pictures is half-brained. Paperback books have changed very little in the last 500 years. Words cannot do justice to the power of visual imagery, so let’s look at some pictures to learn from.

10. Networks & learning
This is the age of networks. We are enmeshed in information networks, social networks, financial networks, communications networks, the Internet, and more. Our bodies and brains are networks.

I define learning as the ability to prosper in the communities that matter to you. Our prevailing views of learning are colored by our shared experience of schooling. Might we be more open to thinking about learning as a network phenomenon? Learning means making better connections.

12. Brand
A brand is a promise to customers that converts a commodity into something so desirable that people we pay extra for it. If we seek to sell learning to workers, doesn’t it make sense to brand it? What promise are you making to your prospects? If your learning programs were an automobile, what brand would it be?

elearnInternational

Once again, I am aloft, this time flying from Scotland back to San Francisco after spending a couple of days pondering the future of eLearning.

I’ve been talking about how time is speeding up for the past few days and this morning I experienced it. I’d turned in quite late. I awoke to my wake-up call at 5:00 am. Then I rolled over to catch a few more winks before getting out of bed. I took a look at my watch and was horrified to see that it was 6:20 am. At 6:30, I was in an Austin taxi hurtling to the airport. Luckily, Edinburgh airport is small. I made my 7:25 flight with time to spare.

The second eLearnInternational Conference kicked off the morning of February 18th at the Edinburgh Conference and Exhibition Center. A BBC journalist introduced the event and The “Edinburgh Scenarios,” four alternative visions of eLearning ten years hence, that would be a springboard to our thinking for our discussions over the next two days.

Scottish Enterprise, which convened the event and would like to see Scotland become an eLearning powerhouse, unintentionally provided a delightful contrast of old and new with the first two speakers.

First up, a professor of moral philosophy from the University of Aberdeen demonstrated why the traditional academic model must change or die. Legitimizing his authority by noting his chair at the University had existed for 510 years, he lectured us through a series of questions that insulted our intelligence. Had we considered the anticipated outcome of this eLearning business? What is the purpose of it all? Mustn’t it be useful or valuable? Can one really expect to receive a quality learning experience via computer? After all, his own attempts to put his material into a learning management system had failed. Did we appreciate that learning is more than serving up content? Finally, some things, for example the ATM and the cell phone, don’t require any training. This erudite fellow was talking through his hat, so wedded to the way things were done on campus that he could only see eLearning as an inferior version of the real stuff that had stood the test of time. Sound and fury, signifying nothing.

I asked the professor a few questions. eLearning is not all or nothing. Shouldn’t we look at how technology can improve the traditional, no-tech solution? In that not every learn can come to the campus, wasn’t eLearning better than nothing? And did he really think that designers of eLearning were unaware of constructivism and that learning is a process? My questions rambled because I found fault with nearly everything this scholar had told us, and it was hard to know where to begin. I never got around to banks weaning customers from human tellers by training them to use ATMs. The prof must have a simpler cell phone than I; I have yet to learn how to use most of my phone’s features.

Remember the scene in the Woody Allen film where a pompous Columbia professor is trying to impress his date with his interpretation of the work of Marshal McLuhan? From behind a poster, Woody pulls out Marshal McLuhan himself, who tells the professor, “You know nothing of my work….”

Don Clark, CEO of the largest eLearning firm in the U.K., provided just such a moment with his common-sense, crystal-clear description of the future of learning. If we lived in a world with no schools, what would we build in their place? Would we rebuild rural, medieval colleges? Don showed photographs of his twin boys learning. These “digital natives” are autonomous learners. They learn from the Internet. Drawing on frameworks obtained from computer games, they ask their father about military strategy. Imagine, ten-year olds talking strategy. The twins do not have the patience to abide with the stand-and-talk model of teaching. Lecture is such an ineffective medium for learning.

Don Clark

What is a university, anyway? The Internet offers more information resources than any university library. The faculty comes and goes. The students are booted out when their time is up. What remains? In this age of digital abundance, the university is no more than a brand.

Learning has been a form of punishment, and it’s time to end schooling’s two thousand years of slavery. Huzzah! That gave us plenty to talk about amongst ourselves during the ensuing coffee break. Most people went easier on the professor than I. No one appeared to disagree with Don.

The next activity was three concurrent sessions, one for corporations, another for government, and one for NGOs. I attended the corporate session led by Martyn Sloman. Martyn directs learning research for CIPD, the U.K. equivalent of ASTD.

Martyn explained that training and learning are different things. Training is an activity you do to people in hopes that they will learn. Learning is a much broader activity performed by learners themselves. Most learning is informal. For example, you learn how to fiddle your expenses without benefit of taking a course on the subject.

PowerPoint. How many in the audience use PowerPoint at least once a month? (Most of us.) How many learned it by attending a course? (1 person) How many learned via eLearning? (2) How many learned through trial and error and/or asking people for help? (45) This is a typical finding.

Links from Martyn:

www.cipd.co.uk/howdopeoplelearn
www.cipd.co.uk/presentation
www.cipd.co.uk/changeagendas

Evaluation?

Last week I concluded a presentation at TechKnowledge by reminding people, "Don't forget to turn in your Level 1 assessments."

Presenters at conferences get to see one thing participants don’t: the Evaluations. Having read more than a thousand of these quick-and-dirty assessments, I’ve concluded that most evals tell more about the evaluator than about the presenter.

Some people show their inner schoolmarm by critiquing form rather than substance. Yes, I know I should alternate colors on my flipcharts, and I understand you lowered my grade for my own good. Uh, thanks. Guess I had other things on my mind.

Others are extremely cynical. On the issue of whether our four panelists improperly promoted their wares, one participant wrote “You must be joking!” In our case, we had studiously avoided even a hint of impropriety. Neither I nor my colleagues even told people what we did. You hear what you expect to hear.

At training conferences, lots of participants come to be trained. They want things spelled out clearly. They expect to receive “the school solution.” They consider ambiguity a sin. I wish they’d come to learn. Then we could co-create some new ideas. Be positive; you might hear something you like.

And then there’s the matter of handouts. I invariably make improvements to a presentation the night before. I find a better way to express an idea or a local angle. Apparently, some in the audience would prefer that I not improve the presentation because it means the handout doesn’t synchronize perfectly with the words on screen.

At a recent event, five of us spoke in the course of 90 minutes. Among other things, participants were asked to rate our appropriateness, adherence to the written description, clarity, and the quality of delivery of each speaker. On the rating scale, “5” was tops and “1” was awful.

What are the odds that someone really found everything awful? Several people responded 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1. Conversely, wasn’t there some room for improvement? Lots of people rated us 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5. Hardly anyone rated any item 2 or 3. I guess we had a room full of extremists. This provides no guidance to anyone.

Let me offer a few suggestions on getting the most from conference sessions.

1. Come to the session as a learner, not an evaluator. Let go. Be open. Forget that you know more about presentation skills than the presenter. You’re here to learn, not to coach the presenter.
2. Don’t assume the presenter is only out for his or her own interests. Some of us are “paying back” for the help they’ve received from others. Many of us are really trying to make the world a better place. Remember, speakers at breakout sessions don't getting paid to do this.
3. Nothing in this world is certain. Few things beyond second grade can be nailed down with three bullet points. Pat answers are usually wrong answers. Furthermore, uncertainty engages the mind. You want to learn? Expect to leave your comfort zone.
4. Regarding handouts, Emerson pegged it with, “Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”
5. If you want to give the presenter meaningful feedback, put it in words. Multiple choice items convey scant information.
6. If you attend sessions to learn, evaluate your own performance. Were you attentive? Did you try to link the speaker’s ideas with your professional challenges? Did you take meaningful notes? Did you learn enough to justify investing your time? Is this the optimal mode for you to learn?

When Lance Dublin and I were making many joint presentations at the time our book came out, we marveled at people who rated us sub-par, but stayed with it for an hour or more. (There’s always at least one character who would have criticized Abe Lincoln at Gettysburg for speaking too long.) We started telling people that if they weren’t getting something out of our session, please leave. We didn’t want their ratings to ruin our averages.

Virtual Clark Aldrich

Harvey Singh had to pinch-hit for Clark Aldrich on our panel on the future of learning. Harvey did great. But Clark, this could have been you in this photo instead of Harvey:

Clark did send along these photos of hundreds of NCOs, soon to be heading back to Iraq, doing the Virtual Leader simulation.

TechKnowledge '04 -- Day Three

By the third day of an event like this, some participants are zombies; others are off to Disneyland (soon to be ComcastLand). This time they missed some great insights.

ASTD chair Pat Crull took the stage to introduce Qualcomm's Tamar Elkeles who was going to tell us about The Wireless Future and the Impact on Learning. Yawn. I expected a pitch about Kyocera phones. Or how people who refuse to read for very long on a 17" monitor are going to learn to love reading on a 2"x2" screen on a PDA. I've heard it and I figured I could wait until this stuff came of age.

Tamar took the stage and began to talk about "learning on the move." She told us how you can already use your phone as a voice-activated remote control for both your garage door and your television set. You can download a ring-tone that is an inaudible mosquito repellent. For $10 a month, SPRINT will let you watch CNBC and sports by phone.

Tamar's presentation

Consider how phones are woven into our lives. Ring! Ring! Ring! You feel compelled to pick it up to answer. Cell phones are a relatively new innovation yet they've become indispensible. Losing your phone is like losing an appendage to your body.

The Europeans are investing € 4,5 million in wireless illiteracy training for the homeless. Why? They may not have a home, but they surely have a wireless device. Gallo uses wireless phone learning to bring merchants up to speed on new products; at least they won't be interrupted by phone calls.

Pilot programs are investigating blends, discovery learning (museums), interpretation (info), and more. About then it hit me. My concept of "phone" had become obsolete.

A dozen years ago, speakers describing how gradual change can sneak up on you would recount a story of frogs and water on the stove. The legend said that it you pitched a frog in boiling water, he'd hop right out. However, if you put the frog in tepid water and heated it to a boil, the frog wouldn't sense what was happening and you'd end up with boiled frog. In my case, the phone had almost reached the boiling point before I woke up to the fact that we're no longer talking about Ma Bell's phones. Today's devices are not the same species as the phones I grew up with. (When I was a little boy growing up in Hope, Arkansas, our phone number was "2"; our town wasn't wired for dial phones at the time.)

It's the old saw that you can't learn what you already know. I was two years late appreciating the real value of storytelling because I thought I already knew most of what there was to know on the subject. Then I finally read Stephen Denning's The Springboard and discovered an entire new landscape. Ah, co-creation. Now I see why stories are great (your mind makes up its own stories in reaction to those of others).

I'd have caught on to M-Learning sooner if instead of phones and PDAs, the enthusiasts described the hardware as learning gizmos or TriCorders. That would have kept me from blocking out the potential with limitations that are no longer there, some kind of learned helplessness.

IBM's executive for M-learning, Christopher von Koschembahr, climbed to the podium to describe a scenario out of Sam Adkins' and my workflow learning playbook. Over the past ten years, the back-end of business computing has consolidated to the point that a mobile learner can connect into the central nervous system of the enterprise. (Chris's wording was much more elegant but I hope you get the idea nonetheless.)

The thought is that the only slack time available for learning comes in small chunks. You have ten minutes waiting in line? Pull out your learning gizmo and catch up:

Tamar came back on to tell us it's time to work on our M-Strategies. It doesn't cost anything to begin, it rides on infrastructure we've already built, and the time is now.

Lance Dublin, the impresario of TechKnowledge '04, came back on to thank everyone who helped put the event together. I found this event very worthwhile. I was happy to get the feeling that America is finally coming out of the economic dark ages of the last couple of years.

Handouts.

TechKnowledge '04, Day Two

Welcome, Dan, Fred, Beatrice, Amanda, and Elizabeth, who attended this evening's sessions on Blogs & Learning at TechKnowledge.

---

Panels

My second morning of TechKnowledge began with a panel of vendors of LMS and eLearning platforms addressing “Where are they going?” Panelists were Jason Averbook (PeopleSoft), Ed Cohen (Plateau), Lenny Greenberg (Pathlore), Malcolm Hobbs ( Saba ), and Jim Federico (Click2Learn). Moderator Josh Bersin (Bersin & Associates) pulled these nuggets of wisdom and rules of thumb from the panelists:

• For every $1 you spend on LMS software, expect to spend three or four times more for implementation.
• 5% to 15% of your cost will be for integration.
• LMS no longer run in silos. One provider says nine out of ten installs link to HR or financial systems.
• Jason: You cannot integrate at the business product level.
• Ed: That's a myth. The LMS can be the hub.
• It's not going to be a single-vendor world. (I thought of a Ferrari, with body by Bertone, Pirelli tires, Bosch ignition, Dell'orto carburetor, and so on.)
• PeopleSoft receives 30,500 RFPs a year.
• You've got a choice with enterprise software. You can customize the software to your processes (paying through the nose for customization and shutting off your upgrade path) or conforming to the best practices imbedded in the software.
• A quarter of the audience had more than one LMS.
• Important in the 3-5 year future: enterprise wide performance culture, adoption of industry best practices, total cost of ownership, plug—and-play enterprise software, integration of learning and work, workflow-based learning.

 

Next I visited a panel of buyers. Steve Teal (Bristol Myers Squibb), Dan Henry (Bank One), and Keith Irwin (Wells Fargo), egged on by moderator Sam Herring (LGuide), told stories of the “Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.”

Lessons include:

• Be sure who owns the intellectual capital.
• Determine your requirements before calling in the vendors. The devil's in the details.
• “Will the vendors come in to you?” “Too often.” One fellow no longer returns phone calls. Advice: don't call them in until you've defined what you want.
• What if the vendor doesn't follow your RFP process? Watch out. One buyer received 200 pp. of boilerplate ahead of the answers to his questions. How they answer the RFP indicates what they'll be like later on. Eliminate them from consideration.
• The RFI is educational; the RFP comes after defining your requirements.
• When choosing an advisor, pick a “partner” who is independent. Lots of great people are available.
• Research? One person suggested Brandon Hall. Another said the information he received from Brandon was inaccurate and out of date. LGuide used to date-stamp its reports since inaccuracies are often attributable to the age of the report.
• Watch out for two similar-sounding but very different terms. Configurable means you can flip a few switches to change things to your liking. Customization is recoding – and you will pay for it.
• Translation: “We can do that” = “Pull out your pocketbook.”
• Would you buy version 1.0? No.
• Sign a prenup setting grounds for a no-fault divorce in case of irreconcilable differences.
• Next was my panel with Ellen Wagner, Harvey Singh, and Dexter Fletcher, orchestrated by Brenda Sugrue. We covered a lot of ground but that will wait for another day; I'm a bit tired.

Next was my panel with Ellen Wagner, Harvey Singh, and Dexter Fletcher, orchestrated by Brenda Sugrue. We covered a lot of ground but that will wait for another day; I'm a bit tired. (My photos of Ellen and Brenda did not turn out.)

ASTD TechKnowledge 04 #1

ASTD TechKnowledge '04
Anaheim

Battlefield Report

ASTD COO/CIO Tony Bingham opened the TechKnowledge conference at the Anaheim Marriott this morning with an arresting slide that announced, "Technology is Dead." Then he announced that this was a quote from Larry Ellison, just crazy Larry spouting off again. (Tony presiding signaled the fact that ASTD has yet to seat a new president.) Tony warned us away from pertrusive (pervasive+intrusive) apps.

Michael Rogers, a "practical futurist" from the Washington Post gave us his thoughts on what's next. Kids think the classified ads in the newspaper are dumb; why wouldn't you search for precisely what you're after online? Why pay for a dozen songs on a CD rather than buy the songs you really want one at a time? The next gen expects to have its media customized: TiVo is replacing "appointment viewning."

With MyWashingtonPost, they invested $1 million, but consumers did little beyond customizing their movie schedules. Personalization must be implicit, like Amazon, the result of smart software watching my behavior and accommodating my needs.

People today want to be doing things. They want control. They want tools. Along with the book review, add a button for buying the book.

The browser's fading away in favor of Internet-aware apps.

Wired kids, e.g. in Finland, make fluid plans. "Let's all go to the pizza place now." You can show up in person or virtually (text messaging is as good as being there.)

Ease of use should mean "Easy to Use." Steve Jobs announced the Mac in 1984, saying that Apple was making the computer as easy to use as the telephone. Now our telephones are getting as hard to use as our computers!

The "guru problem" crops up when an expert has a vested interest in keeping his "secret knowledge" secret, i.e. making himself indispensable.

On my first cruise of the four-aisle exhibition, I found a few new items:

Hatsize supplements a web conferencing tool (e.g. Interwise, Centra, WebEx, etc.) with administrative control. For example, Hatsize will set up all the computers with the software and configuration to participate in an eLearning course. Say the course takes a break. Hatsize can return everyone's computers to their last state when learners return.

Pixion is a conference server. One wonders how many of these the world needs. Unlike most of what's out there, you can buy Pixion as either a hosted solution or to run on your own servers. Written in java, Pixion is natively multiplatform (unlike MS Live Meeting.)

TalentSmart is an online interview that assesses your EQ (emotional intelligence) from asking 28 questions. This creates scores long four dimensions: self awareness, self management, social awareness, and relationship management. Then you're reinforced with action plans, goal tracking, sharing results with your boss, and more. They tell me Goldman Sachs has purchased 3,500 units. Unit cost is $29.95. Workshops, workbooks, etc., are extra-cost items. It's an interesting concept; I can't tell whether it's going to change the world. Experience will tell.

Plateau's Ed Cohen considerately warned me away from his wildly popular session on LMS as too elementary. I walked across the hall and caught Kevin Oakes's presentation on getting "A Seat at the Table." This was Credibility-Building 101. From what I've seen in California companies, I agree with Kevin 100%. Being invited into the executive conversation is not an entitlement; it's something you earn by thinking and expressing yourself like a business person.

Kevin quoted Pat Galaghan, who was sitting directly behind me, telling of an audience member who bolted when Pat brought up the bottom line. "I didn't get into training and development to worry about the bottom line."

I was happy to finally meet T+D's Eva Kaplan-Leiserson f2f. She has just had published a couple of items on social software, good roundups of an exploding area of interest. I invited her to join our next Emergent Learning Forum, which will focus on the nexus of social software and corporate learning.

I expect to be writing more about this. For now, I'll offer Kevin's summary:

1. Skip the rhetoric. (Normal people don't talk about pedagogy.)
2. Understand the business and speak in those terms.
3. Act, don't just "align."
4. Use technology for a purpose.
5. Focus on results. = bottom line.

Totally nutty, the organization of this event. In late afternoon, I wanted to hear Thiagi talking about games and sims. And Sam Adkins, on workflow learning. And Bob Mosher, now with Microsoft. And IBM's Tony O'Driscoll on "challenging conventional wisdom." I ended up in Jack Phillips' session on ROI. (Why schedule all the hot speakers for the same slot?)

Jack's emphasis on results is right-on and his lilting Southern drawl is ideal for putting across a no-nonsense message.

I don't agree with Jack's characterization of intangibles as things that can't or shouldn't be converted to numeric data. Those who read me here know that I consider intangibles such as know-how, competence, and relationship capital more important than physical assets. Geez, I also find that, even thought it's intangible, "opportunity cost" -- the value of what people would have been doing with their time were they not learning -- is often the largest cost of any learning.

ASTD has to think this event a success. They're larger than last year; the expo hall is filling out. The breakout speakers are good. Attendance is up, not down.

Some of the cognoscenti complain that the participants are two or three years off the pace. This is what happens when a technology becomes mainstream.

As I found at my first TechKnowledge event in Vegas a couple of years ago, conferences like this truly serve the membership. It's not cutting edge. It's tried and true.

From my motel, Katella Blvd & DisneyLand

Time for bed. Zzzzzzzzzzzz.......

Recent Presentations

You may have noticed that I've been giving Macromedia Breeze a workout. I'm honored they chose me to give the first two sessions in their inaugural webinar series. Five hundred people signed up for Sam's and my presentation today, although of course nowhere near that many followed through. The etiquette in signing up for webinars is undefined; suffice it to say that registering for an online event is closer to highlighting a show you want to watch in the t.v. listings than to accepting an invitation to a wedding reception.

I'll post the URL to Sam's and my gig as soon as I can lay my hands on it. In the meantime, here are a couple for your listening pleasure. Please leave a comment telling us what you think of Breeze as a delivery medium.

The Edinburgh Scenarios, 34 minutes, Jonathan Star and Jay Cross

GBN's Jonathan Star and Internet Time Group's Jay Cross discuss the state of eLearning ten years hence.

New Directions, 17 minutes, Jay Cross

Jay discusses emergent learning and the Emergent Learning Forum

I've said this before but I'll say it again: PowerPoint presentations without narration or notes are about as useful for learning as a Rorschach test. The interpretation tells you more about the reader than about what the author had in mind. Wordless PowerPoint decks are cop-outs, e.g. "I missed the meeting but I looked through the PowerPoints." You betcha.

Yin and Yang of home computer maintenance

The Dark Side

When I participate in events at L. A. 's Staples Convention Center, I forego the expensive hotels in favor of staying with Patsy. Not that Patsy and I have a thing going; she runs a delightful bed and breakfast half a mile from the Convention Center.

Half a dozen years ago, graffiti appeared on walls and sidewalks in Patsy's neighborhood with a vengeance. She and others vowed not to buckle under. As soon as a graffito appeared, Patsy's SWAT Team painted over it. Armed with buckets of paint, they prowled the streets at three in the morning. Within six months, the vandals moved on, doubtless to a more complacent, less proud neighborhood.

This morning I could identify with Patsy. My inbox was host to hundreds of virtus-laden email bombs. Made for the quaint old days when viruses came in twos and threes, Norton Anti-Virus couldn't handle the situation. After answering "Yes" forty or fifty times to Norton's repeated questioning about whether I wanted to Quaranteen the offending email, I gave up.

I went to my server and deleted page after page of email with subjects like "Test" and "Hello."

In a more just world, the virus vandals would feel a little pain whenever I delete their garbage. I'd like to experience the hard-won satisfaction of Patsy's group, driving the jerks out of my space.

In the meanwhile, I wish Norton Anti-Virus would let me check a box once and for all time signifying that, "No, I never want to open virus-laden Spam."

Now it's as if the local police were to show up at my door every time they catch a criminal to tell me, "Look at what we did for you." Norton's bargain is, "I'll quaranteen your virus in exchange for my pop-up."

The Light Side

Monday night my blogs began to act strangely. I was unable to post an entry. This morning, after 90 minutes of getting through the email-ffiti, an email from Stephen Downes alerted me that the comment function on my blogs was down.

When I tried to post an entry, I got this in return: "Can't open file: 'mt_trackback.MYI'. (errno: 145)" I turned to the Moveable Type Support Forum, dreading a day of geeking through code in languages I don't understand. Could I run "phpAdmin"? Yes, it turned out I could. Soon, all my raw MySQL files were on the screen. A couple of keystrokes could banish years of entries into the aether. At this level, you work without a net. I put a checkmark next to the offending file and clicked "Repair." Everything works again! This is great. Wonderful. Something works!! On the first time!!! I walked the line and didn't fall. I don't need no stinking net!!!! Huzzah!!!!!

Yes!

elearnopaedia

Check out ADL's elearnopaedia. Lotsa links.

Initially I was miffed because I couldn't find my site. Then I turned to "Favorites," a select list of nine. Two are ADL's own sites. Another two are Marcia and Wayne's Learnativity in duplicate (and try Ageless Learner if you want to keep up with Marcia, who, not content with just writing a book, has two books coming out). Learning Circuits is a great choice but for some reason they are down today. Thiagi's site is always gamey; I mean about games. TechForum is represented with a lame events calendar which lists only their own (Go to Learning Circuits or eLearning Centre for a complete calendar). The glossary, curiously, is Australian; e-boolabong? e-digeradoo? And that leaves...ta-da...Internet Time Blog.

There's a lot more here than Favorites, so I'll want to poke around before giving the elearnopaedia anything but high marks for effort. A couple of areas for improvement:

• It would certainly be helpful to have a way for readers to rate the resources. Think of the time you'd save by cherry-picking and reading only the top articles.
  
• My site has more than 25 papers and published articles I've written and a dozen presentations, many available with narration. I maintain an extensive link list and special sections on workflow learning, visual learning, ROI, design, etc. Yet most link lists don't do deep linking. My 500 MB of material gets the same signpost as a three-page vendor site of unoriginal material. I don't mean to whine; I get visitors by the boatload but I do find that many link listers do their readers a disservice by not giving a very full picture of what's out there.
  
  Another example just came to mind. Have you ever visited the archives of Stephen Downes' site? It's awesome. Click one of these links

Another plus for ADL. They at least try to provide descriptions with links. Another reason I like eLearning Centre is that Jane Knight not only provides descriptions, she also tells what's good and what's not.

Use your head!

Brains and Brawn, One and the Same

By NICHOLAS WADE

Published: January 25, 2004

Researchers in Germany report that the brain is similar to muscles in that if you exercise, it will grow:

Since they can't observe what's going on at the cellular level, the scientists don't know if the new weight is due to new cells or new connections. The people the Times spoke with think it's the connections. There are plenty of them:

Prediction: This finding will appear in Training, T+D, and the other vehicles of the training industry's popular press with the fervor of The National Enquirer reporting Michael Jackson's affair with Liz Taylor.

Does reading garbage, memorizing the ball scores, looking at porn, and watching Harry Potter movies a dozen times make one's brain heavier? Just thinking about that makes it hard for me to hold my head up.

eLearning Forum & 2014

Another reason to come to eLearning Forum this Tuesday:

Door prizes!

You must register by this evening!

Copernic Summarizer & ROI

At Winterfest RSS this morning, Bob Scoble talked of blowing people's minds by showing how he can keep up with 1,200 blogs in an hour a day. (RSS lets you read the headlines and drill down only when an item is of interest.) I'm applying similar logic to reading from dead trees (AKA paper).

I have a dozen white papers I'd like to read in the next couple of days. Well, "read" isn't quite the rigth word. I want to extract and retain any new information from them that ties into my current quests.

1. First I would like to assess which papers are worthwhile putting some time into and which are not.
2. Some chunks of the remaining papers will be more worthwhile than others. I'd like to be able to focus on the high-return sections and breeze through the rest rapidly.
3. My days are full. When I'm not reading for pleasure, I want to read as quickly as I can while still retaining the message.

Copernic Summarizer is going to enable me to do all that and more.

As they say on the Copernic website,

I turned Copernic loose on Workflow Leaning, 285 pages (124,000 words) of technical matter and explanations. Minutes later I had a 1000-word summary. Click of a button and I had a 250-word summary. Click, a 100-word summary.

Each summary is a selection of representative sentences. Reading the summary tells you what you want to take the time to read the old-fashioned way. There's some sort of artificial intelligence doing a good job behind the scenes here; the summaries make for great reading.

It's hard to believe technology like this is available, especially with a price tag of only $60. You can try a full-featured 30-day demo for free.

Seeing is believing, so up ahead, I'll show you a few summaries of my eBook, Metrics. Who knows but what you'll see enough to make you want to order the full version of Metrics. For the price of Copernic, you could buy two copies and have enough left over for a cup of coffee and an hour of online wireless time at Starbuck's.

Here is Metrics in 100 words:

In either case, you need to convert the return to profit, or profit contribution.

At a breakout session at TechLearn several years ago, I could hardly sit still while a researcher told four dozen training managers how to use ROI to sell their programs.

You want to build a set of shared assumptions and a logic train that translates training activities to business results.

The vice president of operations and technology training told us how she drummed up management support of eLearning.

When you add up the cost of development, salaries of people out of the field for training, and implementation cost, your "all-in" cost for the project, soup-to-nuts, is $1 million.

Here is Metrics in 250 words:

In either case, you need to convert the return to profit, or profit contribution.

At a breakout session at TechLearn several years ago, I could hardly sit still while a researcher told four dozen training managers how to use ROI to sell their programs.

You want to build a set of shared assumptions and a logic train that translates training activities to business results.

The vice president of operations and technology training told us how she drummed up management support of eLearning.

"Investment" is what you pay to achieve the return.

When you add up the cost of development, salaries of people out of the field for training, and implementation cost, your "all-in" cost for the project, soup-to-nuts, is $1 million.

If you're growing into a new area of capability, you may spend half your time learning.

"People engaged in learning and creating the future together can move beyond the old structure, strategy, and systems philosophy of running the business.

International Data Corporation studied the buying behavior of corporate and IT training managers and concluded that, "ROI will no longer be measured in 'savings' or 'reduced cost of training.'" Instead, attention will be directed to "measurable changes to business metrics resulting from training investments.

Until you know what an individual manager is trying to accomplish, you can't talk to them about potential results.

This eLearning infrastructure would give Charlie a platform for broadcasting and reinforcing his message about transforming our organization.

A Fortune 50 company used eLearning, knowledge management, and collaboration to bring new-hire sales people up to speed in six months instead of fifteen.

Finally, here is Metrics in 1,000 words:

Few others were pointing out the absurdity of traditional accounting measures and the famous "four levels."

In either case, you need to convert the return to profit, or profit contribution.

Applying reasonable rules of thumb, the 15% increase in customer satisfaction could become $1.5 million in profit.

When you talk with an executive, you need to talk about execution.

At a breakout session at TechLearn several years ago, I could hardly sit still while a researcher told four dozen training managers how to use ROI to sell their programs.

You want to build a set of shared assumptions and a logic train that translates training activities to business results.

The vice president of operations and technology training told us how she drummed up management support of eLearning.

The CIO of the bank and other top managers have dubbed her "e-Laura" and use chance encounters for updates on the bank's eLearning progress.

For example, if Chevron-Texaco's accountants uncover a $32,000 error in the sales department's expense budget, they don't make Chevron-Texaco note the error in its annual report.

A very conservative businessperson values these as "soft" benefits and doesn't factor them into ROI calculations.

In sum, following accounting conventions to the letter can lead to making the wrong decision.

"Investment" is what you pay to achieve the return.

When you add up the cost of development, salaries of people out of the field for training, and implementation cost, your "all-in" cost for the project, soup-to-nuts, is $1 million.

If you're growing into a new area of capability, you may spend half your time learning.

"People engaged in learning and creating the future together can move beyond the old structure, strategy, and systems philosophy of running the business.

Training has earned a bad reputation in executive management.

Join me for a fresh look at ROI in the information age.

International Data Corporation studied the buying behavior of corporate and IT training managers and concluded that, "ROI will no longer be measured in 'savings' or 'reduced cost of training.'" Instead, attention will be directed to "measurable changes to business metrics resulting from training investments.

Until you know what an individual manager is trying to accomplish, you can't talk to them about potential results.

When you're working with the right client, measuring results is not difficult.

Accounting conventions play a major role in ruining numbers' reputation.

"Good Heavens, this effort is going to cost us $8 million and change.

This eLearning infrastructure would give Charlie a platform for broadcasting and reinforcing his message about transforming our organization.

A Fortune 50 company used eLearning, knowledge management, and collaboration to bring new-hire sales people up to speed in six months instead of fifteen.

Throughout most of 2000, SmartForce was among my marketing clients.

SmartForce ran off the rails -- It's a complicated story -- but accelerating employee time-to-performance remains one of the biggest paybacks of any investment in corporate learning.

Accelerate the development of the direct sales force.

HP VARs who participate in eLearning build better customer relationships and make more sales.

Schwab and others provide user-friendly, high-quality, and effective learning tools on their Web sites, thereby creating more knowledgeable investors and increasing the likelihood that they will become long-term customers.

The cost of implementing eLearning throughout an organization the size of Widgetware (not just for the sales force) would be approximately $1 million.

Dell didn't get to be the number one computer company in the United States by ignoring customers' needs.

"Why would a world-class company offer anything but world-class learning opportunities to help its customers get the most out of their computers?"

IC Growth has developed models and formulas that link intellectual capital management to economic profit.

Business looks and feels radically different from in your father's day, and it's changing so fast you will hardly recognize it a decade hence.

Accounting -- a system of assumptions and conventions for identifying, measuring, recording, and communicating economic information.

Unlike the cost of an asset, the cost of an expense does not provide a future benefit to the business.

In this case, the roi du soleil.

In Fall 2000, a panel of ROI gurus joined in conversation about the state of ROI calculations today, what needs to be measured, and the ROI of eLearning.

Welcome to today's roundtable on return on investment, part of our series on Making eLearning Work for You.

If people want to know more about what we're discussing today, they should read Ed's Running Training Like a Business and Jack's Return on Investment in Training and Performance Improvement Programs.

I spent most of my career on the customer side of the equation, so I come at this from the point of view of having been a customer of training providers for many, many years.

All the business people I know want to take the time to understand the return on the investments they're making.

To make a credible ROI argument, you have to start before any intervention takes place.

Because otherwise it's like the cartoon where Charlie Brown shoots an arrow and then goes and draws the target around it.

Personalization, where learning is tailored to my style, what I need to know, and where I can test out of things I already know, saves time and makes it interesting.

Most business and university executives know better than to base strategic decisions on a two-decimal-point difference in ROI figures.

But they insist on ROI and other metrics as a form of business discipline to get myopic unit managers to consider the mission of the overall organization, not just the operations of their own department.

This is bound to be a challenging transition because many training professionals need additional skills to assume the new role, upper level executives need see learning as a strategic asset, and there need to be examples that demonstrate this new role and its benefits.

Where infrastructure investment is concerned, as is the case of many of the initial costs associated with eLearning (including training a first generation of trainers and administrators), this should be obvious.

Copernic, where were you when I was in college?

The future of eLearning -- this Tuesday

Today I met with Jonathan Star at Global Business Network to refine our presentation at this Tuesday's session of the eLearning Forum. Our theme is the Edinburgh Scenarios, the ten-year scenario learning exercise being funded by Scottish Enterprise.

For information on our public session at Microsoft's Silicon Valley Conference Center in Mountain View, see the eLearning Forum website.

To participate from afar, sign up to attend over the 'net, courtesy of Interwise.

As I was printing a few pages about the Edinburgh Scenarios, I got a new warning message, words that tell me we already live in "The Age of the Smart Machiine."

Presentation: trends in collaboration

Here is the presentation that kicked off the Collaborative Learning 04 conference. It's 25 minutes but you can pick and choose what you want to see. This is recorded in Macromedia Breeze; the live recording didn't turn out that well.

After listening, please leave a comment below. Thanks.

The Edinburgh Scenarios

Please join the discussion of how eLearning will evolve over the next ten years.

Brief Project Overview

Explanation of the Project

The scenarios:

• Back to the Future


• Virtually Vanilla


• U Choose


• Web of Confidence

Join the threaded discussion on the Edinburgh Scenarios

What's Next?

What's Next? is a compendium of thoughts from fifty illustrious members of the Global Business Network. Their thoughts dwell on the world ten years from now, the same timeframe as the Edinburgh Scenarios.

If you're not familiar with GBN, just reading the membership list will be a treat. Where else are you going to find the likes of William Gibson, Laurie Anderson, Jaron Lanier, Eric Drexler, Doug Engelbart, Stewart Brand, Danny Hillis, Bill Joy, Michael Porter, Clay Shirky, and Michael Murphy in one place?

GBN’s president Eamonn Kelly sets up the interviews by making a convincing argument that complex times call for deeper understanding to underpin our decision-making. "This in turn, is key to gaining adaptive advantage: the ability to anticipate and sense change, and the capacity to respond quickly and coherently."

Everywhere I turn recently, I find myself tripping over complex adaptive systems. Business flows, everything is connected, we don't see the whole picture, surprises are on the way. I'm tempering my view several months back that the "science of complexity" is simply another way of saying "You don't get it." Nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah-nyah.

The "new terrain" posited by What's Next? is composed of these categories, which also organize the chapters of the book:

People
• Cutures & Socities
• Values & Belief Systems
Planet
• Civilzation & Infrastructure
Environment & Sustainability
Potential
• Technology
• Science
Power
• Economics & Finance
• Geopolitics & Governance

Constructed largely of 500-word quotes from GBN members, What's Next? is perfect bathroom reading. Unless I succomb to diarrhea, I won't finish reading it until mid-month.

The old in-and-out

Surfing around to see where other people are at, I stumbled into the site of Epic and this absolutely wonderful list from Donald Clark. Not only do I heartily agree with his list, I was able to do so in about 15 seconds. Pure essence.

I have yet to meet Donald Clark, but I like a man who speaks his mind:

Scenario Learning (2)

Scottish Enterprise has enlisted a gaggle of gurus, Global Business Network, and various professors and school children to specuate on the shape of eLearning ten years hence. I feel so fortunate. Just as my prognostications for this year are petering out (See below), I've been invited to join this project and present findings at eLearninternational in Edinburgh next month. I plan to spend the coming month living in the future.

Why don't you join me? No, silly, not in Edinburgh. I mean online. There's a discussion starting up on the Learning Circuits Blog. A discussion board just popped up here.

Collaborative Learning: Put Energy into E-Learning Conference takes place January 13-15 on the net. I'm giving the keynote at 8:30 am on Jan. 13th on the topic of (surprise!) The Future of eLearning. The event is great if you're interested in Collaborative Learning. Admission is only $199. However, as a speaker, I get 10 free passes. I'll give passes to the first 10 people who email me, giving their first and last names, and email address. Dont tarry, because I am supposed to turn in the names by January 5.

Scenario Learning

In November 1998, I gave a presentation on Learning in 2004 at TechLearn. At the time, 2004 seemed so far away that far-out predictions went unquestioned. Predictions can go astray, I pointed out, quoting:

H.L. Menken, "For every complex problem, there is a solution that is concise, clear, simple and wrong."

Decca Records in 1962, "We don't like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out." (Rejecting the Beatles.)

Jay Cross in 1986: "I think I'll pass." (To then start-up Cisco Systems.)

I described the Scenario Learning I was doing, and my online vehicle, the "Internet Time Machine." (I couldn't stomach the term Scenario Planning. I wasn't planning anything. I was learning about the future.) Michael Porter had said, "Scenarios aim to stretch thinking about the future and widen the range of alternatives considered." That's more what I was after.

I spent six months talking with people, devouring books, and surfing the web. The future became clear. Training was going to follow the same path as e-commerce -- and for the same reasons.

Web services were an obvious direction we were headed:

Some of my predictions were a bit optimistic. (I've been expecting cheap wall-mountable TV for the last 35 years.)

My "vital questions" from five years ago remain unanswered.

Only one of my possiblities for the web has come to pass, and it's pretty primitive.

Whole systems for whole persons

Whole Systems for Whole Persons, The Future of Executive Development Jay Ogilvy, a co-founder of the Global Business Netowrk is a wonderful one-pager on what's wrong with executive development programs and what to do about it.

Most current programs for executive development are deficient in three respects: First, they fail to see things whole, in systemic, inter-dependent terms. Second, they fail to treat their students as whole persons with minds, bodies, and emotions. Third, they fail to treat their students as if they will have both careers and a life. This article treats each of these deficiencies in turn.

Isn't this the truth?

Trouble is, when it comes to doing business in the real world, you don’t find the economy located on one block and the politics on another, or markets in one place, logistics in another. In the business world of today and tomorrow, whole systems, rich with interdependencies, confront strategist and marketer alike.

Ogilvy addresses executive education. This enables him to keep down the word-count. After all, most of us are familiar with the structure (and foibles) of MBA programs. Reflecting on it (I've just read Ogilvy's piece three times) makes me wonder if this is not appropriate for all business training:

All three of these recommendations for the future of executive development—a new emphasis on whole systems, whole persons, and whole lives—are within reach. The tools are available and the need is real. Whether business schools and executive development programs rise to the occasion is largely a question of will and leadership. If we accept the challenge, both our businesses and our lives will be the better for it.

Metrics (excerpt)

Metrics: Measurements that Matter

These are excerpts from Metrics, an eBook available in the store.

Four years ago I attended a how-to-ROI presentation at a major eLearning event and found it so misleading that I began writing about how companies really evaluate project potential and after-the-fact results. Requests for my old articles and white papers still pour in.

Learning about ROI seems to be enjoying a renaissance in the training industry. Workshops and certificate programs abound. However, the courses I've looked at teach things that no business manager would buy. Here, let me tell you why I feel that way.

Metrics are broader than ROI

Metrics are measurements that matter. The Industrial Age is over. Measures that fail to account for intangibles are misleading.

Decision-makers use metrics to

• choose the best course of action
• supplement gut feel with a framework of logic
• assess project failure or success
• monitor progress
• uncover ways to make improvements
• divine ways to do better next time
• focus attention on profitable activities

Metrics are in the eye of the beholder. They are not simply the application of a rote formula or accounting rule. They are subject to interpretation. This is what makes metrics worthy of discussion.

Training jargon doesn't play well in the executive suite, so you need to express yourself and position what you bring to the table in business terms.

'Proof'

If only I had $10 for every time I've heard training managers lament that they can't separate out the impact of the training from everything else that was going on. Some suggest that certain employees go untrained to provide a control group. (Forget it; the Hawthorne effect* would skew the results.)

*In a classic experiment in the 30s at Western Electric's Hawthorne Works, researchers found that workers were more productive when they cut the lights up. Also, when they cut the lights down! Conclusion: Workers are more productive if you pay attention to them. Placebos work.

Why would you want a control group anyway? Business is not precise. Deciding whether to invest in more training or increasing bonuses is not some physics experiment requiring 6-place accuracy. Consider John Wanamaker's regret, "I know only half my advertising is effective. If I only knew which half." Wanamaker didn't become a department store mogul by cutting his ads; he did what his gut told him to do.

Who decides whether an iffy investment, like Wanamaker's ads or your training program, is worthwhile? Your sponsor. The sponsor is the person who most strongly influences the decision on how to spend the money. The sponsor is your client. The sponsor decides what markers constitute proof.

The Performance Agreement

You've got to describe the linkage of your initiative and business results quantitatively, using assumptions your sponsor will buy into. You must be explicit about the what-if's. Do this in writing, as a "Performance Agreement" that:

• Provides a shared understanding of the problem to be solved
• Describes what you intend to provide in its solution
• Estimates the expected increase in profit and the step to get there
• Sets out a way to assess whether the goal was accomplished or not
• Lays the foundation for solving the next problem

The Agreement also shows that you understand the business and that you're on the same page as your sponsor.

Fortune Favors the Bold

Before you get too far into metrics, ask yourself, "Does it matter?"

One of the few aspects of accounting that I like is The Principle of Materiality. This principle says that if it doesn't matter, don't worry about it.

For example, if Chevron-Texaco?s accountants uncover a $32,000 error in the sales department?s expense budget, they don't make Chevron-Texaco note the error in its annual report. Chevron rakes in $100 billion a year. $32,000 is a drop in the bucket; it's immaterial. Now then, if the accountants find a $32,000 discrepancy in your personal expense report, that's material. Send us a postcard from the slammer.

You can?t measure everything. Therefore, you should seek to measure important things. Let everything else coast. Don't fritter away time on the small stuff.

Time Matters

While training directors may have different objectives from CEOs, everyone in today's business world shares one need: they want it all now. Benefits you don't see for two years are hardly benefits at all. Given enough time, a million monkeys at a million terminals could develop your entire curriculum, with Flash animations and a repository of SCORM-compliant objects. Nobody's got time to wait.

An appropriate metric for most eLearning is time-to-proficiency. How long will it take until your people are performing competently? By competent, I mean able to meet or exceed the expectations of customers, be they internal or external to the organization.

Traditional ROI

ROI is often a mask for uncertainty or an attempt to quantify cost/benefit with accounting principles that don't count people as assets. The business return on eLearning investment should be so obvious that you can figure it out on the back of a napkin.

Traditionally, executives assume training has little or no impact on revenue, so they measure training benefits in terms of cost savings. This works against eLearning, where increases in top-line revenue generally exceed reduced expenses by a wide margin.

ROI is relative

ROI or cost/benefit analysis is relative, not some absolute value like the speed of light used to be. Where you stand depends upon where you sit. CEOs don't care about learning objects or LMS. Line managers focus on the performance of their unit, not the overall corporation. Training directors don't allocate resources to business transformation. One size does not fit all.

Beware of bad numbers

Present-day accounting is an anachronism. Invented half a millennium ago to maintain accurate shipping records, double-entry bookkeeping helped Venice dominate its part of the world. Formal accounting worked well when you could go out to the warehouse to count your assets. In the information age, it's an inappropriate yardstick for measuring anything. Most assets drive home every night.

In a nutshell, the basic problem is that accounting recognizes nothing but physical entities. Intangibles are valued at zero. Vast areas of human productivity -- ideas, abilities, experience, insight, esprit de corps, and motivation -- lie outside the auditor's field of vision.

The largest cost of all is foregone opportunity.

Again and again, I've found the largest overall cost of any corporate learning endeavor is the cost of people's time. I'm not talking about salaries and benefits; I refer to the value they would have created had they not been tied up in training. Opportunity cost per hour is not a fixed amount. A salesperson's time during working hours in peak buying season is worth much more than the same individual's time after closing time in non-peak season. eLearning often enables the employee to shift learning to those non-peak hours.

There's more.

I could go on for another ninety pages. In fact, I do just that in a newly published eBook titled Metrics.

Top Trends for 2004

Top Ten Trends for 2004

It's All About Productivity Now. Dramatic Productivity Gains from New Technology Dominate the Landscape.

By Sam S. Adkins, Senior Director of Technology Analysis, Workflow Institute

Customarily, the Workflow Institute distributes reports and updates only to members. This one's on us, to celebrate our debut. This is our abbreviated forecast. For the full version, go here

1. 2004 will define XML and Web Services. Companies that have Web Services strategies now are well positioned to tap into the second wave. The first wave was dominated by integration. The second wave will be dominated by productivity gains achieved by using Web Services to automate tasks, save time and increase output with fewer resources. Medium-sized and small businesses will be able to afford the new services previously available only to enterprise companies.



2. Enterprise Application Integration accelerates. EAI absorbs several distinct product categories. Knowledge Management gets completely absorbed as a technology by Enterprise Content Management and Enterprise Integration Management technology.



3. Productivity gains from new mobile technology explode. Primarily in the healthcare and field service industries, the productivity gains using mobile technology will be dramatic. The initial productivity gains from initial deployments in 2003 have been impressive and have sparked a brush fire of adoption as customers adopt the technology to increase productivity and decrease costs. In the healthcare industry, the technology is eliminating a spectrum of medical errors such as diagnosis, medication and prescription errors.



4. Real-time Managed Collaboration and Workflow Automation start to converge. The convergence of collaboration and workflow begins to dominate corporate and government business practices. Once highly unstructured and completely unmanaged, new collaboration technology will harness Instant Messaging, Web-conferencing and application sharing.



5. The broad adoption phase of Workflow Learning begins. The early adopter concept phase is over. Workforce Optimization, Automated Performance Management, Workflow Learning and Workflow Analytics merge. Workflow automation dominates the Enterprise Application Integration conversation. The convergence of managed collaboration injects immediate productivity gains. Informal Learning dominated by real-time contextual Workflow Learning becomes the overwhelming focus of corporate workforce development initiatives.



6. Simulation reaches adolescence and identity crisis phase. The proliferation of simulation technologies continues in several distinct technology sectors including business process management, workflow modeling, gaming, educational publishing, military training, product lifecycle management and business intelligence analytics. Cost-effective, low bandwidth virtual reality technologies will explode as massively distributed multi-player gaming grows exponentially across the planet. Interactive Flash and video on smartphones and tablet PCs become common.



7. Social Network Analysis Technology is commandeered for productivity. Business2.0 identified Social Network Analysis as the technology of the year for 2003. In 2004, it will become apparent that the technology can be harnessed to improve productivity and cut costs. Automated expertise mining and presence awareness will converge with the technology. In this case, it won't be the technology itself that makes the difference. As an enabling technology it will provide expertise maps with live human experts lighting up the switchboard of the network. Human expertise will shine.



8. The battle for the single business process interface intensifies. There is a fierce battle being fought by several major vendors now vying for the new single business process interface. Each sector and industry leader has a different approach. Enterprise Content Management vendors are advocating "content-based applications".



9. Agent-based technologies dominate the entire spectrum of technology innovation. Intelligent and smart software will grow in prominence. It will be identified as the ONLY way to offset the Information Tsunami crisis that is approaching the business world. Self-healing networks, autonomous computing, predictive software, adaptive workflows, vigilant security software and self-assembly chip technology will become common.



10. The Information Tsunami becomes the top business challenge driving technology innovation. Information is doubling every 18 months and the growth rate is accelerating. The wave cannot be stopped so it has to be conquered. Technology, particularly agent-based software, is the only alternative. Time will become the metric that dominates all automation technology.

---

For a more comprehensive version of our predictions, go here

Don't pass it along

At a think tank session at eLearning Producer last month, Will Thalheimer displayed this well-known graph...

      ...and then documented the fact that it is total fabrication. Fiction. The stuff of urban legend.

Will heads up Work-Learning Research. Here's what he's found on tattered history of this bogus graph.

Ich bin ein Berliner

Peter Isackson attended Beverly Hill High, graduated from Oxford, and has lived in Paris for decades. He is president of Didaxis, a European culture consulting and instructional design firm. (Disclosure: I am on the Board of Didaxis.) Peter introduced me to Online Educa several years ago, and I've enjoyed presenting there. This year I couldn't make it back to Berlin, so I asked Peter to take notes. Peter is thorough. He sent 5,000 words. Because it's important that Americans understand the shifting European situation and vice-versa, I'm going to post Peter's entire report below.

“ICH BIN EIN BERLINER…”

… about this time every year!

Report from Online Educa Berlin, Dec. 3 to 5, 2003

By Peter Isackson, Didaxis, Paris

Let me be brutal. Online Educa Berlin, which has just finished, is an interesting conference, offering a rich and diversified panorama of what people are actually doing with eLearning. But more than that, it’s now an essential one for those of us here in Europe and probably for a lot of others around the world. Though a long-standing member of the Advisory Committee, I have no vested interest in the event, and admit that this year, for the first time, I thought I could live without what had become a pre-Christmas ritual and duty. I agreed only at the last minute to chair one of the parallel sessions. And although I still think a number of significant (and less significant) things can be done to improve the overall quality and pertinence of the conference, if I’m to judge by the comments of the participants and my own renewed impressions, I have to congratulate the organizers on their impeccable performance.

Online Educa is an immensely successful conference, having grown from a level of participation of roughly 300 to the 1,428 who attended this year, which is already a whopping 300 more than a year ago. As a regular since its launch in 1995, for the first time I suffered from agoraphobia. Most of time, I truly and disconcertingly felt lost in the crowd, although it was the same environment (Berlin’s Intercontinental Hotel) where for years I had the feeling of being a member of a family, albeit a visibly growing one. I had the impression this time that some of the brothers and sisters had disappeared (which may be the result of fabulous success --- making such events superfluous for them -- or frustrating failure, making them unaffordable or inappropriate). But who were all these new cousins? One answer was given immediately by the organisation: the Dutch had replaced the Finns as the most populous delegation. But they weren’t alone. The invasion – unlike that of Iraq – was the result of a much wider coalition, with representatives from 68 countries.

Once a marginal event in a marginal field, Online Educa took on significance in its early years as a magnet for Europeans working in fields related to eLearning. It created its niche as an annual platform for largely informal and intellectual, non-commercial exchange among Europeans (principally) but served also as a link with the rest of the world, including the U.S. It catered to a deep need in Europe for colleagues in the same field but of different nationalities to mix, mingle and share. The initial sponsoring partners were the European telecom giants, especially Deutsche Telekom and France Telecom, who in 1995 hoped to pump prime the nascent telecommunications for education and training market (as a segment of the huge future e-commerce market) and at the same time were preparing a Franco-German marriage that never took place.

Online Educa’s spirit of open exchange among trainers, university staff and small producers of both eLearning content and tools produced a number of practical consequences, some of them to do with business, others with technology and yet others with pure pedagogy. In the period roughly from 1995 (its inception) to 1998 the presentations were largely dominated by announcements of what I prefer to call “pro-active eLearning policies” (quite often programs to be implemented locally with a varying degree of imminence) and speculation about or attempts to predict the future, i.e. “what we think it will be like when people starting using networked technology for training and how committed we are to achieving this”. Today, only the big IT vendors (Microsoft, IBM, Cisco, Sun, who have taken over after the telecom providers’ vanishing act following the bursting of the dotcom bubble in 2000) are left to paint the eternally rosy picture of what our future based on integrated enterprise systems will be like, a future that will be delivered thanks to the massive adoption of the technology they have developed to meet our present and future needs, which of course they’ve also taken the immense trouble to identity for us.

Standing room only for the plenary session

As a measure of how far we have come while things remain, in other respects, essentially the same, I remember that in 1995 the only significant commercial online training service being proposed was Berlitz for language learning (which has since been abandoned), whereas Microsoft was busy impressing a receptive public with its outstanding new platform for a virtual university, Blackbird, thanks to a seductive, graphic PowerPoint pitch with more bells and whistles than usual. Never heard of Blackbird? Nobody at Microsoft seems to remember it either. But at a time when Bill Gates was struggling to take a still ambiguous position on the emergence of the Web (“are browsers necessary, and if they are, how do we establish a monopoly?”), his company was occupying the terrain and scaring away the opposition with its educational vapourware delivered in the form of a PowerPoint presentation and well-placed press releases. Microsoft’s position as platinum sponsor this year of Online Educa is linked to its launch of another educational killer application, Class Server. In keeping with the trend to tone down of hype and reassure (rather than aggressively attack) markets, Class Server appears to be a real product, this time addressed principally to secondary schools, reflecting Microsoft’s strategy – already perfected in the street corner drug-dealing industry -- that it’s best to pull the new generations into the fold as early as possible.

The key themes in 2003

In the beginning of Online Educa, when eLearning was still a dream in the mind of the European Commissioner of Education and the World Wide Web was itself little more than a whimpering newborn, a serious confusion existed between distance learning defined as “telecommunications enabled education and training” and its offline cousins, CBT and multimedia. This confusion has only recently disappeared as the Internet has become democratised in Europe and the all-purpose notion of blended learning, with its miraculous healing powers, has been received as an article of faith amongst cutting edge educational theologians. While the background issues of organization and methods for universities and enterprises still attract the bulk of the presenters’ attention, several new themes have recently come to the fore and are likely to have more impact in the years to come. The ones that struck me this year were: flexibility, quality, culture and rich media.

Flexibility

This theme reflects a number of complementary strategic orientations and embraces notions such as change management, blended learning and contextually appropriate learning “in the face of changing learner requirements” (to quote Ashish Basu, president of NIIT, India). Basu claims to be describing “third generation” eLearning, somewhere beyond time and space, but not quite the Twilight Zone. This correlates strongly with the “just for me” principle announced with great fanfare already a year ago by IBM in its role of prophet of the future, always ready to push a catchy new slogan in the belief it will stimulate desire for a new generation of integrated enterprise solutions.

In practice, the concept as described by Ashish Basu seems slightly more human – and therefore possibly less efficient, but considerably more likely as a standard scenario -- than IBM’s vision of embedded learning that embraces both “just in time” and “just for me”… but also “just for everyone else in the team”, since my personal experience of data gathering and production, furthered by my instantly perfected presentation performance (formatting the raw data) is automatically fed back into the system. Richard Straub (IBM Europe) promises just such a perfectly calibrated solution to the hurried and harried sales consultant eager to convey instant, perfectly structured knowledge to his prospect in the interest of signing a major deal faster than the competition. (What happens when the competition buys into the same technology and catches up will only be answered at a future conference as IBM can be counted on to deliver another generation of tools for competitive advantage).

Richard Straub: the future according to IBM

Basu sees the flexibility and adaptability of the system in terms of strong and sophisticated development methodology complemented by what he calls a “layered help desk”, where actual people with different levels of qualification handle the inevitable demands on the system. These people will continue to be instrumental in ensuring that the content is not only just in time, but also dynamic, adapting to the unknown or at least unanticipated (because he quite rightly recognizes that we can never anticipate all the critical features of context). Another aspect of Basu’s pragmatism is reflected in his conviction that with the right methodology and philosophy, time to market (and therefore cost) can be significantly reduced. He didn’t fail to mention that this is particularly true when the production takes place in India!

The reasoning developed by both Basu and Straub reflects a new awareness that now seems pervasive: change, in the Heraclitan world of the information society, is the key to everything. The world and the economy aren’t just global; they’re dynamic. Flux rules. Here are a few examples of the kind of reasoning we hear:

• Learning is change.
• Adopting new forms of learning requires managing change with the objective of implementing change (we used to manage change with the aim of keeping things the way they were!)
• Business is always changing so how we do business must keep changing.
• Content must change as fast as it is created to keep up with business.
• Our values (i.e. beliefs about what eLearning is and what it can do) change as we progressively discover what those values are!
• Another key notion we’re beginning to hear is the need to “capture” knowledge. It actually dates back to the first expert systems in the 80s, but now we see it as being automatically convertible into content, taggable and therefore reusable as a learning object in a new context.

The best news of all, according to Basu, is that dynamic content costs only a tenth of the price of stable content (CBT, WBT).

Quality

The concern with quality reflects the budding maturity of the field. The first wave of experimentation not only produced results that are a challenge to interpret, but has also come up flush against the critical problem of standards, linked in turn to the definition of the criteria to be used for the choice of tools. (The trend seems to be away from one size fits all to the notion of something for everyone, but probably not the same thing). As far as quality itself is concerned, we find ourselves once again in the world of speculation about future intentions and trends. One of the speakers (Claudio Dondi) describes a major, well-funded effort to define quality in eLearning and establish the essential criteria. He notes as the aim of the project -- with which SAP, Sun and Accenture are associated as well as European consultants and think tanks – “to establish a European eLearning Quality Forum” at some point in the future. These experts and consultants appear to be both humble and non-directive: they’re not going to tell us what to do but create a space in which we can discuss it. This is one way of recognizing that there are, as of yet, no visible landmarks. It’s worth remembering, however, that when navigating in uncharted territories characterized by a dearth of landmarks, there’s always the danger of hallucinating them. But with considerable humility, everyone seems to recognize we’re not even there yet.

This isn’t to say that a lot of detailed work hasn’t already been done and that we aren’t already in the phase of experimenting new ideas to see whether they may (or may not) apply. There were twelve presentations on the topic of quality, most of them outlining their approach to the question, which usually reflects the collaborative strategies shared among a number of committed partners. Europe is manifestly ready to fund projects on this theme because there’s the feeling that it may possibly have long term industrial and economic consequences. Getting people to agree on quality criteria (whether applicable or not to real situations) is one way of stimulating a new industry: the different actors can be expected to align their strategies on those criteria, which makes marketing and internal selling much easier. This of course introduces the complementary theme of standards, which curiously wasn’t given any prominent importance as a specific theme in this year’s conference.

Culture

The question of standards did make an appearance (curiously) within the realm of culture, a session officially dedicated to two complementary themes: localization and intercultural learning issues. Eric Duval, president of the Ariadne Foundation and technical editor of IEEE learning object metadata standards made some pertinent observations about the state of play in the realm of standards and the link with transcultural concerns.

Culture, like change, appears to have become something of a buzzword in the industry, and is used for various purposes and sometimes cross-purposes. The awareness of issues having to do with culture appeared throughout the conference, with the leadoff by one keynote speaker (Francesco Miggiani, Italy) who spoke on the theme of the Cultural Dimensions of Change, essentially summing up received wisdom on how to run eLearning as a change management project. Culture in this context was corporate culture but implicitly included notions of learning culture that a number of other speakers also developed, often in relation to trainer behavior, institutional behavior and plans to train trainers and initiate learners into new methodologies.

The localisation/intercultural session I ran focused on a range of questions from best practice in localisation (Alistair Kerr, Ireland) to cross-cultural collaborative experiences. The session raised a number of what I would call existential questions (i.e. sources of hidden anguish) related to globalisation and the status of cultures, generational behavior patterns and even peace on earth, good will to men. I expect many of these deeper questions to take on further importance over the coming years:

• The role of English (and US culture) and/or other languages in globalized eLearning.
• The question of whether learning can meaningfully be globalized (an existential one if ever there was one).
• Flexible strategies for localization (moving further and further away from the notion of mere translation).
• The expectations and behavior of learners of different national or regional origin and the link to learning styles.
• Methodologies (flexible, if possible) to deal with learning across cultures and regions.
• Superficial vs. deep cultural differences (the theme of a presentation given by Patrick Dunn, UK).
• The pace of the type of cultural change that will lead to the acceptance and assimilation of eLearning (I had the occasion to cite what I consider to be the law of the 10 year cycle for the complete assimilation of a new role for a technological component, using the example of the introduction of the PC into corporate environments in the 80s).
• The cultural implications and impact of media and particularly rich media as a bi-directional means of transmission and expression.
• Techniques for managing cultural, multicultural, cross-cultural and intercultural issues within the learning context and the impact on trainers, their role and competencies.
• The impact of standards on culture and culture on standards.

Rich media

A majority of the participants at Online Educa seem to be working on the production and implementation of eLearning. Those who are looking for ways of surpassing the current limits of eLearning tend to manifest an interest in vocal and visual media as a way of extending the scope and interest of what has been essentially an illustrated text-based medium. There is the realization that if learning output is confined to the text medium (supplemented by replies to multiple choice questions), the desired outcomes of learning (behavior, discourse and in some sense, being) will remain underdeveloped as well as being impossible to assess. It also means that eLearning will be confined to a class of people with a somewhat sophisticated level of literacy.

Rich media provides a means of diversifying the contents we provide, giving them more depth and making them more dynamic. Significantly, those who appear to be the most interested in its future see it as a way of diversifying learner output as well. It will empower learners and probably turn out to be instrumental in stimulating motivation.

Rich media has suddenly become a popular theme at Online Educa. It is quite naturally linked to the idea of mobile technology, possibly because companies such as Ericsson (who were present) are looking in that direction. Vendors such as Macromedia (a sponsor of Online Educa and publisher of Contribute) and Wimba (a supplier of user-friendly compressed and streamed audio for asynchronous and synchronous use) are beginning to have an impact on the marketplace, offering the means not only to author with a wider range of media, but also to allow learners to produce their own documents and communicate them back to the server with disconcerting ease.

In the session on culture the question of the impact of rich media was raised not only in the framework of the democratisation of eLearning (extending the possibilities of communication between cultures), but also as a factor of acceleration in the evolution of a global eLearning culture that accommodates the widest variety of national, regional and linguistic cultures. Related to this, of course, is the service it will render in language learning and sensitisation to a diversity of foreign languages (and their cultures).

Two other significant themes

In contrast to previous conferences, the 2003 conference revealed two other tendencies I consider to be significant: the engagement of traditional publishers and, for almost everyone, a certain clear-headed honesty and frankness that hasn’t always been the dominant feature in this business.

Publishing

It’s remarkable to discover that an increasing number of European educational publishers in their specific national markets have moved towards a standard policy of complementing their hardcopy publications with an electronic supplement. This is moving increasingly towards sophisticated forms of eLearning and is beginning to have an impact on teachers, who suddenly find themselves with something to work with and build on. As a one-time multimedia publisher and partner of several established publishers, I’ve followed the trend in Europe over the last ten years and done my best to accelerate it (mostly in vain). The publishers have been coming to see what was going on for the past five years. Now they’ve begun to report back on what they’re actually doing and how they expect it to grow. It’s ironic that most of them remained observers as McGraw-Hill, Pearsons, Vivendi and a few others made the big speculative bets (hoping for a quasi-monopoly on a gold mine) and then as the big players pulled out, came forward to address a local (not a global) marketplace whose rules and habits they were more aware of. Their thorough engagement is also linked to the structure of European national educational marketplaces, which the global players will always having difficulty addressing.

Honesty

Few speakers hesitated to point out the difficulties encountered and the challenges they face in pursuing their training, teaching, development and research. The purely optimistic, utopian discourse that has been so characteristic of the eLearning community is now reserved to the diehard “solution” vendors. In her keynote address, Brenda Gourley, Vice Chancellor of the UK’s Open University set the tone, by stating that all was not well in the state of eLearning.

Few people find themselves in a position to say, simply, “we’ve implemented it and it works”. It may well be the characteristic of a maturing marketplace that reports of difficulty and failure become far more interesting than success stories. Freud himself said that there were three impossible professions: pedagogy, politics and psychoanalysis (all beginning with a p). If someone actually found the silver bullet, perhaps we would all be so bored -- having nothing to say -- we would stop thinking about the issues altogether, ensuring that pedagogy would become a dead science, like astrology.

If the prevailing angst is any indication, that day seems a long way away. The honesty of the participants was both refreshing and stimulating. Even the World Bank (represented by Hans Fraeters), once a proud beacon of eLearning in a benighted world (some would say this is a replica of the Bank’s political and economic behavior in the world), demonstrated outstanding humility and a concentration on the very challenging issues for which no simple solution has yet been found. It made you believe that the world is a less grim place than certain powerful politicians seem intent on making it.

The question of language

There was another phenomenon that struck me, as an expert in the field of language and culture, a phenomenon which somehow seemed less apparent when the conference was still an intimate place. Few conferences exhibit the contrast and diversity of cultures present at Online Educa. Listening to speakers from more and more diverse horizons brought home to me the central paradox of the new global culture that uses English as its lingua franca. The paradox concerns the acceptance of the practical need to be fluent in English and the discouraging failure to cultivate elementary communication skills. The issue is very much a European issue, but it’s also a global one.

The most German (or Prussian!) of German cities, Berlin obviously speaks German. Its historical isolation after World War II meant that even West Berlin was less exposed to English than most of West Germany. From the beginning, Online Educa chose English, not as a second language, but as the unique language of the conference. This may explain why the French were so slow in coming: they tend to fear environments where their language isn’t put on an equal footing with others and where they might be expected at all times to flow with the English stream. (French representation has doubled in the last year, but is still well below the other major nations of Europe).

Online Educa demonstrates the vehicular role of English, but also highlights the dangers. Although English is the standard second language for 90% of the population who have a chance to study a foreign language and is recognized as the best way to get by from country to country, Europe as a whole still doesn’t possess a true English speaking culture. The reasons for this are probably both political and cultural. The British failed to impose their particular model, possibly because they’ve always been shy of Europe and even today regressively cling to English-speaking empires of the past (their own) or the future (that of Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld). Eurospeak (a nebulous style of English prevalent at the European Commission in Brussels) is a curious mix of American and British models filtered through the phonological systems of each native language. Eurocrats (the officials who work for the Commission) spend 80% of their time speaking English and therefore are generally what one would call “fluent”. But theirs is a very odd form of fluency. Eurospeakers, almost as a duty, appear to make a conscious effort to convey their national origin through their accent, rather than adapting it to the range of styles available in the language. I can only speculate on the possible causes and see these two as primary:

1. Rather than being seen as a barrier to optimal communication, accent is for most non-native English speaking Europeans a badge of national identity, as visible as the name badges they wear at a conference. This theory would correctly reflect the loose federalism of the European Union.
2. Possibly because of a lack of cultural specificity (English being an international language, neither American, British, Australian, South African, etc.), there’s no positive model for rhetoric in English. Foreign speakers of International English have therefore implicitly created an all-purpose model: the fact-aligning monotone drone, with most of the phonemes and the little intonation that they dare to use borrowed from their mother tongue.

It’s difficult to imagine a greater obstacle to empathetic listening. In contrast, the native speakers use their rhetorical baggage to push their wares, develop their ideas and create an image of being more commercial.

I ended up asking myself, is the European neglect of communication skills a reflection of a conscious refusal of what’s perceived as American insincerity, the disingenuousness we associate with talented snake-oil vendors? Is it at the same time a refusal of the British style of sophisticated understatement that always seems to imply a form of cultural superiority, the arrogant heritage of the Empire? Or is it simply a reflection of the fact that most training and educational professionals see their profession as still concerned only with the transmission of knowledge, not of the culture (values, behavior, communion) in which knowledge is a mere technical component?

There is a movement towards stronger communication skills and it seems to me most of the presentations in the parallel sessions these days are more engaging than they were several years ago. The organisation has made a point of trying to ensure the quality of the speakers as communicators, however strong their scientific credentials may be. It’s a pity that, for political reasons, it hasn’t always been possible to do so with the keynote speakers, many of whom are chosen largely on the basis of their role as representatives of public bodies (national or European). Still, my feeling is that Europe and the rest of the world ought to make a serious effort in developing its own public rhetoric in international English, a rhetoric that need not be specifically beholden to either the U.S. or British models. Some excellent models for “non-national” English exist and, though diverse and variable, I believe they should be promoted.

Conclusions

In spite of a relatively slow start, eLearning may well have achieved a deeper commitment on the part of active professionals here in Europe than in the U.S., with a correspondingly higher degree of intellectual investment. This is counterbalanced by a significantly weaker effort in sales and marketing, complicated of course by the language problem. But that doesn’t explain everything. Most of the big suppliers and vendors are still American. They’re the ones with the massive promotional budgets. They were there in force, with no European companies in the same league. Online Educa’s sponsors over the past few years have been IBM, Sun and Cisco, and this year Microsoft took the lead position, possibly because the wise men of Redmond saw Online Educa as an opportunity to put Class Server on the map in Europe.

One reassuring element for me was what I might be tempted to call – speaking very subjectively -- the “redemption” of Online Educa, which I had begun to feel was in danger of selling its Faustian soul to its corporate sponsors, the ransom of its success and continued growth. The organisation has done an admirable job of reconciling the aggressive presence of the big name IT vendors with the moral and intellectual force wielded by the wide range of participants mostly from European institutions and enterprises, most of them engaged professionals. Indifferent to the vendors’ relentless marketing, the European worker bees have continued to build together and now buzz with an increasingly common – if, alas, still rather monotone – language full of hope and bonhomie, complemented by a certain professional intensity and a growing sense of commercial reality.

Left in the background were other more dramatic global questions that I know worried the organization earlier in the year, particularly related to the issue of European-U.S. cooperation, something that’s perceived as increasingly necessary for success in the transition towards a productive e-culture. Could this be a metaphor for the current global political predicament? If in politics the reconciliation of the U.S. and “old Europe” (essentially Germany and France) hasn’t yet been accomplished for reasons everyone has an opinion about, Online Educa demonstrates that there may well be a more solid ground for understanding and mutual achievement within the eLearning profession itself and across all continents. Let’s hope everyone can learn from it.

Peter Isackson

Paris, December 2003

Connections: The Impact of Schooling

CLO
December 2003 - Jay Cross

Your 16-year-old daughter says she’s going to take sex education at school and you’re relieved, but she tells you she plans to participate in sex training and you’re unnerved. Why? Because outside of education, you learn by doing things.

Small wonder that executives hear the word “learning,” think “schooling” and conclude “not enough payback.” Executives respond better to “execution.”

Everything is connected. Each of us is enmeshed in innumerable networks. You’re linked to telephone networks, satellite networks, cable feeds, power grids, ATM networks, the banking system, the Web, intranets, extranets and networks that are local, wide, wireless, secure, virtual and peer-to-peer.

Social networks interconnect us in families, circles of friends, neighborhood groups, professional associations, task teams, business webs, value nets, user groups, flash mobs, gangs, political groups, scout troops, bridge clubs, 12-step groups and alumni associations.

Human beings are networks. Scientists are still conceptualizing the human protocol stack, but they affirm that our personal neural intranets share a common topology with those of chimps and other animals. Once again, everything’s connected. Learning is a whole-body experience.

Moore’s Law doubles computing power every 18 months, bandwidth doubles twice as fast, and connections grow exponentially with each node. Interconnections beget complexity, so we have no concept of what’s ahead.

Six years ago, Intel CEO Craig Barrett said, “We’re racing down the highway at 150 mph, and we know there’s a brick wall up ahead, but we don’t know where.” We still don’t know where that wall is, but today the car would be hurtling along at 1,800 mph.

Change is racing along so fast that the old learn-in-advance methods are no longer sufficient. While network infrastructure is evolving exponentially, we humans have been poking along. Because of the slow pace of evolution, most human wetware is running obsolete code or struggling with a beta edition. We’ve got to reinvent ourselves and get back on the fast track.

In a world where we don’t know what’s coming next, what constitutes good learning? We’re in whitewater now, and smooth-water sailing rules no longer apply. In whitewater, successful learning means moving the boat downstream without being dumped, preferably with style. In life, successful learning means prospering with people and in networks that matter, preferably enjoying the relationships and knowledge.

Learning is that which enables you to participate successfully in life, at work and in the groups that matter to you. Learners go with the flow. Taking advantage of the double meaning of “network,” to learn is to optimize one’s networks.

The concept that learning is making good connections frees us to think about learning without the chimera of boring classrooms, irrelevant content and ineffective schooling. Instead, the network model lets us take a dispassionate look at our systems while examining nodes and connections, seeking interoperability, boosting the signal-to-noise ratio, building robust topologies, balancing the load and focusing on process improvement.

Does looking at learning as networking take humans out of the picture? Quite the opposite.

Most learning is informal; a network approach makes it easier, more productive and more memorable to meet, share and collaborate. Emotional intelligence promotes interoperability with others. Expert locators connect you to the person with the right answer. Imagine focusing the hive mind that emerges in massive multiplayer games on business. Smart systems will prescribe the apt way to demonstrate a procedure, help make a decision or provide a service, or transform an individual’s self-image. Networks will serve us instead of the other way around.

For tech networks, foundation meta-processing skills will foster the growth of self-determined learning. Personal knowledge management systems will store memories and facilitate rapid knowledge sharing across one’s network. Alter-ego agents will seek out and present us with a balance of normal alerts and fringy out-of-the-box wake-up calls.

It beats schooling.

Jay Cross is CEO of eLearningForum, founder of Internet Time Group and a fellow of meta-learninglab.com. For more information, e-mail Jay at jcross@clomedia.com.

Life and death simulations

This just arrived from Mark Rosenberg:

"I just came from the 25th annual Interservice/Industry Training Simulation & Education Conference, this week in Orlando. Over 10,000 military, DoD and civilian contractors all focused on one thing… simulations. Unbelievable simulations! Combat simulators of all kinds. The realism is striking.

The exhibt floor was jammed with a multitude of vendors simulating everything from firing shoulder launched missles, to jet trainers, to house-to-house combat. Most of the vendors work exclusively for military clients and there was only one company I recognized from the more generic training venues (Click2Learn).

Anyone who thinks simulation can't teach should spend an hour at a show like this. The opportunities are everywhere. All it takes is money (in the $$millions). A real eye opener.

The Ultimate Video Game!

You won't see one of these at ASTD!

Unbelieveable realisim (and unbelieveably expensive)!

Jet trainer landing simulation…crashing is no problem!

You might want to visit Marc's site if you're not familiar with his work.

Slogan on I/ITSEC's homepage: "Enhancing Warfighter Performance Through Advanced Learning Technology."

(Don't tell my neighbors in Berkeley I'm visiting this. It's much more respectable to tour porn sites.)

from I/ITSEC's site:

HISTORY

The Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference (I/ITSEC) promotes cooperation among the Armed Services, Industry, Academia and various Government agencies in pursuit of improved training and education programs, identification of common training issues and development of multiservice programs.

Initiated in 1966 as the Naval Training Device Center/Industry Conference, the conference has evolved and expanded through increased participation by the Army, Air Force, Marine Corps, Coast Guard, and Industry.

In 1979 it became known as the Interservice/Industry Training Equipment Conference. The Services have steadily evolved toward a total systems philosophy in the acquisition of training equipment and training delivery systems.

In 1986 the Conference name was further refined to the Interservice/Industry Training Systems Conference (I/ITSEC) to recognize the increased importance of Manpower, Personnel, and Training aspects in the systems acquisition process.

In 1992 the name was further changed to the Interservice/Industry Training Systems and Education Conference (I/ITSEC) to reflect the consolidation of the Manpower and Training Committee (MTC) and the Technology and Innovations in Training and Education (TITE) Conference with I/ITSEC. This change emphasizes the importance of education and the man-machine interface in meeting force-training requirements through simulation training.

In 1997, to reflect continued growth and changes in the industry, the conference name was refined to the Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference (I/ITSEC).

Remember the Viet-Nam Rag? Country Joe lives right down the hill.

Come on Wall Street, don't you slow.
Man, it's war a go-go.
There's plenty good money to be made
by supplyin' the Army with the tools of the trade.

Gimme a F.....

Monitor Group Thoughts

Serendipity! Ain't it grand?

I was just following up on an email from Jon Levy announcing that he's left HBS publishing to join Monitor Group. That rings a bell. Oh, sure, they're the guys who bought Global Business Network. I used to follow GBN's booklist suggestions religiously when Stewart Brand was choosing the tomes. It was so brilliant to send your customers books. Cheaper than brochures and so much more meaningful. Astute marketing.

This evening, I happened upon the Ideas section of Monitor's site. There's great stuff here. Click on the topics in the left column. I enjoyed reading Learning, Ecommerce, Management, Marketing, Strategy, and Technology.

Giving away ideas. It's akin to sending out books. It's the old "an informed customer is a better customer" strategy. Educating people to buy. Win-win-win. It will never go out of style.

---

Continuing my explorations, although I should either be in bed or vacuuming, I happened upon the current GBN Book Club site. Treasure Trove! A wonderful way to riff through ideas and pick what to explore more deeply.

When I attended college, back in the days when owning a typewriter made you high-tech, I was proud of my collection of time-saving paperback summaries like 100 American Plays or my mastery of the Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature, the touchstone for locating reviews of books assigned for reading, written at the time the books were published. It's so easy now, just mousing one's way through the great ideas. Kids, when I was your age, I used to walk five miles through the snow just to get to the school bus. Now the Internet dumps it in your lap. (Well, perhaps I'm exaggerating a little. About the snow and the miles. Maybe it was bicycling a mile on the asphalt to school. Whatever. It was more arduous than your childhood, I assure you.)

Brain dead learning

People who complain about having too much information miss the flip side: If you're looking for an example of something, you don't have to wait very long.

David Grebow and I were chatting this afternoon about Sam Adkins' post on the Learning Circuits blog, the one that starts out saying training doesn't work, eLearning doesn't work, and KM doesn't work.

I was comtemplating the 80% of training that misses the mark. At that moment, an example pops up on my screen. This one's so bad I recalled GEN Frank Anderson's advice at TechLearn, "If you're riding a dead horse, dismount."

As if by magic, a dead horse appeared:

What's wrong with this? Multiple choice is not a great way to teach history. The Shakespeare 'toon takes at least five times as long to ask a question as you'd spend to read it. The cuteness wears off in a minute or two. You need to download a 7.5 MB Flash ap just for the demo; imagine the length of a course! Only a complete fool would find this compelling; they'd learn more watching television.

Berlin

Rebecca Stromeyer tells me this will be the biggest Online Educa to-date, with 1500 delegates from 66 countries when it kicks off next week in Berlin.

If you're in Mitteleuropa, you can still register. Unfortunately, I'm going to miss Online Educa this year, after thoroughly enjoying the mix of academics and corporate types in 2001 and 2002.

Christmas Markt on the Ku'Damm in 2001

The toy department at KaDeWe

The Brandenburg Gate last year

Serendipitous learning

The Japanese maples are the only trees showing fall colors in this speck of Mediterranean climate on the shores of San Francisco Bay. Our weather confuses the plants into blooming and shedding leaves one species at a time. Transitions are slower here than environments with more extreme seasonal patterns.

It's Thanksgiving morning, the wind is blowing leaves from those Japanese maples around the yard, and somewhere down below in the People's Republic of Berkeley, students or aging hippies are probably protesting Puritan brutality toward Native Americans at the first Thanksgiving. The pesky Europeans never paid for what they got! Who's the savage, the generous host or the ungrateful interloper? But I digress....

After taking a few photographs of leaves to get my priorities straight, I set out to do some shotgun learning. No, I'm not going after the squirrels, raccoons, and skunks that live in the back yard. Rather, I'm hopping onto the net to sift through items in some favorite hangouts just to see what's out there today. It's more edgy and less predictable than reading the New York Times.

I opened Stephen's Edu_RSS Feed. After a few items in German (too early in the morning for that) I came to a link mentioning The Web: Design for Active Learning. "This handbook will present the idea of interactivity as it applies to a cohesive design including high interface, content, and instructional design." This took me to the Carving Code blog, and that linked me to George Siemens'eLearngspace blog. Eventually I got to the original article, a piece by Katy Campbell, who's with Academic Technologies for Learning at the University of Alberta.

I got lucky. The Web: Design for Active Learning turned out to be exactly the puzzle piece I needed to add to my growing framework for Instructional Artistry.

You've heard it said that "You make your own luck." It's related to "Fortune favors the bold," Virgil's maxim that you've got to try hard to get anywhere. My pathway down the web was not entirely random, even though the result was unexpected.

For years I've maintained a list of links to favorite hangouts, the eLearning Jump Page. Stephen's Edu_RSS heads the list of Top eLearning Reference Sources. Stephen and I have met. We often read one another's work. I haven't met the author of Carving Code F2F, but I respect what I've read there in the past. I've been tracking George Siemens' work since his blog first appeared. George has addressed the eLearning Forum via Interwise. I'm delighted with the interview with me that George posted this time last year.

We who share our thoughts online, driven more by personal interest than commercial reward, are a loosely-knit Community of Practice. People ask where I find the time to blog. I explain that this is the way I think. It doesn't take much extra time to divert a few sentences into blog. That trail of words and images becomes a lure to people on paths that parallel mine.

I'm thankful to have a medium for starting conversations on things that interest me.

Instructional Artistry

Most of the time, I read Maish Nichani's elearningpost for pointers to other people's stuff. Today I was impressed by his eloquence in describing his own learning at the BodyWorlds exhibit:

But even with the explicit exhibits and the information cards, I would not have captured the entire essence of some exhibits if I did not happen to listen in to a doctor explaining the exhibits to his girlfriend. I found his explanations so interesting that I took his route and followed him till he became conscious of my omnipresence.

Instruction and experience seem to take different routes in explaining. The informality of experience just seems to explain things a lot better, and at a higher plane too. We can call it the power of the narrative or it just could be that we humans (me at least) are hardwired to make sense of the informal. We are sense-making creatures and thus thrive on fuzzy conditions that force us to make sense of the situation. Maybe that's why we consider the formal to be mundane.

Maish's observation crystallizes an important factor in learning informally: fuzziness. This is akin to what lends a story impact -- enough left out that the listener's mind can create its own story, a joint effort of making meaning in a shared space. "I enjoyed the book more than the movie because the colors were better."

While old-school instructional design purists busy themselves with structuring learning, I seem to be working to dismember it. This lends new meaning to "back to the basics." Once again, the honest, friendly voice of The Cluetrain Manifesto trumps officialdom and hype.

Maybe it's time to counter the supposed efficiency of Human Performance Technology (HPT) with the effectiveness of informal learning head-on. ISPI describes HPT as "the systematic and systemic identification and removal of barriers to individual and organizational performance."

ISPI tells us to:

• Be systematic in the assessment of the need or opportunity.
  
• Be systematic in the analysis of the work and workplace to identify the cause or factors that limit performance.
  
• Be systematic in the design of the solution or specification of the requirements of the solution.
  
• Be systematic in the development of all or some of the solution and its elements.
  
• Be systematic in the implementation of the solution.
  
• Be systematic in the evaluation of the process and the results.

In my intellectual adolescence, I always took systematic to be a good thing. Now I have my doubts. The dictionary defines systematic as

methodical; formed with regular connection and adaptation or subordination of parts to each other, and to the design of the whole; as, a systematic arrangement of plants or animals; a systematic course of study

-or-

marked by thoroughness and regularity

Roget's entry on systematic lists "Arranged or proceeding in a set, systematized pattern: methodic, methodical, orderly, regular, systematical." Makes me think of McDonald's hamburgers.

If embracing HPT reduces design to things that are orderly and regular, I wouldn't embrace it. Nor would Edison, Galileo, Monet, Shakespeare, Bohr, Coltrane, Picasso, or Scott Adams.

Maish has kickstarted my thinking about replacing instructional design (which is really instructional engineering) with something entirely different: Instructional Artistry.

Essential KM

Denham Grey has written a wonderful synopsis of lessons learned with knowledge management. He absolutely nails it. With no puffery. A must-read. Sample:

We need to focus here!, is a common cry so please take your pick:, customer insights, solutions to common problems, mapping what we know, building yellowpages, inventory [intellectual, human, structural, customer] capital, building relationships, capturing product knowledge, monitoring competitors, mining transactions, capturing web behavior.

Aha said the sage, what you need is balance, a bit here and some from there so: Start small, grab the low hanging fruits, avoid enterprise wide technology solutions, culture an ecology of communities, encourage an informal idea market, work on hiring profiles, start new web forums that cut across silos, play with language, cultivate the emergent activists, encourage boundary spanners, staunch the IC outflow through professional networks by listening to frustrations, always watch the outfield, make business intelligence & customer knowledge everyones job, listen to newbies, kill loosers fast......

OK test yourself:

* Do we really recognize and value knowledge creation (innovation)?
* Do we reward learning (even when it comes from failure?)
* Do we match quality talent with quality ideas even when they are not our own?
* Do we cultivate relationships and show empathy for intellectual diversity?
* Do we encourage deep dialog and creative abrasion
* Can we discover, share and use key business rules?

Denham and I have yet to meet, but he's my primary source of KM wisdom. Go read the rest of his article; it's all precious.

Thanks, Maish, for pointing this one out.

From the "About Me" section of Denham's blog,

Favorites: Verna Allee has written the top book on knowledge management IMO called 'Knowledge Evolution', while Marc Demarest holds my best spot for an article titled "Understanding Knowledge Management". My best link for learning is: New Conversations About Learning

Incidentally, Denham's "About Me" is the first resume page I've seen that doesn't list its subject's name. Extreme modesty?

EdBlogger reflections

I spent five or six hours today at O.J. Simpson's alma mater, Galileo High School in San Francisco, taking part in the first EdBlogger conference. Half the crowd was blogging the event live and chatting online and sometimes just reading their email.

I was the lone corporate guy (or maybe one of only two) amid a crowd of 40 ed bloggers. Just about everyone else had a cute little Apple laptop in front of them.

A few of the things that caught my ear:

Learning objects. (This is a sentence; read objects as a verb.)

Relationships are tough to put in a repository.

The RIAA gets in the way of spontaneous access.

What's the defining characteristics of a blog? New stuff on top, according to some.

The atomic unit of a site is the page; the atomic unit of a blog is the posting; the atomic unit of a wiki is a change.

More easily recognized in the schools than in business: phobia about writing in public.

One participant introduced himself as "sys admin and principal."

Patrick Delaney, host & ringmaster

My BOF (birds of a feather) session drifted into talk about Wikis:

The social context makes it or breaks it.

Wikis first dealt with a project on pattern langauge in software. Many entries argued a position: "This is how it should be." The Wiki-words (links) were nouns. I wonder what a verb-word only Wiki would look like.

Most Wikis are short-lived. The passion dies.

"Wiki gardeners" tidy up unruly entries.

(Jay:) Participants rarely seem to violate the trust implicit in giving them control over making/changing entries.

(Jay:) To encourage comments on ed-blogs, shouldn't commentary be graded?

The BOF continued down to Ghiradelli, with lunch at McCormick & Kuleto's. It was a beautiful day.

Blog fodder -- ask five questions, show everyone's responses.

Web culture in conflict with community-controlled school culture.

What nurtures blogging? (1) Repression (So Polish girls blog about sex; boys in Iran talk politics.) and (2) No street life (As in frigid Finland or blazingly hot Sinapore).

Social engineering, a future problem. One fellow's son receives spoofed messages from "teacher." Justin Hall's tales of sexual awakening -- without forewarning his partners -- could grow.

Freedom. Not clear about student blogs and politics.

Dan Mitchell & Will Richardson

Back at Galileo, memes from panels:

The Browser metaphor reinforces the concept of passive consumption.

If blogs are digital paper in a binder, Wikis are erasable white boards.

One great aspect of blogs is that you can review things that are still works in program.

IT is so primitive now. Imagine if you had to call the Help Desk to use the toilet. Whoops, we have a toilet paper read error. Let me put you on hold....

Will RIchardson

Tim Lauer

Karen Claxton

Chris Kelly & Paul Allison

Phil Wolf

November 2003 eLearning Forum

This is an interim report on the November meeting of eLearning Forum. Our webmaster and CTO is busy building simulations for a client so I'm sharing some of the proceedings for those of you who are curious about what went on. Altus Corp recorded lots of the session; in a while you'll be able to listen in on your iPod.

We met at the Silicon Valley World Internet Center, which is housed in Leland Stanford's former winery. The Center is a warm, inviting space -- perfect for the think tank sessions that are held there and the eLearning Forum's session on where we're headed in the future.

The overarching theme of our first afternoon meeting was June 2005. What do we see up ahead? There are three aspects to this, and hence three parts to our session.

• eLearning. What are the major trends in eLearning? What should be the scope of eLearning? We began wrapping our minds around the state of eLearning 18 months from now. Four members of the Forum led 15-minute, concurrent breakout sessions, which we repeated twice. Then we regrouped to discuss what had popped up on our radar.
• eLeanring Forum. What should we be? How much should we grapple with? Alison Armstrong highlighted strategic issues the Board has been discussing. We encouraged members to pass along their thoughts to eLearning Forum's directors to be addressed at the next session.
• Each of us. Where do each of us want to be 18 months out? What are our passions? Network with others to make connections to take us forward.

I'll continue this in the Continue... section for the benefit of the bandwidth-impaired.

Jay and World Internet Center CEO Susan Duggan

(Click for fullsize image)	Kevin Wheeler Global Learning Resources
	Clark Quinn Ottersuft Labs
	Soren Kaplan iCohere
	Michael Carter
	Jay Cross Internet Time Group What are the boundaries of what we seek to do?
	Alison Armstrong eLF Board	Should we drop "eLearning" from our name? Should we double in size? Provide more online activities? What do you think?
Richard Clark, Next Question	Issues: Simulation rules. Replicable processes. Informal learning. Network effects. Cost/benefit choices. Games/sims. In vino veritas.

eLearning in survival mode

Repositioning eLearning

On the first day of eLearning Guild's eLearning Producer conference, Damien Faughan, Charles Schwab's Director of Infrastructure & Technology, gave a presentation on eLearning in the Post 'New Economy' Business Climate: How to Successfully Re-position eLearning.

Most people who make presentations describe a world without flaws. Everything works, everyone's simpatico, it's smooth sailing, objectives are met, and the boss is happy. Back in the real world, we've endured a lengthy recession, layoffs, disenchantment with anything dot.com-ish, and retrenching. Damien Faughan is the first person I've heard tell the truth about what should happen to eLearning in an economic downturn. I'm a Schwab customer and I respect them even more because they have folks like this fellow who faces reality and makes good decisions in response to a rapidly changing business climate.

What to do with eLearning when the economy heads south

Damien spoke about the preoccupation with 'cool' technology that puts coolness ahead of business benefits.  This "technolust" has manifested itself in the appearance of every kind of eLearning product -- few of which really served a real business purpose.  At the end of the day, all learning needs to be strategic and transformational, learner-centered and focused on contributing to the business.

Lessons Learned

What differentiated this presentation was the candor with which presenter extracted lessons learned from real life.  Learning professionals need to think like business people when business conditions change.  We can't remain married to learning solutions when business environment changes.    

Among the lessons:

• Compulsory eLearning (Financial Services is heavily regulated) works but not without intervention -- so you have to create a lot more "instructional hooks" and a robust LMS.

• Open catalogs of generic courses will bomb, consistent with ASTD research; very few eligible employees sign up for open catalog offerings (the exception being technology employees)

• When eLearning courses are elective, drop-out rates are high.

• Workers ask for classes and don't always see online learning as a preferred learning medium (i.e. there's a gap between what learners want and what they get).  We have to help learners understand how they learn.

Ch-ch-changes

Many things have changed:

• Consolidation.  Business units can no longer afford to replicate corporate wide learning offerings -- it's too expensive, it's disconnected and ultimately confuses the learner when each business unit has its own brand.

• Blended learning is the way to go.  Standalone eLearning products are too risky.

• Even in a large company, one LMS should be sufficient -- it's rare that a business unit has a specific learning need that requires a LMS!  Many large companies have consolidated LMS's as the technology has matured.

• The Corporate University is not very effective for business learning in an eLearning world.  Adult learning requires a more robust paradigm.

• Learning needs to be transparen - i.e. not dependent on an organization or an activity, but a process built into many different systems and environments.

• LCMS technology is still primitive. RLOs require a really sophisticated training organization. Usually they don't work. Having purchased and installed an LCMS it's authoring rules proved way too complex to ever support rapid instructional design and development.

• Last year Damien went home from eLearning Guild event a zealot for Reusable Learning Objects. After two-three months, most of the zeal evaporated as the reality hit home: (1) RLO's is a difficult concept to sell (b) complex object models can really slow development and (c) the technology is not available to really support this work.  So, RLO's are simply not worth the time/effort.

• In development, less 'design' and more templates. Templates are the way to go--but may make creative design talent feel underutilized.

Executive management should be engaged as sponsors of learning initiatives. They need to understand the role of learning and the appropriate use of various learning modalities. One of the ways this is accomplished is to create a Learning & Development Committee or a Curriculum Council comprised of executives who review and sponsors each new initiative.

A new vision

The learning/eLearning function must focus on:

• Facilitating learning
• Leveraging business connections
• Being strategic (transformational)
• Understanding the business and the appetite for different learning modalities
• Connecting eLearning and performance
• Working with HR
• Marrying eLearning to innovation
• Articulating the relationship between business drivers and learning products/offerings

In the past, T&D employees needed to be able to deliver stand-up classes, manage vendors, design, assess & evaluate. The new vision requires new skills, such as:

• Business analysis
• Relationship management
• Writing and information design
• Content development
• Managing high-profile business sponsors
• Outsourcing management
• Change management

 Recap of How/What to Reposition

• Involve senior business leaders
• Focus on strategic/transformational products
• Be clear about business drivers
• Focus on blended solutions
• Dump poor solutions (LCMS, catalogs, etc)
• Reinforce the link with performance
• Build your advocate network (e.g. HR, etc)
• Review and upgrade skillsets
• Forget about confusing ROI models
• Implement standards where they make sense

Whither eLearning?

The MASIE Center has just released:

Making Sense of Learning Specifications & Standards:
A Decision Maker's Guide to their Adoption
(2nd edition)

Eighty-two pages of cogent explanations, history, processes, and reference sources. This is one of those reference works, like a good dictionary, that you need at your fingertips for answering questions about standards you may be a little fuzzy on.

I do take issue with the report's "simple working definition of the term e-Learning" as:

"learning or training that is prepared, delivered, or managed using a variety of learning technologies and which be deployed either locally or globally."

Isn't all learning or training is prepared, delivered, and managed using some learning technology? And deployed either locally or globally? By this definition, wouldn't the scrolls in the ancient library at Alexandria be eLearning?

At last night's eLearning Forum we talked about what we wanted to be known as. eLearning is divisive and carries too much bad baggage. We want to embrace KM, collaboration, simulation, and other things that don't fall neatly into the eLearning category. Our mission statement was projected on an erasable white board in the front of the room. Richard Clark walked up and crossed out the "e." I crossed out the "learning" and wrote in Doing. Someone suggested "Distributed Learning," but that doesn't capture it for me.

This is all sort of ho-hum compared to the response to Sam Adkin's post on Learning Circuits blog, We are the problem. We are selling Snake Oil. Sam begins by saying:

I read these long tortuous posts bewailing the malaise of our educational systems. The problem is not "out there". We are the problem. We are selling snake oil. We now have ample data to show that:

Training does not work.

eLearning does not work.

Blending Learning does not work.

Knowledge Management does not work.

Yet we collectively reify our denial and project the root of the problem out to an external institutional framework. We are the source of the problem because we are selling snake oil. It doesn't work but there is still plenty of money in it.

In a little over two days, thirty-five people have replied, generally with well-reasoned analyses. Is this the gunshot to kick off the new learning revolution?

My only comment thus far: You want to make an omelet, you break a few eggs.

2005

eLearning Forum meets tomorrow afternoon at the Stanford Barn to talk about what's coming down in the next 18 months and what we plan to do about it. We've also put aside more than an hour for personal networking, lubricated with free-flowing two-buck Chuck.

I'm one of five concurrent opening acts. To put PowerPoint behind us, we asked Michael Carter, Soren Kaplan, Clark Quinn, and Kevin Wheeler to send in a single PowerPoint slide. We will blow these up to 3' x 2' at Kinko's and put on the equivalent of an academic poster session.

What talking points would you list if you were doing this?

Here are mine:

Click image for fullsize (50K) image

The fields I expect to be plowing 1½ years hence are the impact of web standards, contextual collaboration, and what to do about this nearly universal phenomenon:

eLearning Producer

Today I joined more than three hundred people at the Parc 55 Hotel in San Francisco for the first day of eLearning Guild's eLearning Producer. It was more than worth the time. Unlike the BS-laden events, David Holcombe and Heidi Fisk keep this event grounded in reality.

Will Thalheimer led a down-to-earth but eye-opening presentation on what works in eLearning. Properly applying spacing, repetition, and feedback can double eLearning's result and efficiency. (I'll fill in the details after I absorb more of the lessons -- and get some sleep.) Deloitte's Harold Cypress described the development and rollout of a simulation/coaching/teamwork situation to help thousands of professions learn complex methodologies. Damien Faughnan gave a cautionary tale of lessons learned at Charles Schwab.

Bill Horton and yours truly

Doug Upchurch, opening keynote

Will Thalheimer

Harold Cypress, Deloitte

Schwab's Damien Faughnan

Kit & Bill Horton, Patti Shank

Posted by Jay Cross at 11:48 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

News?

ONLINE LEARNING REVIEWS
An information and idea service
of VNU Business Media
Tuesday, November 11, 2003

Online Learning News and Reviews has learned that the reader who recommended KnowledgeNet's products in the last issue of Online Learning News and Reviews ("Migrating to the Web," October 28, 2003) is actually the company?s field marketing manager. Therefore, the reader's recommendation may be biased.

FREE Webcasts of popular conference sessions from Training
magazine's Online Learning 2003 Conference and Expo, held
September 22 to 24 in Los Angeles, are now available online at
http://www.vnulearning.com/freesessions.htm .

Peering into the crystal ball

At TechLearn, Mark Oehlert presented his findings on The Future of eLearning Models and the Language We Use to Describe Them. Mark calls it like he (and I) sees it. This is a perceptive, on-target summary of where eLearning is headed. Mark's key findings:

• While a more expansive definition of e-learning has been much discussed, requirements are now emerging that seek to make real some of those ideas (e.g. performance support, augmented reality, on-demand personalized instruction).
• While cultural change continues to be cited as one of the main hurdles to successful implementation of e-learning, no e-learning vendors seem to be packaging change management with their products.
• M-learning continues to gain buzz and momentum
• Economic models for selling e-learning will have to shift away from ‘catalog’ shopping to a service-oriented model.
• Gaming and simulation are poised to make huge impacts in this market space.
• Copyright and other legal issues pose potentially great problems for the future of e-learning.
• The ‘course’, as a meaningful unit of instruction, may well be doomed.
• The cell phone is almost universally considered a learning device.
• A continuation of the move toward “pay as you go” could actually allow smaller shops to get up and competing by providing lower barriers to entry.
• Globalization is forcing a hard focus on US-centric practices and content

Here's Mark's Power Point. The William Gibson quote is absolutely brilliant and will eventually show up on my Time page

---

Mark interviewed Stephen Downes at length. You must read his unexpurgated version to get the full flavor of the exchange. Stephen:

We need to stop thinking of online content as analogous to things. That’s the beginning and the end of it. Even if the language of ‘things’ is more suited to both contemporary academic discourse and commercial discourse, the reality is that when you find yourself immersed on an online environment it becomes evident and apparent that online content is much more like a stream than a collection of objects. That’s why I use analogies like the electrical system or the water system, and not (as Elliott does) analogies like bookstores or warehouses.

...

At this point in history we not only have much greater powers of communication and expression than ever before, we also have access to greater riches than ever before. But there is a sense that we are at a peak, and with shortages in raw materials looming, there is a retrenchment happening, a vigorous conflict over the control of ideas, over the control of resources, and in the end, over control of people.

Clearly Canadian, Stephen gives his view of cultural imperialism:

is the worldwide export of American culture, usually draped in the clothing of values and ideals. Many writers have remarked on this and so I don't need to go into a lot of detail: this not merely the export of McDonalds and everything it represents (wage-labour, corporate subservience, fast food production, massive advertising, and more) and Mickey Mouse (Scrooge style capitalism, greed, individualism and more) but also the twin towers of individualism and capitalism (and yes, I did use the analogy deliberately). These are wrapped in a dressing of 'freedom' and 'democracy', but these values are viewed very differently in the rest of the world. Americans, of course, are free to hold to these values, but those that must see them impregnating every book, movie, television show, and learning material (and also the IMF, WTO, and more) exported from the U.S. into the educational fabric must offer some form of resistance.

Most of the world is far more communually oriented than the United States, far more than most Americans realize, and the political and social agenda that is offered under the banners of 'freedom' and 'democracy' are perceived, even in modern industrial democracies as Canada, as undermining hard-won social and cultural values. This is not merely a cultural facade; it will not be addressed by merely 'localizing' materials; it runs deeply into the selection and presentation of learning. Renaming the 'French and Indian War' to the term everyone else in the world uses, 'The Seven Years War', isn't just relabeling, it is a change of context, of protagonists, of history. Rewriting the history of the War of 1812 to reflect what actually happened, an opportunistic (because of the Napoleonic wars) American invasion of Canada that was rebuffed by a rag-tag army of First Nations (ie., 'Indians') and militia volunteers, isn't just a case of rebranding.

The exchange between Mark and Stephen is a wonderful example of a new form of online learning: the email interview. Aside from baiting the U.S. right (Stephen would fit right in here in the People's Republic of Berkeley), Stephen makes some great observations -- and you must read them in his own words to grok the message.

The learning environment merges with the work environment; each, in turn, an extension of the worker, who with a new capacity for empowerment and self-actualization increasingly enters relationships of mutual association with a corporate structure - it is a dynamic relationship, full of tacit assumptions and convenient fictions (the corporation promises security, which the employee knows is an outright lie; and conversely the employee promises loyalty, which the employer knows will last only as long as the good times do). Learning, then, becomes a tacit agreement between employee and employer, selected by the employee with an eye to personal empowerment and development, aided by the employer, with an eye to developing native talent in- house (if not, any more, specific skills).

---

Another gem is Daniel Schneider's Conception and implementation of rich pedagogical scenarios through collaborative portal sites, although as the title alone tips you off, this one's quite academic in tone. I have yet to make it through all 40 pages but the topic is intriguing:

Often, one associates new rich and open pedagogies are with “learner-centered”. We believe that being “learner-centered” is not sufficient, since main-stream content-transmission- centered e-learning also rightly claims to be learner-centered, since students can look at contents and do exercises and tests at their own speed. Good learner-centered pedagogics may also be very teacher-centered, since the role of the teacher can become very complex and demanding. Let’s recall the three principle roles that we attribute to the teacher-designer of structured, but active, open and rich educational scenarios:
• His role as a manger is to ensure productivity, i.e. that learners do things.
• His role as a facilitator is the help them in their choices and to suggest resources and tools that will help them to solve problems and get tasks done.
• His role as an orchestrator is to create “story-boards”, i.e. to break down projects into scenarios, and scenarios into phases. He also may decompose problems into manageable sub-problems or alternatively encourage and help students to do so themselves.

It is very important to respect a principle of “harmony”, to find an equilibrium of different
pedagogical strategies and tactics and not (and we insist on this) to be tempted by
over-scripting. In our philosophy, a teacher should think of himself primarily as a “landscaper” who uses ICT to build places where learners can “sculpt” according to some rule and with as much help as appropriate. Because of their modular architecture, a well trained teacher can configure portals and its “tools” according to his own needs. He can also hunt down new modules. He can re-purpose tools, e.g. he could use quizzes which are normally used for assessment as discussion openers. He can also suggest to the increasing number of technical support people that can be found in the school system to develop new tools. Since this technology is focused on “orchestration” and not content delivery, we believe that it will spread in the nearer future with almost the same ease as web pages did, but it will bring new functionalities. Teachers should have control over their environment and they can share their experience within teacher portals using the same technology and both fit the C3MS philosophy.

[C3MS = Community, Content and Collaboration Management Systems]

Finally, C3MS may be a chance to promote the open and sharing “Internet
Spirit” to education, which is threatened by the philosophy of the closed so-called “educational platforms”, e-learning systems or whatever are called today’s main stream systems sold without as much success as they claim to the educational system. According to
our initial experience, and despite many difficulties - like administrative hurdles, the time
it takes to accommodate new pedagogical strategies, the disputable ergonomics of some
software that we will have to overcome - teachers who engaged themselves “love it” and
their students too.

(via EdTech Post)

---

The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview by Clay Shirky.

The W3C's Semantic Web project has been described in many ways over the last few years: an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, a place where machines can analyze all the data on the Web, even a Web in which machine reasoning will be ubiquitous and devastatingly powerful. The problem with descriptions this general, however, is that they don't answer the obvious question: What is the Semantic Web good for?

The simple answer is this: The Semantic Web is a machine for creating syllogisms. A syllogism is a form of logic, first described by Aristotle, where "...certain things being stated, something other than what is stated follows of necessity from their being so." [Organon]

The canonical syllogism is:


• Humans are mortal
  
• Greeks are human
  
• Therefore, Greeks are mortal

with the third statement derived from the previous two.

The Semantic Web specifies ways of exposing these kinds of assertions on the Web, so that third parties can combine them to discover things that are true but not specified directly. This is the promise of the Semantic Web -- it will improve all the areas of your life where you currently use syllogisms.

Which is to say, almost nowhere.

To which I say, damn, damn, damn. I drank the KoolAde when Tim Berners-Lee wrote about the Semantic Web in Scientific American. This was supposed to solve problems, not compound them.

Despite their appealing simplicity, syllogisms don't work well in the real world, because most of the data we use is not amenable to such effortless recombination. As a result, the Semantic Web will not be very useful either.

The people working on the Semantic Web greatly overestimate the value of deductive reasoning (a persistent theme in Artificial Intelligence projects generally.) The great popularizer of this error was Arthur Conan Doyle, whose Sherlock Holmes stories have done more damage to people's understanding of human intelligence than anyone other than Rene Descartes. Doyle has convinced generations of readers that what seriously smart people do when they think is to arrive at inevitable conclusions by linking antecedent facts. As Holmes famously put it "when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."

This sentiment is attractive precisely because it describes a world simpler than our own. In the real world, we are usually operating with partial, inconclusive or context-sensitive information. When we have to make a decision based on this information, we guess, extrapolate, intuit, we do what we did last time, we do what we think our friends would do or what Jesus or Joan Jett would have done, we do all of those things and more, but we almost never use actual deductive logic.

Shirky is great. Consider:

...the pattern for descriptions of the Semantic Web. First, take some well-known problem. Next, misconstrue it so that the hard part is made to seem trivial and the trivial part hard. Finally, congratulate yourself for solving the trivial part.

...After 50 years of work, the performance of machines designed to think about the world the way humans do has remained, to put it politely, sub-optimal. The Semantic Web sets out to address this by reversing the problem. Since it's hard to make machines think about the world, the new goal is to describe the world in ways that are easy for machines to think about.

There is a list of technologies that are actually political philosophy masquerading as code, a list that includes Xanadu, Freenet, and now the Semantic Web. The Semantic Web's philosophical argument -- the world should make more sense than it does -- is hard to argue with. The Semantic Web, with its neat ontologies and its syllogistic logic, is a nice vision. However, like many visions that project future benefits but ignore present costs, it requires too much coordination and too much energy to effect in the real world, where deductive logic is less effective and shared worldview is harder to create than we often want to admit.

Much of the proposed value of the Semantic Web is coming, but it is not coming because of the Semantic Web. The amount of meta-data we generate is increasing dramatically, and it is being exposed for consumption by machines as well as, or instead of, people. But it is being designed a bit at a time, out of self-interest and without regard for global ontology. It is also being adopted piecemeal, and it will bring with it with all the incompatibilities and complexities that implies. There are significant disadvantages to this process relative to the shining vision of the Semantic Web, but the big advantage of this bottom-up design and adoption is that it is actually working now.

Bravo! Check his home page for more.

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TechLearn 2003 photos and finale

Tuesday

Soundbites from breakout sessions

Diane Hessan, Communispace: Don't ask what you can teach your customers; ask what you can learn from your customers.

Nancy DeViney, IBM. Learning has become mission critical. Learning must support overarching business goals. Learning is part of the overall package IBM offers. Strategy of future of learning at IBM: Customers demanding real-time, global, customer-focused situation.

Frank Anderson, DAU. Learning culture, imbedded, at point of use. Everything is changing these days. The issue is whether you're a facilitator of or an impediment to change.

Elliott Masie: Context management is going to be the largest major change to hit eLearning in the coming year.

On the state of the Learning Business

• Learning tech is changing faster than its customers.
• Must move from classroom to multiple channels. Nothing surprises me any more.
• Business units are making more training decisions; training has sometimes been an impediment (says an audience poll).
• Through 2007, 70% of the Federal workforce will become eligible for retirement.

Elliott says we've bought a lot of Learning Management Systems but haven't done that much Management of Learning.

Caveat: Get vendors to explain how people are going to become engaged. Diane has been building communities for five years. The first couple were a failure. It's not easy. If the vendor doesn't have a plan, get a new vendor.

Wayne Hodgins, on the future: Let's get small. Smallness is the way to get to uniqueness. Ultimate goal is personalized delivery to everyone on earth. 6.3 billion of us live on the planet, and we are more the same than we can to admit. It's possible to get "any" -- Any time, place, content -- but we haven't been able to spread it around. You want right time, right place, right content, not "any." Standardization leads to standardized uniqueness. Example -- Personalization by assembling many standard parts: Dell.

Phillip Dodds told me ADL CoLab's hidden secret is that they've achieved their mission. SCORM is nearly complete. The project is funded. Agencies are jumping on board.

Elliott stressed the importance of context, saying that if content is king, context is queen. His analogy is off. The age of kings is over; kings are mere figureheads. Also, kings can exist without queens, and vice-versa, but content cannot exist without context. In fact, content + context = learning. Jay's metaphor: Content is inside; context is outside; they are inseparable.

Consolidation continues. The acquisition of TEDS by Fidelity generated more intelligent discussion than the Click/Docent merger. And how about EMC buying Documentum?

Advanstar told me that LTI (neé eLearning) will stay in business but become a quarterly. Also, it will concentrate more on web content.

Elliott expects another merger before Christmas, and yet another by the end of the first quarter.

IBM unveiled its vision for the future of learning. (Press Release.) The gist is that push delivery is replacing pull delivery, in real time, as a component of work. IBM is more eloquent, saying, "Traditional learning tends to be a structured relationship between the instructor and the learner, with a prescribed curriculum. In the future, learners will be increasingly in charge of customizing their learning experiences. Advances in content and delivery technologies will enable learners to access relevant, compelling content and information from a variety of sources, offered on demand and whenever the learner needs or wants it."

I love this part: "IBM believes learning and work will be indistinguishable over time."

Nancy DeViney, general manager of IBM Learning Solutions, said "Learning in an on demand environment will be embedded into real-time work flows, enabling the productivity of individual employees and aligning employees and teams across a company's value chain for action on key business priorities." Wow. That's precisely the future Sam Adkins and I envision. It's reassuring to be in such august company.

Chris von Koschembahr, Big Blue's M-Learning exec, showed me a truly nifty mini-tablet PC. Compact enough to fit the hand -- or to prop up on the counter in a retail application. Wi-fi. Sleek. If IBM needs any product testers, I would love to get my hands on one of these beauties.

 

Party

Tuesday night the entire conference moved to DinoLand. Unlike TechLearns past, where party food was "one ice-cream pop," Advanstar treated us to an all-you-can-eat buffet of grilled chicken, pulled pork, pad Thai, huge turkey drumsticks, and more. Fueled by an open bar, some daring souls boarded a rollercoaster. Most of us played whack-a-mole and other carnival games, winning plush dinosaurs and turtles.

Scooter, our DJ from years past, got nearly everyone dancing to often silly music.

Phase Change

1998 2003

 

It's the end of an era. The early TechLearn Conferences were like Woodstock , gatherings of true believers with smiles on their faces because they had seen the future. Training, coupled with the web, would save the world. We were filled with pronoia -- the delusion that the world was conspiring to help us.

Five years later, adios, Orlando . TechLearn feels more like the Bank Administration Institute's Retail Delivery Conference. Well, sort of. They don't have an enthusiastic, perceptive, big-hearted, and entertaining host like Elliott Masie. Conclusions from this year's event:

• Corporate conversation assumes eLearning is there.
• Learning can differentiate a business.
• Readiness and response time are critical.
• SCORM has by and large completed its mission.
• Learning must support strategy.
• Demand pull is replacing supply push.
• The learner is central.

The best advice of the Conference came from DAU's Frank Anderson: "If you are riding a dead horse, dismount."

This is a work in progress. The continuation has photos of the event. If you don't have broadband and want to see them, click Continue reading... and go have a couple of cups of coffee while you wait.

Introduction by P.Point

Elliott arriving for Sunday Keynote on his Segway

with IBM's Nancy DeViney

Eileen Clegg recording the event in real time

DAU's Frank Anderson tries out the Segway

Pete Weaver. Working? No, listening to the ball game.

Time moves on. Last year Lance and I were signing books in this room.

Lance Dublin: "What part of everything don't you understand?"

Interwise pals

Two dozen simultaneous 20-minute sessions.
There's Unilever's Ron Edwards to the left.

DinoPark Party

Bully for brontosaurus

She won the watergun competition.

Nicole wins a stuffed animal for the little one.
I won two plush turtles which I gave to friends with kids.

Mark Oehlert and I doing the dueling cameras thing.

Self portrait

Seriously into Whack-a-Mole

I think some of these guys have been practicing all year for this.

Getting carried away with Scooter's music

 

The TechLearn kick-line getting ready for Radio City Music Hall next year:
Lance Dublin, Beth Thomas, Elliott Masie, Diane Hessan, and Nick Noyes.

 

And in conclusion

I am embarrassed to offer such fuzzy photos this year.
Wrong settings toward the end of the editing process.
I was going to delete this photo of Wayne Hodgins,
but then I thought to myself, Hold it! Wayne is fuzzy in person. What a likeness! :- )

Adios, Hotel Coronado.

And you thought I wouldn't post this didn't you?

TechLearn Monday

After an hour in the "Learning Showcase," AKA exhibit hall, about 1,000 of us trooped into a large conference room to hear Elliott's state of eLearning address. Nealy half the group is here for the first time. After a PointPoint-as-leader skit, Elliott cruised in on a Segway scooter. He's been providing training guidance to Dean Kamen, the inventor of the Segway. True story: When Bush fell off the Segway, it wasn't even on! He returned from a tennis match, saw the Segway, and hopped on. Duh! Asked, "Why didn't you keep him from falling?", a Secret Service agent responded, "Our job is to keep him alive, not to prevent embarrassing moments.

Elliott downloaded some meta-tagged, freestanding, for-fee music objects (i.e. iPod). Trends for 2004:

READINESS. Be prepared, especially for surprises. Be ready to hire, to change your business, or to go to market. LMS must trigger this.

INTEGRATION. With systems, world processes

WEB EXPERIENCE. "Google is the interface of the future."

NANO-LEARNING. web services, personalization. Wayne says the chunks will be so small that an assembly of them will look like a liquid.

COLLABORATION EVOLVING, more and more just-in-time, when you need it.

USABILTY FOR LEARNING. Gotta pay more attention to this.

NEGLECTED CLASSROOM. IBM update of Apple's Knowledge Navigator. Now the fantasy includes collaboration.

CONTEXT MANAGEMENT. In real life.

MARKETPLACE SHIFTS. Consolidation, technology groups, integrator groups, procurement models.

Content without context is drivel.
Expect to see another large merger by Christmas and other before the end of Q104.

Verizon wins an award for a cross-training program for managers. 40,000 managers had to be ready to do field work in case of a work stoppage. In 72 hours, they took a course that originally took 3 months and had been boiled down to 8 1/2 weeks.

Tuesday

Elliott on compelling content. Get a fast start, as in a game; just jump in. Create some stress. Reduce that is to be learned. Take what I need to learn, subtract what I know, subtract what I don't ned to know, subtract what I can find, and subtract what I need to know but not for a couple of weeks.

TechLearn - Sunday

The new, lighter model Elliott Masie whizzing down the hall on his Segway.

Elliott & Cathy Masie heading to a session.

Companies with deep pockets.

Wannabes

Sunday midday I grabbed my TechLearn bag o' swag and headed over to Celebration for lunch. Celebration is the Stepford town conceived, manicured, and controlled by Disney to the southeast of Disneyworld. It's beautiful but eerie.

I lunched on gazpacho and paella at the Columbia Restaurant, an ersatz-Cuban place. Lunch was a taste treat. Looking through the swag bag, I found almost nothing but ads. This is the last TechLearn in Disneyland. The 2004 event will take place at the Marriott Marquis in New York. There's no Learning & Training Innovations magazine in the bag, although LTImagazine.com is listed as an event sponsor. The last four pages of the show directory look suspiciously like magazine pages. Makes one wonder if another magazine has bit the dust. Tonight's the opening reception and Elliott's keynote. Gotta run.

TechLearn...again

Tomorrow I'm off to TechLearn in Orlando. Yes, I'll be taking pictures and blogging.

How long have I been making this annual pilgrimage to the kingdom of the mouse? Too long. If I'm not attentive, I go onto auto-pilot.

Kissimmee, with its sprawl of T-shirt shops, discount outlets, fast food joints, cheap motels, and pancake houses, laying in wait for wary Disneyworld turistas, is the state champion for tackiness, and given that this is Florida, that takes some doing. Not that I'm complaining. Kissimmee gave me my first time at the controls of an airboat, my first ride on a jet-ski, and my first glimpse of an alligator leaping 5' out of the water to snatch a chicken from a clothesline suspended over the water. I've had good $4 meals, 50-cent beers, and stayed in some fellow's condo for a week for free.

Just this evening, I went on the net to score my room for TechLearn, a "suite" with fridge, microwave, free phone calls, and a nearby lake for $23 a night. Outside the "Kingdom," there's still a near depression, and bargains abound.

Here are reports from TechLearns past. I'm about to finish an article for an academic journal -- 9,000 words and not yet finished -- and the annual migration to TechLearn is one of the rhythms of the piece.

TechLearn '98



TechLearn '99



TechLearn 2000



TechLearn 2001



TechLearn 2002.

This coming week, I'm looking forward to seeing old friends and making new ones. Cathy and Elliott are masters at making people feel comfortable and gregarious.

If you see me at TechLearn, please say hello. I'll be the guy in the zany Hawaiian shirt up near the front. Florida is so unreal for me, an adoptive Californian, that I get these Hunter-Thompsonesque urges to wear funny clothes, drive around in a convertible, and get out of control. I think it's something they put in the water.

And if you're not here, watch this blog for gonzo journalism and highlights.






Click bar for forecast.


Last year



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Neuromarketing

Corante has a tasty, daily blog-piece called Brain Waves: neurons, bits, and genes. The author, "an evolutionary biologist, enterprise software marketer, and economic geographer," today discusses Neuromarketing to Your Mind.

As neurotechnology advances and brain imaging technology becomes more precise, all aspects of business, including the art of marketing, will be reinvented.

This week's NYTimes Magazine article There's a Sucker Born in Every Medial Prefrontal Cortex highlights how one neuromarketing firm, BrightHouse, is pushing the boundaries of understanding how and why people buy different products. As the article explains, "marketers in the United States spent more than $1 billion last year on focus groups, the results of which guided about $120 billion in advertising. But focus groups are plagued by a basic flaw of human psychology: people often do not know their own minds."

Neuromarketing has a long road to travel though as neuroeconomist Kevin McCabe wisely suggests, "While the first step is to look for reward processing in the brain, it is not the last step since demand itself is an emergent mental construct involving cognition, emotion, and motivation."

The Sunday New York Times told of a neuroscientist who used brainscans to study the "Pepsi Challenge," where people prefer Pepsi in blind tastings but much prefer Coke when told what they're drinking. The scientist "demonstrated, with a fair degree of neuroscientific precision, the special power of Coke's brand to override our taste buds."

The Times describes the work of the BrightHouse Instittute, which is studying consumer reactions to products with cerebral MRIs:

whenever a subject saw a product he had identified as one he truly loved -- something that might prompt him to say, ''That's just so me!'' -- his brain would show increased activity in the medial prefrontal cortex.

Kilts was excited, for he knew that this region of the brain is commonly associated with our sense of self. Patients with damage in this area of the brain, for instance, often undergo drastic changes in personality; in one famous case, a mild-mannered 19th-century railworker named Phineas Gage abruptly became belligerent after an accident that destroyed his medial prefrontal cortex. More recently, M.R.I. studies have found increased activity in this region when people are asked if adjectives like ''trustworthy'' or ''courageous'' apply to them. When the medial prefrontal cortex fires, your brain seems to be engaging, in some manner, with what sort of person you are. If it fires when you see a particular product, Kilts argues, it's most likely to be because the product clicks with your self-image.

In other words, we identify with our product choices:

''If you like Chevy trucks, it's because that has become the larger gestalt of who you self-attribute as,'' Kilts said, using psychology-speak. ''You're a Chevy guy.'' With the help of neuromarketers, he claims, companies can now know with certainty whether their products are making that special connection.

Big brother is not quite ready to come out of the closet on this stuff. The Times article, There's a Sucker Born in Every Medial Prefrontal Cortex, concludes that "The brain, critics point out, is still mostly an enigma; just because we can see neurons firing doesn't mean we always know what the mind is doing. For all their admirable successes, neuroscientists do not yet have an agreed-upon map of the brain."

There are lessons here for those of us who are trying to improve learning in organizations. Emotion trumps reason. Build your internal brand. If you have Pepsi-quality training, repackage it in Coke bottles. (It never hurts to improve the taste, too. Just don't call it "New Coke".)

Market your training. That's a central message of Lance Dublin's and my book.

A year after publication, people are still downloading our free Template for Developing an eLearning Implementation Action Plan, which walks you through the basic steps of creating an in-house eLearning marketing plan.

Learners are customers.

Wake-up Call

David Grebow, saying what a lot of people feel on the Learning Circuits blog.

Why not look for what will really work today? Why not finally get serious about workplace simulations, performance support, learning simulations, games that teach, storytelling, collaborative learning environments and more. Why not really start to build Learning Organizations that really help us learn what we need to know and do as go to work as adults in the workplace, and continue learning as we live to an ever older old age?

Why do I feel like I cannot wake up, that I’m the only one screaming and listening to my own voice echo off the school walls, as the Hall Monitors race down the corridors of my mind, intent upon shutting me up, and quietly sending me away to some endless detention?

Why are you all facing forward and being so quiet? Knock, knock. Anybody there on the other side of the glass?

Well, aren't you going to say something???

Click2Docent, III

I am up to my ass in alligators at the moment, so I was going to leave further gossip about the Click2Learn/Docent merger to my friends and colleagues. Then I received a flock of emails about the merger this morning and felt compelled to express my somewhat contrarian viewpoint.

For background, check eLearning Guru Kevin Kruse, Bersin & Associates, Learning Circuits, Upgrade Program, Click2Learn's press release, Docent's FAQ, and the Saba letter which I said was "like a white tiger pouncing on an aging Las Vegas entertainer."

• Don't confuse investment analysis with learning effectiveness. A Chief Learning Officer should be concerned with vendor viability, i.e. Is my vendor a long-term player? Aside from this issue, the random walk of the equities market is jostled by the economy, trade relations, currency trades, war, weather, and the short-term perceptions of investors who wouldn't recognize a trend in the learning industry if it hit them over the head.

• Size doesn't matter. Contrary to what you read in your daily spam, size is largely irrelevant. All the LMS vendors Brandon Hall can count don't add up to a hill of beans compared to the Everest of Enterprise Applications vendors. The big will not eat the small; they will mate with them. Vendors who don't understand this suffer from corporate dyslexia: the inability to see the handwriting on the wall.

• The "complete suite." Applications from multiple vendors are converging, with web services serving as the universal glue. In an interoperable world, it's an advantage not to license everything from a single vendor. The advantage of having one number to call when things go wrong is trivial compared to the risk of putting all of one's infrastructure eggs in the same basket.

• Strength in numbers? Heaven knows, I'm not a finance guy, but I don't understand how savings from eliminating redundancies are going to offset the expenses of maintaining multiple platforms, developing a new offering, and launching a new brand in the marketplace. Of course, I still haven't figured out how a government can increase spending, fight a war, cut taxes, and come out whole either.

• Four out of five mergers fail to meet expectations. 'nuff said.

Overall, make sure you know what you're trying to accomplish, and buy only what you need. And consider financier/philosopher Bernard Beruch?s advice: "Never follow the crowd."

eLearning Forum at UC Berkeley

On Friday, October 24, 2003, eLearning Forum participated in the inaugural meeting of BLT at the University of California at Berkeley. BLT stands for Berkeley Learning Technology. Its goal is to foster coorperation among the many learning tech projects on the U.C. Campus. BLT is a community of practice.

Alex Gault opened the session, introducing the Forum and calling for the audience to introduce themselves, too. Every month, a member of eLearning Forum's Board takes on the role of meeting coordinator to oversee the entire production. The buck stops there.

We met in the charming Joseph Wood Krutch Theater on Cal's Clark Kerr Campus.

Jim Slotta organized the event and was master of ceremonies. Jim is director of TELS, a NSF-funded research consortium. He explained that today's speakers represent three independent areas on campus, a mere sliver of what's going on at U.C. Berkeley in learning technology: Learning Content Collections Learning Content Application Learning Management Systems/Open Source I've lived in Berkeley for twenty years but I'd never heard of most of the projects the panelists told us about.

Brandon Muramatsu , Digital Libraries Project, www.smete.org (Learning Content Collections) Teaching and learning resources (e.g. a problem set). K-12 and university. Supports collaboration. May be resources from others, slightly modified in their re-use. SMETE = science, math, engineering, tech, and education. Focus on teaching and learning. Goal is to elevate social aspects of developing ?educational? digital libraries to the same level as technical ones. 9.25 million users. 42,000 online resources. Cooperation with Merlot, Math Forum, BioQUEST, etc., etc., etc. Awards competition. www.needs.org/premier/ CD-ROMs are the big winners thus far. Challenges include identifying quality resources, integration of external collections, and social aspects. Teachers aren't accustomed to using materials developed by others.

Raymond Yee , interactive university project (Learning Content Collections) The goal is to use technology to democratize the content and community of the campus by opening UC resources to the public, especially K12. There's a wealth of materials out there: California Digital Library, MIT OpenCourseWare, UT Austin Knowledge Gateway, UC Berkeley Interactive University, art museums, etc. Better tools are needed. Now have data silos. Need interoperable content. The goals are worthy but the approach strikes me as strong on content but weak on context. That's okay as long as the users provide the coaching, mentoring, instruction, and support. Wired magazine recently touted the MIT OpenCourseWare initiative, suggesting that students in remote developing countries would be learning the equivalent of an MIT degree by reading lecture notes. What a pipedream!

Mike Clancy , Computer Science Division (Learning Content Application) Mike has taught programming at UC since '77. Skeptical about how technology can help us ? ?because I've seen a lot of screw-ups.? eLearning must include learning. Their direction has been to decrease lecture (passive learning) while increasing online labs (active learning). UC-WISE (Web-based Inquiry System for Engineering) delivers content, quizzes, etc. Mike poured all content and activities into the UC-WISE environment. Now includes gated collaborations and online note-taking. Benefits of the ?e?. Convenience (online, tracking), new activities (collaboration, focused discussion), aids to autonomous learning (hints, interactive programming tasks), monitoring (in real time, which enables ?targeted tutoring?), more detailed picture of each student (misconceptions, coping), and convenient course revision. Everyone has to participate, not just the volunteers. There's so much more detail about students' learning; ?I feel like the first chemists to look through electron microscopes.? This is blended learning. It supplements the traditional student/teacher relationship rather than replacing it. Note to self: When I rant about university training, I need to remember people like Mike, who are making exactly the right moves. I wonder what the ratio of Mikes to old-time faculty is on campus.

Jim Slotta , Open Web Learning (OWL) (Learning Content Application). What are the most effective designs for curriculum and assessments? How can instructors adopt innovative tech and pedagogical approaches? The Web came along as the project began. Lots of great content but no scaffolding to help learners use them. Inquiry maps, cognitive guidance, meta-discussions, visualizations. WISE on the web: curriculum map in left column. Content includes reference notes. Theoretical frame: make ideas visible, learn from each other, accessible models, autonomous learners. TELS is a new research center, funded only last month. TELS = Technology Enhanced Learning in Science. In theory, this sounds right on the money. I hope TELS is a great success. Of course, as Yogi Berra says, "In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is."

Turadg Aleahmad , technology architect, OWL for UC-WISE, describes ambitious web platform shared among many partner institutions. Open data models. Turadg's bandwidth is too high for note-takers. (Learning Content Application).

Fred Beshears , Education Technology Services (Learning Management Systems/Open Source) ETS is developing scaleable learning management systems. 15 years ago, tech was a flea on the tail of the eLearning dog. Now tech is perhaps the tail itself. Fred's the ?Learning Technology Scout.? He brings them back for the wagon masters to choose from. Standards are good, e.g. assembling components beats hand-hewn logs for your cabin.

Mara Hancock , Educational Technology Services (Learning Management Systems/Open Source) ETS integrates tech and learning campus-wide. It even coordinates the activities of the campus radio station, KALX. Learning systems includes faculty development as well as learning tool development; multimedia services is a new addition. Trends: From technology frill to critical teaching tools From faculty do it yourself to a balance of faculty development and professional services Open Source collaboration across institutions Moving to single-system, open source LMS.

Professor Marcia Linn is a pioneer whose work was the genesis of many of the projects we heard about from the panel. She engaged the audience on three pieces of the learning technology puzzle: Instructors: Ego issue (tutor vs. performer). Changed role. Sharing content? Students: Accessibility. Tech can be motivational. Short-attention span theater. Technology: Fear. Interoperability. Hinders feeling of connectedness.

Our meeting got off to a late start -- a combination of introductions we hadn't planned for and some members getting lost on the way to the Clark Kerr Campus. Sandwiches arrived as we broke into groups to discuss each of the three areas, so discussions continued over lunch. Neologism alert! WIKISTORM. (Like brainstorm, but on a wiki rather than in person). Coined by Jim Slotta. Notes from the discussions and from the panelists will appear on the wiki set up for BLT.

Tata Interactive co-sponsored this event. During the break, Santosh Abraham and Veena Adiga showed samples of the simulations Tata has built for University of Phoenix.

Rick Huebsch, eLearning Forum's remote participant champion, brought several dozen people from all over the world into the session. eLearning Forum is currently using remote meeting technology from Interwise. Participants described this event as flawless.

If you're not familiar with wikis, you probably should be. Take a look at the Wikistorms from our session.

Modern marketing

Here's an example of the cluetrain stopping at an unlikely spot.

Bob Scoble is using blogs to put a human face on Microsoft. Think that's impossible? Check this out.

How to Hate Microsoft

In all my travels throughout the blogosphere, I've met quite a few people who viscerally hate Microsoft. In fact, a few even admit it openly on their weblogs.
So, I figure I'd write a guide called ?how to hate Microsoft.? The problem is, there are two types of people:

1) Those who hate Microsoft.
2) Those who hate Microsoft but want to see it improve.

So, if you just plain old hate Microsoft, here's what to say:

?I hate Microsoft. Your monopoly is the only thing keeping you in business. You guys are unfair in business. You are weasels. Your software sucks. You smell. Anyone who works at Microsoft is a shill. Why do you keep bringing out software that infuriates me??

If you hate Microsoft, but want us to improve, here's what to say:

?I hate Microsoft. Your monopoly is the only thing keeping you in business. You guys are unfair in business. You are weasels. Your software sucks. You smell. Anyone who works at Microsoft is a shill. Why do you keep bringing out software that infuriates me??

Whoa, there's no difference between the two, right? Might look like it on the surface, but the person who wants us to improve will keep reading. After all, if you just hate Microsoft, why you reading a Longhorn blog?

If you want us to improve, now we're getting someplace. Take a deep breath. Relax. Feel better?

See, next week we're doing something different. We're asking you to help us improve Longhorn so it's an operating system that you can't hate.

Why is this a massive change? Everytime we've released a version of Windows before we kept it secret. We made anyone who saw it sign an NDA (non-disclosure agreement). Even many of those of you who signed NDAs weren't really given full access to the development teams and often if you were, it was too late to really help improve the product.

Let me explain. I've only been a Microsoft employee for five months. Back in the good old days I was a beta tester. First with Windows 95 and NT, later with 98, ME, 2000, and XP.

I never really got to work with the development teams while the software was in a ?pre-beta? state. I never had a weblog where I could tell them ?I hate the UI? years before the software will ship. Yeah, we had secret newsgroups back in the good old days. Some of us even got invited to meet with the development teams. But, never did Microsoft ask me to write on my public weblog all of its dirty laundry so that it could improve.

Next week, that's exactly what we're asking for. Tear into Longhorn and tell us what you think. more.

Bob Scoble is hardly the sharpest knife in the drawer at Microsoft, but he's helping create a more friendly, personable side of the Evil Empire. This may be worth more to the future of the company than its tech trickes. Scoble's so honest, he's disarming. After the rants die down, people will respect Microsoft for this -- if they take the advice they're being offered.

That's just my opinion. I may be wrong.

Saba takes the gloves off

Saba just pounced on the Click2Learn/Docent combination like a white tiger on an aging Las Vegas entertainer. An email to customers and prospects this morning says the merger offers nothing good to customers, prospects, managers, or investors. The only winners are greedy executives. If you agree with Saba, you'll see this as a new level of candor. If you favor the merger, this is a new low in mudslinging. Decide for yourself....

Dear Saba Friends, We would like to take this opportunity to share our thoughts with you on a recent announcement in our market. On October 20th, Docent and Click2Learn announced a merger of the two companies. The new entity to be created will have a new name, which was not announced. Both companies claim that a "new" product platform will be developed and offered to the market sometime in the future. At the same time they vowed to continue to support and maintain the two legacy product lines. The companies also said that they will achieve profitability while only cutting 20% of their expense base. These claims appear to be optimistic. They do not take into consideration the customer overlap and customer attrition that occurs in this type of merger.

The choice of these two companies to merge is a curious one, because it is their customers who seemingly will get the least benefit. Neither company has upgraded their core technology to a new platform and their products, sales organizations and market coverage are largely overlapping. Both Docent and Click2Learn customers are going to face some difficult decisions.

Who Benefits from this "Event"?
Typically, when a merger like this takes place the benefits are readily apparent. In analyzing the early information on the announcement, it is not clear who actually benefits.

Customers and prospects?
•	Given that the product road map and technology platforms are undefined and that cost cutting will occur, innovation and customer service will clearly suffer. New prospects will have to choose between two platforms nearing the end of their useful life on the promise of future innovation on a third platform.
•	Click2Learn appears to be taking the lead on product strategy, which is not surprising given that the product leaders at Docent left the company some time ago. For all practical purposes, the Docent product has been rendered obsolete. This organizational structure indicates a leaning toward Click2Learn's Microsoft-centric architecture. Neither company has an enterprise-class J2EE platform today, nor it does it appear that the new entity will head in that direction.
Employees?
•	Both Docent and Click2Learn are unprofitable, with a combined loss of $4.1M in their most recent quarters. To make this merger worthwhile from a financial perspective, the combined entity will have to cut its costs dramatically. The companies have publicly admitted to a plan that involves cutting at least 20%. We believe that number is artificially low. They will have to do a substantial consolidation in sales, customer support and R & D.
Shareholders?
•	Neither company gains an expanded market footprint from this merger. Both operate primarily in North America and have many of the same system integration and distribution partners. There is also a customer overlap that will limit future revenue growth.
Management?
•	The management teams are the most likely beneficiary of this merger — both from vesting of stock options and buyouts. Customers should look closely to see what benefits are being directed to the management team.

What does this mean to the industry?
In the short-term, this announcement will create confusion for individuals who have either recently made a purchase decision with either of these vendors or were considering either of these vendors for a planned purchase. Companies and partners dealing with Click2Learn or Docent should immediately question the vendors on the implications of this announcement and its impact upon product direction, product support, company leadership and viability.

On the positive side, there will be fewer vendors, further highlighting the value propositions for companies like Saba that have stayed focused on the long-term objectives. Now more than ever, organizations considering the purchase or expansion of an enterprise learning suite should carefully evaluate the strategy and motivation of their vendors. "Merger of Equals" transactions often result in lowered customer service and innovation. Mergers for the sole purpose of consolidating cash and buying customers are transparent to the market and the customers themselves. No decision maker wants to be in a situation where they have purchased a product line that is soon to be discontinued.

What does this mean for Saba and our customers?
We have always been focused on the long-term success of our customers. Four driving principles continue to define Saba's leadership position in this industry.

1. Customers' Success
	Our commitment to customer satisfaction has never been stronger. Saba just completed highly successful user conferences in Chicago and Amsterdam where hundreds of our customers and partners continued to reiterate their support for Saba, enthusiasm about our product strategy and broad endorsement of our global presence and deployment capabilities. We have made continual and substantial enhancements to usability in each release of our product line and we have expanded our team of services professionals who are able to provide expertise that is specific to the industries where our customers are deploying their solutions.
2. Product Leadership
	Over the past two years, Saba has invested heavily in R&D to build and deliver the fully J2EE-compliant Saba 5 platform, continued to innovate on our 3.x platform, most recently with the delivery of Saba Enterprise Learning 3.5, expanded the Saba Enterprise Learning Suite with Saba Analytics, the market's most powerful learning analytics solution, and for the first time, expanded beyond our core learning market with Saba Enterprise Performance 5.0. As the only company to have delivered an integrated learning and performance offering on a J2EE platform, Saba is uniquely differentiated in our marketplace and continues to be the leading innovator in the Human Capital market.
3. Leading Delivery and Execution
	In addition, Saba is the market leader in delivering business solutions among our competitors in North America and worldwide markets, including Europe, Asia Pacific and Japan. More and more of our customers choose Saba because of our unmatched ability to deliver and deploy enterprise-class solutions on a worldwide basis. None of these fundamental strengths are challenged, let alone addressed by this merger of second-tier players.
4. Industry Leading Vision
	As a pioneer in enterprise learning, Saba continues to define the future direction of the industry. In our market, true business performance is driven through the intelligent integration of learning and performance and measured by industry-leading analytics solutions. This is a core part of our vision and it is the heart of our product platform.

Thank you for your continued support and interest. Please contact your local Saba representative if you have any questions or would like to share your perspective on this announcement.

Regards,

The Saba Team