Internet Time Group

Research on the Future of Learning and Business

Frameworks for Decision-Making
 

Decision factors

 

 A Process, not an Event


Create learning environments, not courses. Build schoolhouses, not classes.

 

Not a Single Intervention


Training interventions are rarely a one-shot deal. In the past, when organizations came upon performances, they would often come up with an answer – a single intervention, for example, a class. Or perhaps a class with pre-work. The future calls for multiple paths for learning, a web of learning if you will. Some people learn reading, others from pictures. And so forth. So if the learning is recurrent and important, it may be worthwhile to provide several different paths through it.

Beyond this, mastering a subject often requires a full loop of learning – observing, jading, conceptualizing, and experimenting – a mix of mental and physical activity. In the future, training will be designed as sequences, not courses.

 

(flow of a session with events and readings etc.)

 

Occam’s Razor


When faced with two alternatives, choose the simpler of the two.

 

Pareto’s Law


The 80/20 rule. It’s better to be responsive than comprehensive.


Beware of Binary Choices
In the Industrial Age, you worked for a service business or for a product business. You were staff or you were line. You ran a job shop or a production line. Most things were either/or. Things were simple. Those days are gone.

Gradations have replaced yesterday’s dichotomies. Fortune’s 500 Industrials merged with the Fortune 500 Service Companies because firms began to fall into both categories. Your job is probably a combination of staff and line. Your production line may mass-produce customized goods.

Thinking along dimensions fine-tunes the decisions we used to make by choosing from extremes. For example, how long is a single “class?” One hour, right? Well, not today. The duration of a class is however long it takes to master the material.

Class Duration

 

 

30 seconds

 

4 hours

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Similarly, the issue is not whether a learning experience is interactive or now but how interactive it is.

Interactivity

 

 

Passive 

 

Intense

read

hear

simulate

coach

team

(you) teach

 

 

Dimensions
As you look through these different dimensions of learning, take note of which items you hadn’t considered variables before. Try to mentally place the people in your organization on each scale.

Interactivity is vital when learners need to change beliefs rather than just learn facts:

Nature of Content Change skills

 


Change mindset

Head/cognitive 

 

Heart/emotional

Reading, video, lecture

Skills practice

Roleplay, OJT

Change process

Restructure  measurement,
rewards

Small group activities

 

We can think of skills as being hard or soft. “Hard skills” are explicit; you can learn them from a book or a teaching machine. “Soft skills” are tougher to define; they’re abstract. Soft skills overlap with “tacit knowledge,” the stuff within an organization that you can learn on the office grapevine, often the ways things really work. Organizations usually find that “the soft part is the hard part.”

Nature of Skills

 



Hard skills 

 

Soft skills

 

Learn from System

 

 

Learn from People

 

 

 

 


Changing people’s mindsets is always a matter of degree.

 

Magnitude of Mindset Change

 



Slight 

 

Major

Be Entertained

Learn Facts

Learn New Way to Do Something

Adopt New Concept

Buy Into New Paradigm

Conquer Addiction & Denial

 

 

 

 


Depth of information (difficulty of learning?)
Factoid, answer, hard info, soft info, behavior change, belief/fundamentals change


The Learning Toolkit

 

ICQ

Briefcase

chatterbots

webex

realpresenter

delphi

ecircles

chat..

netmeeting

search bots

 

Eloquent, Athenium, NetPodium, CBT, Placeware, NetMeeting, Corpus Optima, etc. – a learner’s viewpoint

Mechanisms

 

Synchronous

Internet phone & phone conferencing

Internet Videophone

RealAudio & Overhead graphics

Shared applications

Whiteboards

CU SeeMe on POTS…

IP Videophone

Mbone Video conferencing

Room Video conferencing

Remote Rover (Robot Videophone)

 

Asynchronous

voice mail…STT

email ... TTS

Home pages replace bulletin boards, file transport, and document distribution

Schedule & “Notes”

Voice and Video “email”

Telepresentations (meetings, presentations, & courses)

 

From Training to Learning

Picking the Right Tools for the Job

 

Different learning media fit different types of learning. On the one hand, there is non-threatening information; on the other, ego-challenging mental makeovers. There are droplets of information, and there are lengthy topics. And there are abstract, “soft” skills and tacit knowledge; and there are concrete “hard” skills and explicit knowledge. And there’s one-time need vs. recurring need. And cost-value. And time-value.

 

Unified Theory of Digital Performance Improvement

 

Industrial Age

Transformation

Network Age

Individuals, standalones, things are valuable.

Digitization, communication

Things connect with one another into webs and modules. Relationships become valuable.

 

 

 

Threads

Become

Tapestry

Nodes

Connections

Webs

 

 

 

 

Bits is bits. I think of a pointillist painting. Take the individual dots. They can be reconfigured into a new painting. This enables convergence. And as disciplines converge, constructs from one become available to another.

 

The video porno industry gave us the cheap, plentiful VCRs that play our training videos. Tomorrow’s training will ride on the coattails of electronic commerce, the net, fiber optics, parallel processing, relational databases, and other “non-training” advances.

 

If a tree falls in the forest, and no one hears it, it makes no sound. Similarly, if information arrives in the forest, and no one sees it, it does not become knowledge.
© 1999, Jay Cross & Internet Time Group