Looking Back at 2007

In December 2006, I posted my challenges and predictions for 2007. I thought it would be worth looking back at what I said in this post to see how I did for the year. Shortly, I'll be responding to this month's Big Question with my Predictions for Learning in 2008.

Biggest challenges for 2007?

I could answer this as the biggest challenges for Learning Professionals generally, and maybe I'll come back and do that, but for now, let me just write what I see as some of my bigger challenges in 2007.

• Finding high quality people, especially programmers
  
  This may come as a surprise, but it's really hard to find really good on-shore development talent. Especially since I'm spoiled by a really great, really nice, fun group of developers.

We were very fortunate. I found several very high quality developers at several levels in 2007. Still the market (at least in Los Angeles) remains very tight. Of course, part of the issue is that we spoiled by the quality of our current developers and finding people who match up makes it tough.

• Deciding if I should be speaking more or less at conferences?
  
  I love going to conferences when there's energy and I meet interesting people with interesting problems. I hate hearing the same presentations over and over. The last couple conferences have been interesting again, but I'm not sure if that trend will continue. In the meantime, I'm spending more time blogging and in virtual sessions. Those seem to have been a good replacement for my conference time. I'm still unsure how I should spend my time.

I'm still debating around this. I've basically limited myself to eLearningGuild and ASTD conferences. My expectation is that I'll be doing more speaking in 2009 based on some new work. But, I've increased my blogging and writing and decreased my speaking. Still not sure.

• Retooling my knowledge
  
  I've been paid to be a CTO type consultant on a broad range of topics. And if you are talking Reusable Learning Objects, Courseware Templates, Tracking Mechanisms, Content Management, etc. I'm really well positioned. Of course, since I'm truly believe that the form of what we will be building in the future is changing and things like RLOs and Courseware are going to become much less important, then my current knowledge base seems diminished. Instead, I now need to get smart on things like community, networks, personal knowledge management and other such topics. These have normally been tangential, but I see them as core moving forward. I've already started on this, but the challenge is knowing where to focus.
  

This is an area where I really believe I've made considerable progress during the year. I've been doing a lot of work on custom content delivery and even more on the implications of Web 2.0 on all kinds of businesses. This continues to be a challenge, but I'm way ahead of where I was starting 2007.

• What does all of this mean? What will the landscape look like in 10 years?
  
  Along the same lines, I really am challenged right now to understand where all of this is going. If it doesn't look like a course and doesn't look like a reference system, what will it look like? What is the form of informal learning?
  

Still working on this, but my belief is that the picture is not going to be a simple, clear answer.

• Why am I not finding more opportunities to create front-end tools?
  
  I am a big believer in the ability of web sites to provide simple forms that a user can fill out, that captures data that can be reused, and then feeds the data into templates that provide significant value. At the simplest, these are dynamic job aids. More complex solutions look like marriage matching (eHarmony), action planning solutions (large retailer), marketing support tools (large financial services). These are the most powerful and best solutions that I can personally be involved in. Yet the projects are sparse. My challenge is to find more of these projects.
  

I've slowly been finding more opportunities around these kinds of implementations. I've also been writing articles on exactly these kinds of solutions. I continue to hope to find additional examples of these sorts of things because they still have the great potential to make a big difference for learners.

• Find Lots of Examples of eLearning 2.0
  
  I've already started to identify some of the initial eLearning 2.0 kinds of solutions that people can adopt right now. But 2007 would seem to be a good time to find even more smart, small, starter examples of solutions that don’t fit within classic eLearning, eReference type solutions.

This is probably my biggest failure for 2007. During a panel session in the fall discussing a few examples of eLearning 2.0 solutions, the panelists told us about interesting examples. When we asked where we could find out more, the answer was that there really wasn't a place to hear about these solutions. That's a problem for me/us.

What are your predictions for 2007?

• More learning professionals are going to find themselves blogging.

If you had asked me about this in June, I would have been worried, but it seems like there's been a wave of new bloggers this last fall... More eLearning Bloggers.

Discussion will emerge/increase around the next generation of LMS that focus on quick access to content, search, web 2.0 capabilities, with tracking being done behind the scenes. In the meantime, LMS Dissatisfaction will continue to the Rise and Do You WANT an LMS? Does a Learner WANT an LMS?

I somewhat got this wrong as the big LMS vendors seem to now refer to themselves in terms of talent management and workforce productivity rather than innovating around the learning itself. However, there's Communities / Social Networking and LMS Merger
announcement around Mzinga. There's also more community platforms and other kinds of alternative solutions being discussed. So, there has been some innovation. Part of the issue is that if the picture is a loosely coupled collection of tools, then what's the role of a central piece of software?

• Discussion will emerge/increase that SCORM doesn't fit next generation learning.

I still believe SCORM doesn't fit the world of eLearning 2.0, but interestingly the discussion has been more of how to fit SCORM on top of alternative tools such as Wikis rather than the demise of SCORM. So, I get low marks on this one.

• 2007 will have even more creativity around types of solutions and how those solutions get created.

This is definitely true, but it didn't go as far as I would have thought.

• Informal learning will be a big topic and will become more formal

Interestingly, I feel like there's been less discussion of informal learning (as a term) during 2007. Part of this is that as you formalize aspects of it, it's really no longer informal learning.

• Courses and Courseware are going to continue to fade

I believe this is true, but it's going to be a long cycle. Think classroom training to eLearning. How long did that take 15 years and counting?

• Training 2007 will still have a blind spot around eLearning 2.0, but one keynote by IBM will open some eyes

Yep. And, not sure if the keynote happened, but certainly some stuff out of IBM is opening eyes. And definitely I think that recent sessions I've done have opened some eyes.

• It will be harder and harder to find any software getting installed locally

Yep.

• We will start to see Wikis and tools like ZohoCreator being used by normal people like us to build simple web applications - similar in complexity to spreadsheet programming.

I think I was a bit ahead of the curve on this one. We are still only at the really early stage of using things like Yahoo Pipes. These tools offer some incredible promise. But the true Visual Basic of Web 2.0 is still being figured out.

Overall, I was ahead of where we actually went in 2007 and I got at least one seemingly wrong. Still, I don't think I did too bad considering where thinking was a year ago.

Yale Spam

Yale recently released their Open Yale Courses. Tom Conroy, Deputy Director of Public Affairs, Yale University, invited me to an announcement session (sent 20 November 2007):

I'd like to invite you to attend a bloggers-only press conference we're hosting on December 11th at 7:00 PM EDT to announce a new online initiative here at Yale. We came across your blog, eLearning Technology and we thought you'd be interested in joining.

I sent Tom a nice note thanking him for the invitation, but declining. Then I got a note from Tom today (21 December 2007):

I recently came across your site and found it to be interesting and informative. In case you have not already heard, I wanted to bring your attention to Yale University's newest initiative, which puts high-quality videos of seven of its most popular undergraduate courses online for the free use of the public. It's called "Open Yale Courses" and you can explore it at (http://open.yale.edu/courses/).

Busted. He should have kept better track of who he sent his original spam. His first line makes it clear he is just sending out spam to various bloggers. I'm sure that Tom is just trying to do his job, but there's this funny, fine line between the first message and the second where the second clearly becomes inappropriate spam.

And as a Director of Public Affairs, you would think that he might be more sensitive to the issue.

In fact, there's a law against that sort of behavior:

CAN-SPAM defines a "commercial electronic mail message" as "any electronic mail message the primary purpose of which is the commercial advertisement or promotion of a commercial product or service (including content on an Internet website operated for a commercial purpose)."

What's interesting is that normally if you approach a blogger with an honest email that is making them aware of your product, service, idea, question, etc. - all of that is good stuff. While it might technically be considered spam, no blogger I know thinks of it that way. As soon as it becomes clear that you are sending it to a list with not thought of the individual recipient, it becomes clear spam.

My guess is that lots of other bloggers got this same message. Anyone?

Physics Lectures

I had seen these physics lectures before, but I was reminded via Stephen Downes and the NY Times article about professor Lewin's lectures and was telling someone about them just the other day. Thought I should definitely point you to them. I personally am compelled by watching something like Planet Earth. Professor Lewin has managed to create something akin to that experience on a topic that can be made extremely boring by most professors.

You can find his lectures on: ocw.mit.edu, including electrostatics, mechanics, vibrations and waves. If you can't sit still for a whole lecture, then you can find a few of them on YouTube - see form of a battery.

Now I'm curious if it wouldn't be better to have students watch these and then go have a discussion with their physics professor after. Or why have them take physics at their local university at all.

Facebook Enterprise Application

If you've not seen this, there's a Facebook application by Worklight called Workbook that represents an overlay to turn Facebook into an Enterprise Social Network application. This is something I've been expecting for a while based on some conversations with large organizations who planned to use Facebook as their social network.

WorkBook combines all the capabilities of Facebook with all the controls of a corporate environment, including integration with existing enterprise security services and information sources. With WorkBook, employees can find and stay in touch with corporate colleagues, publish company-related news, create bookmarks to enterprise application data and securely share the bookmarks with authorized colleagues, update on status change and get general company news. Employees can freely use Facebook, with the WorkBook overlay, with no danger of information leaking outside the organization or access being granted to unauthorized personnel.

New Feature in Webinar Tool

Maybe I've not been paying attention, but in the webinar that I just finished, the tool GoToMeeting had a neat feature that showed the percentages of people who were paying attention (had the meeting visual in the foreground) vs. those who were not paying attention. These were shown in percentages - easy to see and understand. There was also a display of those in attendance vs. those who had left. Both of these were great pieces of information.

I'm going to want them in my virtual meeting / classroom tools going forward.

Also - know that the organizer/presenter can now tell if you have their visuals front and center!