Tony Karrer's eLearning Blog on e-Learning Trends eLearning 2.0 Personal Learning Informal Learning eLearning Design Authoring Tools Rapid e-Learning Tools Blended e-Learning e-Learning Tools Learning Management Systems (LMS) e-Learning ROI and Metrics

Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Information Radar


For many of the roles and projects you will be involved in, part of what you need to be able to do is to put yourself in a continuous learning mode. You need information radar that continuously scans for new, quality information that you should be aware of. And certainly, you have to be able to quickly commit it to your metamemory.

Information Addiction

Let me start this topic with a word of caution. Most of you reading this are infovores. When you find new nuggets of information, you get a chemical reaction in your brain much like an opium hit. This reaction causes you to seek more information. In other words, you are quite literally an information addict. Be careful about feeding your habit.


Assess Information Sources

For this reason, I always start any new task, project, role with an honest assessment of whether I really need to be actively tuned into information and what information that is.

You should also periodically go back to your top-down strategy, assess your specific information objectives and then make a deliberate assessment of different information sources. Which newspapers, magazines, journals, news sources, blogs should you look at, how often, how high a priority is this?

Also assess current information sources to see which can be removed. Managing your RSS Feeds has some good suggestions on how to do assessment in an ongoing basis using quarantine folders.

With that caution, here are some thoughts on the methods and tools I use as part of my information radar.

RSS Readers

A central tool for my information radar is my RSS reader. It allows me to gather information from all kinds of sources (blogs, publications, wikis, calendars, etc.) If you are new to the world of RSS readers and subscribing to blogs, here are some good starting points.



Skim and Remember

In Stop Reading - Skim Dive Skim, I proposed that for most of the information we come across via our information radar, we will not read it. Instead we will, skim, dive, skim. And then quickly add it to our better memory.

Remembering content I've seen via my RSS Reader has changed a bit over the past few years. I used to use Keep New or Favorites to save items that I thought were interesting but that I didn't have time to read or process at that moment. I found that it scattered a big part of my memory into another source, so I've stopped using these techniques.

Thus, while I'm scanning I have three levels of remember ready to apply:

1. Visit Pages - If a post, article, etc. looks like it might ever be worth remembering, then I visit the page and skim it there so it goes into Google History. Posts that you have seen in your reader but not visited are not in Google History. They are searchable via the RSS Reader, but that requires that you remember how your originally encountered the information. I believe I'm better off with fewer places to search for things I've seen.

2. Tag Page - If while skimming the article you visited, it looks like something I might need later (future anticpated information need), then I save/tag it in delicious.

3. Notes / Blog - As I skim dive skim, I often will take notes into working documents or blog posts about anything that is interesting. I do this more to help me process the material. But it also helps to surface it again. Make sure you save a link to the source as well.

Information Trickles

For information needs where I want a trickle of information to be coming through and if I miss something "interesting" its not a problem. I'm looking for filtering the content to find the best stuff within a narrow range.
  • Aggregator Blogs. These folks scan through content in a given area and point you to the stuff they feel is most interesting. The three that jump to mind in the world of learning and eLearning are: OL Daily, Big Dog Little Dog, and eLearning Learning.
  • Delicious Popular. Use delicious popular such as http://delicious.com/popular/elearning this shows web pages that many people are tagging with a particular tag. There is a feed for any delicious page including the popular pages.

Information Floods

For areas where I want to be fairly actively engaged in a continuous flow and there's a greater need to see most everything, I use:
Other Tools
  • AideRSS - can be used to limit a given blog or set of blogs to the top few.
Blogging

For me, blogging fits into more than one category. I'm choosing to put it here as I most often use it as a means of processing information that I come across as part of my continuous learning strategy. It definitely moves beyond a simple information radar and into something more. It also is a big part of my networking and community strategy.

As a starting point



Taking Notes

As an alternative to blogging, another option to help remember and process what you are finding through your information radar is the act of taking notes. There are a variety of tools that you can use. I hate to say it, but I still use notepad or Word. Since I rely on desktop search, they work okay for me. My guess is that in another year I'll have a different answer.

Independent of the tool, research shows that the act of taking active notes - not verbatim notes but higher level cognitive notes - while you are receiving information improves encoding. Thus, its fair to assume (though I don't have research proof on this) that while you are skim-dive-skimming active note taking means greater encoding.

Several people have suggested to me that it's significantly easier to take notes on paper while reviewing online. Ummm ... no it's not. Keep a narrow window open alongside your browser that allows you to copy and paste and add your notes. Oh, and make sure you include the URL. I hate it when I find my notes but then have to search for the page again in my bookmarks or via Google search.

By the way, this is the same technique I use when I'm talking to someone on the phone or in a meeting. A narrow window for capturing real-time thoughts works well for me. Oh, wait, am I talking about better memory now or information radar. I guess it's both.

A big part of effective information radar is doing more than just having it temporarily pass by your eyeballs.

It's adding it to memory and processing it appropriately.

Other Posts in the Series
Posted by at 8:06 AM 4 comments

Monday, January 12, 2009

Prepare for a Conference

Heading into ASTD TechKnowledge, there's a particularly timely podcast that I just did for Tom Crawford of VizThink on the topic of:
How to be an Insanely Great Conference Attendee
If you follow the link you can get to the podcast.

This is based somewhat on a post from a couple of years ago - Be an Insanely Great Professional Conference Attendee. The main ideas out of that post still apply. The key theme is to spend some time to come prepared with Better Questions.

Some other specific recommendations on things you could do before the conference that would make your conference that much better.
  • Participate in ASTD's free online sessions: Learning Technologies 101
  • Start a blog just for your conference experience.
  • Take advantage of Conversation Topics to figure out questions and get connected with me.
  • Join ASTD National LinkedIn Group and answer Anthony Allen's Post on LinkedIn
  • Go to my post ASTD TechKnowledge and leave a comment that you are coming.
  • Get Twitterific installed on your iPhone from the AppStore.
  • There will be more information coming around the use of Twitter at the conference.
  • Visit any of the following bloggers / speakers who will be attending - leave them a note and maybe get together with them while you are there - or ask them your question ahead of time.
Some of the bloggers attending the conference:
I'm sure I'm missing some, so let me know who else should be on the list.
Posted by at 6:54 AM 1 comments

Better Memory

In Your Outboard Brain Knows All, Clive Thompson talks about how our need to remember is changing.
Neuroscientist Ian Robertson polled 3,000 people and found that the younger ones were less able than their elders to recall standard personal info. When Robertson asked his subjects to tell them a relative's birth date, 87 percent of respondents over age 50 could recite it, while less than 40 percent of those under 30 could do so. And when he asked them their own phone number, fully one-third of the youngsters drew a blank. They had to whip out their handsets to look it up.
The reality is that we were all trained in school to use metacognitive / metamemory methods and tools as a supplement to our knowledge. I'm only 43, but posts like New Work Skills are a bit of an eye opener that we were taught metacognition using note taking on paper, card catalogs, microfiche readers, rollodex, etc.



For many of us, Nick Carr's words ring true:
... the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind.
The reality is that metacognitive techniques are changing rapidly - hence so are work skills.

Better Memory Tools and Methods

If you are experience more and more of your information electronically, it stands to reason that we need to be good at effectively using this as a better memory. Most of the people who take our workshops on work skills, say that improving their ability around their ability to remember and organize information is one of the most valuable aspects.

In work literacy terms, better memory relates to keep / organize / refind /remind.

A perfect keep / organize / refind / remind system:
  • Keep everything ever encountered (without effort)
  • Organize it (with little to no effort)
  • Allow you to refind something you've seen before instantly based on incomplete information
  • Create lists and other reminders so that you don't have to even remember that you know it - i.e., list of people on the team, list of blog posts to go back and read, etc.
There's a lot that goes on around this and when you look at different projects and roles, this gets pretty varied, but let me explore a few different tools and methods that I apply to this that gets helps me is this area:
  • Google History - saves every page I've visited without me having to do anything and allows me to search for anything I've ever viewed at a later time. I don't like to have to use it, but it's a great back-up when I've not saved something another way.
  • Delicious - Use this social bookmarking tool to save pages with tags as the organizer for me to get back to at a later time. Since this is likely the one that is most new to people, I'll dive into more detail below.
  • Firefox Bookmarks - For pages that I want to launch all the time. I'll get back to this below.
  • Microsoft Desktop Search - Desktop search has probably had the greatest productivity improvement for me over the past few years. Google Desktop Search is also great, but I personally have had better results with Microsoft's integration with Outlook and I'm a heavy Outlook user.
Social Bookmarking



If you are not familiar with social bookmarking tools, I would start with the video above and go to the following to get yourself up to speed.
Then I would make sure I know the basics about using tags.
  • Choose existing tags to avoid misspelt tags (e.g., libary, libray).
  • Group compound terms together (e.g., personalLearning)
  • Use plurals to define categories (e.g., blogs)
  • Don't use symbols in tags with the exception of a tag like eLearning2.0 where the "." is okay. Don't use # or _
Social Bookmarking as Metamemory

What often gets left out of the discussion of social bookmarking is where it fits into keep / organize / refind / remind. I like to think about the main tools I use somewhat in a series:
  • Bookmarks in Browser - It's things you want to launch all the time. I put links to sites that I go to all the time here.
  • Bookmarks in Social Bookmarking Tool - This is where I proactively keep, organize (and sometimes share) things. I use tags to organize according to topic, role, project, group of people. This creates multiple lists for reminding.
  • Blogging - I use a blog or note taking as an added level of processing on information that I consume. Short notes on a single resource can be added to the social bookmark. More substantial notes need to get captured somewhere.
  • Google History - a fall back in case I didn't know at the time that I would want to get back to an item.
I think of the bookmarks in the browse similar to documents in recent or linked on my desktop. These are things that I want to launch often. I think of bookmarks in my social bookmarking tool as items that I want to organize into lists and be able to easily get back to later. This is similar to documents in folders. And Google History is a bit like desktop search. In case I wasn't willing to spend the time to save it, I still have a chance of finding it again.

Anticipated Need

The key term in all of this is anticipated need. You could spend all of your time keeping and organizing content. But the real goal is to spend the least amount of time to meet your future needs to refind and remind. The trick is that you often don't know what those needs will be. So, you are basing this all on your anticipated needs. This is also why spending some time on the top-down analysis is a great exercise. It will help you think through information needs today.



Three Metamemory Practices

#1 - Name Everything

Whenever you start a new project, start working with a new group, take on a new role, or start a new major concept work task, spend just a little time upfront anticipating your needs. Most importantly, at the start name everything and everyone and stick to that name. Every project gets a name. Every person gets a name. It takes a few seconds, but it saves you a lot in time spent refinding and reminding. This name then is on every folder, document, email, tag, etc.

#2 - Include Meta Information

The other practice to follow is to include enough information somewhere associated with every object (document, email, bookmark) so that you can find it again via search. Every email should have in the subject line or somewhere in the message. Even if the sender doesn't put it in there, put it in the response. I also tend to try to put in the names of participants in meetings in my notes and possibly other names like the client. All of this makes searching SO MUCH EASIER.

This is a big reason why I say that desktop search has become my biggest productivity boost.

#3 - Visit Every Page

Theoretically you can use Google to refind whatever you found before. But I often find that doesn't seem to work in practice. Thus, I make sure that any page that I might ever want to see again, I visit. That puts it into my Google History. My chances of finding it again go up considerably. This also means that when you find a magazine article that's interesting. You should go visit it online as well. That's extra work, but it makes it refindable.

Other Posts in the Series
Posted by at 6:00 AM 2 comments

Thursday, January 08, 2009

Work Literacy Skills - New Workshop

Harold Jarche, Michele Martin and I are pleased to announce a new workshop offering that relates to the recent posts on Tool Set 2009 and to the issues of Work Literacy.

Work Literacy Skills Workshop

Was the last formal training you had on knowledge work skills the use of a card catalog and microfiche reader? You aren't alone in that. While there has been incredible innovation in tools and methods that support personal work and learning over the past 10 years, most of us have had a hard time with our Work Skills Keeping Up. We are left trying to figure out where all these new tools fit in our day-to-day work life and our professional life.

This workshop is a hands-on, collaborative, fun experience focused on the new knowledge tools and methods that are core to effective work. It will focus on what is important to learning professionals.

The workshop puts you into small groups of fellow professionals as you work as a remote work team to experience first-hand the use of these tools in work and learning settings.

What You Get
  1. Foundational methods for effective work and learning in a network
  2. Hands-on use of various tools to give direct experience of their effectiveness
  3. Job aids for after the workshop
  4. Introduction to an international network of learning professionals
Workshop Format

We have designed this workshop for either a one-day, in-person session with an online follow-up, or an online workshop with a flexible format. The online session is designed to support small groups of learning professionals going through at the same time. Participants are partnered in small teams as they work together learning new methods and tools. The specific length of time and scheduling is flexible given the availability of the teams involved.

Participants

The workshop is designed to work well for learning professionals and delivered through:
  • Learning Departments
  • ASTD Chapters
If you are an individual or small learning department interested in participating, then please contact us, and we will see if we can have you participate in a public workshop or via an ASTD Chapter.

Topics Include
  • Collaborative Work and Learning
  • Top-Down Work Tools and Methods Assessment
  • Better Memory
  • Information Radar
  • Networks and Communities
  • Search
  • Collaborative, Informal, Self-Direct Learning
Instructors

Harold Jarche has found a passion in the area of sharing, learning, reflecting, and collaborating using Web tools such as social network systems, blogs, and wikis. He constantly tries out new tools and techniques, and then uses his pragmatic business bent to recommend the right ones for clients and colleagues. Harold has been a freelance consultant for the past five years, and blogs about learning and working on the Web at jarche.com. Previously, Harold worked as a Chief Learning Officer of an e-Learning company, Project Manager at a university, and Training Development Officer with the Canadian Forces.
Michele Martin is an independent consultant who specializes in using social media tools to support learning, and career and professional development. She has worked with federal, state, and local governments, nonprofits, and corporations to design and deliver a variety of learning interventions. She used online tools such as forums, listservs, and a “virtual office” to support learning in the late 1990s, and has added tools such as blogs, wikis and social networks. She's a co-founder with Tony Karrer of Work Literacy, a network of individuals, companies, and organizations focusing on the frameworks, skills, methods, and tools of modern knowledge work. Michele blogs at The Bamboo Project.

Tony Karrer is CEO/CTO of TechEmpower, a founder of Work Literacy, and a well-known consultant, speaker, writer, and trainer on e-Learning and Performance Support. He has twenty years’ experience as a CTO and leader of software development, and eleven years experience as an associate professor of Computer Science. He works as an interim CTO for many start-ups, and was the founding CTO at eHarmony. His work has won awards, and has led him into engagements at many Fortune 500 companies including Citibank, Lexus, Microsoft, Nissan, IBM, and Hewlett-Packard, among others. His blog eLearning Technology won the best e-Learning Blog award the past two years.



For More Information

Contact:

Dr. Tony Karrer
akarrer@techempower.com
Posted by at 7:00 AM 0 comments

How long does it take to select an LMS?

I saw a post by Bryan Chapman discussing how long it takes to select an LMS. I've known Bryan for quite a few years - more than 10. And he and I do a lot of LMS selection and implementation work. And I think we are both pretty good at it. I may even be the person he's talking about in his post as the other consultant, but I'm not quite sure.

So, the real answer to how long it takes is, of course, it depends. But to give you some better answers than that the eLearningGuild has some great survey data on it. I put out some of that data in my post - LMS Team Size and Time - Wow 23 Months!

Clearly, there is some disconnect between Bryan's timeline of
entire process from beginning to end in about 2 1/2 months
and the 23 months cited by guild members. Now he's talking only about the selection process rather than the implementation process. So the actual numbers reported by Guild members is roughly 11 months to select. So, we have a difference of 11 months vs. 2.5 months.

Where does this come from? Well if I compare the steps in his process vs. the steps in the LMS Selection Process that I describe, there's a lot of overlap. However, a few differences jump out to me.

Learning Strategy Defined?

The first steps in my process are:

  1. Form a core selection team and define stakeholders
  2. Define business and learning strategy
  3. Agree to process with key stakeholders
Bryan jumps by these. I'm sure that in reality Bryan includes these but is not counting them in his 2.5 months. In other words, you would need to have business and learning strategy and a core team identified before you start. What often happens when you go to select an LMS is that you realize that you don't really have the strategy defined. This is a common LMS Selection Gotcha.

Tail of Process - Demos, Hands-on Testing, Negotiation

The tail of Bryan's process is:

Week 9 - Read and Grade Proposals
Week 10 - Final meeting to pick system

(Bryan has demos in Week 5)

The tail of my process has:

  1. Demos
  2. Pilot or hands-on tests
  3. Negotiate
  4. Final selection
Bryan talks about having demos earlier in the process:
In my model, I have learned the value of moving the demo upfront, rather than waiting until after the RFP. It makes all the difference in the world.
I personally like to have demos after you've defined your differentiating use cases and know where the system is likely going to be more challenging. We don't want a standard demo, we want to see how they handle the challenges.

Similarly, if you can afford the time and effort, there is almost nothing better than using the LMS with a hands-on test or a pilot. When you look at LMS Satisfaction the people who report the lowest satisfaction are the administrators who have to work with it day-to-day. How about giving them a chance before final selection? This is likely the best way to really know what it will be like to have the LMS.

Given the generally low marks that LMS systems get (LMS Dissatisfaction on the Rise), it's best to take a bit of time and make sure that you are doing what you can to get what you need.

I also would suggest that you don't plan to rush through negotiation. Bryan and I probably both save our clients lots of money during negotiation - more than our fees for large deals. But if you are up against a spending deadline or try to finish negotiation in a week, then you put yourself in a weaker negotiating position.

I do believe that Bryan and I can greatly shorten the time and improve the resulting satisfaction. And there have been cases where selections have taken less than 2 months. For me that's been the exception - and often I'm involved when things are more complex. But I thought it would be good to have the rest of the picture.

Some other posts around LMS:
Posted by at 6:00 AM 5 comments
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)