Missed Opportunities?

I need your help.  I’m supposed to be preparing for a panel session at DevLearn 2009.  But instead, I’m finding myself wondering what I’m going to be discussing with people.

The panel description is:

From Learning to Performance — Using Technology to Make It Happen

Thursday November 12, 2009 01:15 PM

Tridib Roy Chowdhury, Adobe Systems, Inc.

Ruth Clark, Clark Training & Consulting
David Metcalf, University of Central Florida
Lance Dublin, Dublin Consulting
Joe Ganci, Dazzle Technologies Corp.
Tony Karrer, TechEmpower, Inc.

Historically, learning departments across organizations have followed the “shiny penny.”   This high-powered panel will discuss how can one overcome this barrier to learning. You’ll discuss the key trends in technology-enabled learning such as self-service (learning by search, mobility, syndication), collaboration, etc., and learn some frameworks for execution.
In this session, you will learn:

• Why “shiny penny” is not the right approach to organizational learning
• Key trends in technology-enabled learning
• Picking the right learning strategy suited for your organization
• How organizations can adapt a productivity-oriented approach to learning technologies

Audience:
Intermediate and advanced participants should be associated with learning, training, or HR organizations at a strategic level.

Each of the panelists have been asked to prepare to lead small workgroups.  My workgroup will focus on the topic of “missed opportunities.”

So, my first question – what would you expect to discuss around the topic of missed opportunities?

 

I’m thinking that we are talking about how the ever increasing set of technologies and solutions causes us to have to continually adapt.  As soon as we feel good about our ability to build one kind of solution, we are expected to build the next.  We don’t want to just fall prey to shiny object syndrome, but at the same time, we need to be ready to deliver good solutions using appropriate technologies as they arise.

So, if that’s what I’m supposed to be talking about, then:

How do you avoid missed opportunities?  How do you stay prepared?  How are you ready when the opportunity arises?

Or at least, what might you discuss as part of this working group if you were there?

 

Please help.

Trainer – Where to Now?

There has been really great response to both Recommended End of Year eLearning Tools Spending? and this month's Big Question: Presenting the Value of Social Media for Learning.  For both, lots of ideas that I never would have been able to provide on my own.  I may be pushing my luck, but I received another question that I thought was a good question.

By way of background, this person is a teacher/trainer who is bright and has lots of great experience teaching and training different adults across different topics.  He's well versed in "advanced Teaching-Learning techniques."  But he's looking for a job right now and wants to point himself in a good direction.  Here was his question:

I taught MS Office and HTML for 8 years in college, then went back for an MFA in Fine Art to give my right brain a chance.  I have exceptional talent at training and communicating across disciplines and I’m trying to get back into the job market.  Any ideas about where some “sweet spots” are, niches that are growing, companies that are doing especially well now?  I appreciate any thoughts you can share.

But I've got to imagine this question is bigger than him.  A lot of the core skills that a trainer has can be applied in a lot of different places.  How do you decide where to focus your search?  How do you figure out what companies are hiring trainers?  And, of course, there's the thought in the back of my mind, do you need to re-skill to be more than a trainer?

What suggestions do you have for him?

Microphones and Audio Information

I just saw a couple of comments on my post Recommended End of Year eLearning Tools Spending? that were asking about quality differences between a Blue Snowball mic and SHURE mics. While I wouldn't know the specific answer to this off the top of my head, I thought I'd show what I do to find a pretty close answer and some people who I could easily ask.

I start by going to eLearning Learning and then I search for something like audio which gets me quickly to a page that's a bunch of great posts and other items all about Audio in eLearning. The keywords on the left are highly related to audio as well, so I'll drill down to pages on Audio Voiceover or Audio Microphone. On the Audio Microphone page I scroll down to the Best of Posts and see a bunch of great posts:

• Microphone Round-up!
• Audio quality does matter
• 4 Simple Tips for Recording High-Quality Audio
• Microphone Review: Marshall MXL Studio 1 USB, USB.008, and USB.009
• More USB Microphone Reviews
• Better Late Than Never: Shure USB Microphones

Of course you could cheat and search just for Snowball and/or Shure and find some reviews. And make sure you read about creating the mini-sound booth shown below.

Recommended End of Year eLearning Tools Spending?

I received a question today that I really wasn't sure how to answer and thought that lots of folks might have thoughts around this.  Here's the question:

I have some extra budget money and I need to invest in software and hardware that will help me create cutting edge, top shelf eLearning programs.

I already have these software programs:

• Articulate Suite '09
• Adobe Master Suite CS3 (Not sure that I really need to upgrade to CS4)
• Camtasia & Snag It

Are there any other must have software programs? It has to work with Articulate of course!  Free software is always nice but I don't mind paying for high quality products.  I have still and video cameras, a mic and a computer ... do you think I need any other hardware items?  I'm happy with my LMS, so I don't need help there.

I can't claim that many of us will face the problem of having a budget that we need to use before the end of the year.  But I thought it might be fun to help someone else spend their money.

I realize that with this little bit of information, it's almost impossible to have the right answer, but I'm sure there are lots of interesting possibilities.

What purchases would you suggest?

Learning Power Laws

Great post by Dion Hinchcliffe - Twenty-two power laws of the emerging social economy where he discusses what Steve Balmer calls “the new normal”. Balmer talks about how a reset of economic expectations during the downturn has created an environment that is putting pressure on business to do more with less.  Some of the specifics of this transformation are captured in the following graphic:

This is lines up really well with a lot of what I discuss in Business of Learning and Trends in Learning.  The primary shifts he talks about are:

• New resource constraints. Requiring that we find ways to accomplish our goals using fewer resources.
• Value shifting from transactions to relationships.
• Business flux.
• Moving from change as the exception to change as the norm.
• A shift of control to the edge of organizations.

Dion then goes through his 22 laws that are useful to understand what is going on with all of this shift.  Several of them I regularly talk about:

• Amara’s Law (backstory) states that "we tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run." – I cite this in Work Skills Keeping Up? and Adoption of Web 2.0 and eLearning 2.0 Revisited and often use this during presentations.  It's easy to look at any one technology and go through a hype cycle.  We first think, wow this will really change things.  Then we realize go through a cycle where we think, it's not that big a deal.  But over time it often has pretty incredible effects that sneak up on us.  This describes a lot of what we see around web 2.0 tools.
• Jakob’s Law roughly tells us that "users spend most of their time on other sites", and so you must be there too.  This has big impact on us as it forces us to think about being in the flow of where the work and learning will occur.  See eLearning Portal Integration as one example of this.
• The The Long Tail which tells us moving from providing best selling products to a wider spectrum of offerings gives an opportunity for larger, potentially more lucrative market overall, if you can service it cost effectively.  This is a common theme in my posts:  Long Tail Learning - Size and Shape  and Corporate Learning Long Tail and Attention Crisis.
• Principle of Least Effort notes that they will tend to use the most convenient method, in the least exacting way available, with interaction stopping as soon as minimally acceptable results are achieved.  This is important for things like Social Software Adoption.

Overall, Dion's post is a great source for helping to think through what's really going on at a macro level with learning.