I'm a foodie and I find a lot of inspiration in my food. A few days back, I went to watch Shrek Forever After 3D at a multiplex. As you'd expect, after the superlative 3D show, I was hungry so my wife and I headed to the multiplex food court looking for a meal. I settled for a bento box at an Asian stall. The bento is a Japanese concept, but the stall filled the box with things like Chinese black bean chicken, Korean Kimchi salad and good old Indian Manchurian. Woah! That was an interesting fusion -- a Japanese bento box, that held Chinese, Korean and Indian food! The meal was surprisingly good as well.The contents of the bento box set me thinking. If a set of interesting food concepts can combine to create a meal that just works, then why can't we combine different methods of learning to create a learning experience that just works? In my experience I see a lot of fanaticism in certain circles -- elearning exponents can't look beyond their trade; trainers swear by the classroom; informal learning geeks scoff at the LMS and novices just follow the loudest fanatic.
I think our current workplaces have room and the need for everything. The presence of a social learning platform doesn't mean the LMS is obsolete; the presence of elearning doesn't mean training stops forever and virtual worlds don't mean that people stop meeting each other forever. In today's post, I want to explore if we really need to be such deep specialists or if shallow generalism is more the order of the day.
We can't be 'One trick Ponies'
Let's face it, traditional methods of creating learning aren't going to cut it for the enterprise -- if we just left them on their own. OTOH, newer methods of learning have their own deficiencies - either the practice isn't 'mature' enough; or people aren't ready or they just doesn't answer specific use-cases. In such a situation we need to adopt a 'horses for courses' approach, where we pick the best approach for our objectives. I'm currently spending most of my time on ThoughtWorks University - our graduate consultant programme. We're adopting a mix of approaches to design the program.- We're using elearning before and during the course, to help students build a theoretical foundation for their roles.
- We're using formal training for topics that require generative discussion and a collaborative exchange of thoughts and ideas.
- We're creating a workscape for the remaining duration of the course - students will participate on a real life project and learn while at work. Learning will be incidental to the job and in the context of work.
Technology is Valuable when it's Not Cool Anymore
There are good reasons why rapid elearning seems to have become a rising phenomenon. A part of it has to be the fact that tools like Powerpoint are ubiqutous now -- you can take it for granted that people have Powerpoint on their computers and are familiar with it. The fact that most people can work on Powerpoint means that most people can create elearning - you get the drift. This is the strange paradox of technology, especially when it comes to LnD - technology is valuable when it ceases to be cool."What matters here isn't technical capital. It's social capital. These tools don't get socially interesting until they get technologically boring. It isn't when the shiny new tools show up that their uses start permeating society. It's when everybody is able to take them for granted. Because now that media is increasingly social, innovation can happen anywhere that people can take for granted the idea that we're all in this together."- Clay Shirky
In April, the Learning Circuits blog asked a question about keeping up - how do we stay up to speed on all the latest stuff? It's one of the discussions I deliberately decided to not follow. If you watch Clay Shirky's talk above, you'll see how he talks about the power of technology when it becomes mainstream. One of the things I've realised, despite being a 'shiny toy' guy, is that the most powerful tools are the ones everyone's familiar with and has access to.
Think about it - the 3D movies like Avatar and Shrek 4 can revolutionise entertainment; not yet though, because its expensive both for the makers and the viewers. On the other hand mainstream technology like SMS is far more powerful - take a look at what RapidSMS has done to revolutionise UNICEF's work in places like Africa.
In a similar manner, the market for Moodle as an open-source LMS is picking up because it's so ubiquitous - it's running every school around the corner and also huge universities like the Open University. OTOH, at least in India Twitter isn't yet mainstream. Even though there are interesting uses for Twitter in learning, the vast majority in India still needs time to reap the benefits. Twitter needs to be mainstream.
So before I wrap up the topic of tools, I'll request that as L&D professionals we give up our fascination for the latest tools. We need to keep our eyes out for the latest and greatest, but we need to exploit mainstream technology and focus on solving problems as against implementing the coolest tools.
- Technology is not valuable when it's cool, because it's still not widely adopted.
- Technology is not valuable when there's hype, because the cynics still exist.
- Technology is not valuable when there's a craze, because business will still be conservative in it's outlook.
- Technology is valuable only when you can take it for granted; take the press, the telegraph, the phone, the radio, the television, the internet and in coming years - social media.
Rising above Specialism and Tools
If corporate education budgets were unlimited, then teams would be huge and we could have specialists for each little purpose. I guess, we'd still struggle to solve the problems we encounter each day, but I'm happy to believe that we won't. Unfortunately that's a utopian state very few of us enjoy. Most of us have limited training budgets and we've got to make do with small teams and high expectations. This puts a huge responsibility on each of us to be as useful as we can for our organisations. In such situations if we choose to stick our ground as trainers, instructional designers, information architects, knowledge managers, or whatever our fancy specialist title may be, we're missing the big picture of our organisations' problems.If L&D has to merit a seat at the decision-making table with executives, then we need to rise above our specialities and our fancy for our favourite tools. We need to demonstrate a strong understanding of our organisations' problems and also know the most practical (not the coolest) way to get to our goals. I like to believe that I'm a consultant to my employers and my job is to fix problems and help my employers achieve their business goals. I don't mind specialising; in fact I feel all of us need to be specialists in something or the other. All I'll say is that we need to spread ourselves across various skills other than our speciality to make meaning at work.
I believe our roles as L&D professionals are fast undergoing a change. I'm not sure it's enough to sit in our corners and wait for work that suits our skills. We need to evolve our skills to the work we get. What do you think? Am I making sense or am I going absolutely bonkers? I'd love to know what you think. Let me know by commenting on this blogpost - I'll look forward to hearing from you.
If it's Jane speaking you've got to expect a mention of 
A few days back I ordered a large meal at a restaurant. Unfortunately, the food tasted awful - really awful. My first thought was to curse the chef - not for one moment did I think of complaining about the ingredients. A strange thought came to my mind. A bad chef with great ingredients, can still produce an awful meal. Given great ingredients, a good meal depends on two things:
So often we instructional designers blame our clients for the bad products we put out. I feel we need to be more responsible for our work. Our clients are not designers, so we shouldn't expect them to know what's the best way to design elearning. I don't deny that we often have difficult clients, but I guess that's where the art of consulting comes in. Take a look at the articles 
We need to treat our learners as adults and do our best to give them the freedom to pick out the information they need. Most importantly, the real world doesn't give out information in a linear sequence. People seek out information based on the demands of the task on hand. Now, we can design challenges that make people 
As in programming, in elearning we should follow the DRY principle - 
Elearning and particularly rapid elearning assessments just have a bad rep. After a pile of slides that do nothing but provide information, the last activity people want is a quiz that rates them on 
Now let me confess, I didn't know of Lou Russell until I joined the Training Mag Network. That's because I often overlook authors from some of the books I casually pick up. Lou's better known in the community as the author of 
Lou introduced this matrix for PMs to try and establish project scope. For example, the sponsor will provide budget/ time and will need status of the project. OTOH, the SMEs will provide us the form for the course and common mistakes and we'll provide them drafts. As you fill this out, you'll develop a complete list of what you need and what you need to provide. This gives you a fair list of items you need to provide.
Lou put's out this table to record risks and to maintain a risk log. This is quite similar to what I've seen and used in the past. This is something to keep revisiting through the project, so you can keep looking through your risk log, see their current status and look at whether you need to get your mitigation strategy in place
I am 
By the time we're about to fix an outdated problem with training, we have another training need on hand. We wait for an SME again, spend weeks designing a course, train the SME and again get back into the vicious cycle of training that solves outdated problems. As 
If we really have to be effective as L&D organisations, we need to move from our preoccupation with content and focus on the context. Strategically and tactically, context trumps content in the modern L&D world. Think about it.
Fourth and last webinar for the day, is yet another Elearning Guild webinar. This one's a real life case study for enterprise collaboration by Lisa Choi, Beth Branick and Wendie Whelan from Advantage Sales and Marketing. I like experience reports because while the experts and evangelists cry themselves hoarse, they are often a bit oblivious to real challenges. So I chose this session over the other concurrent webinar so I can hear what other people's experiences are in the field. My live blogged notes are likely to be a bit weird given it's so late at night! My hands are kinda wobbly!
They took this concept to their org-wide career management tool called enCompass - built on Cornerstone LMS. Things seemed to fall into place because their talent management vendor was coming up with a proper enterprise social media tool. It however didn't feel very useful to integrate one more tool into their entire app infrastructure. So they thought hard and nailed down the obvious benefits:
About 26% of the respondents in the survey haven't participated in 
Back to my webinar reporting business for this afternoon. This 
Very simply put, it's about learning from each other -- and we do this already. The workplace is the best place to learn because learning is contextualised to your current situation. Practitioners make the best teachers, because they know the 'real' ways to get things done. As someone's already said, 
This afternoon, I'm attending a 
A good picture is worth a thousand words and given how cool digital photography is turning out to be, it's more an more available - though very few of us are good photographers. So how do you make your photos look better on slides, elearning, etc. So what tool did Julie show? One of my current favourites - 
Often you'll need props to create the right kind of environment in training - for example a 
This evening I attended a 
The lecture in webinars is 
The good medusa - questions help your audience relate to, interpret and apply your answers. So instead of just saying what we want to say - how about thinking through the real life context of your learners? How about placing them in a real life context and give them a scenario to deal with? Or how about you have them discover the answers by just leading them using your directed questions. Ray used a really nice example of a Times Square bomb situation to illustrate the value of questions to lead people to the eventual knowledge you want to share. Good tips, but I'm still waiting for what I don't know yet. Ray's now showing us a similar example from an Ethics and Leadership scenario.
I'm a big fan of this approach, because it's real life, it tugs at people's emotions, and it's contextualised to people's situation. There's a good reason that Donald Trump's 
Very often the boardroom style of presentations tends towards being 
Going with the previous tip about creating integrated visuals, one of the easy ways to do this is to use full bleed images. Instead of using a low resolution image or a scaled down high resolution image, consider using a full screen image. There are a couple of advantages to this:
The first thing you need to know is the difference between 
Just because there is space on the slide, doesn't mean that you need to fill it all. The above picture on from 
I have to confess that I suck at understanding colour combinations. So I rely on software to help me create meaningful color schemes for my presentations. All of us like to see well coordinated colours and as they say, 
