Learning2.0 : Journey to about2findout.com

The Learning 2007 Conference is over. I had a great time and some new things to follow up upon. The general sessions were a mixture between a personality show and learning related topics, and with some great speakers. I saw Arch Lustberg before on the video's of last year's conference, but he makes a great performance with an important message: in this digital age, how you present yourself and your story to people remains as important as ever. I also remember the very insightful talk by Don Tapscott. He didn't give the intended talk on his book Wikinomics, but talked about talent 2.0 and how the generation that now enters the workforce differs. On site over the past 3 days 4 students have developed two learning games. They will be on the public domain soon. One is on pandemics and one on new hires. But I also got to play with someone's iPhone and see that magic. And I got to test out my site on different systems and browsers as the computer room up here has Macs, Linux and Windows machines brotherly next to each other.

The braindump:

• ROI is caca
• empathy is hard to outsource and hard to automate
• pecha kusha (however you pronounce it) are fun ways of presenting
• Gaming can be done on top of everyday technology such as blogs, podcasts, email etc
• Fail your way forward (learning games)
• Rapid learning: if we as a learning service don't do this, they will do it themselves. (which is not necessarily bad, lets enable and get out of the way)
• Google Docs now has presentations as well as text documents and spreadsheets
• learning is flat(ter): peer to peer
• The lines between knowledge management and learning are blurring
• For learning 2.0 to work, the learning service needs to evangelize the tools
• Unified collaboration
• A lot of learning time is spent in meetings
• Someone (Dan Pink?) is going to publish the first business manga book next year
• ROI: what if your children ask to get an ROI on your parenting?
• 48% of our families don't know what we do as a learning professional

Now my holiday really starts. I'm going to visit colleagues in Atlanta, then explore the state of Florida all the way down to Miami beach. Back on November 5th.

Labels: learning 2007

The learning 2007 conference has started yesterday evening and is now at full speed. During the opening session there was an interview with Doug Lynch from Wharton university. He claims ROI is a false number and the learning profession should move towards other forms of evidence to prove its value. Actually he used a quite strong word to describe the significance of an ROI number but I'm not going to repeat it here, both because I didn't get it well and because it's a dirty word that would bring down the level of this blog :-).

I went to his session this morning. Here is my dump:

• We live in a knowledge economy and more people learn in companies than in schools. However there are no peer reviewed studies of ROI in companies. That is worrying.
• It is not that ROI cannot be done, but it is very complex to do and not necessarily meaningful. A quick poll of the audience says 71% say their companies do not have an accurate ROI measurement in place.
  
• Learning is accounted for under GAAP as an expense, even if we talk about it as an investment in people
• Some reasons why ROI is not what we necessarily need: ROI is outcome based but in a learning organization for example it is the process of continuous improvement that matters. For ROI you need to define, measure and monetize all variables that make up the benefits and the costs of learning, while controlling for all variables except for learning. What goes into ROI is also very specific to the company and context.
  
• All things being equal, what is the impact of learning? Well guess what, all other things that affect performance are not equal, performance is affected by lots of things we cannot control for in the calculation.
  
• What we are actually are talking about is the IMPACT of learning, and evidences of that instead of the financial number related to outcome benefits and associated costs ratio.
• So we should all be like researchers and find evidence and validate that in a scientific way. Work with the evidence you can gather or with what is easily quantifiable.
  
• Americans are typically asking a lot of questions and interrupt the flow of the presentation and go into side discussions much more than you will see happening on European conferences. That is not necessarily bad, but at this point I lost it so I don't really know what we could do instead ROI. We did not get to the end or half of the slides, but they will be on the learningwiki.com site later on so maybe I'll get the point of the session later.
  

At a previous conference I remember in a similar session some people and vendors boosting on how they got a number and cracked the holy grail on proving learning value. Then the last speaker came and declared that mankind has been teaching each other stuff since the dawn of time, and we still do not know how to measure its value, although we all feel it does matter. So who started the whole ROI saga in learning anyway? Was it the business that noticed learning and wanted to manage it like any other service or investment? Or was it the learning function that wanted a place at the table and decided it should come up with a ROI number to achieve that?
At the end of the session I'm still as confused about the ROI debate as before. I have more reasons to believe that ROI is not the unifying answer. But I still have no idea as to what other evidences to replace it with. So hopefully I'll get it later and in the mean time stick to Kirkpatrick.

Labels: learning 2007, masie, ROI

Mobile learning is on a lot of lips in the learning industry. It's not new, but still experimental with too small adoption rates. This is my braindump from the deep dive session on mobile learning hosted by Judy Brown, David Metcalfe and Fabrizio Cardinale at the L7 conference.

• Think about linking people with people instead of people to a device.
• What is the definition of mobile learning? Are laptops mobile learning? Is reading a book in the bus mobile learning? For me it is a subset of e-learning but on particular devices as delivery medium. So all the usual characteristics as AnyX learning would apply as it is general for e-learning as a whole, but specific to small and portable devices. Those characteristics include reduced screen size but also presence awareness. Turns out the definition exercise is bringing us nowhere so use your own or the one on Wikipedia. Flashback to the days where we define 'what is a learning object?'. Don't get stuck on a perfect definition, move on.
• Non-office audiences make a great target for m-learning. Think of field technicians, field researchers, sales people. It is easier to bring work to learning than to bring learning to work.
• Tip: look for a pilot project where the devices are already there for example sales training or executive training on blackberries.
  
• Also a lot of potential for m-learning outside of the west. Think Africa and Latin America where mobile phones are the prime device and not computers.
• Problems with standards, networks, platforms. As any experimental product there is some room for standardisation. It is not long European cell phones will work in the USA. There are 700 different platforms and devices to build for, and they will be obsolete in 6 months. How do you deal with that? Carriers, platforms, devices all need more standards. Also m-learning benefits from standards such as separation of content in XML files, SCORM and OKI or SOA webservices.
  
• Not to mention the cost of mobile connections being a barrier. But those things are improving.
• Lot of interest for m-learning comes out of the health care industry.
• M-learning cannibalizes events and meetings.
• We saw lots of examples: performance support systems, pandemic preparedness training, museums, pod casts, city guides, job aids and checklists, class notes, games, wearable learning
  
• Blended approach: blend m with other forms of e-learning for example do the assessments via mobiles but the richer media forms via PC.
  
• An issue still remains: how to track the use of m-learning or podcasts? Some tools offer tracking or LMS like capabilities, but this remains an important item when selecting the technology and setting up the project.
• How to make m-learning that is as sexy as online gambling or sex? What will be the killer app?
• If you don't spend your dollar the right way, you will have to spend it again in some years.
  
• Elliott Masie dropped by. He predicts most of the m-learning applications will be in the field of performance support (knowledge in the hand). The device will connect to content, context and community.
  
• Elliott quote: "The office is one of the worst places to learn."
  
• M-learning should not just be about squeezing things onto smaller screens. In any innovation we first mimic another technology and set up a metaphor that limits thinking outside of the box. It will happen here as well.
• New hardware features coming: projection in devices, voice recognition, convergence of networks and devices.
• Some tools and sites: hotlava (also some tracking), zirada, iWriter, iQuiz, mob5, mobisite galore

In the end, I was wondering what stopped adoption of more m-learning. Then it hit me that I never do it either. So why am I not learning the m way? I see two reasons: I don't need it and it costs to much. I have a computer everywhere I go: at work, at the customer, at home even here at the conference. Why go back to a more inconvenient device? So I might not be the target audience for big m-learning. And although I have an expensive e-ten Glofiish Windows Mobile 6 phone, I'm not paying the prohibitively expensive UMTS or other data communication subscription to it.
In short: m-learning has a future and a nice one, but we need to figure out what the best applications are and some barriers such as standards, the multitude of devices and technologies and cost schemes need to be addressed before the tipping point can occur.

Labels: learning 2007, mobile learning

Well, it took me a while to get here (two hours delay of my flight, 5 hours waiting for my connection flight) but here I am at the computer room at the Learning 2007 conference in Orlando, Florida. The land of endless opportunity, everything in big size, women with bad haircuts, men with white socks and where the bushes sing Disney film tunes! My cell phone doesn't work in this country so it seems but at least there is free internet in this big room full of different computers. I'm next to a big Apple screen btw, next time I'll try to get me one of those just for the fun of it.
Over the next few days I will share my experiences on the conference. The reason I'm attending this one out of my own pocket is because it promises to be different. So far I got my badge and program bag and guide. That's pretty standard. But I also got an electronic voting device. Every participant gets one for the duration of the conference and I guess it is going to be used for interaction during the general sessions. There is also a special notepad with a template for taking notes in a structured way (visual map, notes, links for follow up...). And we can select from ten different social buttons to pin on our T-shirt. I'm currently wearing pins on e-learning, "I'm new", Friends Wanted and Blogger.
As for content, I'll be particularly interested in anything 2.0-like, learning effectiveness and e-learning in corporations. I'm off to start with a free one day seminar on Mobile Learning before the official opening this evening. To be continued...

Labels: learning 2007, masie

In about 2 weeks time Elliott Masie's Learning 2007 conference starts in Orlando, and I'll be one of the participants. The preparation for the event is going on at full speed, and I must say I'm impressed so far with the building up to the event.

One of my colleagues describes conferences as 'the cult of the wicker man'. He means that on typical conferences, people gather from all around, have a couple of days of intense information sharing, networking and festivities, and then burn it (the wicker man) all down to the ground in a big closing ceremony. Nothing but memories remain and the whole thing starts over the next year.

Learning 2007 does its best to break away from that: there is for example a learning wiki where all sessions have their page, is free for the world at large to view and remains open after the conference. As part of the pre-conference building up there are various mails, YouTube video's, an RSS feed for updates and the social network site I blogged about before. I had a quick look at it again and I found in my circle of 500 closest people not one other Belgian, but a few Dutch people, some people interested in quiz, ... I hope to meet other people that have experimented with 2.0 stuff in learning so I can take some of that into my very own 'social quiz/learning' site about2findout.com when it opens in December.

It remains to be seen how much of this wicker man will remain in November, but the signs look good. As conferences are an annual thing anyway with a lot of the same attendees, why don't they all encourage a more continuous conversation and networking that results in a yearly cumulative point?
Oh, and I enrolled in the Sunday pre session on Mobile Learning for two reasons: it is interesting, and it just became free (thanks!). I guess I'll see Disney backstage another time.

Labels: learning 2007, masie

As a personal treat to myself, I decided to attend Elliott Masie's Learning 2007 conference in October. I'll do the conference first, fly to Atlanta to meet with my American colleagues and take some holiday afterwards together with my friend (we will drive from Orlando through Miami).

I'm fascinated by how this conference is organized. Just to prove it's not one in a row: the learning network has just launched, where all participants can put in their profile, likes, dislikes and interests and view the 500 closest matches to them to get start networking before the event and afterwards.

When I registered I was number 683, but today the counter is at 1709. I'll keep you posted as the conference approaches.

Labels: learning 2007, masie