or, how my graduate studies are affecting my job in corporate education
You read that correctly – I’m no longer writing training for my beloved NCM.
Don’t worry – I’m still with EMC’s Education Services organization. Now I’m a Sr. Program Manager for Social Media.
More details soon…… I just had to post this – I’m finally allowed to talk about it!! 
Since I’m way behind, I’m just going to copy and paste my paper (lame, I know!).
Here’s the link to my timeline. I got the idea from the latest issue of EMC On magazine (I blogged about that here).
Here’s the paper, it explains the rationale.
The intended audience for my timeline would be anyone learning about social media. The intended use is to dispel the notion that individuals in their late teens and early twenties are “digital natives”. The term digital native is used to describe an individual who has always been exposed to digital technologies. The question is to which generation do digital natives belong? Some learning objectives would be:
The lesson containing the timeline would be a historical lesson on digital technologies. The timeline would serve to put the technologies into perspective, and to show that the real beginning of what we are calling Web 2.0 began 40 years ago.
The bands on the timeline were constructed to reinforce the idea that many people that fit the description of Digital Native are Gen X’ers. The top band shows the dates where Gen X starts and ends, but continues to chunk time in 10 year increments. The bottom bands shows the dates where Digital Natives start and end. Important events about Internet history, web history, social networking history, and social media history are identified in the middle band. Even as the user scrolls to look at events that occurred at the beginning of the Digital Native timeline, you can see how the oldest Gen X’er is at that time.
I wrote the descriptions in the bubbles as I would a blog post. I used very little content to explain the event, but I hyperlinked to an article with more detailed information. I technically broke the Spatial Contiguity principle by linking out to more information, but that was by design. The lesson objective was to show that digital advances have been occurring since the late 1960s, not to teach complex technical innovations over the last forty years. The explanations of technical events on the timeline were short enough to satisfy the needs of novice learners, but links were provided for learners who wanted to dig deeper on the history of a particular technology.
Keeping to the Redundancy Principle, in most cases I used icons with the simple explanations. I chose icons because in the case of social media most people will have at least seen the icons before. With some of the older technologies, if it was not possible to find an appropriate graphic I did not include one.
Cammy Bean started me thinking about the books I’ve kept from my IS program over in her thread What is Instructional Design?
Since I am slacking this morning – totally delaying starting my homework and work – I thought I’d drag out the books I’ve kept from my IS program. Here they are, in no particular order:
I am in my last semester. I’ve been arguing with everything the first book we are reading says, so not sure if I’ll keep it. Its Mayer’s Multimedia Learning.
So – what have you read for your IS degree?
EMC has an online magazine called On. In this month’s issue, it talks about the Web being 20 years old. Len Devanna tagged myself and Barry Burke to answer the following questions (which were also asked in the magazine):
I’ve talked about my journey before, but basically the web pulled me out of poverty. I went to college in my early 30s, a single mom of 2 kids living well below the poverty level. I was enrolled in an Associates degree studying Electronic Engineering Technology. My electronics classes were on a campus about 30 minutes away from my house. We had lab times to use breadboards to construct circuits to practice the theories we were learning. It was hard for me to get to the labs because the times scheduled were after the kids came home from school, and going back out to the college campus was hard on my non-existent budget (gas, someone to watch the kids).
Fortunately someone made software to emulate those breadboards. This posed another problem, because I didn’t have a computer. So I used pell grant money and probably some tax return money and bought a computer. Then I could put the kids to bed and work on my electronics homework.
Back in those days, computers came with a floppy drive that gave you free minutes for AOL!! I signed up, and was introduced to the World Wide Web. So I would do my homework, and then get on AOL to chat in the chat rooms. Once I figured out what Netscape was, my world opened up entirely. When I found up that I could get unlimited access to the Internet with a local ISP – I jumped on it! I actually had to choose between internet access and cable, and internet access won.
I learned html. I learned how to do real searches – using boolean phrases. I played in an online community called Worlds Away, where I was blown away by the kids who were writing scripts to manipulate the world. When they moved from a free to a subscription model I couldn’t play anymore, and most of the kids couldn’t either. We held a protest with all of the stuff we had in our “apartments”. It was a great community uprising.
Having access to encouragement from my online support groups, I finished my bachelor’s degree and pulled myself out of poverty. I also hooked into a learning disabilities community called LDonline who helped me use the legal words necessary to trigger the schools in Florida to test and provide accomodations for my daughter (we found out 6 years later that she has autism – something we would have never found out without the internet!).
I’ll stick to the society piece. At EMC we talk alot about how much information is out there, and how to manage it. The trick to taking advantage of all of this information is knowing how to navigate it, and knowing how to determine relevance of the information we find.
I almost feel bad for people who get online now – when I got on you could actually find real stuff pretty easily. Now there is so much noise. But if you look, and you try, you can connect to someone on the other side of the world who has things in common with you. You can share cultural differences. You can unlearn all the biased filters that you have that are based on your own culture. But it takes work, and willingness to have experience that cognitive dissonance that comes with having your filters shattered.
We can use the web to change the world.
Or, you can keep buying the fluff we’ve always been sold. Maybe that is how the web has changed society – you can use it to change the world or to just keep your own little world going. Its up to you.
I hope the web in 20 years is freely available to everyone. We still have the digital divide, and I think some of us who live and breathe the internet forget that not everyone has the privilege of being connected.
I think that things will be more integrated. I hope Bono is wrong – and the big media companies won’t convince US lawmakers try to lock down the web like China did (seriously Bono – what happened to the dude I loved back in the 80s? Did you sell your soul when you cut your mullet?).
Here are some things I wish I could do with the internet now:
Ok – so that’s my take on the first 20 years of the WWW. So now I get to tag someone else — from EMC I pick Stu Miniman because he blogged about the questions but didn’t answer them, and from outside EMC I pick #lrnchatters and elearning gurus Jane Bozarth and Clark Quinn.
My colleague Nada Wheelock and I have entered a submission in the Boston Enterprise 2.0 Conference. Nada and I have worked together on the Proven Professional Community for a little over a year now. She brings the marketing view, and I bring the technical and education view. I’ve learned lots from her about *that* side of the business.
Nada and I worked on this presentation for the better part of last year, changing it and tweaking it so that the message came through to our executives in Education Services. The message was to explain the importance of incorporating social media into our business processes. We came at them from two angles – educational/technical and marketing. We combined our understanding of both of those disciplines to explain social media to our skeptical audience. (I talked about the importance of translating messages from education performance speak to mba speak here, what Nada and I did together was very similar to this idea).
In our proposed presentation, we plan on deconstructing this slide deck (yes, I watch way too much food network!). The deck is an executive presentation, tailored to our audiences. We want to share with you the thought process that went into building the presentation, and how we tailored it to fit our business needs.
If you are interested in seeing that, please vote for us! There are only 24 hours left! We’ll be previewing it internally at EMC’s social media lunch (look on EMC|ONE for details).
