I wrote about what I did at the LS Conference on Wednesday here.

Keynote

The keynote was given by Jonah Lehrer on How We Decide, The New Science of Decision Making. I had a little bit of trouble with the content as it was delivered. It started when he described Walter Mischel’s “Marshmallow Experiment“. In that experiment, 4 year olds were given a marshmallow. They were told if they could wait for 20 minutes to eat the first marshmallow, they could get another marshmallow. The experiment was conducted in the 1960s, and they found that the kids who could wait had better SAT scores and were “better adjusted” than the kids that couldn’t wait.

Of course every alarm in me went off. What does better adjusted mean? The SAT tests are culturally and to kids who were 4 in the 1960s biased against those with disabilities, so do better SAT scores really tell us anything about this population? Asperger’s Syndrome and other forms of autism higher on the spectrum were not even identified back then, so how many of these kids had untreated executive functioning issues?

I was able to attend a more informal session with Lehrer later, and he did speak about executive functioning issues. I was able to ask him my question about autism. He talked about his interview with Clay Marzo (a pro surfer who happens to have Asperger’s Syndrome), and I would have liked to have heard him talk more about decision making and executive functioning. I think the format of the keynote, and speaking to such a diverse audience, probably made it hard for him to go as deep as I would have liked.

The Great ADDIE Debate

I missed the first part of the great ADDIE debate because it started during the keynote (eLearning Guild – that scheduling was so frustrating!!). Stephen Acheson and Clark Quinn debated if ADDIE is still valid for today in front of a pretty lively crowd. It was a great debate – but in the end everyone seemed to agree that this is a process.

My big take-away: Clark talking about how he’s concerned about the organizations that use ADDIE in a top-down, hierarchical control-driven approach to training. I remembered that ADDIE originated at FSU. It was used to organize training and development for the military – an organization you expect to be top-down, hierarchical and control-driven.

I thought that this slide was interesting. It shows that the way we really A D D I E doesn’t happen in a completely linear way. (Clark wanted everyone to know that the slide came from this post by Anol  Bhattacharya).  Even more proof that ADDIE may be necessary as an organizational tool, or maybe even as a starting point for an organization, but its not a prescriptive one-size-fits all model. I also liked the idea that we aren’t creating learning, but a learning experience. Also, so much learning happens outside of the learning organization none of us are probably really doing enough A (analysis).

Designing for Mobile Learning

I sat in on Clark Quinn’s Designing for Mobile Learning session, and it was one of the most practical sessions I attended. Many of the sessions I went to didn’t go deep enough, used non-Enterprise tools I’ll never use, or just didn’t apply to an Enterprise environment.

Here were some of the main ideas I captured from this session:

• People use mobile devices to do quick look-ups for information in the time of need (performance)
• The 4 Cs of mobile: Content, Capture, Compute, Connect
• We can use mobile devices to help people connect to the right expert at the right time. The right person may not be the person in the cube next to you – it may be a person on the other side of the world!
• Use mobile learning to accessorize your brain
• Mobile learning can sense things for us (details, microphone, camera, video, compass, gps, etc)
• Mobile design heuristics:
  • Pareto Rule – on a mobile device more apps is not better after a point
  • Location, Location, Location – sweat the design details.
  • Semantics
  • Gesture – design to the device (touch or point) so people don’t have to type. Make it easy for the user
• Providers are fighting each other and making it hard to design for a diverse audience. Most use SMS, and you can use DITA/XML as markup schemas (most providers will use them). Someone mentioned the OSI (Open Screen Initiative). Sounds like most providers are onboard with that – except Apple. I think that person may have meant Adobe’s Open Screen Project (anyone?).
• Low-hanging fruit: make sure documents and job aides are in a format that is accessible by mobile devices
• If you have sales training videos – consider adding director’s notes to help explain the scenarios
• Customize performance help: create cue cards that can be accessed as someone goes into a client or a sales card. They can have it called up on their phone and look at it as needed during their meeting
• Customized performance help can be wrapped into someone’s calendar. You have a sales call, something alerts you to where the cue cards before the meeting

Structured Communities: Creating a Performance Center

I went to Lee Maxey’s presentation on creating performance centers. Here are my key take aways:

• One reason to create a performance center is sometimes creating training takes so long that the objectives  for which the training was developed have changed.
• Well designed content should be designed to change
• One of the main reasons people buy an LMS is compliance
• Training should be right
  • Right Time – time of need
  • Right Place – point of need
  • Right Amount – no more than necessary
  • Right Stuff – personalized to the learner’s behavior
• Community participation should be part of the workflow

See Lee? I was taking notes on my Blackberry.

When Worlds Collide: Social Media and the Learning Organization

Mark Oehlert presented his work as a learning professional using social media. He works for the government. Here are my takeaways:

• Moving to social media is a social issue, not a technical issue nor a cost issue
• At some point a big friggin wall will be in the way of truly adopting social media for learning. You have to convince the leaders to let go and jump that wall
• Ignore the technical hype about individual tools, look for real foundational changes that will impact communication, learning, and work flow
• What can help leverage all the smarts in your organization
• Social media can give you context about your co-workers. Can help you know how to interact with them better on your next project
• People don’t really hate change, but they may hate how you are trying to change them
• The features that will be available next year in Enterprise social media products are readily available in the free social media tools right now
• The 3 horsemen of Social Media are Control, Fear, and Trust
• The Dept of Defense has a Social Media policy
• There is an opportunity cost to NOT doing Social Media
• You know how important SMEs are, but can you imagine the power of a Subject Matter Network?
• You give employees computers, phones, corporate credit cards, you let them speak in front of customers. But you won’t trust them with social media? You hired them! Social media won’t turn them into lazy, worthless employees – its already too late if that is how they are

I loved the Sabotage Manual screen. This was an instructional manual written by the US government in the 1940s that outlined ways to infiltrate and sabotage organizations that were deemed a thread to the US. Go to page 32, to the section named “General Interference with Organizations and Production”. Here are ways to sabotage an organization:

• Insist on doing everything through “Channels”. Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.
• When possible, refer all matters to committees, for “further study and consideration.” Attempt to make the committees as large as possible — never less than five.
• Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.
• Advocate “caution.” Be “reasonable” and urge your fellow-conferees to be “reasonable” and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments or difficulties later on.
• Be worried about the propriety of any decision — raise the question of whether such action as is contemplated lies within the jurisdiction of the group or whether it might conflict with the policy of some higher echelon.