Archives for education

Can an educator be happy as a marketer?

Posted by  on Wednesday, February 9th 2011     

My new position at Dell Storage is technically a marketing position. People have asked me – you just got your master’s degree in education – how can you do marketing (this is usually after jokes about a techie crossing over to the dark side…).

I have always thought there was lots of education skill needed in marketing. And let’s be honest – right now in the storage industry things are moving so fast that the early adopters are being taught by the technical marketers.

Then I read a post by Alistair Croll that convinced me I was right about the similarities between education and marketing. His post outlines the three questions all marketers must answer:

  1. Who’s the audience
  2. What specific action do you want them to take?
  3. Why will they take that action? What’s their motivation?

This makes the similarities between marketing and education pretty apparent to me. The first one (from an edu point of view) should set up what sort of knowledge a person should have coming into a course. The second question speaks to what action a learner should they be able to perform after taking the instruction – learning objectives 101. The third one is all about motivation – how do you get a learner’s attention so they will want to learn what is in the lesson.

The point is, good marketing and good education have one core tenant in common – it should be all about the end user. I’m excited to use my education training in a new discipline – even more so since I get to be technical!

@storagezombies wanted me to mention that both education and marketing have zombies. Since I am scared to death of @storagezombies, I am mentioning that here.

category: education
tags: , , ,

Building Trust in the Cloud, One Proven Professional at a Time

Posted by  on Tuesday, December 7th 2010     

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been at a forum or read a blog that talks about all the trust issues with the cloud – no security, lack privacy, doesn’t stand up to regulations, etc. Everyone seems to think of the cloud still as the wild-wild-west and yet I think by this time that we have a pretty good handle on what the problems are – now we need to really focus our efforts on how to solve those problems.

In October of this year a friend of mine – Dr. Jeffrey Voas, a computer scientist at NIST, co-authored a paper called “In Trust we Trust”in IEEE Computer Magazine.  In the article they made the statement:

Trust isn’t a static property and must be evaluated continuously

Cloud embodies one of the most dynamic computing environments so how do we engender an atmosphere of trust?

If you want to build a house that will stand the test of time (and the elements) you find a good contractor, one you can trust will do a great job.  And that contractor will  employ (or contract) trusted partners for materials and specialty functions like foundation teams, masons, and most important the architects who are going to specify how the structure is built and what the materials have to be to make the structure safe and pass the regulations.

It’s the same with technology. Have you ever walked into a technology Value Added Resellers (VAR) lobby? I have had the privilege of visiting many of EMC’s partners (VARs), and the first thing you always see is in their lobby are the plaques and awards from the vendors they resell for.  The execs at these partners will lead you down the hallway of their greatest assets – their technical people. They will talk about the years of experience on their technical staff and how they have built the best all-star team. Many of these technical people will have plaques, awards, and most importantly certifications showing their deep expertise in multiple related technical disciplines – security, networking, virtualization, or specific applications. The partner execs make sure you see this as part of their trust campaign – so that you see that they are serious and committed to making the investment in the technologies that they want to help you purchase and implement successfully.

There are many things we do at EMC to help our customers with their journey to the cloud. EMC Ed Services is no different with a great curriculum already in place designed to prepare technical people and turn them into EMC Proven Professionals. Our mission is now extended to help our customers, our partners, and our own internal technical talent become better trusted technical resources specifically in cloud and virtual data center certifications - so that all of us can build better trusted clouds.

I’m looking forward to learning even more about the cloud through more research and through the process of teaching. I know I’m going to meet a lot of really smart people, hear their stories and challenges, hopefully see a few light bulbs go off, and  then watch them take what they learned to new and more trusted heights.

/wayne

category: emc, emc education, learning professional, Proven Professional, proven professional community, technical_training, Uncategorized
tags: , , , ,

Systematic Instructional Design should be a Learning GPS

Posted by  on Sunday, June 13th 2010     

This post is a continuation from a post about the impact of lots of freely available content on learners. My argument is that systematic instructional design can be used to help students navigate the tremendous amount of content that is available to them.

ADDIE is our friend

I know everyone hates on ADDIE, but using ADDIE as a true design process can help to create a Learning GPS for our learners.

A: The first part of ADDIE is A – Analysis.

If we are designing instruction, one thing we should be analyzing is our audience:

ADDIE

ADDIE

  • Are they experienced?
  • Do they know the vocabulary of the discipline?
  • Are they newbies?
  • (If you design corporate education) What is their job role?
  • How much time will they have to come up to speed on this topic?

D: Once you know this information, the Design process can start.

Maybe part of our jobs as learning professionals is providing a GPS, based on the experience level and job role of the student. For total noobs, we’ll have to design a way for the students to learn the vocabulary. For experienced folks, we can show them the most relevant places to search for information and let them build a CoP or PLE (whatever we’re calling it this decade).

E: Notice how the E in ADDIE is not at the end, but connected to each step of the process?

If you design something that you think will work as an information navigation device for your audience, pilot it! Evaluate it!

Just because the navigation system works for you does not mean it will work for your audience. Not only do learners need to understand how to find and filter information online, they need to have an affinity with the source of that information. They need to be able to trust that source if they are going to add the source to their PLN. The content needs to resonate with the learners for them to take action on what they are learning.

D: If your pilot went well, go ahead and Develop this new system.

I don’t know what it will be – you are going to design it for YOUR learners and THEIR needs. Once you have built the system, go back to E (evaluate!).

I: If everything still looks good, Implement the new design.

Once again go back to E (evaluate!).

Help learners learn to find content

We can use ADDIE (and other instructional design models) to design new systems of instructions, taking advantage of the user-generated content that is building the enormous digital universe. We can help newbies learn the vocabularies they will need to perform effective searches. We can create a learning GPS that will help experts and novices navigate to the content they need to get their jobs done.

This is just the starting point though. How do you get learners to connect with each other? How do you get them to trust you to provide content relative to their needs, and to stay connected to you? More on that in a few days.

category: instructional design
tags: , ,

More content means we need instructional design more than ever

Posted by  on Sunday, June 13th 2010     

By now you’ve all heard it. Heck by now you have experienced it. I’m talking about the explosion of the digital universe. IDC and EMC have been measuring the size of the Digital Universe for a few years now. This year’s study confirms our digital universe – or all the information that is available to us in a digital format – is growing even faster than we thought. In fact they expect it to grow 44 times what it is now in the next ten years.

This means we have more content available at our fingertips (literally!) than at any other time in history. For learning professionals, this should be a great thing right? We can just connect people to the Internet, where they will be able to find all the content they need.

Right?

The amount of content available is the solution and the problem

Time: Think about the last time you had to search for something you knew nothing about. For instance, right now I am very interested in learning about SOAP and REST because these technologies enable cloud applications. Problem with me: I have zero free time. At some point my itch to figure this out is going to overwhelm me, and I’ll sacrifice a few nights of sleep to learn the basics.

Where should I start looking for content? A google search for “soap rest cloud” looks promising, but returns 1,620,000 results. Just eyeballing the top results makes me think the articles will be too advanced for what I know now.  I don’t have time to sift through all of that, I just want to know the basics from a source I can trust to give solid technical content.

And are there really 1.620,000 pieces of content available? Probably not. From experience, I know many of the results will be reposts of one good blog post or web page, with some spam and non-relevant links mixed in. I have enough experience to be able to filter through most of the muck, but what if I was a complete novice?

Vocabulary: Every discipline has its own vocabulary. When you study a discipline its one of the first things you learn. Ohm’s law. The Negroponte switch. ADDIE. When you learn these terms, you have a reference for researching more about the terms, learning new things related to the discipline. If you are a total newbie, you may not know the vocabulary of the discipline. This limits how you search for information, and it may be a barrier to finding the digital content you need.

Search Engines: Many times search engines provide results in a chronological order. For example, I couldn’t find a good reference link for the Negroponte Switch, so I gave a Wikipedia link. The Wikipedia article is an orphan, which makes me question its relevance. But even thought I know what this term means, I couldn’t find an article that succinctly describes it. I learned about it in college 10 years ago, so my thought is maybe all of the articles I need are just to old to come up in the first 30 pages of Google results. My experience with the term helped me sift through the content provided, but if I was a total newbie would I have been able to do that?

So we have tons of content, we’ve all agreed on that. But can learners find content when they need it, especially can they find it at the time of a performance need? I’ll touch on that in my next post.

category: instructional design
tags: , , , , , , , ,

online education infograph

Posted by  on Friday, April 16th 2010     

Online Education Facts
Via: Online Colleges

category: education
tags: ,
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