Archives for Uncategorized

Are you using ADDIE without realizing it?

Posted by  on Sunday, July 25th 2010     

This post came to me after a discussion as our Rock Band BBQ party was winding down Saturday night. There is so much misinformation about ADDIE – so here is my post to try and shine a  little sunshine on the topic.

You may be using ADDIE without even realizing it. ADDIE is a process  model used to aid the design process for training and/or performance support tools. For my techie friends, its like ITIL for the education crowd. This particular model was documented at FSU for the military. I say documented because this was the method developed and documented by the folks at FSU to hand over to the military so they could carry on building instruction in a systematic way.

ADDIE is an acronym, lets go through each letter and you can decide for yourself if you are already using it.

A is for Analysis

Analysis includes determining if there is a need for instruction, if a performance support tool will do, or if there is a larger systems problem causing a performance gap. Some of the things my organization looks at is how many people are impacted, is this customer installable, etc.

The analysis should include can you develop the training – do you have the right SMEs, the right developers, the instructors with the right skill sets (or can you get people up to speed)?

Its very important this analysis is not done in a vacuum – it must include all the stakeholders. Everyone should have input into the analysis.

D is for design

Once the analysis is done, and everyone agrees some training needs to be written, its time to start to designing. The results from the analysis should inform the design.  The analysis should influence modality if instruction is seen as a need (eLearning, face-to-face, boot camp, etc).

Here’s the thing that trips people up about ADDIE – they think you have to deploy it like you read English words – from left to right. But here’s the beauty – you should bring the Big E (Evaluation) into every step! Once the design is set, evaluate it against the original analysis. Did you learn something from the design process that no one caught in the A step? Bring in the big E!

D is also for development

The second D in ADDIE is for development. This is where you take the design blueprints you made after the analysis (and hopefully evaluation) and actually start writing the training course. This is another great time to bring in the big E.

At EMC we have technical folks from our field organization evaluate training before it goes live, and our technical instructors are probably our harshest critics.

I is for implementation

Once the course has been written, its time to implement it. Its time to make it live, let students take the instruction.

You have probably guessed it, this is another great time to introduce the Big E. Once its live, are there technical issues? Do students understand all the learning objectives? Do students even know the course is available?

At EMC we have “smile sheets” after every course that are taken, and instructors encourage students to write issues with the course in the notes (thanks guys…).

The Big E is evaluation

Hopefully you have figured this out already – but evaluation should happen at every step. This is going to slow you down. This is going to make it impossible for you to interchange blanket forms and processes for all the performance gaps you identify.

If someone comes in saying they want to implement ADDIE and the forms come out, run the other way. ADDIE is simple and straight-forward, but it is a lot of work. People misuse the concept of ADDIE, just like they do with ITIL. If someone comes to “implement ADDIE” armed with templates and pre-made processes, run quick the other way! I think this tweet from Jane Bozarth sums up why:

tweet

In conclusion

ADDIE is just a way to effectively manage the instructional design process. Because of that, it will look different for every organization. So you may be doing ADDIE without even realizing it.

So lets show ADDIE a little love. I mean, how can you not love a face like this?

addie

category: Uncategorized

Biggest lesson from my graduate studies: Communities ignite learning

Posted by  on Saturday, May 8th 2010     

If you follow me on Twitter or are friends with me on Facebook, you know that I graduated last weekend with a Master of Science degree from the Instructional Systems program at Florida State University.

Here’s a video to prove it!

FSU has an amazing program. I studied with legends in the field like John Keller and Rob Reiser (who was also my advisor). I was able to take the program as a 100% distance student, which was helpful to be because for the first 2/3rds of my program I had to travel for work.

But my real learning did not happen during my studies. I am lucky to have a very experienced set of people in my organization (Education Services) who did not mind me asking them questions about the things I was studying. It was great to see how we really do have a great system in place to execute formal learning. Thanks Lila, Gene, and Ernie!

Also, where would I be without #lrnchat? Because of this online Twitter chat, I connected with other IS grad students nationwide, as well as professionals and some of the superstars in our field. I got my internship at Pistachio Consulting because of #lrnchat. If I had any question about my studies, I could tweet to the #lrnchat community and I’d get links, questions, or just conversation.

I should also mention #cck08. This course set the stage for the way I would question and evaluate everything in my studies. It also connected me to many individuals whose path is similar to my own.

I feel like I am part of the online learning community. As sad as this is to say – I do not feel as if I am part of the FSU IS community. When I graduated last Sunday, at least one other Master’s student and 3 other PhD students walked. No one from the program arranged anything for us as graduates, not even a meet and greet. None of the faculty were even in town – they were at a conference. The student organization did nothing to recognize the accomplishment.

Landis Green - Graduation!Now, two wonderful ladies I am connected to via Twitter and Facebook did come to see me. In fact, one fellow student, Lea Ann, even took me all around to get pictures on campus (I got my BS from FSU, and attended as a full-time student in Tallahassee), and came to dinner with my long-time friends who had also come to my graduation. My friend I’ve known since my undergrad days could not believe I had never met Lea Ann in real life before graduation day. I had to explain: we’ve talked on the phone, on Dim Dim, on Skype, via email, and lived together through all the tough times of graduate life. We connected through social tools, found a way to make our own small world, and I think it helped us learn.

I would not have learned much without some community to help me learn, to keep me grounded, to challenge the questions I had about different topics. Since I was a distance student, the University just didn’t know how to make and foster that community. Thank goodness there was #lrnchat.

This is the biggest lesson I learned from my graduate studies: Communities ignite learning.

Would I have still finished my degree if I had not been connected to any community? Yes, most likely. But I wouldn’t have gone as deep, I would not have done as much reflecting, and I would not have be able to integrate what I was learning through my formal studies into my work. To do that, you need a community of people – professional colleagues -  to help you put the formal learning into perspective from a practitioner’s standpoint.

This has huge implications for corporate learning. Formal instruction will always be required. You need it when you are a total newbie to some category of information, or when things have changed dramatically. Since I am in an organization that does technical training, we’ll always have the situations that make formal learning important.

But what happens after formal training?  Once people learn the basics, and go back into their jobs or into the field? What happens when they need a way to put the formal learning into perspective from a practitioner’s standpoint? Harold Jarche has a great post about this where he discusses how social learning is really the way we get things done in knowledge intensive and creative enterprises. In the post, he shows a model of the 5 stages of organization learning as seen by Jane Hart and Jay Cross.

I like these new models, but I don’t think we can learn without being attached to a community. I think formal learning is meaningless if the student doesn’t have a way to connect to a community that will help him or her integrate what they have learned into their thought and work processes.

Maybe the question for the enterprise is: how do you foster communities to which each and every worker can attach?

category: Uncategorized
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SWA vs Kevin Smith (or the power of social media)

Posted by  on Wednesday, February 17th 2010     

In case you missed the drama over the weekend, SouthWest Air was embroiled in a social media and customer service nightmare with director Kevin Smith.

Here’s how the story was reported:

Smith was thrown off an SWA flight for being fat. He started tweeting right away. He was offered a voucher, which he refused. He finally got home (on another SWA flight). He tweeted and made a podcast. SWA put a post on their blog defending their actions. The media (and social media fanboys & girls) sided with SWA, and painted Smith as an angry fat guy.

Here’s the timeline, according to Smith’s podcast(s):

  • Smith had purchased 2 seats, he does this because the tickets are cheap and he likes a barrier (probably from fans.  I know I’d talk his ear off and probably embarrass my son to death! Come on, we all know how geeks are and sitting next to a captive Smith would be like nerd nirvana. I get why he buys a barrier seat!)
  • He had a chance to catch an earlier flight. He actually chatted with the gate agent about how sure he’s a bit overweight, but he can buckle up and lower the armrests. She put him on the plane.
  • When he was called to board, he asked about getting his money back for the unused seat, which seemed to aggravate the new gate agent.
  • When he got up to the plane, some guy asked another SWA employee if Smith was “revenue”. They wanted to be sure he had paid for his ticket, and wasn’t traveling on vouchers. I guess they were close to some ratio they had to meet.
  • He sits down, and buckles in, and the original gate agent comes to escort him off. He shows her that the arm rests could go down, but it doesn’t matter. He gets booted for the “safety” policy.
  • He waits for over 10 minutes for the gate agent to come deal with him. From the sounds of it, the conversation got heated. And remember, Smith is a storyteller by trade. His tweets about not throwing a fellow fatty under the plane were priceless.
  • Smith is tweeting the entire time. SWA tweets back, and it sounds like they were able to get someone on the ground to go apologize to Smith. (He admits he wasn’t really reading tweets, he was writing them).  But it was too late, the damage was done.
  • Smith gets on another SWA to go home, using both seats. Another plus-size lady gets in the third seat on the row (that’s right, there was now a fat buffer seat for two passengers).
  • The lady gets pulled off the plane by an attendant, but she comes back. Smith learns later that the lady was told she should be more considerate of other passengers, and purchase two seats when she flies. Even though there was a fat seat purchased in the row in which she chose to sit. For the record, this seems to be what really set Smith off. He said all he could think of was his daughter – what if someone did this to her?

So lets look at the performance problems here:

  • Is the policy the problem?
    Many posts have been written about how the enforcement of this policy is at the mercy of the gate and flight attendants. Should there be a weight or girth size stipulated that kicks off the buy 2 seats safety policy? Is going by the handrests going down enough? Is it possible to enforce the policy in a fair manner to customers?
  • Is execution of the policy the problem?
    Was Smith kicked off for a safety reason, or would returning his ticket have made that flight below the percentages set for revenue? Was there any reason to pull the woman on Smith’s second flight aside and shame her, since there was a paid for “safety” barrier seat? Is this a training issue, or a hiring issue (don’t hire mean people!)?
  • Was the social media reaction adequate?
  • Is responding to an irate customer who is tweeting his/her frustration with standard corporate-speak really engaging? Should you always engage? This is customer service 101, you let the irate customer get it all out until they are calm enough to reason with. Then you follow up on whatever you promise to do for them.
  • Did SWA have a contingency plan for when one of its highly controversial policies?
    All they had to do was google (or search on Metafilter) for posts of how horribly this policy has been implemented in the past, were they ready for this?

Wrapping it up…

I’m thinking of this from the engagement piece. We have this powerful, powerful tool that we can use to connect and engage with our customers. Guess what, sometimes customers get pissed off. Sometimes for very good reason. Do you know what is going to make them go all Kevin Smith? Do you know how to react when they do? Do you know how to use the feedback from negative experiences to improve the experience of ALL of your customers?

For the record, I like Smith’s work. Most of it (most of it – come on a DONKEY!! WTF!!). And he is my son’s idol (again – a donkey?? come on help the moms out a little here Kevin!). I think my appreciation of his work is what connected me to his network, but his passion for seeing things set right really makes me helped me connect his problem to problems I am sure to face in the future.

category: social_media, Uncategorized
tags: , , , ,

My top 10 posts of 2009

Posted by  on Monday, December 28th 2009     

Here are the the top 10 viewed items from my blog in 2009

10. The Power of Language: What does sexy mean

This post was a response to responses to my post and activities at PodCamp Boston this year. I’m still really struggling with what happened during PCB4, but I’m lucky enough to be around people who really challenge me when I challenge their thinking on societal-based issues such as gender.

9. If the world is changing, why am I studying about the guys that sent us down the wrong path?

In the Fall ’09 semester, I took 2 Human Performance Theory (HPT) courses. One of them did a deep-dive into HPT. I started thinking – wait. If we are trying to reboot and innovate management styles now, why do I have to study these jokers who messed it up in the first place? :)

8. Twitter Tools

I created a Twitter cheat sheet that could be downloaded and folded into a pocket-sized reference for EMC’s diversity team. I based it on the cheat sheets EMC Education used to have for connecting Unix hosts to storage. Apparently people liked this. :)

7. What is informal learning?

I wrote this for executives at work back in February, when our organization (like many other corporate learning orgs) was really starting to struggle with this. This initial conversation has led to other interesting things that I’ll be able to discuss openly soon. :)

6. My portfolio

To graduate from my Master’s program, I must have a portfolio. I’ve been trying to keep most of my artifacts online and linked to this area of my blog. Apparently people have been reading them – I hope that is a good thing!!

5. Anyone can be an ID. But should *anyone* be an ID?

This post came out of a #lrnchat session that (to me) was a little bit too hard on SMEs. I’m expected to be an SME, but I also do ID work. I just hate when IDs are not nice to SMEs.

4. If the Gervais principle isn’t working, what is the ideal management structure

One of my favorite posts this year was about the Gervais principle, which explained that we all love the TV show “The Office” because it does a good job of portraying middle management. I read this in the midst of my Fall Semester (studying HPT), so that’s where the post came from.

3. EMC FAST – how do IT folks keep up to speed?

This post was to talk about EMC’s FAST launch, as well as to tell people about the EMC Proven Professional Engineer 2 Engineer broadcast that focused on FAST for Celerra and Symmetrix V-Max.

2. Language that homogenizes creates losers

This post referenced my new-favorite Gervais Principle post, but was about the sexist overtures at the Yahoo Hack Days in Taiwan. If you are counting, this is sexism post #2.

1. Podcamp Boston, lack of women speakers, and bringing things to neutral

I went to Podcamp Boston. I worked with 2 other women to create an ad hoc session about why women didn’t speak at tech conferences, especially when the barriers were so low (as they were at podcamp boston). I walked away from the entire experience feeling attacked and vulnerable. Gender, and the power to define gender, still is a weird thing that baffles me. I’m so happy I have people who are willing to push back and help me really understand this gender thing! (If you are keeping score, this was gender post #3!)

So – what will 2010 hold? For me personally, lots of big changes at work, in my academic life (I graduate in Spring 2010), as well as my personal life (I’m getting married 10/10/10). Thank all of you for not only reading my blog, but talking to me about what I post in the comments, on Twitter, on Facebook, and via email. I hope I get to meet you face-to-face, but until then please keep challenging me to look at things from all sorts of different angles!

category: Uncategorized

Women in Technology – tell your story!

Posted by  on Tuesday, October 13th 2009     

I had an interesting Facebook conversation last night with Storagezilla (a fellow EMC blogger, and one of the biggest geeks I know). He’s at a big EMC internal conference, and he had a conversation with folks at the conference about the lack of women present. He made a pretty familiar comment:

.. talking earlier as to how we could change that mix (men to women at the conference) but we can’t hire what isn’t there.

This is what started the conversation. Zilla is sincere in wanting to see more women, but there do not seem to be women available with the proper skillset, so how can more women be hired? So a woman asked him about his job, in particular how much it paid, and he basically told her how hard the job is.

I thought it was weird he’d complain about no women to hire, and tell a woman who asked about pay how sucky the job is. To be far, zilla is an extremely strait shooter, doesn’t mince words, and doesn’t sugar his responses about anything (and that is why I like him!). So he was just being honest about what the job requires, and he’s a geek not an recruiting rep. He’s not the only person that describes jobs in our industry in that straight-forward way, and lets be honest there is a tremendous amount of work and stress that comes with many of our roles. But shouldn’t we sell the good parts first, tell about the challenges of the role, and let the individual decide if they want to risk it? Maybe this is one of the problems the industry has?

Another lady jumped in and reminded us about the study of young girls to find out why they don’t want to go into technology. Reasons: girls think that computers and engineering are “boring” , “filled with nerds” and “you are stuck to a desk all day” and most strangely that “there is no money in it”.

This got me thinking – how the heck did I get into, and stay in technology if all the job descriptions suck? I’ll tell my story, and ladies, please tell yours!

I have always loved to break things to figure out how they work. I’ve written before about how I grew up very poor, so the only time I got to figure out how things work was when one of my dad’s best friends, who was a garbage collector, would bring me broken transistor radios. I loved tearing things apart.

I went to community college as a non-trad, and they first tried to put me in business school. I said nope, I want to do Electronics. I mostly wanted to take the EET curriculum to find out how sound and video ACTUALLY went over the air waves. I was so happy when we finally got to that. :)

I could have stopped there, but I had started to teach myself (and my instructors) how to do HTML and had been taking programming courses. This was in 1999, and some of my brother’s friends we finishing their CS degrees, and were telling me how much money I could make with a Bachelor’s degree. So I decided to risk it and transferred to Florida State.

So what was my motivation? My kids. I wanted a steady job, with insurance. When I found out I could have that as well as make enough money to try and make up for all the years I lived under the poverty level, not to mention doing work I was very interested in, I was sold. That mother’s instinct to care for her family should not be underestimated. I’ve put up with all sorts of nonsense to provide for my kids. I would even have considered the job description ‘zilla gave.

So what is your story? What motivated you to become a technologist, and what has kept you in the field? Maybe we can start telling stories about how all the nonsense of the jobs are worth it, and convince more women to make the move to work with us. Leave a comment here, or write a post linking back here. And spread the word!



category: Uncategorized
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