This one is from this blog:

And this one is from my delicious account:

I also spent alot of time with fellow EMC blogger Polly Pearson.

I have some video I need to edit, and some better coverage of the conference, but I am still processing some of the things I heard. I tagged my tweets with #swlc, so did other EMC ladies. Check it out in a twitter search.

As a preview for what I’ll blog about…there were a couple of speakers that really got to me. One speaker talked about leading but talked as if the world is flat and we all communicate and listen on the same frequency. And an amazing Southern woman put a spotlight on why culture and family and community matter so very much.

But what does a systems method of designing instruction actually mean?

The definition of system is:

A group of interacting, interrelated, or interdependent elements forming a complex whole.

from thefreedictionary.com

What are these “interacting, interdependent elements” that may affect the development of instruction? Here’s a list from The Systematic Design of Instruction (Dick, Carey & Carey) along with my comments based on my experience in the world of designing technical instruction:

Individual Components of the System

• The instructor: What sort of training do they have? How much experience do they have with the product? How about the protocols, or the environment in which the product will be used?
• The learners: What sort of training do they have? What sort of information do they need about the product – will they be selling it? Will they be installing and configuring it? Will they be answering support calls from customers about it? Are they the customer? Or will the learners be a combination of all of these groups? Are they being forced to come to training, even if they think they don’t need it? Will they still have to answer customer calls and emails even if they are slated for training?
• Materials: What materials will be created for instruction? I develop training for software products that have some sort of revision every three months. Do we update our materials for each update of each product? What if a critical update is sent out for a product two weeks after we finish the materials?
• Instructional Activities: What instructional activities are needed? With software training, most of these activities are hands-on practice in labs built with the product being taught. But what should the activities be? How detailed should the lab instructions be?
• Delivery System: How should the instruction be delivered? Instructor led? Asynchronous eLearning? Synchronous eLearning? M-Learning?
• Learning Environment: In what kind of environment will the students be consuming the training?
• Performance Environment: In what kind of environment will the students be performing the activities that are taught during the training event?
• What have I forgotten?

Changing one component will impact the whole system

Each of these individual components work together with the other components. This means that if you change one thing midstream (lets say you make the decision to move from Instructor-led to eLearning, changing the delivery system), this will mostly impact other components of the overall system (the instructors, the learning environment, the materials, the learners all will most likely be impacted by the move from an Instructor-led to an eLearning delivery system).

And what happens if there is a component of the system that you haven’t even identified?

The systems way of thinking and performance

The systems way of thinking about instruction has been attributed to Larry Israelite (see Elliot Masie’s Learning Rants, Raves, and Reflections 2004, review here). This way of designing instruction helps find performance problems so that the appropriate instruction can be designed. It provides a framework for systematically looking at a performance problem, and designing instruction so that the performance gap can be closed.

One reason it is important to apply a systems approach to instructional design is that one of the goals of instructional design is to  close human performance gaps. According to another one of my books, Mastering the Instructional Design Process (Rothwell & Kazanas) some of the things to consider when trying to lose those gaps are:

• Individual Performance: Does an individual worker have the right skills? Do they want to perform well? Do they have the tools to perform well? Do they have the ability to perform well?
• Work Group Performance: Can people work as a group? Is there a clear leader (that people are willing to follow?) Do individuals understand their roles? How do group members feel about the methods prescribed by the leaders to achieve group goals?
• Organizational Performance: Does the organization anticipate change? Does the org react well to change? Is there a culture of sharing in the organization? Is work being done in the most up-to-date fashion for the organization’s field?

If the real goal of “training” is to close performance gaps and enable a state of readiness in an organization, then it becomes pretty clear you have to think about a little bit more than creating power points, designing a lab, scheduling a classroom and sending invitations to students. A systems approach of designing instruction must be applied so that the effect on each individual component as well as factors affecting human performance are considered.

Natalie spear-headed the idea of pulling together stories from mothers all over the company into a book. Today there was a book launch party at EMC, and I got a copy of the book. I’ve only read a couple of the stories (from women I’ve never met), and I can totatly relate to the stories.

Natalie has started blogging, and it looks like she’s going to extend the intent of the book onto her blog. This is so great, and so important. We work in a global company, and we work very, very hard. The thing I like about this book project (and now the blog!) is that it helps me take a break, and see people for who they are. Not a resource, not the contact I need to complete my next project, but a mom who might be waiting for that 3:00 call from their teenager just like I used to do.

Who knows? Maybe knowing these are the what help us make those permanent connections to networks that help us learn and work faster…

This quarter a partner and I are doing an inventory of the tools we have available to create blended learning, as well as identify efforts in other groups to create this sort of learning. One thing it’s hard to get across is that you cannot simply take what we have designed for Instructer-Led learning and port it to some form of blended learning. This article makes that point too – you must redesign the learning. The learning objectives must be matched to the appropriate delivery medium.

There is an entire section in the article devoted to the helping people “overcome the idea that online learning cannot be as effective as classroom training”.

So quick! Go read this article! Read the entire Feb T&D it is very good!

So this post is about how I’m using VMware to develop the lab environments for the courses I’m working on now. That way it’s techie, and edu tech at the same time.

The product for which I’ve been developing training for the past year is VoyenceControl. This product automates the compliance, configuration and change management of network devices. Creating a hands-on learning environment is important for people to practice what the courses teach them.

Instead of purchasing servers and desktops for this lab environment, all of the hosts are housed on a single VMware ESX server. If you didn’t know, VMware virtualizes hosts. So I create 12 Windows desktops that each student uses as a client, and 8 RedHat servers for the students to use as the VoyenceControl Servers, and they all are physically located on one server. The VoyenceControl servers access a physical network of routers and switches that we have set up.

VMware is the best thing to use for a software learning lab environment. Since the machines are virtual, you can take “snapshots” of them. A snapshot is a point in time image of what the vm image looked like. Each vm server in my lab has 3 main snapshots:

1. Snapshot 1: has everything needed to install VoyenceControl, but the software is not installed. This is for the classes where students install and configure the environment.
2. Snapshot 2: has VoyenceControl installed, but no Networks have been discovered. This is for classes where the students don’t need to install the product, but they need to discovery the network devices
3. Snapshot 3: has VoyenceControl installed AND discovered. This is for classes that concentrate on compliance and reporting.

These are the main snapshots, but each of the images has several other snapshots. If a patch is released, or if I need to update a license, I don’t have to create a new image. I just make a new snapshot!

Snapshots are amazing during class as well. If you have ever taught technology, you know sometimes there are some very adventurous students who experiment a little too much and wreak havoc on the lab equipment. Hey, its how some people learn right? With snapshots, no matter how much a student messes up a lab machine it doesn’t matter. You just roll back to a snapshot, and the machine is ready for more abuse.

The instructors even thought of other ways to use snapshots. If students are curious about a feature that wasn’t explicitly covered in the class, the instructors just take a snapshot of where the students are during the course, let the students experiment, take a snapshot when they are done experimenting, and then roll back to the first snapshot to carry on with the course.

I know my posts will never be as technical as other EMC bloggers, but then again they can’t geek out on learning theory now can they?

Gah.

I shared the link and pointed out that antics like this are probably one reason there aren’t more women in IT. This led to a flurry of responses from the (male) storage bloggers who follow me:

The guys had the first reaction of whoa, girls can be in IT if they want. Which to me can’t be true or there would be more women.

Next the conversation morphed from the women in IT issue to the issue of what do we actually do? What is our field? If we could define the field, could we attract more people (male and female to the field?)

This is an interesting question. I asked – can you explain to your family what you do for a living? Everyone who answered said no.

I know I can’t explain what I do. I just say I write technical training for the stuff my company sells. You know, computer stuff. If I try to explain what storage is, let alone how important the software I am currently writing training for is to managing network configuration and ensuring compliance to company standards and PCI DSS standards, I get that look. You know the glazed over look of what the heck are you actually saying!! You have always been such a weird girl!

I think this is a valid question. If we can’t explain what we do for a living, can we expect to attract qualified people to the industry? And especially can we expect to attract women and minorities to the field?

One thing my organization has done is developed a generic storage curriculum that is taught for college credit on campuses worldwide. It is a way to put educate undergrads about the storage industry, so it’s a start.

What else can we do to educate people about our craft, thereby encouraging them to join us?

Maybe another time I’ll try to tackle the women in IT issue.

Here’s the agenda:

SMB9 Theme: Starting Social Media and Community-Building Programs with a Reluctant Executive

SMB9 will feature three, eight-minute presentations on getting executive support for engaging in social media communities – tales from the enterprise trenches.

The Presenters

* Jamie Pappas, Manager, Social Media Strategy at EMC
* Sam Lawrence, Chief Marketing Officer at Jive Software
* Peter Kim, Former Forrester Research Analyst, Entrepreneur

Does marketing own social media? The social media groups I am involved with are all run by marketers. The marketing group in my company are the early adopters of social media in the Enterprise. Marketers see the reasons for connecting, breaking through silos, etc.

But marketers don’t have to implement these solutions. They don’t have to do really deal with the fallout from people talking openly about information that needed to stay within a group. They can get righteously indignant at the IT guys who block access to the tools they want to use, since they won’t have to work 48 hours straight when one of those tools introduces a virus that makes all nodes on the corporate network inoperable.

Marketers can talk about how awesome these new tools are and how we have to open access to all of them RIGHT NOW!!!!

Which puts the rest of us in a bad position. Sometimes all that enthusiasm comes across the wrong way to folks who have t put these exciting plans into motion.

Our bosses want to know if we have time to blog, read blogs and feeds, are we really working? How is all the new media different? How will it affect current revenue streams? Or is this just another fad that marketers are getting all worked up over?

Yeah, that is where I am. I think my management sees me as too technical to do social media. Even though social media tools could help me connect to my audience. Cut through silos to give me a genuine feedback loop for the training I develop.

So let me bring this back to the network. In my company, the people who develop courses have to become SMEs. I used to be a sysadmin, and now I am expected to learn the products I write about until I am an SME. I help write our Proven Professional Certification Exams, in fact most of the courses I have been involved with support these certifications.

So marketers may want links into the geek networks that are made up of folks holding our certifications. I am already a node in that network of certified geeks. So who would have an easier time accessing that network? Someone who knows the language, the norms, etc of the network? Or someone trying to connect to the network for the first time?

In IP networking terms, my connection to the network is the least expensive because I have the fewest amount of hops before I reach the network. So, you would think that I would be a perfect candidate to facilitate social media plans for these groups.

Except I am not in marketing. I am an SME that creates technical training. Infinite Loop.

So all you SM gurus: how do I change that perception?

It did not turn out well.

I had a little better luck a few weeks ago when I hosted an event for my student organization on ASTD island, although that event was ill-fated as well.

I wanted to put down my thoughts on why Second Life is not reliable as a Corporate Training tool.

Second Life is difficult for IT to support

Second Life (SL) is blocked from our corporate network. I requested that this block be lifted so that we could access the conference in SL. The operations guys in support were very helpful and accomodating. They understand the SL communication paths, and knew what had to happen so I could have an opening in the firewall to access the application.

We ran into problems because things have changed since the last time the ops guys attempted to set access up for someone. For some reason SL changes the IP range for connections. It almost looks like they provide an IP address for each region (maybe island?). This means every time new land is developed, another IP address needs to be added to the list of IP addresses that need to be allowed through the firewall.

I could log in to Second Life at my home on Broadway island, but I couldn’t teleport to any other region. This made it impossible to teleport to the conference. I could not even directly log into the conference, as the port was blocked.

The IT guys told me that they asked SL support (about a year ago) if there was an Enterprise relationship person available, someone who could help them build out a proposal for what is required to support securely accessing SL from our network. Basically, they were told that sort of function was on a “wish list”.

To me, it doesn’t seem like SL is quite ready for prime time on the support side (at least from an Enterprise perspective). Never mind the normal bugs and technical bumps, like the one I saw when I hosted a SL event. The night of my event, the SL database got corrupted at the exact same time our event was to start – so corrupt in fact that logins to Second Life had to be disabled. It’s sorta hard to hold an event in SL if people can’t log in.

If we were to use SL for training, we’d have to be sure that every time we held a training event, every student could log in and access the correct environment. Right now, there does not seem to be a reliable way to do that.

Events in SL should be run as if they were Real Life (RL) events

I signed up for this conference about three weeks ago. I emailed and asked for an agenda, but one was never sent. I went to the conference location and looked around for an agenda in vain.

People are busy. Using these virtual tools is supposed to enable participation for busy people. If you are going to have a 4-hour conference, let people know the agenda! Then folks can decide if it is worth their time to attend.

Also, it is important to remember that as the host of an event in Second Life, you must take extra care that you compensate for the lack of non-verbal cues in your communication. In other words, don’t be rude to your guests! The reason I am not mentioning the conference name is that I was totally appalled at the way I was treated by the person listed in the welcome email as the support contact for access problems.

This person told me there were limited seats, and that I should have noticed that when I signed up. She was very rude to me (via IM). I had her double-check my avatar name on the list. She realized her mistake, and was very apologetic for the way she treated me. It was a little late for that, however. I was a customer, going to a conference she was assigned to support. She was not a very good representative of her organization. I’ll just leave it at that.

Second Life is Resource Intensive

Apparently the avatar limit on this area was 50 people. This is actually a resource issue that could make training in SL prohibitive. Let’s say we wanted to run an entry-level CLARiiON (storage array hardware) class in Second Life. The appeal of SL is that we could have objects the students could access, manipulate, “touch” if you will. In order to do that, the object would have to be created. A script would possibly need to be attached to the object to make it behave so that it is more realistic. The more realistic we make things, the smaller the amount of avatars that can access the area. This means we would have to purchase more land, and build more objects, etc. This quickly turns into a resource issue to purchase, build, manage, and maintain the environment to train a global audience.

Summary

In summary, I can see some uses for Second Life in corporate training. But until there is a cleaner way to securely connect to SL, and until it becomes a bit less resource intensive, I don’t see what is gained by this environment over other forms of training that we already deliver.