Like I mentioned in my wrap-up post from Friday at the Learning solutions conference, I did not care for the last keynote talk.

The keynote was given by Leonard Brody, and was entitled “365 Days From Now: Preparing for the Change Ahead”

My Issues

Here are some the things he said that I disagree with:

• You can’t predict the future using the past
  His main reasoning on this point is that there is so much change at the moment, that the future won’t be anything like the past. I think this is very dangerous, because the changes driven by technology are all actually controlled by social interactions. In the past, greedy people (be it power or money) used social interactions to control and manipulate the masses. Do we really think those kinds of people will treat social technologies any differently? As wise King Solomon said, “There is nothing new under the sun”. And as George Santayana said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”.
• Everyone on the planet has access and is connected to everyone else because the cost barrier of technology is almost zero
  This is just not a true statement. We still have a significant digital divide in the US.  To have access to the technology that is connecting everyone, you must be able to afford the device (hand-held or computer) and access rates. Not everyone can afford food and shelter, at least in the US, and these folks do not have the luxury to be connected to everyone else.
• Behavioral Economics is about slight of hand
  Behavioral Economics is actually the marriage of economics with psychology and sociology. Some programs use it to “improve the accuracy and empirical reach of economic theory“. One of the main premises of behavioral economics is that humans have bounded rationality – which means the rationality of individuals is dependent on the information they have, the cognitive limitations of their minds, and the finite amount of time they have to make decisions (via wikipedia). This is a field with decades of research to back it up. Maybe a bit complicated to understand and explain, but deserving of a better description than a comparison to a magic trick.
• Kids today are genetically smarter, and have more mental capacity than previous generations
  This claim was made with images of brain scans as “proof”, as well as a story of how kids with an electronic device tend not to pay attention to anything that is said to them. Hate to break this to you, but kids of certain ages won’t respond to an adult no matter what is in front of them. A TV, a radio, a boombox, a book.
  And those brain scans? Who were they of? OK, he said one was his. Fine – what about the other one? What type of person? Where were they on the spectrum? What were they doing at the time the scan was taken? Why wasn’t any context given to support this grandiose claim that evolution has picked this latest generation to start speeding up?

Why I think it matters to speak up

I think as learning professionals we should be alarmed when someone walks in and spouts so much unsubstantiated drivel as if it were fact. I’ll go even further: I think as learning professionals in this time, in the middle of the seismic shifts that are going on, it is our responsibility to point out the recklessness of these sorts of claims.

We all supposedly do an analysis when there is an issue in the organization. Based on the analysis, we look for the intervention, which in many cases is training. Why shouldn’t we critically analyze what speakers at our conferences tell us?

We’re at a time when the roles that would traditionally defend us against information imposters are being eliminated by the move to digital. What if defense of truth and logic is one of our new responsibilities as elearning and social learning professionals?

This sort of talk annoys me because I’m very analytical. Its almost like this guy took a bunch of pop-culture buzz words and threw them all  together because he didn’t know anything about education. Maybe that’s ok for Oprah, but this sort of psycho-pop babble will cause my management to throw up all sorts of new barriers for not wanting to move ahead. It makes our field, and social learning, look like a trend and not a viable tool.

I want to use social media to effectively solve problems. Because of that, I’m not interested in half-truths and forgetting about doing the hard work to analyze problems. I’m very interested in learning from the past so whatever solution I recommend will stick and change work processes for the better, for everyone, no matter their social class. I want to use social learning so that people can customize their learning to make sense to them.

I want way more than this guy was able to give us in one hour.

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):

• How has the Web changed your life?
• How has the Web changed business and society?
• What do you think the Web will look like in twenty years?

How has the Web changed your life?

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!).

How has the web changed business and society?

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.

What do you think the web will look like in twenty years?

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:

• Connect a device to our tv and get radio, movies, news, everything else. You can do that now, but I want to be able to get BBC shows without waiting 4 years.
• I wish right now I could buy songs I that people I listen to on blip.fm blip. (blip.fm is the closest thing to sharing mix tapes I’ve ever seen – it is seriously awesome).
• I wish I had a better way of scanning/organizing my RSS feeds
• I wish I was able to share all the stuff I know how to do faster and more efficiently

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.

This post has been bubbling in my brain for about two weeks. Our group finally turned in our midterm project, so I have a little time to get these thoughts out of my head.

Before I start let me say something to my group. I am just using our collective painful experience to illustrate a point. If you disagree with anything I say, please leave a comment and set the record straight!

I am in a class this summer called “Designing Online Collaborative Learning”. To the best of my recollection, there were no technical prerequisites for the class. I took the class because I wanted to become more familiar with how the principles of group theory could be applied to a Learning 2.0 environment.

After completing a survey, we were put into groups to create a lesson that has learners define factors that make Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) successful, create causal maps, create a shared theory of CSCL, do research to support that theory, and finally create a web page.

Now my group are self-professed non-techies. And they really are not very technical (it’s true guys!!). About 75% of my time has been devoted to helping and coaching everyone to learn some of the social media skills needed to complete our project. We used a wiki, slideshare (which went down for most of the weekend the project was due!), polldaddy, meebo, and  edublogs.

Now I’ve been using tools like this for about 12 years, so I can figure out the nuances between different sites. If you don’t use them all the time, those nuances are huge barriers. It takes time to figure them out. And if you want the project to look professional, it may take even longer!

My classmates became frustrated because they had to learn these web 2.0 skills PLUS the academic information. I am frustrated because I had to spend so much time coaching my teammates that I don’t feel I learned the academic information at all.

So how does this tie into my corporate life?

Learning 2.0 will not be successful unless it is implemented with good design principles.

Opening up collaboration and communication with the web 2.0 tools is not as easy as just pointing students to one of these sparkly tools and telling them “Go! Learn!”. Asking non-technical people to just learn a new technology places an unfair cognitive burden on those learners. It also places an unfair burden on the technical person in the class.

If the class truly becomes a collaborative group, and I feel mine was, the techie will try and bring the others in their group up to speed. That may take up all the time alloted for instruction – meaning the team learned to use a shiny toy, but did not learn the materials assigned to the course.

I think there is a lesson here too for those people who think Web 2.0 is going to save the world. You may have grown up using a computer, but there are many people in this country who can not afford a computer. There are people who can’t afford to pay for an Internet connection, or they can only afford dial-up. These people are entering the workforce too, and they don’t have the skills you have because they didn’t have access to the tools you did.

I have not heard much lately about the Digital Divide, but it’s still there. Aside from not being able to afford the Internet or equipment, there are lots of people who have to work 2 and 3 jobs to pay their rent. I can guarantee you that if they are able to be online, they aren’t worried with managing their brand. They get online to relax – play poker with their friends, play games, send stupid chain letters even though their techie daughter has told them a million times to look at Snopes first (ok off topic rant, sorry!).

What I am trying to say is, not everyone has the Web 2.0 skills because not everyone has access to the tools, and not everyone has time to get online and develop the skills. This has to be taken into consideration when creating training for a global audience.

I am NOT saying that we should avoid Learning 2.0 in our curriculum. I think these tools are powerful and should be harnessed. I AM saying this new way of instruction must be implemented thoughtfully.

We cannot afford to create instruction that requires the learner to learn how to use the instructional tools as well as learn the class materials. We either have to make the technology transparent, or we have to start teaching some of the Web 2.0 skills to our audiences.

Whew I feel better now that I’ve gotten that off my chest! Let me know what you think of these ideas.