July’s big question is very timely for me! Here is the question:

In a Learning 2.0 world, where learning and performance solutions take on a wider variety of forms and where churn happens at a much more rapid pace, what new skills and knowledge are required for learning professionals?

This week my Web 2.0 Learning and Performance started. I’m keeping a blog for the course, as are most other people. Someone is already asking about what are the most important things to know as educators about Web 2.0.

The Technology

I think there are some basic technology tools that need to be mastered. These include:

• Simple HTML: for example creating hyperlinks
• Screencasting software: You should be able to create a screencast (using something like Camtasia) and post it to the web
• Feed aggregation: You should be able to harness information into one feed. Lots of very simple tools exist for this now. I use newsgator as an RSS aggregator, but even tools like FriendFeed can help pull different feeds into one stream

Learning to Surf

You have to be able to surf the web. By this I mean, you need to be able to ride the waves of information that may be connected to a learning topic without getting swamped and pulled under by the sheer volume of information.

You also have to be able to show learners how to surf as well. Teaching someone to surf is not easy at all. OK, let me be truthful I’ve only taught people to body surf, but that is still hard. You can’t get inside their body to make them understand how to hold themselves so that they jump at the right time to catch the wave. All you can do is model your technique for surfing, they have to adopt their own style.

Its the same when you teach someone to web surf. You can show someone how you do it. You can show them the end goal, but they have position themselves so that they are comfortable with the wave of information.

Don’t forget about ID

I think ID is very important in the case of Learning 2.0. There is so much information to be consumed that there has to be some design involved to ensure that learners don’t become so overwhelmed that they aren’t able to master tasks.

All of the rules of doing analysis of what the end results should be are still very important, as is doing formative and summative evaluations during learning events to be sure that learners are at least moving towards catching a wave.

If you follow me on twitter, you are probably very well aware of my rough ride in my summer class. So, my final paper has been handed in, and I have been mulling over what I can take away from this experience. This may turn into more than one post, but I think it’s important.

We all know that things are changing fast as far as education is concerned. All of a sudden, instructors have access to all sorts of tools. In this class alone, we were required to use the following instructional tools:

1. Blackboard
2. Online readings
3. A book (yes a normal book – I am listing ALL of the tools)
4. Wikispaces
5. Diigo
6. GoogleDocs
7. jMAP
8. Screenhunter (I used Snagit)
9. We had to create a website (I used vi)
10. My group used meebo to meet (Blackboard is not so great with synchronous communications)
11. My group used slideshare

That is a lot of tools! That should be great right? In theory, educators now have lots of inexpensive tools that can be used to make their students’ learning experiences more meaningful.

The “more meaningful” bit is where it gets tricky. In order for instruction using these technical tools to be meaningful, strong design must go into the instruction. Without this design, students will be frustrated and refuse to use the tools, and this arsenal of new tools we have available to apply to instruction will become useless.

I am at an advantage here; I work in a group that creates technical training for our customers, partners, and internal personnel. I know what has to go into planning reusable technical labs that allow students to use all their cognitive powers to concentrate on lesson objectives (and not on learning yet another tool).

This is a critical point: it places an unfair cognitive burden on students when you expect them to learn new technical tools at the same time they are learning new lesson materials. You must either make the technology invisible, or teach them how to use the technology.

Here are things that need to be thought about when designing a class using these technical tools:

• Just because it was easy for you to pick up one of these new Learning 2.0 tools doesn’t mean that it will be as easy for your students.
  You must provide instruction for the tools for those students who need them.
• Will it run on all Operating Systems?
  If you have a PC, will this new software run on a Mac?
• Does the software have minimum requirements?
  Will it run on all versions of Windows? Mac? All the flavors of Linux?
  Does it require Microsoft Office products, or can it run on OpenOffice?
  Do you need a certain amount of memory? You should really let your students know about this before the class starts, so they have a chance to tune up their computer.
• Are there clear instructions available on how to access/install/use the software?
  If not, you need to write these instructions before the class runs.
  Don’t expect the learners will just figure it out, especially if this is not a class on how to access/install/use this software.
• Are there security considerations to using the software?
  As much as I like Diigo, it’s not something I could design into my courses because of confidentiality agreements.
• Be available during the assignment window to help with technical questions.
  If you are going to require students to use these tools, plan on being very available during the assignment periods. If assignments are due on Thursday nights, you will probably get lots of questions Thursday afternoon. (You could probably address this need with a wiki).
• Do not burden the technical students in the class with being the technical mentors.
  Your techie students probably won’t mind helping, but they did not take the class to sharpen their skills. If they are helping other students learn the technology, they are being robbed of learning time. That’s not really fair.
• Be sure to keep the technical documentation up-to-date
  Again, a wiki may come in very handy here.

In short, the stuff I learned in this class was not on the syllabus. It occurred to me I am probably the worst student possible for this class. I hope this post didn’t come across as too negative.

So what do you think? Am I completely off-base? Did I leave any good planning advice out of my list?

Tony Karrer suggests going for the small wins, specifically by taking the following steps:

• “implement a small Wiki that has performance support materials that goes along with your eLearning on that new software application
• at first have it only editable by the authors
• then open it up to edit the FAQ and Common Issue pages by your help desk
• and then open up editing to end-users
• and to more pages”

hmmm

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.

I started writing this as a comment to a post on the Silence and Voice blog. That post is about where are all these users who are supposedly chomping at the bit to use Web 2.0 in educational settings? My comment was getting so long I decided to turn it into a blog post.

I want to add a technical slant as well as an instructional design slant to this discussion.  Just because we have the “L 2.0″ tools doesn’t mean that learners will automagically use them. Similarly, just having the new tools doesn’t mean those tools are the best ones for every instructional situation. These technologies are still just that – tools. To me, this means the use of the tools will require design work.

We have started discussing how we will use these tools where I work (developing and delivering technical training). There is a great potential to use the tools to solve all sorts of problems our audiences face. However, for the transition to be effective and smooth there is also alot of design work that will have to happen up front.

One thing I think is being left out of the conversation is the cost of these new tools. There is a human resource cost: instructors and developers must be taught about the tools, how and when to use them effectively, etc. The audiences must also be  retrained, I think especially in a fast-paced corporate setting. For years and years and years they have been taught to come to class, get info dumped into their head,  and take a test to prove that taking time off to go to training was well spent. After years of this conditioning, we are expecting them to just suddenly act completely the opposite: Be open, be collaborative, feel free to make mistakes, etc. In some industries, undoing that culture of control is going to be a challenge.

There is also a cost for machines, for bandwidth, for software. Is it really any wonder that  E2.0 made it look like this change will happen tomorrow? All of  the vendors presenting there  (including my company) are selling the physical tools that will make this new world happen.

I am working hard to help my organization start to think about how we can use these tools. I’m always surprised at the objections I hear. Some are very valid from a systems point of view, and are things I hadn’t thought about. The things I am learning in my class this semester are helping me to think of ways to overcome the objections, but there is still alot of work to do.

There is a post out there right now about Edupunk, and how they are upset that corporate LMSs. The comment that caught my eye:

“My bias has been for a long time that an LMS is sold by and sold to senior levels in an organization, and doesn’t often involve the people who are directly trying to create better learning within the organization.”

Then I saw this link about the differences between higher ed and corporate ed. Although I disagree with #10 – I complain.

Tony Karrer picks up on the conversation, and mentions that at some point trainers are going to end up in the middle of this issue, in between users who are already using 2.0 tools in their personal learning environments and the official, corporate LMS.

So how do we design so that students can use the tools they use to learn everything else when they come to corporate training classes? I am not sure yet. I have more ideas on how to design collaborative elearning assets. I am learning stuff at school – let’s see if I am able to implement.