It’s the last day of December, the last day of 2009, the last day of a decade. But I still want to answer December’s Big Question:

What did you learn about learning in 2009?

Grad School

Personally, I took five graduate courses (for my Master’s degree in Instructional Systems at FSU)

• Development of Computer Courseware: I am not sure if learned anything new about learning in this course – I did learn that my organization at EMC does a very good job of creating computer courseware though!
• Inquiry and Measurement of Instructional Systems: This is the class that started me thinking differences in the language used by education people to describe measurements, and how these differ from language used by MBAs
• Web 2.0 Learning and Performance: I’m not sure if I learned anything new in this class either, but I did get to try out some new ideas I had about aggregating information sources. This is a great class, if you are in the IS program take it when it is offered!
• Introduction to Program Evaluation: This course introduced me to “The Standards“. They are pretty sense guidelines for conducting evaluations, but a nice reference.
• Performance Systems Analysis: This was  my HPT course. As much as we talk about innovation and doing things differently, all systems we analyze (at least from an academic standpoint) are built on principles created by the men who pretty much got us in this mess. Should we be studying them differently – as the bad examples maybe?

Blogging

According to the social signals for my blog posts at eLearning Learning, people liked the printable Twitter Cheat Sheet I posted.

Twitter was big last year. One of the most important additions to my PLE was #lrnchat. How amazing is it to be able to connect with education and performance experts from all fields? The remind me that there are so many ways to look at topics, not to fall into the trap of believing the hype, but to really analyze and evaluate systems…have reasons for the things you suggest and believe. And also not to take it all so seriously, that is nice too.

Another popular post (based on social signals) was one where I tried to find a definition for informal learning. I actually wrote this for one of my executives. I knew if I put my thoughts out there, my PLE would challenge it. And y’all did not disappoint!!

Wrangling with the idea of how to use communities in corporate learning took me back to my undergraduate days (my BS is in Information Studies) many times, especially in a post I made about Communities, PLEs, small groups, & power. This is something I’m still wrestling with. If Social Media is about the social, then finding a way to manage the power networks that allow (and prohibit) connections to networks is critical…especially in a highly political corporate environment. This is probably a core reason you can’t just build it (a community for learning) and expect learners to just show up. I’m sure this will be a big topic for me in 2010 as well.

I also wrote a post explaining how I personally use social media to learn. I compared it to fishing, I guess in a nod to my Gulf Coast heritage. I don’t think I’m unusual, especially for someone who works with technology. I still have to explain to people how important blogging is to me as a source of personal growth. The connections and shared information I’ve made from the blog have really helped me stretch and verify my thought processes.

Wrapping it up..

In summary, I’ve learned that I know lots more about learning than I knew. I’ve also learned that there is so much I have to learn. So, here’s looking to 2010. I’m sure I’ll have more provocative posts, and I’m sure you guys will knock my back down to reality!

For the last two years, I have submitted an education-based idea to EMC’s Innovation Conference. Both years the idea was based on a PLE – Personal Learning Environment. Both years, I used information gleaned from the Connectivism courses to shape my ideas. Both years my idea was ignored by the selection committee (cue sad music….). I think that I just don’t position the ideas correctly for the engineer brains that run the conference (EMC’s CTO office). I am working on my cross-functional communication, so maybe next year.

2007

The idea was an evolution — so let’s start at the beginning.

The first year EMC had an innovation conference was 2007. For some reason, I was nominated to be a judge of the conference. So it was me – an individual contributor (from the education department no less!!) — and a bunch of Senior VPs judging the most innovative ideas at EMC. Boy was that weird. Take away from 2007: Senior VPs are nice people who listen to ICs after all.

2008

The second year of the Innovation Conference – 2008 – I was pumped up. I worked with some folks in my organization who have their PhDs in IS and Performance (one of them from FSU!) on the idea that we should create a customizable PLE (personal learning environment).  We explained the business need for a PLE, defined educational terms, and then laid out what the PLE would actual do.  In the first iteration, we saw two important facets, a PLE with the Portfolio:

PLE Components

Formal Learning

• Assigned Learning Path: Information pulled from the Education Services Portal about Technical courses as well as EMCU courses

Informal Learning

• eRooms: A list of eRooms the user should be accessing, based on role
• Email Distribution Lists: A list of email distribution lists that can be accessed for information, based on role
• EMC ONE Communities: A list of EMC ONE communities that can be accessed for information, based on role
• Departmental Learning Resources: A list of wikis, message boards, shares, etc that can be accessed for information
• Industry Specific Resources: A configurable widget that allows the learner to bring in external information using RSS feeds. This information could be blogs, websites, conference information, message boards, etc.

Demonstrate Competency

This was a way for learners to prove they had gained competency of a skill in all sorts of ways (not restricted to formal learning):

• Formal Learning: A list of courses that the learner has successfully completed
• Certifications: A list of certifications that the learner has obtained
• Link to Employee Blog: Links to relevant posts in the learner’s blog that prove competencies
• Link to Employee Portfolio: Link to the employee’s portfolio, with a better picture of how the employee feels he or she is meeting the competencies for the role

Description of the Personal Portfolio

We didn’t feel like it was enough to have a checklist of what each employee could do. We wanted a way for the employee to demonstrate skill and comptency beyond the restrictions of the LMS, or even practice groups. We felt that the Personal Portfolio should be controlled by the employee and should include:

• A blog: The employee can blog about their accomplishments, lessons learned engagements, etc. This will develop the social media skills of EMC’s workforce, and also provide a place to document skills that may not be captured by the formal learning process.
• Competencies based on role: This should be a pre-populated widget that brings in the competencies that have been determined for the employee’s role.
• Development Plan: This information is pulled from the Education Services portal. It includes the development plan and a list of the employee’s mentors
• My 5-Year Plan: The employee should also be able to look at the competencies of other roles, so that they can make personal decisions about what skills they need to develop in order to advance their career. This widget should be personalized by the employee, with their goals and plans for the next 5-years.
• Other information: This widget will allow the employee to import information that proves their competency from  other social media sites, such as LinkedIn
• Privacy Settings: The employee should have the option to advertise their portfolio to everyone within EMC. If they choose to keep the portfolio private, the employee’s management team will always have access to view it.

2009

Lets jump to the 2009 Submission. We tried to make the idea short and to the point, I think that may have been our fatal flaw. This is what we submitted:

Practical problem solved:

This solves the problem helping all EMC employees (customer-facing and non-customer-facing) have access to the learning environments that make the best sense to them, so they are able to learn faster and execute better than our competitors.

There are many different silos of learning assets in and outside of EMC. We have official formal training from Ed Services, we have communities, we have documentation on Powerlink. Outside EMC there are blogs, communities, technical groups, etc. How do we enable individuals to create their own Personal Learning Environments to keep up with this data?

How it works:

We need to make it easier for our knowledge workers to build their own Personal Learning Environment (PLE).

This could be done by building a widget-keeper that could be installed on someone’s desktop, their blog, or even their profile on EMC|ONE. The keeper could recommend widgets based on the individual’s role. For example, someone in sales would have an Ed Services widget that is connected to SABA, so their formal learning path is visible. They could also have a widget for relevant EMC|ONE info, competitive info, Powerlink information, etc. They would have an RSS widget to gather their own learning links, as well as other social media links to help them stay connected to the sales (and customer) community.

2010

So will we try in 2010? Perhaps.

I definitely think that a PLE can be enabled from a corporate education group. We are chartered with helping the workforce learn, and to help them be ready to work. We know we can’t do this on our own. Why not provide the workers with a way to get organized, to access the critical information they need to do their jobs in the most efficient manner? And on top of that, give them a way to bring in all the other ways of learning that make sense to *them*?

This is my dream. Maybe one day I’ll be working on it!

I just finished my class meeting, and saw this posted by @courosa:

Pursuing the elusive metaphor of community in e-learning environments

In my Human Performance Theory class, we have to turn in Executive Summaries (ES) and mindmaps for selected readings each week. Since I know so many people who are experts on performance, I thought I’d share what I am doing on this blog.

Background

OK, I’m doing this for selfish reasons – I know my PLE is very experienced, and also most of you are not shy about correcting a misguided grad student’s ideas (I love you guys for that!!!). I’m hoping to generate discussion that goes beyond the theory I’m learning to real world practical application. Several of my classmates read this blog, so you’d be helping out the next generation of Instructional Designers!

Our official book for the course is an ASTD Press book: HPI Essentials which is a compilation of articles edited by George M. Piskurich. Our first ES/mindmap assignment is based on Chapter One: What is HPI? What makes you a Performance Consultant? How Can You Tell if You Already Are One? by Ethan S. Sanders.

Week 1 HPT Homework

Here’s a link to my mind map: Chapter1 MindMap

Here’s my ES:

This week’s reading was from Chapter One in the HPI Essentials book. The chapter explains the three principles of HPI and describes the type of individual best suited to be an HPI practitioner.

Human Performance Improvement (HPI) is the practice of identifying business gaps between an expected performance outcome and the actual performance outcome, and then identifying and managing the application of interventions that will resolve the root cause of the problem and improve organizational performance. The steps in the HPI module include Business Analysis, Performance Analysis, Cause Analysis, Intervention Selection, Intervention Implementation, and Evaluation of Results.

One key to a successful implementation of an HPI intervention is to focus first on the results that an organization expects to observe. Results, or performance, are what drive key business objectives.  Sometimes individual behavior can be a cause of a performance gap, but often times there are other contributing factors. If the individual behavior is addressed with a training intervention but the other contributing factors are ignored, the performance gap will never be closed and key business initiatives will continue to fail. By starting with an evaluation of the desired business objective, all factors required to meet the stated business objective can be identified.

HPI is successful because the concept of systems thinking is built into the model. It is important to acknowledge that there are more indicators of performance than human behavior. There is an organizational level of performance which includes how the business is performing in the marketplace. Organizational performance also includes how the business has been set up operationally. How do the individual departments interact with each other, what is the formal hierarchy for communication, what are the value networks that dictate the informal communications? Process level performance is how the work actually gets done throughout the organization. What are the inputs and outputs required to enable the successful completion of the business objective? What are the Service Level Agreements (SLAs) between the individual departments? What are the underpinning contracts between a department and an outside vendor that may affect how the work flow? Finally, the job level is important because the work is performed by people. Have the right people to do the job been hired or promoted? Have the correct performance goals been set for these individuals?

An HPI practitioner is someone who enjoys the challenge of being in the midst of change. An HPI practitioner has to help an organization solve problems, deal with broken systems and disillusioned workers, and be determined to cut through all of the drama to find the root cause of the performance problem.

My mom loves telling the following story about me, to emphasize the fact that I have always been bossy. I am the oldest, and I have one brother who is 16 months younger than me and another who is 3 and a half years younger (there are seven of us in all). Apparently, we all played together very nicely until my brothers discovered that they didn’t have to play exactly they way I told them to play.

Once they figured this out, they would let me play with them as long as I didn’t try and dictate the rules. This is one of the reasons I think I get along with guys so well, I was never allowed to play with my brothers if I started “acting like a girl” (whatever that means!). Obviously, my brothers had found a way to turn the tables and exercise control over me. However, and this is the part of the story that my mother relishes, I still had a way to exercise my power. I would just pick up and leave. Refuse to play because they didn’t play by my rules. You would think that I would have gained a partner when I had a sister but that didn’t work out (thanks alot Sissy!!).

What does this story have to do with corporate education? This may take more than one post, so please indulge me for having to explain this in my story-telling way.

Lots of learning happens in the social spaces, whether it is the social interaction of communities formed during a formal class, or the informal learning that happens when we traverse our Personal Leaning Environment (PLE) to get to the best community for the (learning) job. Knowing the control mechanisms in all the learning communities we encounter may just help us learn faster. And if you are designing instruction, understanding control can mean the difference between enabling and hindering learning for those who participate in the events you design.

Before I get to the control topic, I want to talk about the social part.

Communities follow many of the same rules that the small worlds described by Dr. Elfreda Chatman follow.  Dr. Chatman theorized that groups have their own style, or signature. This signature is defined by particular attributes of a group:

• How the group will handle certain events
• What topics will be discussed
• What topics will be excluded from discussion
• How do interactions happen between group members?
• How do interactions happen between group members and outsiders?
• What is the level of meaning of certain terms and traditions/ceremonies?

If you know all of the components of the signature, you’ll be treated like an insider to the community. You may even know most of the components, and you may be granted access to the community. But if you unknowingly break one of the community rules: you don’t use the correct jargon, or you communicate in a way that is not approved by the group, then your outsider status will be affirmed by everyone in the group.

This is what was happening with my brothers. As long as I deferred to the rules they made for our small group – that I could never tell them how to do anything – I was allowed entrance to the group. But if I got bossy, or “played like a girl”, I wasn’t allowed to play.

Or check out this example. The comic shows the differences in the way HR (one community) and programmers (another community) see the same information, in this case a resume. HR may push your resume through to the tech interview with glowing recommendations, but the programmer won’t understand why someone who only knows one language even made it through to them. You may have fooled HR into thinking you were a programmer, but you broke the norms of the real geek who is now going to pound you with ridiculously nit picky technical questions.

So understanding the style or signature of a community gives you quite a bit of power, starting with the power to belong to a community as an insider. This insider status is important because it gives you access to the real interactions and workings of the group. It is probably what drives the tighter collaborations that lead to real innovation.

On the other hand, if you don’t bother to even investigate what the style of a given community may be, you give that power over to the members of the group. In most cases, you will be given limited access (at best) to communities for which you don’t bother to determine a style.

Let’s get back to the idea of power in a community or network. Manuel Castells asserted:

… in this network society, power continues to be the fundamental structuring force of its shape and direction. But power does not reside in institutions, not even in the state or in large
corporations. It is located in the networks that structure society. Or, rather, in what I propose to call the ‘switchers’; that is, the mechanisms connecting or disconnecting networks on the basis of certain programmes or strategies.

From Network Logic: Who Governs in an Interconnected World

I think that this idea- power residing in the mechanisms that connect or disconnect networks -is really key to designing communities and educational events. We have to figure out how to empower members and learners to create a dedicated connection to the community we have built. We have to look at how the controls we put in place (you know, that list of stuff that defines our community) interact with the signatures of groups with which we have invited to connect. Are there too many conflicts between the group we have created and those invited groups, so that any connection that is made will be constantly flapping? Or have we done our homework about the signatures of all groups involved so that when connections are made, they are stable and lasting?

There has to be a way to increase connectivity by decreasing the likelihood that the use of power will be members deciding to disconnect from the network because of conflicting group signatures. The practical application of making this happen is the hard part….and will have to wait for another post.

If you have ideas on practical application, or if you want to weigh in on the whole idea of power in networks/communities/groups, please drop them in the comments!

This question “what IS informal learning?” came up in a meeting the other day. The answer that was given was interesting – but it focused on educational technology. Today’s post will attempt to define informal, and in another post I’ll tackle some technologies that can be used to enhance informal learning.

First, a textbook definition:

a type of education or training program in which learners define what they want to learn and learning is considered successful when learners feel that they are able to master their intended objectives (whether or not the course designers believe that the learners have or have not demonstrated mastery) [Carliner, 2004] (all emphasis mine).

Driscoll, M., & Carliner, S. (2005). Advanced Web-Based Training Strategies: Unlocking Instructionally Sound Online Learning (p. 118). San Francisco, CA: Pfeiffer.

If I think about how I learn, I use a mix of formal and informal learning methods. I am in grad school, so obviously that is formal learning. There is a curriculum, there are classes with learning objectives that have been set by the instructor, there are activities I must complete successfully in order to get credit for the class. It has been decided for me what I will learn, how I will learn it, and how I will prove that I have mastered that topic.

But here’s the problem: I don’t always learn in the way the instructors have decided I should learn. I have to set up my own personal learning environment to augment what the course designer created. My PLE includes talking to other experts, reading blogs, googling, tweeting for help, and blogging.

Additionally, I don’t stop learning about that topic once the semester is over. I continue to use my informal methods to expand what I learned during class.

And that is just my graduate work. I’m a techie, and I write technical training for other techies. There is so much informal learning that goes on in the technical world, mostly because our field changes so rapidly! For instance, I am working on sharing a VMware virtual machine with some students, and I’m having a hard time figuring out how to get the job done. I googled. I asked for help on Twitter. I consulted with other experts in my department. I just try different options. (I’m leaving out lots of detail here, there are some underlying issues making this a very complex problem).

I can tell you, it has taken me all week to get to the point where I have one or two solid options to solve my vm problem. This is partially due to the way I learn – I am easily distracted with shiny, interesting, technical things. Sometimes I don’t realize my search for answers has gone off topic until I have been playing with the shiny new idea for an hour or so.

I can also tell you that I wouldn’t have the means to do an intelligent search for information to solve my problem if I didn’t have the base technical knowledge I’ve received from formal learning. That formal learning came from my undergraduate education and technical classes I’ve attended. The designed, focused attention to specific learning objectives have helped me build a strong technical foundation. That foundation is what enables me to understand how to informally search for information to solve my complex technical problem.

I’m left with more questions than answers:

• Can informal learning be loosely designed to augment formal learning?
  Jay Cross believes that it can – he says informal does not mean unintentional
• Can formal learning be designed to facilitate learner creation of PLEs which in turn will enhance informal learning?
• Isn’t it important to help facilitate informal learning so learners continue to learn even after they have attended a class?

In my last post I talked about the learning environments (LEs) we as developers create for students, and the Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) students create to situate themselves so that they can master the course objectives. In this post I want to explore the instructor’s role in helping students get over barriers they have to meeting course objectives, and if this role is still critical to eLearning.

Instructional designers provide course prerequisites and course objectives. They they create course LEs based on this information.

Learners come into a course with barriers to learning. Some examples of barriers to learning are:

• Not meeting the course prerequisites
• Not wanting to be in the course (attitude)
• Thinking the course was going to cover something it won’t cover
• Not devoting their full attention to the course (we get this alot — field  personnel who get customer calls during class. Guess what takes precedence..)
• A disability
• A language barrier
• Personality conflicts (don’t like the instructor, don’t like the other students in the class…)

Good instructors try to identify these barriers right away, and compensate for them during the course. They may slow the course pace if the students don’t have the prerequisite knowledge, they may try to provide the information the learner thought they would learn, they may try to make accommodations for any disabilities. I think a good instructor tries to knock down any barriers a student has as low as they can go so the student can construct their own PLE and master the learning objectives.

Most of the instructors (and course developers) at EMC have their Certified Technical Trainer (CTT+) certification. To get this certification you must prove your ability to put students first so they are able to master course objectives.

My new question is: what happens if you move a course that was formally 100% instructor-led to eLearning? This is actually an important question, since travel is being restricted. People can’t travel to training, more requests are coming in for eLearning. Here are some questions I have:

• If you make the courses completely asynchronous, who does the work of helping lower the students’ barriers to learning?
• If you do synchronous eLearning, are the LEs designed differently? Do instructors need to do things differently to help students navigate their learning barriers?
• Can you simply port courses designed for instructor-led learning to an eLearning environment? Are there best practices for converting these courses for eLearning, or do the courses need to be redesigned from scratch?

I would love to hear from other people who are facing this same situation. I’d also like to hear from anyone who has taken the CTT for the Virtual Classroom Trainer exam.

After I wrote my last post about my eLearning course, I started thinking about Learning Environments (LEs). I made concept maps for both of my classes that include the designed LE as well as the personal learning environment (PLE) I’ve created to make sense of the courses. My PLE starts with the LE, and then I add the components I need for an effective learning environment.

Here’s the c-map for the eLearning course:

I’d say this is a behavorist-styled designed learning environment

Here’s the c-map from my Inquiry and Measurement course:

I’d say this is a constructivist design.

To be fair, I created a concept map of how one of the courses I am working on has been designed. I have to design courses based on the method my department dictates.

I think we do a good job of creating a real-world environment with our labs. That’s pretty important for technical training. But as I look at how I’ve designed this course, I can’t help but think how our students must augment our designed LE to create a PLE that facilitates their learning. In particular:

• Could we design the LE to more closely match some of the common PLE components our students have?
• Do different audiences have different PLEs?
• How can you capture this information?

This blog post discusses PLEs (Personal Learning Environments) and how they are needed based on how this new industrial revolution we are in is changing education.

The author discusses a 7-country study on ICT Learning (ICTs stand for Information and Communication Technologies) showed workers primarily use Google for informal-based learning. Quoting from the post:

Managers were often unaware of this learning, although they were frequently aware of the problem which inspired it. There were considerable differences in the use of ICT for informal learning between different enterprises. It would be tempting to ascribe these differences to age, sector, size or occupation but it is hard to discern such causal factors from the case studies undertaken. None of the employees in the enterprises studied had attempted to claim recognition or accreditation for the skills and knowledge gained through informal learning. It is not clear if this is because they are not interested in pursuing further formal qualifications or if it is because they are unaware of any opportunities of claiming accreditation for informal learning.

The use of the Google search engine as the major tool for learning is interesting. It raises the question of how people are framing their search terms, how they are refining search strings, how they are selecting from the results of search queries and how they are following hyperlinked texts. For a search result to be useful it needs to produce materials, ideas and concepts which can connect with the learner’s existing knowledge base on the one hand and deal with the issue or problem being addressed on the other.

The article gives a great overview of how industry has changed, and therefore education must change as well. There are so many opportunities as far as education is concerned, especially corporate education, to help people learn faster so that they are better prepared to compete.