The third day of The eLearning Guild’s 2008 Annual Gathering just got better!

The Future of the Internet

John Patrick, author of Net Attitude, started us off with his keynote about The Future of the Internet. John believes that we are only seeing about 5% of what the Internet will do. He used these terms to speak about the future:

Fast, Always On, Everywhere, Natural, Easy, Intelligent, and Trusted.

He talked a lot about businesses that are simply accommodating the Internet vs. those that are embracing it to provide their customers with choices. He had some very funny examples of extremely poor customer service that the audience could clearly relate to.

I was totally surprised to find out how poor Internet access is in the US. We rank 14th in the world, apparently. The big companies and lobbyists keep up from having the super fast connections that are already available to folks in other places. It was kind of upsetting.

Patrick also had a lot of amazing visions for what the medical field could and should be doing with the Internet to serve their patients. I just never really thought about it before. Yeah, why can’t I get my detailed medical history online? Why don’t doctors have our information in a database where they can access it easily? People worry about personal data being out on the web, but Patrick pointed out that currently our information is just sitting in an envelop on a shelf somewhere. Many, many people handle these records that contain our sensitive information (and we don’t know who they are). Those files get passed from doctor to doctor, mailed, transported - how is that safe and secure?

These issues of customer service really got me thinking. We need to start demanding more for the services that we pay for. The Internet should be about power to the people or the “Power of the click”, as John Patrick puts it.

Mission Possible: Successful Conversion of ILT to E

Rebecca Anderson, Training and Development Manager at the State of Arizona - AHCCCS, gave an incredibly useful talk, Mission Possible: Successful Conversion of ILT to E. This session is probably the one that most directly addresses the work I need to do right now. She shared her story of taking traditional classroom training programs and getting them online successfully. She laid out her process like this:

1. Tool Selection:

• She created a criteria-based raking sheet and tested three products in detail (after doing a lot of research and watching many, many demos in order to narrow it down).

2. Team Selection Criteria:

• Good computer skills
• Adventurous/willingness to try new things
• Work independently AND collaboratively
• Sense of humor
• Diverse
• Writing skills (critical)
• Training experience helpful, but not critical

What I found really interesting is that she said the two SMEs she hired who were tech and web savvy were a lot easier to get up to speed and performing successfully than the two traditional classroom trainers. She said it was harder for the training professionals to unlearn their ideas about training and teach them the ways of eLearning design than it was to teach the techies.

3. Process:

• Created a user group consisting of someone from policy, legal, and a supervisor, a higher-level manager who can make decisions and find support, SMEs. This group tears apart existing training material and asks of each element, “Why are we teaching this point”?
• Then each designer is assigned a topic and reviews the material, creates a storyboard, and sends it to the team for review. (Notice that this step is not going back to the SME.)
• Only after the storyboard is approved does the development happen.
• The module then goes back to everyone for review/QA

Anderson shared a great free mindmapping tool called FreeMind. I have tried many mindmapping tools, but this one seems to have some improved output options. I might be giving this one a try (when I get back on my Windows PC).

Another great tip Anderson had for constant assessment and improvement of her training courses was her follow-up methods. Right after the training she interviews each student by phone. After 30 days she contacts their supervisors and asks about any changes in performance. She then calls them again after 90 days to see if the changes in performance have remained. She really feels that these one-on-one interviews are the most valuable way to go.

At the end of the presentation Anderson shared with us photos of herself completing a ropes course. As she told the story she compared it to her experience of conversion to eLearning. It was an exemplary training technique in action and her story was very moving. (Yes, I got teary).

After the session I just couldn’t get myself out of there. I kept asking her more questions. What a wonderful and generous person! You could really see her heartfelt commitment to pass on her informed knowledge on to others embarking on this quest.

I’m Busy Enough… What Do I Need a Second Life For?

OK, I can’t really say this particular session directly benefits my work right now exactly, but “Never say never” someone said to me today. Plus, I got so much good stuff out of the previous session I thought maybe I deserved one purely for fun. It was also an opportunity to hear from someone at the New Media Consortium (NMC) - an organization I’m very interested in.

Alan Levine is Vice President, NMC Community and CTO for the New Media Consortium (NMC). His session began with an awesome slide show illustrating many examples of the diverse creativity being built in Second Life. Then he talked a little about NMC and the Horizon Project. Very cool.

Next he appealed to the skeptics in the audience with statements like these:

“How do those people have time to do this?”

“The graphics suck” (Something gamers say)

“There’s nothing to do in there.”

Levine talked about peoples’ fear and the bad experiences that newbies often do have when they enter SL for the first time. He talked about barriers for entry: long learning curves, system requirements, and a slow startup time. (It can take awhile to learn how to walk, fly, and become functional - it takes “Evolution time”).

He showed us this SL satire site.

But, check this out. Gartner Says 80 Percent of Active Internet Users Will Have A “Second Life” in the Virtual World by the End of 2011.

He launched into some explanations of SL’s thriving economy and then we finally got to watch his demo. He took us to the NMC island and we checked out a classroom. Just as Anders had done, he demonstrated the new voice capabilities in this virtual world. I think this is really the technical enhancement that can help learning professionals see the potential of this kind of environment. It could be good for role-playing, simulations, and social networking (of the professional kind).

I furiously tried to record the locations he was visiting so that I could teleport there tonight. I am definitely going to check out the David Rumsey Maps in SecondLife!

I was so tired when my alarm went off this morning. My visit to Second Life extended into the wee hours last night. Part of it was spent showing my best friend (in RL) all of the cool sites that Anders Gronstedt had shown us yesterday. But I dragged myself out of those soft hotel sheets cause today was the second awesome day of The eLearning Guild’s 2008 Annual Gathering! The day was mostly about collaboration, video production, and personal networking (conference hall connections).

The day began in an excellent Breakfast Byte session called Tips & Tricks When Implementing Social Learning lead by Kevin Jones from GTS. It was a very interactive group and I think we learned a lot from listening to our varied experiences. Kevin did a great job of facilitating.

A few of the best ideas that stuck with me had to do with making a good case for social networking and collaboration in the workplace. It’s all about culture change and combating fear it seems. People still think about information as being “owned” by one person. I know my organization is very concerned about the content “owners”. The idea of collaboration and using tools like Wikis to contain community-generated content means moving away from this old idea of a single owner. That’s going to be a tough one… Another argument the resisters cry is “But what if bad information gets out there?” Well, Kevin had a great point. The “bad” information is already out there - it’s over the phone, near the water cooler, buried in personal email. If that content was put out on a collective space like a Wiki it could be seen by the community and corrected. In a way, there’s more “control” in that. Another concern management has about these tools is that it will encourage people to waste time. Well, again, if they are going to waste time - they are going to waste time. Tools don’t waste time, people do. I’m going to adopt some of these ideas and add them to my elevator conversations.

Next we headed into the big International Ballroom for the keynote. Keith Sawyer, author of Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration, (and creator of the Atari video game Food Fight) spoke to us about about what it takes to have innovation. His stories were great. We learned about the origins of the Monopoly game and Gore-Tex guitar strings, and how the contributions of many were involved in these inventions. Hardly ever does an invention simply come out of one person’s head. Real innovation comes from the collaborative efforts and play. It was one of those talks that you just wish your whole organization could see.

Because of our recent video efforts, I wanted to attend both of the video-related sessions today. Both were lead by Steve Haskin. The first one was called Best Practices for Using Rich Media and Streaming Video in eLearning. This was a very technical presentation. It was all about how to talk to your IT Department intelligently so that you can get your video content up on the web. I have to admit that I didn’t get the math yet, but I hope I will if I stare at the handouts long enough. He explains it like this:

Length of video in seconds times stream rate in kilo BITS (not bytes) divided by 8 = Total file size

Easy, right?

The next session with Haskin was called, Storyboarding for eLearning Video Production. He had a co-speaker call in which was kind of fun. We saw some real like examples of video story boards, including some from Star Wars and one from Indiana Jones. Very cool. We also saw how you can create a relatively detailed storyboard simply using stick figures. (More my speed). Haskin explained the differences between storyboarding for eLearning vs. video production. It seems like eLearning storyboarding is more about laying out all of the content piece by piece. Video storyboarding seems to be more about sketching images that can portray the key elements of what you are trying to convey. Sometimes this can be done in just one picture. It ensures that the production team is all on the same page with the vision. As my group moves into producing our second safety video, maybe I will try to sketch something. I’ll post it if it’s any good…

I also attended an excellent panel discussion with several of the authors of Bill Brandon’s new collection: Best of The eLearning Guild’s Learning Solutions. Subjects included:

• Create successful synchronous events
• Survive the “one-person department” experience
• Create a design document that supports standards and consistency
• Create a content strategy for your organization
• Understand the direction in which e-Learning is evolving

All the speakers were good and there were many take-aways. Most interesting to me was what Marc Gamble had to say about radio style synchronous eLearning. I have really been wanting to try an interview style recording of some kind for some of the more, how shall I say this - boring topics. If I could get my SME to answer questions posed by someone “out in the field” about financial topics I think this could make a much more interesting delivery than the usual PowerPoint monologue. So far, this is the first thing I want to explore when I get back home. (If anyone reading this has some good samples you would be willing to share, please post them here or send me an email.)

The best thing about today, however, was the Dinner Group for the 1-person training department organized by one of my favorite bloggers, Tracy Hamilton. There were ten of us and we had a great time! And I had a great steak. We talked shop - tools, Second Life (that was my doing), training, learning, etc. We also compared notes on the the best places to live since we were from all over. Then we passed around our business cards. Good networking was had by all.

Now I really must sleep so I can get up for another exciting day tomorrow!

Today was the first day of the eLearning Guild’s 2008 Annual Gathering and I’m flying already! I spent the night trying to figure out how to join the various AG|08 Twitter, Meebo, and Flickr groups. Plus, I flew around in Second Life prepping for the “optional intensive”, Web 2.0 Innovations for Learning with Anders Gronstedt of The Gronstedt Group, Inc.

Anders lead a great discussion and facilitated a lively group. We debated the definitions of training vs. learning vs. education, and which of these could Web 2.0 tools accomplish, if any.

We talked a lot about generational differences and the new millennials. These folks are the “digital natives” while the rest of us (and yes, I’m old enough to be in the “us” group which I can’t even believe) are “digital immigrants”. Anders had a great slide illustrating these two camps with a young man carrying a cell phone and an iPod while climbing Kilimanjaro, and an older man banging his head and his fists up against a traditional chalkboard.

Anders also talked about mobile learning and other alternatives to death-by-PowerPoint. He pointed out the (past?) mistake of simply slapping PowerPoint content up on the web and calling it “eLearning”, complete with all of the same poor design and content as the original. I question the finality of the word past because at my organization we are just now starting to do that and everyone is pretty excited. Hah.

We looked at organizations like Sun Microsystems who are using blogs like crazy. The employees are allowed to post and it’s all public. Very cool. Check out the CEO’s blog here.

The podcasting section was one of my favorites. Anders had some great case studies and examples to share with us including what EMC, Ericsson, and Jamba Juice are doing. This was really inspirational and got me thinking. Our folks wouldn’t carry around iPods… but he says 80% of podcasts are still be watched on computers and laptops anyway. Our folks could do that. And with the success of our recent safety video, my head started swirling with ideas. I know by the time I get home at the end of the week I’m not going to be so interested in our 3-day, classroom, ILT financial management course. Nor am I going to be interested in simply videotaping it the next time we hold the 3-day session and slapping that on the web. No more slapping!

Anyway, I’m saving the best for last which I know one isn’t supposed to do in a blog post but I’m reporting items of discussion in order… After lunch we all launched our Second Life applications and met in the virtual world created by The Gronstedt Group, called Training for Success. And there was a train there… and a bunch of us circled around Anders’ avatar to hear what he had to say and see what he had to show us. A colleague of his joined in to demonstrate the voice capability so we could hear him talking. The makes for a MUCH MORE INTERESTING online meeting. Some of us got silly and started dancing and trying on funny hats. Wow, text chat is so boring to me now.

After Training for Success we traveled to the following locations. If you haven’t visited them in SL, they are well worth the teleport:

Sun MIcrosystems - Main Pavilion
Tsunami Demonstration (Check this out for the feeling of a big tsunami coming right at you!)
Greenies Home (Weird and fun place - can’t tell you any more)
Virtual Palomar West: Hospital of the Future (Prototype site to solicit feedback on new hospital design)

Basically, the potential applications for virtual worlds are endless. There is really no end to the creativity that can be generated and what it can be used for in terms of learning, training, or education. Now that I have concurred that it can be a useful and serious “game” for meeting educational goals, I’m going to go play. I have more flying to do!

This is going to be a great week…

Just wanted to be sure everyone dealing with a LMS had seen that Elliott Masie has posted these podcasts:

Interviews with LMS CEO’s

We are interviewing the CEO’s of the major Learning Management Systems and LCMS companies focused on 4 key questions:

1. What is changing in the world of learning?
2. What is changing in Learning Systems?
3. What are the plans for your future developments/focus?
4. How is a tougher economy impacting the learning field?

Elliott Masie interviewed each of the CEO’s including executives from Saba, SAP, Meridian, Net Dimensions, Blackboard and many more. Each audio interview is approximately 6 minutes long.

Well, here’s my first learning video. As you know, I shot my first video of the CFO introducing the Strategic Plan. Next came an offer to help with a safety video to inform people how to move safely. Our whole building is moving to another location and safety is a big deal. We decided to do a series of videos covering file reduction, pre-move, the move, and post-move.

Here’s the first! We threw a team together with some great ideas from the writers and pulled it off. I filmed it using my mini DV camcorder and edited it using iMovie. I’ve never really done anything like this before but I’m SO pleased with the results. We published it at work (including there the names of the actors and the production crew) and it has been spreading around like crazy. Even the guys at the top who rarely seem to crack a smile are sending us their appreciation and congratulations.

Please watch it and let me know what you think! It’s posted here from YouTube so it lost a little of it’s quality. Just be sure to turn up your speakers!

I’m hardly posting these days, I know. This is certainly our busiest time of year for training. But right now I seem to be doing a lot more communications and a lot less training. I’m still gearing up for the big 3-Day Financial training which is all in the classroom and utilizes about 20 SMEs. I’m still creating new online learning activities. But the focus right now is on our internal communications.

Our Communications Committee just released an extensive communications survey to the whole division. It took us weeks to come up with the questions and I barely survived the writing-by-committee (that was so important to have because of the nature of the content). I sent it out an hour ago and 50 people (out of ~200) have responded already!

Watching the responses come in live through SurveyMonkey is like playing an addictive video game.

Our plan is to actually do something with the results. From what I am seeing there is some really good feedback and useful ideas coming in. The Committee hopes to use this information to create a Communications Plan that we can recommend to the Big Boss and his Senior Manager types. A little change, if not a lot, is bound to come from it.

On another note, I released the video of the Big Boss introducing our Strategic Plan as I mentioned in this post. This was an attempt to do something different - using a new technology. I filmed him and edited it myself in iMovie, YouTube style. There’s music and everything. Beats the usual wordy PowerPoint slides in the front of a large auditorium.

The success of that video has led to a request from our Safety department to do one for them on how to move boxes without getting hurt… could be a new career for me!

I know a blog post isn’t really the best way to ask this question (especially cause my readership is pretty low right now) but I’ll try anyhow. My organization is about to embark on its first-ever, relatively large online learning project. The department driving the endeaver is looking mostly to our internal web design department and will most likely do everything on static html pages. (While they build nice websites, they know nothing about training or learning.) I’m wishing and hoping for more…

For starters we have, let’s say, 400 slides worth of content that we need to get online in some kind of modular format. I would like to see it in small, bite-sized pieces - maybe in Flash or something. I want them to look good. Where appropriate, I would like to add some true interactivity (not just clicking on an arrow, but maybe scenario-based branching). The interactive element has not been considered thus far and would need to be developed by working with SMEs.

Based on my extremely crude description of this job, can anyone give me a ballpark idea of what something like this costs these days? We would be wanting to hire an outside consultant who has their own tools. If you do this kind of work or you have had this work done, please send me an email with some ideas. I’m not looking for any kind of true estimate, just something I can take to them and say, “Hey, for something like X, we might be able to hire someone to do something really great instead of slapping this stuff up on a website.

My boss said yes! I’m so excited to be attending the eLearning Guild’s Annual Gathering conference again in April! Florida was a hard sell, but that conference changed my professional life in huge ways last year and I feel like it will deliver again. I know Tracy Hamilton will be there. Anyone else?

This is the most beautiful computer I have ever seen. I am so in love I can’t sleep. The keyboard glows… GLOWS while I’m typing away in the middle of the night. It’s fast. It’s fun. Seems powerful.

This is my first laptop. At home my partner gets the nice desk because she consults from our office. I have a small, somewhat uncomfortable spot to sit while I work at my G4. I have always been a Mac person at home and a PC wonk at work. For what I like to do - photography, music, internet browsing - the Mac is the best, of course. But my G4 was getting old. It was effecting my flight patters in Second Life for one! Plus, I want to be able to play in cafes like all other Berkeley residents. And now I can! Whoo hoo! (Thanks honey!)

Happy Birthday to me, happy birthday to me, happy birthday dear me…

I’m working on some cool communication projects right now. We have an internal Communications Committee that is being recognized as a go-to body for advisement by the Big Boss.

We just published the new and improved Strategic Plan. The Senior Managers worked on it during a retreat that most of us didn’t know they were going on until they had returned. Some felt, well, not included. Many tell me that they don’t care about the Vision or Mission or Strategic Plan cause they have so much work to do they are just trying to get through the day. I understand that. Some ask, “What is a Strategic Plan really, and why have one?”

Usually we roll these things out during a “Town Hall” meeting where a one-way PowerPoint presentation puts everyone to sleep (even though the Big Boss is an excellent and dynamic speaker).

So, when he came to our group and asked, “How should I roll this out?” I was very excited about trying something new. I put it out to the group and someone came back with - video.  She wanted to see the Big Boss looking right into the camera casually explaining the Strategic Plan in five minutes or less. I thought he’d never go for it. Plus, we don’t have any money (or time) for something splashy.

I pitched it to him as a grass-roots YouTube approach. We could do it all grainy with my hand held camera. People could watch it on their own time. “You could show them your personable side.” It would be cool.

Well, he said OK! We aren’t going to script it - just have some key points for him to cover. It’s got to be short and it’s got to start with explaining why all of this matters.

So, tonight I’m working on some key points. I’m feeling pretty inspired. We have 7 key goals in the Strategic Plan.
The fact is that I think if people could really hear what they are and how some or all of them directly relates to them and their work we would succeed - well, in “rolling out” the Plan at least.

I’m taking in my little digital camcorder on Monday. I’ve never done anything like this before. I’m hoping the roughness of it will add to it’s charm… I’ll report back!